“Goldie. Ican’tgo in there,” he called after her, bending over and peering inside. “I suffer from claustrophobia. I keep my eyes closed half the time I’m in a confessional. Really! I’mnotkidding!”
She didn’t answer and kept walking, turning her light slowly to and fro to get a sense of where she was.
“Jiminy Cricket!” the priest said angrily, turning and running back toward the generator.
Goldie smiled to herself, hearing his departing footsteps. “Catholic guilt. It’s the best!”
She continued walking and moving her light around, surprised by the high, solid rock ceiling. The tunnel she was in went steadily downward at a twenty-degree angle, and the further she went, the less fresh the air became. She also noticed rails on shorter railroad ties for the push carts that carried ore paralleling her to the right.
“It’s like bein’ in the bat cave,” she observed. “Please let Robert Pattinson pop out from behind a rock.”
She came to an intersection of tunnels that went right and left. In very faded white paint on one rock wall was the number “4.” The tunnel going in the other direction was labeled “17.” As she studied the numbers, an endless string of interconnected single clear lightbulbs, each about three feet apart, and hanging on the left-hand side wall via a series of metal spikes, came fading up like someone had slowly turned on a rheostat. Obviously, Father Fitz had figured out how to turn on the generator.
“Let there be light,” she mused, thankfully.
Goldie didn’t know how many strings of lights had been interconnected, but she guessed there were dozens. The lights on the left-hand wall descended, going straight across the opening of other tunnels, almost as far as she could see. Then, they seemed to turn abruptly left, illuminating the entrance of another tunnel.
“Goldie?” she heard the muted voice of Father Fitz call. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah,” she yelled back, clicking off her flashlight. “I’m gonna follow the lights. See where they lead. I might be gone for a few minutes. So, if you don’t hear from me, don’t worry. Okay?”
“You shouldn’t be doing this!” Father called. “But, since youare,be careful!”
Usually, Goldie knew she would never be this brave. But her being in Sparkledove was anything but normal. She’d awakened in a different state, in a different time. She was watching the spirit of someone commit suicide daily, and no one else could see it. She’d heard people use the lyrics of songs that were decades away from being written. She figured she had inherited a set of circumstances and a mystery that she was supposed to solve. And since she was sure of this, she didn’t believe that dying in a mine was going to be her destiny. She didn’t consider herself brave so much as desperate for answers. She was further bolstered by the fact that a priest was waiting outside for her.
She went deeper and deeper, descending lower and lower into the mine. Passing tunnels on either side labeled “7,” “13,” “11,” and “2.” Some were large enough to accommodate a group of miners, while others were smaller and clearly just for push carts. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the numbering system.Maybe it refers to the order in which they were dug,she thought.Or maybe it had something to do with an overall mapping system.
She finally came to where the lights turned left into yet another tunnel that continued to go down. It was labeled “22.” At this point, she’d been steadily descending for nearly seven minutes, and the air was getting thinner. She slipped off her stocking cap and gloves, then stuck them into her pockets.
“I don’t know how much miners make,” she said, looking around. “But whatever it is—it ain’t enough.”
She continued into tunnel “22.” About a minute later, she noticed little trickles of water on the rock walls. Just a couple at first. Then, a few more, and a few more until there was a small puddle of brown water on the tunnel floor.
“Where’sthatcomin’ from?” she wondered out loud.
About a hundred yards further down, she came to a tunnel to her left labeled “12” where the lights were strung straight across its entrance. Some ten feet beyond that, she came to the first real thing that truly bothered her on this trek.
Straight ahead, she saw that the rock floor of tunnel “22” had partially collapsed. The tunnel was about nine feet wide, and approximately eight feet of the floor had fallen away, leaving only a foot or so of ledge to her left that continued for a distance of about eleven feet. More disturbingly, she didn’t know where the floor had fallen to.
“What the hell isthis?”she complained. “This ain’t no freakin’ Indiana Jones movie!”
She slowly approached the drop-off to the floor, got out her flashlight, clicked it on, and pointed it down. The beam of light stretched into only darkness.
“Oh, this isn’t good,” she decided.
She saw a small rock by her foot, picked it up, and tossed it into the abyss. After she did, she counted: “One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.” She finally heard the echoing “clack” of rock striking rock at “Seven Mississippi.”
“Oh, shit!”she sighed. “This isn’t good at all!”
Goldie thought about turning around and going back. But after having come all this way, she still didn’t have any idea where the lights led. And despite the collapsed floor, the lights were still leading on to somewhere. Meaning, somebody had gotten safely across and strung them. So, she stood there for nearly a minute, considering her options.
Studying the tunnel wall to her left, with the metal spikes holding the connected cords of lights, she took off her jacket to give her arms more movement, then stuck her flashlight into a front pants pocket. Moving to the left-hand side of the tunnel, she raised her foot and put it on a protruding piece of rock, then grabbed another protruding rock with her left hand. She began to scale the seven-foot-high tunnel wall, traveling sideways and carefully maneuvering herself around the string of hot lights. She figured if she fell, she still had that foot-wide ledge of floor to land on, although she didn’t know if that would give way as well. This side-stepping process was slow going, a strain on her muscles and balance, and caused her to stretch her arms and legs like a large, brown-haired spider. But finally, after ninety seconds and traveling a mere eleven feet, she hopped safely to the other side of the tunnel floor.
“Ha!”she cried, victorious as she landed. She turned and looked down at the blackness she had just traversed.
“Marco’s Fifth Avenue Gym and Climbing Wall, bitches!”she yelled.
She heard the echoing return of“bitches-bitches-bitches”from the emptiness below. Then turned toward the tunnel before her, leaned over, and rested a hand on each leg, trying to catch her breath, which was now becoming quite difficult to do. The air was very stale, and she could see from her cold breath that she was exhaling less oxygen.
