“Maybe the woman hadn’t been there to be murdered; maybe she was there to be traded. She’d been kidnapped, and the mine was the place her abductors had selected to return her to whoever was going to pay her ransom. Or she was a high-class prostitute, being transferred from one brothel to another. Either way, the scheduled meeting went pear-shaped and the men died. It didn’t explain why they had done so in such a fashion, but the cops liked it better, it felt more probable to them.
“There were other, wilder explanations offered, too. The dead guys were Polish. This was the end of the sixties, the Cold War was in full swing, and Poland was slotted into the Eastern Bloc. Were the brothers foreign agents? Was the woman a fellow spy who had failed in her duties? Had she been sent here to be liquidated? Then rescued by other spies? Or were the brothers working for the US Government, and the woman a captured spy who had to vanish? These weren’t the craziest scenarios, either. Rosemary’s Baby was pretty big at this time, which may explain why some people picked up on the detail of the nun who stepped off the train. Could it be that the woman had been carrying the spawn of the Satan, or otherwise involved in diabolical activities? It would account for the savagery of the brothers’ deaths—the Devil and his followers are pretty ferocious—if not for what the men had been doing at the mine in the first place. It’s been a while since the Catholic Church sanctioned anyone’s murder.
“In the end, the investigation dead-ended. Officially, it was left open, but in the absence of any credible leads, the cops turned their attention elsewhere.”
Sarah drinks more water. “Within a year or two, the local kids were telling stories about the woman in the mine. Some of them portrayed her as criminally insane, delivered to the place to be kept in a secret cell constructed for the sole purpose of confining her. Other accounts made her a witch, dropped at the mine for essentially the same purpose, imprisonment. Whether she was natural or supernatural, the woman escaped her bonds, slaughtered her jailors, and was now on the loose, ready to abduct any child careless enough to allow her too close. A few years later, when The Exorcist was released, the narrative adapted itself to the film, and the woman became demonically possessed, transported upstate for an exorcism, which obviously had failed. It was one of the peculiarities of the story, the way it shaped itself to the current cultural landscape. The woman morphed into a teen with dangerous psychic abilities, an alien masquerading as a human, even a vampire. For older kids, venturing into the mine, especially at night, and especially at Halloween, became a rite of passage. After the railroad stopped running in the seventies, high school and college kids would drive to the access road and hike to the entrance to build bonfires and drink.
“A similar process happens all over the country—all over the world. Something bad happens, and it hardens into the seed for stories about a monstrous character. This was what Isabelle’s dissertation director said. There was nothing unusual about the woman in the mine, as the local kids called her. Isabelle disagreed, said she had additional information that distinguished this narrative from the rest. Once again, it involved her uncle, Rich, the cop.
“Ten years to the date after he answered his first call about the mine, he received a second. A group of high school seniors had been partying outside the entrance, and one of them had gone into it on a dare. That was three hours ago, and there had been no sign of him since. A couple of the other kids started in after their missing friend, but could find no trace of him as far as they dared to go. Everybody panicked, and eventually someone who was sober enough drove home and phoned the police. The Huguenot cops were busy with a costume party at one of the university’s dorms that had gotten out of hand when someone spiked the punch with acid, so the call was booted to the state troopers. Rich suspected a Halloween prank, probably by the missing kid on his friends, possibly by all the kids on the cops. Despite that, he drove to the access road and made his way on foot to the spot.
“There, he encountered a dozen teenagers, all of them more or less sober, so sick with worry he decided they must be telling the truth. Flashlight in hand, he set off into the mine to search for their friend. He wasn’t nervous, he told Isabelle. Sure, he remembered the bodies of the men he’d discovered a decade before, but he’d seen a lot worse than that in the meantime. The dark had never bothered him, nor did the thought of being underground. He was more concerned about the debris littering the floor: rocks of varying sizes, dusty boxes, rusted bits of old machines, the occasional tool. His feet crushed fast food containers, kicked the bones of small animals, clanged on an empty metal lunchbox. There was one good thing about the clutter—it allowed him to track the missing student without much difficulty.
“He came across graffiti farther inside the mine than he would have expected. He read names of people, sports teams, bands. He saw hearts encasing the names of lovers, peace symbols, even the anarchist A. He stumbled through a heap of beer cans, whose musical clatter wasn’t as comforting as he would have liked. Finally, he came upon the portrait.”
“Portrait?” Edie says.
“A woman’s face,” Sarah says, “done in charcoal on a patch of rock about head level. Whoever she was, Rich said, she was striking. Long black hair, high, strong cheekbones, full lips. Her left eye had been smeared, which made it look like a hole into her skull. The artist had given the picture a force, a vitality Rich struggled to define. He said it was as if she were two seconds away from stepping right out of the rock.
“By this point, he was pretty far in. Any sounds of the high school students had long since ceased. He was grudgingly impressed that the kid had traveled this distance. On the right, the tunnel he’d been walking opened on a shallow chamber. He swept his light across it, and stopped. There was a bed in there, its metal frame spotted orange with rust from the damp, its mattress black with mold. Lying half on the bed was a long piece of clothing—a straightjacket. He entered the room, lifted the restraint to check it. Mold blotched the material. What wasn’t mold was covered in writing, in symbols. He saw rows of crosses, stars of David, crescent moons, other figures he didn’t recognize, but assumed were religious, too. He held up the straightjacket, passed the light over it. The right front side and sleeve were stained with what he was certain was blood. He replaced the garment on the bed, and heard a footstep behind him.
“It was some kind of miracle, Rich said, he didn’t spin around gun in hand and shoot whoever was there, or at least brain them with his flashlight. Of course it was the missing student, who’d gotten himself good and lost in the mine’s recesses and had only come upon Rich through dumb luck. ‘Why didn’t you call for help?’ he asked the kid. Because there was someone else down there, the kid said. A woman. He’d seen her at the other end of one of the tunnels, right before the torch he was carrying guttered out. There was something wrong with her face, and when she saw him, her expression made him turn and run as fast as he could. The student couldn’t say how long he’d been hiding, listening. He’d thought Rich was her, and had debated fleeing further into the mine before she saw him. Now that he’d found Rich, it was imperative the two of them exit this place without delay.
“Had he heard the kid’s story outside, Rich told Isabelle, beside the fire he and his friends had built, he would have taken the tale with a block of salt. This far into the mine, the only source of light his flashlight, facing the stone cell with the weird straightjacket, the tale sounded less incredible. The student was all for bolting for the entrance, which Rich nixed. They needed to pay attention to their surroundings, he said, or the kid would find himself lost again, and he didn’t want that, did he? ‘No way,’ the kid said.