As they passed the front steps of the church, with one door sagging and ajar, Eddie cast a longing look back but followed Harley past an old well and into the open area of the colony. They were surrounded on all sides by crumbling old cabins and open stalls. In one of them, Harley saw a rusted anvil, in another a pair of iron-hooped kegs. Plainly, it had once been a working village, with maybe forty or fifty people living in it. But all that concerned Harley was where these people went when they died. There was no sign of a graveyard anywhere, not even on the other side of the church. Weren’t folks supposed to be buried in the churchyard in the old days?
At the far end of the stockade he saw what had to have been the main gate to the colony—some weathered beams, off-balance like the totem pole in town, still framed the entrance—and after switching the shovel to his other shoulder, Harley set off for it. Outside, a path led away from the colony, across some cleared land, and straight into a dense grove of trees.
“Not another fucking forest,” Eddie complained.
“This one’s got a trail,” Harley said, striding ahead, and it did. Although it was narrow and winding, the path seemed to be leading him back toward the rim of the island. Gradually, it descended, and to Harley’s relief yet again, he saw a gateway ahead, like the colony gates only much smaller. And the posts, he noted as he got closer, were elaborately carved with something in Russian. It looked like the same word or two, chiseled into the wood over and over and over again. Even Eddie paused to study the writing. “You think it says, ‘Welcome to the buried treasure’?” he said.
And Harley could only wonder. Just beyond the posts lay the colony graveyard, no more than an acre, but littered with stone markers and wooden crosses tilting this way and that in the frozen ground. It was starting to get lighter out, the sun fighting its way through a scrim of hazy clouds, and in the faint daylight Harley could also see that many of the headstones had their own curious inscription down toward their base. It looked like a little crescent, but he was damned if he knew what that meant either. Did headstone makers sign their work? Shit, he thought, dropping the end of his spade between his feet, where was he supposed to start?
Eddie was wandering around among the graves, taking an occasional swipe at one of the wooden crosses with the end of his pickaxe, and Harley—who was by no means a religious man—still thought it was wrong and shouted, “Stop it, you dumb fuck.”
The gravity of what they were about to do struck him now like never before, and he cursed his brother Charlie, and he cursed himself for always playing the fool. How the hell did he get here?
Eddie stopped to take a piss, the urine splashing on the unyielding ground, and when he finished up and turned around, he said, “So, where do you want to start? I’m freezing my ass off already.”
And all Harley could think of was starting where it had all begun. With mechanical footsteps, he walked toward the rim of the graveyard, a precipice overlooking the Bering Strait. A coffin had fallen into the sea, and in only a minute or two he had found the spot from which it must have fallen.
At the very edge of the cliff, a hunk of dirt and rock had eroded away, leaving a scar in the earth. Harley took care not to step too close.
“That where you think it came from?” Eddie said, with a snort.
And Harley said, “Yes.” He stared at the jagged earth, and it was as if he was looking at a vanished grave … and worse. He could picture the gaunt man in the sealskin coat as he lay in the coffin aboard the Neptune II. Or as he appeared in the storage shed behind the gun shop.
Looking for his emerald cross.
“I say we pick the one with the biggest headstone,” Eddie said, surveying the graveyard. “The richer the dead guy was, the better the chances he got buried with some good stuff on him.”
With no better plan in mind, Harley had to concede it wasn’t the worst logic.
Eddie walked off a few yards, stopping beside a truncated stone angel, and said, “This one’s good as any.” And then, slipping the backpack off and tossing it to one side, he lifted the pickaxe and swung it over his head.
The iron barely grazed the soil before rebounding hard, and Eddie dropped the shaft and danced backward, swearing and shaking his hands.
Harley laughed, and Eddie said, “You try it then.”
“Let’s do this right,” Harley said, taking off his own pack, loaded with the steel climbing spikes and chisel. “If we loosen the soil first, we may get something done before dark.”
For the next hour or two, they bent their heads over the grave, alternately driving spikes into the ground, chopping at the surrounding dirt, scraping it away with the end of the spade. It was slow and backbreaking work, and Harley felt the futility of it with every breath. They should have brought dynamite and simply blown the place to pieces before that Slater guy showed up. His only hope lay in the fact that the Russian gravediggers must have had the same problems he was having; the graves they dug must have been as shallow as they could make them.
After taking a break to open some more tins of food—Eddie got Spam, and he made Harley trade it to him for his own can of corned beef hash—they got back to work. Eddie took a turn chopping and mincing at the dirt with the end of the spade, and when he caught what looked like the dull patina of buried wood, he got down on his knees and brushed the soil away with the ends of his sweaty gloves.