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By Root 481 0

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