The Pit-Heads: Short Story

by David Nickle

  These miners had something, all right. But they weren’t only doling out art lessons — those miners took something different away in return for their blood. And simply because they had so far only bestowed in exchange for blood was no reason to assume that blood was the only coin they understood — or that trade was the only way to draw the genius out of them. I hefted the shotgun to remind myself of that possibility.

  The tunnel was wider than it was high at first, and I had to stoop under lips of shale and thick, tarred cross-beams as I moved along. After a time, the tunnel widened out to a space that must have been used as a lunch room when the mine was active. I played the light over the few artefacts that the miners had left: a metal-topped table, surrounded by four folding metal chairs; a stack of more chairs, leaning against an oblong wooden box — an oblong box! — which I pried open with shaking hands only to find it empty but for three badly corroded car batteries.

  Sitting on the table was a fabulous anachronism — an ancient oil lamp, with a single crack snaking up from its base. Layers of soot made the glass nearly opaque. It would make a good still-life, I thought, and laughed quietly.

  I should have brought my paint kit down.

  Beyond the lunch room, the tracks ended and the tunnel took a steep downward slope. There were no steps, but long stems of cedar had been bolted to the rock wall on either side, making banisters. I descended the staircase, such as it was, and at the bottom found a room filled with buckets, made of wood slats and iron hoops and filled with a black liquid that was, after all, only water. The tunnel continued beyond that, and as I followed it I noticed that the long wires and wire-mesh lighting fixtures that had been stapled to the ceiling had been replaced by ornate lamp shelves, such as one might have found in a home around here, before the advent of electricity.

  I had stopped for a moment, resting against the wall between two of these low sconces, when the miners found me.

  Three of them stepped into the light, and stood frozen there as I hefted my shotgun. Unlike the first creature I’d seen in the pit-head, these wore nothing but a few rags over limbs that were taut with sinew. Their eyes were round and reflected back the flashlight beam like new pennies. The hair on their scalps and their chins was thin, and shockingly white.

  “Don’t come any closer,” I said.

  In response, the tunnel filled with a low chattering. I caught fragments of thick Quebecois French, mixed with other sounds: whistles, clicking; a pig-grunt; a wet, bronchial wheeze.

  I don’t think they understood me any better than I understood them. But they understood the shotgun all right. The trio watched me for a moment longer, then one of them turned and vanished into the dark. When the other two followed, I was after them.

  We ran deeper into the mine. If the floor had been rough as the upper tunnels, I don’t think I would have been able to keep up. But the rock down here was so smooth it seemed to have been carved, not dug.

  The creatures finally escaped me in a wide room — so wide that its walls were beyond the reach of my flashlight. It had a low slate ceiling, supported with thick wooden posts at regular intervals. I stopped, scanned my flashlight across the shadows around me.

  “Bonjour, mon petit.”

  It was the same voice we’d heard in the pit-head. The one that had spoken to Paul, with such familiarity.

  Paul had called it, what? Monsieur Tevalier. Mon père.

  Father.

  “Show yourself,” I said.

  Monsieur Tevalier’s breath made a frosting on the hairs of the back of my neck.

  I whirled, barely in time to face him. But I couldn’t get the shotgun up as well. The flashlight fell to the ground and I felt his talons dig into my coat. I only caught the barest glimpse of his face as he lifted me into the dark. The mutton-chops had darkened, and the flesh on his cheeks had reddened, plumped out with the new blood.

  “Vous étudiez avec le maître,” said the vampire — then, in thickly accented English: “I show you the way.”

  How was it for Paul, the rest of them? How was it for the miners, for that matter — who made their own dark bargains here in the earth beneath Cobalt?

  I can’t say for sure, but it must have been different than the darkness was for me. The twin punctures of the vampire’s teeth would have been an utter shock to them — until the moment it occurred, they would have had no reason to expect such a complete invasion as the vampire would have perpetrated.

  I was prepared for the attack, though. Where five days earlier I might have looked away — forgotten the assault — as Monsieur Tevalier pierced the flesh of my throat in the rooms beneath Cobalt, I did not lose myself.

  Tevalier spoke through my blood, and I was attentive. He and his kind had been in the land here for as long as the mines had been in Cobalt, moving between the great rocks that remained when the world last thawed. As my blood pulsed down his throat in clicking gulps, he showed me: the earth pulsed too, and that essence that moved through it also flowed through Tevalier, through me. If Tevalier drained me, swallowed all my blood, then the earth’s pulse would be all there was. The clarity would be absolute, because I and his land would be as one. In the early days of Cobalt I wondered at what the miners, the prospectors, would have made of that clarity.

  Because that was the secret of Tevalier’s gift. It dwelt in the razor-line between my heartbeat, absolute insularity — my life — and the earth’s simpler rhythm, a final subsumation to the external — my death.

  Should I ever stray too far, one way or the other, there would be Tevalier, waiting in the pit-head to nudge me back onto the artist’s one true path. Did I understand the depth of my dependency? he asked me through my blood. I felt his tongue on my neck, rough like a cat’s. Then, with the care of a physician removing a long hypodermic, he withdrew.

  I thought again about the prospectors — thought about the strange town they had built on the earth above, the mining companies that had prospered in it, and the terrible bargain that had founded it.

  Did I understand the depth of my dependency?

  Before he could withdraw completely, I swung the barrels of the shotgun up, pressed them against the brittle flesh and bone that covered the vampire’s heart.

  “Je comprends,” I whispered, and pulled both triggers.

  The hardest part of getting out of the minehead was the climb up the rope, something I hadn’t expected. But the run up along the tunnel had proven exhausting, and I was lightheaded already with the loss of my blood. When I fired off the last two shells back into the tunnel, the recoil nearly knocked me into the shaft. The buckshot did its job, though, sending the two vampires that followed me screaming back into the depths. I wanted to rest then, wanted the escape to be finished, but of course I could not, and it was not. I had to ascend the rope.

  I lost the shotgun, and nearly lost the flashlight on the way up. Finally I did have to rest, so I tied myself off and dangled there in the shaft, the timber creaking above me and my limbs feeling like meat below; I had the feet of a hanged man.

  From the depths, the vampires whispered a cacophony. I had removed their head with Tevalier, taken the one who had made them, shown them their own line — evidently, they had much to discuss. When I resumed my ascent, the whispers had grown quieter, and nearer.

  It was near noon when I reached the top of the shaft, and that may have been what saved me. Cobalt is too far north for the sun to have shone straight down the open tower in November, but it made a bright yellow square among the upper rafters, and the light filtered down through the dust to make the pit-head brighter than I’d ever seen it. Clutching at the numbness in my throat, I stumbled to the door and out into the afternoon.

  Only as the sun set, five hours later, was I able to calm Paul down and convince him that we had to leave Cobalt before dark. And then, I think it was only the screaming, hungry and subterranean as it echoed from the dark of the pit-heads, that convinced him:

  Tevalier was
gone; and with him went the razor-line that protected us, and gave us our art.

  That summer, the Women’s Art League of Hailiebury disbanded, after an early-June tragedy that made the national news reports and forced a six-week coroner’s inquest. But throughout that inquest, not one witness stepped forward to charge that the deaths of Elsie LaFontaine and Betty-Ann Sale were the result of anything other than stepping too close to the edge of the mine-shaft.

  In 1978, the shanty-town houses of North Cobalt were destroyed by a fire so huge it lit the sky for a hundred miles and kept them warm in Quebec. The Ontario Fire Marshall’s office raised the possibility of arson a number of times in the course of its inquiries. But never was it remarked — at least not in public — how close some of the old mine tunnels came to the surface in that section of town. The news reports never dwelt upon the prevailing view in southern Cobalt — that North Cobalt wasn’t so much burned, as it was cauterized.

  Painting was good in that time. We took precautions, of course; when he got back to his studio, Paul went down to the library in town and came up with a whole list of them. Chains of garlic; Catholic-blessed Holy Water; crucifixes, one for each neck; and silver coins, to cover the eyes. He put them together in a green strongbox, and never came within a hundred miles of Cobalt without his Equipment. I preferred the simpler approach, and as my painting career allowed me to afford it, I expanded my arsenal to the very limits of the prevailing Canadian gun laws.

  When the vampires came to our camp outside the pit-heads, we knew how to deal with them. We only allowed them enough blood to complete the transaction: attempts to get any more were met with garlic and holy water and buckshot. The razor’s edge remained, even in Tevalier’s absence.

  It paid off for us all over the years. Jim went professional in the early 1980s and moved to New York in ’86. Paul abandoned oils and embraced watercolour, and for five years made a fortune off royalties from art books and calendars featuring reproductions of his hyperrealistic landscapes and naturalist paintings.

  We nearly lost Harry in 1981, when he got too close to the edge one night; after that he got spooked and stopped coming out. But he’d produced some damned fine panels in the meantime, and I know they’d pleased him.

  And for myself, I did fine, I think; a lot of good work over those years. The rise of my career was far from meteoric — I have yet to see my work on postage stamps, the biggest interview I ever gave was to the North Bay Nugget, and I’ve still never been able to afford a new car. But groceries are never a question and I keep the furnace going all winter long.

  The mining companies finally surrendered in 1985, and tore down every one of the pit-heads, capped the holes. In a way, I’m surprised it took them as long as it did; for Paul and Jim and Harry and me, adaptation was relatively easy — we were only up there two or three weeks out of the year, and when we were there, we knew how to behave. But the men who ran the companies in Cobalt didn’t adapt so well; they didn’t even have enough sense to put a guardrail around the edges of their shafts — let alone recast the bargains that had made them wealthy in the early years.

  It was a scary time for us, in the years after the pit-heads came down. Paul stopped painting altogether, and has sat in an artistic paralysis ever since. Jim traded on his reputation and actually made the cover of Esquire after he hired a loyal coven of apprentices to do the actual painting, while he busied himself with what his publicist calls conceptualization, articulation. He’s done quite well for himself, but I don’t think he’ll ever work again.

  I, on the other hand, kept on painting. My work’s gotten repetitive over the years, but I keep a couple of dealers in Toronto happy — if nothing else, my pictures are a good match for the style of sofa-beds and armchairs that well-heeled doctors and their wives favour as they furnish their cottages in Muskoka.

  Art is in the narrow line between life and death — Tevalier was right on that score. I walked that line with Jim and Harry and Paul for more than a decade, against all my better judgement; and I’ll admit, it does offer its intoxication.

  Now, the pit-heads are down, the pictures there are done. Cobalt has been bled dry — of silver, of art, and of blood. The bargain, whatever coin it was that sealed it, is finished.

  But here’s the thing: in that bargain’s wake, the town of Cobalt persists — a little quieter, maybe, hunched a bit around the scarred land and flesh that Tevalier and the prospectors and the mining companies that came after left behind. But the town accepts its strange shape, acknowledges its new limitations. Within them all, it persists.

  I’ve been warped by Tevalier’s knowledge too, and bent again by its absence. But when I wake up in the morning, after I’ve driven away the nightmares with my coffee and an egg and seen to the other mundane chores, I still pick up my brush and set to work. Because when art is finished, the land remains.

  And whatever may have transpired in the past — whatever Tevalier’s grave-cold shade accuses, in the small, quiet hours of the night — I don’t need a bargain with anyone to paint that land.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Nickle lives and works in Toronto, Ontario in the company of his partner Karen Fernandez, and not far from an old filling station where his grandfather John Nickle briefly pumped gasoline in the 1930s. David was born somewhat later, in 1964.

  Since then, he has authored numerous short stories and one published novel, The Claus Effect, with Karl Schroeder — all while cultivating an unfortunate singing voice and a tragic affection for the music of Tom Waits.

  He is not finished yet.