Rattleyard Read online

  “Here he is,” Arthur said, and Crispin looked up and could see Dick coming across the football fields at an angle, his confident yet lackadaisical swagger singling him out. It seemed to take an age for him to get to where they were.

  “Hi guys,” Dick called out when he was close enough, giving a wave as he did. They said hello back, and then they were standing as a trio looking at one another.

  “Well boys, you’ve got yourselves involved in something haven’t you?” Dick said with a smile that was forced and made his face look quite unnatural.

  “So what’s going on?” Arthur asked.

  “How much did you read in my papers?” Dick asked.

  “Enough to know that you knew our father, and there was no accident at Cripple Creek.” Arthur said. Dick nodded.

  “This thing, Rattleyard, he is what happened at Cripple Creek.”

  “What is it?” Crispin asked.

  “We don’t know. There is a legend that when Indians settled on that land, they worshipped a metal God, and that legend was passed on to white settlers in the form of a monster that lived inside the mountains.” Dick smiled ruefully. “Who knew that such vague and wild stories could have turned out to be true?”

  “He’s a God?” Crispin asked. He wasn’t following exactly what Dick was saying.

  “The Indians thought he was a God, but he’s no God. He’s a killer.”

  “Sounds like he was just protecting his home,” Arthur said. Dick shot a glance at him that was crystal cold and frightened Crispin a little.

  “That may have been that case at Cripple Creek, but he has followed me for years since. He is here now killing again, and this is a long way from his ‘home’,” Dick said.

  “He killed our dad didn’t he?” Crispin asked after a short silence.

  “Yes he did, but your father was saving others when he died, me included.” Tears were in his eyes but didn’t fall.

  “How did he save you?” Arthur asked.

  “He stayed behind, letting us out ahead of him, and then the mine collapsed before he could get out.”

  “Why didn’t you stay behind with him?” Arthur said. Crispin looked at his brother and saw his fists clenched and the tossing of his hair that always gave his anger away.

  “I’m not as brave as your father,” Dick said. They were all quiet again.

  “We heard you talking to that man out the back of the house,” Arthur said.

  “Jared,” Dick said.

  “You told him you might know how to kill it?”

  “I think I’ve found a way, yes.”

  “How?” Crispin asked. Dick looked at the ground around them, and he looked at the goalposts and the metal framed chairs that ran on one side of the pitch for spectators and the benches for the teams just at the sidelines.

  “I better not tell you here,” he said, and he nodded to the ground. Crispin and Arthur looked down and for a moment Crispin didn’t understand but then he realised that Dick was saying that Rattleyard could be right underneath them, right now!

  “Probably not,” Dick said when he saw the hot footed shuffling of Crispin and the fear in his face. “But I don’t want to say out loud what I have planned in case he hears it.”

  “Take us somewhere where you can tell us then,” Arthur said.

  “You boys have to be anywhere in the next while?” Dick asked them.

  “Nothing that we can’t miss,” Arthur said. “It is the school holidays after all.”

  “Okay, come with me,” and Dick began to walk back the way he had come.

  They followed him back to his car which was parked in front of the closed school, and he motioned for them to get in. It was warm in the car from the sun beating through the windows and Dick rolled down the window on his side of the car. Crispin looked at the frazzled and ancient looking radio and wondered was it ever on.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The city.”

  “The city!” Crispin said, and he looked at Arthur, who he could tell was impressed as well but was trying to hide it.

  “Why there?”

  “Because that is where I think we can talk and not be overheard.”

  The drive took an hour and for a long time Crispin looked out at rolling hills and green fields. From time to time he got a glimpse of the mountains where they came from, realising for the first time how high up their little town was.

  When they got to the city, it was so busy; the streets were crowded with cars and the paths jostled with people. There was noise from everywhere, and the buildings towered over them and made the streets seem darker. They pulled up to the curb, and Dick nodded to the top of one of the high buildings.

  “We’re going up there?” Arthur asked. Dick nodded, and Crispin jumped out of the car with excitement so he could get a better view of the massive building.

  They crossed the busy road between slow moving, honking cars and then pushed through the crowd on the path to get to the door of the building. Once inside the two boys discovered that it was a hotel. They were mesmerised by the bright lights and the bustling staff busy helping guests with baggage and answering questions. People sat about the lobby reading newspapers and drinking tea and coffee. Dick walked across the room to the elevator and pressed the button. They joined him and looked at the arrow above the door that told them the elevator was coming down to them. They got in, and Dick asked for the restaurant to the man who operated the lift.

  At the top, they chose a table by the window where they could see the whole city around them and what was going on in the tiny streets below. There were a few buildings nearby that were taller than the one they were in, but not many and the views were spectacular.

  Dick ordered himself a drink and two hot chocolates for the boys. When they arrived, they got down to business.

  “How do you think you can kill Rattleyard?” Arthur asked.

  “I’ve tried to study what he has done over the years–that’s what all my notebooks are about—but I have done a lot of research about soil and land types and compositions as well,” Dick said looking from Arthur to Crispin and back again. They nodded but had nothing to add. “I think Rattleyard gets his strength from the amount of metal or iron there is in the surrounding soil.”

  “He eats it?” Crispin asked. Dick smiled.

  “Not exactly, but I think he must be able to take some energy that is within metals that we can’t see or haven’t discovered yet and turn that into physical strength.”

  “So if there was no iron he would be weak?” Arthur asked.

  “Yes, he would be at his weakest where there was the least iron. In Cripple Creek, we were in the iron mine, that’s why he had the strength to be able to collapse the mine and smash through walls and tunnels the way he did. In other places where I know he has been since then, there has been less iron in the soil and I think he was significantly weaker on those occasions.”

  “So where do you think you can kill him?” Arthur asked.

  “There is a place in the forest I have taken some samples from where there is next to no iron. It is a large area, and I think if I could lure him there he would be weak. If I could trap him somehow, then I could melt him down.”

  “Melt him down?” Crispin was shocked at the idea of this. Dick nodded.

  Chapter 10

  Mrs. Constable and her two daughters and Francis were in the sitting room that looked out to the front of the house, with its expansive views of the lands and the mountains beyond them. The girls were practising their knitting as their mother worked on polishing the furniture. Francis played on the floor with a wooden toy train on a string.

  “Is Arthur going to work in the mine?” Mary asked.

  “No,” Mrs. Constable said.

  “He asks a lot about the mine to Mr. Duggan,” Elisha added.

  “He’s just interested in what goes on in there,” their mother said.

  “Why?” Elisha asked

  “Because that’s where Daddy worked,” Mary sa
id. Mrs. Constable didn’t say anything; she was hoping that the conversation would die here, and they would go on to something else in the next few minutes.

  “I wonder if Daddy and Dick were good friends,” Elisha said.

  “Why do you think they would have been friends?” Mrs. Constable asked, thinking that the girls probably thought that all people who worked in a mine worked in the same mine. It was the look on Elisha’s face and the way that Mary looked at her sister that told Mrs. Constable that there was something else here.

  “‘Cos they work in the mine,” Elisha said.

  “Elisha, you know that you shouldn’t lie to me,” she said sternly.

  “Mr. Duggan was working in the same mine as daddy when he had his accident.”

  “Who told you this?” The girls looked at one another. “The truth!” she said in anticipation of the lie.

  “He told us,” Mary said.

  “Mr. Duggan told you this?”

  “Well he told Arthur,” Elisha said.

  “And Arthur told us,” Mary added.

  “What else did he tell the boys?”

  “Nothing,” both girls said in unison. Mrs. Constable looked at them both for a few seconds each.

  “Keep on with your knitting,” she said, and she walked out of the room and into the kitchen.

  As soon as she was out of earshot she began to cry at the memory of her lost husband. She got upset about him often, but it was worse when there something said about him in surprise, or she found out something that she didn’t know when he was alive. So Mr. Duggan had known Francis. Why had he not said so when he came to stay and why was he telling the children this? She wondered how he knew her husband and then she had the strongest urge that Mr. Duggan would know more about his death, something that she had not been told before. Had Mr. Duggan been there when it happened? She had never spoken to anyone who had survived the accident, but she knew there were people who had made it out alive. Was he one of them? She wiped her eyes on a damp dishcloth when she heard one of the girls come into the room.

  “You can’t be finished yet!” she said sternly.

  “No, I just wanted to get a drink,” Elisha said timidly.

  “You can have a drink when you are finished, now go on back in there.” Elisha did as she was told.

  Mrs. Constable made the decision to confront Mr. Duggan about his duplicity. She would pack the kids off to her sister’s house for the evening and wait for him to come home. It would be too hard to try to talk to him with them here; there would be no opportunity to be frank and find out what he knew without interruptions.

  She phoned her sister and asked if she could take the kids for a few hours, and she said yes. When she finished the call, she made some sandwiches for them all and waited for the two boys to come.

  When Dick came home that evening, he found the house unusually quiet. There were lights on, but there didn’t seem to be anyone home. He walked into the kitchen to see if anyone was there and found Mrs. Constable sitting at the table with an almost empty wine glass in front of her.

  “I thought for a minute there that there was nobody home,” Dick said. He was surprised to see her like this and drinking as well.

  “You better sit down Mr. Duggan. I’ve sent the kids to help at my sisters, they won't be home for a while yet,” she said seriously. Dick sat across from her.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. Had one of the children said something?

  “I believe you knew my husband,” she said. Her eyes pierced into him, and he almost felt like she was able to compel him to tell the truth.

  “Yes, I did,” he answered. She poured more wine into her glass and took it in her hands and let it swish around a little.

  “Were you with him when he died?”

  “Yes.” More silence and she drank this time.

  “How did he die?” What did she want to hear? Should he tell her about the fake accident that she thought was the truth? Should he tell her that a monster killed him? Would she even believe such a thing existed?

  “He died a hero, trying to save the lives of the others who died in the Cripple Creek mine,” he said.

  “A hero?” She wanted more. He nodded. “How was he trying to save others?” There was a mean rasp to her voice now, the anger of grief coming back he supposed. How was he going to navigate this?

  “Your husband died trying to save men from a killer.” This astonished her and was clearly not what she had been expecting. If the children had said something, they hadn’t mentioned anything about Rattleyard.

  “When we dug into the ground to mine in Cripple Creek, there was something in there that we must have woken up.”

  “An animal?” She looked confused.

  “No, it wasn’t an animal.” He paused here; this was going to be very hard for her to hear. “It was a creature of some kind, but we don’t know what. It was in the shape of a man, and it could think like a man, but it was made of metal.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” Mrs. Constable roared “This is no time to be joking!”

  “I’m not; I only wish I was!” Dick shouted back, his voice caught up in the emotion of the room. They were silent again as she looked at him. She wanted him to say something sensible, something she could understand. “The locals said there was something in the mountain. We thought they were just superstitious but what they said was true.” Still she said nothing; she just looked at him. “A man was killed near his house a few days after the mine was drilled and then another died in the mine but we couldn't link the deaths to the stories the people told.”

  “Did they talk to my husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And, I think he began to believe them.” She nodded as though this sounded right to her; that this is what her husband would have done.

  “We talked about closing the mine but there was so much to be made there, and one death was nowhere near the mine, and the other could have been an accident.”

  “So you just kept on going?”

  “Yes.”

  Mrs. Constable took some more wine, and Dick could see her flushed cheeks. She was drunk or else approaching it, but this was happening very fast, the alcohol was inside her pooling together, and she wasn’t used to it.

  “Did my husband want to come home?” she asked, and her voice broke near the end of the sentence, and it was like she was going to cry. Dick didn’t know whether he should say yes or no. Would this make it worse or better for her? If she thought he was just about to come home before he got killed would she feel happy about his intentions or devastated by the twist of fate?

  “We hadn’t talked about leaving for sure, but I know he always wanted to come home,” Dick said. She smiled, and a tear slid from her left eye and trickled down her cheek, hanging on her chin for a moment before falling to the material of her dress bunched in her lap.

  “He loved us,” she said, “all the kids and me.” She smiled a little with a memory that Dick would never be able to know of.

  “He certainly did. If there was only one thing anyone ever knew about him, it was that he loved his family.” She smiled again as more tears rolled slowly over her face.

  “How did this thing kill him?”

  “It was on a rampage in the mine, and we were trying to stop it, but it was so powerful there was nothing we could do.” Dick felt his throat dry up as he spoke about what he had seen. “There were men running everywhere, and the lights were gone all over, only a few of them were left. We could hear the monster moving around, but we couldn’t see it until it burst from the walls or the ground or even come from above us and take one of the men.” He was crying now. “In the end, the tunnels couldn’t take the amount of damage that was done, and as your husband tried to get me out, the shaft collapsed, and he and few other men were crushed.” They both bawled at the table. He, at the images of those men being killed and the fear and confusion and helplessness that he had felt, and she, at the thought of
her husband being flattened by tonnes of rock and gravel and how horrible a death that must have been.

  “Did he save you?” she asked when she could speak again.

  “Yes,” Dick said.

  “What happened to the creature?” she asked, and the question came as a shock to him. To have to say out loud what he knew to have happened was something he had never done before. He felt ashamed at the answer, and he fought for a way to word it, but there was no good way to say it.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and he felt his face go crimson with shame “We left the mine then, and we didn’t go back. We filed the accident report, but we never said anything about the creature.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it sounds crazy, do you really think anyone could believe it?”

  “I can see in your eyes that you believe it,” she said softly to him “You don’t want to, but you do.” He nodded absently in agreement.

  “We hoped that it was killed in the mine collapse as well.”

  “Do you think it was?”

  “No, I could always feel that it was still around,” he looked at her to see if she believed this as well. In her eyes, he saw sympathy, but there was something else there with it, something harder and stronger.

  “Do you think it is here now, up at the mine?” she asked

  “I do,” he said.

  Mrs. Constable stood up and poured the remainder of her glass into the sink and ran the tap to rinse it down the drain.

  “I thought so,” she said. She washed the glass and began to dry it slowly as she looked out the back window. “I’m going to have to ask you to move out of my house Mr. Duggan,” she said.

  “Okay, I’ll get my stuff and leave now.”

  “I think that would be for the best,” she said. He left her standing there at the sink with the sound of the cloth squeaking on the dried glass as she continued to rub at it mechanically.

  Chapter 11

  Dick drove the short distance to Jared’s house. He assumed Jared would have heard the car coming up the gravel track, and he expected to see him look out in suspicion. Nothing showed. Dick killed the engine and shut off the lights. He went to the door and knocked loudly. There were no lights on, and he wondered if Jared was already in bed. It was more likely that he hadn’t returned home yet and stopped by the bar for a drink He waited a few moments and then knocked again.