Strindberg's Star Read Free Page A

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 tunnelas 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.
    Creaking, it swayed suddenly as the hinges came loose from theirattachments. As it fell it swirled up a cloud of mud, and the water turned brown.
    He pushed himself forward, but didn’t see the stairs that rose behind the iron door and when his forehead hit the bottom steps, the diving mask was wrenched off and the regulator torn out of his mouth. The sudden cold gave him such a shock that he immediately swallowed water in a choking gulp. He started to fumble blindly for his backup hose, but couldn’t find it. With his eyes shut tight, Erik flailed about and his lungs burned for air.
    Air—
    He desperately raised his head up and was suddenly above the surface of the water again. Snorting, spitting, and when he instinctively inhaled through his mouth and nose: that nauseating stench.
    He hyperventilated so that he wouldn’t fall forward and immediately throw up, and then crawled up the last few steps of the stairs and collapsed; just breathe through your mouth, just through your mouth now …
    W hen his breathing calmed, he rolled over on his back and rested, until he slowly managed to sit up.
    Erik noticed that he had dropped the lifeline that indicated the path back to the original shaft. He had no energy to return. The water must clear up first.
    The smell of rotting made it hard to think.
    He pulled off his fins and the mask, which had ended up hanging around his neck. The continuation of the mine tunnel ran away into a nightlike darkness, narrow and damp. He stood up on his reinforced-rubber dive shoes and started to walk.
    The ore was even and regular where the tunnel had been burned out of the rock. The tunnel branched off suddenly, and he went to the right. Then there was another