Grotesquerie

by Richard Gavin

  I take the hairbrush and mirror from Rita’s dresser. Noting their condition, I rummage around father’s workroom until I find a can of silver polish and a soft rag. A canvas grocery sack hangs from the foyer coat rack. I pluck it from its perch and fill it with a few canned goods, a jar of instant coffee, and some packets of oatmeal. I find five bottles of water left in back of the pantry.

  I begin my journey back to the mine.

  *

  The Dunford Incorporated coal mine first began operating shortly after World War II and had been Evendale’s main employer for the next four decades. But then a tragic tunnel collapse took the lives of a dozen miners. Eventually, through resulting lawsuits and legal fees, this accident also took the life of Dunford Inc. The company declared bankruptcy and shut down the mine in 1983. It has stood in the arid field on Evendale’s outskirts ever since.

  I escaped Evendale in 1991, moving to the city in search of myself. At that time there were rumblings of a new company purchasing and re-opening the dormant mine, but it was not to be. When Dunford Inc. laid my father off (mercifully, a year before the collapse) he used to tell my sister and me that there was hardly any coal left in those shafts anyway. I’d always thought these words were merely a way for my father to balm his wounded pride, but given that no one has seen fit to resume clawing at those tunnels, perhaps he was speaking the truth.

  Either way, the site was left to rot; its towering iron scaffolds bowing like aging men, its subterranean maze resting hushed and hollowed like some vacated netherworld.

  As to the origins of the mine’s more recent and more rarefied role in the lives of the townspeople, accounts differ depending on whom you ask. That a posse had formed to rescue a child who had scrabbled down into the shafts on a dare and gotten lost seems to be the most common account. But the age and gender of the strayed child varies from teller to teller. A point that does run uniform through this folklore is the discovery of the greenish light.

  The search party had apparently bored through one of the walls of the farthest tunnel. Their claim was that the lost child could be heard sobbing and pleading on the far side of that rugged culm barrier. When their picks and shovels and clawing hands finally pierced through, they found neither boy nor girl, but instead a luminescence. Were they the beams of some strange fallen sun long interred in the Earth’s bowels? The gleam of a green jewel lodged within a great crown? I can only theorize based on the testimonials that have been whispered to me below, for I have never seen the light myself. Nor has Rita. But unlike me, she is convinced of its existence.

  My sister loves to brand me as the eternal skeptic, one unwilling to accept that there are things that lurk beyond the reach of our five meagre senses. Honestly, I cannot say that I’m even that, for a true skeptic would be eager to disprove the myth of the emerald light, to expose the folly of those Below. While I will concede that yes, there may well be a greenish glow in the depths of the mines, I suspect that its presence is some natural anomaly, some phosphorescent property in the carbon, or an optical trick that arises when the human eye struggles against absolute darkness.

  Still, I am not so convinced of these empirical theories that I am willing to creep down into those far depths to prove or disprove anything.

  *

  I am only a few hundred yards from the gate to the mine site when I witness the impossible.

  At first my brain doesn’t properly register that what comes trundling out of the roadside bracken is a dog. (The sight of something moving in Evendale is now so rare it truly startles me.) I press down hard on the brake pedal and the pouch spits out the tinned foods into the jeep’s foot-well. The creature plods onto the road, pauses to turn its dismal face toward me. I put the jeep in Park and step out, taming my enthusiasm so as not to startle the poor animal.

  It is a yellow Lab. I crouch down and coo to her. She comes to me with neither reservation nor love.

  That it has been foraging and roaming for some time is obvious. But I am unaware just how badly the poor beast had been faring until I run my hand along its matted coat and feel the fence slats of its ribs pressing against the fur. I race back to the jeep and retrieve the tin of Spam I’d taken from our pantry, along with one of the bottles of water.

  The dog is now lying as though the littered asphalt road is her bed. I uncap the bottle, pour some of the water into my cupped hand, hold it out to her. She laps at it with a pale tongue.

  I peel the label off the Spam, open the tin and shake the meat out onto the label. This I slide before the dog. She sniffs it, perhaps in distrust or disbelief, then begins to lick and gnaw the pinkish cube.

  As I sit beside the dog, her tail now faintly wagging, I hear the sound of a helicopter. Shielding my eyes, I look past the rim of the escarpment to see the small chopper coasting on the ashen sky. A TV reporter perhaps, or an airlift ambulance; someone merely passing over Evendale. That is what Evendale is now, perhaps what it has always been; a place one passes by or through or over on their way to somewhere else. Is this why the exodus Below has been allowed to occur without any outside notice at all? Or is there something other at work here?

  “Do you want to come home with me?” I ask my new companion. Every inch of me goes cold once I realize that I have referred to those dank and cultish tombs as home. The dog looks at me with her teary, tired eyes. I pick her up and gently pile her onto the passenger seat. Then I drive to the far end of the road.

  *

  Dad had been part of that first group that tore the barricades from the mouth of the entrance pipe and breached the mine for the first time in years in search of a supposedly lost child. I only learned this a few months ago from Rita. She told me that the men were glad to have my father among them, for he was the only one left in Evendale to have worked the tunnels when Dunford Inc. was still in operation. I suspect it was more than his knowledge of the shafts that made Dad a welcome member of that search party. He had always been a calming presence in our home, so I can only imagine what a balm it must have been to have his wise and careful suggestions offered in his sonorous voice, especially once they were down in that stinking darkness.

  Just what it was Dad saw in that green radiance Below I never came to know. I only know it changed him. The fallout of this encounter was drastic enough for Rita to plead with me to fly home and help her find some means of bringing him back around.

  When I returned to Evendale I discovered a catatonic shell in the shape of my father. He never spoke, scarcely ate, slept nearly eighteen hours a day. I insisted to Rita that a hospital was the only place for him; there he could receive not only medical attention but (perhaps even more importantly) psychiatric care. Rita, despite asking for my help, stubbornly refused to admit Dad, stating that this was a family problem and therefore could be fixed by the family. I suppose I should have protested more passionately, but I didn’t. It seems I also inherited the same caginess that Rita possessed. Perhaps it’s a symptom of growing up in a small town, but propriety and fear of scandal, however slight, always seems to automatically trump common sense.

  Three weeks ago, Rita and I finally agreed that hospitalization could not be put off any longer. Dad had always been a strapping man, so his rapid mental dissolution was a sobering and painful wake-up call to my sister and me.

  The night before we planned to drag Dad off to receive help, he snapped out of his depression. Late that night my sleep was broken by the clanging of pans and the thudding of cupboard doors. Rita’s bedroom door was shut when I walked past it to investigate.

  I switched on the kitchen light and found my father preparing a goulash so redolent with spice I teared up the moment I entered the kitchen.

  “Dad?” I’d said to him.

  “Hungry?” was his reply.

  I told him no, then watched as he left the ingredients to simmer on the range. He sat down at the kitchen table and asked me to switch off the light. I did, and together we sat in the lunar glow from the window, listening to the food hissing in its p
ot.

  “Can’t sleep,” he admitted, answering a question I never posed.

  “You’ve probably been sleeping too much.”

  “Well, I’m awake now.”

  Something in his choice of words unsettled me.

  “Your sister told me that Sadie-Anne next door boarded up her house a couple of days ago.”

  “Yes, I saw that. Any idea why?”

  “Probably to become a pit-canary like the others.”

  I swallowed what little moisture there was in my mouth. “Why are people running down there, Dad? What are they running to?”

  His silhouette shrugged.

  “I know about the glow down there, Dad. Rita told me. Is that what the pit-canaries are moving to the mine for? Are they looking for the light?”

  If my father was fazed by my questions, he contained his emotions, just as he had always done with all things. Dad: even-keeled, stoic, strong, like a lake of still black water.

  “I think maybe they’re after what’s on the other side of that light,” he answered at last.

  “What’s beyond the light, Dad?” Worry and tears mangled my voice into something thin and reedy. “What did you see down there?”

  It seemed like a long span passed. We sat in stubborn silence like two monks lost in contemplation. The goulash bubbled over the pot rim and splashed onto the burner, hissing as though maimed.

  “Been dreaming a lot lately,” he said at last. “Funny thing, that. In my whole life I think I can remember one, maybe two dreams. And those were from when I was a boy. But lately…” His voice trailed off.

  “There was this one dream,” he said after a long pause. “I must’ve had it three, four nights in a row. I’m in this meadow, real peaceful, real pretty. I’m standing beside an old-fashioned watermill and I’m holding a large bucket with a rope handle. The mill’s wheel is turning slowly, but the weird thing is, the only noise I can hear is the creaking of those wooden gears. I can see the brook moving along, I can see it being lathed up by the paddles and I can see the runoff gushing back down into the brook, but the water moves completely silently. You know how sometimes in dreams you just know things about things? Well, in this dream I knew I had come to this brook to gather water to bring back to my village, which was on the other side of this great stone building that this watermill was attached to. Maybe they were grinding grain in there or something, I don’t know. But I was there for the water because the villagers were all dying of thirst.

  “I reached down to scoop up some of that quiet water, when this awful, awful feeling came over me. I stared down into the brook and noticed in the reflection that a figure was now standing above me on the bank. I tried to cover my eyes because I didn’t want to see who or what that figure was, but the next thing I knew I was standing face to face with it. It was a woman, a very strange, very thin woman. She was trying to tell me something, but she was as mute as that water, so she traced some symbols in the air with one of her stick-like fingers. She spelled out that the water was poison. I nodded to show her that I understood. Then you know what I did? I filled that rope-handled pail and carried it back to my village and when I got there, I took a wooden ladle and I doled out that poisoned water to all my wretched-looking neighbours. When that awful deed was done, I poured the last sip into my own palm and drank it myself. Then I woke up.”

  I wasn’t sure how to react to my father’s account, but I was desperate to keep him talking, so I asked him what he thought the dream meant. Again, he shrugged. Then he rose to tend to his food.

  “The light’s coming,” he announced. At the time I believed he was referring to the sun that had begun climbing above the hedges beyond our kitchen window. Now I am not so certain.

  That was the last time I spoke to my father. The next night, while I slept, he moved Below.

  *

  The day’s organic gloom makes it seem much later than it is as I edge the jeep off the lane and along the entrance driveway of the mine. At one time this passage was truncated by a heavy iron gate bearing a sign that warned of the legal repercussions and physical dangers that trespassers could endure. Today that gate hangs permanently open and the sign is covered over with spray-paint.

  The floodlights on their tower perches shine on me, weakly, like a pair of potted moons. I gather up the groceries and the dog that I carry and comfort as though she is my own flesh and blood. As I cross the gravel lot toward the mine entrance, I tighten my grip on the Lab, for she’s begun to whimper and squirm.

  “You’re okay, girl,” I assure her, “you’re okay. What should I name you, hmm? What do I call you?”

  But the nearer we draw to that rugged tunnel with its downward pitch, the more the dog begins to panic. I know that my clutching her against her will is purely selfish. How I need her companionship, her vitality, her love.

  As I struggle with her up the wooden rungs and into the tunnel, the dog begins to growl and bark in a sad, effete protest. No doubt she can sense the offensiveness of whatever lurks Below. She wriggles free and charges for the tunnel’s mouth. I cry out and lunge for her, but she leaps heedless of any risk. I hear her claws scrabbling against the ladder. A moment later I see the dog tearing across the gravel plain. She nears the road and is soon gone.

  I slump against the cold black wall of the shaft and I sob. It is the kind of outburst usually reserved for children; the frame-shaking, convulsive weeping that threatens to tear the soul up by its roots.

  The sound of approaching footsteps causes me to fight for composure. How sad is it that even now, under such conditions, we pit-canaries still feel the need for personas?

  “Everything alright, miss?” one of the sentinels asks me, the light on his hardhat beaming in the blackness like a lustrous pearl.

  I nod, pick up the sack of food and brush past him, negotiating the wooden slats with care as I make the long descent toward the platform where the carts are nested.

  A family of four sits at one of the platform’s picnic tables, eating peanut butter and saltines.

  The people come to the upper level in shifts. For most of them this is as near to the surface as they’re willing to go, despite the dangers to their health. Strategically installed fans spin constantly, both here and deeper Below. They do their best to draw the methane out of the tunnels and to coax fresh air down from the surface. But they have been rotting down here since Dunford Inc. shut down production, and I remember Dad saying that even when those fans were new it was always a risk spending too much time “under the crust.”

  “One of the drivers will be up shortly,” the mother calls once she sees me climbing into a cart. I turn back and look stonily at them, at their wan faces smeared with soot, the clothing that hangs loose and grubby upon their malnourished frames. They are like a faded photo of some anonymous Dust Bowl family in a history book.

  “Never mind,” I say, releasing the brake. The ancient wheels squeak, and the cart begins to roll toward the greater descent.

  Down I go, down, staring numbly at the roughly textured tunnel. I begin to imagine the juts and pockets as being some strange and tedious grammar in Braille, some record of a world that had existed below ours for unknowable years, their entire secret history spelled out here in angled carbon.

  These walls are veined with thick cables that feed power to the vent fans and to the garlands of uncovered light bulbs. To my eye these strung lights have all the impact of a few fireflies straining to illuminate a canyon.

  The cart reaches the final swoop of the track and I ease up the handbrake to soften the final thud that always comes when the track ends. The carts are inexorably fed into a pent-in platform constructed out of lumber grown soft from too many years in the methane-reeking chambers.

  There has yet to be any theft or pillaging down here, but I do my best to conceal the sack of groceries all the same. The converts here have commented about how this profound fellowship and egalitarianism is somehow a sign of renewal, of change. I think it is only because things ha
ven’t yet gotten desperate enough. They’ll start scavenging and rending sooner or later. It’s simply a question of time.

  The only proper shelter at this level is the rescue chamber that the miners once relied upon in case of a collapse or other accident. It is a pod where one could hole up until help arrived. Now, with its oxygen tanks long drained, its food devoured, and its water guzzled, the chamber serves as a curious spirit house, a shrine that the people have embellished with mementos of those whose spirits they claim have been glimpsed beyond the emerald light, or with fetishes meant to represent things unfamiliar but still experienced.

  I sit down at one of the picnic tables where Rita is knitting a scarf. I watch her for a spell, watch the way her eyes habitually move from her needles to the tunnel a few yards away.

  “You get my dress?” she asks without looking at me.

  “Yes, and the other things you asked for. I also got some food. Not much though. There’s water, too.”

  A young girl, perhaps fifteen, moves past our table and makes her way to the decorated tunnel mouth. Rita and I both watch as she crouches, and slides her hand into the gap. She seems to be feeling something in that chute, something that appears to greet her touch in a pleasing way. For a moment it looks as though the girl is about to enter the void, but she ultimately lacks the required conviction. She shuffles back to her mattress at the far end of the tract and lies down.

  “Have there been any changes?” I ask Rita.

  “Define ‘changes.’”

  “Anyone else gone in…or maybe come back out…there?”

  “Don’t be stupid.” She puts her needles back in her canvas bag along with her yarn. I study her as she carries the silver hairbrush and the handheld mirror into the pod and adds them to the shrine. As she exits the shrine, she refuses to look at me.