27 Mar The Lost Lantern

It wasn’t my fault that Albie went into the lost mine. I keep telling myself that. I guess if I really believed it, I wouldn’t have gone in after him. It was my fault that he had the lantern, after all.

This all started on a search for uranium glass. Well, a little before that, I suppose. I met Albie on a bottle digging forum. He had found a really great dump site near me, and was looking for someone else to come help dig it all up. I hadn’t ever had the chance to talk about this hobby with anyone in person before, so I jumped at the opportunity. We spent the whole weekend rooting out bottles from the early 1900s and talking about other “weirdo hobbies,” as my dad always called them. By the end of the trip, we were fast friends.

That was a couple of years back, but it helps explain who Albie was and why he would have gone into an abandoned mine on his own. He was lucky, you know? He could pick a random patch of mud and dig up some amazing treasure from a hundred years ago. He was the kind of guy who got out of bad situations with nothing worse than a harrowing story. It made him a little bit reckless.

I’ve never been particularly lucky. I mostly stick to the tamer weirdo hobbies. Albie was always trying to get me into urban exploration and sewer mapping and all that, but I liked the sort of discoveries that you could make with an open sky and a clear exit. He’d talk me into exploring an abandoned mall every once in a while, though, and in exchange I’d drag him out to go comb through thrift stores for pieces of uranium glass, the old kitchen glassware that glows under a blacklight.

To me, finding abandoned treasures in a thrift store was every bit as good as digging them up out of the ground. The stores rarely knew what they had, so if you had a blacklight and knew what you were looking at you could pick up some amazingly rare stuff for just a few bucks. Plus you’d see other niche collectors out there looking through the old posters or the salt and pepper shakers or whatever. I usually had no idea what exactly they were looking for, but I knew the look in their eyes. It was just like mine.

We were on the hunt, tracking and stalking prey. The thrill was no less real just because our targets looked like unregarded kitsch.

Albie, like I said, tolerated this more than he enjoyed it. He mainly used the time while I was shining my ultraviolet light over unsuspecting candlesticks to try to convince me to come on another crazy adventure with him. It worked about half of the time, so it was always worth his while to try, even if he didn’t have a specific idea in mind.

“Let’s go back to the old coliseum,” he was saying that day. “I heard that someone got into the tunnels and they go all the way to the new arena. It was easier to keep digging out the old stuff than it was to tear up the ground again, so if you know where you are you can pop up under the outfield where they store all the tarps.”

“Why would we want to do that?” I asked, shining my light over a stack of sadly unreactive glass plates.

“I don’t know. Just to see them up close? You don’t get the sense of scale when you’re looking down at them from the stands. How big of a roll does it have to be to cover an entire baseball diamond?”

I looked it up on my phone. “About five thousand square feet.”

“Yeah, but that’s just trivia. What does that look like? We could go see.”

“How long would it take us to walk through those tunnels to go look at some tarps?”

“As long as we go the right way? Half an hour, maybe.”

“What are the odds we go the right way, Albie?”

“So an hour, then, counting screwups! The tunnels themselves are gonna have something cool, you know it.”

“And then we have to get back.”

“Hour and a half, then. We’ll know the right way on the way back, so it’ll be easier.”

“I don’t know.” I did know, and so did he. I was going. The rest of this was just a formality.

“C’mon, it’ll be great.” Albie was gracious in victory. He pointed to a bullseye lantern on a nearby shelf. “Look, there’s even a cool antique lantern you can—whoa!”

His exclamation mirrored my own surprise. I had flashed the blacklight on the lantern more or less by accident. I’d never heard of a lantern made with uranium glass. Nothing about the coloration in the panels suggested it would fluoresce, so there was no reason to have checked. It was lucky I did, though, because when the light hit it, the glass lens on the front of the lantern lit up brighter than anything I’d ever seen.

“Do that again,” said Albie, and I did. Sure enough, the round pane glowed a vibrant, eerie blue. “That’s fun, right? Ever seen anything like that?”

I had not. And at a price of fifteen dollars, I couldn’t take a chance on never seeing it again. I tucked my blacklight discreetly away, brought the lantern up to the front, and paid for it in cash. There was no reason to believe that the store would decide they’d made a mistake, nor that they’d have any recourse to come take it back, but it was better safe than sorry. This was my trophy. I wouldn’t be losing it to anyone.

Except Albie, it turned out. It was a half-hour ride back home, and he didn’t put the lantern down for one second of it. It fascinated him.

“We’ve got to get some oil and check this out,” he said. “You think it can shine blacklight? Could they have made something like that back then? This doesn’t say when it’s from. Can you just shine regular light through some kind of fancy glass and see in UV?”

It was like that the whole way back. I fully expected him to ask if he could keep the lantern, but when I pulled up outside of his house, he put it down without an instant’s hesitation.

“You’ve gotta bring that thing to the arena tunnels,” he said as he got out of the car. “I bet it looks awesome when that’s the only light.”

“Albie, man. Take the lantern.”

“Yeah? You sure?”

“You’re super into it. Give me fifteen bucks sometime and we’re square.”

“Oh man. Thank you! I’m gonna have to go pick up some lamp oil. I’m taking this thing out tonight. Hey, if I find something cool with it, it’s all yours. Like a uranium glass dump or something.”

“I don’t think you’re gonna find a secret stash of uranium glass.”

“I found a drone in the river once! You never know. Just gotta keep your eyes open.”

I didn’t think he was going to find anything. That wasn’t really the point, though. The point was looking. Finding stuff was cool, but the joy was in the journey. Albie had an exciting new accessory for his journey, and that was all that really mattered.

I was honestly shocked when I got a message from him later that evening. It was short, unexplanatory and very much Albie:

u gotta come see this!!!

There was a map pin attached showing that Albie was out at the old quarry. I sighed and paused the TV show I was watching.

What’ve you got? I sent back, as if I actually thought he’d just tell me. I hoped he would. I was settled in for the evening. I didn’t want to head back out just to see some weird rock that Albie had found.

get here in 10 mins or i’m going in without you!!!

I dragged myself out of the chair, shaking my head. I knew this was going to be something minor. I knew I was going to regret not staying home. But I had to go look. If it turned out that it really was something unique and amazing, I’d kick myself forever for not having hurried out to see it.

Albie knew how to weaponize my FOMO. Grumbling, I pulled on a coat, grabbed my car keys and drove out to the old quarry.

It was locked up, of course, but only for those who didn’t know where the holes in the fence were. Albie and I had been here a dozen times. I parked on the side of the road not far from the waypoint Albie had sent me and hiked on in.

Two-dimensional coordinates are always a little bit iffy in a three-dimensional space like a mining pit. I made my way down the long, winding road to the bottom of the quarry, only to find that the map pin wanted me to keep going another few dozen feet into a solid stone wall. Albie was nowhere to be seen, of course. It had taken me thirteen minutes to get there. He had undoubtedly grown bored of waiting and ducked into whatever tunnel he had found. Honestly, I’d be lucky if it turned out he was only three minutes ahead. It would have been entirely like him to send the text, decide I wouldn’t make it in time and set out on a solo exploration immediately.

I swept my flashlight around, trying to figure out where he’d gone. Both in front and above, there was nothing but a blank wall. I could see no entrances of any kind. The GPS swore I needed to go into the stone, though.

Frustrated, I turned my flashlight off, hoping that maybe I’d catch sight of a light shining out of a tunnel I had missed before. It sort of worked; I did see a light. It wasn’t in the cliff face, though, but instead tucked away beneath a tangled shrub growing at the base. It shone a deep, oceanic blue.

My concern deepened as I crossed to the bush and pulled the lamp from its grasping arms. This was the lantern we had found in the thrift store earlier. It was lit now, the flickering orange flame inside turned to blues and purples by the tinted glass. There was no sign of Albie anywhere.

“Where are you?” I called, turning in a slow circle. My voice echoed off of the quarry cliffs, but there was otherwise no response. I had no idea where he had gone. I had to be missing a cave somewhere.

Suddenly, to my surprise, I spotted it. It was almost directly in front of me, a narrow rectangular hole cut into the quarry wall. I couldn’t imagine how I’d missed it before. It was thin for a quarry tunnel, but still at least two feet wide and definitely over eight feet tall. It was located directly where Albie’s map coordinates needed an opening to be. It didn’t blend into the rock even a little bit. I must have been staring right at it before, but I had not seen it at all.

I stepped forward, the lantern swinging loosely at my side. As the lantern light was occluded by my body, the narrow doorway vanished.

I stopped. The lantern swung forward again. The pathway reappeared.

I tried my regular flashlight, my phone light and my small keychain UV light. Under all of their beams, there was nothing in front of me but a seamless rock wall. It blended perfectly with the rock around it. I could even put my hands on it and feel the solidity beneath them. When not under the scrutiny of the blue light from the lantern, the rock wall was solid and unbroken.

When the lantern’s light fell on it, though, the tunnel appeared again, in exactly the same place every time. I could reach inside. I could feel a cool, slow breeze coming from somewhere deep within. It felt like an expectant breath.

I was afraid to go inside.

“Albie?” I called down the tunnel. “You okay? Why’s the lantern out here? Do you need a light?”

No answer. I could picture him discovering the same thing I had, the odd absence of the tunnel when the lantern wasn’t lighting it. He would have been curious. He might have found a way in that I had not yet discovered. And once inside, he could have tripped in the dark, or hit his head, or suffered any of a number of debilitating injuries.

I checked the oil level in the lantern. It was low, but adequate.

I strobed the light back and forth across the wall a few times, watching the tunnel appear and disappear. Finally, I steadied the beam on the narrow entrance.

“I’m coming in, Albie,” I called. “You’d better actually be hurt.”

I thought it would be funny when I said it. It didn’t sound that way once it was out of my mouth, though. The echoes hit my ears like a threat.

The tunnel wound its way into the rock, twisting back and forth with no apparent reason to its construction. I could never see more than a dozen feet ahead before it would cut sharply to one side or the other. It wandered up and down as well. I was just thankful that it didn’t branch at any point. It was small and claustrophobic, but at least my path back out was clear.

Or so I thought until I glanced back. I could feel the rock looming in all around me, which made sense as it was literally brushing my shoulders on either side as I walked. I could feel it tickling my back as well, which made no sense. That was the way I had just come. There couldn’t possibly be rock behind me.

There was, though. When I shone the lantern on it, there was nothing but an empty hallway. If I tried to simply step back without directing the light behind me, my shoulders collided immediately with a slab of stone that had the immovability of mountains. The rock reappeared immediately when it was not illuminated by the lantern. My circle of light was the only thing holding the unyielding stone at bay.

Albie didn’t have his light. However he’d gotten in here without it, it was seeming increasingly likely that he was trapped. I had to find him and get him back out. Even if he wasn’t hurt, he was likely perilously low on air by now.

“Albie!” I shouted. The echoes hurt my ears. There was no other response. “I’m coming to get you, man. Stay put. Say something if you can.”

Nothing but silence. Mentally, I began figuring out how I could drag his unconscious body out while also keeping the lantern pointed forward. Maybe I could hang it around my neck? Or maybe I’d do better to get him up on my shoulders and keep the lantern in my hand. There wasn’t really room to do a fireman’s carry in here, but then again, there wasn’t really room for much of anything that involved two bodies side by side.

I was still trying to puzzle out the logistics when I turned another sharp corner and saw Albie fall.

“Albie!” I called, rushing forward. He collapsed bonelessly to the ground, falling face down. He did not move.

Until I grabbed his shoulder to roll him over, I genuinely thought he was probably okay. I thought that I had gotten there just as he had fainted or run out of oxygen or something.

As soon as I touched his body, even before I saw his face, I knew how wrong I was.

Albie was—flat. Pressed, like a flower between the pages of a book. He had no dimensionality left to him. His nose was crushed in on itself. His teeth were shattered and pancaked. His eyes were closed, which was for the best. I would not have liked to have seen the pressed bone peeking through those sockets.

He had been horribly crushed in the stone. I had not come around the corner just in time to see him fall. I had released him from his stone prison with the strange light from the thrifted lantern.

When I removed the rock around Albie, his abused body had collapsed under its own weight. He had died the instant he had been caught here without the lantern. I had never had a chance to rescue him. I had only had a chance to trap myself.

And it was a trap. I could feel that now. The tunnel up ahead went straight at last, the lantern’s blue light illuminating parallel walls stretching ahead and down until they vanished in the distance. I could feel eyes somewhere up ahead, beyond what the lantern could see, in the rock itself. They were watching me, as I knew they had watched Albie just minutes before.

I took his flattened corpse by the hand. It was light, terrifyingly light. All of the liquid had been pressed out of it. I was going to carry him out. I wasn’t going to leave him there.

But then, just at the edge of vision in that long tunnel, I saw something move. Its head almost brushed the tall ceiling. Its thin torso moved easily through the narrow space. This corridor had been built for it, and things like it. It galloped toward me, and my nerve broke. I dropped Albie’s broken hand and I ran.

The lantern swayed as I ran. The oil, already burning low, sloshed from side to side. The light danced crazily, inviting in shadows, creating unpredictable oscillations of rock. I bashed my head on an overhang that did not exist a moment later. I tripped and nearly fell on nothing at all. Eventually, I grabbed the lantern in both hands, ignoring the burning in my palms, and tucked it against my torso. It burned, but it kept a steady light forward. I would accept a few burns to avoid Albie’s fate.

I did not look back. I knew what was behind me: a blank rock wall, and somewhere within or behind or despite it, a creature that was more angles than were comfortable to see. Something crystalline and impossible loping steadily along a pathway that did not exist. Something that had teased and taunted and trapped my friend, and then brought his lantern back outside to do the same to whoever came after him. To me.

I did not consciously think any of this at the time. I only ran, the lantern burning against my arms and stomach, the light making reality dance and shiver before me. I did not think of what was behind. I did not even think of what lay ahead. I only ran.

It was a shock when I spilled out into the quarry, into the cold night air that opened up for hundreds of feet in every direction. I made it thirty steps before I skidded to a halt, turned, and hurled the lantern back at that narrow passage where Albie had died, where I had so nearly lost my life.

I couldn’t have made that shot one time in a thousand. But that night the lantern flew true, the corridor appearing and disappearing as the light tumbled end over end. The lantern sailed into that impossible mine and vanished. There was nothing but a solid rock wall remaining.

I stood in the quarry for a long time, shaking. I don’t know what I would have done if that stretched thing had emerged. It never did, though. Eventually my adrenaline drained away, and my courage failed with it. I took one last shivering breath before I turned and fled the quarry.

I haven’t been back, of course, nor will I. I wish I had kept the lantern, though. There are so many blank walls in our world. I can’t imagine that the thing from the quarry has only one unbranching corridor through which to travel. Somewhere in the depths, that pathway must have split, fractured into a thousand unseen roads along which to travel.

The creature tried to trap me once. I would love to think that when it failed, it simply gave up and faded back into its quarry lair. But I’ve never been that lucky.

I saw the lantern sitting by the mouth of an alley the other day. It was broad daylight. A box of matches sat next to the lantern, inviting me to light it.

I imagine that somewhere within that alley, visible only in the deep oceanic light of that lantern, was a thin pathway almost eight feet tall but less than two feet wide. And just beyond that opening something waited, observing me, curious to see what I would do.

I did as I did in the quarry. I ran.

I doubt I can run forever.