The Secret Place by Richard McKenna

The Secret Place by Richard McKenna (Orbit #1, 1966) has as its narrator a geologist called Duard Campbell, one of a team sent to a small town to search for a vein of uranium:

It began in 1931, when a local boy was found dead in the desert near Barker, Oregon. He had with him a sack of gold ore and one thumb-sized crystal of uranium oxide. The crystal ended as a curiosity in a Salt Lake City assay office until, in 1942, it became of strangely great importance. Army agents traced its probable origin to a hundred-square-mile area near Barker.  p. 31

After the team finds nothing (the whole area is overlaid by Miocene lava flows) Campbell is left behind to maintain a skeleton operation to keep the army happy. He is angry and feels betrayed by his boss, and decides he will find the vein to spite him. Then, one night at dinner, Campbell speaks to Old Dave, one of the townsmen, who tells him about a local myth of a lost mine, and how the deceased boy’s sister, Helen, might know something about its whereabouts.
Campbell then hires Helen (who is described in part as “elfin”) as his secretary, and the main part of the story concerns itself with Campbell’s manipulation of her to obtain the information he wants. Initially this proves unsuccessful, but one day he makes a breakthrough:

I was trying the sympathy gambit. I said it was not so bad, being exiled from friends and family, but what I could not stand was the dreary sameness of that search area. Every spot was like every other spot and there was no single, recognizable place in the whole, expanse. It sparked something in her and she roused up at me. “It’s full of just wonderful places,” she said.
“Come out with me in the jeep and show me one,” I challenged.

During this trip, and subsequent ones, Helen tells him of the “fairyland” that she and her brother used to play in, and talks about “big cats” that chase dogs, “shaggy horses with claws, golden birds, camels, witches, elephants and many other creatures,” “the evil magic of a witch or giant,” “sleeping castles,” “gold or jewels,” and “magic eggs” amongst other things. Throughout this Campbell sketches the topology of Helen’s fantasy land (noting that she is remarkably consistent with her descriptions) and later convinces her to show him the “magic eggs,” which turn out to be quartz pebbles that could never have originated in the basalt desert around Barker.
Throughout all this Helen becomes increasingly unhappy and unstable, and there is a crisis point where she says that her brother Owen stole the “treasure” and later died because of her family’s poverty (when he was found he had lacerations of his back consistent with a cougar attack, although there were no such animals in the area). Old Dave eventually intervenes, tells Campbell about the townfolk’s displeasure about Helen’s condition, and states that she needs to go home.
Before he can arrange this Campbell receives a map of the prevolcanic Miocene landscape of the area, and is stunned when he realises it is a point for point copy of the map he has made of Helen’s fairyland. All of a sudden he realises, “The game was real [. . .] All the time the game had been playing me,” and he rushes out to find Helen, only to come across Dave who says she is missing.
Campbell drives out to the desert in the jeep ahead of the search party and, when he finds her, declares his love:

“Wait for me, little sister!” I screamed after her. “I love you, Helen! Wait for me!”
She stopped and crouched and I almost ran over her. I knelt and put my arms around her and then it was on us.
They say in an earthquake, when the direction of up and down tilts and wobbles, people feel a fear that drives them mad if they can not forget it afterward. This was worse. Up and down and here and there and now and then all rushed together. The wind roared through the rock beneath us and the air thickened crushingly above our heads. I know we clung to each other, and we were there for each other while nothing else was and that is all I know, until we were in the jeep and I was guiding it back toward town as headlong as I had come.
Then the world had shape again under a bright sun.  p. 45

There is a minor confrontation with the townsfolk when they get back, but Helen says she is going away with Campbell to be his wife.
A short postscript takes place sixteen years later, where Campbell tells of his professorship and the son they have had. Campbell also says that they don’t have any books of fairy tales in the house, but goes on to quote a cryptic remark from the son:

“You know, Dad, it isn’t only space that’s expanding. Time’s expanding too, and that’s what makes us keep getting farther away from when we used to be.”  p. 47

When I first finished this story (I skimmed it again later) I found it a bit of a muddle to be honest, and wasn’t sure whether “The Secret Place” was located in a different time or in a different reality, or both.¹ Part of this was down to expectation (I’d previously read a review—which I can’t now find—of McKenna’s Fiddler’s Green which states that the characters in the story generate their own reality to escape the current one), and part of it was McKenna’s execution of the story itself, which trowels in so much talk of fantasy and magic that it almost drowns out the evidence suggesting the children (and later Campbell and Helen) are actually playing make-believe games in another time: the gold, the uranium, the quartz pebbles, the topology map, and the comment by the son.
I also thought the sudden declaration of love by Campbell a bit unlikely, and have no idea what is happening in the earthquake scene above (is it really a timequake—“now and then all rushed together”—or is it just an emotional climax to the story?)
It’s a very mixed bag and by no means a worthy Nebula winner. Bob Shaw’s Light of Other Days should have won that year, but was probably pipped by this as McKenna had recently died, and the film of his best-selling book, The Sand Pebbles, was in the cinemas.
** (Average). 6,150 words.

1. It took me a couple of days of scratching my head, Algis Budry’s October 1966 Galaxy review (“a minor story by a major writer,” “about time travel, love and maturation”), and reading the other comments on my Facebook group read thread before I could make sense of the story.