Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

good deal of its life underground, maybe even born down here without ever seeing the light of day. Odd that the miners would just leave the dead carcass to rot in this spot. It would have been a straight shot to cut it up like a moose and haul the pieces out. Something must have happened…”

“Like what?” Maycomb asked, eyes locked on the bones. Absent any sunlight to bleach them, the bones had absorbed the minerals in the mud that surrounded them, turning the color of a terracotta pot.

Cutter shrugged off his pack and set it on the ground.

“You’re going to use the rope?” Maycomb asked.

“Nope.” Cutter slipped on his thin Mechanix gloves to give him some level of protection from hundred-year-old slivers of wood. “But that pack is thirty pounds the rungs don’t have to hold if it’s not on my back. Drop it down to me when I get to the bottom.”

Maycomb began to chew on a hangnail. She looked up at Cutter, then said, “I know, I know. No smoking.”

Cutter used the lip of the shaft to lower himself into the hole, descending slowly. He added pressure gradually to each successive rung, one foot at a time, probing, testing, before committing both feet to repeat the process. He had a vague idea that he’d grip the uprights if one of the rungs gave way, letting his feet crash through while the shattering wood acted as a brake. But they held. The idea sounded insane anyway by the time he reached the bottom, like something from a superhero movie.

“Toss it down,” he yelled when his feet hit firm ground.

Water gurgled somewhere in the shadows, like the last few inches of dishwater in a sink. He put his light on the bones first. A heavy-duty leather harness lay half embedded in the mud with the skeleton. Some of it had decayed along with the flesh that it rested against, other bits looked almost serviceable. A pear-shaped loop of rolled leather and several smaller straps lay in the mud beside the pelvis. Cutter recognized it as a crupper, the strap that went under the tail of a mule or horse with low withers to keep the saddle or harness in place. He was right. Likely a mule.

The fact that the animal had just been abandoned there at a well-traveled junction to rot began to eat at his curiosity. He scanned the room, trying to make sense of it.

Maycomb’s voice tumbled over with the trickle of water from above. “I’m coming down,” she said.

“Nice and slow.” Mud sucked at his boots as he stepped to the base of the ladder to steady it. He sniffed the air, suddenly wondering if it had been gas that had killed the mule. If that were the case, he’d already be dead.

Maycomb made it down the ladder quickly, unwilling to spend any more time than necessary in a pitch-black tunnel by herself.

She brushed remnants of the wet timbers off her hands when she reached the bottom, and immediately began to chew on her fingernail again.

“It seems a little cooler down here to me,” she said.

Cutter didn’t say it out loud, but by his calculations, they were three hundred meters inside the mountain and six hundred meters deep from the peak. It didn’t seem like a factoid a person with claustrophobia would want to know.

“Must have been a large pocket of ore here,” he said, scanning the chamber.

The oblong room was roughly twenty by thirty feet, with an arched ceiling just higher than Cutter could jump. It was empty but for the dynamite box, the coffee can, and the old bones.

Closer inspection revealed that the gurgling sound came from the center of the room where water seeped into a down shaft, or winze, that had been backfilled with tailings.

“Must be another tunnel running beneath us,” Cutter said. “Otherwise, this place would have…” His voice trailed off as he studied water marks, high on the walls. “That’s what killed the mule,” he said. “At some point, this entire chamber flooded.”

Maycomb stared at the gravel sump in the center of the floor. “So somebody filled in our escape tunnel. Now we’re basically screwed.”

“No,” Cutter said. The beam of his headlight bounced off the rock as he sloshed toward the far end of the room, away from the ladder. “The shaft we want should be back here.”

He stopped cold when he reached it.

Maycomb came up beside him. “And… we’re still screwed.”

Like the one they’d come down on, a heavy timber ladder descended into the shaft – only this one was filled to the brim with crystalline water.

“Let’s see your phone again,” Cutter said, holding out his hand like a surgeon waiting for a scalpel. He’d never been one to panic, but this had him worried.

Maycomb dug the phone out of her jacket and passed it to him.

“According to Horning’s map,” Cutter said, “in order to reach the larger stope – and the way out of this mountain – we have to drop down this winze about thirty feet, travel laterally through another tunnel for a hundred and change, and then climb thirty feet up another shaft.” He ran a hand over the rock face at the back of the chamber. “The place we need to be is on the other side of this wall.”

“Over a hundred feet,” Maycomb said, chewing on her hangnail again. “Every inch of it under water. Might as well be on the moon.”

Cutter stooped and pointed his spare headlamp into the flooded pit. The light faded to an eerie green shadow toward the bottom. The base of the wooden ladder was just visible in the deep. He dipped his fingers below the surface.

“Fifty degrees or so,” he said. “About the same as the air. Chilly, but doable.”

Maycomb looked up at him in horror. Her hair, absent the elastic ties since he’d borrowed them for the tracking stick, stuck out in all directions from under the helmet.

“Doable? Are you shitting me? Even if you could dive