Strindberg's Star (2 page)

Most—in fact, all—abandoned mine shafts were supposed to be noted on the maps. The surveyors from the Mining Inspectorate had seen to that. But this hole had apparently been overlooked.

E
rik heard a faint buzzing, as some flies had started to gather around him. They made their way in curiosity down into his bag to see if there was any food.

But in the first bag there were only spools of rope, snap hooks, and bolts. The double-edged titanium knife with a concave and a sawtooth edge. A battery-powered rotary hammer drill, the climbing harness, and the primary dive light that he would fasten to his right dive glove.

When Erik had dumped everything out on the yellowed grass, he opened the side pocket of the bag. In it were the Finnish precision instruments in hard cases. He unpacked a depth gauge, which would measure how far down he sank under the surface of the flooded shaft, and a clinometer to estimate the gradients of the mine paths once he got there. The flies had increased in number; they hovered around him like a cloud of dirt.

Erik waved the insects away from his mouth, irritated, while taking the regulators and long hoses that would keep him alive out of the next bag and checking the pressure of the tanks. Then he moved backward a few steps, but the cloud of flies followed him.

Half standing in the gravel, he pulled off his green rubber boots,
then his camouflage pants and his Windbreaker. With bugs crawling across his face and neck, he opened the cover of the last bag. Under dive computers and a headlamp waited the bulky wetsuit and the rubberlike skin of the dry suit. Glossy black three-layered laminate fabric, specially developed for diving in forty-degree-Fahrenheit water.

He pulled on the full-cover neoprene hood. Now the flies could reach only his eyes and the upper part of his cheeks. Then he took out the bag that contained his fins and mask. At the opening of the shaft, the rotten-egg stench almost made him change his mind, but then he attached a nylon rope and began to lower the bag.

Forty, fifty yards—he managed to follow its jerky descent that long—but the line just kept going. Only after a few minutes did it reach the water that filled the lowest part of the shaft.

He secured it with a few loops around a block of stone, and then he went to get the bundle of climbing gear and hooks. When he got back to the shaft, he sank down to his knees.

A strident roar from the hammer drill finally broke the silence, and he could soon attach the first bolt. He pulled—it would hold. He drilled bolt number two.

Then he lifted the hundred-pound pack with tanks, the buoyancy compensator, and the hoses onto his back and fastened the strap of the climbing harness across his chest and did a few tests of the self-locking rappelling brake that would control the speed of his fall down into the shaft. He swung himself over the edge, the brake hissing as he dropped.

T
here were blurry pictures on the Internet from urban explorers in Los Angeles who, without a map, hiked their way through mile after mile of claustrophobic sewer systems. You could find texts from Italians who dedicated themselves to crawling through rats and garbage in ancient catacombs, and from Russians who described expeditions to ruins of forgotten prisons from the Soviet era, hundreds of feet
below the ground. From Sweden there were video clips that showed dilapidated mine shafts where divers swam in pitch-black water. They crawled through tunnels that didn’t seem to end.

Some called themselves the Baggbo Divers and hung out outside of Borlänge. Then there was Gruf in Gävle, Wärmland Underground in Karlstad, and several groups in Bergslagen and Umeå. And besides them, there were people like Erik Hall, who went diving on his own and most of all wanted to keep to himself. It wasn’t recommended, but people still did it.

Because they shared tips about equipment and shafts that were worth exploring, all of the mine divers in the country knew of each other. Year in and year out, it was the same people who did it. Without exception, they were men.

But a month or so ago, a group of girls had started putting up pictures of their mine dives on the Internet. They called themselves Dyke Divers. No one knew where they came from or who they really were, and for their part they didn’t answer any questions. At least not the questions that Erik had sent as a test.

At first when he was surfing around the girls’ Web site, he had found only a few grainy photos. Then clips of advanced diving had shown up, and yesterday there had suddenly been a snapshot from a mine shaft in Dalarna.

The picture had shown two women in diving suits down in a cramped mine tunnel: pale cheeks, bloodred mouths, and both had shining black hair trailing over their shoulders. Behind them they had spray painted:

545 feet, September 2

Under the photograph, the girls had listed a pair of GPS coordinates, which marked a place near the Great Copper Mountain in Falun. The position had been only ten or fifteen miles from Erik Hall’s summer cottage. They added:

The self-locking rappelling brakes lowered him gently into the depths. The cloud of flies was still circling up by the opening, but down here in the dark, Erik was hanging alone. He breathed only through his mouth now to avoid the smell of sulfur.

When he let his eyes drift around, it was like sinking down into a different century. Rusted-away attachments for ladders, half-collapsed blind shafts, notches cut by pickaxes and iron-bar levers.

There was no room for mistakes when lowering yourself down into a mine. But he tried to persuade himself that this shouldn’t be difficult, just a vertical hole and dirty support posts that had managed to withstand the strain of the rock for hundreds of years.

Still—older mine shafts were never truly safe. What looked like a wafer-thin crack could run deep into a rupture. And if the wall gave way, it would mean that one of the one-ton boulders hanging above him could suddenly come loose and tumble down.

How much farther?

Erik broke a glow stick and let it fall. The glowing flare disappeared in the dark, but then he heard a splash much earlier than he had dared to hope for. The stick glittered green far below, bobbing on the black water.

The depth meter on his wrist indicated that he had already lowered himself some 225 feet, and the cold had only gotten worse. Frost glistened on the rock wall in front of him, and the next glow stick landed on an ice floe.

Then he discovered that a small ledge stuck out just above the water. It was about ten yards to the right, so he swung himself along the rough boulder and landed.

Now to the most important part.

He took out a little bottle of red spray paint from the leg pocket of his suit and with a few quick movements, he sprayed a large E and an H. Under the letters, Erik Hall wrote:
SEPTEMBER 7, DEPTH OF 300 FEET
, then snapped a few pictures.

He pulled off his neoprene hood and ran a hand through his curls. Several more flashes. He examined the results on the camera’s display.

His hair was a bit thin, now that he was over thirty, but it was hardly something you’d notice. The dark circles under his eyes made more of a dramatic impression than anything else, Erik thought to himself.

Then he sank back down into a crouch in the stench and the cold. He tried to forget that no one knew where he was and that no one would miss him if he drowned or disappeared in the tunnels far below ground.

T
he Dyke Divers had left bolts where he could secure his navigation line before his dive. When it was fastened, he pulled on his flippers and mask and put the regulator in his mouth for a first test breath. Before he had time to exhale, he had already taken a large step down into the water. The roll of line he was holding in one dive glove spun quickly, and above him he could see how the strong wire cut through several layers of ice as it followed his sinking body.

Below the surface, the better part of the light from his headlamp was swallowed by the dark walls. But the water was relatively clear, and the beam carried farther than he had dared to hope.

Erik braced himself against the wall of the shaft and pushed out into the emptiness. The safety line followed him, winding through the water like a tail.

The bottom appeared in the light from the lamp on his right wrist. Under him were remains of the litters that had been used to carry the ore out of the tunnels. Erik moved his fins carefully and floated
weightless above a wheelbarrow. His underwater camera began to flash and take pictures of the iron gear that had long ago been forgotten and left behind. Precision tools, sledgehammers, chisels, an ax, cracked pump rods, and farther off … something that looked like a track.

Erik let his body sink, and he landed next to the narrow-gauge rails. The depth gauge read sixty-nine feet under the surface of the water. Even with a slow ascent to avoid the bends, he still had plenty of air left.

He sailed above the rails, which led him away from the middle of the shaft. He had the sensation that he was moving into a narrower space and slowed his speed. That was when he caught sight of the timber-framed opening of a tunnel, where a yellow scrap of fabric was speared onto a hook.

Erik glided forward a few more yards, and he illuminated the scrap with the light from his headlamp.

It wasn’t fabric hanging there by the entrance to the tunnel, it was a strip of bright yellow seven-millimeter neoprene. Triple seams, made to be highly visible in cloudy water. The girls must have cut up an old wetsuit in order to mark the right way in.

The tunnel was perhaps two yards high, and a rusting mine car stood in the middle of it. Above the car there was a small space where it looked like he could pass.

Perhaps this was the beginning of a long system of tunnels and shafts—without a diagram or a map, it was impossible to know. But according to the Dyke Divers’ pictures, it would lead to someplace that was dry.

He managed to make his way over the rusted-down mine car and tried to increase his speed gradually. With a third of his air in reserve, a total of forty-five minutes of dive time remained. Fifteen minutes tops in this direction, before he had to turn around and make his way back to the surface.

The farther he got into the tunnel, the more it began to slope upward. His clinometer showed a gradient of eleven degrees upward, and it was only getting steeper.

Only about a hundred yards more. Then the tunnel would presumably be at a higher level than the flood, and it would stretch out, dry and full of air. Or … the tunnels, because now he had come to a fork. The one that continued to the left seemed navigable. The right-hand one was barely a yard wide, dilapidated and tight.

He couldn’t see very far into the dark passage with his headlamp. But the light was more than sufficient to show the yellow strip of neoprene, which indicated that the Dyke Divers had taken the difficult path. Slender female bodies, and there had been several of them, could help each other. He was alone, as always, and wouldn’t even have enough room to turn around, if he should be in a hurry to get out.

Erik let his glove stroke along the frosty ore and hung there, weightless. Then he chose to continue to the left, but quickly felt like giving up, because only a bit farther he noticed that this tunnel also quickly began to narrow.

Ten yards, twenty, thirty. Soon he would be able to brush both walls with his fingertips. At forty yards his shoulders grazed stone. Forty-five. Two iron supports made a narrow doorway. He twisted his body to the side and managed to force his way through.

But the tunnel became increasingly narrow, and before long he reached two more supports, this time so close to each other that he would have to tear one out if he wanted to keep going.

Erik directed his flashlight to where the support was attached to the ceiling and the floor. It wouldn’t be possible to dislodge. The right support’s floor attachment seemed to have rusted away. Two bolts had detached at the ceiling … and two still seemed to hold. He grasped the right support and moved it carefully. It moved an insignificant amount. If he were to really put his weight into it …

Erik hung suspended above the narrow-gauge rails.

Then he let his headlamp search the darkness as far into the tunnel
as possible. To turn around now … he shoved on the support again, and it unexpectedly came away from the wall in a cascade of gravel and small rocks. His view became clouded, and he curled up to protect himself, expecting the immediate collapse of the rock. After a while he began to search through the silt with his gloves. With lumbering movements, he managed to squeeze his way through.

After the bottleneck, the tunnel widened again. He had to hurry now. Maybe the Dyke Divers’ tunnel and this one would converge again, just a bit ahead? Surely he had gone another ninety or hundred yards in just a few minutes. Hundred twenty, hundred thirty. It shouldn’t be long before he reached the surface, because the upward slope was still just as pronounced.

He was so busy keeping an eye on the narrowing walls that he didn’t realized until it was almost too late that he was about to swim into an iron door. It was completely rusty, with gaping holes, and it hung from the tunnel wall on crooked hinges. Through one of the openings he could see the bolt that kept the door from opening.

Erik let his light play over the brittle brown metal … and what was that? A lime deposit?

He swam a little closer.

No … not lime. White lines of chalk. Someone had written large, shaky letters, an incomprehensible word:

NIFLHEIM

Niflheim … maybe it was the name of the mine itself?

Erik placed the fingers of his diving glove against the rusty surface and gave it a careful nudge.

The door moved, if only a bit.

He pushed harder, and through the water he could hear the hinges creak.

Erik took a deep breath from the regulator. Then he pressed both of his diving gloves against the door and pushed with all his might.