The Creature of Old Dark Silver Mine

Even the Pinkerton had to be halfway to hell by now. His body lay at the bottom of a hole dug into the mine floor, impaled on sharpened planks taken from the tracks once used to bring ore to the service. The worst part was that he’d seen it, shined his lantern into it, and observed long enough to say, “It’s like the tiger traps we made when I went on safari.” Then the earth crumbled beneath his feet, clattering into the depths, hungrily drawing him to his end.

The Methodist had grabbed the lantern at the last minute, or the arrogant detective would be burning at the bottom of that pit even now. The holy man still held the light, though in the end he’d also taken up one of the rangers’ Colts, filling both his hands and revealing himself to be of sterner stuff than he first appeared.

“Who would’ve thought it would be down to us, Padre? The homesteader and the preacher.” Solomon Hart armed sweat from his brow as he spoke. It should have been cool this far underground, but the silver tube radiated heat like the summer sun at high noon.

Solomon’s question garnered no response. Instead, the Methodist shined his light around the room, illuminating both dead Texas Rangers and also Milton Longenecker, whose sheriff’s badge still clung to the daily polish Milt had given it every morning since his first election. The lantern’s flames danced in the sheriff’s sightless blue eyes, reflected in the sweat beaded on his flesh.

“It wouldn’t’ve been, if you hadn’t started layin’ down fire with that gun,” Solomon said. The look in the other man’s eyes worried him a little. He’d heard of men who got a taste of violence and couldn’t give it up, but he’d also heard of those who brushed against death and lost themselves to it. They lived, but ol’ Grim had still managed to take their soul away when they stared into his empty eyes.

“Padre,” Solomon said. “Listen to me.”

The Methodist continued to stare. He wasn’t evening praying. Sweat slicked his bald pate and he seemed not to notice.

The three dead men lay where they fell, marionettes whose strings had been cut in the middle of a frantic dance. Their faces contorted from the horrors that had ushered them to their final rewards. The thing in the silver tube had revealed itself in a different form to each of them. Solomon had seen his daddy, Cortland Hart, the angriest drunk he’d ever met, also the reason Solomon had set out for a new beginning in Wichita. The creature must have chosen better for the rangers and Sheriff Milt, based on their present condition. All the same, if the Methodist hadn’t bottled that thing up when he did, Solomon knew that his old daddy would have gotten the best of him despite the miles he’d put between them—at least that’s the way it would have seemed.

Solomon shuddered.

A faint sound, a spider’s breath of words. The Methodist had muttered something too softly to be understood, but Solomon watched as the holy man lowered his eyes to the floor of the shaft. Solomon took meaning from what he saw. A moment of respectful silence. The men in this room had died badly. The expressions of horror on each of their faces had been etched in place, eyes nearly burst, tongues lolling, more bloodless than a gutshot gunfighter. Worse was the way the lantern’s glow danced across their bodies, throwing shadows. Sometimes Solomon imagined hints of movement in the uneven light.

The longer Solomon watched, the more the furtive gestures seemed to exist outside of his imagination. One of the ranger’s fingers twitched. The other winked, the way he always had when he thought he’d landed a particularly clever joke. Solomon dared not look at Sheriff Milt. They had been friends.

He said, “Ready to go, Padre?”

“We’re not done yet,” the Methodist said, this time speaking just loudly enough to be heard.

“It ain’t in there?” Solomon asked, indicating the silver tube throwing off all that heat. He knew, if he asked, the Methodist would confirm that the heat emanated from the literal pit of hell, and probably quote the verse from Leviticus or Deuteronomy that provided him that knowledge.

“It’s in there,” the Methodist said.

“Then, what? We got to get it out of here? Or blow the mine and keep it buried?”

There was a long pause while the holy man thought. He did not lower the lantern, and he did not put down the Colt in order to caress his battered cross the way he always did when thinking.

“Padre?” Solomon asked.

The Methodist wore that faraway expression again, the one that suggested he had gazed into the abyss and might never look away. He wasn’t the sort of man who should have come along on a hunt like this one. He should have given Sheriff Milt the silver tube and then stayed behind in the safety of the homestead. Solomon shook his head at the thought. And who am I? Some mad dog killer?

No, he’d just been the man who lived closest to old Dark Silver.

“We have to seal the prison,” the Methodist said. Then he spoke again, the words following close together as if he were desperate to get them all out before his nerve failed. “The blood of a righteous man must be spilled upon the prison.”

Solomon felt dizzy. The force of understanding nearly shoved him back a step. This was why the Methodist had insisted on coming along. Like Jesus facing Golgotha, this brave man had marched to his end knowingly. And he had held his ground the whole time, maybe even better than Solomon himself. When the shadows had come alive, up near the entrance, it had been the Methodist who had pulled Solomon out of danger, not the other way around. If it weren’t for the Methodist, no one would be walking out of the mine tonight.

“Oh, Padre,” Solomon said. He felt his heart break in a way it never had for another man before. “I’m sorry.”

The Methodist’s eyes traced the contours of the room again, more alert now, as if he sensed something changing. Solomon let his eyes follow the same path around the rugged contours of the mineshaft, only to find that the three dead men had shifted their blank eyes toward him while he was talking. In the treacherous light of the lantern, all three seemed to be smiling.

Not smiling, Solomon thought, watching the unholy light ebb and swell. They were laughing.

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Reverend Callum Swallow, who had been simply the Methodist since his arrival in Wichita two short years ago on February 14, 1918, could not bring himself to look directly at the homesteader. He hadn’t intended for it to go this way. Longenecker had been a good man, likely the best of them all. The sheriff hadn’t polished his badge every day out of vanity, but rather so it would shine brighter in the eyes of those who took strength from it.

Whatever Sheriff Milt had witnessed at the end, his screams had been loud enough to strip him of his voice. While Callum completed the holy ritual to bind the creature to the silver prison, he had heard the last, pitiful rasps emitted from the sheriff’s throat. They had been no less desperate, but the poor man’s body had been unable to do justice to his last moments and instead collapsed. The two rangers had not fared much better, but their deaths had come quicker, which seemed a mercy.

Milt’s death was too far in the past now. His soul had moved on. He could no longer serve the purpose for which he had unknowingly come.

“Oh, Padre,” Solomon said, and something in his tone broke Callum’s heart. Solomon’s brand of compassion—the kind that was sincere—came along so rarely on the frontier. To find two such men in the same town had seemed an embarrassment of riches. Over time, though, Callum had come to genuinely like both Solomon and Sheriff Milt. Just after they entered the mine, when creature had imbued their shadows with the shape—and the claws—of a grizzly, Callum hadn’t saved the homesteader just to watch him die later. He had decided by then that it would be the sheriff whose final sacrifice sealed the silver prison.

“I’m sorry,” Solomon said.

Callum felt tears threatening to well in his eyes. He could not bring himself to look at either Solomon Hart or the silver prison that would soon fail if it was not consecrated. Instead he looked to the sheriff, whose death had failed them all.

Why is it always the blood of a righteous man? Callum wondered, bitterly. People often spoke of rituals requiring the blood of virgin women, but that was the devil’s work. The machinery of heaven was oiled with the blood of good men, and there were so few in this world to start with.

“Padre?” Solomon said, but his tone had changed. He wasn’t worried about Callum now. The fear in his voice had become personal.

Callum narrowed his eyes, trying to see what Solomon had noticed. It took only a moment to realize that the phantasms were returning, images tailored to the horrors of the viewer, like the invisible terrors that had done in poor Milt. The creature strained against the bonds of its prison. If the silver was not consecrated, then it would escape.

We should run, Callum thought. The prison was weak, imperfect in its current state, but days might pass before it failed, even weeks. Here beneath the earth, the creature would be rendered powerless throughout that time. Weeks where the people of Wichita could rest easily. And weeks where Solomon Hart and the Methodist could retreat to the East Coast and get lost in the twisting labyrinth that was New York. Callum looked up, ready to suggest this very escape, only to find Solomon Hart backed against the wall, his gaze shifting from one dead lawman to the next. Solomon’s hands rose defensively, but he did not let go of his old hunting rifle. Callum watched as the barrel waved generally in his direction.

“It’s comin’ loose again, Padre!” Solomon cried. Their eyes met, and Callum saw grief in the other man’s expression. Grief, but also strength. The resolve that had so impressed Callum over the last few months.

“That’s why you brought me, ain’t it?” Solomon asked. He narrowed his eyes, clamped his left hand over one ear as if to drown out some terrible noise. “You can’t do it yourself, or it’d be sinful. I’m sorry, Padre. I’m sorry!”

Callum raised his own hands, which only served to thrust the lantern and the ranger’s Colt between them. “Wait!” he cried, but Solomon could not hear anything above the phantasm that the creature wrought against him.

“I don't wanna do this, Padre!” Solomon shouted, his voice echoing in the narrow confines of the shaft. He returned his second hand to steady the old hunting rifle. He squinted against the pandemonium in his mind.

Callum fought against the panic welling within his breast, a palpable pressure rising to the top of his head like thermometer mercury. His eyes flashed from the lantern in his left hand to the ranger’s Colt in the right.

I can’t do it, he thought.

One final gunshot challenged the integrity of the Dark Silver Mine. As it had earlier in the evening, the old shaft held.

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The Methodist died in old Dark Silver. The lawmen who rescued the bodies for proper burial were from out of town, because the hunt had resulted in the deaths of Sheriff Milton Longenecker and both his deputies. Among the dead were a Pinkerton detective, a pair of Texas Rangers, Sheriff Milt, and the strange holy man who had come out of the east on the trail of the creature before anyone in Wichita understood they were in danger.

The man who returned to the Hart homestead looked nothing like the one who had left it just a few days earlier, but there was no one for miles who had known him well enough to recognize the difference. He dwelled on a large plot of land, after all, and he had lived a relatively self-sufficient life. If that land hadn’t been so near the entrance of the Dark Silver Mine, everything that had transpired up to the consecration of the silver tube he carried might have just passed by the original Solomon Hart like a cold breeze on a warm night.

This new Solomon Hart was a foot shorter, and—at first, anyway—not as muscular. The latter changed in short order, of course. He was also bald, but that didn’t bother the right woman when they met. Soon they were wed and with a son on the way, whom he would name Solomon Hart, Jr., not quite after himself. On late nights he would sit on the porch of the old homestead and regale his son and wife with tales of the labyrinthine city of New York. On these nights, Solomon Hart spoke with the talent of a practiced orator, and his adoring audience hung on every word.

Solomon Hart thought often of the silver tube. Eager to be rid of it, he disposed of it the best way he could imagine. Wichita County buried a time capsule in the fall of 1920, with no intention of opening it for one hundred years. The people of the new frontier did not seem to understand how different this world would be by the year 2020. Solomon said good-bye to the silver tube on that day, but he prayed every night that, after a century, the people of Wichita County would lose interest or, better yet, forget their time capsule. If his prayers were answered, then the creature would be bound forever in its prison, bathed in the blood of the last righteous man Callum Swallow had known in Wichita County.