The Abandoned Mine Mystery Read online

  Then they reached a room, and could tell that this had once been the scene of major diggings. Walls of black, with doors through some of them, still remained, and they seemed to be walking on pure coal.

  “Too bad they had to leave all this coal behind them,” Nelson commented. “I suppose safety required it, but strip mining would have got it all.”

  “Maybe strip-mining machinery came along too late, and the mine was too exhausted by then to make it pay. And I imagine there are limits to how deep you would care to go with strip mining.”

  “I wonder how many levels there are below this one? Are we down to the bottom of the hill yet, Ted?”

  “I don’t think so, but we’re pretty deep. You’re probably right about other levels. Notice how level this floor is. I suppose it was done that way on purpose, so there’d be no difficulty calculating the distance between the floor here and the ceiling below.”

  “And I hope somebody calculated it just right. This time I’m on the side of mathematics.”

  One room led directly on to another, and each room had numerous doors. They supposed it was handy to have several routes for taking out the coal, as well as a safety precaution. They couldn’t tell whether there was any way to get outside other than by the long path they had come. There was no sign of such an entrance.

  “Holy smokes, Ted! I nearly made a bad mistake. Where there are several doors, I have to mark not only the door we go out of, but the one that brought us in. If I didn’t, we might return to this room, and wouldn’t know which one to take.”

  “We’ve got my maps, Nel.”

  “Sure, but I like to be doubly safe. It’s a good thing I thought of that. I hope I haven’t slipped up.”

  They passed through six, seven, eight rooms, before Ted suddenly called a halt. “Do you know where we are, Nel?”

  “No, should I?”

  “This is the same room we were in about fifteen minutes ago, according to my map. We’ve come right around in a circle.”

  Nelson found some of his own marks on one of the doors on the opposite side of the room. They were glad to see that Ted’s maps had proved accurate.

  “Should we try one of these other doors, Ted?”

  “I’m afraid it all seems to be pretty much of the same thing. Just one room after another, all interconnected. Let’s go back a way, and see if we can’t find something different.”

  They did, and taking a little side room they had bypassed before, they found a door opposite that led into another long, descending tunnel. There were no side paths, and by the time they reached the bottom, they knew they had found a new level. They felt a little cooler and damper than they had before, and wondered if perhaps they were reaching the level of the river itself.

  “Wouldn’t water seep in if we did, Nel?”

  “Not necessarily. We build tunnels beneath rivers, and they don’t leak. I imagine nature could do the same thing. The rock might be water-tight, at least in certain layers. But maybe there is some seepage, for Mr. Winslow mentioned pumps.”

  This level seemed to be almost a duplicate of the one above, as though it had been planned by the same engineer. They investigated a few of the rooms—all of them apparently mined out many years ago—without discovering anything new enough to interest them. They still had found no way to reach the outside world, other than the long, roundabout route they had come.

  Understanding the layout of the mine a little better now, they had no trouble finding another corridor that led them down to a still lower level.

  “Holy Moses, Ted, how many more of these levels are there?”

  “I don’t know, but let’s make this the last one for us. After we’ve looked around here, we’ll go back up.”

  The tunnel led into a few rooms that had been mined out and seemed to lead nowhere. These rooms were less extensive than the ones above. Another corridor led away from them, level this time rather than descending, and seemed to lead to another section of the mine.

  “Let’s follow this for a while, Nel, but if we find it going down, we quit and go back.”

  “You bet,” Nelson agreed emphatically. “We must have covered about three miles altogether, and it’s probably nearly a mile back to the surface, even by the most direct route we know of. No wonder the miners want portal-to-portal pay, when they have to go so far to their work.”

  Some distance down the corridor they encountered something that surprised them. There was a large wooden door that, when closed, would have blocked the tunnel efficiently and completely. Was it a fire door? If so, surely it would have been made out of something more resistant than wood. A sign painted on it in large warning letters read:

  DANGER

  THIS DOOR MUST BE KEPT CLOSED ALWAYS

  And yet the door was standing wide open.

  “What do you make of that, Ted? Should we close the door? At least I’m glad to see there isn’t any lock on it. That means it isn’t intended to block off anyone’s retreat.”

  “That’s probably exactly why they don’t have a lock on it. I have an idea what it is, though. It’s an air door. The door is kept closed so that when the air-conditioning equipment is turned on, the airflow won’t find a short circuit this way, when it’s intended to flush out a more roundabout section. I suppose there are many of these doors down below, where the mine was worked more recently. By opening and closing them in different combinations, they can air out any portion of the mine that they want to.”

  “Do we close it, then?”

  “No, it was probably opened by a maintenance man, and he must know what he is doing. After all, if a door was really meant never to be opened, there wouldn’t be any point in having a door.”

  They went on through the open doorway, the corridor continuing to twist about. They passed some side tunnels, but decided to ignore these. They were looking for more signs of coal mining, trying to reach the section where the big mining had been going on before the closing.

  Presently the corridor divided into two lanes. Which way to go, or should they go at all? They were pretty tired, and it was getting on toward evening, if that meant anything in a coal mine.

  “We’ll make this the last one, positively,” Ted decided, and Nelson agreed. “As soon as we come to a room, or another branch, that’s it. This map is beginning to look like a maze, and I don’t want to complicate it too much.”

  Which one to try? Ted suggested the left one, while Nelson suggested the right at almost the same instant. They were too tired to disagree with each other. Ted, who was standing on the left, turned to the right, at precisely the same moment that Nelson turned to the left. They collided, and both dropped their flashlights, which were immediately extinguished.

  Complete silence reigned in the darkness for a few moments. Then each one started to speak at the same moment, not quite willing to admit the desperation of their predicament:

  “What . . . what happened?”

  CHAPTER 13.

  THE SOUND OF HEAVENLY MUSIC

  THEY quickly realized they must size up their situation carefully and rationally. This was hard to do, for they had never experienced such intense darkness before. Their eyes rebelled at it, and for a few minutes lights flashed just as though the tunnel were full of flickering beams, dancing about at random, elusive, teasing to be caught. Then this stopped.

  “Don’t move, Ted, not even a step,” Nelson warned him. “The first thing to do is to retrieve our flashlights. Maybe all that happened is that the bulbs are broken, and we can replace them.”

  But they both heard the flashlights hit the hard ground with a solid crash, and knew that it didn’t take much of a jolt to disconnect the circuit on a flashlight. They stooped down and began to feel along the ground. Ted soon recovered one of them, but the other had rolled a few feet away. Nelson had to feel a short distance in several directions before he finally regained it.

  “Ouch!” he exclaimed. “Cut myself.”

  “Very badly?”

  “I d
on’t know. Turn on the lights and I’ll see.” But his cut was evidently nothing to worry about, in view of their far greater troubles. “Now, Ted, let’s sit down on the ground facing each other, with our legs touching, and we’ll put all the parts between our legs so we can’t lose them. Just hold on to your flashlight for a minute, and I’ll see what I can do with mine. The glass is broken, of course, but I’m screwing off the top so I can change bulbs without cutting myself. All right. Now I’ll take out the old bulb. It’s broken, too.”

  “Don’t cut yourself.”

  “I’m using a handkerchief on it. It’s hard, but now it’s coming. There. I’ve got a fresh bulb out of my pocket now, and I’m screwing it in. No, it still doesn’t light.” He tried not to sound disappointed. “All right, Ted, we’ll try the same thing with your flashlight. Want me to do it?”

  “No, I’ll try it myself.” Ted repeated the same operation, with the same result. “Mine isn’t going to work either. What more can we do about it, Nel? Is there any way to fix the flashlights?”

  “I don’t know yet. Sometimes if you just bang them around a little, you can get them going again. We’ll have plenty of time to try that later, if nothing else works. Do you think putting in fresh batteries might help any, Ted?”

  “I never knew that batteries could get broken from a short drop like that, but let’s try it anyway.” They did, but with no success.

  “All right, then, Ted, we’ll have to see what else we can think of. We don’t have any matches, or any way of starting a fire—which may be just as well. What do we have? We’ve got plenty of batteries and bulbs. Actually, you don’t even need a flashlight case. You just put a bulb on top of a battery or two, and then you connect the bulb to the bottom of a battery with a little piece of wire, and you’re in business. What have you got in your pockets, Ted? You must have a paper clip. You always carry paper clips with you.”

  “No, when I took these clothes to the laundry I cleaned out the pockets. I don’t have a clip.”

  “You’re sure about that, Ted? This might be awfully important.”

  “No, no clip—but I’ll never be without one again.”

  “All right, no clip. Now tell me everything you do have.”

  “I’ve got my notebook—”

  “Metal rings?”

  “No, this is my stitched one. And I have two pencils.”

  “Metal?”

  “No, one is a wooden pencil, and the other one is made out of plastic. Not even a metal clip on it.”

  “But there might be a metal spiral inside.”

  “I don’t know about that. If there is, we might have a devil of a time getting it out.”

  “Go on. What other metal have you got?”

  “My wallet, with a metal snap on it. A belt buckle. How about the zipper on my jacket?”

  “That won’t do. There are gaps between the teeth. What else?”

  “Some pocket change. Silver is a good conductor of electricity, if we could only assemble a string on a piece of tape, but we can’t. There’s my wristwatch, but the band is leather, the tips of my shoe laces, and maybe a couple of silver fillings in my teeth, and that’s all the metal I’ve got on me.”

  “Let’s see if I can do any better. I’ve got just about the same inventory, plus the chalk and extra batteries and bulbs I’m carrying. If worse comes to worst, we might be able to smash up one of the flashlight cases, in the hope of getting out a piece of metal that we could use. But we won’t do that unless we’re completely desperate. It’s too much like burning your bridges behind you. Right now let’s try banging the flashlights on the ground a little. How do you rate our chances of getting found, Ted?”

  “Well, this mine isn’t exactly uninhabited. There are maintenance men around, there are the pirates, there is a ghost, in case he comes back. But it’s an awfully big place, too. We might be in an abandoned part of it that doesn’t get visited every week, or even every month. There’s no telling how long it would be before someone stumbled across us. But what about someone coming in search of us, Nel?”

  “Our car might be sitting out there anywhere from three days to a week before someone reports it to the police or they spot it themselves. Then they’re likely to tow it in, and might or might not notify our families while they waited for us to turn up. It could be another week before anything was done.”

  “Wouldn’t they connect an abandoned car with the mine, long before that?”

  “I don’t know how long you mean, Ted. Especially with the coal pirates around, they might not be particularly anxious to see too much. The point is, we don’t know how long it’ll be, but we can’t count on having that much time. Who else besides the police? The motel keeper? I don’t think he would give us a thought, as long as our rent’s paid up in advance. When that time is up, he might be satisfied to hold our luggage for a while, and my camera’s worth good money. What about Mr. Dobson?”

  “He doesn’t expect to hear from me every day. If he thought I was particularly busy winding up on a story, it might be a week before he began to worry seriously about us. Probably the same thing goes with our families. They know we’re working, and that satisfies them.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to be able to coax this flashlight back into operation, but let’s trade, just for luck. Who else might find us?”

  “At least we’ve got those marks on the walls you made working for us. Just in case someone did come looking for us, there shouldn’t be too much of a problem about it.”

  “I hope you’re right, Ted, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that maybe I made a mistake someplace. It wouldn’t be too important to us, because we had your map and our memories to help us. But it would only take a small error to throw the whole thing off for someone looking for us.”

  “I guess it adds up to the fact that there’s a chance someone might find us, but we can’t count on it. So we’d better consider our chances for finding our own way out. That offers two possibilities: to go forward, or to go backward.”

  “Which looks better to you, Ted?”

  “Going back has certain advantages. We’ve been there before, and have at least an idea about things. And we’re staying within the area where we’ve made our markings, so that we’d have a better chance of being found by someone looking for us. But when I remember all the places to make a wrong turn, and know that only one mistake would be too many, I just can’t see how we’ll make it.

  “Going ahead looks attractive because for all we know there might be an entrance to the mine just a short way ahead of us. Or we might get into a part of the mine where someone was working. Even coal pirates would look pretty good to me now!

  “But I suppose our chances of finding another entrance are really pretty small. We’re down deep here. I don’t know whether we’re below the level of the river or not, but at least we know we have a big hill sitting on top of us. There might be open pits or stale or contaminated air ahead of us. And I’m not sure we could mark our trail so that anyone following us could stay with us. That’s how I size it up. What would be your vote?”

  “The same as yours, Ted. If we try to find our own way out, I guess it would be better to go back. Then the question is, how long do we wait here before we make our move?”

  “It can’t be too long. It’s a long way back to the surface, and we have to make it while we still have enough energy and before we get knocked out by thirst. That gives us maybe three days to do it in, and we may need every minute of it. How long do you think we should fool with the flashlights, Nel?”

  “Let’s see, at least we can tell time with these illuminated dials. Suppose you give me two hours to see if I can rig up something. If I can’t do it by then, we’ll give it up and start hunting for our way back. I suppose we could walk along side by side, with you feeling along one wall while I felt along the other. We could take note of every turnoff, and reach a decision about it. But distances are awfully deceptive in the dark.”

  Nelson set to wo
rk with the flashlights, but just what he was trying to do Ted did not know. Except to hand Nelson something that he asked for from time to time, Ted took no part in the operation, trusting more in Nelson’s mechanical abilities than in his own. All he was sure of was that Nelson had not yet pounded one of the flashlights apart.

  Occasionally they heard a noise—probably, they decided, the groaning or creaking of the supports as the temperature changed, and a few times they heard pebbles fall. This could be a natural thing, or there might be rats or other small animals scurrying about in the darkness.

  “Listen!” said Ted suddenly.

  Nelson did, for at least half a minute. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “No, I don’t either now. Wait . . . there it goes again. Hear it?”

  “Yes. What is it? It sounds a little bit like music. What could it be?”

  “Heavenly music, the sweetest music ever heard,” said Ted, his voice more optimistic than it had been since the lights went out. “That’s a bell . . . a tinkling bell . . . it sounds like Alice’s bell!”

  “Alice! Say, Ted, I believe you’re right. Is she coming this way?”

  “I—I think so. Listen, Nel, grab up everything and stick it in your pockets. We may need it later. Got everything?”

  “Yes, I guess so. She’s still coming, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, but in her own good time.”

  The boys stood up. They found that it was not easy to keep their balance in the dark, and even small obstacles, as they took a few steps, threw them off stride.

  “How’ll we handle Alice, Ted? We’ve got to be careful not to spook her off. But she knows us already, so that might not be too bad.”

  “Don’t touch her, whatever you do, Nel.”

  “Why’s that, Ted?”

  “Because the minute you touch her she’ll think you’re trying to guide her, and it becomes a case of the blind leading the blind. We’ve got to be careful that she goes exactly where she wants to go.”

  “She must be almost here. Let’s keep talking, Ted, so our voices don’t suddenly startle her.”

  They did so, and though Alice must have heard them now, it did not seem to frighten her or cause her to change either her pace or her course. She was very close now. They thought they could even hear her breathing. They pulled back against the wall, so that Alice would pass them, and then they could follow her. To their great surprise, Alice did not pass them, but turned the Y and headed down the other corridor.