Richard Hodel, a man who had never been accused of an overabundance of fatherly feeling, would almost certainly have hunted down his son and heir (and strung him up from the nearest tree, after putting a few holes in his gullet and a few boots to his bones, like as not), but he never had the chance. Every man who had not crept quietly away from Hodel before sundown that night (well before Handsome Jack’s escape had been noticed) was dead before sunup the next day. The work of claim-jumpers, said some, seeing overturned chairs, bloodsign, and the pitably light scores of human fingernails scratching across the hotel’s wooden floors. Bears, said others, because for all of that, there were no bodies to be found and buried. The Indians said nothing at all, but thought, perhaps, of restless spirits, Wendigo, and Trickster’s half-born abominations.
Either way, it was over and done, and so after the investigation (and the emptying of the mineral shed where everything Handsome Jack had not taken lay untouched by the murderous, claim-jumping bears of Alaska), all shafts leading into the mines were boarded over (the cage shafts, anyway, and whatever vent shafts the investigators stumbled across in their investigations), and Hodel was abandoned until the company decided what it wanted to do with the land. There was not much room for mystery as long as there was still gold in the mountains, but there was no gold on Mount Isaac and so the men were content to bury the truth of the Disaster with the mine and move on.
The Disaster had nothing to do with bears or monsters. In truth, it could not be said to have much to do with men either, as men reckon themselves.
But they were men once. Not a hundred years ago, or even a thousand, but at the very roots of mankind’s emergence. They were men when men lived in caves, made fire with stones, and still lived in fear of the world they would one day subjugate and master. They were men then, but the men came out of the caves. These went deeper inside. Both changed. And in 1898, when they met again, Hodel’s mining camp vanished. But it could be said that the people of Hodel remained, the new people, content to stay in their new home once the threat of other, of not-same, had been overcome and peace returned to their simple lives.
For they were peaceful, really. Not in the same way as humans now reckon peace, no more than they could be reckoned men, but in their own way, and it was peaceful enough. Men disappeared on the mountain from time to time—men who had no business being up there in the first place, men who were not much mourned or long missed—but there were no more Hodel Disasters. Gradually, some very ordinary murders and vanishings took its place. The gold gave out in the mountains. The mining companies collapsed and the towns built on their names were forgotten. If Handsome Jack had waited another hour and fifteen minutes before sneaking away on his father’s horse, or if he’d just left the deed behind and stolen one more bag of silver instead, Hodel might have been just another ghost town haunting the high unknown wilds of the Cascades, and things would have been different. Or if Jack had not been quite so quick to settle down with the first rich widow taken in by his good looks and frontier charm, or if a thousand things, culminating in if the wooden barrier capping the old Number Two pipe-shaft had never collapsed.
It had been a hundred and twenty years, almost to the very day, but the high, dry climate of the eastern face of Mount Isaac had preserved much. Quite a lot of debris had fallen in over that cap over the years, and countless animals had crossed over it without worry, but upon that unremembered anniversary, whatever restless and angry spirits dwelled in that hungry place surely guided the feet of William White, who had hunted the dry forest and panned its streams some fifty-odd years and who feared no man and no rotten timber. With one dry, dusty snap, Big Bill dropped one hundred six feet past rusted pulleys and mummified fibers of rope that had once hauled lead by the cage-load from the same mountain where he panned for gold. He actually landed pretty well, which was paradoxically unfortunate. He shattered his rifle, as well as most of the bones in the lower half of his body and lay alternately screaming for help and laughing at his own stupidity, watching his horrifically non-lethal wounds worsen and drinking what he had left of his day’s allotment of homebrew until the shock wore off. The rain that kept him chilled and helped his broken limbs to rot away kept him alive ten agonizing days more, and then he died. Forty days after that, give or take, a descendant of the creatures who had broken into the Hodel Company Mine from deeper parts unknown (a descendant, in fact, of the very one who had pulled Calico Pike to his unpleasant doom) followed the smell to this newly-opened portal and squinted up into the wet sky.
His name was Pool, a name which was meant to evoke the dark, deep waters that seemed so still but which teemed with unseen life. They were calling him Pool even when he was still a child and it was not an endearing name, for he’d had those dark, ungraspable thoughts even then and it unnerved the others. It unnerved them now too, but they accepted him better. He had become leader, a role that had always been and always would be needed in spite of their unchanging and essentially peaceful lives.
He had become leader, although no one could say exactly when or how. He had begun easing into the role even before the old leader’s death, so that when Bent Thumb did finally go to the Pit, no one questioned Pool’s right to take him there, not even Edges, who, as the biggest and strongest of them, would surely have been the one to assume leadership if Pool and his strange way of thinking had never come along.
The clan was smaller now than that which had first come to Hodel in the spring of 1898, but that was to be expected. It is an easy thing to die in a new place, particularly when there are monsters in your dark, safe tunnels, easiest of all to become frightened and flee back to the distant clan you left behind. But in the end, the mine had been boarded up, the camp abandoned, and with the memories of the monsters growing dim, the clan tentatively rooted themselves in this new soil and began to grow.
And they grew well. The tunnels were huge and relatively dry—any one of them could stand and walk upon their feet through any tunnel as far as it bored through the rock—but best of all, they were easy. The floors, walls, and even the ceilings were all flat, which was not only kind to hands and feet, but helped to catch sounds and bounce them back to waiting ears. The topmost tunnels where were the largest, but the clan rarely ventured there. True, it was where meat fell and where the air was freshest, but it was also coldest and damp and often filled with biting beams of Upworld’s light. The lowest tunnels, by comparison, had succumbed ages ago to the lack of a pump and yearly runoff into the nearby lake, and had almost entirely flooded out. Many new holes had opened under the water, and now fish and frogs and sometimes meaty things swam freely into the mine, so there was always something to eat even when no meat fell into the shafts.
They lived for the most part in the mid-levels of the mine, where the temperature stayed cooled year-round but never so cold that water turned hard. There were a few vent shafts here, if one traveled far enough, but most of the clan stayed close to the old track line, the great crossways of the Hodel mine, their hub of community. It was a good place, a strong place, nearly sixty feet by forty and adjoined by two other rooms half that impressive size. In 1898, the rough dome of the chamber was thirty-seven feet above the floor, but now it was scarcely half that and the many criss-crossing rails that had once brought Richard Hodel a half-ton of galena each day had been long buried under layers of animal hides. There was room enough for all of them in this place and they all used it, not only to sleep, but to hold whatever objects occupied their fleeting interests.
