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 pi?ata. 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 Debo?n 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 Debo?n 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…”