Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  “Thank you, Captain.” Andy smiled. “We’re below Sentinel Hill already. We’ll be at the drift in no time. Over and out.”

  The party marched forward, out of the adit and into the shaft station. Their claustrophobia yielded a little at the wide, level room directly beneath the mine’s shafthead frame, and Andy even reexperienced some of the fascination of their first visit. Ancient yellow lighting painted the stopes, loading docks, catwalks, crates, and mine carts.

  “We are definitely riding a mine cart this time around,” she said.

  “I think I’ve got my quota of video game clichés fulfilled,” Nate commented, examining the rusted wheels on one of the wagons, seemingly as inclined to move as the mountain itself. It had been forty years since those carts had last carried the materials that were still lying around: rocks, tools, hydraulic machinery, gas tanks.

  He lingered by that last item: gas tanks.

  “Oxygen?” he said, kneeling to read the stenciled letters on the side of one of the industrial-sized bottles. “Should this really be here?”

  The rest of the team approached as Tim came by to sniff the objects and formulate his expert opinion.

  “Maybe it’s not that strange,” Andy offered. “We’re carrying oxygen.”

  “Portable bottles. These could feed a space shuttle.”

  “Maybe they were used to refill the smaller ones.”

  “It’s funny,” Kerri commented darkly. “I’m not sure miners used oxygen forty years ago. In fact, I’m not sure they use it now.”

  Tim puffed at the tank, completing his evaluation—Yup, it’s a big metal thing—while Andy and Nate waited for Kerri to come to a conclusion. Instead, she just shrugged.

  “I guess I’ll have to hit the library.”

  Andy checked the different galleries opening at the other end.

  “That’s our door. One-point-six miles to the Allen shaft. About twenty minutes.”

  —

  Those twenty minutes turned out to be some of the longest twenty minutes in the history of minutes. The drift was wired and lit enough to store away the flashlights, but there was very little sighting to do. The novelty of bare rock walls instead of concrete had become old at the speed of SNL material. Rails were laid on the floor as well; Kerri tripped twice on them, mind numbed by the dull, everlasting stonescape.

  “Why did they even dig this?” Nate heard himself ask out of boredom. “I mean, do they just start mining in a random direction and hope to strike gold?”

  “They follow a quartz reef,” Kerri explained. “This quartz reef.” She fingertapped a dark red vein on the wall across the lights.

  “This is quartz? In a gold mine?”

  “Yeah. In the nineteenth century, gold was either found along water streams or inside quartz veins. The latter discovery was one of the triggers of the Gold Rush.”

  “So you think there is gold down here.”

  “Well, I’m not sure Deboën could keep a company running for a hundred years by planting the gold himself. Plus, quartz reefs happen when the rock cracks and the gap is filled up by crystal growth.” She paused, if only to appreciate the fact that she was lecturing again. She went on anyway, because it felt good. “High volcanic activity means tremors; tremors mean cracks. So these hills are not a bad place to prospect.”

  “If we find gold, Kerri, first thing I’m buying you are some proper hiking boots,” Andy joked, glancing at Kerri’s suede boots dragging on the dusty ground.

  The idea merrily walked along with them for a few seconds, before the rancid air and ichorous lights weighed it down and dissolved it.

  One-point-six miles, twenty minutes, 880 lamps, and 1,763 rails later, Kerri thought they were stopping at a random milestone of tedium until she noticed the iron grille under her feet, the steel beams, the handrail before her. They had reached another smaller station.

  She leaned over the handrail. Hopeless, brainless pitch-black shadow coagulated below.

  “Cap?” Andy radioed. A burst of static responded. “Cap, do you copy, over?” With her free hand, she pulled Kerri away from the chasm. “Captain, we can’t hear you. We’re at the Allen shaft. Got a little problem. Over.”

  “What’s the problem?” Kerri whispered.

  Nate punched two big fat buttons on a yellow control panel: “We were hoping to find an elevator here.”

  “Al? I’m not copying; we’re going downstairs anyway. We stick to the plan. Repeat, we stick to the plan.”

  “What stairs?” Kerri asked.

  Nate directed his light to the opposite wall of the shaft. A flimsy iron catwalk led to a set of metal rungs jutting out of the rock, torn spiderwebs flapping off them.

  “How far down?”

  “Five hundred feet.”

  “Jesus Ichabod Christ,” Kerri muttered, smoothing her hair down. “How’s Tim going to climb down those?”

  “He can’t,” Nate said. “He’ll have to stay behind.”

  “No,” Andy objected. “We don’t split up. I will carry him.”

  “You will?”

  “Yeah.” She paused to reckon the Weimaraner’s size. “It’s okay; he’s what? Forty-five pounds? I’ve carried that weight in air force training.”

  “More like sixty-two,” Kerri winced to say.

  “Right,” Andy acknowledged. “Fine. That’s what males used to carry.” She smirked, irony-punched. “I can do anything boys can do, right?”

  —

  Tim did not complain once while they pouched him inside an emptied backpack like an oversized puppy, snugly padded with Andy’s jacket, with no footing and all straps on the bag fastened up to keep him safe. His default air of resignation hardly intensified when Andy lifted him and strapped the package around her shoulders, as though he understood there was a valid reason for undergoing all that. Perhaps his biggest letdown had been to learn that the canary would have to stay up with most of the former contents of Andy’s backpack. Even as Andy grabbed the first burning-cold iron rung and started the long climb down, he remained perfectly silent, head sticking out of the half-zipped top lid, as grave and determined not to look down as an officer on board the sinking Titanic.

  Andy did not falter either. They were all tethered together by a rope, with Andy in the rear behind Kerri and Nate in the lead. They had bivouacked for only ten minutes before the descent, eating cereal bars and drinking water. Even Andy had had trouble grasping some joy out of that picnic, by the light of 1940s wiring, beneath two hundred feet of rock.

  “There’s another platform here if you want to take a rest,” Nate announced. They had encountered catwalks every few minutes.

  “I’m fine,” Kerri moaned. “I’d rather rest with my feet on solid ground.”

  Andy wondered how much farther down that would be. She had lost track of time. Her arms had begun to smart a long while ago. Tim was small-framed for a Weimaraner, but sixty-two pounds was destined to pep up any challenge. On the other hand, she knew Kerri and Nate had to be putting on brave faces; even with the gear they had left at the top, their backpacks were not light.

  “I get more tired thinking we’ll have to climb back up,” Kerri tried to joke.

  “That’s food for thought, right?” Nate said.

  “What is?”

  “Well, if the elevator’s somewhere down there, and the cable seems to be fine…Either the last person down came back up on this ladder, or they’re still down there.”

  Kerri tried to think of a sarcastic dismissal for that and failed.

  “Watch out, there’s another rung missing here,” Nate warned. “Shit, wait. Two in a row are gone.”

  Andy stopped, waiting for instructions, struggling to ignore her shoulders.

  “Nate?” Kerri queried.

  “Wait, I think I see the floor already. I can—fuck!”

  “Nate!”

  Andy automatically fastened an arm around a rung and clenched for the yank of the rope. It never came. Instead, she heard a loud crash.

>   “Nate?!” Kerri shouted into the dark, holding on with one arm as she tried to point the flashlight in the right direction. “Nate, are you all right?!”

  She was able to see the floor (wooden boards and a cloud of dust) and a hole right through it.

  “Nate! Say something!”

  “Fuck,” Nate whined from below.

  “Right,” Kerri sighed. “Good boy.”

  She reached the final rung and dropped to a beam on top of the elevator. Nate had crashed through its roof. She untied the line and slid through the hole into the box to find him sitting on the floor, staring past her, pointing upward.

  “Uh…I think I found out who took the last ride down.”

  Kerri turned and flashed her light at the ceiling. Andy was following her, slipping into the wooden structure at that moment, and as she was hanging off the edge, under Kerri’s spotlight, she saw the person. Eye to eye. Had his or her eyes not rotted long ago.

  The alarming feature about the body was not its nearly bare skull, jutting loosely out of the clothes that had once fitted the body. Nor was the absence of some limbs particularly unsettling. Broken skeletons could be almost expected to lie deep inside the earth’s crust, like dinosaur bones. But they should be lying asprawl on the floor. Instead, this one was hanging. From a hook on the ceiling of the elevator. By the base of its skull.

  “Holy shit,” Andy greeted upon being introduced.

  Tim struggled out of her bag and dropped onto the floor, eager for some appreciation of his good behavior before he noticed what everyone was staring at. He quickly caught up with their fascination.

  “Does it look like a miner to you?” Andy asked. “How long you think it’s been down here?”

  “At least ten years,” Kerri said. “No more than twenty.” She read Andy’s bewilderment, then pointed at the cadaver’s exposed wrist. “Digital watch.”

  “Oh.”

  “This looks exactly like the one we found in the woods,” Nate pointed out.

  His remark met an awkwardly cold reception.

  “Near Sleepy Lake,” he expanded. “It was just like this. I always told myself it was a prop. Peter said it was too. It was too high up to verify.”

  “It’s a warning,” Kerri acknowledged. “A message to trespassers. ‘Intruders be warned.’ ”

  “But who could it have been?” Nate wondered. “No deaths or missing people were ever blamed on the lake creature.”

  “A lonely camper? Perhaps just a bum,” Kerri tried.

  “And this guy?”

  Andy swallowed, if only to get some time and make sure she’d read the cue correctly, then stepped forward and checked the skeleton’s clothes.

  His leather jacket was dry and stiff; not so much the corduroy shirt below, stained with what once had been internal fluids. She omitted those pockets and tried the pants first—the leg that was still attached. A wallet came easily out of the pocket around the loose femur. She flipped through the contents.

  “Oregon driver’s license. Expired 1980. Name: Simon Jaffa. Born 6-1-1943.”

  Inside the wallet, seven dollars and sixty-four cents, chewing gum, a company ID card.

  Expedited by RH Corp.

  “RH,” Nate usefully reminded. “The ecovillains.”

  “Maybe he was sent to inspect the mines for them,” Kerri suggested. “Tim. Stop that.”

  At this point Tim was jumping and poking at the sack of bones as if it were a Halloween-themed piñata. His last effort caused another bundle of papers to drop from the skeleton’s jacket.

  Andy picked them up and unfolded them carefully, wary of the chance they would crumble rather than spread open. It looked like a hand-copied map of the mine. A few flocks of words had been chickenscratched in the blank areas. Not many made any sense: “Blyton Hills,” “Allen,” “Isle shaft,” “Where,” “Dead end.” The rest was a jumble of letters and numbers, possibly directions. “From W, S-5, E-2, bottom.”

  Andy queried the back of the page, to no avail. She was sure there was no S-5 gallery in her blueprint. But as she compared this map with her own copies, something else had begun to bug her.

  “We have a problem,” she announced. “This looks more up to date than what we have. I think I miscalculated the length of the tunnels we’re supposed to inspect.”

  “By how much?” Kerri asked, clenching for the answer.

  “Searching one carefully would take two hours. And…we’ve got four hours and need two to get back to Al.”

  All three rotated their spotlights away from the skeleton and lighthoused the plateau where they had landed. They illuminated more signs of human presence than they had dared hope for: sacks, simple tools, wagons loaded with rubble. Several passageway openings blinked awake at the battery-powered lights.

  “Okay, let’s think rationally here,” Nate suggested. “I think Deboën was digging to find Thtaggoa. (Facing Kerri.) You claim all he wanted was gold.”

  “Look around—they’ve been following the quartz reefs all along,” Kerri argued, lightpointing at the red open wound in the rock right next to her.

  “Okay, but this shaft is named after Allen. Allen’s the guy who Deboën put in charge when he left for the East Coast—when he left as Damian and came back as Daniel.”

  “Right. So the people he left in charge were really looking for gold. Therefore, the tunnel that does not follow a quartz reef…”

  “Is the one we follow.”

  Andy drew her flashlight across the station, tracking down a crimson scar that snaked vertically across the north wall. Three tunnels, labeled N-3, N-4, and N-5, opened on that same wall. All three were marked with rusted signs and wired, even though the lights were not working.

  She then turned east: the gallery seemed to expand casually in that direction, carved by natural forces rather than industry, sloping downward into pitch dark.

  “There,” she concluded bitterly. “The unpopular tunnel.”

  —

  From the mining equipment buried in that station like implausible goodies found inside pyramids and hellgates for the use of video game characters, Andy picked up a few items she deemed useful. Two kerosene lamps seemed to be in good order; she lit both and left one by the elevator. The packing of a few sticks of dynamite sparked a new controversy: Nate argued that, if they found the entry to the wheezers’ hideout, they would require explosives to seal it; Kerri opposed the idea of detonating dynamite underground without any notion of safety. Andy became the tiebreaker once again, Tim having lost any interest in the discussion once it had been stated that he wasn’t allowed to carry the sticks in his mouth. In the end, she settled the argument by allowing Nate to pack the dynamite and forbidding him to carry the lamp at the same time. Then, regretting yet another lost chance to align with Kerri, she marched the party toward E-6.

  The kerosene lamp proved somewhat better than flashlights; though it did not shine nearly as bright, the halo was wider, allowing them to see both where they trod and where they headed. It also granted Tim more freedom of movement to scout ahead. There were no rails; the galleries seemed freshly dug, or not dug at all, like natural, conveniently sized caverns. Except for some passages densely flanked with pillars and boarded-up walls, marks of human craftsmanship were dwindling; warning signs had gone extinct; derelict mining gear was infrequent. And that was long before the gallery funneled into a lower, narrower tunnel that sloped steeply downward, a brief inscription crudely chalked on the rock above reading E-6.

  Nate scowled at the unceremonious sign. Miner slang for “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

  Steps had been roughly carved or occurred naturally, too tall and irregular to let travelers forgo the use of their hands. The detectives had to sit and slip in single file down onto the next ledge, each one narrower than the preceding one. At some point Andy stood up and noticed that the ceiling was remarkably close.

  Kerri noticed the ceiling too, but she had already decided she would not complain before Tim did. An
d he didn’t. The brave motherfucker kept hopping down from landing to landing without a whimper.

  About the depth line of 5,200 feet, as chalked on an exposed slate of basalt, the weight of the ten thousand tons of rock above finally sank in. Kerri glanced behind and could not make out anything six feet back. The light they had left by the elevator was a distant memory. Sunshine was a dream. She tried to stretch her arms: both her hands met walls she knew to be miles thick. She realized that their kerosene lamp was the first thing to have lit that nook of the planet in fifty years, a single bubble of light and air in a one-mile radius of three-dimensional solid matter. And the darkness kept pouring in.

  “What is that sound?” Nate asked.

  “Running water, maybe,” Andy said.

  “Maybe?”

  “I’m guessing. We may be close to a subterranean river.”

  “Andy, I can’t breathe,” Kerri said.

  Andy raised the lamp at her. She barely made out some distressed orange hair. “Yeah, you can.”

  “No, I’m telling you, I can’t go on.”

  “You’re just anxious. Look, we all are—”

  “This cave isn’t safe; there’s water on the other side of this wall! It could collapse on us.”

  “It won’t, Kerri; it’s held this long.”

  “We could be buried alive. We are buried alive!”

  “No, we’re not—we came that way, we’ll leave that way!”

  “There is no way!”

  “Kerri!”

  “What’s happening to the light?” Nate pointed out mellowly.

  The girls stared straight into the kerosene flame. They could. It burned bluish and shy, its halo receding, crawling back from Andy’s face.

  And then it went out.

  Blackness—a million tons of heavy, stone-hard, Neptune-cold blackness took over.

  Life, light in the universe, ceased to exist.

  —

  Nate switched on his flashlight, a hysterical white beam drawing the image of primordial panic in the new Age of Light. Andy searched her pockets for a box of matches, tried to scratch one and dropped it. She gritted her teeth, commanding her hands to pull themselves together, and tried another one.

  Kerri saw the phosphorus flash with a short-lived burst of glee before the flame quickly ebbed down to a helium-voiced, meek, lukewarm drop of blue.