I overtook Mrs Garin just as Seth reached the mine entrance. He stopped there for a second, and I hoped maybe he wasn’t going to go in. I thought there was a chance that if the dark didn’t put him off, the smell of the place would-kind of an old campflre smell, like ashes and burned coffee and scraps of old meat all mixed together. Then he did go in, and without so much as a look back at me yelling for him to quit it.
I told his Mom to stay clear, for God’s sake, that I’d go in and bring him out. I told her to tell her son and husband the same thing, but of course Garin didn’t listen. I don’t think I would have, in his situation, either.
I climbed the slope and broke through the yellow tapes. The tyke was short enough so he’d been able to go right underneath. I could hear the faint roaring you almost always hear coming out of old mine-shafts. It sounds like the wind, or a far-off waterfall. I don’t know what it really is, but I don’t like it, never have. I don’t know anyone who does. It’s a ghostly sound.
That day, though, I heard another one I liked even less-a low, whispery squealing. I hadn’t heard it any of the other times I’d been up to look into the shaft since it was uncovered, but I knew what it was right away-hornfels and rhyolite rubbing together. It’s like the ground is talking. That sound always made the miners clear out in the olden days, because it meant the works could come down at any time. I guess the Chinamen who worked the Rattlesnake back in 1858 either didn’t know what that sound meant or weren’t allowed to heed it.
The footing slipped on me just after I broke through the tapes, and I went down on one knee. I saw something lying there on the ground when I did. It was his little plastic action figure, the redhead with the blaster. It must have fallen out of the boy’s pocket just before he went into the shaft, and seeing it there laying in that broken-up rock-waste stuff we call gangue-seemed like the worst kind of sign, and gave me the creeps something fierce. I picked it up, stuck it in my pocket, and forgot all about it until later, when the excitement was over and I returned it to its proper owner. I described it to my young nephew and he said it’s a Cassie Stiles (sp.?) figure, from the Motor Cops show the little tyke kept talking about.
I heard sliding rock and panting behind me; looked back and saw Garin coming up the slope. The other three were standing down below, huddled together. The little girl was crying.
“You go on back, now!” I said. “This shaft could come down any time! It’s a hundred and thirty damn years old! More!”
“I don’t care if it’s a thousand years old,” he said back, still coming. “That’s my boy and I’m going in after him.”
I wasn’t about to stand there and argue with him; sometimes all you can do is get moving, keep moving, and hope that God will hold up the roof. And that’s what we did.
I’ve been in some scary places during my years as a mining engineer, but the ten minutes or so (it actually could have been more or less; I lost all sense of time) that we spent in the old Rattlesnake shaft was the scariest by far. The bore ran back and down at a pretty good angle, and we started to run out of daylight before we were more than twenty yards in. The smell of the place-cold ashes, old coffee, burned meat-got stronger in a hurry, and that was strange, too. Sometimes old mines have a “minerally” smell, but mostly that’s all. The ground underfoot was fallen rubble, and we had to step pretty smart just to keep from stubbing our toes and going face-first. The supports and crossbeams were covered with Chinese characters, some carved in the wood, most just painted on in candlesmoke. Looking at something like that makes you realize that all the things you read about in your history books actually happened. Wasn’t made up a bit.
Mr Garin was yelling for the boy, telling him to come back, that it wasn’t safe. I thought of telling him that just the sound of his voice might be enough to bring down the hangwall, the way people yelling can sometimes be enough to bring down avalanches up in the high country. I didn’t, though. He wouldn’t have been able to stop calling. All he could think of was the boy.
I keep a little fold-blade, a magnifying loop, and a Penlite on my key-ring. I got the Penlite unhooked and shone it out ahead of us. We went on down the shaft, with the loose hornfels muttering all around us, and that soft roaring sound in our ears, and that smell up our noses. I felt it getting warmer almost right away, and the warmer it got, the fresher that campfire smell got. Except by the end, it didn’t smell like a campfire anymore. It smelled like something gone rotten. A carcass of some kind.
Then we came on the start of the bones. We-us with Deep Earth, I mean-had shone spotlights into the shaft, but they didn’t show much. We’d gone back and forth a lot about whether or not there really was anything in there. Yvonne argued that there wasn’t, that no one would have kept going down into a shaft-mine dug in ground like that, not even a bunch of bond-Chinamen. They said it was all just so much talk-legend-making, Yvonne called it-but once Garin and I were a couple of hundred yards in, my little Penlite was enough to show us that Yvonne was wrong.
There were bones littered everywhere on the shaft floor, cracked skulls and legs and hip-bones and pelvises. The ribcages were the worst, every one seeming to grin like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. When we stepped on them they didn’t even crunch, like you’d think such things would, just puffed up like powder. The smell was stronger than ever, and I could feel the sweat rolling down my face. It was like being in a boiler room instead of a mine. And the walls! They didn’t just put on their names or initials down where we were; they wrote all over them with their candlesmoke. It was as if when the adit caved in and they found they were trapped in the shaft, they all decided to write their last wills and testaments on the support beams.
I grabbed Garin’s shoulder and said, “We’ve gone too far. He was standing off to one side and we missed him in the dark.”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I still feel him up ahead,” he said, then raised his voice. “Seth! Please, honey! If you’re down there, turn around and come to us!”
What came back put the hackles up on my neck. Further on down that shaft, with its floor of crumbled skarn and skulls and bones, we could hear singing. Not words, just the little boy’s voice going “La-la-la” and “dum-deedle-dum”. Not much of a tune, but enough so I could recognize the Bonanza theme music.
Garin looked at me, his eyes all white and wide in the dark, and asked if I still thought we’d come past him. Wasn’t anything I could say to that, and so we got moving again.
We started to see gear in amongst the bones-cups, picks with rusty heads and funny short handles, and little tin boxes with straps running through them that I recognized from the Miners” Museum in Ely. Keroseners, the miners called them. They wore them on their foreheads like phylacteries, with bandannas tucked in underneath to keep their skin from burning. And I started to see there were candlesmoke drawings on the walls as well as Chinese words. They were awful things-coyotes with heads like spiders, mountain lions with scorpions riding on their backs, bats with heads like babies. I’ve wondered since then if I really saw those things, or if the air was so bad that far down in the shaft that I hallucinated them. I didn’t ask Garin later on if he saw any of those things. I don’t know for sure if I just forgot or if maybe I didn’t dare.
He stopped and bent down and picked something up. It was a little black cowboy boot that had been wedged between two rocks. The tyke must have got it jammed and run right out of it. Mr Garin held it up so I could see it in the light of my little flash, then stuck it in his shirt. We could still hear the la-las and dum-dee-dums, so we knew he was still up ahead. The sound seemed a little closer, but I wouldn’t let myself hope. Underground you can never tell. Sound carries funny.