The Hollow Skull Read online

  “This mine had more uranium in it than any place on earth,” Tim said as if he had a personal stake in the property. “It helped make the world safe for democracy.”

  They neared the lifts, which couldn’t properly be called elevators. To Cass’s surprise she saw that there was only one open wire cage—she would have guessed they’d have had a backup. Here, too, the metal was coated with a fine red dust. It was almost as if the wire had oozed out its own mechanical blood over time. Tim brushed the dust aside and reached for the controls. An idiot could have understood them. There was a green button for descent, a red button to push to return to the surface. The controls were duplicated inside the metal cage Cass noticed as Fred pulled back the screeching lift door. They faced a moment of truth as they all hesitated to step inside.

  “There should be a call box in this thing,” Cass complained.

  “There might be one at the bottom,” Tim said. “The word might is not reassuring at a moment like this,” Cass muttered.

  “Tim and I can go down first,” Fred suggested. “See how safe it is.”

  “No,” Cass said firmly. “You’re not going down there and die and leave us up here alone and miserable. We either all go together or we don’t go at all.” They paused and fidgeted. It had been easier to talk about exploring the Shaft when they were miles from it. But standing on the edge of the precipice was another matter. Beneath their feet the black hole seemed to plunge into another dimension. Tim picked up a stone and tossed it over the side. They listened as it clattered against the metal framework, but they never heard it hit bottom. It was as if something down there had eaten the rock. Tim let out a nervous laugh, he was fully sober now.

  “It’s something we can tell our grandkids about,” he said gamely. .

  Fred stared down for a moment. “Yeah, let’s just go for it.”

  They climbed into the creaking lift. It swayed with their weight, and Cass wondered if four bodies would overload the thing. Yet they weren’t cramped—the lift looked as if it could take down a whole crew. Fred and Tim busied themselves by staring at the control panel while Cass and Jill stared down between their feet, through the thick wire mesh. They could have been floating in orbit above a black hole. Jill was acting more and more nervous, she had always been a bit of a coward.

  “What if we need oxygen down there?” Jill muttered.

  “I don’t think we will,” Cass said. “A half mile is not that deep.”

  “Jesus!” Jill gasped as an unseen motor kicked on and they began to descend. The rails did not screech; they screamed. The whole system was rusted, and it sounded as if they were trying to reactivate alien machinery on an abandoned planet. They gathered in a tight knot in the center, somehow thinking that would help if they suddenly went into free fall. They were all surprised at how slowly the lift moved, it would be a long ride to the bottom.

  “We’re committed,” Tim said.

  “I think we’re in good shape,” Fred answered. “The motor started without prodding. The scientists probably had it serviced before they went down the last time.”

  Jill took a deep breath as she clung to Tim’s arm. “The air is getting bad.”

  “The air hasn’t changed,” Tim said. “You’re just feeling claustrophobic.”

  It was a wonderful place to suffer from such a condition. Overhead the tunnel vanished into a starless black canopy. The screeching quieted but the lack of noise was somehow even more disturbing. The beams from their flashlights flickered from the minor tremors in their hands. They continued to huddle close as they descended; it was as if they had agreed to sacrifice themselves to the hungry gods beneath the surface of the earth.

  Suddenly the lift stopped. They weren’t at the bottom, but rather perched on a metal platform. Fred cautiously slid the door open. A second lift waited on the far side of the platform.

  “I should have thought of this,” Fred said. “No cable would be long enough or strong enough to take us all the way to the bottom. I bet we have to take a series of lifts—could be as many as four.”

  “Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead,” Jill muttered.

  “Can’t go back now,” Tim joked positively, but he looked uneasy.

  Cass stared down, panned her flashlight into black infinity.

  “This mine has got to be deeper than half a mile,” she whispered.

  “The air is still good,” Fred said as he stepped over to the new lift and studied the controls. “In fact, I think there’s less dust down here.”

  Jill shivered. “But it’s getting cold. Is that normal?”

  “Who the hell knows what’s normal down here?” Tim said as he joined Fred. Tim reached out and pulled open the second lift door. It didn’t complain as the other one had, perhaps the scientists had oiled it.

  Hopefully something human had.

  They climbed inside.

  They, in fact, rode four more lifts before they reached the bottom, five in all. By then the temperature had dropped considerably, which was odd because they had all thought it would be hotter deep underground. When they finally emerged from the fifth lift they were in a tunnel coated with icy black frost. Yet their exhaled breaths didn’t fog up in the beams of their lights because the air had been stripped of moisture. All around them, the walls shone black and smooth, black marble carved by machines the four of them could not imagine. They moved forward so quietly they could have been trying to communicate telepathically.

  “Where are we going?” Jill hissed as they crept away from the lift.

  “Like we brought a map of this place,” Cass said sarcastically.

  “We’re exploring,” Tim whispered.

  “What if the lift has a timer on it?” Jill asked. “What if it returns to the surface after a while.”

  “Shut up, you’re spooking us,” Cass said.

  “There’s another set of controls down here,” Fred said, leading them forward with Cass gripping his elbow. “Don’t worry.”

  “I like it down here,” Cass lied. “It turns me on.”

  Tim forced a snort. “Maybe we should do it down here.”

  ”Yeah,” Jill said with no enthusiasm. “You build a fire out of black rock and I’ll strip down.”

  In reality there weren’t many rocks, or, for that matter, many features at all. The black tunnel clearly led to another place, probably where the vein of uranium carved its way down into the earth. Cass kept thinking what it must have been like for the men who worked the mine to come down all this way each day. She wondered what they dreamed of at night. She suspected she would have a hell of a nightmare before the next morning. The place didn’t feel merely spooky—it felt evil. She had lied when she said she liked it.

  The tunnel came to an end a hundred yards from the lift, opening into a cavern that reminded Cass of a movie set for a horror film. There was a black pool in the center that stretched in a rough oval without a single ripple. The still fluid could have been oil. The cavern itself was perhaps a hundred feet long, half that in width. It was a dead end, the tunnel went no farther. Obviously this was where the miners toiled. Cass just wished they had a Geiger counter with them. “We might be getting a hard dose of radiation therapy as we stand here,” she said.

  “They wouldn’t have discarded the mine if it had still been a rich source of uranium,” Tim said.

  “A poor source of uranium could make us all pretty sick,” Cass said.

  “What could it do to us?” Jill asked anxiously.

  “For one thing it might make your lovely black hair fall out,” Cass said as she stepped over to her boyfriend. “And make hair grow on Tim’s chest.”

  “I heard that,” Tim muttered as he moved close to the walls. Fred was doing his own examination, bent over the black pool with his flashlight. The liquid seemed to reflect hardly any light. Fred leaned forward to touch it but Cass reached out and stopped him.

  “You don’t know what it is,” she scolded.

  “It looks like water mixed wi
th oil.” Fred frowned. “But I doubt this pool was here when the miners worked in this room. It would have gotten in their way, and I’m sure they would have drained it. The liquid must have bubbled to the surface during the years the mine was closed.”

  “I would hardly call this place the surface,” Tim muttered.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Cass said to Fred. “I don’t want you touching it. I don’t want our kids being born with three eyes.”

  Fred was amused. “Are we going to have kids? Are we going to get married?”

  She held his eye. “You should be so lucky as to catch a hot chick like me.”

  “What do I have to do to catch you?” he asked; and he acted as if he wanted a real answer. Cass only stood and shook her head.

  “I don’t want to discuss our future in this grave,” she said.

  “It’s funny you should say that,” Tim said. “Back in town, at Chico’s bar, I’ve heard a few of the old timers talk about this mine. They said when it was first opened, during World War Two, a lot of people thought it was haunted. I heard that a few of the miners who worked down here went insane.”

  “That’s just great,” Jill said. To put it mildly she was not adapting well to their new environment. She kept glancing over her shoulder as if she were about to be jumped. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Tim ignored her and went on, “They said that the miners who did crack didn’t just need hospitalization. They had to be killed.”

  Fred stood back from the black pool and chuckled. “Yeah. The U.S. government put its own people to death.”

  Tim stood his ground. “These guys at the bar said it really happened. That there was something down here that got to a couple of miners and messed up their systems so bad that they were a danger to anyone who came close. They said the miners were put to death and their bodies were cremated.”

  Jill practically shook. “Thank you for sharing that story. Why didn’t you tell us that on the surface?”

  Tim laughed. “Because hundreds of people came down here for dozens of years and nothing happened to them.”

  “Was it the radiation?” Cass asked, growing more and more uneasy.

  Tim scratched his head. “Not the way these old guys put it. The miners caught something and began to change in some way—it was like they had caught some kind of virus.”

  Jill got angry. “Would you just shut up and get me out of here!”

  Tim was shocked by her reaction. “Honey, it’s just a story. You don’t have to get excited.”

  Jill turned toward the entrance. “This place has creepy vibes. I want to get out of here. Now!”

  Their happy night ended right then. Maybe human history did, Cass was to think later. As Jill stepped toward the tunnel that led back to the lift, Tim ran after her. Jill was wound tighter than he had ever seen her, and obviously he was concerned that he had upset her. She might have had a headache from the stuff she had ingested earlier. The double whammy of pot and alcohol often gave her a headache. Or maybe she was just scared, so far beneath the surface, hearing such an unsavory history. In either case as Tim laid a hand on her shoulder, she shook it off. But it was a hard shake—she practically pushed him away.

  Now Tim was not the most coordinated individual to begin with, and even though his mind had largely sobered, his body was still trying to catch up. He tripped and fell.

  He landed in the black pool. “Oh Christ,” Cass whispered.

  Fred was on Tim in a second. The pool didn’t appear to be very deep so Tim’s struggles on its surface were brief and violent. Yet as Fred pulled Tim free, it was clear that the pond was mostly oil. Tim stood covered from head to toe with black gook. Not only that, his right hand seemed to be injured. Through the film of oil Cass saw he was bleeding. Although she planned one day to be a doctor, she didn’t move immediately to his aid. If the truth be known, she was afraid to touch him, and that made no sense to her.

  “Why did you do that?” Tim was screaming at Jill. “Now look at me!”

  Jill stood at a distance, seemingly in shock. “Sorry” was all she could get out. Fred was braver than the girls. As Tim wiped the slimy stuff from his eyes, Fred lifted his friend’s hand and studied the cut.

  “This is deep,” Fred muttered. “You must have scraped something sharp on the bottom of the pool. You need stitches.”

  “I don’t have money for stitches,” Tim growled as he continued his feeble clean-up job. Jill finally stepped forward and offered her blouse as a cleaning cloth—a significant offer, it was one of her favorites. But Tim waved her and her offer away—he was still really mad at her. He added, “What got into you, Jill?”

  “This place,” she mumbled and glanced at Cass. “I don’t like this place. It feels like bad stuff went on here.”

  “I know what you mean,” Cass said as she forced herself to examine Tim’s hand. She prided herself on being unaffected by blood but the sight of the blood mixed with oil turned her stomach. It was as if Tim were oozing something inhuman. Fred continued to probe the wound and act concerned.

  “What did you cut yourself on?” Fred asked.

  “I don’t know.” Tim coughed as he brushed at his arms with his good hand. “It all happened so fast. I had this terrible moment when I inhaled the stuff. I thought I was going to smother.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jill said again.

  “You definitely have to see a doctor,” Fred said. “We can all chip in a few dollars to get this sewn up.”

  “I have twenty extra bucks,” Cass lied. Twenty bucks was a small fortune to her; she needed every penny she had saved just to get set up in L.A.

  “I’ll pay for the doctor’s bill,” Jill said. “It was my fault.”

  Tim stopped and stared at her. For a moment it looked as if he would shout again, but his face softened and he shook his head.

  “It was my fault for bringing up those crazy miners in the first place,” he said.

  Cass nodded. “Yeah. Now you just be careful and don’t change into one.”

  2

  Madison had a part-time clinic, which obviously wasn’t open twenty-four hours a day. They had to call a number on the door and leave a message and then wait while the doctor in a neighboring town drove the forty miles to Madison. Fred thought the system stupid, he just wanted to take Tim to the next town. But the doctor was probably on his way before Fred thought to voice his opinion.

  “A man could bleed to death before getting help in this place,” Fred grumbled.

  “I am bleeding to death,” Tim said, elevating his hand. They had bought white gauze at the 7-Eleven, but it was thin and already soaked through. Tim had gotten cleaned up somewhat but was still a mess. Jill started to reach for his wounded hand but he motioned her away.

  “You have to keep pressure on it,” Jill said.

  “You don’t want to stick your hand in an open sore,” Tim said.

  “It’s weird that it hasn’t stopped bleeding,” Cass mused.

  “Like I said, it’s a deep cut,” Fred answered. “I’m just glad the lifts got us out of there with no problem.”

  “We have much to be thankful for,” Tim muttered.

  Jill reacted. “I said I was sorry.”

  “You did say that.”

  Jill was annoyed. “Anyway, it was your idea to go down there in the first place.”

  Tim shook his head. “Don’t worry; it’s over and done.”

  “Does it hurt?” Jill asked, worried now.

  Tim stretched. “Everything hurts.”

  Jill was obviously concerned about her earlier vow. “How much do you think this is going to cost?”

  “It depends whether Plant charges for the drive,” Fred said. “Why can’t this stupid town have its own doctor?”

  “Because no highly educated person would be stupid enough to live here,” Cass said.

  “I take it you won’t return after medical school and take care of us poor slobs?” Tim asked.

  Cass felt tired. It was get
ting late. “No,” she said flatly.

  The medical man, Dr. Steve Plant, arrived forty minutes later. They all knew him because he had treated each of them at one time or another. A tall man with a bad limp, he had a strong face and a pleasant bedside manner. Yet he could be firm, especially if anyone ignored his advice. Fifty, he seemed older, because of the ridiculously long hours he kept.

  He took care of the residents of three other hick towns like Madison, crisscrossing the desert in his high-powered Lexus. His hair was snow white and his face tanned; he had the deep lines of a desert lizard. He seemed amused at Tim’s middle of the night mishap, he didn’t act put out at all as he led them into his tidy office. Dr. Plant used the office every Tuesday and Thursday, when he held normal office hours. He was well-respected in town.

  Dr. Plant cleaned up the hand and numbed the tissue around the cut. It took him fewer than twenty minutes to put in ten stitches—he was a skilled worker. Tim did not complain until Dr. Plant brought up the need for a tetanus shot.

  “How much is that going to cost?” Tim asked. “Do I really need one?”

  ‘You need it,” Dr. Plant said firmly, reaching for a fresh syringe. “You need to take antibiotics as well, that cut already looks inflamed.”

  “I can’t afford all these drugs,” Tim muttered.

  “You can’t afford not to take them,” Jill said, her hands gripping her bag as if it would sprout legs and head for the door.

  “We’ll all chip in,” Cass repeated. “Dr. Plant? Isn’t it unusual for a cut to show signs of infection so soon?”

  Dr. Plant stuck his needle in a vial of clear liquid. “Yes. But it can happen sometimes. The material that cut Tim could have been dirty. We won’t be positive if there is infection right away. Better to be on the safe side and take antibiotics.”

  Fred chuckled. “Better to take him out back and shoot him.”

  By the time Fred took Cass home it was close to midnight and she was exhausted. They barely kissed goodbye; she just wanted to get inside and under the covers. But Mary met her at the porch right after Fred drove away. Her ten-year-old nightgown-clad sister looked scared and Cass knew that that meant only one thing. Daddy was drunk.