He made up his mind. That was what he would do. He stretched his left hand out as far as he could, camera turned toward his body, hoping he could get a wide enough angle so the picture would show that half his body was inside the mine shaft everyone was so afraid of.
Then he froze.
Something was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on what it might be, but something was definitely not right.
Then Tim realized what it was: Total silence had fallen over the old mine. The site was one hundred percent quiet. Tim knew there was always ambient noise, even in the middle of nowhere: Birds chirping, rodents rustling the grass, animals moving through the woods.
But now there was nothing. Even the light breeze had abruptly died down. The phrase deathly silence flashed into Tim’s head and he suddenly understood its meaning. The formerly bright sunshine now seemed muted and dim and the only sound Tim could hear was the blood rushing through his ears, loud as a waterfall, and all at once he recognized exactly how alone he was out here, miles from anywhere, and that he had told no one of his plans.
No one knew he was out here.
No one knew where he was.
And something touched his ankle.
Tim screamed even though no one could hear him and he instinctively jerked his leg toward his body, away from whatever awful thing had touched him. He pulled his leg up and tried to propel himself away from the broken concrete slab and out of the mine shaft, but his left foot was barely touching the ground and it slipped on the weed-strewn dirt.
And then he felt it again, except this time the thing — it was thin and ropy and felt slithery and throbbing and somehow alive, all at the same time — wrapped itself around his ankle in an instant. Tightly.
Tim screamed again and tried to regain his footing, but the thing began pulling him, and it was powerful, it was unbelievably powerful, and it pulled on his ankle and Tim felt himself being dragged steadily over the slab. Into the tunnel.
He scraped his shoulder on the top of the wooden beam which until just a few minutes ago had held the concrete seal over the mineshaft. He didn’t notice.
He scraped his head against the beam as the thing continued pulling, reeling him in like a fish on a line, and he didn’t notice that, either.
He felt blood trickle down his neck from the scrape on his head and didn’t care.
Then he disappeared into the mine, the blackness so complete it was like floating into outer space, still screaming for all he was worth.
But it didn’t matter. Because he was all alone.
3
Julie McKenna stood in her son’s bedroom doorway, puzzled. Tim’s bed covers had been thrown back haphazardly, as if he had gotten up in a hurry, and Tim was nowhere to be found. She had come immediately to his room to check on him upon her arrival home from work, and after discovering he wasn’t there, she had searched the entire house — it was easy, being just a five room ranch — ending up right back here in a matter of minutes.
An ill-defined feeling of unease took root in the pit of her stomach. Tim was not the type of kid to take off without asking permission, even when he wasn’t sick with the flu, and this morning he had been burning up. His fever had been so high, in fact, that Julie had momentarily considered taking her son straight to the emergency room. He had been that sick.
Or had he?
She thought back to her son’s strange behavior, how he had seemed nervous and jumpy, completely unlike his usual cheerful self. She had chalked it up to the illness, but now she was not so sure.
The disappearing thermometer.
The sudden onset of illness after seeming completely normal all day yesterday.
His extreme reaction to her suggestion on the phone that perhaps she would come home from work early. She had expected him to be excited and happy and he had practically bitten her head off.
Tim wouldn’t be the first kid to skip a day of school by faking illness — Julie had done it herself a few times, now that she thought about it — but it would be so out of character for her son, who was always so conscientious, she was having a hard time believing that might be what he had done. He was growing up, though, and he had changed since the move here to Tonopah last year. It hadn’t been an easy transition for him, first losing his dad and then moving away from the only home he had ever known, in Harrisburg. Maybe the sudden “illness” was actually Timmy’s way of acting out.
Julie turned away from her son’s bedroom door and padded down the short hallway to the phone in the kitchen. She would call around to his friends’ homes — it wouldn’t take long, he only had a couple — and read him the riot act when she finally found him.
The uneasy feeling in her stomach grew a little. She knew she should be angry, but there didn’t seem to be any room for anger in her body. The fear was taking up too much space.
Julie couldn’t stop pacing. Back and forth, one end of the tiny kitchen to the other: Circle to the left in front of the kitchen table then back across the well-worn vinyl tiles to the oven, circle to the left again and start over.
Timmy was missing. He had now been gone nearly twenty-four hours. None of his friends would cop to knowing where he was, and all of them had had their feet held to the fire by their parents when they heard the panic in Julie’s voice. They claimed they didn’t know his whereabouts and she believed them. One thing she did know was that he hadn’t gotten dressed and gone to school after she left for work yesterday, not that she really believed he would have. None of his friends had seen him all day.
“Honey, you need to relax,” Matt said, and she ignored him.
He tried again. “Tim’s probably off smoking cigarettes or something, trying to be a rebel. He’s a kid, remember?”
She stopped pacing abruptly. “I think I know my son,” she said curtly and immediately regretted it. Matt was just trying to help. “I’m sorry,” she said with a weak smile, and started walking again. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Her boyfriend held up his hand in surrender. “You don’t have to apologize, I know how upset you are. And I’m not trying to say I know him as well as you do. The cops are looking for him and by now so is pretty much everyone in town. Someone will find him. He’ll show up. Let’s not panic.”
The telephone rang and Julie sprinted across the floor, reaching the receiver before Matt could even move. She put her hand on it and then pulled back as if she had been burned. “You get it,” she said. “I’m too nervous to talk to anyone.”
She continued pacing, chewing her fingernails as Matt answered the call. She tried to pay attention to his end of the conversation but couldn’t seem to concentrate. Where are you, baby?
Finally her boyfriend replaced the receiver and turned to look at her. His face seemed to have paled a bit. “That was the police. They talked to all of his friends again and one of them mentioned some crazy idea Tim had talked about.”
He hesitated and Julie wanted to scream. “Well? What was it?”
“Apparently he tried to talk his buddies into skipping school and exploring the site of the old Tonopah Mine, the one that was closed down back in the 1920’s after a miner disappeared following an underground explosion and fire.”
Julie’s legs turned to jelly and refused to support the weight of her body any longer. Her eyes filled with tears and she crumpled to the floor. She thought she might throw up, even though she hadn’t had anything to eat since yesterday at lunchtime. Before Timmy had gone missing. “Are you saying my baby is lost in a mine?”