Monster Resources

Monster Resources

Not far down on The River, way up high, there’s a place you can’t get to by boat because the surrounding cliffs might get you first. Into the side of one of these cliffs, you can see, spanning an area 500-foot long, a winged image in flight etched into the rock face. If you’re not too afraid of the buckshot that rains down maiming or blinding you from these cliffs or the boulder-laced rapids drowning you, you might get there. You can try to scale these cliffs, only to slice your way through the fog and foliage that pounce upon you as if they’re a smothering creature that draws life from your breath as you gulp at your existence; then, you might barely get there. But you’d never get out of Pike Mine Run.

Besides these impossibilities, the only land way in is one no one considers a road but more of a gravel path into those all-consuming woods that spreads and lurches across the ground; that smothering creature that simultaneously walks upright and crawls, a true marriage of green, grit, sod, and the unknown. 

Rumor has it that Pike Mine Run is so-well protected because of its Indian Lost Mine, not of coal but rather of gold. So old secrets die there.

Do school-age kids live there? No school bus goes there. But if Pike Mine kids did attend public schools and competitions, they would outrun, outdive, outswim, outsurvive anybody.  What school would they go to? Pike Mine Run is within the distance that a crow flies or bear runs from Coal Town School District. 

Coal Town is haunted. None there denies it. Rumor has it that this area had experience with runaway slaves, hiding them in Coalman Castle, which looms on its hill with tales of underground tunnels. But this belief could not be true because Coalman Castle had had slave owners and has no known tunnels to speak of.

Between Pike Mine Run and Coal Town and The River, if you could count them, you’d find that a vast number of kids end up missing. It always felt like something simply claimed them. Only one thing anybody knows for certain: castles and towns with an unknown past speak to everybody—even about those who can’t speak for themselves. Mines, tunnels, castles, and Indians, why not? Any of it could be plausible, especially when, with the facts you have, you leave out some of the details and deal with speculation. 

The other-worldliness of the present and the past there speaks often to teenager Cal Mercy, leading his grandfather Naynaw, in early stage Alzheimers, as they cross through the parking lot from the doctor. Coal Town’s Hallowberfest, set up there, has been put on hold because of the incumbent weather. 

 “Fate is fickle,” Naynaw says, as they shuffle, Cal Mercy providing support. “Iwo Jima. Just never know. Got dead-men’s pictures from there. That’s why the plane landed by my bed last night.” 

 “Horrible.” Cal Mercy shakes his head. “What men can do to each other.” Cal Mercy pauses as Naynaw wheezes. “Fickle. That’s a weird word for fate.” 

“Okay. Fate is resourceful. We got outta there, by damned.” 

Coal Town’s Hallowberfest this year was going to be bigger  than ever. Riverboats had been paddling The River, boats mooring at improvised docks, residents quickly crafting them for a price. At downtown’s central parking lot, vendors had booked local talent and arranged games in tents, stalls, and booths and onto flatbeds for profit or entertainment: rummage, antique, and white-elephant sales, a roulette wheel, dance groups, hot sausage venues, pulled-pork sandwich wagons, and crafts for all. Even the local soothsayer had set up shop with her granddaughter. Coal Town had been buzzing with more activity than you can rattle a bag of old bones at—all for naught; the weather had changed everything. 

From the doctor, Cal Mercy is delivering Naynaw to his grandmother-soothsayer, Sally. His sister Grace is there, too. “Let’s get everyone out of here before the weather gets worse, Pappy.”

Sally’s spot is set up very dramatic and effectual: not quite as big as a circus tent sideshow and not quite of this world, perfect for Hallowberfest. On poles twelve feet up had flown multicolored silks like birds. Now they were frozen stiff.

Sally—-everyone knows her, like a mini-person with her small frame, dark clothes, plain spectacles, black hair-bun pulled tight back. But up close, you get a whole different feel: some unseen power tied up in all of it. 

Then there’s Grace. Everyone knows her but in a different way. She’s the witch you would expect to be affiliated with such silks, scarves, and tents, and dressing as the gypsy. Grace personifies the word “soothsayer.” 

Sally doesn’t like her granddaughter’s drama. “I’ve told you not to do this, Grace.”

Grace shrugs. “Grandma Mean Magic, you know I don’t believe in psycho-drama. I just want to act the role. Doesn’t matter this year. Nothing happening, as fate would have it.”

Sally slings her arm around her. “Honey, it’s for the best. We have tomorrow. Some don’t.” 

Grace sniffs. “Sometimes, Granny, I can smell what’s coming.” 

“Hmm, like ozone before a storm.” 

“Humph, like a sewer in summer. Like now.” 

Bullish, the old man charges in, Cal Mercy tagging behind, and bellows, “Yeah, those blackbirds outside my window, Mean Magic, they have no faces. They told me to talk to you. Said you know. No one else’d believe me. Bunch of dumb asses.” 

Sally sits. “Come in, we’ll ask for answers.” Grace ushers him to a chair and Cal Mercy props himself behind. Both kids are shaking their heads.

Pappy throws his arms up, in hopes not so much to remove Cal Mercy’s hands as to allow Sally to feel his frustration. “No, no, no, I have answers. I’m looking for the questions.”

Sally searches his eyes shining like diamonds, suddenly oddly still. “Have a seat, Cal Mercy. I’ll be quick.” She motions for Naynaw’s hands in hers.

Naynaw’s words, wanting to be wild but held back so as to be understood, pour weirdly from his mouth. “I see the place. In there. Left for dead. Because of the weather. Got to find.” Pappy jumps from his seat. “Letgomyhands.” And he takes off faster than anyone imagines.

Sally stands when Pappy flees, and Cal Mercy shoots out of the tent. 

“Mean Magic, you think that was about Trellis? Since we discovered the new stuff?”

“My God, Grace, follow them.” Sally nods toward the tent flap door. 

For almost a year now, Cal Mercy, Grace, and their friends Billie and Punkin—-two brothers—-have been looking without a lead for Trellis. No one really cared to look very long because she was a loner girl who worked at Pleas Place, the local house of prostitution, before she went missing. The four teens care. They all went to Coal Town High School together.

A week before this Hallowberfest celebration, Punkin and Billie are lollygagging down Front Street, where Coalman Castle stands at its end, when Punkin pulls a skeleton key on rawhide out of his pocket and snaps it like a whip alongside his person. 

The whole time Billie smells nothing black or red, only green, like aliveness. Billie, his unbraided hair a-blazing and bouncing in sunlight, is beating a rhythm on his legs. “What yo’ got there, Bruh?”

“Our way into history.” 

“Since when yo’ a drama queen?” But Billie follows his brother. 

Punkin unlocks The Rose Mansion, they squeeze in, and Billie follows Punkin into its basement.

No one lives there. All around, The Rose has creepy stuff on shelves: dusty Mason jars filled with dirty-ish water and crammed with distorted creatures. Brittle herbs on boney-looking stalks hang down to grab at hair and clothes from the cobwebbed rafters. Metal instruments of various sizes and degrees of declared importance grab from overhead. 

Covering his eyes, Billie staggers about the dirt floor. “What up wit’ all these spooky thangs? I can’  look!”

“Then close yo’ eyes, but deft’ly don’ start drummin’. ‘Specially not here.”

Billie does close his eyes. “Why? Ghosts’ll get me? Punkin, how I s‘pose to walk if’n I gots my eyes closed? If’n I ain’t drummin’ my way ‘bout? It help me. Punkin? Punkin!”

“Wha’?” Punkin says mean, preoccupied, so Billie peeks.

Handing Billie a flashlight from a hiddie-hole, Punkin says, “Bruh, yo-yo. We gots us an adventure.” Punkin moves a stack of rusty shelving away from its moorings. 

Before them breathes a hole with a cold current so strong it’s about to suck them in. Punkin clicks on his light. He ducks into the darkness. 

A tunnel stretches out as a finger of at least one dark path to nowhere visible. They follow, snaking through (more like under) ancient Indian burial grounds above them; the tunnel narrows abruptly, as if cut off, and they halt at a stoned wall. Billie is too quiet—for Billie.

“What’s a matter, Bruh? Cat, or ‘ghost’ got yo’ tongue?” Punkin laughs as his brother keeps close without words. They feel their way around wall stones. The stone-wall-structure winds around and around: it’s the outer wall of Coalman Castle’s well. And there’s an opening into its interior. They climb in.

The two begin scaling the well wall—-slippery with the moss, algae, and damp rock—-which causes them unsure footing. One step at a time, Punkin and Billie ascend the well’s face, towards the unseen top.

“Where we climbin’ to, Bruh?”

“Just climb, an’ shu’ up.”

It’s doubly quiet, black quiet. 

As they scale in the darkness, Punkin vanishes.

“Punkin! Bruh! Oh, no, the spirits got him. He gone jus’ like Trellis.”

However, Punkin has found an exit, an opening similar to the one they had first entered through to this well wall, and has tumbled into Coalman Castle’s dungeon. 

The two know Coalman Castle probably has a dungeon because legend told them so. But supposing-to-be and existing-and-being are two different things. 

From where the boys land, their flashlights emit a pinhole of light upon a cave-like chamber. Cages of various sizes hang from the ceiling with chains and cable ropes crawling the mudded walls to move the monstrous devices. They breathe death. Hidden metal grates embedded around the dungeon’s ceiling must coax a ventilated air exchange and sound between this chamber and rooms above. Are there possible exits to the street? Or tunnels leading elsewhere? It’s too dark to tell.

From the darkness the boys hear gruff voices through the grates. 

“Yeah, we’ll take care of it with one fell swoop. On parade night.” 

Billie whispers, "We gotta tell somebody.”

Punkin’s eyes wide, his finger covering his lips.

“It’s time to make our move,” one voice growls.

“Yes, indeedie-deed,” another agrees.

“Listen,” a voice barks, “I’m the one got to live with these idiots after.”

“We didn’t get caught last time we took a kid from Pleas Palace, did we? Or times before that?”

“Shut up,” the voice rages. “You almost did. This weather’s for shit. Keep your eyes and ears open. Even if our river plan is screwed, fate is resourceful. There’s always something. It will present itself.”

In the dungeon, Billie and Punkin hunker down, praying to be safe, but knowing they may not be-—not till much later, when the voices leave. 

“The voices tells no plan, Cal Mercy,” Punkin tells him, as the teens meet in their hiddie place.

“What’s to do?” Billie asks.

”I have a hunch,” Cal Mercy says. “Me and Grace do.” 

“Boys,” she explains, “for some reason we’re supposed to go back to your tunnel.”

The four teens re-enter the tunnel. Inside, Grace sniffs the air. “There’s something here to follow. See that black shining ash dust in your light, brother? That’s a dead give-away.”

Cal Mercy moves his light up and down. “I see nothing, smell nothing, mud, maybe mold, some sewage.”

“But yo’ do gotta hunch, right, Cal Mercy?” Billie asks. “So c’mon, my boos and ghoul.”

Grace hears Billie’s feet slurp in mud. “Walk on.” It smells like an old, cold day. 

“Anybody,” Grace asks, “do you smell that?” 

“What?” Billie says. “Pay ‘tention to yo’ walkin’.” His voice is drifting farther away.

“You need to drum on your hip so’s I can follow you. My light’s weak. Root branches catching my hair, freaking me out.”

“Chicken girl,” his voice echoes. 

As Grace trips forward, Cal Mercy rights her. Grace shakes her flashlight with its blinking more off than on. Grace’s footing erratic, she slips much with someone always hurling her body from toppling. Once, someone even catches her arm from behind.

“Okay, let go, Cal Mercy.” Grace feels breath on her neck. But how is Cal Mercy behind her? She spins around eyeball-to-eyeball with more of a skeleton than a face. It’s Nonny No-Face. 

Through her fear, Grace manages speech, “Oh, my God. Thank God it’s you, Nonny, you scared me.” 

Nonny No-Face says, “Hope they get me. They goina get me. Praise God, they goina get me.” He gums his words as much as  pronounces them—-because he has no teeth in his mouth. His face is so much just skin and bone rather than flesh and has a ghost-gray wrapping about it, down across the rest of his frame. Nonny has more of him not to see than to see, especially in the darkness. The cloth thinly veils a woolen army long-coat with pins as if medals lined up along its pocket, glinting in her unreliable flashlight. 

Her bodily functions are about to melt into a mess of nothingness and death there the mud. But the smell in the air, besides the moss, mud, and mold, is a very alive smell. 

When Nonny grabs her hand, she feels its bony-ness. “They goina get me, please, God, don’t let ‘em get me.” He repeats his mantra everyone has heard, his skeletal face slobbering, “They goina get you. They got her, too.” His deep intake of breath sucks the air to such an extent Grace feels the hair move on her body, and gasps.

“Help me. Help yourself. Oh, please God, don’t let ‘em get you.” 

“Who, Nonny, who?” Grace both wants and doesn’t want to know. 

No-Face is eye to eye with her. “Believe none of us.” His closeness smells of onions and damp earth. Grace’s light flickers across his pins. There is a set of wings, which match the ones Trellis always wore.

“Where’d you get that pin?” Her voice is so dry it’s croaky. 

Nonny, not even an inch from her, says, “She gone. We hain’t. Follow this lead.” Grace grabs at the pin he’s putting in her hand. It falls to the mud.

Then, he’s gone. Grace feels his absence, a bone-chilling void so palpable she keeps reaching out for the substance of him. 

Grace yells, “Guys! Help! Please! Guys!” 

Nonny No-Face has presented much to take in. With shaky legs, Grace sits in the dizzying darkness. Are his a madman’s ramblings? Or does Nonny No-Face know about Trellis?

Punkin finds her first. “What yo’ deal, woman?” Cal Mercy and Billie run up in the sludge. Billie pushes Punkin aside. “Dang, Grace, yo’ down in this a-here mud. Tsk. Tsk. Lemme help yo’ up.” 

In the mud something glitters. “Here,” she points and picks between her feet. “Nonny knows something.” The wing pin shines in her hand. “This was Trellis’.”

The monster comes early, not as a thief in the night or a river creature but as snow and ice. All Coal Town’s plans for the Hallowberfest parade are put on hold. The kids can’t determine their next move, not that they know, anyway. It feels like they’re mourning something.

The weather starts Friday afternoon, dropping rapidly to below freezing. And the snow comes. Big flakes that even the deer, walking slowly in it, look to be trying to catch on their eyelashes and noses. Most parade floats are trucked to garages. 

But Naynaw needs his doctor appointment and so the family gets him there and waits in the soothsayer tent—until the old man comes in and takes off running.

Cal Mercy is yelling, “Wait! Pappy, it’s not real. Naynaw, it’s in your head! It’s like the plane! Stop!” Of course, the old man doesn’t listen and, on ice, not knowing where he’s headed, Naynaw has an advantage, especially in his state. Cal Mercy and Grace hurry down along the railroad tracks of town.

On the other side of the railroad bridge’s tunnel, the two teens finally can stop with their grandfather without injury. He’s clearing away thick vines and weeds from something.

“What’s that there?” Grace asks her brother, pointing at her grandfather’s dramatic madman’s weeding quest.

“It looks like an entrance to a mine or something.”

An idea, like lightning, crossing her face, Grace adds, “Or a tunnel.” They both attack the entrance there with Naynaw. 

Part of the wooden boards which had sealed up the entrance are rotten, falling away, ghosts past and forgotten. Naynaw, maniacal, tears away. 

“Pappy, slow up, I got you.” Cal Mercy tries to appease the man.

“Got to get in. I saw it in my mind’s eye. It’s real.” His hands, spidery from blood thinners, bleeding and already bruising, continue pulling at the boards, as does Cal Mercy, until there’s room to step through. They all plunge into the unknown.

 “Pappy!” Cal Mercy’s voice echoes everywhere in the darkness, a pinhole stream from a pocket flashlight the only light, but his feet keep moving. 

“Over here, over here, Boy,” the old man hollers. Untold things creep by and flit through the place, rancid and sour. In the darkness, two eyes shine back. There in a huddled mess they find a boy, captive by ropes. On his shirt lapel glimmers a winged pin, just like the 500-foot etching on the rock cliff face of Pike Mine Run.