by Paula Guran
Still, I am not so convinced of these empirical theories that I am willing to creep down into those far depths to prove or disprove anything.
I was only a few hundred yards from the gate to the mine site when I witnessed the impossible.
At first my brain didn’t register what came trundling out of the roadside bracken – a dog – because the sight of a moving thing in Evendale was so rare it actually spooked me. I pressed down hard on the brake pedal and the sack spat out the tinned foods into the jeep’s foot-well. The creature plodded onto the road, pausing to turn its dismal face toward me. I put the jeep in park and stepped out, tamping my enthusiasm so as not to startle the animal.
It was a yellow Lab. I crouched down and cooed to it. She came to me without reservation or ardor.
That it had been foraging and roaming for some time was obvious. But I was unaware at just how badly the poor beast had been faring until I ran my hand along its matted coat and felt the fence slats of its ribs pressing against the fur. I raced back to the jeep and retrieved the tin of Spam I’d taken from our pantry, along with one of the bottles of water.
The dog was now reposing as though the littered asphalt road was her bed. I uncapped the bottle, poured some of the water into my cupped hand, and held it out to her. She lapped at it with a pale tongue.
I peeled the label off the Spam, opened the tin and shook the meat out onto the label. This I slid before the dog. She sniffed it, perhaps in distrust or disbelief, and began to lick and gnaw the pinkish cube.
As I sat beside the dog, her tail now beginning to faintly wag, I heard the sound of a helicopter. Shielding my eyes I looked past the rim of the escarpment to see the small chopper coasting in the ashen sky. A TV reporter perhaps, or an airlift ambulance; someone who was merely passing over Evendale. That was what Evendale was now, perhaps what it has always been: a place one passes by or through or over on their way to somewhere else. Is this why the exodus below has been allowed to occur without any outside notice at all? Or is there something other at work here?
“Do you want to come home with me?” I asked. Every inch of me went cold once I realized that I’d referred to those dank and cultish tombs as home. The dog looked at me with her teary, tired eyes. I picked her up and gently piled her onto the passenger seat. Then I drove out to the far end of the road.
Dad was part of that first group that tore the barricades from the mouth of the entrance pipe and breached the mine for the first time in years. I only learned this a few months ago from Rita. She told me that the men were glad to have my father among them, for he was the only one left in Evendale to have worked the tunnels when Dunford Inc. was still in operation. I suspect it was more than his knowledge of the shafts that made Dad a welcome member of the search party. He had always been a calming presence in our home, so I can only imagine what a balm it must have been to have his wise and careful suggestions offered in his sonorous voice, especially once they were down in that stinking darkness.
Just what it was Dad saw in that green radiance I never came to know. I only know it changed him. The fallout of his encounter below was drastic enough for Rita to plead with me to fly home and help her find some means of bringing him back around.
When I returned to Evendale I found a catatonic shell in the shape of my father. He never spoke, scarcely ate, slept nearly eighteen hours a day. I insisted to Rita that a hospital was the only place for him, where he could receive not only medical attention but (perhaps even more importantly) psychiatric care. Rita, despite asking for my help, stubbornly refused to admit Dad, stating that this was a family problem and therefore it could be fixed by the family. I suppose I should have protested more passionately, but I didn’t. It seems I also inherited the same caginess as Rita. Perhaps it’s a symptom of growing up in a small town, but propriety and fear of scandal, however slight, always seemed to trump common sense.
But three weeks ago Rita and I finally agreed that hospitalization could not be put offany longer. Dad had always been a strapping man, so his rapid dissolution was a sobering and painful wake-up call to my sister and me.
Then, the night before we planned to drag Dad off to receive help, he snapped out of his depression. Late that night my sleep was broken by the clanging of pans and the thudding of kitchen cupboards. Rita’s bedroom door was shut when I walked past it to investigate.
I found my father preparing a goulash so redolent with spices I felt myself tearing up the moment I entered the kitchen.
“Dad?” I’d said to him.
“Hungry?” was his reply.
I told him no, then watched as he left the ingredients to simmer on the range. He sat down at the kitchen table and asked me to switch off the light. I did and together we sat in the lunar glow from the window, listening to the food bubbling in its pot.
“Can’t sleep,” he admitted, answering a question I never posed.
“You’ve probably been sleeping too much.”
“Well, I’m awake now.”
Something in his choice of words made me queasy.
“Your sister told me that Sadie-Anne next door boarded up her house a couple of days ago.”
“Yes, I saw that. Any idea why?”
“Probably to become a pit-canary like the others.”
I swallowed what little moisture there was in my mouth. “Why are people running down there, Dad? What are they running to?”
His silhouette shrugged.
“I know about the glow down there, Dad. Rita told me. Is that what the pit-canaries are moving to the mine for? Are they looking for the light?”
If my father was fazed by my outburst he kept it contained, just as he had always done with all things. Dad: even-keeled, stoic, strong, like a lake of still black water.
“I think maybe they’re after what’s on the other side of that light,” he answered.
“What’s beyond the light, Dad?” Worry and tears mangled my voice into something thin and reedy. “What did you see down there?”
It seemed like a long span of time passed. We sat in stubborn silence like two monks lost in contemplation. The goulash bubbled over the pot rim and splashed onto the burner, hissing as though maimed.
“Been dreaming a lot lately,” he said at last. “Funny thing, that. In my whole life I think I can remember one, maybe two dreams. And those were from when I was a boy. But lately . . .
“There was this one dream. I must’ve had it three or four nights in a row. I’m in this meadow, real peaceful, real pretty. I’m standing beside an old-fashioned watermill and I’m holding a large bucket with a rope handle. The mill’s wheel is turning slowly, but the weird thing is, the only noise I can hear is the creaking of those wooden gears. I can see the brook moving along, I can see it being lathered up by the paddles and I can see the runoffgushing back down into the brook, but the water is absolutely silent. You know how sometimes in dreams you just know things about things? Well, in this dream I knew I had come to this brook to gather water to bring back to my village, which was on the other side of this great stone building that this watermill was attached to. Maybe they were grinding grain or something, I don’t know. But I was there for the water because the villagers were all dying of thirst.
“I reached down to scoop up some of that quiet water, when this awful, awful feeling came over me. I stared down into the water and suddenly noticed in the reflection that a figure was now standing above me on the bank. I tried to cover my eyes because I didn’t want to see who or what that figure was, but the next thing I knew I was standing face to face with it. It was a woman, a very strange, very thin woman. She was trying to tell me something but she was as mute as that brook, so she traced some symbols in the air with one of her stick-like fingers. She spelled out that the water was poison. I nodded to show her that I understood. Then you know what I did? I filled that rope-handled pail and carried it back to my village and when I got there I took a wooden ladle and I doled out that poisoned water to all those wretched-looking villagers.
I poured the last sip into my own palm and drank it myself. Then I woke up.”
I wasn’t sure how to react to my father’s account, but I was desperate to keep him talking, so I asked him what he thought the dream meant. Again he shrugged. Then he rose to tend to his food.
“The light’s coming,” he announced. At the time I thought he was referring to the sun that was climbing above the hedges beyond our kitchen window. Now I am not so sure.
That was the last time I spoke to my father. The next night, while I slept, he moved below.
The day’s organic gloom made it seem much later than it actually was when I edged the jeep off the lane and along the entrance driveway. At one time this passage was truncated by a heavy iron gate bearing a sign that warned of the legal repercussions and physical dangers that trespassers could endure. Today that gate hangs permanently open and the sign has been covered over with spray paint.
The floodlights shone on me, weakly, like potted moons. I gathered up the groceries and the dog that I carried and cooed to as though she were my own flesh and blood. As I crossed the gravel lot toward the mine entrance I tightened my grip on the Lab, for she’d begun to whimper and squirm.
“You’re okay, girl,” I assured her, “you’re okay. What should I name you, hmm? What do I call you?”
But the nearer we drew to that rugged tunnel with its downward pitch, the more the dog began to panic. I knew that my clutching her against her will was purely selfish. How I needed her companionship, her life.
Once I struggled to carry her up the wooden rungs and into the tunnel, the dog began to growl and bark in a sad, effete protest. She could sense the offensiveness of whatever waited beneath. She wriggled free and charged for the tunnel’s mouth. I cried out and lunged for her, but she leapt heedless of any risk. I heard her claws scrabbling against the ladder. A moment later I saw the dog tearing across the gravel plain. She neared the road and was soon gone.
I slumped against the cold black wall of the shaft and sobbed. It was the kind of outburst usually reserved for children; the frame-shaking, convulsive weeping that seems to threaten to tear the soul up by its very roots.
The sound of approaching footsteps caused me to fight for composure. How sad is it that even now, under such conditions, we pit-canaries still feel the need for personas.
“Everything alright, miss?” one of the sentinels asked me, the light on his hardhat beaming like a lustrous pearl.
I nodded, picked up the sack of food and brushed past him, negotiating the wooden slats with care as I made the long descent toward the platform where the carts nested.
A family of four sat at one of the platform’s picnic tables. They were eating peanut butter and saltines.
The people come to the upper level in shifts. For most of them this is as near to the surface as they’re willing to go, despite the dangers to their health. Strategically installed fans spin constantly, both here and deeper below. They do their best to draw the methane out of the tunnels and to coax fresh air down from the surface. But they have been rotting down here since Dunford Inc. shut down production, and I remember Dad saying that even when those fans were new it was always a risk spending too much time “under the crust” as he’d called it.
“One of the drivers will be up shortly,” the mother called once she saw me climbing into a cart. I turned back and looked stonily at them, at their wan faces smeared with soot, their clothing hanging loose and grubby from their malnourished frames. They were like a faded photo of some anonymous Dust Bowl family in a history book.
“Never mind,” I said, releasing the brake. The ancient wheels squeaked as the cart began to roll toward the greater descent.
Down I went, down, staring numbly at the roughly textured tunnel walls. I began to imagine the juts and groves as being some strange and tedious grammar in Braille, some record of a world that had existed below ours for unknowable years, their entire secret history spelled out here in angled carbon.
These walls are also veined with thick cables that feed power to the vent fans and the garlands of uncovered light bulbs. To my eye those strung lights have all the impact of a lone firefly attempting to illuminate a canyon.
The cart reached the final swoop of the track and I eased up the handbrake to soften the final thud that always came when the track fed into a pent-in platform constructed out of lumber grown soft from too many years in the methane-reeking chambers.
As yet there has been no theft or pillaging down here, but I did my best to conceal the sack of groceries all the same. The converts have commented about how this profound fellowship and egalitarianism is somehow a sign of renewal, of change. Personally I think it is only because things haven’t yet gotten desperate enough. They’d start savaging and rending sooner or later. It’s all a question of time.
The only proper shelter at this level was the rescue chamber that the miners could use in case of a collapse or other accident, a pod where they could hole up until help arrived. Now, with its oxygen tanks long drained, its food devoured and its water guzzled, the chamber serves as a curious spirit house, a shrine the people have embellished with mementos of those whose spirits they claim have been glimpsed beyond the emerald light, or with fetishes meant to represent things unfamiliar but still experienced.
I sat down at one of the picnic tables where Rita sat knitting a scarf. I watched her for a spell, watched the way her eyes would habitually move from her needles to the tunnel a few yards away.
“You get my dress?” she asked without looking at me.
“Yes, and the other things you asked for. I also got some food. Not much though. There’s water, too.”
A young girl, perhaps fifteen, moved past our table and made her way to the decorated tunnel mouth. Rita and I both watched as the girl hunched down and slid her hand into the gap. She seemed to be feeling something in the chute, something that didn’t appear to be unpleasant. For a moment it looked as though she was going to enter, but she ultimately lacked the required conviction. She went back to her mattress at the far end of the tract.
“Have there been any changes?” I asked Rita.
“Define changes.”
“Anyone else gone in . . . or maybe come back out . . . there?”
“Don’t be stupid.” She put her needles back in her canvas bag along with her yarn. I studied her as she carried the silver hairbrush and the handheld mirror into the pod and added them to the shrine. She wouldn’t look at me when she returned. “I’m going to try on my dress,” she said, almost daring me to object.
She was on her way to change in one of the old miners’ shower stalls – no running water but the remaining plastic curtains offered privacy – when the ground began to quake. This tremor was longer than previous ones, more forceful. Immediately people began to murmur, in prayer or in vexation or simply in fear. The rocking subsided and there was a false sense of relief poured over the area.
Roughly ten minutes later there was another tremor.
Few become true pit-canaries. While the townsfolk dwell below, there is another stage, another extreme that only the most devout have courage or madness enough to explore.
Beyond the tract where the mattresses and bags are strewn there is another tunnel, stiflingly tight and perilously ragged, one bored by something cruder than even the crudest tool. Only those who have dared to squeeze through that aperture earn the stigma of pit-canary because, like their namesake, those birds go beyond.
As to what forged that tunnel, I could add my theory to the hundreds that have been posited before, but what would such a thing prove? The tunnel is somehow connected to the emerald light. I believe this. And I believe that both are the products of something even greater and stranger than both those things combined.
Somehow somebody in Evendale awoke something down there. Now that something is beginning to awaken all of us.
The change is undeniable. Everyone down here feels it, but because it is so indefinable we do not speak of it. We simply accept its
presence within us, like a growing contagion.
This is a cold, unwanted revelation, like happening upon a lump in one’s breast or testicle; the kind of discovery that makes one yearn for normalcy, tedium, for all those ditchwater-dull afternoons and daily routines that we so foolishly felt needed to be stripped away by novelty and change. Yes, it is that kind of wordless knowledge that there is no going back. Even racing up to the sunlit yards of Evendale would be a small and flimsy defense. And so, we wait.
I’m told that early on some of the men wanted to place bright orange sawhorses before the mouth of that unmapped tunnel as a warning to keep away, but before they could return with their barricade, the mine had produced its own.
The vine sprouted from one carbon wall, drooped across the down-sloping chute, and then poked through the black rock of the opposite wall. Blooming out of this twisting verdant cable were five bellflowers, vibrantly red, as though colored by arterial blood that raced through transparent petals. Deeply fragrant; even the methane fumes were made sweet, so strong was their perfume. The flowers hung inversely. Set against that gaping hole in the mine wall they were positively incandescent, the beginnings of some new garden in paradise. I studied the flowers often, perched upon my plastic lawn chair, coughing into my sooty hands.
I watch the flowers and I wait. Wait for my father. Two weeks ago, much to my shrieking protests, he left the camp here on the tract and he became a pit-canary. He said he’d dreamed my mother had come to him through the emerald light and that she’d encouraged him to see what dwelt on the outer rim of that light. Dad said he believed the light was actually the breath of some living thing, large and ancient and wise. An entity that had been here long before we crawled out of the swamp, just down here sleeping, waiting . . .
