He did not know his mother's name or his father's, or whether he had ever had either. He knew only that he had lived for as long as he could remember in a place he called the lower rooms, and that the lower rooms were reached through a doorway in the side of a hill, and that the hill was not far from where Trout had found him, though he could not say in which direction. He told Wickham that the lower rooms were lit by something that was not fire and not sunlight, and that the walls of the lower rooms were smooth and cold and not made of any stone he had ever seen on the surface. He told Wickham that there were other children in the lower rooms, and that some of them were older than him, and some were younger, and that none of them, so far as he knew, had ever been outside.
He told Wickham that the ones below, were not people. He was very specific about this. They walked on two legs. They had faces that looked in most respects like the faces of people, but they were not people.
And the children in the lower rooms all knew this, and none of them were ever confused about it. The ones below spoke a language that Thaniel could understand, but could not repeat because the sounds could not be made by a human throat. They fed the children on a paste that was gray and had no taste. And they measured the children with instruments that clicked.
And they took blood from the children at regular intervals, which was what the seven scars on Thaniel's chest were from, though he did not know why the scars were in that particular line, and no other child he had known had scars in the same pattern. He told Wickham that he had escaped or been released. He was not sure which, three nights before Trout found him. He had woken in the middle of what passed for night in the lower rooms, and the door to his sleeping chamber had been open, and there had been no keeper at the end of the corridor, and he had walked, following his hand along the wall, until he had come to a stair, and he had climbed the stair.
And at the top of the stair there had been a second door, and the second door had also been open. And beyond the second door there had been a room he did not recognize, and beyond that room there had been a passage, and beyond the passage there had been earth and roots, and eventually night sky. He had walked in the dark for what he thought was a long time. He had slept for a while under a fallen tree.
He had walked again, and then he had come to the road and the flat stone, and he had sat down on the stone because he was tired, and because he had a feeling, which he did not know how to explain, that if he sat on the stone, someone would come. Wickham, in his letter to his sister, wrote that at this point in the conversation, the boy stopped speaking and turned his head for the first time to look directly at the sheriff. And Wickham wrote that the look on the child's face was not the look of a child at all. It was the look, he said, of a very old man who has just remembered something terrible.
And Thaniel said in that same calm voice, “The ones below will come looking for me. Not tonight, probably not tomorrow, but soon. And when they come, they will not come alone. Whatever you do, you must not let them into the parlor.” The next morning, Sheriff Wickham sent a rider to the county seat at Beverly with a telegram addressed to a man named Colonel Henderson Price, who was the president of the West Virginia State Historical Society and a personal correspondent of Wickhams dating back to the 1880s.
The telegram was brief. It asked Price to come to Pickens at his earliest convenience and to bring with him any records he possessed concerning what Wickham, in the telegram, called the “older diggings.” That phrase, “the older diggings,” is not one that appears in any of Wickham's surviving correspondence before that date, and its meaning has been the subject of some debate among the small circle of historians who have studied the Thaniel case. Marjorie Salow in her 1994 article argues that Wickham was referring to a set of preindustrial excavations in the region that predated the coal boom of the 1880s and which had never been satisfactorily explained by geological survey teams. Whether those excavations were the same as what the boy called the lower rooms is a question that Wickham himself, according to his sister's letters, was actively trying to answer during the six weeks that followed.
Price arrived in Pickens on the 9th of April, 5 days after the boy's discovery. He brought with him three trunks of documents, most of which were maps and survey records collected during his tenure at the historical society. He also brought a nephew, a young man named Silas Corwin, who was 22 years old, a graduate of the mining engineering program at Washington and Jefferson College, and who was, according to Price's own letters, uniquely suited to assist in what Price called a delicate geological inquiry. Corwin's name will become important later.
For now, it is enough to say that he arrived. He was introduced to the boy and he spent two days going through Price's maps in the sheriff's parlor while Wickham sat with Thaniel and continued to write. The boy answered every question Wickham put to him and he answered them without hesitation, but he could not always answer them in the terms Wickham wanted. When Wickham asked how many other children were in the lower rooms, Thaniel said there were as many as fingers on a certain number of hands, but he did not know how to count higher than 12, and he could not describe the number in any other way.
When Wickham asked how long he had lived there, Thaniel said he had lived there for the time it takes a child to grow from being carried to being able to walk and then again for that same amount of time and then again and he thought maybe four times over, though he was not sure. Wickham in the ledger estimated that this made the boy between 6 and 8 years old, which matched Dr. Cade's physical assessment. When Wickham asked what the ones below wanted with the children, Thaniel said he did not know, but he had a guess. And his guess was that the ones below were waiting for the children to be ready.
He did not know ready for what. On the 11th of April, Wickham, accompanied by Dr. Cade and Silas Corwin, took the boy out into the country to see if he could identify the direction from which he had walked. They traveled in Cade's covered buggy. Corwin brought a compass and a leather-bound notebook.