Izzy closed her eyes, took a breath, and entered the portal. Using her flashlight, she walked, stooped over, along the narrow dirt passage to her left, among the rocks and the discarded gobbing. A lone bat slept snuggled in the rock crevices, kitten-furred and that small. She almost wanted to touch it with her finger, but she’d known a kid who died of rabies from a bat bite.

The mine had been active in the seventies, abandoned in the eighties, she’d read. Along the path of ore cart track crossties, usually removed but still in place after all this time, she found a vinyl kitchen chair, empty bottles of bleach and oil filters in a box, and brown paper bags labeled “Anionic Polymer,” the substance used to help avoid clumping of the ore. Bundled up yellow ventilation tubing the color of crime scene tape. A small metal machine that resembled a torture device. Two white helmets hanging on the wall just like skulls.

The passage she’d chosen led to a collapse, so she turned, went back to the junction, and ventured in the other direction. This passage was steeper, took her farther down.

She came to a wooden ore bin with a rickety ladder that stopped partway up. A hangman’s rope on a pulley led to the chute gate through which the ore would tumble out into a waiting, now broken cart. The chute was marked with the number three, scrawled in red.

Izzy shone her flashlight into a shaft that might have gone one hundred and fifty feet deep. This ladder resembled a rib cage. Darkness lay at the base.

Eventually the tunnel she traversed opened out into a larger square-set chamber with timbers made of tree trunks supporting the roof. Someone had constructed the chamber in a cathedral-like fashion. Remnants of ore carts littered the space, but the area was now broad and open enough that she could venture around the carts and down the wooden stopes.

From here she moved into a narrower passage. So narrow that to see what lay ahead she had to lie flat and wiggle through. Izzy chose her stomach so she would be able to see and shimmied down the opening. The gravel cut into the flesh of her breasts and belly. She felt pressure against her ribs as if invisible hands squeezed the bones together.

The way it would feel to be crushed to death.

She shone her flashlight into the darkness.

And that was when Izzy saw the hand.