John Hart - The Last Child

Hunt turned onto a narrow state road and crossed a single-lane bridge that spanned a small creek. Deeper into the forest, the sky diminished to a narrow strip. It was almost five. The sun would be down by eight.

“Almost there,” he said.

Katherine squeezed her son.

They passed a dilapidated sign that read: RAVEN COUNTY MINES HISTORICAL SITE, TWO MILES . Someone had spray-painted the word “Closed” in white paint across the front of the sign. Bullet holes pocked the surface.

The road crossed another small bridge, then turned to dirt. On the right, a battered trailer sat on blocks under the trees. It was a single-wide, old, with a beater truck parked at the front door. A propane tank was hooked onto the front of the trailer. Lawn chairs sat on a flat place by the creek. A youngish man leaned on the tailgate of the truck. In his twenties, unshaven, he was thin and burned by the sun. He held a can of beer in one hand; the bed of the truck was full of empties. Johnny raised a hand as they passed and the man raised his, too, squint-eyed but friendly. A young woman stepped onto the porch behind him. She was mean-faced and fat. Johnny raised his hand again, but she ignored it and stared after them until a bend in the road plucked her back into the woods.

“Some people don’t like strangers,” Hunt said. “And few people make it out this far. Don’t worry about it.”

A mile later, they hit the abandoned parking area. Weeds pushed through the gravel. There was a large map under a covered area and Johnny started toward it. “I know where the shaft is,” Hunt said. “The main trail goes right to it.”

They walked for ten minutes, slowly, then passed a series of warning signs before the ground simply opened up. The shaft was twelve feet across. Abandoned track stretched away into the woods. The rails were narrow gauge and rusted, overgrown. They settled on rotting ties that still smelled of creosote and oil.

Johnny edged closer to the shaft. Sections of earth had collapsed at the rim. The ground was gravelly and loose underfoot.

“Don’t.”

He looked at his mother, leaned out. The air that struck his face was cool and damp. He saw the rock sides drop away into blackness. “We came here in school,” he said. “There were ropes, then. To keep the kids back.”

The posts were still there, set into concrete; but the ropes were gone, either stolen or rotted. He remembered the day. Overcast. Cool. Teachers made the kids hold hands and none of the girls wanted to be stuck holding Jack’s. Johnny could see it. Kids leaning over the safety rope, waiting for the teacher to turn away, then tossing rocks in the pit.

Jack had been standing over there.

“Johnny.” Her voice had an edge. She was wrapped into herself, worried.

Johnny stepped back and let his gaze wander to the place that Jack had stood, dejected. It was near the wood’s edge, away from the other kids. He’d had his back to the class and he’d been staring at a small square of rusted iron secured with rivets to a slab of naked rock. Jack had been staring at the sign, pretending not to cry.

Hunt edged closer to the edge of the shaft and Johnny walked to the sign. It was original and dated back to the time the mine had been in operation. Letters were beaten into the metal. Jack had been tracing them with one of his small fingers. Johnny remembered how the finger had come back stained red with rust.

“I see pitons.” Hunt leaned out, and Johnny realized that he’d seen them, too: thirty feet down, metal still bright from the hammer blows. But the knowledge was distant, like Hunt’s voice.

Johnny stared at the sign. He saw letters scored into the metal, rust, Jack’s stunted finger, stained at the tip. He felt wind at his back. Hunt was on the phone.

“This is it,” Johnny said, but no one heard him.

He stared at the sign and reached out a finger of his own. The letters marked the sign. The sign marked the shaft.

“She’s here.”

The name of the shaft was abbreviated, and Johnny traced the letters.

No. Croz.

His finger came back red.

No crows.

Hunt called in favors and kept it quiet. In less than an hour he had two off-duty firefighters in personal vehicles loaded with gear. Trenton Moore, too, rolled personal. Hunt hiked back to the lot and used bolt cutters from his trunk to cut the cable that blocked the trail. The first firefighter drove a dark blue Dodge Ram. He forced it up the trail, branches screeching on paint, then turned the truck around and backed almost to the lip of the shaft. The second one drove a Jeep. They were unloading rope when the medical examiner parked and got out of a station wagon lean enough to save its paint. Hunt looked at Katherine to see what effect the medical examiner’s presence had on her, but she was beyond worry. She watched the big firefighters strap on web harnesses and snake thick coils of rope over the lip of the shaft. Then she sat down beside her son.

Hunt huddled with the firefighters next to the shaft. They were young men, and strong; but light was dying fast. “Down and out,” Hunt said. “We don’t know what this is, so no bullshit heroics.”

The older firefighter was in his thirties. He clipped a final carabiner onto his harness. He wore a headlamp and carried a second light clipped to the harness. Their ropes were hitched to the back of the Dodge. He leaned on both to make sure they were secure. “A walk in the park, Detective.”

“Shaft is seven hundred feet.”

“Got it.”

“Flooded at the bottom.”

The fireman nodded. “A stroll.”

Hunt stepped back, and then they were over, into the shaft. They called out to each other as they dropped, voices fading to hints, then gone. Hunt leaned out and watched the lights drop away. They lit the shaft in narrow arcs that constricted as the shaft swallowed them.

Hunt looked at Johnny. He was rocking where he sat. His eyes were glazed and his mother was crying. He watched them as the rope played out.

It didn’t take long.

Hunt’s radio crackled. He cranked down the volume and turned his back. “Go ahead.”

“We’ve got something here.”

It was the older fireman. Hunt looked once at Katherine. “Talk to me.”

“Looks like a body.”

Johnny watched a cloud as Hunt stood above them in the gathering gloom and talked of what the climbers had found. The cloud was orange on the bottom and shaped like a submarine. The orange faded to red. Wind pulled the cloud into something shapeless and flat.

“Johnny?”

That was Hunt, but Johnny couldn’t look at him. He shook his head, and Hunt talked some more. Johnny watched the cloud twist. He heard something about the shaft having collapsed a hundred and twenty feet down, something about choke points and shifting rock. It was unstable. He got that. Johnny’s head moved when Hunt spoke of a body that was wedged above the bottleneck. There was talk of bringing it up.

But it couldn’t be Alyssa. It couldn’t be like that, not like it was with his father. That’s not how it was supposed to end. Then Hunt said, “We can’t make an identification yet.”

That was good. That sounded hopeful.

But Johnny knew.

And so did his mother.

He looked away from the cloud and she squeezed his hand. Johnny stood. He watched the rope, and how weight came on it from some place deep in the ground. There was a winch on the truck, and it turned slowly with a small, electric-motor noise. Hunt tried to convince them to wait in his car, to let somebody take them home. His hand was shockingly warm on Johnny’s arm; but Johnny refused to move. He listened to the slow grind of the winch; and that’s what Hunt’s voice sounded like, a whir, a hum. Johnny’s mother must have heard it that way, too, because they were there when it happened.