The Regulators (38 page)

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. Farther 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 top shaft 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, “l 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 rockface—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 we re 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 I 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.”

Once we actually had the boy, that groaning in the ground seemed louder than ever. I fancied I could even hear the timbers creaking. I'm not usually an imaginative sort, but it sounded to me like they
were trying to talk. Telling us to get out while we still could.

I couldn't resist shining my light into that crack once before we went, though. when I bent down I could feel air rushing out, so it wasn't just a crack in the slide; there was some sort of rift on the other side of it. Maybe a cave. The air coming out was as hot as air coming out of a furnace grate, and it stank something fierce. One whiff and I held my breath so I wouldn't vomit. It was the old-campfire smell, but a thousand times heavier. I've racked my brains trying to think of how something that deep underground could smell so bad, and keep coming up empty. Fresh air is the only thing that makes things stink like that, and that means some sort of vent, but Deep Earth has been burrowing in these parts ever since 1957, and if there had been a vent big enough to manufacture a stench like that, surely it would've been found and either plugged or followed to see where it went.

The crack looked like a zigzag S or a lightning-bolt, and there didn't seem like there was anything much in it
to
. see, just a thickness of rock—at least two feet, maybe three. But I did get the sense of space opening out on the other side, and there was that hot air whooshing out, too. I thought I
maybe saw a bunch of red specks like embers dancing in there, but that must have been my imagination, because when I blinked, they were gone.

I turned back to Garin and told him to move.

“In a second, just give me a second,” he says. He'd taken the boy's little black cowboy boot out of his shirt and was sliding it on his foot. It was the tenderest thing. All you'd ever need to know about a father's love was in the way he did that. “Okay,” he says when he had it right. “Let's go.”

“Right,” I says. “Just try to keep your footing.”

We went as quick as we could, but it still seemed to take forever. In the dreams I mentioned, I always see the little circle of my Penlite sliding over skulls. There weren't that many that I saw when we were actually in there, and some of those had fallen apart, but in my dreams it seems like there are thousands, wall-to-wall skulls sticking up round like eggs in a carton, and they are all grinning just like the little one was grinning when his Dad picked him up, and in their eyesockets I see little red flecks dancing around, like embers rising from a wildfire.

It was a pretty awful walk, all in all.
I kept looking ahead for daylight, and for the longest time I didn't see it. Then, when I finally did (just a little tiny square I could have covered with the ball of my thumb at first), it seemed like the sound of the hornfels was louder than ever, and I made up my mind that the shaft was going to wait until we were almost out, then fall on us like a hand swatting flies. As if a hole in the ground could think! But when you're actually in a spot like that, your imagination is apt to go haywire. Sound carries funny; ideas do, too.

And I might as well say that I still have a few funny ideas about Rattlesnake Number One. I'm not going to say it was haunted, not even in a “backstage report” no one may ever read, but I'm not going to say it wasn't, either. After all, what place would be more likely to have ghosts than a mine full of dead men? But as to the other side of that slide of rock, if I actually
did
see something there—those dancing red lights—it wasn't ghosts.