Chiral Mad 3 Read online

  He looked behind him and saw that Polly Ann had been right—there was a long, shiny silver thread trailing from the back of his belt, leading back to the tunnel’s entrance.

  He flexed his arms and shoulders, took a deep breath, and started down the chaotic staircase of massive, wedge-shaped boulders. At last, his feet touch ground in some vast, silent, ancient chamber. Ahead, through the fiery, sulphur-choked gloom, he saw a bluish radiance, haloing some kind of vaguely familiar rock formation. He hung the hammers from his belt and climbed an enormous slab of limestone, scraping his shins and cutting his arms, then scrabbled onto a ledge.

  On a small plateau, under an overhang of surprisingly white calcite that curved gracefully upward like a snowdrift hollowed by the wind, stood a cluster of meticulously-carved stones, each roughly the size and shape of a man, arms outstretched, holding something whose shape he couldn’t quite discern. Their bodies were complete but all of them lacked faces. Beyond these figures he saw the retreating blue radiance and beyond that the entrance to another passageway.

  All around John Henry there echoed the sounds of tortured souls crying out for mercy and forgiveness, but too late, too late.

  He said a short prayer. It seemed the Christian thing to do.

  The odd radiance guiding him, he maneuvered toward the entrance, which looked more and more like the gaping mouth of some mythic titan, frozen into a perpetual scream at the moment of its death. He moved slowly, his back pressed against the wall, feet sliding slowly to the side, the ledge becoming tight and close, less than seven inches in depth. He slipped only once but did not let it shake his resolve, and as he safely reached the far and much wider side of the ledge he saw that the faceless stone figures on the plateau had changed position, then realized it is only an illusion; he was now seeing them from a different angle.

  Instead of a random cluster, they formed an eerily straight line that stretched toward the center of the chamber; not six, but several dozen bluish-gray faceless figures, about his height, standing silently by under their white canopy, cowled voyagers waiting with no hope on the frozen deck of an icebound ship, each holding a raggedy whip—

  —and that’s when he realized who they were.

  These were the Klansmen who had killed his brother, who had so brutally cut short Martin’s life. It wasn’t that they were faceless, no; they had been sent here still in their robes and hoods.

  Even from where he stood, John Henry could see the recognition in their eyes, could see them remember his face from when he’d come to cut down his brother’s body and weep over his mangled remains.

  In their eyes was fear and pain and regret.

  John Henry listened, listened real good, and heard that from beneath their robes and hoods came the sounds of whips cracking and men screaming for mercy.

  Even though he was a Christian man, John Henry couldn’t find in himself to pity them.

  “He was a fine man,” he snarled at the frozen figures. “He wanted to be an artist. Martin, he could paint a picture like nobody’s business. But you didn’t care about that, did you?”

  Don’t be like this, he thought.

  And found some touch of pity in his heart for these men.

  So John Henry said a little prayer for them.

  But only a little one.

  And moved on.

  He stepped into the opening and saw the wispy tail of the blue radiance disappear around a bend. Following it, John Henry found himself stumbling downward once again. The humming grew louder, becoming a keening that filled both the air and his chest with a dull, despairing throbbing.

  The ground evened out, trembling. Down here, deep in the mystery, the walls and roof, glistening with a ghostly iridescence, dripped with moisture—salty and heated. John Henry took a drop on his finger and tasted it.

  Tears.

  The walls of Hell wept with the tears of the damned.

  The keening increased its volume, growing steadily more intense, becoming a full-throttle roar of anguish. He saw a bit of the radiance, churning slowly, moving forward, a worm wriggling its way into the dirt as it vanished into the mouth of a tunnel. Whatever it was that was in such pain was at the end of that tunnel. John Henry had no doubt it was Mr. Daedalus’s son.

  I’m coming, he thought, then dropped onto hands and knees and crawled into the opening. For a while there was enough room for him to use his hammers to clear the way, but suddenly and without warning, the passageway narrowed to a few feet in width and the roof soon dropped down so low he could touch it with his fingers. When John Henry moved—which he could do now only in bursts of mere inches—his shoulders scraped the sides of the crawlway, and the roof above pressed mercilessly onto his back. He didn’t even have enough room to raise one of the hammers—not that he would want to, not in something this tight; the hammers might have special powers, but they didn’t mean nothing to the rock, nosir: one good hammer-blow might bring the whole thing crashing down on his head.

  The air grew thin. He stopped after every movement to gulp in great lungfuls of stale, mephitic, sulphur-tinged air, trying to control the rabid panic he felt snarling to the surface. All his life John Henry had never been afraid of enclosed spaces, but now he tried desperately not to imagine himself becoming wedged in or being crushed or buried alive. He thought only once of trying to go back but the keening drew him toward it, begging for help, have mercy, don’t leave me here, please, oh please god don’t leave me here it’s so lonely—

  —he managed to get on his side and in a burst of near-panic scrabbled forward, catching sight of an opening ahead and hoping it will be big enough for him to get through, pushing and clawing with all he had, wriggling forward, closer, he could see the blue, could almost grasp the keening in his hands, and then the roof began to crumble down around his ankles, collapsing with every move he made, and John Henry thought he might have started screaming but he couldn’t be sure because it was happening too fast, he had to stay ahead of the collapsing ceiling that was catching up with him too fast, too fast, and he lunged forward as his mouth filled with dirt dropping down in clumps from above—

  —and he emerged into a grotto, shoving himself out of the tunnel just as the last few feet of it filled with something organic; part placenta, part earth, part anguish.

  John Henry could see that the silver thread still shone brightly, only it didn’t lead into the collapsed tunnel as he’d expected; it lead in the other direction, as if he’d come from over there instead of—

  —he turned around—

  —and saw the Gates of Hell.

  John Henry whistled long and low, for the gates were an impressive sight, extending to either side of him for as far as he could see, and rising above him so high that he could not hope to see the top.

  But he could see the young man who was chained to them, one arm outstretched on either side and his feet manacled one atop the other, looking for all the world like Christ on His cross.

  Except Christ didn’t have a set of wings that were bound together with barbed wire.

  The young man looked down at John Henry and said, “I … I made these so I could … could fly out and it … it caught me … please …”

  Icarus had evidently inherited his father’s talent for invention.

  “Your daddy sent me, son,” replied John Henry, and started marching toward the terrible gates—

  —and stopped dead in his tracks, less than three yards away, when he heard a growl from the surrounding shadows, and remembered …

  … a terrible thing, a thing so awful it might damn well frighten God his own self, was coming, maybe even for him …

  … the unseen terror from his dreams.

  “Ahgod,” croaked Icarus, tears streaming down his cheeks. “It heard you.”

  “Shh!” snapped John Henry, peering into the darkness.

  At first he thought it was some kind of great and terrible horse, its head was so far above the ground, so far above his own, but then he saw the red, glowing e
yes—all six of them—and heard the mad-dog snarl, and smelled the sickening mixture of sulphur, fur, and waste, then it emerged from the blackness and John Henry nearly cried out, for what stood before him, towering over his own massive body by a good eighteen, twenty inches, was a giant three-headed dog with glistening foam dribbling from all its jaws.

  “Save yourself, sir,” cried Icarus.

  “Shut your fool mouth, boy!” John Henry would not break eye-contact with the creature. It might be a good hundred feet away from him, but one good jump and it would be right on top of him, chewing him to pulp.

  He dared not look down at its haunches to see if it was readying to spring.

  John Henry had no idea what he was going to do.

  His weight suddenly shifted, and without looking away from the beast’s faces John Henry became aware that the hammers were moving, shaking themselves in his belt as if to say, Let us swing free, John Henry, let us swing free!

  “Good boy,” he whispered, easing his hands down to his sides, “good little doggie.”

  He gripped the hammers and began easing them out.

  The beast moved forward, slowly, rippling the muscles in its back.

  “Damn if you ain’t one ugly sumbitch,” John Henry said in the same sing-song voice he’d used before.

  The beast bared teeth. A whole lot of teeth. John Henry wasn’t sure, but he thought he could see bits of flesh flapping in there.

  “Good little ugly-sumbitch-doggie,” he said, the hammers firmly gripped in his hands.

  The beast reared back, tensing its haunches, then barked a Hell-hound’s bark.

  John Henry swung the hammers up, and then brought them down in a crescent-arc, slapping the heads together just below his belly, and the thunder rolled and lightning burst from their heads.

  The beast yelped as if in pain but did not stop advancing.

  John Henry swung the hammers up, bringing them together over his head. This time the thunder was a small earthquake and the lightning was Nature’s wrath.

  The beast howled.

  He brought the hammers down—WHAM!—and the Earth cracked around him and the lightning was the center of a twister, snarling outward in jagged streaks, blasting against the walls.

  “Oh, my hammer,” he sang—

  —WHAM!—thunder from the beginning of the universe, lightning from its end—

  —“Hammer ring”—

  —WHAM!—the walls began to crumble from the vibrations of the peal—

  —“Hear them ring, Lawd”—

  —WHAM!—jagged, whipcurling bolts of lightning shot nearer the beast, blowing holes in the ground—

  —“Hammer sing!”

  And John Henry kept slapping the heads together, filling the bowels of Hell with the peal of a steel-driving man’s might and brightening the place up a bit with the dancing bolts of lightning.

  The beast fell on its belly, crippled by the noise and power but John Henry kept slamming his hammers together, feeling the power shake his guts loose from his bones but he would not stop until he was certain that the beast was too stunned to come after him.

  WHAM!

  The beast jerked and snarled and whined.

  WHAM!

  It rolled onto its side, legs kicking in the air.

  WHAM!

  Finally, its eyes rolled back into its heads and its tongues lolled from the sides of its mouths and its legs stopped kicking.

  John Henry stopped.

  He watched very carefully to see if the beast was still breathing.

  He heard the raggedy sound of a steam-engine train idling in a station, and knew that he’d not killed the beast. That was good—not just because John Henry was not a killing man, but also because something about this beast’s awful magnificence told him that it could not—and possibly should not—be destroyed.

  He whirled around and ran up to the Gates, grabbed onto one of the bars as if it were a rope, and shimmied up until he was level with the manacles that held Icarus’s wrists and arms in place.

  He drew back one hammer, and then froze.

  “What is it?” said Icarus, great panic in his voice.

  “Seems to me I ought to do your feet first,” said John Henry. “‘Less you feel like flopping face-first down to the ground.”

  He slid down a ways and struck his hammer against the manacle trapping Icarus’s ankles, then slammed them against the others, freeing the boy—

  —who did not fall to the ground as John Henry had expected, but instead unfurled his wings and flew upward, laughing.

  John Henry dropped to the ground, picked up the other hammer, and watched the boy enjoying his freedom.

  “We got to get out of here,” he called.

  “Try and stop me!” yelled Icarus, swooping down to piggyback John Henry and lifting him off the ground.

  “Which way?” he shouted in John Henry’s ear.

  “You see the silver thread behind me?”

  “Yes?”

  “Follow it.”

  Straight up, they went, following the path of the thread as it wound through Hell, somehow ending up back at the foot of the same staircase John Henry had descended before. Icarus flew up the narrow passageway, setting John Henry down where he’d stopped his hammering.

  “Looks like the machine’s got a bit ahead of me,” said John Henry, gently pushing Icarus to the side to resume his labors.

  Before he got back into the race, John Henry did something he swore to Mr. Daedalus he’d do—seal up the antechamber.

  Three good strikes did the job.

  “Time to show that machine who’s boss.” This time the hammers roared, and the rock didn’t so much fall away from his blows ad it did run away, and soon, bellowing his hammer songs for all he was worth, John Henry regained the lead.

  The steam-drill kept chugging and snarling, but it was no match for a man who’d been to the bowels of Hell and lived to tell the tale.

  When John Henry at last hammered his way out the other side of the mountain and into daylight, the crowds cheered and the band struck up with a rousing rendition of “Oh, My Hammer,” and John Henry dropped to his knees, weeping, then threw back his head and let fly with a whoop of victory they heard three counties away. He held up his magic hammers—

  —and saw that they weren’t gold at all.

  They were his own, regular old twenty-pounders.

  He brought them down, dropped them to the ground, and stared.

  Polly Ann ran to him, threw herself on her knees next to him, and held onto him as if she never planned to let go again. “I knew you could do it, John Henry, I just knew you could!”

  “… the hammers …” he muttered to himself.

  He looked up as Mr. Daedalus wheeled over, Icarus by his side. “Thank you for my son, John Henry. Thank you.” Then: “How does it feel to be something of a god?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  Mr. Daedalus pointed at the hammers. “You know, don’t you, that you were using them all the time?”

  “But … how? I done things that no natural man ought to be able to do with them.”

  “Some men grow into their divinity, John Henry; other have to be tricked into it.”

  “Then you lied to me?”

  “No—I fooled you. There’s a difference.”

  Icarus placed a hand on John Henry’s shoulder. “Thank you for freeing me, John.”

  John Henry could only nod his head.

  “Well, then,” said Mr. Daedalus, looking into the mountain. “Seems my ex-partner’s contraption’s nowhere near making it out here.”

  John Henry nodded. “… not even close …”

  Mr. Daedalus grinned as Captain Tommy brought John Henry a tall, cold glass of water.

  “You know what I’d like to do, John?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I think I’d like to devote more time to my inventions—and to getting to know my son again. I need someone to take over this railroad for me. Any suggestions?”


  “Captain Tommy’s a damn fine man.”

  “That he is, but he doesn’t want my job. Do you want my job, John Henry?”

  “You foolin’ with me again?”

  “Absolutely not. As far as I’m concerned, this railroad belongs to you, John Henry. Treat her well, and she’ll take good care of you and yours.” Mr. Daedalus turned and began wheeling away.

  John Henry called out, “You was plannin’ on giving it to me the whole time, weren’t you? This here railroad’s my reward.”

  Mr. Daedalus, not looking back, wagged a finger in the air.

  “Never jump to conclusions, John Henry. It drains all the surprise out of life.”

  Mr. Daedalus and his son disappeared into the limousine and drove away before John Henry could ask why he’d been told to think only of his brother on the way in.

  “Well,” said Captain Tommy. “Looks like I’m working for you now.”

  John Henry looked at him and grinned. “I don’t know. Uppity fellow like you—is your do-so as good as your say-so?”

  “And then some.”

  “Okay, you’re hired.”

  And they laughed loudly, as did the other steel-drivers, and the crowds.

  When the steam-drill finally emerged, some two hours later, Minos and his monster step-son were laughed out of the county.

  The steam-drill? The crew decided to keep it.

  Never could tell when a working man might need a good laugh.

  Later that night, after all the singing and dancing and celebrating had died down, John Henry and Polly Ann walked back to their home, hand in hand.

  “What a day this has been!” declared Polly Ann.

  “That it be,” replied John Henry.

  Polly Ann poked him in the ribs with her elbow. “Where is your mind at? You been looking at the ground and mumbling to yourself for the last half-hour.”

  “I was just … wondering about something Mr. Daedalus told me to do. Something he told me to think about while I was hammering my way—”

  He stopped speaking as he looked up and saw the figure standing on the front porch.