The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler Page 0,14
hopes of sending down engineers with plans to go deeper and lay tunnels for fresh metals. But whenever the digging crews went below a thousand feet, the lights went out. Each time the engineers went down to take a look, they found the sheathing ripped away from the electrical lines. Gnawed. Shredded to pieces.
Animals were considered as a possibility. Or local activists who didn’t approve of the mining company. Security around the perimeter was strengthened. And then the lights failed completely. The engineers went down and discovered what they thought were ruddy streaks of iron dripping from the walls. When they realized it wasn’t iron, they surfaced and refused to go back. There was only one specter that could survive at such depths.
Pratt took the job when no one else on the list of licensed hunters would. He made his way to the site and spent days studying his surroundings—the old cave openings, the ruins of the cabins that had housed the mine families, the bits of rusted and cast-off machinery. He spoke to the security chief and insisted he be allowed to go down into the shaft alone. Too many anxious, breathing bodies, Pratt explained, too much pulsing life in such close quarters, would make it harder to pinpoint the solution. He was given a hardhat with a headlamp and two sticks of phosphorescent light. Down the elevator he plummeted, down, down, and down, until he felt the pressure in his ears shifting. The creaking metal cage stopped at a thousand feet, and the door opened. He took a last gulp of air that still tasted of life above ground and waved one of his wands of light out in front of him, into the darkness.
The floor slanted, pitted under his feet. To his left, he heard the sound of dripping water, or something else bleeding, and a rumbling in the earth, a tensing sound, like the moaning of something too heavy for whatever held it in place. The ceiling hung low. The smell of ancient creosote floated down, along with a cleaner, drier odor. Calcium.
In the dark, he pointed his headlamp to the floor and saw his own reflection in a wide, standing puddle. Then he saw something else in it. Refracted. Upside down. The face behind him and to one side. He turned and shone all of his light on the waiting child, suspended like a knob from the glistening rock.
“Do you want me to go on, Ellen?”
No. Tell him no, Ellen.
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“Do you still want to know what it’s like to be alone forever?”
A boy. It was impossible to tell with certainty, but it was probably a boy. Its body was black as tar. Its sinews smelled of earth, woven with rags. It looked more like the matted root of a living thing than a thing that had lived itself.
Pratt had done his homework, of course. He’d read about life in the shanties where the mining families had once lived, and how young boys, in the latter part of a cruel century, had been sent down into the mines and crouched in niches in the walls so they could grease the wheels of the ore-cars as they passed. Untold numbers of children had died in such holes when tunnels collapsed and the air stopped flowing and they couldn’t be reached.
This rotting child, if it was one of those, went on swinging upside down, its eyes lightless.
It was always a grim, difficult matter, putting down children. They hadn’t lived long enough to become finished human beings. So they hadn’t lived long enough to become finished ghosts, either. They fell to pieces if you went at them too quickly; they disappeared. Then, too, a child was often difficult to pin with its own anger, because when you tapped into its rage it was often only a fit, a confused tantrum, aiming at everything and nothing. What was left was guesswork.
A shot in the dark: Pratt asked the ghost if it wanted a bit of fun. If that was why all the lights were out.
Its torn mouth spread into a smile that broke its jaw loose from its skull. Poor creature. Pratt understood the trick. The child was trying hard to be terrifying. Like all children, living and dead, it confused the horrible and the fearful. But the smile was also a hint. Like all ghosts, the boy offered clues without meaning to. That’s what lonely ghosts in eternity do.