“Wouldn’t do to have these here go up in our faces now, would it, with the fellers diggin’ for us. Don’t want ’em to find us all of a mess now, do we, hey? Hey?”
Slade shook his head. The last of the caps was defused, then McCaulay began the task of easing each cap from the dynamite sticks, in case it should detonate through an accidental bump or further shifting of the rock. When all had been disarmed, he lay back and took several deep breaths, the skin of his face running with sweat.
“Best be turnin’ off our lights, I’m thinkin’, save ’em for later. No tellin’ how long a job it’ll be, the diggin’.”
Both carbide lamps were turned off, and the darkness became absolute. Slade felt that without light, the thing called darkness extended beyond the confines of the tunnel’s end; it reached as far as Slade cared to extend it, further even than the natural darkness of night that must by now have fallen far above them in the world. The darkness that had swept across his eyeballs when the lamps were shut down was of a velvety richness, a darkness without depth. It seemed to Slade’s suddenly blinded eyes like water into which ink had been poured, or air so choked with chimney soot it became something else, some other, impenetrable substance that probably could be found nowhere but down where he saw it, an underground dark of blackness beyond all known shades.
“Be able to hear ’em comin’, most likely. Hear ’em diggin’ even when they’re far off still. Then we’ll know. Could be a day or two, even so. Too bad for us we et our lunch already. Be starvin’ hungry by the time they fetches us out, the both of us. Got anythin’ left in your water flask? Near empty, mine. Can hear drippin’, though. Always some water in a mine. Hear it, just a little ways off? That’ll see us through all right. Ought to put our flasks under it to catch what’s there. Waste not, see? I’ll do that now, I will.”
The shocking brilliance when McCaulay turned on his lamp again caused Slade to turn his head away. When the light passing through his eyelids had lessened, he opened them, and saw McCaulay scrambling over the nearest chunks in search of the dripping he had heard. Slade made no move to assist him; if McCaulay wanted to play at acting concerned, Slade would let him. With McCaulay out of sight, Slade drank the last from his metal water flask and restoppered it. He would have drunk what was left in McCaulay’s but he had taken it with him. It would have been interesting to see the look on McCaulay’s face when he came back to find his flask empty. The thought of that made Slade smile. It would irritate McCaulay if a lot of pranks like that were played on him. Instead of Slade becoming more and more fearful of the danger they were in, which would make him easier to replace when the time came, he would do just the opposite, and cause McCaulay every kind of upset he could think of. It would pass the time, and keep him alive.
“Found it! Just a trickle, but it’ll do for us. Pass your flask over.”
Slade moved cautiously toward the light of McCaulay’s lamp, suspecting a trick, but McCaulay lay on his back beneath an overhang of rock created by the cave-in, completely vulnerable to attack. His arms were stretched into darkness, despite his lamp. “It’s back here, hell of a squeeze.… Flask’s under the drip now. We’ll fill yours when this’n gets full.”
Slade handed his flask over, then resumed his position by the rock wall. McCaulay followed, and both turned off their lamps. “Take a couple hours maybe, to fill all the way up. We can wait, I reckon.” McCaulay laughed briefly.
Soon McCaulay slept. Slade waited for the sound of his slowed breathing before allowing himself to relax. The air was hot enough to permit his removing his shirt to make a cushion. Slade folded this and tucked it beneath himself, then placed both forearms across his knees and bowed his forehead to rest on them. He was calm, although he had been unable to figure out how the replacement of himself by McCaulay was supposed to occur. It could not be anything too difficult, because McCaulay was not a smart man. Maybe it was Shoupe who had been elected as replacement, but the tunnel had collapsed a minute too soon. No, it was McCaulay, because it had been while he watched the man working with his fuses that Slade first became aware of the plan to replace him. It was the actual business of replacement he could not understand, in fact he had already forgotten how it was that he realized in the first place that replacement, not simple murder, was the object. He had been positive about it at the time, though, so he would not change his mind now on account of a little haziness. Replacement, that was their game. What had they planned to do with his body? Was it to be swallowed somehow by the mine? There were plenty of played-out tunnels and corridors where no one went except to shit. They might place him far along one of those, then seal it up. No one would notice the stink of a rotting man along with all the other bad stenches down there. He would make McCaulay tell him all the details before he died. McCaulay would have to die so Slade could survive. There was no doubt in his mind about that. Slade considered doing it while McCaulay slept. It would have been easy, even in total darkness, thanks to McCaulay’s plugged sinuses; the man gave himself away with every whistling intake of breath.
Slade considered sleep, but decided against it. He could hear no sound from outside the collapsed tunnel, no thump of pick against rock, no hammering of drills reaching for the trapped men, and the absence of these sounds told him there would be no rescue until McCaulay somehow informed those on the outside that Slade had successfully been replaced. It was irritating to understand so very little of what was afoot, but Slade reasoned that time would reveal everything. Others had tried to fool him before, and had paid the price. He could recall neither the men nor the circumstances, but was sure he had survived whatever it had been that they arranged to bring him to his knees, or he would not have been alive still; he would have been replaced long before. He had bested them then, and he would do so again. It would be smart to sleep while McCaulay did, he thought, or he would fall asleep later, when McCaulay was awake. McCaulay was no match for him in any case, but it would be prudent to match his periods of wakefulness with those of his partner. Having decided that sleep was wise, Slade released himself into a deeper darkness.
He knew it was a dream when he felt himself rising through the ground. Afraid at first, he held his panic in check, then found he enjoyed the slight rasping sensation as he passed through solid rock during his ascent. The dream body was moving slowly, steadily upward. Slade had never experienced a dream like it before, or at least had no memory of anything so strange. He seemed to rise forever, but eventually his head passed into open air, and his shoulders and torso followed, although they seemed to stretch themselves like a wad of molasses to do so. A moment later he was free of the earth, drifting upward still. Falling snowflakes passed him by, but he felt no chill against his naked skin. He continued to rise, and on looking down to see if maybe he had left some kind of hole in the ground behind, saw that he was some distance above a town. Like a bird, he thought. The novelty of flight pleased him greatly, and Slade found that he could cause himself to move left or right simply by desiring to do so. He made himself stop in midair, not wishing to rise too high above the town, which he now recognized as Glory Hole. It looked much different from above, but the various chimney stacks aligned his sense of direction, and he drifted slowly to a position above the Grand Mogul.
There was a great deal of commotion beneath him, a chaotic assemblage of horses and men and vehicles of one kind or another, all illuminated by torches that danced like blazing flowers below. Then he remembered the cave-in. He had escaped somehow, but McCaulay was still down there, buried deep in the ground. How had it happened? Slade felt sad for McCaulay, even if he knew the man intended replacing him before too long. If McCaulay could come up into the air and float like a bird on the wind as Slade was doing, he might abandon his plan, because the feeling of being high above the earth produced in Slade a sensation of exquisite pleasure. He had never felt so serene, so content. It no longer seemed like a dream, although he knew it could be nothing else. It would be a shame when the dream ended, he thought, and he had to waken.
Something was near, some unknown thing. Slade felt its presence, and turned to confront it. The thing was formed like a young girl, but he believed it was a false form; the true nature of the thing was in its face, which was half covered by an ugly shadow. The thing was staring at him with much concentration, coming closer to examine his face, and as it moved through the air, the hem of its nightdress stretched out behind it like a swatch of fine muslin, and Slade knew himself to be in the presence of a ghost. If the shadow-faced girl was a ghost, and she flew in the air as Slade did, could it be that he, too, was a spirit, like her? Had McCaulay gone ahead and murdered him while he slept? Had he truly allowed that to happen?
He had to know, and no sooner was the wish to see his real body expressed than he found himself hurtling toward the ground, passing through it with a mild tearing sensation along his sides, then he could see the tiny space beneath the ground where he squatted with head and arms on knees, with McCaulay sleeping still beside him. Slade rushed into himself, a feeling akin to inserting his body sideways through a crack between window and windowsill, and he burst out again from the body he had reinhabited, taking the body with him as he rose in utter darkness to step forward and strike his boots against rock.
The sound of it, and the reawakened awareness of confinement it brought, drove Slade to a state of rage. He punched at the black winding shroud around himself, skinned his knuckles against rock and howled. To his right, McCaulay rose up in confusion to add his own voice, a querulous, fearful shouting that brought Slade’s fists and boots down on him before he was fully upright, and feeling them, McCaulay began to scream, unsure if the thing attacking him was Slade, or some demon of the darkness that had also given Slade cause to bellow and howl. McCaulay dropped to the tunnel floor and began casting about frantically for his lamp, but his confusion sent him in the wrong direction, and the whimpering that came from him gave Slade a target he could not miss despite their mutual blindness. He kicked and pounded the body crouched at his feet, infuriated by the sounds it made, unmanly sounds that Slade associated with beaten dogs, and so he beat the creature groveling in pain and bewilderment beneath him, until it absorbed the blows without any further protest.
Exhausted, Slade collapsed beside McCaulay, blood thudding like a drumbeat through his head. He held the skinned hand that had begun the rampage, cradled it and moaned in sympathy for its hurt. McCaulay was responsible for the fix both men were in, Slade knew that much, but he could not remember why. McCaulay had done something with the dynamite to cause the cave-in, and he had no right to be shouting and getting under Slade’s feet like that, sounding like a fool dog. Slade would have kicked him some more if he had the strength, just to teach him a lesson about tangling with a man like himself. The pain in his hand was losing its excruciating edge, becoming a dull throb that could fuel only a sense of misery. Slade felt as sorry for himself as he felt angry with McCaulay. Something had happened in his sleep, something very strange and important, but he could not recall even a tiny part of it. That, too, was McCaulay’s fault; the man’s whining had woken Slade from a dream beyond dreams, and ruined it. Slade was sure he had never dreamed before in his life, although he had heard other men talk of dreams, and now that he had at last experienced one, it had been cut short by the fool lying close by in the dark.
Now he wanted light. He must have light, or he would become fearful of the dark. Where was his lamp? Slade crawled about on hands and knees until the familiar contours of his lamp were felt beneath his bloodied hand. He hugged it to his breast like a lost friend, then pulled matches from his pocket and struck one alight. The flaring before his unprotected eyes was like the sun, and the match burned itself out against his fingertips before Slade could open his eyes again. He struck a second match, keeping his head turned away, and lit the lamp. When he was able to see by its beam, he looked at his hand. It did not look as bad as it felt, and Slade’s spirits rose a little. McCaulay was groaning, partially conscious, and the sound was an interruption, another insult from the weakling who had caused everything to go wrong. Slade suspected there were others involved, but could not bring their names, or the precise nature of their wrongdoing, to mind. He had slept too deeply, he suspected, and some of the thoughts inside his head had trickled out like liquid from an overturned bottle, and dribbled away into the dark. The things he had thought before falling asleep were hiding now behind the massive boulders choking the tunnel. Slade imagined that displaced thoughts such as those that had escaped him were supple things, rather like worms or centipedes, which accounted for their ability to wriggle out through his ears while he slept, and scuttle away. They would be heading for the tunnel’s far end, where it joined the main tunnel, which led to the lifting cages. The thoughts would want to rise up and be warmed by sunshine, if it was daylight again, and not stay behind under the ground with Slade. He wondered how many of his thoughts had been lost to him that way over the years.
McCaulay groaned again, and his left hand stirred. This caused Slade to become angry again, but in a more controlled manner than before; it was the presence of light that enabled him to do what he did next without losing his temper. Slade searched among the lesser rocks that had descended from the tunnel roof along with the massive chunks that held him prisoner, and found one to his liking. He took this to McCaulay and applied it with considerable force to the side of his head. McCaulay shuddered several times as the rock was raised and smashed down again. Eventually he was still. Now there would be no more interruptions while Slade thought.
The lamp was turned off as a precaution against waste. He could not judge how long it might take for the tunnel to be cleared. He would have plenty of time to jam McCaulay’s head under a rock, to make it appear he had been a victim of the cave-in. That did not concern him for the present. The darkness was welcome after so much light, so much chaos. If Slade had been cut off by himself in the first place, McCaulay would not have paid the price for his interruption and panic. Slade felt it necessary to absolve himself again of any wrongdoing. He wished to concentrate on the darkness and, if possible, go back to sleep and reinsert himself into the dream that McCaulay had ruined.
To facilitate his return, Slade arranged himself as before, and waited for sleep to come, but his apprehension over whether the dream would be waiting for him prevented any rest. He squirmed about to make himself more comfortable, but that increased his awareness of himself. Slade wanted himself to go away and leave the other Slade there, the one that could enter dreams, but his physical body would not allow it. He was very hungry. His empty stomach would prevent him from achieving sleep. The dream was held at bay for want of food. Slade used his lamp again to locate McCaulay’s lunch pail, and found it empty of everything but the tantalizing odor of roast beef. Slade thought he should be suspicious of roast beef, but could not remember why. Today his memory was worse than usual. He knew he had forgotten several important things since beginning the shift. Maybe the forgotten things were waiting for him inside the dream. Believing this might be so made him more vexed than before over his body’s resistance to sleep. If he filled his belly with water it might allow him to forget the hunger gnawing at him, and allow the dream’s return. McCaulay had shown him where the flask was placed to catch water dripping from the wall, but Slade was not sure now where that was, even though it could only have been within several yards of him. He would have to locate it by sound. The droplets had produced a hollow echo as they entered the flask and splashed inside; he clearly remembered it, but now that he was listening for that same sound, it was not there. Had the dripping stopped? If it had, he was in trouble; a man could last a lot longer without food than he could without water.
Slade began to search for the seep, yanking McCaulay’s body clear of the fallen rocks. It had been deeper inside the tunnel, he was sure, and low to the ground. He wormed his way among the jumbled blockage, pausing often to listen for the telltale dripping. He found he could smell the water, but he could not hear it, and the frustrati
ng closeness of it caused his thirst to escalate. Now the water was paramount in his thoughts, the one thing he must have, and his inability to find it in so small an area made him angry all over again. Then he heard it, the faintest of drippings. The sound came from behind a rock he had examined several times, and he felt a fool for not having discovered the source earlier. With far greater difficulty than McCaulay, who had been a skinny man, Slade wormed his way beneath and around the rock. There stood the flask, filled to its narrow neck with water. The distance from the top of the flask to the tiny rock ledge from which the drips descended was less than an inch, too brief a descent to create anything but the least sounds of impact. The flask was overflowing down its sides, and had already formed a small puddle around its base. Slade’s own flask stood nearby, waiting to be placed beneath the niggardly spigot.
He grabbed the full flask and drank greedily, lying on his side. The water entered his chest and coursed down through Slade like cool quicksilver. He had never drunk anything so fine as the hard mineral-tasting water exuded by the broken walls of his prison. He drank until the flask was half empty, then placed his own beneath the dripping rock. The droplets fell inside and landed with a hearty splash, the sweetest sound he had ever heard. Slade wormed his way back to the tunnel face and set the first flask down nearby before turning out his lamp. His gulpings had produced a stomachache, and he doubted that he would be able to sleep again for a little while.
Waiting, he felt a strange contentment, and attempted to find the reason for it. He could only conclude that it was pleasant to be alone, even in such dangerous circumstances. The body of his partner counted for nothing. He would arrange McCaulay’s crushed head under a rock the next time he went for water. Sooner or later men would break through the rocky barrier separating him from them, and they would ask how McCaulay died. Slade listened for the sounds of digging; there were none. He slept.
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