Glassing the Orgachine Read online

  Chas said, “You sure you don’t want a medevac? Or you could drive out, I suppose. The road’s still pretty decent to drive.”

  “No need,” Poppy said. “Did Lazarus need to have the doctors check him out after Elder Brother Jesus brought him back?”

  The Bunyans didn’t have an answer for that. Lazarus might indeed have sought out a doctor, but the Bible didn’t record it one way or the other. The Prophecys thanked them again for their help, and before opening the sally door, Poppy asked Chas, “See anything else out of the ordinary on the bottom of the lake?”

  “I saw one of your yellow hard hats,” Chas replied.

  “Nothing else? Not something that looked like a brass marble? Shiny, about this big?” Poppy made a circle with index finger and thumb.

  “No, can’t say as I did,” Chas said. “But then I was looking for boy-sized objects, not marbles. Why? Did you lose something else down there?”

  “No, no. Don’t be concerned.”

  ON THEIR WAY back up tunnel, Poppy said to Proverbs, “You didn’t tell Ginger they were here, did you?”

  “No, lord, I didn’t.”

  “Well, maybe that’s best. Sounds like nobody’s missing her.”

  “It also sounds like the world is holding itself together,” Proverbs said. “Maybe there’s time for me to go out and fetch her folks. What do you say, Lord? Is there room for in-laws?”

  “Let me pray on it.”

  WD3 1.0

  THE FOLLOWING DAY they moved into their new cottage as planned. Perhaps Uzzie suffered some brain damage after all. For a full day after the drowning, the boy wasn’t right. At first he couldn’t sit up on his own. The girls propped him up in a lounger in the new common room next to Mama P. Both mother and son had the same faraway stare. It scared everyone to see them like that. At least Uzzie looked at you when you spoke to him. Soon he was crawling around on the floor like a baby. Then he pulled himself to his feet and shuffled about the common room, using the furniture and walls to keep his balance. After that he was fine.

  Meanwhile, Crissy Lou started to avoid the cottage. They couldn’t even coax her inside to eat her meals. Something about their new home had her spooked, but no one had the time to figure out what. A new smell? The constant state of chilly darkness? Who knew what was in a dog’s mind?

  IT WAS LATE. Everyone else was asleep. No one saw him leave his bed.

  Uzzie stood on the shore of the underground lake and gazed into the water with no need for light. He didn’t need to hyperventilate or hold his breath. He didn’t need air tanks, regulator, or ballast weight. He simply stepped off the ledge and sank to the bottom. He found the hard hat; it had been his. He put it on absent-mindedly but took it off again and dropped it. More important was the golden pea wedged between two rocks. He dug it out and slipped it into his mouth to hold in his cheek. Not far from the pea was the golden ball. He picked it up and peeled tiny strips off it with his thumbnail. He let them consolidate into seeds in the palm of his hand. They made the water boil around them but did not burn him. When he had several dozen seeds, he put them into his mouth with the pea and swam to the surface again.

  THAT NIGHT WAS Proverbs’ turn to sleep at the gate, and he was a notoriously light sleeper. So Uzzie didn’t go that way but stayed on the Level 2 tunnel. He followed the tunnel past the cottage chamber and past the storeroom chamber to the terminus where there was a ventilation shaft. He climbed up the shaft, which was a tight fit even for a boy, to the junction with a wider shaft that brought him to the surface.

  At the surface was a heavy, cast-iron grate for keeping rocks and debris from falling in. The grate was rusted but had lost little of its Gilded Age integrity, and it was bolted right into the mountain. Fortunately, the iron bolts were rusted through, and Uzzie was able to break the grate free and shove it aside.

  When Uzzie climbed out of the shaft, his wet clothes and hair flash-froze in the nighttime air. Four ravens awaited him in the moonlight. He spit the golden seeds into the palm of his hand and tossed them to the birds. Three of the ravens gobbled them up and flew away, each in a different direction. Before returning to the ventilation shaft, Uzzie tossed the golden pea to the fourth raven.

  THE FIRST RAVEN landed in the middle of the 850-square-mile (2,200 sq-km) Malaspina Glacier near Yakutat. It regurgitated a seed onto the ice. The raven continued flying over the Gulf of Alaska, dropping a few more seeds along the deserted shoreline. Glass tulips sprouted in its wake.

  The second raven regurgitated its seeds on Russell and Klutlan Glaciers, east of McHardy, places no one ever went, or for that matter, flew over.

  The third raven flew west through the Chitina Valley to the park boundary. There it turned north, skirting the slopes of Mount Wrangell. When it reached the Native village at Kluti-Kaah (Copper Center), it descended to treetop level and followed the highway across the Klutina bridge. After a few more miles, it spied a small, blocky, nondescript shed with a metal roof and siding and no windows at the end of a gated gravel drive. This was a repeater station for the Greatland Opticom fiber optic cable that girdled the interior of the state. The bird circled the station a couple of times but did not alight. It turned south and followed a cleared strip of utility easement until it was several hundred yards from the building. It landed on the centerline of the easement and hopped this way and that in the snow, homing in on the trunk cable buried below.

  The raven regurgitated a golden seed. With sizzle and steam, the seed sank from sight.

  THE FOURTH RAVEN flew north and west, following the same return route as the mail plane. It swung around Mount Drum and turned north again. It followed the desolate highway and frozen river over forests of dwarf black spruce to a junction where the highway turned east.

  Soon the carpet of trees was interrupted by a large, rectangular field under a grid of blinking red aircraft beacons.

  The raven veered from the highway and headed toward the field. But before it got much closer, the bird exploded in volume to ten times its size. It was a blimp-sized version of itself, and its belly grazed the treetops. A half-blink later, it reverted to its original dimensions. It continued to expand and shrink, expand and shrink, at an increasing rate. A passerby on the highway would have seen a strange sight, but at that hour in that season on that highway there was no traffic traveling in either direction.

  Slow to react to its crisis, the striver attempted to reverse course, but its rapidly oscillating mass made flying difficult. It did manage to retreat far enough from the field to regain its proper body size before losing control. All its tiny engines seized up, and it toppled out of the sky and crashed into the trees.

  Tonite Midnite

  TM1 1.0

  THERE WAS MORE work to be done than Jace had estimated, and on the following Friday, his twice-extended employment contract finally expired. But by then the historic mill town was buttoned up and put to bed for the remainder of the winter. Jace rode home for lunch, newly unemployed till May. Alone in his chilly house, he started thinking maybe it wasn’t too late to go visit Kate’s family in Colorado, find a part-time job there, meet some girls. He looked up flights from Anchorage on his iPad (with its last full charge courtesy of the park service). He browsed Deut’s Facebook page. Actually, the profile was in the family dog’s name. But it had to be hers. Not much to it, no updates, no profile photo. The few uploaded snapshots showed no people or dogs, only views of Stubborn Mountain taken from around their compound. And no changes made to the profile since the last time he checked.

  While he was snooping around, the Chat tab at the bottom pinged and popped open. Crissy Lou had sent him an IM:

  u there ranger?

  It was her! Such luck. His pulse raced as he typed:

  Yes, hi. Who’s this?

  who do you think?

  Are you Deuteronomy?

  ha ha wrong!! Me dog wag wag : O)

  This again. It was a game with her.

  Then, good doggie. pat, pat.

 
meet me tonite?

  Whoa. That was fast. No religious test this time?

  Is this really Deuteronomy?

  woof!

  It wasn’t like he could refuse.

  Sure, I’d like to meet you. When? Where?

  end of airstrip tonite midnite

  OK I’ll be there. The public airstrip in town?

  no silly our airstrip.

  HE DRESSED FOR the cold, about minus twenty-six (–32 C) and dropping, and followed the Mizina spur trail to the far end of the Prophecys’ pirate airstrip. He approached through the woods with his headlights off and turned the snowmobile around before killing the engine.

  The quarter moon lit up the countryside enough so that he could glass the Prophecy airstrip, yard, and house with his binoculars. He never once questioned why Deut might choose a midnight rendezvous: obviously it was the only time she could sneak away. But he arrived an hour early just in case “Crissy Lou” had plans to ambush him.

  No lights were burning in the main house or outbuildings. That wasn’t unusual in the country where nighttime was meant for sleeping. But there was no woodsmoke coming out of any of the stacks either, and that was odd on such a cold night. Jace, himself, wasn’t cold; he’d come prepared in his full arctic expedition gear. Even his toes were warm.

  Over the next hour nothing moved but the moon in the sky. The frozen forest was so quiet that all he could hear was his own breath and a slight ringing in his ears. He did see a fox bolt across the snowy airstrip, or at least a critter the size of a fox. Now and then an owl hooted. That was about it.

  Midnight passed with no Deut. Twelve fifteen. Twelve thirty. A last-minute hitch most likely. Someone had woken up, and she was forced to wait for them to fall back asleep. Or maybe she had fallen asleep herself. Or she was halfway out of the house when someone saw her and wanted to know where she was going.

  By one thirty he was ready to pack it in. She wasn’t going to make it. There’d be an apology waiting for him online. But then he saw someone coming down the airstrip. Even with binoculars it was hard to tell if it was her. Whoever it was looked too small to be Proverbs. It had to be her, and when she reached the end of the airstrip, she stopped. Jace left his machine and waded through hip-high snow to meet her. But it wasn’t Deut; it was one of the little kids, a boy.

  “Hey, kid,” Jace said. “Looking for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You Deut’s brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Uzzie.”

  “Hi, Uzzie. Where’s your sister?”

  “She can’t come.”

  “She got held up? I thought that might happen. Thank you for coming out to let me know.” Jace crouched down in front of the boy. Though he wore a coat, it looked too lightweight for the weather. And he had no hat or mittens. “Come on, champ. Let’s get you back to the house before you turn into a popsicle.”

  “No.”

  “Aren’t you cold, Uzzie?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m cold just looking at you.” He turned the boy around and tried to usher him back up the airstrip. But Uzzie planted his feet and wouldn’t move.

  “Got to show you,” he said.

  “Say again?”

  “I got to show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  The little guy raised his bare hand and pointed at the side of Stubborn Mountain. “Our angel.”

  Jace looked up and was stunned to see a light shining on the mountainside, a pinkish purple light of the exact same hue as the one he’d seen on the river flats a month earlier. It was the glass tulip that had nearly killed him. The alien was still here. The feds hadn’t found it, or, if they had, hadn’t taken it back with them. Or maybe there were more aliens than the one he’d seen.

  Jace removed his hat and outer mitts and put them on the boy. They were way too large for him, but they would do. “All right, Uzzie. Let’s go see your angel.”

  JACE COULD HARDLY keep up with the boy. The kid took the slope like a mountain goat, dropping the hat and mitts along the way. They climbed to a ledge that Jace recognized. It was above the mine entrance near the northeast corner of the property where he had helped set a monument during the fractious boundary survey.

  They followed the ledge around a granite outcropping — and there it was, the shining tulip. Or tulips, actually, six of them. On the flats it had taken only a single tulip to drain his gas tank of fuel, his batteries of juice, his Clif energy bar of energy, and his own flesh of its vitality. One tulip had nearly done him in. Here were six of the jokers.

  “Close enough,” he said to Uzzie, grabbing him from behind. “We can see the angel good enough from here.” But Uzzie shrugged him off and stepped into the tulip light. He went right up to them and touched their delicate glass stems with his bare hands. He looked back at Jace as if to reassure him. And it was true that Jace felt none of the crippling fatigue he had on the flats. Maybe the “angel” had figured out that it was impolite to eat people. So he cautiously approached the tulips, ready to bolt at the first sign of fatigue. They looked exactly as he remembered: tall glass stems so slender they couldn’t possibly support their own weight, let alone the large, flower-like crowns; tiny, swirly, sparkly pinwheels embedded just beneath the glass surface; the eerie, neon glow; no leaves or branches. The only difference was that these were slightly tilted at the top, all in the same direction. Following Uzzie’s lead, Jace removed a glove and touched a stem with his bare hand. It felt warm.

  He peered up at the flower crowns. “Hello, there,” he said. “I think I met one of you down on the flats. I mean you no harm.”

  None of the tulips acknowledged him.

  Uzzie tugged at his sleeve. “These ain’t angels,” he said and pointed into the darkness further along the ledge. “The angel’s over there.”

  Jace swept the area with his flashlight but found only rock and snow.

  “Is the angel . . . safe? I mean, is it injured? What’s it doing out here? Is it hiding?”

  “Yes. You gotta help him. He wants to meet you.”

  So, if the tulips weren’t the alien, what were they? Sentry posts?

  “Okay, Uzzie, lead the way.”

  Jace followed Uzzie to the other end of the ledge, but there was no one there.

  “Down here,” Uzzie said, squatting next to a large hole in the ground.

  Jace shined his flashlight down the hole but couldn’t make out the bottom. Its sides were lined with a layer of frozen condensation. A large, cast-iron grate lay next to it. It was one of the old mine’s ventilation shafts bored into solid rock.

  “The angel is down there? Are you sure this is what Deut told you —”

  Before Jace could stop him, the boy scooted into the hole and began descending.

  “Wait! That’s dangerous. Don’t go down there.”

  “Come on,” the boy urged him. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid. It’s just . . .”

  Jace crouched and sat on the lip of the shaft and dangled his legs over the edge. He put away his flashlight and turned on his headlamp. It would have been smart to have a climbing rope to belay himself, but as he started down, he found plenty of hand- and footholds and even a number of railroad spikes driven into cracks, and climbing was easier than he had anticipated. But in his pillowy arctic gear he nearly filled the space.

  Ten yards down (9 m), the vertical shaft ended at the intersection with another, more horizontal one. The junction had partially caved in at some point in the past, and the gap was too narrow for him to pass through. Short of excavation, Jace was blocked. Not so the boy, who had continued through to the horizontal shaft. A faint breeze carried the scent of woodsmoke and cooking. Had the family moved into the mine? That would explain the unheated house.

  Jace had to contort himself to look through the gap. “Uzzie, wait up. I’m stuck here.” He could see the boy’s cherub face in the light of his headlamp. “It’s too
narrow.” Then it occurred to him: this must have been where Deut got stuck. She must have been inside the mine trying to crawl out this shaft. Maybe she was still nearby.

  “Deut!” he shouted through the gap. “It’s me, Jace. Can you hear me?”

  No reply, just the boy, who said, “Stay there. The angel will come to you.”

  “All right, but tell it to hurry.” Jace turned off his headlamp to wait and tried to make himself comfortable. As a rule, he wasn’t afraid of confined spaces or the dark, but he’d never been lodged at the bottom of a mine shaft before. For that matter, if this whole affair was an elaborate trick to entrap him, it was a success. All anyone had to do was reattach the iron grate at the top and he was a goner. No one would ever find his bones.

  On the other hand, the Prophecys weren’t able to fake the glass tulips he’d seen. No, those were real, which meant there probably was an “angel” in the mine. Still, he checked the time on his phone. He’d give the angel ten minutes to show, fifteen at the outside. Then he was out of there.

  Time passed, at least ten minutes. He bent down several times to shout into the gap, “Hello! Deut? Uzzie? Hello!”

  SCRABBLING SOUNDS IN the horizontal shaft. When the sounds got closer to the junction, Jace switched on his headlamp and twisted himself to peer through the gap. He didn’t know what he expected to see, and he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Something lumpy. Then it moved, and he saw it: a big, turd-shaped head with leathery, brown skin, tiny ears, and no hair or fur; a plump, little body with spindly arms and long, twig-like fingers. When his light found its face, it froze and gazed at him with large, moist eyes.