“I don’t think I’m better than you, Beth,” Sarah said in a low voice, then without another word, climbed onto the ladder.
“Sarah,” Beth took a step closer to the shaft opening.
Sarah didn’t bother to turn her head to look at Beth as she started down the ladder. The fear she’d had about heading into the darkness had disappeared. Now she wanted to escape this painful conversation, fighting the tears that threatened to blind her to the wooden rungs in front of her. She also felt confused and shaken by Beth’s revelations. She’d never known how much Beth resented her for what happened during high school. She’d also never realized that Beth had picked up on her disdain for the social media madness that seemed to infect Beth.
As she descended, her breaths growing short and labored from the effort, she wondered what she could do to repair their friendship after this. She also wondered if perhaps they had both passed a point where it couldn’t be repaired.
2
The emotional upheaval that came from her argument with Beth wasn’t enough to completely block her anxiety over what they were doing. The ancient wood beneath her feet creaked as she stepped down each slat of the ladders. The walls of the shaft felt like they were closing in on her, and the dust kicked up by Matt’s passage floated in the still air like a choking cloud, illuminated by her headlamp.
Matt was many ladders down, probably even nearing the bottom of the shaft, though she still caught flashes of his lights and heard the echo of his voice as he narrated for the benefit of his video. Above her, she heard Beth climbing onto the first ladder. Dust and splinters rained down onto the boards that supported the ladder on which she stood.
She climbed further down, tensing with nerves as she settled her weight on each ladder, fearing that one of them was bound to give way, or the narrow boards that supported them would suddenly snap, sending her down the shaft the fast—and fatal—way. The ominous creaking of old wood and the crunch of animal bones beneath her boots every time she stepped on a supporting board raked over her nerves, until it was impossible to look downwards at the dark, narrow rectangle of the next level and the ladder that disappeared down into it. She also couldn’t look upwards without feeling a dizzying sense of disorientation, or getting a face full of fallen dust and crushed bone and desiccated fur from Beth’s movements above her.
Instead, Sarah stared straight ahead at the ladder in front of her, only glancing down briefly at each stop to find her footing on the next ladder. In what seemed like an interminable time, she ran out of ladders, and her boots met a stone floor, earning a gasp of relief from her. Finally on a solid, dependable surface, she tore her gaze away from the last ladder and turned to find a camera in her face.
“You’re looking pretty spooked there, Sarah,” Matt said with a chuckle. “Maybe you should take a rest and drink some water. You sound out of breath.”
She resisted the urge to punch the camera that probably cost thousands of dollars and turned her back on him, unwilling to give him any more footage for his video. She had no doubt her face was white as a sheet after that descent, and she was out of breath, and not just from exertion. She’d almost forgotten to breathe as she’d climbed down, as if she was afraid that the weight of that extra air in her lungs would be the final straw for the ancient wooden slats.
Beth arrived not long after that, which was a good thing, because it distracted Matt from trying to urge Sarah to answer inane questions for the camera.
The two had a little session where they spoke for the sake of the video, talking about the “scary” mine shaft as if they didn’t really think it was. Their cringy overacting was almost painful to watch, but it did have the benefit of calming her own nerves. Their obvious lack of concern gave her reassurance.
When they finally finished their act, Matt trained his lights on the drift that snaked away from the shaft. It meandered one way then another without much in the way of interesting sights along the way. There were offshoots everywhere, but the main tunnel was clearly the most developed. The miners must have found a promising vein and followed it deep into the ground.
Occasionally, they found evidence of the long gone miners, in the abandoned and rusted cans, broken gun powder barrels, and even an intact pickaxe, the tip of the rusted head still buried in a chunk of rock. After that landmark, the tunnel changed, growing larger. It also looked smoother, as if, instead of merely picking at the rock, someone had cleaned it up to remove any potential head smashing hazards.
The air changed at that point as well, growing fresher. It also carried moisture from somewhere deeper within the mine, hidden by the unrelenting darkness that filled every tunnel. It was a darkness that their lights seemed to struggle to push back.
Once again, they found cart tracks as they followed the new tunnel until it bisected an even larger one. This time, the tracks were cleared of debris and disappeared on both sides of the tunnel. These tracks were free of rust and even looked like they’d been oiled and had been used more recently.
“Is this part of the mine still active?” Sarah wondered aloud, interrupting Beth’s monologue at the camera Matt held.
Beth shrugged, flashing Sarah an irritated glance before turning back towards the camera with a fake smile and wide eyes, her false lashes fluttering as she pretended to be spooked out.
After a few minutes of them talking for their audience while Sarah wandered around the larger tunnel, never straying too far from them, but staying out of the sight of the camera, they finally finished up their little dialogue with a future audience. Matt turned to point his camera towards one end of the tunnel.
“Let’s head down that way. I think that’s where the secret military installation is,” he said, his tone taking on a serious note filled with excitement, as if they really were about to find some underground bunker with aliens or creepy science experiments—both possibilities had been suggested to the camera during their earlier exposition.
Sarah sighed, but she was already this deep into the mine. After the harrowing trip down the shaft, she figured she might as well make the most of this exploration. As much as she hated to admit it after their argument, Beth might have been right about dragging her out of her house to experience this. It was out of her comfort zone, breaking her out of a rut that she’d initially been grateful for, after spending her teen years living in so much uncertainty. Her current schedule had dug deep grooves in her life, giving her a sense of stability that she’d desperately needed, but it also kept her from experiencing things beyond the virtual worlds of her video games or the four walls of her office.
Now she was curious about what hid behind the darkness at the end of the tunnel, so she didn’t argue when Matt and Beth headed in that direction. She followed on their heels, rolling her eyes at their constant commentary and pretend startled yelps as they delved deeper into this new area.
Matt spun an improbable tale of gray aliens being held as experiments as they went along, his tone growing more and more tense with excitement. Beth threw in plenty of gasps and expressions of fear to add to the atmosphere they were trying to create. Sarah just wished they’d shut up long enough to appreciate the genuinely creepy environment as their shadows bounced along the walls with each step they took.