Nightmare Country Read online

  Iguanas numbered among Edward’s favorite creatures, good enough reason to have one on the jacket of his book. Besides, the iguana represented a hint of mystery, of other worlds and other ages.

  Bending low to the viewfinder, Edward saw another iguana pull itself into view as he adjusted his aging vision to that of the Nikon F2A, heard a “whumping” sound that sent little stabbing pains through his ears and impacted with a pressure that caught at his breath.

  It startled him, so he sat up and the blind collapsed around him.

  The iguanas appeared disturbed also. One pushed up on his forelegs and flailed his tongue at the air. The other lashed his tail about as if looking for a fight.

  And no wonder. A man stood before them, as though he’d risen from the sea all in an instant. But he wasn’t wet. He wore a one-piece suit of a color somewhere between that of a ripe peach and the flesh tones of a ruddy Caucasian. It was made of a lacy material, yet opaque, and fit him like skin, outlining every hump, bump, roll of rib and muscle. It had no visible points or lines of fastening for zipper, button, or even Velcro. His skin tone was a tad lighter in shade than that of Rafaela Paz. His face showed not one wrinkle, pouch, or blemish. His hair was cut short and curled tightly in a dark shade of auburn. He showed no expression and reminded Edward P. of a retouched photograph.

  The man was the finest specimen in both looks and form that Alexander had ever encountered. Edward, who in his youth and when standing at perfect attention had measured six feet and four inches, judged this apparition to be well over seven feet.

  The old adventurer, rarely taken for lack of words, found himself speechless before this amazing entity while a nasty gas bubble racked its way through a kink in his lower intestine. The two iguanas swiveled a hasty retreat into the Caribbean.

  There was little of the unexpected Edward had not either experienced, imagined, or read of in his lengthy lifetime, and he waited for some reaction within himself to offer a clue as to what life expected of him now. Fear might be healthy, his mind suggested, but his being waited, as if separated from logic until understanding offered a glimmer of itself.

  “Ohhhhh!” said the creature without blinking or moving his mouth or one muscle in his beautiful face.

  Edward P. sat back on his heels, and the Nikon F2A toppled face-first in the sand onto its ultraviolet filter. He was still waiting for fear when understanding presented itself unannounced. And vindication. “You’re an Atlantean.”

  The stranger widened his eyes, which were an indeterminate shade of dark, as though he’d heard, but his response was to raise open palms to the sky and shout, “Primitive in the funnel!”

  He did this without moving his lips or the smooth skin of his throat. He stared back and forth across the heavens as if expecting an answer.

  Edward P. looked up, half-expecting a crash of thunder, but saw nothing more than a man-o’-war bird lazing on air above them. Not even a cloud.

  The man walked to a high and relatively smooth stonelike outcropping of coral and sat. Neither his suit nor his skin wrinkled with his fluid movements. The slight hunch of his shoulders, the clasp of his hands, suggested dejection. His face showed no expression. He ignored Edward altogether, and looked skyward once more. “Help! I’m caught.”

  The man-o’-war bird hesitated in its flight, lowered its slender head. Edward had never seen one do that before. It swooped very low, circled twice, and wheeled out over the bush jungle of the island’s interior, leaving them alone.

  Edward’s ankles and legs pained him, and he stood finally, marveling that fear still hadn’t arrived, but uneasy about that. Fear had saved him more than once. He tried to think of something to say, but again his tongue surprised him. He reached into his rucksack for his other canteen, which contained something stronger than water. He must be from Atlantis. How else can he be so magical? Speak without words.

  “You are merely receiving my thoughts in such manner or ‘words’ as you can perceive them, primitive.” The man answered Edward’s thoughts much as one would speak to an animal. If one could speak to an animal. “You and the fowl that just left us.”

  Edward took a swig of rum and tried to decide if this guy was human or just unusual. “But I am a man like you, not a fowl.”

  “In your state, there is little difference.” He rubbed a chin that looked too smooth to have ever grown a beard. “What does it matter? We are doomed.”

  Edward P. turned his back on the man to see if he could still hear the motionless mouth. Mental telepathy? Or was this all just a dream?

  “I knew the malfunction was in this century, and I told them where it was within twenty-five years.”

  Edward turned around. This guy not only wasn’t talking with his mouth, he wasn’t even looking at Edward, and still Edward could hear him.

  “Amstrack said the terminals had to be located in inaccessible places.” The apparition was obviously talking to himself. “He pointed out the geological changes in landmasses with the fall and rise of continents and oceans. What he didn’t predict was the mental energies of primitives, the interference of their rudimentary power systems. You savages play with energy waves as if they had no force.”

  “You are not from Atlantis.” Edward P. capped the rum canteen. He felt his vindication slip away.

  “I know nothing of Atlantis.” The perfect man stood. “I can’t believe we ever looked like you creatures.”

  “I’m old but still human.”

  “I suspect I’m older by far than you. But that makes no more difference now than the fact I’ve a new granddaughter I’ll never see again. Just your ugly bearded face forever. Not that you could understand my plight.”

  “You, sir, are probably nothing more than a bad dream generated by Rafaela’s excellent but heavy black beans and Belize’s questionable rum. I am an author.” Edward P. Alexander III straightened an imperfect, aging spine that had climbed mountains in Tibet and curled under fever in the jungles of Quintana Roo. “I’m an adventurer. I was once on the Jack Paar show. I have been interviewed by the best. Criticized by the worst. Until a short time ago I had a grandson. And I resent your attitude.”

  “You’ve organized into formal families, have you?” He walked around the tumbled blind of browning palm fronds and almost stepped on the extended 500-millimeter lens. “My survivors are all female, thank God.”

  “Why thank God for females?” Edward, still expecting to wake up at any moment (no more black beans, Rafaela), slipped in behind the stranger to retrieve his Nikon F2A. “I’ve a son, had a grandson, and am damned well pleased—”

  “In a matriarchy, females are a blessing.”

  “You consider us so primitive and you still have a god?”

  “Even in your day she was a necessary evil, right?” The mouth finally opened, smiled perfect teeth. But they had remained closed while the words came out.

  They’d been following each other in a circle around the fallen blind. Edward P. stopped, and that brought the giant up against his back. Edward sensed the revulsion of the other man, but when he turned, could read nothing in the blank face. “Who are you? And why a matriarchy? This is my dream, and I may be getting old, but if the men look like you, I’d surely love to see the gals.”

  “The women took over after the destruction.” The apparition turned away from Edward. “I am a time engineer and I come from your future.”

  “And God’s a woman?”

  “She’s the creator, isn’t she? Tell me, old man, for the sake of curiosity, when some fool created the combustion engine”—there was almost the hint of a crease in the smooth forehead now—“did she know it would take the planet’s atmosphere two centuries to recover?”

  “It was a man did that,” Edward P. said. “If you really are from the future, your ignorance of history is shocking. Even for a dream.”

  “History is not my specialty. And this is no dream.” He sat again, and again allowed a dejected hunch to his magnificent shoulders, and Edward P. quite l
iterally felt his sadness. “We are doomed to relive this moment throughout time, never remembering that we’ve met and talked before, because we are between time. At least that’s the theory. As in death, no one’s ever returned from this no-man’s-land to inform us for sure.”

  “What’s a time engineer, and how can we be between time?”

  “Enough, old man. Give me some peace to mourn my losses.” The engineer’s hopelessness overwhelmed Edward suddenly, bore down on him so that he had to sit at the man’s feet. Those feet were covered by the same material as his suit, with no hardened sole for support.

  II

  The Witch of Iron Mountain

  17

  Russ Burnham stood in the entrance to the lower six-hundred-foot portal of Iron Mountain, the great wooden doors opened flat against the walls. A line of overhead lights extended back into dimness and disappeared, unable to hold away the darkness of the hollow mountain for long. The rails below shone dully under the lights and narrowed in the distance. Then they too disappeared.

  The smell of dirt and damp the sun never purged from his pores, that went to bed with him at night, hung unmoving on the air. Sandstone walls left by the miners between broad passageways gouged of their limestone were thinner than the tunnels they separated at this level. Instead of walls, the level above had only pillars remaining to hold up the mountain. It was like a vast and empty ballroom.

  This main entrance below was a good twelve feet wide and ten high. B & H and Russ sent the men ever deeper into Iron Mountain in search of the rock for making milk-of-lime, used in the purification process at all the company’s plants in Colorado and Nebraska. Tons of sugar beets were grown in these states each year.

  But B & H had just opened a surface mine nearer Cheyenne, where rock was extracted by a contractor with machines instead of skilled miners. Less remote and cheaper to operate, the new mine would soon spell the end of this one. Reclamation laws of the state of Wyoming would require the portals be filled with concrete, the company buildings demolished. Only the prairie winds and the pocket gophers would be left to listen to the whispered tales of the old-timers.

  Russ Burnham shook himself and took a deep breath. The closing of this place would be a relief. He’d been here too long. It was just that sometimes Iron Mountain took hold of him—its history, its people. He’d miss the old-timers.

  “Here she comes,” Saul Baggette, his underground manager, said behind him. “I’m going to take a leak.”

  Saul’s boots crunched off in the other direction as the sound of footsteps approached ahead. Where would she and the other squatters go when Iron Mountain closed?

  Jerusha Fistler was a witch. Russ couldn’t have described how he knew this. Not that he was sure what one was or that he believed in such things. He just believed in Jerusha Fistler. And although he’d never discussed it with any of them, he knew the other men did too. Life in Iron Mountain had become comfortable for Russ only because it had become familiar. He did not enjoy change. But getting this woman out of his life was one change he looked forward to.

  The beam of her flashlight probed out toward Russ and the mine entrance. Her footsteps slow and careful, she emerged from the darkness behind it. The print dress hung on her loosely; shadows deepened the hollows in her face. But he was amazed at how quickly she was adding weight, how recovered in strength she seemed. The first time he’d seen her this way, he’d decided she was dying of cancer.

  “Mrs. Fistler, you know company rules about nonemployees in the mine. And you also know—”

  “Oh, I know, Russel Burnham, that we are getting closer. I can feel it, the strength and power just flowing out of the middle of this mountain like a river.” She walked on by him as she spoke, her big eyes and big teeth sparkling at him.

  “I keep telling you,” he shouted after her, “there’s nothing inside this mountain but rock! Do you hear me? Rock!”

  The crusher started up at the other end of the tracks, and its screeching grind drowned him out. Jerusha turned onto the path up to the old level without looking back.

  “Goddamn-son-of-a-bitchin’-biscuit-full-of …” Russ kicked the side of the tunnel with the iron-reinforced toe of his work boot and then socked it with his fist, felt the pain cut into his anger as the rock cut into his knuckles, saw his underground manager slip into the mine entrance through eyes teared over by rage.

  “Hey, boss, you don’t think there’s anything to what she’s always talking about? I mean, there’s all them old stories and—”

  “There is nothing inside this mountain but what you have seen. You got that?” They were shouting over the noise of the crusher.

  “Yeah, well, the guys thought they might of heard something—”

  “Baggette, do you know what it is that I am going to hit next?”

  “Uh … yeah. See ya.” Saul Baggette switched on the light on his helmet and disappeared down the tunnel.

  Russ walked out into daylight, and the earth beneath his feet shuddered with the crusher’s thunder as it chewed the bowels of Iron Mountain. He’d recommend Baggette and Johnson, the aboveground manager, to the company for transfer when operations closed down here. The rest would be on their own. He took the path Jerusha had taken, but slowly, so as not to catch up with her, stopping at the little ledge on which he’d found the other teacher, Miriam Kopecky, walking in her sleep one night.

  There had always been stories about the mine, and that was not unusual. Miners were a superstitious lot. Russ was the only one who would sleep on the company compound. Most refused to live free in the company town below, would rather commute from Horse Creek or even Cheyenne. And not since the days the company imported every able body by rail, miner or not, had the mine worked full shift. Night or day made no difference inside the mountain, but B & H couldn’t get enough men to run more than one shift a day. Even so, things had not been so bad until old Abner Fistler brought home a wife less than half his age.

  Russ kicked a pebble down the incline and stared into space. Not that he hadn’t seen the ghosts before that, or had trouble getting workers. But since then, life had become decidedly more complicated, and Russ preferred simplicity.

  Abner Fistler had come to him on Russ’s first year on the job, complaining of not being able to sleep. He was trembly and coughing a lot, and Russ decided it wouldn’t be long before B & H would have to pension him off. Headquarters and the insurance companies demanded there be a night watchman on patrol around the grounds even in so remote an area, and particularly since the mine and crusher shut down at night. Russ took Abner out of the tunnels and made him watchman, thinking he might sleep better during the day.

  This had seemed to work quite well for a while, but then Abner took to drinking and talking about the pretty young thing he was going to marry. And one day he cashed in all his savings bonds, borrowed money from everyone he knew—including Russ—and left to get married. He was back in two weeks with Jerusha. She did not look, talk, or act like anyone from Horse Creek or Cheyenne, the only two places Abner ever went. Rumor had it she must have come from Denver, where odd people were reportedly abundant. Jerusha simply ignored the question whenever asked.

  Flexing his sore fist, Russ tramped up the rest of the path that was a shortcut from the curving road connecting the two levels. Since Abner’s death, Russ had dreamed more than once that the old man had joined Iron Mountain’s ghosts.

  He honked, snorted, and spit into the weeds, his eyes searching the buildings and ruins of the upper level. He couldn’t see Abner’s wife, and he fervently hoped that she’d gone on home.

  The next Monday was the first day of school in the mustard-colored schoolhouse in the company town. Tamara stood at the cloudy window and watched her new students through fly spatters as they circled each other on the playground. There were Vinnie and Bennie Hope (he was an inveterate sniffer), Will and Nate Baggette, Larry Johnson, and Adrian from Iron Mountain. And Rene and Mike Nygard from a nearby ranch.

  Tamara would have
liked to escape the dusty room and go out in the sun too, but she had a series of preliminary forms to fill out on each student and had to study Miss Kopecky’s files. Much of this kind of thing would have to be done on noon hours and recesses so she could prepare lessons in the evenings. She stooped to pick up a paper that had fallen off Vinnie’s desk. A spidery hand had scrawled “Gloria Devine Hope” across the top, and page numbers for tomorrow’s assignments below. In the margin, she’d doodled a line drawing that reminded Tamara of the topside of a palm tree—like those she’d seen in one of her dreams when she’d risen above them into the sky with the frigate birds. And below that Vinnie had sketched that marking that had been in the sand of the dream cemetery in front of Backra’s house. The one that looked like a leaf skeleton, with the long central vein and evenly spaced ribs extending diagonally from each side ad infinitum, as though the leaf had no beginning and no end.

  Putting the paper down firmly, she went to her desk. She was seeing these dreams in too much of her waking life. If this continued, they might interfere with her work, and Tamara needed a good record her first year if she hoped to make teaching a career and support herself and her daughter.

  Miriam Kopecky’s files on the school’s students were complete through the winter quarter and blank for anything beyond the last year’s spring break. Did this indicate the time of her death? Tamara was startled to find the improvement in Vinnie’s test scores over the last quarter recorded. And in every subject. Previously an indifferent scholar, Gloria Devine Hope must have knuckled down last winter. Larry Johnson had been quick in math and anything smacking of the scientific throughout his schooling, but in the last recorded quarter, he too had shown a surprising improvement in other subjects.

  Curious now, Tamara leafed through the folders and found the scores were close to identical. They were all A’s and B’s or the letter representing that grade level’s equivalent in jargon. As if Miss Kopecky had filled out report cards by marking the same thing in every box she came to. All except for Bennie Hope, who went from failing to the equivalent of a C in reading.