As he stepped into the mouth of mine shaft, his skin began to crawl.  A cold, damp breeze carried the musty smell to Jerry’s nose.  He stopped as a shiver went up his spine and goose bumps filled his arms.  “Why am I doing this?” He thought to himself.  The bullies, The Iger Brothers, had been harassing Jerry all his life.  Now that they found out about his fear of the dark,  they had become relentless.  The bullies had gone as far as threatening his little sister if he didn’t do this tonight.  “Great…” he mumbled as he stepped into the opening of the shaft, “The kid that is scared of the dark has to go down a mine shaft without a flash light.”  “For Jenny… “, he trailed off as he moved forward.

About one hundred feet into the shaft, the air was thick with a musty smell.  The little moonlight that spilled in from the mouth of the mine was now useless to see by.  He turned and looked back at the entrance.  His heart raced.  He had slipped past the temporary barriers setup a few days ago by the State Police .  The story was that the four old miners that made this mine their home were found in a state of shock.  Their faces frozen in terror at the last thing they saw.  He drew in a deep breath of musty air.  “I can’t let Jenny down…  Its only darkness right?”  He realized he had said it out loud.  He stepped forward again keeping his right hand against the slimy wall.

Not far into the mine the walls became dry to his touch.  He came across some kind of chamber to his right.  A faint light glowed from back of what appeared to be a small room.  He stepped in and let his eyes adjust.  This must have been where the four old men lived.  Cots lined the walls on the far end.  A crude table and some kind of fire pit were to his left.  He walked over to the table.  There were papers there… Papers and a candle.  “HA!”  The bullies had told him he couldn’t bring any kind of light in with him but they didn’t say he couldn’t use what he found in the mine.  This might not be so bad after all.

Jerry looked around near the fire pit for something to light the candle with.  As he drew near the fireplace, he noticed a small bowl shaped depression cut into the rock.  A thick oily substance filled the hole.  A wick of some sort burned near the edge.  It flickered in the gentle breeze that came up from the depths of the mine.  “Not so hard at all… HA!  I’ll show those guys.”  He lit the candle from the wick and placed it in a holder that had a reflector on it.  “This must be how the old men could see to move around in the mine.” He thought as he went back to the table to examine the papers.

The papers contained very rough drawings of shafts and some notes that were hard to read.  These guy apparently hadn’t spent much time learning to write.  One of the pages contained a drawing of a shaft that opened into a weird shape.  The drawing ended as if the walls trailed off into nothing.  At the bottom was scribbled “Go no f’rthr.”  Jerry thought about the drawing and its message as he moved back into the shaft of the mine.  He couldn’t tell by any of the other papers whether the message meant they couldn’t get past that space or if it was a warning.  The goosebumps ran up his arms again as he pushed deeper down the shaft.

Jerry found nothing of interest in any of the shafts he explored.  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been down here.  The bullies took his watch too.  He had long lost sight of the faint light of the entrance.  His lone candle provided him plenty of light to see buy now that his eyes had adjusted.  It had one drawback though.  The flickering candlelight cast weird shadows on the walls and ceiling as it faded off ahead of him.  Several times, Jerry caught himself gasping as the shadows tricked his mind into thinking something was moving ahead of him.  He pressed on.  His heart still beating like he was running a marathon.

Just about the time Jerry’s heart began to settle down a bit, he found that his candle no longer possessed the brilliance to cast its light along both walls and the ceiling.  The shaft was opening up.  He tried to keep the light on the right wall as much as possible.  The shadows to his left and above him now faded into the blackness.  Dripping sounds and the occasional rock fall caused Jerry’s heart to skip a beat every now and then.  He stopped to catch his breath and look back in the direction he came.

As he turned back around to continue on his journey, he began to walk.  No more than two steps of his right foot and the light no longer struck the right hand wall.  Jerry moved the candle quickly to the right and then to the left…  nothing on either side.  His heart began to race again.  “Is this the spot on the drawing?” He thought to himself as he tried to gather his composure.  He stepped slowly forward one foot after the other.  The floor was now the only thing his candle cast light upon.  He continued to move slowly toward the breeze.  “It has to be coming in from somewhere? Right?!” he quizzed his now spinning brain.  The lack of reference was now really playing tricks on his mind.

He gulped as the light suddenly fell away from his feet.  He froze in his tracks.  Kneeling down on his hands and knees, Jerry moved the candle about.  He was at the very edge of a steep cliff.  One more step might have been the end of him.  He searched the floor around him for a stone.  He dropped the stone down the rock face in front of him.  His ears strained as they tried to follow its sound as it bounced down the face.  After three hits, there was no more sound.  Jerry waited and waited for the sound of the stone hitting the bottom.  No such sound returned from the blackness. “That’s a steep drop!.. And a long one…” he said out loud as he plopped down in the dirt.

His chest tightened and his head began to ring.  The world around him seem as though it was spinning off kilter.  He wasn’t sure if it was the darkness and the quiet playing tricks on his mind again or if it was something in the stale atmosphere robbing him of the life giving air in his lungs.  He decided that this was far enough.  He best find his way out of here.  Bullies or not, he had had all he could take.  Jerry stood facing the edge of the cliff.  He knew if the cliff was directly in front of him, then he could just turn around and go back to where he could see the walls and ceilings again.

He turned and took two steps in what should have been the right direction.  Again, the light of his candle fell from his feet.  He knelt again using his candle to survey the edge of the cliff.  “Wait… This can’t be… There should be a path here!”  His mind raced.  He flung the candle to the right only to find himself kneeling in the middle of a 6 foot round circle of rock.  There was nothing but darkness on any side.  “How?… There has to be a place to walk over.  I got out here.”  A brief image flickered through his mind.  He remembered an Indian Jones movie where Indi had to make a ‘leap of faith’.  Indi used dirt and stones to uncover an optical illusion that hid a bridge.  “That’s what it is… ” Jerry thought as he gathered a handful of dirt.

Handful after handful of dirt plummeted into the abyss.  Jerry could find no hidden bridge.  “Could it be that when it felt like the cavern was spinning, I was actually moving away from the cliff edge?” he proposed in an effort to calm his own mind.  It didn’t really help because he had already come to the realization that whatever the cause, he was now stranded on an island of rock with nowhere to go…  in a mine that no one else would probably ever come down again.  Tears began to well in his eyes.  The unthinkable happened… A strong gust from somewhere below snuffed out Jerry’s candle.  He was suddenly very alone in the pitch black darkness.  The room began to spin again.  His heart jumped into his throat.  The only thing he could think to do was to sprawl out flat on his back across his little stone island and pray.

Jerry laid there squeezing his eyes shut hard.  It didn’t really matter if he closed his eyes or not.  The darkness was the same either way… complete.  He dug his fingers into the edges of his little island.  His perception of time was gone.  He couldn’t tell how long he laid there.  He had no way of knowing how long he’d even been in the mine.  It could be daylight outside but you couldn’t prove it by Jerry’s eyes.  The cold sweat running down his brow seemed to attract the dusty dirt from the ground.  The gritty feeling, enhanced by the darkness, caused Jerry’s stomach to turn.  “Is this dirt or are those bugs crawling on me?”  He rolled over and vomited over the edge as his fear took an even deeper hold.  He gripped the edges with his hands and feet.  “I’m going to die here… in the dark.” he whimpered.

The bullies had let Jerry’s sister go about two hours after Jerry went into the mine shaft.  They were surprised he had snuck past the officers at the barriers let alone gone ‘into’ the mine.  It had been a couple of days when two State Police officers showed up to ask the Igers some questions.  The officers told the brothers and their parents that Jerry’s sister had told her parents about the whole incident.  No one had seen Jerry in over forty-eight hours.  He was now officially a missing person.  “If the brothers had had anything to do with it, they could face criminal charges.” the older office told the boy’s parents.

The younger of the Iger brothers began to cry.  The older brother slammed a heavy fist into the younger’s arm “Cool it!.. Yer gonna get us in trouble.”  “Too late for that… ” The older brother looked up to see his dad staring angrily at the pair.  Dad was not a violent man.  Mom was the disciplinarian in the family but the brothers knew Dad meant business this time.  The younger brother began to tell the story of the dare and the threat against Jerry’s sister.  They both told how Jerry had slipped past the officers at the barriers.  “The last we seen of him he was heading down into the mine… ” The older brother said.  His words trailed off as he began to sob.  “We’re sorr….. ”  Dad cut him off with a wave of his hand and turned back to talk to the officers.  A search party would be put together immediately.  The officers continued to explain that two of the four old men found in the mine had died from unknown causes.  The third was failing rapidly and the forth was still in some kind of shock related coma.  They had to move quickly if they were to find Jerry.

Back in the mine, Jerry’s mind again began to play tricks on him.  He could sense something moving around him.  “Bats… ” he told himself.  “Its just bats… ”  His mind raced.  “Bats… great.”  His mind had chosen that bats were the lesser of the evils that this place held.  He dug in tighter to the ground.  The rock seemed to vibrate with a steady hum.  A hum that his ears now seemed to pick up.  He began to sing to himself, hoping that this was all in his mind.  He recalled the stories of the men he had heard the day before coming down here.  The images of their scared faces filled his mind even though he’d never set eyes on them.  “Was this what happened to them?”  He thought as he shook the visions from his mind.

Jerry could swear his little plot of solid ground was now moving.  He had no reference without being able to see, but he swore he was moving… down maybe.  The motion appeared to correspond to the rhythm of the hum.  Was this his mind playing tricks again.  No…  something was happening.  He squinted his eyes in a vain attempt to peer into the darkness below him.  He knew he wouldn’t be able to see anything but he tried repeatedly anyway.  At one point, he even thought he saw something move in the darkness.  “Impossible… ” He thought.

The humming slowed.  The breeze that had been steady now slowed as well.  The air seemed somewhat different here… cooler… fresher.  Suddenly, he felt something touch the tips of his fingers.  He shot to his knees, attempting to center himself on his little spit of rock.  The humming stopped and the air went still.  Either his eyes were playing tricks on him or he could see small sparks of light on the ground and walls ahead of him.  Wait!

He could see the ground and walls.  There were small flickering sparks of light in the stone.  It wasn’t much.  He thought to himself that the only reason he could even see them was because it was so completely dark.  A spark of energy fired in his mind.  He quickly gathered his senses.

With a deep breath held for good measure, he stepped beyond the edge of his plot that he’d clung too.  He definitely could see a little now.  He could make out the difference between the sparkleless edge of his former resting place and the sparkley  ground now in front of him.  He moved forward cautiously.  A passage opened before him.  He moved slowly down it.  The small amount of light here had brought some comfort to him.  He also knew that those men had had a run in with something in this mine.  More than likely, he was about to find out what it was.

The passage opened into another huge room.  Here the light seemed brighter.  Jerry could make out much more detail.  The small sparks seemed larger. “No… There are just more of them.” He thought as he glanced around the room for a direction to head.  The sparks seemed to flicker in a pattern leading to another opening on the far side of the room.  He admired the beautiful structures of this room.  He couldn’t decide whether these were natural rock formations or something that was built by someone… “… or someTHING…” He gulped as he neared the far doorway.  Something was definitely moving inside.  He paused and took several deep breaths.

On the surface, the State Police search party was assembled and briefed.  They took their dogs and their high tech equipment into the mine to begin searching.  Jerry’s dad and step mom waited eagerly at the command tent for any news that Jerry might be alive.  A counselor spoke comforting words mixed with foreboding that because of the amount of time that had passed… Jerry’s dad turned away.  His eyes swelled with tears.  He was a tall, well built man.  He had to remain strong.  He shouldn’t be crying.  His mind raced as he fought back the feelings that his son was lost… possibly forever.

Jerry stepped into the passage way.  Something hit him square across his whole body with a force that rendered him unconscious.  When Jerry awoke, he was on a gurney being loaded into an ambulance.   “How did I get here?  What were those sparking lights?” He pleaded to his dad.  “Jerry… What lights?”  “How far down was I?” Jerry again pleaded.  “You were about a hundred feet inside the entrance.  The medic thinks you may have hit your head on a loose beam.  They think you’ve been unconscious for a couple of days.”  The ambulance pulled out for the hospital.  Jerry’s mind spun trying to piece all the details together.  Did he just hit his head and dream all these things?.   He remained quiet the rest of the forty minute ride to the hospital.  The doctors told him he probably hallucinated all of it from the concussion and fever.  The images  of the whole thing in Jerry’s mind were so clear .  After several days of counseling, Jerry unwillingly accepted that it was all a result of hitting his head.

The Iger brothers were disciplined by their father.  No courts or judges were needed by the time Dad was done.  When Jerry came back to school, both brothers had to make a public apology to him in front of the whole student body.  Jerry didn’t accept their apology, much to his dad’s dismay.  He was still wrestling with what happened in the mine.  Sure…  He had hit his head but something still was not sitting right with Jerry about the whole thing.  He continued the counseling sessions the school set up.

It had been months since  ‘the accident’, as people now referred to it.  The counselor called Jerry in for his last session before school ended.  There was a box sitting on the table.  The counselor said that it was a box of the things that were found with Jerry when the search party found him that day.  Jerry opened the box slowly.  The pants and shirt that the EMT’s had cut off him when they found him lay on top.  The candle and its holder with reflector lay just below the shirt.  The paper with the incomplete drawing was also there.

The counselor finished the session and left the room, leaving Jerry some time to his thoughts.  Jerry picked up his things and began to put them back in the box one by one.  He had now almost completely accepted that he had hallucinated it all after hitting his head.  The search team found only a stone wall at the end of the shaft where the drawing opened up and Jerry had found the bottomless cavern.  Jerry had even been back to the spot with a State Police Investigator.  It was solid rock.  Jerry sighed as he folded the pants to put them back in on top of the other items in the box.  A small stone fell from one of the pockets.  Jerry reached down and picked it up.  “Nope… No sparks in you either… ”  He tossed the rock on top of the box and left it sitting on the counselor’s table.

He walked to the door flipping the light switch off and locking the door as instructed by the counselor.  As he closed the door on the now darkened room, a faint sparkle of light shimmered across the wall.  “Nah… Never happened…” Jerry whispered as he pulled the door closed.

~Cappy