Annerton Pit

by Peter Dickinson

  “Drifted?” said Martin. “Doesn’t sound very strenuous.”

  “That means the coal seam came out at the surface and they were able to get at it sidelong,” said Mr Smith. “But coal seams don’t lie level, and at Annerton the seam ran tiltways up into the hill, so when the big iron-founders and steel-founders started and they was begging for good coking coal, it paid the coalmaster at Annerton to sink a pit from the top and fetch the coal out that way. That’s the main Annerton Pit, where the Disaster was.”

  “What happened?” said Martin.,

  “Why, nobody knows.”

  “I thought your grannie’s uncle got out alive.”

  “A’m coming to that,” said Mr Smith mysteriously. “Those days, when a miner died in a pit, there was never an inquest. Think on that! What’s a few dead miners, they said, when there’s coal to be won so as the coalmaster’s missus can buy a few more diamonds to wear at the balls in London? So there was never an inquest at Annerton, though there was questions in Parliament and a bit of a fuss in the London papers. But the papers up here, they belonged to the coalmasters too. A whole shift dead, forty-seven men and women and boys and girls— why yes, they’d little girls in the pits them days, younger than you are, laddie—and the papers said it was from natural causes! Eeya! Think on that!”

  Metal and china clattered as he slid his plate across the table. Then the little room filled with the reek of treacle-sweet tobacco. Jake heard the faint whisper of paper being carefully rolled into a cigarette.

  “Where’s the ghost?” said Martin.

  Mr Smith grunted, too absorbed in getting his smoke just as he wanted it to think of anything else. At last he lit up.

  “Why yes, the ghost,” he said. “Now there’s one thing you’ve got to know about Annerton. They had never any trouble with gas, never any explosions or foul air. Don’t ask me why—there’s pits like that, and there’s others where you’re in trouble if the fans stop for a couple of hours only. Now there’s a tip at Annerton on the cliff top—not a tall pointy one like you see from the railways, more of a big mound. You know what a tip is? Why, it’s everything that comes out of a mine that they can’t sell as coal. They’d have dumped it in the sea, except that they didn’t want to go silting up their harbour. So there’s this thundering weight of rock and stuff on top of the cliff that God never set there. Maybe it was that, maybe it was something else, but all of a sudden, July nineteenth, eighteen hundred and thirty-seven, the men working above ground heard the whole hill groan. Like a great beast in pain, it was. And then there came a crash and next thing they knew, was the main shaft had all caved in. It was lined with timber, of course, but my grannie told me it was just as though the hill had clutched that timber like a man crumpling a letter in his fist. And there was forty-eight miners trapped below!”

  “How far down?” said Martin.

  “Not far. Why, no. Twenty fathom, something like that. Course, the night shift was back at the pithead straight away, and digging. They was full of hope, because like I told you Annerton was always a clean pit. So they dug all the first day, until toward evening somebody come from the shore saying they’d found my grannie’s uncle Jack wandering down there, clean out of his wits. My grannie wasn’t born then, of course, and Jack was only a boy. He was drenched with water— not seawater—and they made out he must somehow’ve got himself washed out down the drainage cut that carried the water out of the pit. They got no answers out of him, so his Mum put him to bed and he lay there, shuddering and weeping until the pneumonia caught him and he near died of that. Course, there was no way back along the drainage cut, but his getting out so unexpected made them look for other ways in, and while the digging went on at the main shaft they thought to explore down an old bye-pit. A bye-pit’s more of a ventilation shaft, but sometimes it’ll have rungs in it, or an iron ladder, if the pit’s not a deep one. So there was this bye-pit, and that was blocked too, but nothing like so bad, and they’d dug their way down through it by the middle of next morning. And what did they find?”

  “You tell us,” said Martin.

  “Why yes, A will. They found the rock-slip had not been down in the mine at all. It was in the layers of rock above, and the coal seam was just as it always was, with only a bit of a roof-fall here and there. And the air was good and clean too. But every miner, man, woman and child, was dead. Dead and cold. And the face men that should have been trying to dig them out from below had dropped their picks in the galleries, and they’d all clustered to the foot of the shaft, and there they’d died. Not starved, not gassed, not burned. Just died.”

  “What of?” asked Martin.

  “Ask your granddad,” said Mr Smith sharply. “A’m telling you what A know. They brought the bodies up through the bye-pit, and never a man of them would go down into Annerton Mine again. There was still coal down there, but the coalmaster couldn’t hire the miners to work it. The word went around that there was something in Annerton Pit, or maybe just that it was an unlucky pit.”

  “What do you mean, something?” said Martin.

  “A don’t know. But my grannie’s uncle Jack, he lived a long while and he never got his wits back. Not that he was raving mad. They never needed to put him away. But he couldn’t speak sense, and some days he’d sit from morning to night in the corner, shuddering. Only when he came to be dying and my grannie was sitting by his bed he woke up in the middle of the night and looked at her like he’d suddenly remembered who he was. ‘We let it out,’ he said. ‘We loosed it from the rock.’ He said it quite plain, though for forty years he’d never done more than mumble. And then, before she could ask him what he was talking about, he was dead.”

  Chapter Four

  The BMW growled up the slope as though it were gnawing its way to the top of Sloughby Moor, bouncing and bobbling on the rough track, but when Martin cut the engine the huge peace closed round Jake like a dream of space and silence. It was as though the noise of the bike had been a pain, a wound, which the quietness flowed in to heal.

  “Can’t take her any farther,” said Martin. “We’ll have to walk if we want to go on. What a place! I wouldn’t mind tramping fifty miles, and I bet I’d never see a soul.”

  Jake lifted his helmet off and let the wind ruffle through his hair. The silence wasn’t dead, or absolute. A curlew called and was answered some distance away, and farther still a tractor engine toiled, but distance dwindled the sound of it to a whispering tock. All the while the bitter wind hissed through grass-stems, a wind empty of smells, air as clean as water.

  “What’s it look like?” said Jake. It wasn’t a question he often asked.

  “Bare,” said Martin. “I can’t see a house or a tree. That next hill’s got stone walls running up it, straight as a ruler. If we go along the path here we’ll come to heather pretty soon. It’d be easy to get lost, even without fog coming down, because the hills flow into each other. No landmarks. I don’t mean it’s shaPeless. It’s like the flank of a horse, fawn-coloured, with heather-coloured blotches, and we’re a couple of ants or something. Feel like a walk, ant?”

  “OK.”

  The path was only wide enough for one, so Martin picked his way through the tussocks beside it with Jake’s fingertips on his wrist. They walked nearly half a mile and stopped again.

  “Well?” said Martin.

  Jake stood still, trying to shut the present out of his mind, trying not to hear the hiss of the wind or feel its chill nagging. He concentrated on the Moor, which had been here always. He knew he could usually tell when Granpa was in the same room with him, so perhaps now he might be able to sense faint traces of his having walked along this path a week ago. But he felt nothing.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a bloodhound, Mart.”

  “No need to get shirty,” said Martin. “It was worth a try. Anyway, I’m glad to have come, for its own sake.”

  “How’d Granp
a have got up here, anyway?”

  “There’s bus stops on the bottom road. That’s about four miles off.”

  (Granpa could have afforded a small car but he preferred the company he found on buses and trains. Sometimes he hired a taxi to visit a really isolated ghost; Sergeant Abraham was getting someone to ring round the Newcastle taxi firms and check, though Jake doubted whether he’d have thought it worth it for Roman soldiers only seen by hikers in fog.)

  “I expect Sergeant Abraham could ask the bus company,” said Jake.

  “Right. And if we go back the other way we can stop at—what’s it called ?—Burlaw and ask at the pub if they’ve seen loopy old ghost-hunter saying which way to the Romans. He’s bound to have come one of those ways.”

  “He’d probably do that himself—go one way and come back the other, I mean—so he could ask at pubs and post offices. That’s what he usually does.”

  “OK, that’ll rule out Sloughby. Let’s get back to the bike and out of this wind. I want my lunch.”

  Penbottle Pele stood nearly a mile out of Penbottle village, along a farm track. The woman at the pub had told them to ask Mr Yerby about the ghost, and he’d turned out to be an ancient cottager who had elected himself as the local expert on the subject. He told them the same story as Mr Smith, but not half as well. A few details were different, such as the wife not being hanged by the Scots but hanging herself after her husband’s death. He hadn’t seen Granpa, which almost proved Granpa hadn’t been there, but they rode down to the Pele none the less.

  It was a heavy, oppressive place, smelling of cow-dung and rotting grass. When Jake stood in the middle of the space where the byre had been he could sense the rough and massive walls reaching up towards the square of sky at the top. They seemed to be leaning inward, as if they were still clutching in a miser’s grasp the rooms that had once lain between them. The rank air at ground level was still, but higher up leaves shuffled gently where shrubs had found root-hold in the tower walls. Leather scraped on stone fifteen feet up.

  “She’s not there now,” said Martin’s voice. “Far as I can see, that is. There’s the hole where the beam ran, and there’s the hearth. The windows are incredibly small. It must have been a pretty dismal place even when it had a roof and things.”

  “It feels dismal now.”

  “You’ve been listening to too many ghost stories.”

  That might be true, thought Jake. Granpa often said that if you told people that a place was frightening, or that something frightening had once happened there, they’d be more likely to feel frightened when they went. You didn’t have to believe in a ghost still dangling in the moonlight from a beam which had rotted centuries ago; the story itself was enough to produce a shudder, as though time were a wire which still vibrated to the touch of that particular cruelty. Jake used his stick to find a path between the cow-pats and reached the door in time to hear Martin coming down the steep outer stair.

  “Well?” said Martin again.

  “I don’t know,” said Jake. It was too difficult to explain. Suppose it had been possible to do the bloodhound trick, to pick up, somehow, traces of Granpa’s personality after he’d left, then the moor had been too empty and bare and the Pele was too crowded and muddled. It would be like trying to pick out a single whisper across a playground of yelling kids. And it probably wasn’t possible anyway.

  “OK,” said Martin. “Don’t let’s worry. He’d be bound to have talked to Mr Yerby. So that’s two off the list for Sergeant Abraham. I suppose it’s progress of a sort.”

  It was more than an hour’s ride to Annerton Dyke. Last night’s gale had blown itself out but seemed to have left patches of cleaner, colder, saltier air inland; after a while, though, Jake was sure they were travelling with the sea itself only a mile or two away to their left. They passed through a small town and spun along a good main road for quarter of an hour. Then the bike slowed and turned seaward. Now the road was a quiet lane which twisted sharply several times, usually at right-angles, as though it were running through a village; but from the echoes of the exhaust Jake could hear that there were no houses anywhere near, only low banks or ragged walls on either side, and nothing much beyond them. Then the road straightened again, but after a couple of minutes Martin stopped the bike and throttled back. Now Jake could hear the sea and smell the sting of salt.

  “No entry. Road closed. Danger Falling Rocks,” called Martin through the burring engine note. “There was a sign in the main road saying the hotel wouldn’t be open till May.

  “Where are we?”

  “Top of a cliff. There’s a sort of harbour place down at the bottom. Quite a big yacht there, and what looks like a pub. Caravan site. The road’s a real slope—it looks dangerous enough without the falling rocks … Hey! something’s been down there since last night’s rain! Truck of some sort.”

  “What’s that over there?” said Jake, waving to his right where there seemed to be a sort of gap in the wide march of the wind off the North Sea.

  “Must be the old mine-tip, I suppose,” said Martin. “Looks like a ruddy great burial mound. Good place for a picnic on fine day—you could see miles—it’s right on top of the hill. That must be what caused the Disaster.”

  “I expect so. Listen, Mart—Granpa never pays any attention to ‘No Trespassing’ notices and things like that. I think seeing we’ve come so far …”

  “So do I. Hold tight.”

  Martin revved the engine and took the bike slowly forward. The tilt was as sudden as that of a slide in a children’s playground—Jake used to love going down the slide when he’d been small. Martin picked a path over a slithering, rutted surface. The engine coughed and popped and its echoes coughed and popped back off the cliff to their left. The salty updraught from the waves came in sudden gusts. Then the track levelled and its roughness changed to the wincing regularity of cobbles. There was a smell of mutton stew in the air, penetrating the stinging sharpness of the sea and mixed with the faint but unchanging odour of pubs, stale beer and oak and vinegar. Martin cut the engine. Jake eased himself off the pillion, loosed his helmet and slid his stick out of its sheath. He heard the sea-wind gusting against the flat front of a building on his left. A curtain flapped in an open window. Over to the right a wire halyard clinked irritably against the metal mast of a yacht. A gull mewed by.

  “Pretty in a bleak sort of way,” said Martin. “Very pretty on a sunny day, I should think, though those caravans are an eyesore. Time somebody invented a burrowing caravan, so that everybody could go and camp in beauty spots without spoiling them for everybody else. Otherwise there’s only this pub and some beat-up buildings the other side of the creek— something to do with the old mine, by the look of them.”

  “I can smell cooking,” said Jake.

  “So can I. Hotel looks pretty shut. Hang on.”

  He strode away. Jake heard a light rattle and thud as he tried the door.

  “Locked,” he called. “I’ll try round the back. You be all right?”

  “Fine.”

  Martin’s footsteps and the squeak and brush of his leathers vanished round a corner. Jake leaned against the bike, enjoying the slight updraught of warmth that rose from its cylinders. Good old bike, he thought. I hope Dad understands … there’s going to be another gale tonight—the sea sounds hungry. Now, where am I?

  Close by, Jake could hear the lap and slosh of smallish waves breaking against a regular surface—the sea-wall, presumably, but protected from the larger, noisier waves by some sort of mole further out. There was a steady even growl running across a fair arc of sea to windward, and then somehow becoming more irregular to left and right as it dwindled away. Jake cocked his head this way and that, picking out separate pieces of the general roar, until he was pretty certain that he was standing on a quay at the narrow end of a funnel-shaped inlet—a broad, flat funnel—formed by the Dyke running into the sea. The
harbour mole cut off a triangle of calmer water this end. Over to the right as he faced out to sea were cliffs, not very high, with the mound of the tip on top of them. That was where the mine had been. To the left the land seemed to slope down less ruggedly—at least there seemed to be nothing that side to toss back scraps of echoes—so perhaps that was where the caravans stood empty, waiting for another tide of summer visitors. Just before Martin’s footsteps came back he picked out a rhythmic clank from below the cliffs to the right. It didn’t sound the kind of noise the wind could set up.

  “Not much cop,” said Martin. “Only a batty old girl peeling spuds. Pub only becomes a hotel summer weekends and holidays—otherwise the landlord opens as he feels like. He’s got a gang of friends here, industrial archaeologists by the sound of it, studying the old mine. She said she hadn’t seen Granpa. But she didn’t sound as if she’d really know whether she’d seen him or not.”

  “There’s somebody working over that side. I heard hammering.”

  “That’ll be the archaeologists. Let’s go and try there. Just the sort of thing Granpa would poke his nose into.”

  “He said in his card it was great to be in mining country.”

  “Right. Leave the bike here, I should think.”

  They walked back over the cobbles. From habit Jake registered directions and distances, though he wasn’t likely ever to come here again. Nine paces beyond the point where the hotel front ceased to catch the wind, letting it rush on to buffet the main cliff, Martin led off a little to the left along a rough track squelchy with mud and sea-slime. The rumble and grunt of the larger waves against the mole came nearer.