I shrugged. “That’s what I would have done if I’d been looking for something for a decade, then had the misfortune to be off duty the day it was found.”
Bowman frowned, still skeptical, but I moved on. My fingers suddenly itched for a pen, eager to write down details Devich hadn’t provided about the box. The granite, the length, and the weight. Why hadn’t he given me any specifics?
“What happened once you got the box up?” I asked, determined to remember the entire interview word for word.
“We loaded it on the helicopter, as instructed.”
“Well, it wasn’t quite that easy,” Allen added shaking his head.
“What went wrong?” I asked them both.
The foreman looked up quickly, surprise thick in his expression. “Is it that obvious?” he asked, and I nodded. His lie would have been apparent even if Allen weren’t fact-checking him from over his shoulder.
Bowman sighed. “Some of the men got excited.” He drained his cup and crushed it in one hand. “They’d been digging for a long time, mostly in miserably cold and wet conditions. They were tired, and irritable, and more than a little curious. So when the box came up, naturally they wanted a peek at it.Insideit.”
Ohhh. The crew thought they were entitled to a share of the profits.
“All hell broke loose,that’swhat happened,” Allen insisted.
“Did they get it open?”
“Of course not,” the foreman spat, clearly insulted by my insinuation that he’d lost control of the box. And of his crew. “They just got a little riled up. It was over in a couple of minutes. No harm done.”
“Horseshit,” Allen insisted, moving to stand behind Bowman and to his left, so I could see them both at once with a slight shift of my gaze.Smart man. “The almighty foreman here had a riot on his hands. It was a miracle no one got killed in the stampede.”
“Was anyone injured?” I asked, still watching Bowman.
He shook his head slowly. “No. Not seriously, anyway. One guy got a broken nose, and another got a little scraped up. It was no big deal. Nothing Mr. Devich needs to know about.” His last words were clipped and harsh. Fortunately for him, I felt no loyalty to Troy Devich, and no particular urge to divulge the foreman’s confession.
Cursing beneath his breath, Allen stepped forward until he was practically hovering over the other man’s shoulder. His expression was intense, almost desperate, and I sipped from my coffee as he spoke, letting Bowman think I was mulling over what he’d told me.
“They wanted it. All of them.” Allen’s eyes started to glaze over as if from a fever. Or from the strength of a very powerful memory. “Hell, I wanted it too, and my hands would probably have gone right through the damn thing.” He held very substantial-looking palms up for inspection. They seemed solid enough to me.
Over my coffee cup, I watched the foreman push snow around with the toe of his work boot.
“I could understand a stampede if they’d hauled up a treasure chest dripping with gold coins and jewels,” I said, and Bowman’s attention jerked back to me from wherever it had gone. “But it was just a big stone box, wasn’t it? No gold inlay, no encrusted diamonds, nothing special at all, right?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “It was just a big box. And therewasno stampede.”
“So why did everyone want this plain stone box?” I ignored his last assertion; I believed Allen’s version of the rush on the ‘treasure.’
Bowman shrugged, shivering as a frigid gale blew across us both, sending snowflakes swirling up from the ground. “They just wanted a look at whatever was inside. That’s it.”
“Neededa look, is more like it,” Allen insisted. “They allneededthe box, same as I did. We needed to touch it—to open it. It was an alarming impulse, because the whole time I stared at that box, craving the feel of the stone beneath my fingers, I was also terrified of it. Frightened almost outta my mind.”
Bowman glanced from me to the empty space on his right, then back to my face, clearly confused. I was watching the wraith openly now as he ran his hands over a phantom surface in the air in front of him. “You were scared? Of a box?” I asked, the foreman completely forgotten for the moment.
“No.” Bowman stared at me as if he feared for my sanity. But his eyes betrayed him; they showed perfect understanding. Hehadbeen scared. He had seen the box, and it terrified him too, even if he wouldn’t admit it.
“Yes.” Allen nodded, as if it were perfectly logical for a non-corporeal being to fear an inanimate object. “It’s a bad box. It feels…bad. I don’t know how else to say it, but you’ll know what I mean if you ever see it. But I hope you never do. The box feltwrong, and so long as it was buried there, so did the pit. It felt warm, and wrong, and bad.”
The box felt bad. I’d read similar reports about the site itself, though mostly in tabloids. Had people actually been sensing the box, rather than the pit, for all these years?
“Let me see if I understand this.” I paused brushing hair back from my face as I gathered my thoughts. “The box feltbad, and so did the hole, until the box was excavated. But people kept digging until they found it anyway, because they needed to…what? Touch the box?” That made no sense at all. Why would someone need to touch something that felt so…bad? And how could something you’ve never touched feel like anything at all, much lessbad, which was about the least descriptive adjective in the English language.
Bowman shook his head slowly, though he seemed unsure. “We kept digging because that was our job. Devich was paying us to dig in the hole, so we dug. It had nothing to do with some abstract ‘feeling’ coming from the box, or from the pit. That’s total bullshit. Stupid rumors started by ignorant, superstitious workers.”
Allen turned his back on the foreman in disgust. “Don’t listen to him, Miss Walker. He’s lying because he’s uncomfortable with the truth. Just because he can’t understand something does not mean it doesn’t exist.” The wraith rubbed his perfectly three-dimensional, wrinkled forehead in obvious frustration. “I don’t know why, and I can’t explain how, but the box made mewantit, made me desperate to touch it, to open it. But my skin was crawling the whole time, and I was kind of glad I couldn’t touch anything, because the temptation to fight over it like the living workers did wasn’t an option for me. I was removed from the true frenzy, you might say.”
