4
I don’t know what I expected from the entrance to a mine.
A big dark hole in the ground, maybe. And indeed, there was a large hole in the side of a hill, but it looked more like the entrance to a train tunnel, assuming the train was about fifty feet wide.
It went back about fifty yards, turning into gray twilight inside, with mine cart tracks coming out, but it wasn’t the first thing you noticed about Hollow Elk Mine.
No, the first thing was all the buildings .
There were buildings everywhere, from windowless shacks to a three-story wooden structure directly in front of the mine, and an immense brick chimney at the top of the hillside, the stones blackened with soot.
The buildings were in various states of disrepair, ranging from “dilapidated” to “kindling.” The big one in front of the mine looked like a couple of barns stacked on top of one another, with sharply angled rooflines and staircases in odd places.
(I assume there were chutes or something involved, but I haven’t the least idea how coal is mined other than “pickaxe, dynamite, apply one or the other,” so don’t ask me to explain it.)
We threaded our way past the buildings and stepped into the shadow of the mine entrance.
It was a cool autumn day and I was already wearing a coat, but a chill prickled my skin anyway.
It felt like entering a cave, and while the sunlight fell bright and crisp behind us, the far wall of the entrance was smothered in shadows.
There was a small building tucked just under the overhang of the tunnel, off to one side, which had been spared the worst of the weathering.
It had two rooms and a large window empty of even the memory of glass, which made me suspect that it had been the foreman’s office.
Judging by the bedroll, the desk, and the scattered papers, it was where Oscar had set up his base of operations.
“There’s only one bed,” said Angus, frowning.
“Angus, you dog,” I said. “I’m flattered, but what will Miss Potter say?”
He rolled his eyes at me. “I mean that there were two people staying here, weren’t there?”
“Oscar and Roger,” Denton agreed. “I didn’t think of that when I was here before, but you’re right. Roger must have taken his gear and left Oscar’s.”
“A point in favor of murder?” asked Ingold.
I shrugged. “If I were trying to cover up a murder, I’d take both sets of gear with me, so that it looked like my victim simply left.”
Denton grimaced. “We don’t know that Roger left after the disappearance,” he said. “They may have had a falling out beforehand.”
“It’s also possible that Oscar was simply lost in the mine, and Roger waited for him until the supplies ran out, then left,” Ingold said. Denton’s face tightened, but he didn’t reply.
Angus had been poking around in the crates and straightened at this. “There’s still some tins of food left,” he said, holding up a can of peaches. “So he didn’t go through them all.”
“Perhaps Roger didn’t like peaches?” I offered. Angus gave me a look that indicated that this was not a constructive addition to the conversation.
Ingold rubbed his face. “Sadly, I think we don’t have enough information yet. We need to find this Roger fellow, if he’s still in the area; track down who sent the telegram, if we can; and of course ...” He waved his hand in the direction of the mine shaft.
I was not looking forward to that bit. Nevertheless, I followed everyone else out of the building and deeper into the hillside.
The gloom increased, the farther back we went. The shaft narrowed down to a line of cart tracks, then angled sharply downward. A jumble of rusted equipment lay off to one side. The shaft had been braced up with timbers as far down as I could see, which wasn’t very far at all.
It was very dark and very quiet.
“I suppose we should do this first,” said Denton, without much enthusiasm. “At least far enough to make sure that Oscar isn’t ... well ...” He flicked his fingers, which somehow managed to convey lying dead at the bottom without having to actually say it.
“Do we have lights?” I asked. There wasn’t much point in going down if we didn’t, and I could just see someone tripping over a discarded pickaxe and breaking their neck.
“The miner’s lamps are in the luggage with Kent,” said Ingold, “but there’s two lanterns back in the foreman’s office.”
He and Angus went to fetch them. I stood looking down into the dark, with Denton beside me.
It was eerie. No, that understates the case.
It was downright uncanny , in a way that had nothing to do with ghosts or monsters.
You could feel the weight of the stone pressing down overhead, uncounted tons of it, held up by what?
A few wooden pillars? Christ’s blood, what a ridiculous concept that was.
As if you could flip a mountain over and hold it suspended by a couple of trees planted on the summit.
Denton had said that what he felt reminded him of the Usher house. I couldn’t say that I felt anything like that. Mostly what I felt was an intense belief that humans were not meant to burrow into the earth like worms or moles.
“You didn’t go all the way down before?” I asked.
He shook his head, the motion almost invisible in the gloom.
“I called for Oscar a few times, but I didn’t dare go down on my own.
If there’s an unexpected drop-off, or if I slid and broke a leg .
..” He trailed off. Thankfully. I imagined lying in pitch blackness at the bottom of the shaft, leg broken, running out of water while the earth pressed down and down and down.
I reminded myself firmly that I was not claustrophobic.
“Dark,” I said, unnecessarily.
“Very,” Denton replied, equally unnecessarily.
As we stood gazing down, air began to trickle past us with a soft whooshing sound. I took a step back, startled, as the pressure increased. It was only a strong breeze, not difficult to stand against, but it was blowing from behind us, down into the shaft.
“What the devil ... ?”
The sound rose in pitch to a dull whistle, then the wind began to slacken and it died away.
“Changes in atmospheric pressure,” said Denton. “Cave systems breathe the same way. It’ll calm down in a bit.”
Breathing . That was exactly what it felt like, as if the mine was inhaling, dragging air down a steep stone throat. A throat that had already swallowed one man alive.
If I had been alone, I don’t mind telling you that I would have turned around, ridden back to the train station, and gone right back across the ocean to Paris.
There may well be mines in France but no one expects me to visit them.
I wasn’t alone though, and like many fools over the ages, I was determined not to be the one who broke first.
Even the name Hollow Elk was troubling. It sounded like an animal gutted and hollowed out, reduced to skin stretched over empty bones. I imagined an elk staggering down the hillside in the dark, hide hanging in tatters. In my mind it moved like the hares from Usher’s lake.
I shook my head to clear it. I never used to be this fanciful, or if I was, my fancies were mostly about wine, women, and occasionally, as a distant third, song. Not skinned deer with nothing inside them.
“Why Hollow Elk?” I asked Denton. “Where’d the name come from?”
“Probably from Elk Hollow,” he said. “Though around here it would be a holler , not a hollow. There’s a town called Banner Elk not far away, so presumably the name of the mine is a take on that.”
I liked the idea of a banner elk much better, a big sturdy ungulate with flags streaming from its antlers, prancing down the middle of the street during a parade. Why couldn’t Denton have inherited a mine like that instead?
Light splashing on the walls around us announced the return of Angus and Ingold, holding lanterns. “We shouldn’t go too far down,” Ingold said. “If there’s a buildup of gas, we don’t want to encounter it.”
“We’ll get loopy?” I asked.
“Our lamps will cause it to explode.”
“Oh. Lovely.”
Despite this warning, Ingold set off down the shaft without apparent concern. The remaining three of us looked at one another, looked after him, and then followed him into the dark.
The wooden walls of the shaft were dark and uneven, and when I brushed against one, my sleeve came away black with coal dust. The air wasn’t noticeably stale, but it wasn’t exactly a fresh spring breeze either.
Perhaps the mine’s breathing wasn’t enough to keep it circulating this far down.
Mostly it smelled cold and lifeless, as if all the green and growing things aboveground were very far away.
The shaft down was steep but not treacherous. I still wouldn’t have wanted to fall down it. We passed several abandoned mine carts and strategically placed wooden backstops, presumably to keep you from tripping and falling all the way to the bottom.
I paid very close attention to my feet because if I looked up, I’d see how low the ceiling was and how puny the timbers were that held up so many thousand weights of stone.
“Here,” said Denton, stopping. He held up a lantern and pointed. “That’s the first horizontal shaft.”
It looked like a black hole in the wall, framed by wooden pillars. We stepped into it one by one. The lantern light might have gone farther if the walls hadn’t been black as well.
The tunnel ran back a few dozen yards, then split into three branching tunnels. Denton lifted the lantern higher, and we could just make out where the first tunnel split again.
Bad enough the place is as black as Satan’s bowels and there’s a mountain on top of you, but it’s a maze as well. It’s a very good thing I’m not claustrophobic .
“So this damp of yours ...” I said to Ingold, looking around the shaft. “You said we won’t smell it. Could we be standing in it now?”
“Most likely we are,” said Ingold, with what I thought was entirely too much enthusiasm. “But not much of it. Wait here just a moment.” He walked forward, fingertips skimming the wall, then paused. “Does anyone have a lighter?”
I pulled mine out and handed it over. Ingold flicked it and a spark flashed, and then an eerie blue-white flame appeared on the wall itself, sliding and slithering over a section of stone. A moment later it winked out again.
“That was firedamp.”
Denton pursed his lips, looking fondly resigned rather than angry. “Could you have exploded the mine, just now?”
“Sure. But I didn’t think it was at all likely.
” Ingold flashed a boyish grin. “The mine’s breathing too much, and any firedamp here will rise through the ventilation shafts.
It’s farther down that we’ll really need to worry.
” He handed my lighter back. “I wouldn’t use that anywhere in the mine, though. Just in case.”
I shoved my hands into my pockets and told myself that Ingold wouldn’t have done that unless he was quite sure it was safe, and therefore my desire to throttle him was entirely unwarranted.
“Is there a map of the tunnels?” asked Angus.
“Not as such,” said Denton. “There’s an old excavation plan, but it wasn’t kept up to date. The third shaft that Oscar wrote about is listed as ‘future third shaft,’ for example.”
Angus made a grumbling noise that managed to indicate his displeasure with the previous ownership of the Hollow Elk Mine.
Denton turned back toward the main shaft. “There’s not much point in exploring without headlamps. We’ll have to make a map as we go along.”
“I’ll do the mapping,” volunteered Ingold. “As long as somebody else comes with me when I go. I don’t mind telling you that I wouldn’t want to be down here alone.”
There was an almost imperceptible shift in the air as all four of us relaxed a fraction. Someone had said it out loud.
“No, certainly not,” said Denton. “No one should go down in the mine alone. Basic safety precautions.”
My relief at that pronouncement was almost enough to get me back to the top of the shaft without the hair on my neck standing on end.
Almost. The mine’s breath hissed out, going past us this time, and I was very glad to see the glow of a fire lit outside and to hear Kent informing us that dinner was about to be served.