The portal of sky above had diminished to less than the size of a penny, and her breath came fast now as she imagined some skulking woodsperson coming upon the telltale scatter of their clothing and finding a boulder to roll over their tomb. She paused and lowered her head to her chest, forced herself to chase the thought from her mind, but there was nowhere for it to go; like a bat, it fled but returned. She felt chilled, and she was seized with the sudden impulse to pee, but held it in.
Fifty feet farther down—moving as slow as a sloth, now—she imagined that they were using up all the air, and another twenty-five feet after that, she imagined that although Russell had been a nice enough young man, a gentleman, on the earth above, the descent and the pressures and swells of the earth would metamorphose him into something awful and raging—that he might at any second seize her ankle and begin eating her raw flesh, gnawing at her from below.
A trickle of urine escaped. She stopped again, clamped down, hoped that he would not distinguish it from the spring water. Despite the coolness, she was sweating, muddy and gritty now.
There came a grunting sound from below her, piglike in nature, and her heart leapt in terror, certain that the transformation had begun.
“Oh, man,” Russell said, “I wish I hadn’t eaten so much.”
“Are you stuck?”
“No, I’ve just got to go.”
“Can you wait?”
“Yeah.”
“How much farther do you think?”
“Any minute. Any time now,” he said.
The penny of light above had disappeared completely.
A little later, a little deeper into the hole, she heard Russell cry out in what sounded initially like fear.
“What is it?”
He was right below her, thrashing and bumping, so that at first she thought he was falling.
“What is it?” she asked again. She felt him climbing up below her, his hands and head up around her ankles, and she scooted up quickly, bumping her knees against the wall.
“Oh Christ,” he said. “It was a shitload of bones down there. A wad of bones. Something must have fallen down the hole and gotten stuck there where it narrows. God,” he said, “I was all tangled up in them.”
Sissy was quiet for a long while. “What do you think they are?” she said. “Do you think they’re human?”
“I guess I should find out,” Russell said. He descended from her ankles back into silence. A few seconds later, she heard the sticklike clattering of bones as he kicked his way through the nest of them: the brittle snapping of ribs and femurs. God, she thought, I will go to church every Sunday for the rest of my life, I will become a nun, I will...
Russell groped around for the different pieces he could reach. “I heard them land,” he said. “We’re almost to the bottom.”
Thank you, Jesus, Sissy thought, not caring now if they were the pope’s bones.
“Careful,” Russell said, “they’ll scratch you some, coming down through them.”
“What are they?”
“I don’t know,” Russell said, and then a moment later, “Okay, I’m on the bottom.”
After the constriction of the adit, the space around her was divine: open air all around her, and a set of railroad tracks beneath her feet, tunneling laterally through the coal.
She hunkered down and peed. There was too much space in the total blackness; she felt that if they ventured left or right of the adit, with its lightless surface high above, they would never find it again, but Russell said that they would be able to feel the ladder rungs hammered into the wall and would know also where they were by the tangles of bones beneath it.
“What kind are they?” she asked. She had moved nearer to Russell and reached out to touch his shoulder, and kept her hand there, as would a tired swimmer far out in the ocean who found, strangely, one rock fixed and protruding above the waves. Even that close, she could see nothing of him, though she could feel the heat from the mass of his body.
He crouched and began sifting through the bones, sorting them by feel, nearly all of them long and slender, until he found the skull, which he groped in the darkness: felt the ridges above the eyes, the molars, the eye sockets themselves.
“Deer,” he said, and handed her the skull. He could not see where she was, and accidentally pressed the skull into her belly.
She took the skull from him and examined it. The relief that it was not a human seemed to her to give them a freedom, a second chance at something.
“All right,” she said, “I guess we can walk a little ways.” She reached for, and found, his hand.
“Wait here a second,” he said. “I’ve really got to go.”
He left her standing there and walked down the tracks. He was gone a long time. Sissy sat down and wrapped her arms around her knees and waited. She kept her back to the wall. She kept listening for Russell but could hear nothing. She wondered if he had come to some junction in the tracks and had taken a turn and gotten lost.
She had the adit directly above her, or very near her. She could feel the slight upwelling of breeze, still rising as if to a chimney, though she supposed that at nighttime as the air cooled it would begin to sink back down the adit, falling with an accelerated force that might be exhilarating, deafening.
She called out his name but got no answer. He was too shy. It was possible he would walk a mile, maybe farther, before depositing his spoor, to keep from offending her.
If he got lost, all she had to do was stand up, take hold of the rungs in the darkness, and begin climbing back up.
She called his name again. Not only was there no answer, but there
