Chapter 14

Dr. Paul Spencer, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey, sat at his desk in the tiny room he had rented at Mable Lee’s Bed-and-Breakfast across town from where Hayden was starting his day. He had been up about an hour prior to the rising of the sun and was already on his third cup of coffee. Two days ago, he had been working up in the mountains with a group of students from the University of Boston, studying rock formations, when he received a call from his office about a series of small tremors that had recently been recorded in the area.

His boss, Dan McAdams, had asked him to cancel his trip and come down into the city proper to stay for a few days and advise the small town. He had contacted the town mayor and met with him quietly in order to avoid causing a panic, and told him he wouldn’t be too far away, should they need anything. They kindly asked him to not let anyone know he was there, as the winter was not far away and ski resorts would start attracting the masses from out of state.

“We wouldn’t want to keep tourists away if there was no problem, now, would we?” asked the aged mayor.

Paul had assured him that informing people wouldn’t be necessary at the moment, but he and his staff would be monitoring the area closely, should the need to warn residents arise. He’d managed to keep smiling as they traded veiled threats concerning local politics and the power of the federal government during times of crisis.

As he walked out of the office, Paul was half tempted to make a special trip to the local video store and rent a copy of Dante’s Peak and slip it under the old man’s door, so he could see the consequences of leaders putting profit before the populace. Sometimes he hated his job.

Yet that morning, he received another report that had left him a little confused. He had spent three days catching up on all recorded information concerning earthquakes in the region.

After leaving the mayor’s office, he’d walked down to the local library to study Maplewood itself and had run into some interesting facts about the little town of under five thousand. Maplewood, he was surprised to find, was formed not long after an earthquake had destroyed its predecessor. The remains of that town were now underneath the water of Lake Veronica, named after a Ms. Veronica Ackley, a school mistress who died during the quake.

The librarian, a bright young woman named Michelle, wandered over to ask if he needed help. When he told her what he was looking up, her eyes grew large and she brought him several diaries, historical pieces, which talked about the quake.

According to a diary kept by a merchant from the town, a massive “shock” disturbed the earth in the evening of September 16, 1732. He described the horrific aftermath thoroughly and told the peculiar story of how the lake got its namesake. A Daniel Raven, his wife, Mary, and their son, Albert, were three of the forty residents who managed to survive the night in what he described as the most horrific ordeal he had ever witnessed. About sixty-five people were lost to the quake in the initial tumble into the mineshaft or from drowning when a subterranean river broke through the wall of the shaft and filled up the lake. The entire incident took less than four hours.

* * *

September 17, 1853

Mary Margaret and I had just put the baby to bed. After a day of labor in our new home, we were awakened by a series of loud cracking noises and tremors felt underneath our bed. Our whole house shook with the force of the ground moving beneath us. It was strange to feel such a movement, and Mary clung to me as if we would be separated by the sheer violence of the shaking. Albert let out a horrendous wail to let us know he was as frightened as we were. The shaking felt like it would go on forever. Yet, as soon as it started, it stopped, but that was where things grew from frightening to terrifying.

As soon as the shaking was over, I leapt from the bed and lit a candle, surprised to see that the walls were still intact. I tried to open our bedroom door. It was stuck! The tremors must have moved the foundation of the house just so, and it took a great deal of pulling to dislodge it from the wall.

I stepped around broken glass, grabbed my boots, and headed out into the night to see if any of the neighbors were in need of help. My house seemed fairly intact. I no sooner reached the door than I saw Samuel Wallace, my neighbor who lived up the road and the furthest away from town, racing down the road towards the town square. He saw me emerge from the doorway of my home on trembling legs and ran up to me, his eyes wide and terrified. His voice, usually calm and slow, was filled with such urgency that I scarce believed this was the man I’d known for three years.

“The whole town has disappeared into the earth. The mine shaft has collapsed!” he bellowed.

I didn’t bother to try and get to my horses; instead, I fled down the street to the church house. Pastor Galvan Ackley ministered to the growing town. I followed behind Samuel, who was running at full tilt. When we came upon where the church once stood, the scene before us nearly drove me mad with grief. My storefront, the church, the bakery, the school house, and the post office were gone, along with numerous little houses and apartments. The fissure followed the length of the mineshaft, which spanned for miles. The moon hung full in the cloudless sky and cast its unfeeling light upon the crater.

Men and women who had homes built down and away from the center of town gathered. Women wept and the men looked shocked and sick. Most of the men were miners who worked gathering granite in the hole of the earth every day. A dangerous, dirty, and unrewarding job, rife with tragedy, was now introduced to a whole town. No one dared get too close to the gaping maw, as rocks slid down from the sides, falling and crashing on the remains below.

The silence was broken when another tremor rumbled under our feet. The ground seemed to buckle and bolt like a horse unbroken. It knocked several people off their feet, including myself, and I flattened myself to the dusty street. Women screamed as their men held them close, I remember praying to God not to send them spiraling into the void.

There was a loud cracking noise, followed by what sounded like cannons going off. The sound of rushing water brought my head up in confusion, and as I got to my feet, gingerly, hopeful, and terrified at the same time, I was once again terrified by another sound. Tormented and horrified screams of those who survived the initial crash into the darkness flooded outward and to our ears from inside the pit.

Ignoring the dangers of further collapse, people rushed forward to the edge of the ravine and stared in wonder. One side of it had turned into a waterfall. An underground river had broken through one side of the canyon and the water poured downward into the darkness. Chaos broke out among the crowd as people were shaken out of their stupor by the sounds of the survivors below.

“We must help those people!” cried one man.

“How?” asked another, pointing downward in the pit. “There isn’t any way down there. All of our equipment was inside the mine!”

“Find Riley! Where’s Riley?” cried a woman.

Riley Dunne was the mine foreman, a young immigrant known for his hard work, drinking habits, and for the scandal of courting the town minister’s daughter Veronica. Riley was considered a scoundrel, and while the townsfolk gave him a wide berth, and even though most despised him for his Papist faith, they admired his strength and hard work. They also admired his ability to keep those under his employ out of danger while working in the mines.

The sound of a racing horse could be heard from behind us and we all turned to see the minister riding hard and fast up the lane. Once he reached us, he dismounted, his face white with shock and his eyes disbelieving. We all stood to the side as he walked forward, looking down into the pit. The wails had begun to fall silent as the water rose, filling the void; we could see debris swirling around as the water had moved past where it had broken through the wall.

The elder shook and buried his head in his hands, crying out for his daughter. He made to leap into the abyss, a fall that would surely have killed him. He had gone mad. He struggled against the men’s hands that tried to hold him back, all the while screaming his daughter’s name. In grief, he tore at his garments like the mad man of Gadara, his eyes wide with madness.

“God has judged me!” he cried, over and over again. It took many of the remaining people to restrain him and pull him back from the edge.

“Reverend! What are you talking about?” asked Abigail Smith. I recognized her from church. Her husband was one of the men trying to hold the minister down.

“You don’t understand! I locked my daughter and Riley Dunne in the cellar of the church! I found them together inside! I cursed and damned them to hell! Oh my god, my god! What have I done?” he shrieked.

The church was at the bottom of what was quickly becoming a lake. We all looked at one another, another shock upon another, and finally, in disgust, John Smith ordered the minister to be let go. He scrambled to his feet, ran to the edge of the ravine, and flung himself in. The fall must have been at least a hundred feet, and I knew he would never be seen again.

* * *

Paul had stopped reading at that point and looked up to find Michelle staring at him expectantly. His eyes must have been as wide as saucers and she tossed her head back and laughed.

“That is some pretty intense stuff, huh?”

He nodded and asked her if it were possible for him to check these items out. She shook her head; they were part of a collection for the town, she couldn’t let them go. However, she would be glad to store them off to the side for him, to read any time he wanted.

He thanked her and left for the day, as it was nearing closing time. The incidents of almost three hundred years prior shook him inside, and as he rounded the corner of the town block, heading towards his car, he stopped dead in his tracks. Lake Veronica sprawled out in front of him and he stared in wonder.

As a geologist, he appreciated the catastrophic event and couldn’t imagine the horror the people of the town had faced at the time. He received his PhD in geology from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and had worked with the United States Geological Survey since then. However, when he was studying at the University of Michigan, as an undergrad, he minored in history. It was a secret passion of his, and his house in Boston was filled with biographies of various historical figures—he still attended lectures at the university. He thought perhaps, while he was here, he could write a book about the incident, should nothing evolve in the realm of earthquakes. He had nothing but time on his hands.

However, he had woken up in the middle of the night in a tangled mess of sheets and blankets, half on and half off the bed. He had a series of nightmares where he was locked inside a cellar. When that dream ended, another began—he was crushed under a pile of rubble, trying to claw his way out when water began to fill up the crevices, leaving him gasping for breath before he drowned. He was sweating and shaking, breathing hard, and for an instant, he almost swore he saw a man standing in the shadows of his room, looking down at him.

Now, as he threw his running shoes on, stretched in front of the mirror and limbered up, he was excited to start the day. His inner historian was barking at him to get his ass in gear, finish his run, and head back to the library, where he could read more of the diaries. On his way out to pound the pavement, he remembered to grab his cell phone. He opened the door, walked downstairs, and stepped through the front door into what was looking to be a beautiful day. He started running.