Colony

by SpunSilk

Part twelve: Mine

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

–– Thomas Carlyle

I buried Horace Dowd in the churchyard.

I've dug up enough dead bodies in my day, alone at night, to know exactly how much dirt is involved in 6 feet. My energy level was sluggish with Colony gestating in my aura, but I felt he deserved the respect – and I was living my life on my terms. I laid him next to the graves of his grandfather, father, and mother. Graves that, like as not, he himself had dug for each of them as each of their times had come.

Now there was just me, again.

Sitting there on a low gravestone in the quiet yard afterwards, surrounded by generations of the dearly departed, I again had the odd feeling; as if I had people around me. Death was quite a bit on my mind that morning. Understandable, I guess, considering what I had spent the morning doing. As I mused on this, I had a thought; I would come here. You know... when the time came... This was the proper spot.

Dust to dust. My bones would at least have other bones as company. Mind you, I'm not one that goes for a lot of human interaction. And sentimentality was right out. But it felt... I don't know… 'better' that way.

But enough philosophizing.

It wasn't hard finding his cabin. A path had been worn over the years between the general store and his place, the general store that had sustained his isolated existence all those years. The cabin stood in the woods, some half-hour's walk from town. It was a tidy little cabin, built by hand, log by log just like they used to do out in the frontier. The roof was split wood shingle and the lean-to kitchen was to one side. There was a well, but not a pump; it was a pail-winch type. I could see how the small remnant of the town (one singular family) had adapted and made do, once they were cut off from the rest of civilization. It looked a lot like the original settlers' houses, they both had used the same strategies to survive out here in the wilderness. The only difference was the angular repulsion symbols that were painted boldly around the bottom of this one.

The inside of the cabin was a study in the character of the occupants. They must have loved books, as it seemed the family had rescued the entire contents of the town library after the thorns threatened it. Bookshelves sagged under the weight on most every available wall. Old books, with bindings of muted colors of crackled leather, and well-used each one. A quick browsing showed the likes of Keats, Irving, Wilde, Twain, and Dostoyevsky. Huh. High brow stuff.

Furniture was limited to what was needed. A table with delicately-carved legs stood on the rough plank floor, a disconnect between the very civilized pre-thorn past and the hard pioneer-life afterwards. The only other furniture was a cupboard and a sagging bed. A double bed. Ironic, considering Horace's solitary life, but probably inherited from his parents.

On the table lay an old violin – or maybe it was a fiddle, I never could tell the difference between – that was well-worn with a patina of enthusiastic use. I looked around for sheet music, but didn't find a thing.

Hanging overhead in the rafters, I found to my delight a good quantity of smoked meat and fish. I counted this as my best gift from Horace, by this time I had gotten quite low on canned stew back at my cabin by the Mustang.

The lean-to kitchen showed evidence of Horace's skill at hunting and trapping. Bundles of aromatic dried plants that hung from rusty nails on the log cabin wall convinced me he had these to use as spices, and well-used metal cooking pots were stacked in a small pile. I had never before realized just how useful was a single metal cooking pot. A garden at the side of the cabin was thick with drying corn stalks and pumpkins that glowed a happy orange from between the brown-tinged leaves. Fall was giving way to cold, and winter was coming.

I stood contemplating the snug little cabin. Oh well. It seemed it was time to move house again. I guess it was at that point that I accepted the yoke of being the troglodyte's keeper.

Really, I didn't have a lot else clogging up my calendar…

So then I faced the next assignment; see the mine. Finding it was also elementary, the path to it from the cabin was even more well-established than that to the general store. About two thirds of the way there, I came across a finely built hardwood chest, some two foot square, off to one side of the path. Out here in the woods? I opened it with curiosity, and had my first glimpse of the 'special' tool Horace had mentioned. It was a hand-saw, but not like the rusty one I had taken from the floor of the collapsed barn two mornings earlier (had that really been just two days ago?), this one was not rusted at all. It looked as fit and shiny as the day it had been made, as if it had arrived from 1890 in a time machine. I had the oddest sensation deep in my chest, looking at this tool laying in its box. It attracted me.

I have to say, I am no man's handyman, and have never felt a need to have more than the odd screwdriver to my name – to tighten any loose screws in my life. But this handsaw was different. My hand reached out for it of its own accord, without any need for a command from my brain to do so. To my shock, the tool actually leapt –all by itself! – into my hand before I even touched it. And there it landed sure and strong, and in what I can only describe as a 'perfect fit'. I had never seen the like before. It felt right. Thus emboldened –as if I ever had needed emboldening!– I proceeded farther down the path with the saw to see this cairn-thing for myself.

The mine lay about 15 minutes walk beyond the chest. I could tell I was approaching the place before I saw it. It was the silence. It got so, so quiet. No jabbering birds, not even wind in the dry leaves. I'd bet even the damned crickets held their tongues near here. The air got hollow and intense. This place tasted like death. Edward R. Murrow, who padded along silently behind me felt it too, and stayed close by.

As I entered an opening in the 'natural' woods, I saw it. Tucked into the mountainside was an old timber mineshaft opening, some five foot tall and just as wide. And, as sketched in the grandfather's ledger book, stacks of smooth river rocks measured off a semi-circle at short distance around the opening, each stack standing about a foot and a half from its next neighbor. Nine in number, each one fifteen stones high. The cairns. I approached them quietly, they seemed unbelievably fragile. Nothing stabilized the stacks; each stack was made up of flattened roundish stones that stood precariously atop the stone below it. Delicate, but static. Rock hard, but breakable. Natural, but mystical. My eyes narrowed, incredulously. This? This was enough to contain the creature that had done this catastrophic damage to the whole area? It didn't make sense. But if I waited for the Odd Stuff to make sense, I would be left tapping my foot a lot in this cursed life.

My attention moved from the slender cairns to the black hole that stood beyond it. All was quiet. I certainly didn't expect to see him here today – even Horace had seen him only three times in his lifetime. Curious as I was I couldn't expect to catch a glimpse my first time out. But I was happy for the pewter amulet that hung on its chain around my neck just the same.

I turned around to examine my charge: the thorn-vines that grew pitifully in this direction, out from between the large old-growth 'normal' trees at the perimeter of a 50 foot half-circle. Compared to the vines in Banesville itself, these were thin and weak. I smiled. The presence of Lahabiel's stone columns seemed to suck all the power out of them. But not the evil intent; they strained forward, impeded, but still straining forward at something just over the speed of a normal-plant's growth rate, trying desperately to reach the graceful stone cairns. To touch them – and in the touching, topple them. But the dang things didn't stand a chance. Of the 50 feet they would have had to cover, they had made only some seven feet of progress since Horace had last been there to trim them back. What was that, 3 days ago? The magnificent saw in my hand seemed anxious to lay tooth into the barbed botany.

"Changing of the guard, troglodyte!" I grinned.

It was like a hot knife through butter.

I made short work of the straining vines, and leaving them thus truncated, returned back toward Horace's cabin with a satisfied smile. I returned the handsaw to its chest, although it almost seemed it did not to want to leave me.

I set to work at the job of moving house. With a wheelbarrow from Horace's, I hiked back to the Mustang to gather my typewriter, satchel, and Lady Vet's three tennis balls. Horace's advice had been good, his cabin was much closer to my charge. And like everybody knows – with Real Estate, it's location, location, location.