He described it to Wickham as a set of stone steps leading down into the earth at a steep angle, cut with obvious skill, and lined with walls of dress stone that did not match any of the local geology. Reynolds had descended the steps to a depth he estimated at 40 feet. At the bottom of the steps he had found a door made of what looked like iron, but was not rusted, and set into the door had been a lock of a design he had never seen. He had not opened the door.
He had climbed back up, filled in the hole, and had never dug there again. But he had that winter sold his farm and made preparations to move his family to Ohio. And he was, at the time of Wickham's interview, waiting only for the sale to be finalized before leaving the county for good. Clauss, the naturalist from Boston, was the most troubling of the three. He was, in Wickham's estimation, a man who had spent too many years alone with his own theories, and who had come gradually to believe things about the region that no rational person could accept.
Clauss had over the course of 5 years excavated a series of sites in the hills around Pickens, and he had from those excavations recovered a collection of objects that he kept in a locked cabinet in his study. He showed the collection to Wickham with obvious pride. It included fragments of dressed stone bearing incised markings, a small metal object that Wickham recognized with a jolt he was careful not to show as being very similar to the one Kettle had produced from his chest and in a glass jar filled with alcohol, an object that Clauss identified as a fossilized hand. It was not fossilized.
It was preserved and it had, Wickham noted in the ledger, seven fingers. Wickham asked Clauss where the hand had come from. Clauss told him it had been recovered from a sealed chamber at a site he had been excavating for the previous 11 months, a site he called, in his own notebooks, the lower entrance. He offered to show Wickham the site.
Wickham declined. He returned to Pickens that evening and, according to his sister's letter, sat for a long time in the parlor with the boy and did not speak. The boy, Thaniel, watched him with the same patient expression he had worn since his arrival, and after a while, without being asked, said quietly that the man from Boston had already been marked, and that it would not be long now, and that Wickham should not go to the man's house again under any condition.
To understand what Wickham was beginning to grasp, we have to consider a larger set of questions that have haunted the study of Appalachian history since the first surveyors entered these mountains in the 1700s. The ridges of central and southern west Virginia along with the connecting ranges in eastern Kentucky, western Virginia, and southwestern Pennsylvania contain a density of unexplained man-made features that no serious geologist or archaeologist working in the region has ever been able to satisfactorily account for. There are stone walls in places where no known indigenous people ever built stone walls. There are cut stone chambers, some of them 30 feet on a side, buried in hillsides that were considered virgin wilderness when the first Europeans arrived.
There are shafts perfectly vertical lined with masonry in locations where no colonial or industrial mining ever took place. There are in more than a hundred documented sites across the region, features that have been variously attributed to lost tribes, to pre-Columbian Norse expeditions, to a wandering group of Welsh explorers led by a semi-legendary prince named Madoc, and in more recent years to a civilization that some researchers believe occupied the entire continent long before the arrival of any of the peoples we know from the historical record. That civilization has been called by many names. In the mainstream, its existence is denied outright and the features attributed to it are reattributed one by one to natural processes or to indigenous groups whose actual construction traditions do not match the features in question.
But among a certain kind of researcher and among the older families of the region who have always known what they know without needing outside confirmation, the civilization has a name. It is called most commonly the Tartarian civilization or simply Tartaria. And the theory in its broadest outlines holds that Tartaria was a globe-spanning technological civilization that reached its peak sometime in the millennium before the year 1600. Its remains, the theory holds, are visible everywhere in the world if one knows how to look, and the civilization was ended deliberately or accidentally by a catastrophic event or series of events that left the survivors scattered, its cities buried, and its history systematically erased from the official record.
The specific mechanism of erasure varies from theorist to theorist, but the pattern of what was erased and what was left behind is remarkably consistent. In Appalachia specifically, the Tartarian theory holds that the region was at the time of the fall an inhabited and heavily developed territory and that its underground infrastructure sealed by whatever catastrophe ended the civilization on the surface has survived in a state of preservation that would astonish any conventional archaeologist for somewhere between four and six centuries. The catastrophe itself, in the version of the theory most commonly told in the older Appalachian families, involved a great mud flood, a rising of subterranean water and sediment that swept across the surface of the continent and buried the lower stories of every existing structure to a depth of 8 to 12 feet. The theory uses this to explain why so many of the region's older buildings have windows at ground level that appear to have been originally designed as second-story windows.
And why so much of what looks like natural hillside contour in the mountains follows lines that are on closer inspection too regular to be natural. What was buried in that flood, according to the theory, was not empty. And the beings who lived in it or who were sealed into it as it happened did not necessarily die. This is the framework within which the story of the boy Thaniel makes a certain terrible sense.
If the lower rooms he described were the surviving lower levels of a Tartarian settlement, and if the ones below were not, as Kettle had told Wickham, ordinary human beings, but something else that had inhabited those structures before or during the catastrophe, then the arrangement that Kettle's family had maintained for nearly a century and a half was not a superstitious pact with imagined spirits. It was a very real diplomatic understanding negotiated by the first white settlers in the valley with the surviving inhabitants of a buried civilization and honored on both sides until the arrival of coal mining and industrial excavation in the late 19th century began to breach the seals that had held the arrangement in place. Borland's mine had broken through into a void. Reynolds had dug down to an iron door.
Clauss had opened a sealed chamber at the site he called the lower entrance. And Thaniel, the boy with the seven scars, was the response. Wickham did not have the word “Tartaria.” That framework would not be developed in its modern form until decades later, but by the middle of April, he had enough pieces to understand the shape of what he was dealing with. He had a boy who had lived underground with beings who were not human in structures that were not built by any people known to the historical record.