Chapter 7: Nine Pairs of Eyes

The lamp had twenty minutes in it, maybe, and the snakes were not in a hurry.

They went ahead of the light and came back into it and went ahead again, and the sound was a wet rope pulled over stone, long and slow, and twice Theo heard the second one’s tail come around a corner after the rest of it had already turned.

He had worked his way up behind the light somewhere in the last hundred yards, because he couldn’t count steps he couldn’t see, so he walked third: Voss, then the contractor who had carried Quarles in out of the passage, then him. Voss had the light and had not offered it to anybody all night. Theo knew the contractor by the strip of duct tape across the heel of his boot and by the way he breathed through his mouth, which was the whole of what he had to go on. He had spent most of the night failing to learn faces and had stopped trying somewhere around the first snake.

Behind him, boots and breathing and one bad lamp. Quarles, and Fox behind Quarles. Hollis, and the second contractor, and the two from the state.

“Keep the beam off the walls,” Quarles said.

“They’re dirt,” Fox said.

“They’re painted dirt.”

The passage ran straight a while and then bent, and Theo counted his own steps so as not to count anything else. A hundred and thirty before it ended the way the other one had, in a doorway with a lintel he had to duck under, and the beam went out of the doorway into a dark it couldn’t fill.

“Stop,” Voss said.

They stopped. Ahead of them the dragging went on a few seconds longer and then stopped too, and the quiet after it had a size to it.

Theo’s first thought was about exits, because that was where his mother’s teaching put first thoughts: where does the crowd get in, and where does it get out. His second thought was that he couldn’t find the near wall.

Then Quarles came up beside him and took the light out of Voss’s hand without asking for it, put his palm over the lens to narrow the beam, and swept. Left, back, right. “Oh,” he said. It was the first quiet thing he had said all night. He handed the light back to Voss, and she kept it.

The room was nine rooms.

That was the part Theo’s eye kept sliding off. Black timber walls, still standing, divided the space into bays, and every bay was bigger than the room with the drum in it. Beams crossed overhead and boards lay on the beams and the boards still held. The whole of it was a little over thirty feet on a side. The light went fifty feet and stopped being light.

“Nobody move,” Quarles said. “Nobody touch anything. Not a timber, not a wall.” He turned a slow circle where he stood, and put a hand out to the nearest post for balance, and remembered, and took it back. “Somebody has to remember this. Say it back to me. Bay by bay, from the door, left to right.”

“Gerald,” Voss said. “You’re burning the lamp.”

“Say it back to me.”

She held the light on him a second longer than she needed to. Then she stopped talking. That was how Theo learned that she could hand a room to somebody else and keep the light.

Hollis said the bays back to him in a flat voice, left to right, and Quarles corrected him twice, and it went faster than it should have.

While it went on, Theo found the second door, on the far side, and measured with his eye how much floor lay between the two doors, and then looked at what was in the middle of the floor.

Two shells. The outer one black and plain and all of a piece. Inside it the red one, and the red was still red. Not the dull red of a thing that had been in the ground: the red of a fire door, of a toolbox, of something painted last summer. A bird was raised on the lid with its wings down and its head turned, and the sides of the box carried rows of diamonds, and among the diamonds there were circles.

The beam came off the lid and dropped to the floor. Something at the far end of the chamber had begun to move.

The first snake came out of the black between two bays without hurrying, put its head against the foot of the red box, and went up it.

The lacquer complained. Under a thing that size, any surface was going to complain.

The second came from the far end and went up the other way, and they met along the lid and kept going, and Theo spent longer than he should have looking for the place where one of them became the other, and there wasn’t one.

They lay along the sides in the rows of diamonds. Their scales had been red-black in the other room, the color of the paint on the walls; now the diamonds were that same red-black and the scales were too, and at ten feet, in that light, he could not tell the animal from the box.

The eyes went last. The painted circles on the lacquer were flat and the size of a coffee cup. The snakes’ eyes had been yellow, and then they weren’t.

Theo counted them the way he counted anything he did not want to look at. Left to right, top to bottom, out loud.

“Eighteen,” he said. “Nine pairs.”

Quarles wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Pairs of what?”

Nobody answered. Everybody could see.

“That’s a Copper King,” Fox said.

He said it the way a man says the name of a road he has been down before and doesn’t like.

Voss turned her head. “Say that again.”

“Copper King.” Fox shifted the shotgun under his arm and did not look away from the box. “Nine heads. Look at the thing.”

Theo was already talking. He hadn’t decided to; it came up out of the place in him where his mother’s handwriting lived.

“The copper king is nine-headed,” he said. “It comes and goes in a flash. It swallows men down, and by this its heart is made greater.”

The light swung onto him and he put a hand up against it.

“Where’s that from?” Voss said.

“Photocopy in the back of my mother’s book. She got it out of the historical society’s files.” He didn’t look away from the box. “There’s no citation. She doesn’t do citations.”

“What division,” Fox said, “has a name for that.”

“Four-oh-four,” Voss said.

She had a folded page out of her jacket. She held the light low and looked at it, and the paper was white in it, and she looked at it a while, and she did not need to.

“We’ve had the number since before I was born,” she said. “UNF-0007.”

“Does the file say anything?” Quarles said.

“The file has a species field.”

“And?”

“And it’s blank.” She folded the page along its crease and put it away. “Nine heads, and no field to put it in.”

“So you’ve got a file on nothing,” Theo said.

“We’ve got a file on the shape of a thing.” She said it without heat. “That isn’t nothing.”

“Nine heads,” Theo said. “There are two of them.”

“I counted too.”

“Nine pairs of eyes. That’s nine heads’ worth of eyes.” He heard himself doing arithmetic out loud and couldn’t stop. “And two animals.”

“The text is a copy of a copy of a description of something nobody has seen in a thousand years,” Voss said. “It can be wrong.”

“Then say it’s wrong.”

“I can’t.” She tapped the folded page once against her palm. “I can tell you it’s the only thing in the file.”

“There are no nails in that box,” Quarles said.

He had come up level with Theo. He was looking at the coffin the way he had looked at the table in the other room, and Voss put the light on him and left it there.

“Before nails, you bound a coffin,” Quarles said. “Leather. Cord. You wrapped the box and you tied it off. It’s in every site report I’ve written about a burial of this kind, and it’s not in this one. I’ve been looking for three days. I put it down as missing. Or rotted.”

“And?” Voss said.

“And it didn’t rot.” He lifted one hand, not quite pointing. “It’s lying on the box.”

Nobody said anything.

“It’s not an animal that got in here,” Quarles said. “It’s part of the box. It’s the binding.”

“Can they move?” Fox said.

Theo looked at the coils. Nothing in them had the look of a thing that planned to get up. He had thought something like that in the other room, and then the second one had come through the doorway.

“Theoretically, no,” he said.

“Theoretically.”

“I did a thing. I don’t have a way to check whether the thing holds.” He heard himself and did not like it. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you it holds.”

Quarles crossed to the nearest bay wall — slowly, one hand out, and this time he remembered and kept it to himself — and pushed the tip of his pen into the seam where a brace met a post. It went in the width of a knuckle and stopped.

“That’s a squared joint,” he said. “Every post I can see from here has one cut into it, the same gauge, by somebody with a rule and a steady hand. Under a stone cap, this size, in a hole in the ground. The people who were here when it was built could not have cut it, and could not have raised it.”

“Somebody did,” Fox said.

“Yes.” Quarles put the pen back in his shirt. “That’s the part I want on the record.”

“There were wooden men on the ramp,” the tape-boot man said. He said it without turning around. “Carved. Near life-size. Masks on them.”

“We walked past them,” Voss said.

“We walked past them.” He wiped his face. “They’re not decoration. They’re a sign. Like a sign on a door that tells you what’s on the other side of the door.”

“And the box does it,” Voss said slowly.

“The box is the mechanism.”

“Professor Nye opened it,” the tape-boot man said. “The little professor. He was fine when he came up. I want that said out loud, in front of everybody. He came up fine.”

The quiet after that was a different kind.

Theo held the fan flat against his chest. He wanted all of them out of this room.

The shape he had made in the other room was carved into the hands of the wooden men on the ramp. It was in a photograph on a folding table, the third pair of figures, the ones holding the fan. He had it from his mother, who had had it from somebody, and the line ran into this room and stopped.

That was as far as he took it.

“Up top,” Voss said. “We’re not doing this here.”

The noise started while they were still standing there. A hammer, metal on stone, three strokes and a pause, and then a machine winding up and settling into a growl.

“That’s a compressor,” Fox said. “That’s an electric hammer. That’s above us.”

They went back the way they had come. Voss counted them with the light, touching each one on the shoulder and making them say their names into it. Hollis. Fox. The tape-boot man. The second contractor, whose name Theo still did not have. The state man with the lamp. “Theo Marsh,” Theo said, and the light moved on. Nobody looked into any of the bays. The dragging had stopped, and Theo didn’t know when.

The place where the cap had come down was open. There was a hole in it the size of a bathtub, and a work light hanging in the hole, and a rope coming down out of the light, and a voice coming down with the rope, saying, We got them, hold on, we got them.

“What time is it?” Quarles called up.

“Seven and change.”

“Morning or night?”

“Morning.”

Quarles looked at his wrist. There was still no watch on it. “We went down at eleven,” he said.

Nobody answered that.

“Twelve lamps,” the state man said. He held his up as though it were still worth something. “We brought twelve. Six in the truck, six on the rack. We’re carrying one, and it’s the one in my hand.”

“We weren’t even running them high,” somebody else said.

They went up one at a time. Hollis first, then one of the contractors, then the state men, then Quarles in a harness with a man above him and a man below, and Quarles did not care for it and said so the entire way, in detail, with dates.

The contractor with the tape on his boot stayed at the bottom. He held out his hand, and Theo gave him the fan, and the man tucked it inside his coat and buttoned the coat over it and jerked his chin at the rope.

“Can you fly up?” he said.

“No.”

The man nodded slowly, the way a man nods when a disappointment has been expected, and put his hands on Theo’s waist and boosted him onto the rope.

Up top he handed the fan back. Theo put it inside his jacket and pulled the zipper up over it.

The sun was up. It had rained and stopped, and the ground smelled like a hot sidewalk, and the wet spoil heap threw the light back at him and he shut his eyes against it.

There were more people on the surface than there had been. Somebody in a rain jacket asked him his name and wrote it down, and asked him again ten minutes later. A pump ran somewhere behind the heap. There was a folding table with coffee on it, and he drank two cups of it cold.

“You’re thinking about Nye,” Voss said.

Quarles was watching the men at the hole. “I’m not. Nye’s going to be fine. The boy has the fan. Give him a night’s sleep and something to eat, and he can put Nye back the way he found him.”

Theo was near enough to hear that and did not say anything, because he had no way to know whether it was true, and because Quarles had said it out loud in the voice he used for things he meant to write down.

“Then what are you thinking about?” Voss said.

“My site report.”

Voss waited.

“I have to write the sentence,” Quarles said. “’The outer coffin was bound with’ — and then a noun. And the noun is a snake.”

“Write ‘organic binding material.’”

“That isn’t what it was.”

“It’s what it was made of.”

Quarles took out his pen. It was a ballpoint. He turned it over twice and put it back in his shirt.

He came over later with two cups and gave Theo one and stood next to him looking at the hole.

“What year are you in?”

“Eleventh.”

“Eleventh.” Quarles nodded. “And after that. What’s the plan.”

“My mother has a plan.”

“I’d expect she does.”

“Physics and chemistry.” Theo turned the cup around in his hands. “She wants me to take the work apart. She says you can’t sell a thing you can’t explain the same way twice.”

Quarles was quiet for a moment. “That’s not the worst reason to learn chemistry,” he said.

“People think it’s a racket,” Theo said. “It’s not a racket. In season we do four shows a day and there’s a shop by the door, and a good month, once the school groups start, is twelve to eighteen grand.” He drank. “What do you get for one of these?”

Quarles looked into his cup. “It pays for the paper.”

“There’s a line item,” Hollis said from the other end of the table, not looking up. “It’s steady.”

“Steady,” Theo said.

“Steady.” Hollis turned his cup around. “You get to plan a month out. She can’t plan a week.”

“Nobody,” Voss said, “finish that sentence.”

Quarles got the pen out again and turned his left hand over and began to write on the back of it, above the knuckles, where the skin was flat.

“What are you writing?” Theo said.

“Everything I can’t put in the report.”

It took him a while. He had to stop twice and shake his hand out. Then the pump started again, and the men in the rain jackets went back down the slope to the hole, and Quarles went with them, still writing.

Theo stayed where he was until the coffee was gone. Then he walked to the edge of the hole, past the cinder blocks, and looked down. The work light hung in the rockfall and the rope went down through it, and past the bottom of the light there was nothing to see at all.

He straightened up. The sun had come over the spoil heap and it was in his eyes, and he got a hand up against it, and the light came through the thin part of his fingers and was red.