Her hand closed on a flashlight, and she drew it out. She tested it a couple of times, flashing the narrow beam on the walls that closed in around her. The tunnel widened into a room around the shaft, and the shaft itself appeared to be a well in the center of an oval room whose floor was littered with boulders.
Elizabeth removed the coiled object from around her neck, and, still clutching the flashlight, moved to the edge of the shaft. She pointed the light downward and stared into the depths. Far below, she wasn’t sure how far, the light glinted on something that lay on the bottom of the shaft.
She laid the flashlight carefully in a cleft of stone, and jiggled it a little to be sure it was secure. Then she began uncoiling the object she had carried from the barn. It was a rope ladder that had once provided primitive access to the loft. For years it had lain in the tack room: the loft was no longer used, and the ladder had been deemed a danger to playing children. Elizabeth began wedging the ends of the rope into cracks in the boulders, chinking the rope tighter with bits of stone that lay scattered across the cavern floor. Finally she tested the ropes, pulling on them as hard as she could, bracing her legs against the boulders. The rope held.
She pushed the rest of the coil over the lip of the shaft. It clattered against the side of the shaft, then caught She pulled it back to the surface and carefully untangled it. The second time, as she fed it carefully over the edge, it fell straight to the bottom. She felt a slight vibration as the bottom rung struck the floor below.
She picked up the bag and dropped it over the edge. She heard a soft thunk as it too hit the bottom. Then she worked the flashlight loose from its crevice, put it in a pocket of her dress, and began making her way down the ladder.
It was slow going, but Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice the slime that rubbed off the walls of the shaft as she crept carefully from rung to rung, nor did the darkness frighten her. She felt the cool stone touch the sole of her foot as she found the bottom of the shaft. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the flashlight.
The yellowish beam flickered around the chamber at the bottom of the shaft. It was very much like the chamber above: smaller, and with a lower ceiling, but oval, and with a flat, rock-strewn floor. The shaft opened almost in the center of the small chamber.
Elizabeth played the light over the floor of the cavern, and the object which had glinted from above suddenly flashed once more. It was a gold bracelet, set with a small opal.
It was still on the wrist of its owner.
The skeleton lay directly below the opening of the shaft, sprawled in the position in which it had lain through the decades. Here and there small pieces of rotten cloth still clung to it, but they disintegrated into dust when Elizabeth touched them. The sack lay near it, where Elizabeth had dropped it, its impact having scattered some of the ribs across the floor. Elizabeth retrieved the bag and set it aside. Then she played the light over the skull. She picked up a rusted metal barrette that lay next to the skull and examined it carefully. She nodded to herself.
“I knew you were here,” she whispered. “Everything will be all right now. You’ll see.”
She left the skeleton for a moment and found a new resting place for the flashlight. She left it on and trained it on the spot where the ancient bones gleamed palely in its light.
Elizabeth worked slowly, moving the bones carefully. She laid them out at one edge of the chamber, close to one of the walls. She found a small flat rock to cushion the skull, and when she was finished the remains lay on their back, the arms folded peacefully over the rib cage. Elizabeth smiled at the corpse, and there was a strange light in her eyes as she removed the bracelet from the fleshless wrist and slipped it onto her own.
She began moving some of the rocks around, wrestling a large one with a fairly flat surface into the center of the cavern. Then she moved four other, smaller rocks to form stools around the