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.
“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.”