We went on and on, I don’t know how far, but the ground kept sloping down, and the air kept getting hotter. There were less bones on the floor of the shaft but more fallen rock. I could have shone my light up to see what kind of shape the topshaft was in, but I didn’t dare. I didn’t even dare think about how deep we were by then. Had to have been at least a quarter of a mile from where the explosions cut into the shaft and opened it up. Probably more. And I’d started to feel pretty sure we’d never get out. The roof would just come down and that’d be it. It would be quick, at least, quicker than it had been for the Chinese miners who’d suffocated or died of thirst in the same shaft. I kept thinking of how I had five or six library books back at my house, and wondering who’d take them back, and if someone’d charge my little bit of an estate for the overdue fines. It’s funny what goes through a person’s head when he’s in a tight corner.
Just before my light picked out the little boy, he changed his tune. I didn’t recognize the new one, but his Dad told me after we got out that it was the Motor Cops theme song. I only mention it because for a moment or two there it sounded like someone else was singing the la-las and dum-dee-dums along with him, kind of harmonizing. I’m sure it was only that soft roaring sound I mentioned, but it gave me a hell of a bump, I can tell you. Garin heard it, too; I could see him a little bit in the light from my flash, and he looked almost as scared as I felt. The sweat was pouring down his face, and his shirt was stuck to his chest like with glue.
Then he points and says, “I think I see him! I do see him! There he is! Seth! Seth!” He went running for him, stumbling over the rubble and rocking like a drunk but somehow keeping his balance. All I could do was pray God he didn’t fall into one of those old support baulks. It’d probably crumble to powder just like the bones we’d stepped on to get where we were, and that would be all she wrote.
Then I saw the kid, too-you couldn’t very well mistake the jeans and the red shirt he was wearing. He was standing in front of the place where the shaft ended. You could tell it wasn’t just another cave-in because it was a smooth rock-face-what we call a “slide”-and not piled up rubble. There was a crack running down the middle of it, and for a minute I thought the kid was trying to work his way into it. That scared me plenty, because he looked small enough to do it if he wanted to, and a couple of big guys like us would never have been able to follow him. He wasn’t trying to do that, though. When I got a little closer, I saw that he was standing perfectly still. I must have been fooled by the shadows my little flashlight threw, that’s all I can figure.
His Dad got to him first and pulled him into his arms. He had his face against the boy’s chest, so he didn’t see what I did, and I only saw it for a second. It wasn’t just my eyes playing tricks on me that time. The boy was grinning, and it wasn’t a nice grin, either. The corners of his mouth looked like they were pulled most of the way up to his ears, and I could see all his teeth. His face was so stretched that his eyes looked like they were bulging right out of his head. Then his father held him back so he could give him a kiss, and that grin went away. I was glad. While it was on his face, he didn’t hardly look like the little boy I’d first met at all.
“What did you think you were doing?” his father asks him. He was shouting but it wasn’t really much of a scold even so, because he gave the boy a kiss practically between every word. “Your mother is scared to death! Why did you do it? Why in God’s name did you come in here?”
What he replied was the last real talking he did, and remember it well. “Colonel Henry and Major Pike told me to,” he said. “They told me I could see the Ponderosa. In there.” He pointed at the crack running down the middle of the slide. “But I couldn’t. Ponderosa all gone.” Then he laid his head down on his father’s shoulder and closed his eyes, like he was all tuckered out.
“Let’s go back,” I said. “I’ll walk behind you and to your right, so I can shine the light on your footing. Don’t linger, but don’t run, either. And for Christ’s sake try not to bump any of the jackstraws holding this place up.”
Once we actually had the boy, that groaning in the ground seemed louder than ever. I fancied I could even hear the timbers creaking. I’m not usually an imaginative sort, but it sounded to me like they were trying to talk. Telling us to get out while we still could.
I couldn’t resist shining my light into that crack once before we went, though. When I bent down I could feel air rushing out, so it wasn’t just a crack in the slide; there was some sort of rift on the other side of it. Maybe a cave. The air coming out was as hot as air coming out of a furnace grate, and it stank something fierce. One whiff and I held my breath so I wouldn’t vomit. It was the old-campfire smell, but a thousand times heavier. I’ve racked my brains trying to think of how something that deep underground could smell so bad, and keep coming up empty. Fresh air is the only thing that makes things stink like that, and that means some sort of vent, but Deep Earth has been burrowing in these parts ever since 1957, and if there had been a vent big enough to manufacture a stench like that, surely it would’ve been found and either plugged or followed to see where it went.
The crack looked like a zigzag S or a lightning-bolt, and there didn’t seem like there was anything much in it to see, just a thickness of rock-at least two feet, maybe three. But I did get the sense of space opening out on the other side, and there was that hot air whooshing out, too. I thought I maybe saw a bunch of red specks like embers dancing in there, but that must have been my imagination, because when I blinked, they were gone.
I turned back to Garin and told him to move.
“In a second, just give me a second,” he says. He’d taken the boy’s little black cowboy boot out of his shirt and was sliding it on his foot. It was the tenderest thing. All you’d ever need to know about a father’s love was in the way he did that. “Okay,” he says when he had it right. “Let’s go.”
“Right,” I says. “Just try to keep your footing.”
We went as quick as we could, but it still seemed to take forever. In the dreams I mentioned, I always see the little circle of my Penlite sliding over skulls. There weren’t that many that I saw when we were actually in there, and some of those had fallen apart, but in my dreams it seems like there are thousands, wall to wall skulls sticking up round like eggs in a carton, and they are all grinning just like the little one was grinning when his Dad picked him up, and in their eyesockets I see little red flecks dancing around, like embers rising from a wildfire.
It was a pretty awful walk, all in all. I kept looking ahead for daylight, and for the longest time I didn’t see it. Then, when I finally did (just a little tiny square I could have covered with the ball of my thumb at first), it seemed like the sound of the hornfels was louder than ever, and I made up my mind that the shaft was going to wait until we were almost out, then fall on us like a hand swatting flies. As if a hole in the ground could think! But when you’re actually in a spot like that, your imagination is apt to go haywire. Sound carries funny; ideas do, too.
And I might as well say that I still have a few funny ideas about Rattlesnake Number One. I’m not going to say it was haunted, not even in a “backstage report” no one may ever read, but I’m not going to say it wasn’t, either. After all, what place would be more likely to have ghosts than a mine full of dead men? But as to the other side of that slide of rock, if I actually did see something there-those dancing red lights-it wasn’t ghosts.
The last hundred feet were the hardest. It took everything I had in me not to just shove past Mr Garin and sprint for it, and I could see on his face that he felt the same way. But we didn’t, probably because we both knew we’d scare the rest of the family even worse if we came busting out in a panic. We walked out like men instead, Garin with his boy in his arms, fast asleep.