Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (59 page)

“Sir?” I presented myself as he stepped down from the train. He looked me up and down and said, “Mister Fenwick?” Subterranean rumble of a voice. I nodded, and tipped the sopping straw brim of my hat. “Good to meet you, sir.”

“Nice hat,” he said, still taking my measure as he shook my outstretched hand. “Snappy.” No hint of a joke in those flinty eyes. It was 1924, for God’s sake.
Everyone
wore a straw hat back then.

“I guess it’s had most of the snap soaked out of it by now,” I said, taking it off and examining it. “We could dry it out, maybe, or else there’s a horse back there in town without a tooth in his head, poor bastard. He could probably use it for his supper.”

Keith smiled at that. Didn’t go overboard or anything; but I think I passed the test. Then, the welcoming committee were upon us.

∇

The guest of honour was polite and everything; that is to say, he wasn’t outright rude, not to their faces. He shook all their hands, and listened to a few bars more of “Shenandoah” from underneath the mayor’s big umbrella. I was fine, I had my snappy straw hat. But then the mayor, a big moose called Kronke, wanted to cart him off in the civic automobile for some sort of a formal reception with drinks, and Keith drew the line at that.

“Gentlemen, it’s been a long day, and I need to consult with my colleague here. We’ll meet up first thing in the morning, if it’s all the same to you.”
My colleague
. That was about the nicest thing I’d heard since I’d arrived in Oram County. It did my self-esteem a power of good; better than that, it got me a lift in the mayoral flivver as far as the McEndoe Hotel, which was where Keith and I had rooms.

The McEndoe was a rambling old clapboard palace, one of the few buildings in town that went much above two storeys. It had a view over downtown Oram that mostly comprised wet roofs and running gutters, and inevitably you found your eyes were drawn to the wooded hills beyond, brooding and enigmatic beneath their caps of cloud. Here and there you saw scars running down the hillside, old landslides and abandoned workings. Oram was a mining town, and you weren’t likely to forget it; at six in the evening the big siren blew, and soon after a stream of men came shuffling down main street on their way home from the pits. Looking at their sooty exhausted faces from my perch in the window of the hotel smoking lounge as I sipped bootleg brandy from my hip flask, I told myself there were worse things in life than getting my hat a little wet. I might have to work for a living, like these poor lugs.

“It’s funny,” Keith said, close up behind me. I hadn’t heard him come in.

“What?” I guessed he meant peculiar; God knows there was little enough that was comical about the view.

He was staring at the miners as they stumbled by in their filthy denim overalls. “I was up in the Klondike round the time of the gold rush, back in ’98,” he said. “Dug up about enough gold to fill my own teeth, was all. It was like that with most of the men: I never knew but half-a-dozen fellows who ever struck it rich; I mean really rich. But my God, we were eager sons o’ bitches! We’d jump out of our bunks in the morning and run over to those workings, go at it like crazy men all the length of a Yukon summer’s day till it got dark, and like as not we’d be singing a song all the way home. And were we singing because we were rich? Had we raised so much as a single grain of gold? No, sir. Probably not.” He took a cigar from his inside pocket and examined it critically. I waited for him to carry on his story, if that’s what it was.

“Now these fellers,” he said, indicating with his cigar: “each and every one of them will have pulled maybe a dozen tons of coal out of that hill today. No question. They found what they were looking for, all right. Found a damn sight more of it than we ever did. But you don’t see them singing any songs, do you?” He looked at me, and I realised it wasn’t a rhetorical question: he was waiting for an answer. I was sipping my drink at the time, and had to clear my throat more quickly that I’d have liked.

“They’re working for the company,” I said, as soon as I could manage it. “You fellers were working for yourselves. Man doesn’t sing songs when he knows someone else is getting eighty, ninety cents out of every dollar he earns.”

“No,” agreed Keith. “No, he doesn’t. But that’s just economics, after all. You know what the main difference is?” I had a pretty good idea, but shrugged, so that he’d go on. “We were digging for gold,” he said simply, “and these poor sons-of-bitches ain’t. Call a man an adventurer, send him to the top of the world so he’s half dead from the frostbite and the typhus and the avalanches, and he’s happy, ’cause he knows he might—just might!—strike it rich. Set him to dig coal back home day in, day out for a wage, and he’s nothing but a slave. It’s the difference between what you dream about, and what you wake up to.”

It sounds commonplace when I write it down. That’s because you don’t hear the way his voice sounded, nor see the animation in his face. I don’t know if I can put that into words. It wasn’t avaricious, not in the slightest. I never met a man less driven by meanness or greed. It was more as if that gold up in the Klondike represented all the magic and excitement he’d ever found in the world; as if the idea had caught hold of him when he was young and come to stand for everything that was fine and desirable, yet would always remain slightly out of reach, the highest, sweetest apple on the tree. That he kept reaching was what I most admired about him, in the end: that he knew he wasn’t ever going to win the prize, and yet still reckoned it was worth fighting for. The Lord loves a trier, they say, but sometimes I think he’s got a soft spot for the dreamer, too.

“Well, these fellows here might have been digging for coal,” I said, offering him a light, “but seems as if a couple of ’em may have lit on something else, doesn’t it?”

“Indeed,” said Keith, glancing at me from beneath those jet-black bushy eyebrows before bending to the flame of the match. “Now you mention it, I guess it is kind of time we talked about things.” He fished out another stogie and offered it to me.

I sat up straight and gave it my best stab at keen and judicious. Keith probably thought I’d gotten smoke in my eyes.

“What do you think we actually have here, Fenwick?” He honestly sounded as if he wanted to know what I thought. Back in my twenties, that was still pretty much of a novelty.

“Toad in a hole,” I said promptly. “There’s a hundred of ’em in the newspaper morgue—seems like they pop up every summer, around the time the real news dries up.”

“Toad in a hole,” said Keith thoughtfully. He gestured with his cigar for me to continue. Emboldened, I did so.

“The same story used to run every year in the papers out West,” I said, to show I’d done my homework and wasn’t just any old newspaper shutterbug. “Goes like this: some feller brings in a lump of rock split in half, it’s got a tiny little hole in the middle. See there, he says? That’s where the frog was. Jumped clean out when I split the rock in two, he did. Here he is, look—and he lays down some sorry-looking sun-baked pollywog on the desk. Swears with his hand on his heart: it happened just the way I’m telling you, sir, so help me God. And the editor’s so desperate, he usually runs with it.” I spread my hands. “That’s about the way I see it, Mr. Keith.”

Keith nodded. “So you don’t believe such a thing could happen?”

“Huh-uh.” With all the certainty of twenty-four summers. “Toads just can’t live inside rocks. Nothing could. No air. No sustenance.” Speaking of sustenance, I offered him a pull on my hip flask. Keith accepted, then said:

“But these miners here—they don’t claim to have found a toad exactly, now, do they?” He was watching my face narrowly all the while through a pall of cigar smoke, gauging my reactions.

“No sir. They say they’ve found a whoosit.”

“A whoosit.”

“Exactly that. A whoosit, just like P.T. Barnum shows on Broadway. A jackalope. A did-you-ever. An allamagoosalum.”

“Jersey devil,” said Keith, entering into the spirit of the thing.

“Feegee mermaid,” I amplified. “Sewn-up mess of spare parts from the taxidermy shop, monkey head stuck on the back end of a catfish. That’s the ticket.” I felt pleased we’d nailed the whole business on the head. Maybe we could be back in Washington by this time tomorrow evening.

Keith was nodding still. He showed every sign of agreeing with me, right up until he said—musing aloud it seemed—“So, how does a thing like that get inside a slab of coal, do you suppose, Mr. Fenwick?”

“Well, that’s just it. It doesn’t, sir.” Had I not made myself clear?

“But this one did.” His deep-set eyes bored into me, but I held my ground.

“So they say. I guess we’ll see for ourselves in the morning, sir.”

Unexpectedly, Keith dropped me a wink. “The hell with that. I was thinking we might take a stroll down to the courthouse after dinner and save ourselves a night of playing guessing games. Skip all the foofaraw the mayor’s got planned. That is, unless you have plans for the rest of the evening?” A wave of his cigar over sleepy downtown Oram.

I spread my hands, palms up. “What do you know? Clara Bow just phoned to say she couldn’t make it.”

∇

And so, in the absence of Miss Bow’s company, I found myself walking out down the main street of Oram with Horton Keith, headed for the courthouse. We’d passed it in the mayor’s car earlier that afternoon; Kronke had told us that was where the whoosit was being kept, under lock and key and guarded by his best men. If the man who was on duty out front when we arrived was one of Kronke’s best, then I’d have loved to have seen the ones he was keeping in reserve. He was a dried-up, knock-kneed old codger with hardly a tooth left in his head, and when Keith told him we were the men from Washington come to see the whoosit, he waved us right through. “In there,” he said, without bothering to get up off his rocking chair. “What there is of it, anyways.”

“What there is of it?” Keith’s heavy brows came down.

“Feller who found it, Lamar Tibbs? Had him a dispute with the mine bosses when he brung it up last week. They said, any coal comes out of this shaft belongs to the company, and that’s that. Lamar, he says well, thisyer freak of nature ain’t made of coal though, is it? Blind man can see that. And they say, naw, it ain’t. And Lamar, he says, it’s more in the nature of an animal, ain’t it? And they say, reckon so. And Lamar says, well, I take about a thousand cooties home out of this damn pit of yourn ever’ day, so I reckon this big cootie here can come along for the ride as well. And he up an took it home with ’im.” The caretaker cackled with senile glee at Lamar’s inexorable logic. I guess it was a rare thing for some poor working stiff to get the better of the company, at that. But more to the point:

“You’re saying the whoosit isn’t actually in there?”

“No sir. It’s over to Peck’s Ridge, up at the Tibbs place. Mayor’s plannin’ to take you there in the automobile, I believe—first thing after the grand civic breakfast.”

This was starting to look like a snipe hunt we’d been sent on. Keith jabbed his cigar butt at the courthouse. “So what
have
you got in here?”

“Lump o’ coal it came out of,” said the caretaker proudly. “Got an exact imprint of the whoosit in it, see? Turn it to the light, you can see everything. Like life.”

“Is that right?” Keith said. “Company hung on to the lump of coal, I guess?”

“That they did,” agreed the last surviving veteran of the Confederate army. “All the coal comes out of that mine’s company coal—them’s the rules. Mayor’s just holdin’ it for safekeeping, is all.”

“Exactly so,” said Keith. “Well, thankyou, sir.” He slipped a dollar into the caretaker’s eager hand—assuming it was eagerness that made it tremble so. “Now if you could see your way to showing us where they’re keeping it, we’ll quit bothering you.”

“They got it in the basement,” said the caretaker, leaning back in his rocker and expelling a gob of tobacco juice. “Keep goin’ down till you can’t go down no more, mister, an’ that’ll do it.”

The basement of that courthouse was like a mine itself; you might almost have believed they’d dug the whoosit out right there, in situ. Keith and I came to the bottom of a winding flight of stairs and found ourselves in a damp dripping sort of crawlspace, its farther corners filled with shadows the single electric bulb on the ceiling couldn’t hope to reach. The ceiling was low enough that we both had to stoop a little, and most of the floor was taken up with trunks and boxes and filing cabinets full of junk. Thank God we weren’t looking for anything smaller than a pork barrel. We’d have been down there all night. As it was, we began on opposite sides of the basement and aimed to get the job done in something under an hour.

“This is annoying,” Keith called over his shoulder. “These damn rubes don’t realise what they’ve got a hold of here.”

“Toad in a hole,” I called back. Keith ignored me.

“This miner fellow—”

“Lamar Tibbs,” I sang out in an approximation of the caretaker’s Virginian twang.

“—he probably thinks he’s sitting on a crock of gold, just like the mayor here and the mining company with their slab of coal. But the two things
apart
don’t amount to a hill of beans, and they don’t have the sense to see it.”

“How so?” I didn’t think the whole thing amounted to much, myself.

“Because the one authenticates the other, don’t you see? Look here, I’m the authorities, okay? This here’s some sort of a strange beast you claim to have found in the middle of a piece of coal. Who’s to say it’s not a, a, what-d’ye-call-’em—”

“Feegee mermaid.”

“Feegee mermaid, exactly.” A grunt, as he moved some heavy piece of trash out of the way. “Nothing to make a man suppose it ever saw the inside of a slab of coal—
without the coal to prove it
. The imprint of the beast in the coal goes to corroborate the story, see?”

“Yes, but—” I was going to point out that you didn’t find beasts, living or dead, inside slabs of coal anyway, so there was no story there to corroborate, only a tall tale out of backwoods West Virginia. But Keith didn’t seem to be interested in that self-evident proposition.