It’s amazing that any of the shaft was still up. They drove it straight into hornfels and crystal rhyolite-leftovers from the volcanic event that emptied the Great Basin-and that’s pretty shaky stuff even when you’re not shooting off ANFO charges all over the place. I told her I wouldn’t go in there even on a double dare unless and until it was shored up with concrete and steel every five feet. Never knowing I’d be in there so deep I couldn’t see the sun before the day was over!
I took them to the field office and got them hard-hats, then took them out and showed them all around-diggings, tailings, leachbeds, sorters, and heavy equipment. We had quit a field-trip for ourselves. Little Seth had pretty much quit talking then, but his eyes were as bright as the garnets we are always finding in the spoil-rock!.
All right, I’ve come to the “little scare” that has caused me so many doubts and bad dreams (not to mention a bad case of conscience, no joke for a Mormon who takes the religion stuff pretty seriously). And it didn’t seem so “little” to any of us at the time, and doesn’t to me now, if I’m to tell the truth. I have been over it and over it in my mind, and while I was in Peru (which is where I was, looking at bauxite deposits, when Audrey Wyler’s letter of enquiry came in to the Deep Earth post box in Desperation), I dreamed of it a dozen or more times. Because of the heat, maybe. It was hot inside the Rattlesnake Mine. I have been in a lot of shaft-mines in my time, and usually they are chilly or downright cold. I have read that some of the deep gold mines in
S. Africa are warm, but I have never been in any of those. Andthis wasn’t warm but hot. Humid, too, like in a greenhouse.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, and I don’t want to do that. What I want is to tell it straight through, end to end, and thank God nothing like it will ever happen again. In early-August, not two weeks after all this happened, the whole works collapsed. Maybe there was a little temblor deep down in the Devonian, or maybe the open air had a corrosive effect on the exposed support timbers. I’ll never know for sure, but down it came, a million tons of shale and schist and limestone. When I think how close Mr Garin and his little boy came to being under all that when it went (not to mention Mr Allen Symes, Geologist Extraordinaire), I get the willies.
The older boy, Jack, wanted to see Mo, our biggest digger. She runs on treads and works the inner slopes, mostly digging out benches at fifty-foot intervals. There was a time in the early “70s when Mo was the biggest digger on Planet Earth, and most kids-the boys especially-are fascinated with her. Big boys too! Garin wanted to see her “close up” as much as young Jack did, and I assumed Seth would feel the same way. I was wrong about that, though.
I showed them the ladder that goes up Mo’s side to the operator’s cab, which is almost 100 feet above the ground. Jack asked if they could go up and I said no, that was too dangerous, but they could take a stroll on the treads if they wanted. Doing that is quite an experience, each tread being as wide as a city street and each of the separate steel plates that make them up a yard across. Mr Garin put Seth down, and they climbed up the ladder to Mo’s treads. I climbed up behind them, hoping like mad nobody would fall. If they did, I was the one who’d most likely be on the hook in case of a lawsuit. June Garin stood back aways so she could take pictures of us standing up there with our arms around each other, laughing. We were clowning and mugging for the camera and having the time of our lives until the little girl called, “You come back, Seth! Right now! You shouldn’t be way over there!”
I couldn’t see him because up where I was on Mo’s tread, all the rest of the digger was in the way, but I could see his mother just fine, and how scared she looked when she spotted him.
“Seth!” she yelled. “You come back now!” She yelled it two or three times, then dropped her camera on the ground and just ran. That was all I needed to see, her dropping her expensive Nikon like a used cigarette pack. I was back down the ladder in about three jumps. Wonder I didn’t fall off and break my neck. Even more of a wonder Garin or his older boy didn’t, I suppose, but I never even thought about that at the time. Never thought about them at all, tell the truth.
The little boy was already climbing the slope to the opening of the old mine, which was only about twenty feet up from the pit-floor. I saw that and knew his mother wasn’t ever going to catch him before he got inside. Wasn’t anyone going to catch him before he got inside, if that was what he meant to do. My heart wanted to sink into my boots, but I didn’t let it. I got running as fast as I could, instead.
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.
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.
