Eric McCormack - Cloud

After another drink he said he needed to get some sleep, for he had a busy day ahead. I took the hint. Before I went out the door, he invited me to join him for breakfast at seven in the morning. I thanked him and staggered across the compound to my own sleeping quarters.

THE SCREECHING of parrots and a host of noisy morning birds woke me not long after sun-up. I could have slept much longer despite the noise, but I remembered my breakfast appointment, got up, showered, and went over to the big bungalow. The general manager had already eaten and gone to his office. Gordon Smith had waited for me. We didn’t talk much as we munched orange slices and banana along with corn bread. I drank four or five cups of coffee.

“Feeling a bit better now?” he said.

I assured him I did.

“I’m just about to head for the mine and see if I can pin down whatever has been causing the problem,” he said. “I’ll have to use a machine for measuring air quality. I’d like to check in case there’s some kind of gas down there.”

The hawk eyes were on me and I could guess what was coming.

“I was wondering,” he said. “If you’re feeling up to it, would you mind helping me carry some things down into the mine? I can’t really trust any of the locals in their present state of mind— even if I could persuade one of them to come with me, which I very much doubt. Besides, I wouldn’t mind having someone else along to act as a witness, or a second pair of eyes.”

I hesitated. I didn’t feel at all brave.

“Maybe you’re a bit under the weather?” said Gordon Smith, watching me. “I’d quite understand if you don’t want to.”

I told him I just needed one more coffee. To my satisfaction, my hand was quite steady as I poured.

We wore coveralls and miners’ hats, Gordon Smith and I, as we went into the La Mancha mine. He had a small backpack that ticked loudly and a shoulder bag for rock samples, and was carrying a trowel. I brought a pickaxe and a long-handled shovel.

I was hoping there might be a few spectators at the mine entrance to witness my bravery. But since the incident, the workers had thought it best to stay well away from the mine, and this day was no different.

As we entered the gloom of the tunnel the sultry morning sun was cut off. By the time we’d advanced about thirty paces, a sharp bend almost eliminated any remnants of natural light, so the occasional electric bulbs strung overhead now became our main illumination. The silence was broken only by the crunch of our boots on the gravelly floor and the metallic ticking from Gordon Smith’s backpack.

Soon we could no longer walk side by side, for the tunnel began to narrow, with many sharp rocks protruding. Gordon was in the lead and had become more cautious, pausing every few moments and peering ahead. I walked a couple of paces behind.

This single-file advance went on for about a hundred yards into the mountain. The tunnel widened again and we could see the rock face where the work had stopped. A dozen wheelbarrows, some of them full of gravel and ore, had been left by the fleeing miners. In the light of the bulbs, veins of gold gleamed in the half-excavated wall. Power drills and discarded shovels lay around.

Gordon Smith stopped beside one of the wheelbarrows. He bent over it and began to trowel up some of the smaller pieces of ore into his shoulder bag. All at once, he stiffened and then straightened up, head cocked, as though to listen to something.

The little hairs on my neck tingled.

He was about ten feet away and had begun to make a peculiar, growling sort of noise. He turned very slowly towards me.

The face that looked at me was no longer Gordon Smith’s but rather seemed like parts of a number of faces superimposed on one another, with noses, mouths, and ears all misplaced and distorted. A huge pair of eyes dominated in the midst of that awful face, bulging and cold like a predator’s.

I knew this transformation was illogical and impossible, but my heart was pounding nonetheless. I tried to say something when the thing that had replaced Gordon Smith started to shuffle towards me with its claws reaching out.

That was enough for me. I threw my shovel and pickaxe at it then turned and ran as fast as I could. The thing scuttled along behind me, its breath rasping horribly. When I reached the narrower part of the tunnel, I had to slow up because of the protruding rocks. I was terrified it might catch up to me, but it too was having trouble avoiding the rocks. At last, glimmerings of daylight appeared ahead. I raced round the final corner of the tunnel and out into the open air.

The thing was right on my heels. I could run no more, so I turned with my fists raised, ready to defend myself to the death.

The monster slouched over in front of me, gasping, was Gordon Smith. He was the only living creature around, aside from myself, and he was trying to smile.

BACK AT THE big bungalow, I drank some coffee and gradually got my nerve back. The general manager, like me, was wondering what exactly had happened. Gordon looked at me.

“I was taking a sample of some of the ore and I turned to ask you for the shovel,” he said. “To put it mildly, you didn’t look at all like yourself. In fact your face was so ugly, it frightened the wits out of me. You threw your tools at me as though you wanted to kill me, then you turned and ran. So I just grabbed my sample bag and ran out after you. See, this is where you hit me with your shovel.”

He slowly unbuttoned his shirt and we could see, on the left side of his chest, a red and purple welt. He flexed his left shoulder gently and winced. “This is real enough, anyway,” he said.

I was shocked that I’d done this to him. I told him he’d seemed to me to be transformed into something awful and I’d only been defending myself.

Gordon addressed himself now to the general manager.

“Clearly we both experienced some kind of hallucination,” he said. He took out the ticking instrument that had been in his backpack. The arrow on one of the dials pointed at a red zone. “You see, it’s registering a high quantity of some kind of gas other than methane or carbon monoxide or any of the usual things you find in mines. My guess is it’s from some vegetable component in the rock. The miners may have released it into the air when they were boring deeper inside the mountain. If so, it’ll be in the rock samples I brought out.

“If I’m right, there’s no miracle involved. Though whether you’ll be able to convince your miners of that is another problem.”

“Claro,” the general manager said.

Throughout, Gordon Smith had seemed more amused than anything else about what had happened. I really had thought he’d somehow been turned into a monster.

“For a moment, I thought the same about you, too,” he said. “But I knew that couldn’t be. One of the advantages of being a scientist is that we’re loath to consider the impossible as the cause of anything.”

As for me, I should have been reassured by his rational explanation of the event, sitting there in the orderly calm of the bungalow, with a cup of coffee in my hand and the sound of birds through the screens. But I wasn’t quite at ease. The entire incident reminded me of too many weird things I’d come across — in the Tollgate, in Duncairn, and in Africa — that never seemed quite resolved by common sense.

LATER THAT DAY when the rocks were analyzed in the mine laboratory, Gordon found traces in them, in various concentrations, of a hallucinogen.

“It has the same makeup as various peyote mushrooms,” he told me and the manager. “Perhaps they were petrified in some ancient upheaval of the earth in this region. The original inhabitants may have stumbled on this place, had their visions, and decided the mountain was holy.”