Guard yer man weel through the night.
Hold him at dawn's early light.
For come the lang day
He'll be far away
Deep down underground far from sight.
- A folk song from the pits of AlbionThat night the boy saw his grandfather for the last time as he dreamt.
The moon, nearly full. A white horse trotting along the railroad bridge. A murder of 43 crows. Horseshoes skidding on the tracks. Iron on iron. Ashes to ashes. Iron to rust. Screeching. Falling. The earth shaking as the corpse of the horse hit the ground far below.
Reverberation from the mine explosion shook the boy awake in a cold sweat. Through the bedroom door he could see his grandmother seated in the good chair in the corner of the front room, screaming in that quiet way that had been learned on the Trail. Tears from her green eyes streaked across her warm paprika skin. The radiant sheen of her long black hair dulled and frazzled.
He went out and curled into her lap. She held his head against her chest, heaving and thrumming with agony and anxiety. Out the window he stared at the neighbor's whitewashed company house. Tonight it was blazoned burnt orange and heat from the mountainside radiated through the thin pane of glass onto his face along with the cries and the wailing.
As the fire in the mountain burned to ash, the hot night faded into a cold, late autumn morning. A thin filament of smoke still rose from the ruined hillside; acrid incense from the burnt offering to the angry machine gods Back East. That whispy column held up the roof of residual smog that hung low on the valley. Muted and impotent light strained through the gloomy ceiling to press down onto the town.
Sooty carbon streets ran in a rough grid. The widest of these mucky arteries extended past the houses wedged in between the river and the rails. Past the tipple that filled the railcars, bending along the contour of the mountain it eventually terminated in a rough cul-de-sac with a machine shop and a small office building. A hole in the ground held a motorized cage for descending. A flume of sunlight whispered a dry rasp of hope down that shaft before succumbing to the darkness just inside. Down that shaft was a place not made for human souls.
Down that shaft was a place reserved for the roiling and recoiling of cthonic powers heaving the dry coughs of old men laboring in vain to expel dark lesions from the walls of their hard lungs. Grinding iron on granite, screeching metal on metal, mysterious furnaces heating the air from below and a chilly dead sun marked upon every forehead. Creaking chunks of the dark lie in wait. Hiding. Biding. Waiting to flake off and grind bones into a dirty marrowpaste. Floors rush up to crunch the fragile against ceilings. Rifts wait to swallow up the stout and strong. The air is thin. The air is heavy. Men creeping, through a land of ghosts.
That was a normal day. Today, however, these men were not delving for the Company. They were delving for their fathers, their brothers, their uncles, and their sons. Their lamps battered the darkness as they searched for what no man wants to find. No gloves were thick enough to protect their hands from the horror absorbing into their skin as they bore that pall. A nauseating ritual of exhuming. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. A reverse interment.
Up on the surface they laid them out in a rough grid pattern on the sooty carbon pavement in front of the pit. A mangled char of two men fused together had been laid there, mouth to ear. Heart to heart. Tear to tear. A tarnished reflection pushed out from under the umber-black pumice of a face baked into a skull: the remnant of Mr. Bustamante's gold tooth.
They organized the charnel, not by name, but by the number stamped on the round brass tag that they recovered from each gritty corpse. Not all the numbers were accounted for. 59, 17, 12. The recoverers knew that at this point they were laboring in the confusion of a vain attempt. Those remains would not be found. At least not today. But they couldn't rest. Not while the eyes of the widows were upon them.
High on the adjacent mountain, Miner 59 looked down onto this little Gehenna through an opening in the trees. Dried elk blood was caked under his fingernails and along his cuticles. The guilty hands of a killer. The miner wearing number 59 had died in the explosion that night: a father pouring out his love for his only son, taking his shift so that his son might make an attempt on the last day of elk season. Dying so that he might live.
A body down there somewhere is his father's, but the spirit that passed from this world on that drab morning was his own. The darkness that remained plastered itself behind his ribs, soaking into his liver and bones, killing him slowly until the blacklung could finally end his days.
A strong wind scowered the valley in the night. The sun rose in a clear sky the next morning and the men that were left went back to work.
Well done. This degree of lyrical description usually comes off as stuffy or overwrought. Your writing feels confident and beautiful. I really like how you don't just spell everything out. This story requires a little work on the reader's part, which is rewarded handsomely, even if horrifically. I'll be looking for more from you•