Tim scratched his head and shooed away mosquitoes and wondered how much farther he would have to walk. The mine should be impossible to miss, because for one thing the road didn’t lead anywhere else — it had been built specifically for use by the miners to get to work — and for another, the clearing where the old base of operations had been built had to be at least an acre in circumference, if the ancient map could be believed.
Tim wondered if he had been played for a fool by his friends. No one wanted to come out here because they all knew the mine didn’t even exist. It was either a figment of everyone’s imagination or, more likely, had been demolished by the government after being closed down. The map was a fake and the whole story had been concocted by his class to make him look silly.
But of course both possibilities were ridiculous. The mining disaster had been national news. Miss Henderson had shown the class old, yellowed, brittle copies of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, both papers splashing headlines about the disaster across the front page.
So it had definitely happened. And as far as the mine being demolished, even if that were the case, there would still have to be some kind of evidence the place had existed, even if the evidence was nothing more than a big empty clearing.
Tim sighed and took one last drink, then stowed his stuff in his pack and zipped it up. He shrugged it onto his back and stood. He decided he would walk another half hour or so and if he still came up empty, he would admit defeat and hike back home. It wasn’t like anybody knew he was coming out here, so no one would call him a quitter or give him a hard time about giving up. And even if he somehow found out, Jake Mallory couldn’t say much; he had refused to come!
Tim resumed hiking and five minutes later stopped in the middle of the forest, awestruck. He had found the old mine. And it was magnificent.
The clearing was filled with relatively new forest growth, just like the abandoned road leading to it. Field grass swayed in the warm breeze, thick and hardy in patches, thin and dying in others. A rusted chain-link fence encircled the area, topped with nasty-looking rolls of concertina wire, complete with a closed gate which had been padlocked for security. Tim’s heart sank. He had stuffed a few tools inside his backpack, but his mom’s boyfriend didn’t own a set of bolt cutters and Tim knew he wouldn’t have thought to bring them along in any event.
He approached the gate slowly and as he got closer, he realized the padlocked entrance would pose no problem because he wouldn’t be using it, anyway. Thirty or so feet into the woods to the left of the gate the fence listed severely, to the point where Tim guessed he could crawl right over it, barbed wire be damned. A tree had crashed down onto it during some long-ago storm, and the fence had suffered the worst of the confrontation.
Tim left the old road and walked along the fence line to the damaged portion. A closer inspection revealed accessing the old mine would be even easier than he had thought. An unknown adventurer who did own a pair of bolt cutters and who had remembered to bring them along had very thoughtfully snipped right through four feet of links immediately adjacent to the support pole on the left side of the damaged fence. Tim inspected the links and concluded the adventurer, whoever it was, had done his exploring a long time ago, because the slices in the metal were as rusted as the rest of the fence.
Tim didn’t care. He had hoped for access to the mine and now he had it. He dropped to his knees and forced the fence away from the metal support pole. The links were stiff and hard to move and when he touched them, rust flaked off in Tim’s hands. He placed his backpack on the ground and pushed it through the opening, then belly-crawled behind it.
And just like that he was in. He stood and brushed the dirt off his clothes and turned toward an ancient wood-frame building positioned roughly in the middle of the clearing. It was obvious that at one time this had been the mining company’s office. Decades of Pennsylvania weather had scoured the paint right off the siding and it now stood gray and forlorn, beaten-looking. The front of the building faced what had at one time probably been some kind of rudimentary parking lot and Tim wondered whether cars had even been invented nearly a hundred years ago, or if horses had stood tethered to poles outside the office like in the old black and white Western movies his dad used to like to watch before he pulled up stakes and moved on.
The most interesting part of the building, though, was the front door, because it hung awkwardly off its frame, inviting Tim to walk right through and explore the inside. He approached and examined the door as closely as possible without actually touching it, fearing the whole thing might just drop off its rusty hinges and fall on him. Jeez, stop being such a wuss, he told himself. You came all this way, and now you’re afraid to check the place out?
He took a deep breath and squeezed through the small opening, trying not to disturb the rotting wood, holding his breath until he had slipped safely past the entrance.
Inside the decrepit building was… nothing.
Tim wasn’t sure what he had expected to find — decomposed human bodies or caches of weapons or maybe a chest filled with priceless treasures — but whatever it was, this wasn’t it. Decades worth of dust and grime littered the floor of the open space, which had been cleared of everything but one lonely table in the far corner. It was as if there had been no room on the last moving truck to leave the doomed mining compound, so the owners just said the heck with it and left it where it stood. The office windows were so dirty a twilight-like gloom permeated the interior despite the fact it was barely past noon and outside the sun was beating down on central Pennsylvania through cloudless skies.
Well, this is a letdown, Tim thought, and hurried through the empty office toward a back door, which, against all odds, still seemed to fit snugly in its frame. It was unlocked. He turned the grubby handle and pushed and the door popped open after a moment’s hesitation, as if it had been closed for so long it couldn’t quite remember exactly what it was supposed to do.
Tim squinted and shielded his eyes against the blazing sun, which seemed even brighter now than it had been before after the murky dimness of the old office, despite the fact he had spent no more than two or three minutes inside. Finally he spotted what he had come for.
Across a small empty space Tim could see a gradual rise in the earth into which had been carved the entrance to the mining operation. It seemed somehow small and insignificant given the amount of attention it had received so many years ago. A semi-circular tunnel had been dug, barely higher than Tim’s five feet, four inches, and reinforced with a frame constructed of thick timbers.
Tim’s heart hammered excitedly in his chest. This was it! Unless there were other mine shaft entrances scattered throughout the area, this had to be what he was looking for. There was a problem, though. When they shut down the old mine almost ninety years ago, the authorities had sealed the shaft entrance with a thick slab of concrete. It was enormous, big enough to close off the entire entryway, and had been secured in place with heavy iron bolts, rendering it impassable.
But as was the case with the exterior of the office building and the fence encircling the compound, the passage of time and nearly a century of Pennsylvania weather had taken its toll on the patch job. A network of cracks criss-crossed the concrete slab, some of them close to half an inch thick, Tim guessed. The iron bolts had suffered from the passage of time, as well. They had been heavily corroded by rust, and Tim knew there was no way they would ever turn as they once had.