by Kate Cayley
“Jesus, help me. Jesus, help me.”
He’s looking up at her, eyes wide with naked fear.
“I don’t have a radio,” she calls. “I’ll go find a Femco. I’ll be right back—”
“Don’t leave! I can’t get down. You need to cut me down.”
It’s a hundred feet down to the next level. If Roxane cuts him down, he’ll fall to his death. There’s something funny about the way he’s talking, and his eyes are too big and too black. He might be concussed. He might be in shock. His back might be broken. That’s why he’s jerking like a worm on a hook in the gaping maw of the chute.
“I’ll get help—”
“He’s coming back!” Wycliffe says, his voice taking on a different kind of panic. “Don’t leave me. Dear God, don’t leave me alone down here with him!”
“What are you talking about?”
“He did this to me. It was him.”
As far as Roxane could tell nobody had done anything to Wycliffe. It looked like he was working the fifteen-pound sledge on top of the grizzly and he forgot to unclip his safety lanyard before driving away in the Kubota. When he ran out of line he got pulled out of the Kubota and down the drift and then he fell down the chute. He should be dead.
“He’s there!” Wycliffe says again. “Behind you!”
Roxane resists the urge to whirl around; she knows nobody’s out on the rail with her. But even as she thinks it, a whisper of wind stirs the loose strands of hair that have fallen from her braid, prickling the hairs on the nape of her neck.
She digs in the pocket of her coveralls and finds her spare light, sets the flashlight on the grizzly rail so it shines over the top of the chute. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll be back in one minute.”
“Don’t you leave me, you bitch!” Wycliffe screams. “Don’t leave me alone in the dark with him—”
His shouts chase Roxane down the drift, headlamp arcing back and forth as she stumbles on the jagged, slippery rock. There are Femco phones every half-kilometre. She jumps into the Kubota so she can drive down the drift but then remembers the loci’s blocking the way. Her breaths rattle in her ears as she runs. She passes the Femco the first time, backtracks and finds it, makes the call.
She finds out a few days later that Wycliffe has some broken ribs but is otherwise fine. “He’s damn lucky,” Gloria says. “He’s always been damn lucky.”
Roxane tells Gloria that when the Mine Rescue team had Wycliffe strapped to the stretcher Wycliffe was raving. “He said, ‘I can feel it in the rock! Can’t you feel it? Can’t you? It’s the quiet before the big burst.’ ” Roxane hesitates. “He said we’re all going to burn.”
“That crazy bastard,” Gloria says. “He was in shock. He didn’t know what he was saying. And he’s a nutcase, anyway. He didn’t like being on that stretcher, probably. You know what happened the last time they had him on a stretcher? He had volunteered to play the injured man when the Mine Rescuers were practising for a competition. He was strapped down, and they were administering oxygen to him through a facemask attached to a hose. When they were finishing up the exercise, the Captain detached the hose and farted in it. Everybody thought it was so funny that they passed the hose around until everyone on the team had a turn farting.” Gloria laughs so hard he hacks up a wad of phlegm and spits it, plop, on the floor of the cage. Roxane’s glad he can’t see her making a face.
“When they were carrying him away, he said there was somebody down there,” she says. “Somebody who whispers in your ear in the dark.”
Gloria laughs. “Yeah, that sounds like Wycliffe,” he mutters.
“I felt somebody standing behind me,” Roxane says. “It sounds crazy, but I did.”
“I’ve felt and seen and heard all kinds of strange things down here,” Gloria says. “But I can explain all of them. Underground is the darkest dark there is—it plays funny tricks on your imagination, especially if you’re half-crazy already. You can put whatever’s in your head into that dark space in front of your eyes. And once it’s there it never goes away again.” Gloria laughs. “No, I wouldn’t put too much stock in what old Wycliffe Nichols says.”
“Why not?”
“Wycliffe should have died in the fire along with the two Mine Rescue men, but somehow he survived. And nobody’s ever forgiven him. Maybe because he says Jesus saved him.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“He meant it was Jesus who pulled him up to the refuge station when he was passed out.”
“Oh,” says Roxane.
“When they found Wycliffe and Wycliffe told them what happened, the Captain had to take his bullshit story seriously. They thought maybe one of the other miners had saved him, someone who hadn’t signed out before leaving. So they sent more Mine Rescue men down to the lower levels to see if someone was trapped, and that’s when those two boys got trapped themselves. Maybe he’s not crazy,” says Gloria. “But Jesus has a sick sense of justice if he kept Wycliffe around and let the other two burn. You can’t have scum like that working underground.”
The cage hits the collar, the door opens, and everybody files out into the amber light like fool’s gold that floods the drift near the refuge station.
—
Roxane is working down on 4000 level again. But this time she’s not alone. On the way back and forth to the chute she can hear voices every time she passes one of the sublevels.
When she parks the loci and walks down the drift, she sees that the sublevel’s filled with people: geologists and the shift-boss, and a bunch of miners. Their shadows dance tall and monstrous on the drift wall behind them as they titter excitedly, huddling together, walking back and forth and pointing. They’ve been drilling with longhole machines and blasting to get at the ore-filled stope. The subdrift’s a mess of broken muck and puddles of water. A silent, squat scoop sits in front of the stope, covered in dust like a calcified, caged animal long forgotten.
“What’s going on?” Roxane asks.
It looks like there’s something written on the drift wall. The marks are like pressed leaves, stippled dots in striped ridges forming vaguely round shapes.
“They’re fossils,” one of the geologists says. “They’re over 4.6 billion years old. Those things used to be all over the Earth.”
“Too bad we have to blow ’em up,” says one of the miners. He’s taking pictures with his phone, the flash wiping out the darkness in between the hole-punches of the headlamps. “Look at ’em. Aren’t they evil-looking little buggers? They’re just like a big grub or a centipede. I hate the sight of them. Why do you suppose that is? Why do you think I hate the sight of them so much?”
After Roxane’s delivered her last load, she parks the loci and hooks up the battery so she can charge it for the next shift. But it’s still forty minutes until the cage comes so she walks down the ramp to the subdrift where they found the fossils. Everybody’s gone, probably waiting for the cage, but the fossils are still grinning down at her.
They are ugly, she thinks. They writhe this way and that when she turns her head and drags the light across the rock to look at each of them in turn. Their depths well up with shadow, making them look real, like they’d been trapped alive for millions of years, just waiting to stretch out their ventricular legs and crawl away.
Roxane’s light dips down to the big chunks of muck lying in front of the stope. The same stippled dots and cracked-open shells lie in broken heaps on the ground around her feet. A long, cucumber-shaped imprint with ridges down its middle leaps into shadowy movement, gnawing at her steel-toe.
She takes a slow step backward and turns around. There’s a light in the distance, a headlamp. She feels a jolt when she realizes somebody’s been standing there, watching her.
The headlamp arcs from side to side, and then shines around in a circle; he’s rolling his head. It’s the sign for “to me.” “Come closer,” he’s saying. She starts to walk toward him, feet crunching fossil dust.
“Hello?”
Roxane calls.
The miner makes no reply except to keep swinging his head, saying “closer” again and again.
“What is it?” Roxane yells. “Is something wrong?”
No answer.
When she gets to within ten feet of him she stops. He’s standing in the centre of the subdrift, blocking the way to the main drift where the loci’s parked.
“Who are you?” Roxane asks. She can see the shadows of his legs in the penumbra of her headlamp, thinner and longer than they should be. She’s been walking forward with her head bowed to avoid shining her light in the man’s eyes. But she can’t stand the dark silence stretching between them, so she lifts her light, trying to get a look at him.
Before she can see his face, the man steps into the shadows and she loses sight of him.
Roxane’s breath catches in her throat. There’s a sudden crack and a jarring feeling in her neck and then she’s in the dark. She realizes that the bastard broke her headlamp with something heavy, a wrench or a hammer.
“What the fuck?” she tries to say, but the words won’t come. She takes a step back, reaches into her coveralls for the flashlight she always carries. But she pulls it out too quick and drops it. It clanks down onto the drift, and Roxane knows it could be a foot away and she won’t find it in the dark, even if she crawls on her hands and knees looking.
Think. Don’t panic. What are you supposed to do when your lamp goes out? Sit down in the dark and wait for somebody to come find you. You wouldn’t get more than twenty feet walking blind in a goldmine—you’d fall, maybe down an open chute.
But then she feels hot breath on her face, rank as sulphur.
She takes a step backward, then another. Then another, and then she’s running through the dark. Once she gets out onto the drift there’ll be the light of the loci in the distance and she could run through the black without tripping too much, using the light to guide her blind feet. She thinks she can hear heavy boots thudding along behind her in the dark. The sound is getting closer, almost in time with her own footfalls. Then she’s falling, and for a moment that stretches too long she loses all sense of up and down.
She hits the ground hard, relief bursting forth with the air from her lungs. The drift is on an incline underneath her and she knows she’s on the ramp that leads up out of the subdrift.
Get up. But now that she’s down she feels like she could stay still and wait for help; whoever’s on the subdrift with her is as blind as she is. She could disappear into the dark. Eventually somebody would find her. But she knows if she stays and waits she’ll never come back underground again. Get up, she thinks. Get up. Just get up.
When she crests the ramp and rounds the corner out of the subdrift the warm circle of the loci’s lights glows in the near-distance, showering gradients of penumbra closer and closer until her feet break the light and she is no longer as dark as the darkness; she can see a part of herself again. When she reaches the loci she sits down in the driver’s seat and turns it on and starts to drive before she even tries to catch her breath.
—
“Don’t read too much into it,” says Gloria when he’s taking her up to the surface. “It was a nasty joke. Just somebody messing with you. One of the old-timers giving you a hard time. It’ll teach you to never shine your light in someone’s eyes, anyway.”
Roxane’s next shift’s cancelled because a slow trickle of water built up somewhere above 1000 level and then blasted out of a ten-by-ten chute holding five hundred tonnes of muck. Someone was taking muck out of the raise at the bottom with a scoop, and when they’d taken enough the water gave way all at once, burying a brand new scoop in rubble after moving it two hundred feet down the drift. It could have killed somebody. As it was, the scoop operator who got hit was in the hospital with a collapsed lung and a broken wrist. Roxane realizes, only after she sees the muck blown down the drift, that she was tramming near the chute on the day the water gave. If the man in the dark hadn’t broken her light she might have been the one laid up in the hospital, or worse.
“Maybe that’s what Wycliffe was talking about,” Roxane says to Gloria. She’s trying to sound like she doesn’t believe.
“In a place like this it’s a miracle accidents don’t happen more often,” Gloria says. “And if they keep happening, they’re going to close this place down. They won’t shut us down just because people keep getting hurt. They’ll close when the bad morale causes production to get so low there’ll be no point in keeping it open anymore.”
Roxane knows what’ll happen if they close the mine. She remembers growing up playing on streets lined with derelict houses and broken fences hemming in overgrown lawns. The downtown strip was burned down and boarded up. Everything slept quietly, lying nascent until another company came in wanting to refine the old tailings or strike down to another mother lode.
“They dug too deep,” Gloria says. “And they didn’t fill in the ground properly. It’s dangerous here. Why does a nice, pretty girl like you want to work in a hole like this, anyway?”
“I need money,” Roxane says.
“You can get money working on top of the ground.”
“I can’t make enough money working anywhere else. I have a little girl, and she’s got nobody but me.”
“What about her daddy?”
“He was one of the boys who went missing in the forest fire a few years back,” Roxane says.
On the news they said that the fire front changed direction in the wind at the last minute, trapping the crews that were working at the front. They had to resort to their emergency survival plan: digging a big trench in the ground, as deep as they could get it before the flames and smoke got too close, and then pulling a big fireproof tarp over their heads in the hope that the fire would burn over them. But they were never found.
“I’m sorry,” says Gloria. “I am sorry to hear that. But your little girl’s the reason to get out. You’re not planning on staying down here forever, are you?”
“What about Wycliffe?” Roxane asks, trying to change the subject. “He looks like he’s seventy, anyway.”
“He was retired until just a few years ago. It’s funny you should mention the fire. Wycliffe had a hobby farm, and he lost everything in the fire—his whole property went up. He had to start working again. But he’s done now, after that with the Kubota. Good riddance, I say. He’s too old to work anymore. He’s dangerous. Crazy.”
At the end of her next shift, just after Roxane has parked the loci and she’s walking back to the cage, she sees the solitary headlamp again. The light starts to roll in the dark—“come closer.”
This time she stays where she is. “Who are you?” she calls. “What the hell do you want?”
The light stops rolling and starts to bob gently up and down. He’s walking toward her.
“Stop!” Roxane shouts. “Stop right there!” She shines her lamp at the man’s head.
“Will you get that fucking light out of my eyes?” the shift-boss says.
“Sorry.”
“Listen, I think there’s a power outage. The phones are down, and I can’t get ahold of anybody. I want you to go to the refuge station and wait there till I come back. If you meet anybody on the way, tell them the same thing.”
“What’s happening?” Roxane asks. “Is something wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”
His frame jitters in the light while he walks away. No jokes now. He hurries over the uneven ground, splashing through the puddles without seeing them.
When Roxane gets to the refuge she finds it empty. The lights don’t work, but she still has her headlamp. She closes the big steel door behind her. It’s set in a concrete wall, designed to block the refuge off from the rest of the mine. The refuge floor is concrete too, but the other walls are jagged, bare rock. She picks up the phone that’s mounted beside safety procedure posters on a piece of plywood backing. But the line is dead.
She sits down on one of the
picnic tables in the middle of the room, the dark air pressing down on her shoulders. Maybe it’s just a power outage. Or maybe there’s something wrong with the cage. It happened three or four times a year that the hoist got tangled or something went wrong with the winch. The last time a shift got stuck underground, they had to wait for hours. The Captain was thinking about making them climb up to the surface in the escapeway.
Roxane feels the air stir, a herald of movement unseen. She holds her breath. There it is. The steady wheeze of slow, deep breathing.
Slowly, she shines her light around the circumference of the room, starting in the corner nearest to her. Her light catches in the crags, playing tricks on her eyes. She’s almost swept the entire room; still, there’s nothing. But in the last corner her light slides over a bundle of rags, slides back. Roxane leaps to her feet.
A pair of eyes blink open, glassy and reflective in the light. It’s Wycliffe Nichols.
“Why the hell didn’t you say anything when I walked in?” Roxane asks.
“I didn’t know who you were,” Wycliffe says. “I couldn’t see your face. You might have been him.”
He’s curled up in a dozen pairs of old, dirty coveralls, Roxane realizes.
“What’s going on out there?” he asks. “Why’s the power down?”
“Shift-boss sent me to the refuge,” Roxane says. “He says he’s going to find a radio. The phones are down. He’s coming back soon.”
“He won’t be back,” Wycliffe says. “No, we’ve seen the last of old Roger. Old Roger who likes a good joke.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Wycliffe’s voice is hoarse, as if he hasn’t spoken for days. His breaths rattle around a moist cough that sounds like it issues from infected lungs. Though he’s sleeping in a nest of them, he’s not wearing any coveralls—just dirty jeans and a flannel shirt. His boots are tall, insulated rubber ones like the kind Roxane’s father used to wear to shovel the driveway. He has no hardhat.
“Where’s all your gear?” Roxane asks. Wycliffe makes no answer.