Voices echoed again down the tunnels. It sounded like Tad, but I couldn’t make out his words.
“They must have started filming,” I said. We reached a larger passageway. Two miners stood there, looking lost. I pulled Artemis past them, heading back to the north. She was huffing a little bit now. “I told you not to bring that backpack.”
She grunted at me.
Footsteps echoed. My ankle throbbed as I kneeled at the mouth of the tunnel. We waited a few minutes, until a flashlight beam came around a bend up ahead.
“... get the KII and the EVP recorders out and see if we can capture anything in here while Leila and Eric head south.” Tad, with his TV voice now. He and Mike stopped. Mike, the sidekick, who had his hair neatly dreadlocked and tied into a ponytail, stood pointing a camera down the tunnel. Tad, beside him in a black beanie and sweatshirt, stared at a KII meter. Behind them was another cameraman with a larger, bulky TV camera mounted on his shoulder.
“Is there anyone here who would like to communicate with us?” Tad’s voice faded. It was quiet for a few moments. “If you are here, we would like to speak with you.” Another pause.
In the long stretch of silence, I cupped my hands around my mouth and hissed nonsense. Tad’s head whipped up; Mike straightened and focused the camera down the tunnel.
“You heard that, right?” Mike said.
“Is someone here with us?” Tad repeated, still in TV voice. I had to hand it to the guy; he did not break character.
I nudged Artemis. We got up and started back again, into the long tunnel parallel to Tad and Mike’s, that ran deeper into the mine. We passed two cross tunnels this time, ghosts flickering in my peripheral, trying to follow the echoing shuffle of footsteps, then stepped carefully down the third cross tunnel to intercept Tad and Mike once again.
I let out another loud whisper.
“There it is again!”
“We’re following it. Or chasing it.”
Both Tad and Mike stared down the tunnel, frozen. Their lights didn’t reach this far.
“Can you give us some sign?” Tad called. “A noise? Anything?”
I was about to whisper again when Artemis grabbed a rock beside my foot and tossed it out the tunnel mouth. It clattered into the darkness. I gave Artemis a surprised thumbs-up.
“I thought we told the assistants not to bother in here,” Mike said. “Did Grant send them in?”
“Who cares. Keep the cameras on.” Tad held out the KII meter and went back into TV voice. “I have in my hand a device with lights on it. If you come near, you can make these lights change.”
We must have been lucky, because not a second after he said it, two lights along the top of the meter came on, flickering, then went down. The nearest ghost stood several feet behind him, impervious to the darkness of the tunnel. Tad looked back at the camera. Either he thought this was real, or he was damn good at playing off coincidences like supernatural fact.
“We’re going to ask you a series of yes or no questions,” he said. “If the answer is—oh—” The device had lit up again. All the lights this time. The hairs on my arms stood up, and I had to grip my forearms to make them go back down. More ghosts came to the ends of their tunnels, casting no shadows. They all looked at me.
I turned, expecting a sheet-white Artemis, and found her instead looking through the viewfinder of her own camera. She had the night vision turned on.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
“There are so many dead down here!” She barely made noise.
Her voice carried. Too loud. Tad and Mike were looking down the tunnel again.
“Did you hear what it said that time?” Tad asked.
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Sounded like ‘dead down here.’”
I was already herding Artemis in the opposite direction when Tad said, “They’re trying to tell us thereissomething down here? Do you think they’re trying to lead us to it? Salem Hillcroft—”
Artemis and I made it to the other end of the cross tunnel.
“We should leave,” Artemis whispered. “They’re going to find us.”
“Not yet. We only gave them good evidence. We need to make it obvious the evidence is teenagers messing with them; otherwise we did the exact opposite of what we meant to do. And we can’t let them wander when there might be a firestarter around.”
