by R. D. Tarver
Never mind.
As though sensing the impulse, Mal diverged from their plotted trajectory, leading Jesse through the southern edge of the forest towards the old mine. Despair turned to relief as Mal gripped his hand tighter. Together, they descended down into the forgotten spaces of the Old Townsite—an abandoned industrial venture retooled as sanctuary for the displaced teenage castaway.
When they arrived at the Hell Hole, Mal jettisoned her backpack. She jumped up and down, shaking her hair out.
“Fuck today. Do you ever just feel like you are stuck between worlds?” Her eyes were pleading with him.
Jesse nodded. “Seems like most days, here lately.”
“Do you believe in God?” she asked.
Jesse was taken aback by the pointedness of the question. “My brother always says that the only Holy Trinity worth worshiping is Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Rainbow.”
Mal returned a blank look.
“Because a lot of the same players were in all three bands at one point or another.”
“And what about you? What do you think?”
Jesse shrugged. He mostly wondered why people seemed to be so hung up on that question. It was too loaded. The question itself revealed more than the answer.
“I don’t know. I guess I don’t think anyone really believes. Just something they tell themselves to get through their lives. Something to drown out the fear.”
“But if you try to embrace the fear and refuse to go with the flow, you’re pushed out into the wild. And here we are.” She gestured to the surrounding forest. “I feel like a prisoner. I don’t ever want to go back to that shithole high school, or the shithole house I live in. I just want to get the hell out of here.”
“Where would you go?” asked Jesse. The question served to momentarily deflect his crumbling vision of the future, a future that he had only just realized he had come to covet.
“My cousin lives in the city. She’s basically like my big sister.” She tapped the camera case that was strapped over her shoulder. “There’s a pretty good photography school not too far from where she lives, off the interstate.”
Jesse pulled out the self-portrait she had given him. “You’re really good, you know.” He held up the photograph as proof.
“You probably say that to all the girls.” She stomped out a freshly lit cigarette and held the scene in her eyes. “The lighting is actually perfect right now.” Mal pulled the camera out from its case and adjusted the lens. “Go stand against the gate.”
The rusted gate groaned as he leaned against it. He could feel the shape of the thin, wrought iron bars as they pressed into his back. Mal took several shots from different angles, calling out various directions to Jesse, who obliged willingly. When she was finished, she leaned against the gate next to him.
They stared up in silence at the barren trees from beneath the stone arch. Silhouetted against the horizon, they looked like great skeletal hands, clawing their way up from the grave. Jesse noted that the imagined scene was reminiscent of one of his brother’s album cover sketches.
In addition to being a roadie and a promoter, his brother was also a solid visual artist. Rick had tried his hand at designing logos and putting together flyers for a lot of the local bands on the scene back in the day. Nothing much since the accident aside from the occasional mixtape cover.
Buried beneath the realization that Rick could no longer physically access such blissful wanderings, and the threat of Mal’s exodus, Jesse felt like an undead ghoul, torn from the life he once knew. He had awakened from the sweet dream of the living and stumbled out from his gated crypt into a land filled with chaos and uncertainty.
Although the air was still, Jesse thought he saw one of the utmost branches bend slowly towards the ground. He raised his arm to block the glare of the sun. As he was about to dismiss the phenomena as a trick of shadow, he felt Mal’s lips brush over his.
The kiss drowned out the world. He could hear the leaves dropping on the stone arch above as he closed his eyes. A brief conversation among birds chimed out somewhere in the distance. Time slowed as he reveled in the touch of her flesh against his.
He leaned back on his shoulder to gain leverage. Together, the combined force of their weight jostled the gate loose from its hinges, causing the pair to tumble backwards through the crumbling brick wall that separated the mine from the outside world.
Mal pulled Jesse up to a seated position, laughing as they looked to the darkened path beyond the gate. The weathered brick seal had disintegrated beneath them, creating an accessible portal into the dormant space.
A pocket of stale, sulphuric air washed over them like an exhale of foul breath trapped in the static bellows of stone.
“Come on, let’s check it out,” Mal said. She grinned, revealing a crooked bottom tooth that somehow made her smile more authentic. “I’ll let you feel me up.”
Jesse rushed to fill the silence that came on the heels of the offer.
“Almost everyone on my mom’s side of the family have nearly gotten themselves killed down there.” He gestured to the darkness beyond the crumbled gate. “They bricked it up after some kid fell down the shaft and died.”
“Jimmie Shankly?” Mal shook her head. “That’s an urban legend. The real story—the Spring Creek Mine was decommissioned after a terrible accident that happened like over sixty years ago. The workers tunneled into a natural cave system beneath the mine. A large portion of it collapsed and killed the miners—seventeen of them in all.”
“Holy shit. I’ve never heard that before.”
She pulled Jesse to his feet and inspected the mine entrance, pointing to the grey springer stones that comprised the arch. “That’s why if you count the stones, there are exactly seventeen.”
Jesse started to feel uneasy about venturing farther—and not solely for fear of having to confront the growing tension fostered by the presence of adolescent hormones.
“How do you know so much about this?”
Her eyes widened as she recounted the tale. “When I was in fourth grade we had to do a public library assignment on the history of Macomb Springs. It took forever, but I eventually found some original newspaper articles in the Chronicle archives that mentioned the mine collapse.”
“That’s crazy,” Jesse shook his head in disbelief. “I’m surprised my mom never told me about that. She grew up here. And ever since my brother’s accident she’s been super overprotective—pointing out every pothole and blind alley across the county.”
“Wait, it gets better!” She squealed and punched him in the shoulder. “Nobody knows about it now because the mayor of Macomb Springs at the time, Edgar Winchell, tried to cover it all up. He wanted to prevent the story from becoming national news so the town wouldn’t protest the arrival of the coal industry, which was like the major economic industry at the time.” She took a deep breath and flailed her hands in the air. “I’ve pretty much been obsessed with the story ever since.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“What’s even more fucked up…because the collapse was so deep and widespread, no one was ever able to recover the remains. And Winchell paid off the families to keep them quiet.”
“The bodies are still down there?”
Mal nodded. “I know, it’s awesome. Eventually, after he died, the Winchell family quietly shut down the mine and bricked up the entrance—out of sight, out of mind.” She took his hand and gestured through the archway. “You scared, Jesse?”
6
Guided by the flames of their lighters, the two followed the old rail cart track into the abandoned mine. Mal put her arm under Jesse’s and squeezed it tight.
“We’re probably like the first people to walk inside this place in years.” Her long, black fingernails clawed deeper into his forearm with the utterance of each word.
They passed through the brick-lined entrance, feeling along the natural rock walls of the tunnel for guidance. Wooden support frames were erected every few feet
, eventually widening into a spacious corridor.
Shiny black deposits of carbon flickered along the walls and ceiling of the rough-hewn chamber, carved out over a half-century ago.
“Look, there’s the service platform for the rail cart track.” She pointed to the west wall, where a raised wooden platform ran parallel to the track that snaked deeper into the mine. “So cool.”
Jesse turned back to survey the distance from the gate, pushing the rising claustrophobia from his mind. The entrance had receded to nothing more than a pinhole of light surrounded by an impenetrable field of black.
“Is that a door?” asked Mal.
Beneath the soot-lined surface Jesse could make out the unmistakable shape of the large rectangular pair of double doors set within a steel support frame along the east wall of the open corridor. Before he could object, Mal pulled on the handle to the nearest door. To his relief, it remained closed.
“You just gonna stand there?”
Jesse cast aside his reservations and put his hands beneath hers and pulled on the door handle. The hinges creaked in protest, but eventually allowed the door to swing free in an explosion of rust and dust.
“Holy shit—check this out,” she said, pulling Jesse through the doorway.
Inside, a bank of modular consoles lined the walls of a large control room. Many had been gutted. All that was left behind were piles of cables and wires that spilled onto the floor like the entrails of disem- bodied robots (a scene also reminiscent of one of Rick’s album cover sketches during his Somewhere in Time phase).
Remnants of signage appeared along the walls just above the console banks, indicating the former presence of a rail switching station, lighting control panels, and a two-way radio call box.
“What do you think this one does?” she asked, brushing the dust and grime from one of the large breaker panels.
“Okay, we got inside, now we can go back. There’s no way anything still works down here.”
“Maybe there’s still something connected to the Old Townsite power grid? It still powers all the railroad crossing arms along the old service road.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“My dad used to work for the railroad before he got off on disability. We’ll go back after we see what it does, I promise.” She opened the panel and pushed up on one of the main breaker switches.
A shower of sparks erupted from the panel.
The sound of their screams echoed out into the central tunnel and reverberated down into the deeper recesses of the mine.
They stood in silence, listening as the acoustic rumble dissipated. As the echo resolved, what sounded like the call of a deep, bellowing foghorn answered back. Jesse felt a wave of dizziness crawl up his spine as the sound vibrated through the cavern.
“Cool,” Mal whispered.
They stepped out into the corridor.
“Hello!” Mal called out into the darkness.
Once again the sound of her voice echoed down into the mine, and once again a deep bellow answered back from its depths like the call of a ship at sea, announcing its presence to the coast.
They steadied themselves against the tunnel wall as the disorienting sound waves reverberated off the stone from all sides.
A pocket of trapped air rushed by, followed by the sound of rocks falling from somewhere deeper within the mine.
“Cover your face, and try not to breathe. There could be blackdamp coming up from below.”
“Blackdamp?”
“Bad air, trapped from the collapse.”
Though he had never seen it himself, Jesse knew from regional lore that the vertical shaft that led down to the heart of the mine was located near the end of the rail cart track. The sound of the distant rockslide had conjured an image of skeletal miners, still wearing their headlamps and safety gear, scrambling up from the deep towards the sound of their voices.
“We should probably head back. I’m starting to feel a little weird.”
“Relax, it will pass,” Mal said. She pushed Jesse a step deeper into the tunnel. “Come on, let’s go check it out.”
Jesse ventured deeper into the abyss alongside Mal.
She called out again into the darkness. This time a voice answered back. Jesse could clearly discern the words as they rattled off the stone walls, raising the hair on the back of his neck.
“hail satan!”
Mal screamed.
Two silhouetted figures approached from the entrance. Jesse had already drawn his knife before he recognized the familiar cackle that resounded over the lingering reverberations of Mal’s scream.
Muffled music rang out from Alex’s umbilical boombox as Jesse’s bandmates came into view.
“Bitchin’,” said Rust. The light from his Zippo revealed the astonishment that bore out on their faces as they explored the forbidden space.
“How did you guys get in here?” asked Alex.
“Goddamnit. Was that you two assholes the whole time?” asked Mal.
“What do you mean? Rust is the asshole. I’m the happy-go-lucky one.”
“Shut up. Listen to this.”
Alex turned down the boombox as Mal attempted to demonstrate the strange acoustic phenomenon. Her call resounded flatly, absent the deep resonating bellow that had followed from the two previous occurrences.
“What have you guys been smokin’ down here, and why are you bogartin’ it?” asked Rust.
“Forget it,” Mal sighed. “I need to get home anyway.”
“Me too. I’ll walk you,” offered Jesse.
As the group exited, they piled up the loose bricks and propped up the broken gate.
“We gotta promise not to show this to anyone,” said Mal, holding out her fist. “If word gets out, they’ll seal it off for good. Got it?”
The others formed a circle and put their fists in the center of it, next to Mal’s, and swore to uphold the secret of the hidden space.
7
They arrived at Mal’s house just as nightfall began to blanket the sleepy town of Macomb Springs.
As they approached, Mal’s father was sitting on the front porch downing a beer. He stared at Jesse as he crushed the empty can, placing it next to a dozen of its predecessors that lined the windowsill behind him.
“Hey, I’m home.” Mal gestured to Jesse. “Frank, this is Jesse.”
Frank shouted back over the blaring volume of the television set that flooded through the open living room window. “You’re on your own for dinner. I already ate.”
Mal shrugged. “I think I know my way around a frozen tv dinner, but thanks anyways.”
“It’s disrespectful the way you talk to me, you little jerk. I work too damn hard to put food on the table—”
“Collecting disability isn’t exactly a job.”
As Mal’s demeanor hardened, Jesse suddenly felt transported back to Principal Anderson’s office.
“You watch your mouth when you talk to me, little girl. I took that shit from your bitch of a mother, I’m not gonna take it from you, understand?” Frank stood up from the bench, nearly falling back against the windowsill, causing an avalanche of empty beer cans to fall to the porch. “And pick this shit up.” He gestured to the spill of empty cans as he leaned on the door jamb. “This ain’t a motel.”
He stumbled inside, slamming the screen door. The force of the impact caused it to reopen, revealing a similar scene on the coffee table in front of the small color tv.
“That’s my Dad.”
“You want me to stay?”
“No, it’s okay.” She forced a smile as her eyes welled with tears. “This is my life. I’m kinda used to it.”
“I better head home too. My mom is gonna freak out when she hears about detention.” Jesse gave her a hug and held her for a moment. “Thanks for the Macomb Springs history lesson.”
Mal walked up the steps of the porch and turned back to offer a final wave to Jesse.
“Thanks again for the sympathetic magic.” She p
atted the handmade Chick tract that rested in her back pocket.
Jesse lingered until she closed the screen door behind her. As he ventured down the gravel drive towards his familial ranch house, he could still hear the barbed tangle of raised voices through the open window.
C H A P T E R T H R E E
