Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  It was Cyrus Zarene. He was standing on the lawn, by the hedge of roses and lavender at the edge of the terrace. She couldn’t see Ghislain, who was beneath her on the veranda.

  Cyrus said, “There’s a girl missing. A guest. Sixteen years of age. From Castlereagh. We wondered if she’d come up here.”

  “How would she manage that?” said Ghislain.

  “It’s happened before. People have found their way up here.”

  “Not for a long time. The road is overgrown.”

  “You haven’t seen anyone?”

  “I saw you. Six days ago.”

  “No girl?”

  “What would I do with a girl?”

  There was a silence. Cyrus Zarene looked up at the house, and Canny stepped back out of view. She did it without thinking. She didn’t want to be seen by Cyrus—or found again by Ghislain. Which meant she had best leave by another door, or window, while the two of them were occupied.

  She went out along the hall to the head of the stairs. The front door was open. She could see the young man’s shadow on the perfectly sanded boards of the veranda. But she couldn’t see the drawing, the silhouette on the wall. There was no sign of last night’s prisoner’s calendar.

  She heard: “If you don’t believe me, you could always come indoors and conduct a search.” Then, after a pause, “I thought not.”

  Canny ran back the way she’d come. In big old houses like this there was often a servants’ staircase. It would lead off the upper hall, where she was. There would be a passage off the hall, with servants’ little rooms and back stairs.

  But she didn’t find what she was looking for—and of course she didn’t, how could such secretive people ever have lived with servants, outsiders, in their houses?

  Canny was cursing herself for stupidly losing time. She darted into a bedroom. It was unused, the mattress was doubled up on the bare springs of the bed. Canny threw up the sash and poked her head out. There was no sign of a fire escape on the back of the house. It was an eight-foot drop from the windowsill to the veranda roof. Canny didn’t hesitate. She climbed over the sill and briefly dangled by her hands, then let go.

  Her feet hit the tiles and promptly slid out from under her. The roof was too steeply sloped for anyone to stand on it comfortably. Canny came down on her knees and her chin hit the weatherboard wall. She bit her tongue. But there wasn’t any time to pause and nurse it. She had to keep moving. She dropped onto her belly and slid down the roof till her feet hit the gutter. Then she gathered herself to look back. It was at least eighteen feet to the ground. Perhaps she could shimmy down a veranda post. She turned herself around and hung her head over to locate one, and then she turned back around and edged along the veranda roof till she was above it. She took hold of the gutter and swung herself out into space. The gutter creaked loudly as the bands fastening it popped open. It sagged away from the roof. Canny kicked out and hooked one leg around the post she was aiming for. Then the other leg. She gripped the post with her thighs and then with the soles of her feet, using them as her older boy cousins had when they were climbing coconut palms back on Lost Link.

  The gutter was still protesting, but she’d taken most of her weight off it. She let go with one hand and snatched for the post. Her legs had it, but her hand hit the fancy woodwork along the eaves. Her knuckles crunched. She got a grip on the woodwork and let go of the gutter. Her bare legs squeaked on the freshly painted post. Its surface clung to her skin and burned as she slid.

  Then a hand closed on her right ankle. Another moved under her left foot. The hands took part of her weight. Canny found another handhold on the woodwork. She dropped lower and he moved his grip to hold her behind the knee. He didn’t say, “Let go,” but she did let go. She had no choice but to trust him. She dropped, and he opened his arms so that she slid through them, his hands on her thighs, then her back, then her shoulders. He set her feet on the boards of the veranda. For a minute she gazed into hard, mineral-black eyes. She couldn’t read anything there—no amusement, or displeasure—nothing at all. His face was masklike. And there was something else wrong with him—something missing.

  She struggled out of his arms and took off. She ran, waiting for the soft rope of signs and air to trip her and tie her up again. She sprinted across the lawn and jumped over the roses and lavender, forgetting that they marked the edge of the terrace. She jumped up three feet and sailed over the lavender, its flags brushing her feet. Before she could do anything about it she was out over the ten-foot drop to the terrace below, with a bamboo bean frame directly below her. Then something scooped her up and threw her sideways, so that her fall became a leisurely arc to the right of where she’d jumped. She fell like a badminton shuttlecock rather than a body. She dropped into a compost heap and was enveloped in its heat and thick vegetable stink.

  Canny lay stunned and, once again, waited to be recaptured. She waited for the young man to appear at the edge of the terrace. But no one came. She got up and peeled some black fibrous mats made of turnip tops, lettuce leaves, and eggshells off her clothes. And it was while she was doing this that she realized what had been missing. The young man had been holding her tight. She’d been pressed against him, and his body had had no scent. He had smelled of nothing at all.

  Canny climbed off the heap of compost and went looking for the steps to the lower, overgrown terrace. She had to go all the way around the front, where she heard voices again. It appeared that, after helping her down from the veranda roof, Ghislain had gone back to Cyrus. Perhaps Cyrus had been in the house searching while the young man had come to help her.

  Ghislain had come to her assistance, and Cyrus meant her no harm—so why was she hiding from them? Why did she feel that, no matter what, she must get away unseen? It was inexplicable, this urgent need to stay hidden.

  She reached the steps and ran down them, then found her way to the pig path and slid and scrambled her way down it, her eyes out for wild boar and her heart pressing painfully under her collarbone.

  10

  SHOLTO GOT UP that Thursday shortly after Canny had left the guesthouse. He didn’t look in on her, so wasn’t to know all day that she was missing. He too took an apple from the fruit bowl in Iris Zarene’s kitchen and ate it as he walked down the valley to the meadow where they’d left the Austin. He drove to Massenfer and, at eight in the morning, reported at the gate of Massenfer colliery. He gave his name and waited in the custodian’s little shelter for George Mews, the mine safety manager.

  It was a bit of a wait. The custodian stirred several teaspoons of condensed milk into his coffee and sat back on the stool with his belly in his lap. He didn’t look at Sholto again. The corrugated tin roof popped as if a large bird had landed on it. It was the sun, coming out from behind the clouds. Before long the little shelter was stifling.

  George Mews, mine safety manager at the Cleverly Mine, had, thirty years before, gone into the Massenfer’s Bull Mine after the explosion to search for survivors. Mr. Mews’s condition for letting Sholto interview him had been that Sholto first take a tour of the Cleverly to see how things had improved in the intervening years.

  Sholto waited twenty-five minutes, and then Mews appeared. Mews was a squat, powerfully built, balding man. He handed Sholto a clean pair of overalls, a helmet, and a belt onto which was clipped a self-rescue breather. Sholto put everything on. Mews said, “We’ll walk up to the portal, Mr. Mochrie, and I’ll give you a quick lesson with the breather before we go underground. But I won’t do to you what we do with the new lads. Them we walk up and down the gateway till they’re stinking hot and sick of sucking air through the filters—all so they can get some idea of what they’d have to do in an emergency.”

  “The men in ’29 didn’t have these,” Sholto said, getting right down to it. After all, the man hadn’t even wanted to shake his hand.

  “You’re wrong about that, Mr. Mochrie. They did. But they were all still clipped to their belts.” Mews tapped the box. “Theirs were a bit mor
e primitive. But the Draeger Rebreathers that rescuers wear nowadays have hardly changed at all from the one I was wearing when I entered the mine after the explosion in ’29.”

  The portal to the mine was huge and square and framed by steel. There was one big old axle-and-gear winch nearby, and two vast ventilation outlets, both apparently pulling atmosphere out.

  Mews took Sholto through the drill. The filters on the mask made Sholto’s breathing into a business that required real effort. He was glad when the lesson was over and he was allowed to take the mask off again.

  Then, without any further ceremony, Mews led Sholto underground. About thirty yards in they met the shift manager. “This young man is here for a history professor,” Mews shouted, flipped his eyebrows at the other man, and then drew Sholto farther in.

  They walked alongside the conveyor that carried the coal from the distant diggings to the surface. It was noisy. Mews leaned in to ask Sholto to please notice how wet the coal was. “A safety measure, of course.” The conveyor dripped and the ground squelched underfoot.

  After a few minutes of steady downhill trudging they stopped at a crosscut. The conveyor was farther off, and Mews could speak. He asked what Sholto thought of the gateway. “The gateway is what you might call the mineshaft.”

  “It’s quite steep,” Sholto said. He’d been looking back at the portal now and then as they walked. They hadn’t gone very far before the floor had come up to close off the daylight, like the inverted eyelid of some giant, mythical creature.

  Mews took Sholto’s arm again and they angled back toward the conveyor and continued along beside it. Neither they nor it were going very fast, but their combined speeds, going different directions, made Sholto’s head spin. He was very nervous and painfully alert. He couldn’t seem to keep his head still. He kept looking about and casting his helmet lamp over everything.

  Mews stopped to point out the blocks of timber mortared into the wall of the mine. He explained that beyond that was a sealed void. “What we call a gob. It’ll be full of methane. The gas keeps coming out of the coal that’s left when the seam has been mined. Now, at Bull what happened is that they probably accidentally broke through into an old gob. The gas escaped and spread, and there was a spark somewhere. They had a machine like our continuous miner at their working face. A kind of digger with steel belts covered in fist-size picks that claw at the face, ripping coal from the seam. The men at the machine had reported seeing sparks running on the back of its picks.”

  Sholto knew that this was the front-running theory: that there was a breakthrough into an old void, the methane level went up, and despite all the water on the machinery, there was a spark. He said to Mews, “I’ve read that the whole shaft was shut off after it flooded in ’26. And the mine had a safety review—and yet there was still an accident.”

  “That’s right. Though you have to remember that, in 1926, it was the company in charge of safety and the safety review, not the government. The government didn’t get involved until after the disaster. That’s what your da’s book is about—the changes in labor laws. In ’26, when the mine flooded, thirteen men were trapped. Nine were saved, after being underground for three days. Four drowned. One of the draegermen who went with me into the mine in ’29 after the explosion had been in Bull when it flooded in ’26. He’d been trapped and rescued. He was working as a chain runner in ’29. Chain runners take care of the conveyors, or rail carts. We had carts and horses in the Bull. In ’29 this man was on the night shift, so he wasn’t underground when it happened. When we went down after the explosion he was all for keeping going, because he’d been saved himself against terrible odds. But the deeper we penetrated, the less there was left to find.” Mews paused and stared off into the dark. “Of course none of us wanted to leave the eleven men we had to leave. They’re still there today. Anyway—this fellow—the sheriff’s deputies had to drag him away from the pit.”

  “He had family down there?”

  “Yes. He was a Zarene, from the valley. Lealand Zarene. Many of us had family trapped. And we all had mates. I lost my sister’s husband. He’s still down there.”

  After the explosion the coal seam in Bull Mine caught fire and hadn’t stopped burning until the lower shaft was flooded. They pumped the water out again, but the strata had been fatally weakened, and the mine was too unsafe to reopen, even to look for whatever remained of the men who couldn’t be reached. The pit was closed, there was a final memorial service, and a monument was unveiled. Sholto had seen photographs of the service.

  Mews was quiet for a time. Sholto didn’t want to break in on the man’s memories so didn’t immediately go on with his questions—like, why was the mine shaft so white? There was rock dust everywhere, coating the walls and floor, and there were bags of it at every crosscut. Eventually he said, “The mine is white.”

  “Yes,” said Mews. “The floor of the gateway in the Bull was very soft underfoot. And black. I remember that. The stone dust here—they throw it around pretty liberally. The proportion has to be more than half stone dust to coal dust before the coal dust is rendered noninflammable. They had only just started stone-dusting back then. They were stone-dusting at the working face, but not the length of the gateway. It was burning coal dust ignited by exploding methane that produced the carbon monoxide that killed most of the men who died in ’29.”

  “Afterdamp,” Sholto said.

  “That’s what it’s called, or chokedamp. Take your pick.”

  “If I was to take a pick down here I’d only embarrass myself,” Sholto said, and was pleased to hear Mews laugh. Then the man asked, “How old are you, Mr. Mochrie?”

  “Twenty-three,” said Sholto.

  “The youngest man in the mine today is seventeen. In ’29 the youngest was fourteen, a kid called Felix Zarene.”

  Sholto was sweating. He was having a hard time keeping his eyes on Mews’s face. The headlamps made any direct eye contact almost impossible, and Mews had a habitual sidelong glance, his head tilted down so that his helmet lamp lit where his feet would go, while his eyes turned up. This up-under-the-brows scrutiny made Mews look very shrewd, and a bit skeptical too. “You keep looking at the ceiling, Mr. Mochrie,” he said, sounding amused. “Those arches up there are steel and timber. We timber as we go.” He pointed at the steel that studded sections of the ceiling. “Those are rock bolts. They pin together the layers of rock.”

  “They’re holding the roof up?”

  “Yes. Perhaps you should have taken a tour of the Westport Mine. Westport is a roof and pillar mine. They’re much more roomy, and not as deep.”

  “I wasn’t planning to go down a mine at all, but I see now that I had to.”

  “I’m pleased to hear that.”

  They stopped under a huge vertical shaft. Mews called it a downcast. Sholto could see a flicker of daylight through a giant fan, far above. There was a ladder too, an escape ladder. Sholto couldn’t help but think how hard it would be to climb if the shaft was full of smoke.

  They went on, trudging downhill for some minutes till they reached the place where coal was being torn from the face of the seam by a big, steel-toothed machine.

  “This is the inbye,” shouted Mews. “That’s what we call the working face. We are now a mile underground.” Mews showed Sholto into the flame-proof enclosure of the gate-end box, where all the equipment was. The continuous miner was clawing at the face and feeding broken coal back onto the conveyor.

  Sholto saw that there were bags of stone dust everywhere, apparently waiting to be spread. He asked if the equipment was stopped so that that could be done.

  “No, these bags are what are called a passive barrier. If there’s an explosion the force of it throws the stone dust up into the air and the stone dust suppresses the fire. We use stone dust and barrels of water as passive barriers. You will have noticed the bags and barrels everywhere.”

  Sholto didn’t quite get it. He said, “Sorry, but isn’t that shutting the stable door after the
horse has bolted?”

  Mews patiently explained that explosions were made of a shock wave and fire. It was the shock wave that dispersed the water or dust, and the shock wave moved ahead of the fire. “The shock wave throws up the stone dust and water, then the fire hits the barrier and flames out. The fire flamed out in the Bull when it hit the wet patch that was the result of a continuing leak after the flooding in ’26. But the men above the wet patch didn’t survive, because there were two fires.”

  “What?” Sholto thought he mustn’t have caught that right. Did Mews say two fires?

  There were three miners working under the drill canopy, keeping a close eye on the machine and the coal face. Lumps of coal were sometimes shaken down from the ceiling by the vibrations. They bounced off the canopy. Sholto could see them rolling and flashing in air that glittered with dust. There was a breeze in his face. It was breezier at the working face than anywhere he’d been so far, except the ventilation shaft. The air was being pulled their way by a huge, wet canvas curtain. Mews saw Sholto looking at the contraption and said, “That’s a brattice, auxiliary ventilation. The seam is very gassy this week.”

  “Oh,” said Sholto.

  And then it happened. One of the miners craned and peered, then flung up a hand. Several people—including Mews—shouted, “Shut her down! Shut her down!” But not before a plume of flame shot out of an invisible fissure in the face and rolled, blue, across the ceiling.

  The men at the hoses hit the fissure with jets of water.

  Sholto had dropped into a crouch, his hands over his ears. Water rained down on him. The continuous miner had stopped. The conveyor rattled into silence.

  Then the flame was gone. Spray continued to wash the fissure. Mews called out to the men with the hoses, “Stop for a minute, would you?”

  He tugged Sholto’s arm, then stepped up onto the continuous miner. The machine had pulled back from the face and its steel claws could be climbed. “Come on,” Mews said.