7
T here are many reasons not to run in a dark mine, and Denton presumably thought of them, because he cursed softly, then whispered, “Can you point your lamp down?”
Ingold did. I left mine off. We crept forward in the gloom, alternating between watching our feet and looking up to see if the red light was still there.
It was hard to tell at first, since it was the same dull red color as the afterimages that burn onto your eyes.
I kept staring at it for too long, half-convinced that my eyes were playing tricks on me, then stumbling over the uneven floor.
As our eyes adjusted though, the light came into better focus.
It was an unmoving glow, not like our headlamps, but without the flicker of firelight.
Irregular shadows loomed against it, coming clearer as we approached.
A rockfall, possibly, or just a pile of debris left over from excavation.
It was hard to tell how far away it was.
Farther than I thought initially, anyhow.
Tunnels branched off to our right, but we kept inching forward, drawn by the bloody red light.
“This is what Oscar wrote about,” Denton breathed. His whisper sounded as loud as a scream in my ears.
I had to swallow twice before my mouth would form the words, “Must be.”
After long minutes of not getting any closer to the rockfall, suddenly it was right in front of us.
It was chest-high, with only a narrow gap at the top.
Anyone wriggling through would be vulnerable to an attacker waiting on the other side.
Ingold flicked the edge of the light along the scarred ceiling, then lowered it to the ground again.
“Was it a cave-in?” I whispered.
“Looks like it.”
I closed my eyes briefly. “Gas?”
“Doesn’t look angled to trap it, no.”
“Good enough,” Denton murmured, and set his foot on the rubble. Rocks rolled and clattered together under his boot, loud as a gunshot in the silent belly of the mine.
The red light went out.
Denton cursed. Ingold whipped his light back around, the beam nearly blinding me.
Blood-rainbows danced in front of my eyes, and then we heard it—a flurry of wet slapping sounds, right on the other side of the cave-in, no longer stealthy but rapid, like a fish dragged out onto land and beating itself against stone.
The sounds reached a crescendo, mere feet away, and then suddenly they were moving away, into the distance, and then ... gone.
Denton was already at the top of the rubble pile, scrambling through the crawl space.
Ingold was close behind him. I took a moment to turn my lamp back on, telling myself that it was only sensible and certainly not because I wanted someone else to find out if there was firedamp on the far side before I jammed myself into a narrow death trap on the arse-end of a mountain.
Then I cursed myself for cowardice and started up the pile.
My head scraped the ceiling at the narrowest point, then my back. I had an image of getting jammed between the stone and the rock, knees against my chest, unable to move forward or back ... Christ’s blood . I went flat and hauled myself forward like a worm in a panic.
I heard Denton saying, “What the devil ... ?” as I clambered over the loose rock and pitched headfirst into the space beyond.
For a moment, I was busy trying to breathe and convince my nerves that I had not gotten stuck and the air I was breathing was not firedamp. Eventually my nerves decided to accept this as a polite fiction and I could focus on what Ingold and Denton were staring at.
Which looked an awful lot like a body in miner’s clothes.
Strangely, this helped settle my nerves. Mines are enemy territory for me, but I have experience with all kinds of bodies. “Dead?” I asked.
“Never alive,” said Ingold. He flipped one empty sleeve at me. (Well, it had looked awfully flat, come to think of it.)
Sure enough, what I’d taken for a body was a set of miner’s clothing—trousers, shirt, socks, boots, all laid out on the floor, facedown and arms spread. A miner’s helmet and goggles topped the set, the headlamp unlit.
“Strange place to leave your clothes,” Denton said.
“Strange way to leave your clothes,” Ingold said. “They buttoned everything back up and then laid it out on the ground like this.”
There was something oddly unsettling about the fact that it was facedown.
I’m not sure why that struck me more than anything, but it just seemed so peculiar.
If you’re laying out clothes for later, you lay them out faceup.
(You also don’t leave them in the middle of a collapsing mineshaft God knows how deep underground, but that’s neither here nor there.)
I looked down the tunnel and saw at once why Denton hadn’t continued his pursuit of the red light.
The passage continued perhaps twenty feet, then ended in another wall of rubble.
This one was even higher than the last, with perhaps a foot of clearance at the top.
Irregular chunks of stone lay scattered along the floor, some of them nearly the size of my head.
This was looking more and more like the site of a cave-in, which did not exactly fill me with confidence.
“Well,” said Denton, playing his lamp along the narrow gap. “Whatever it was must have been smaller than it sounded.”
“I suppose it might have been a frog,” I said, without much conviction.
“At the bottom of a mine? Glowing red?”
“I don’t know, maybe you have strange American glow-frogs here.”
“I believe those are limited to Australia,” said Ingold, deadpan.
Denton shook his head. “We’ll have to move these rocks and see what’s on the other side.” He picked one up and dropped it behind him with a small thud.
I cleared my throat. “Are you chaps, ah, not worried about another cave-in?” (I was quite proud of how steady my voice was. I certainly wasn’t worried about a cave-in, it said, but other people might be.)
Ingold glanced up to see both Denton and me waiting expectantly. “What? Why are you looking at me?”
“You’re the one who knows about coal mines,” I said.
“I know about coal . It’s different.”
“But the firedamp and the poison water ...”
Ingold’s lips skewed sideways as he scowled. “That’s chemistry . I like chemistry. Cave-ins and whatnot are ...” He gazed up at the scarred rock of the ceiling. “ Architecture .”
I have heard military men scream obscenities under enemy fire with less venom. “I see. Not fond of architecture?”
“My aunt wanted me to be an architect.”
I made a mental note to avoid meeting Ingold’s aunt at all costs.
“Hopefully this all came down during blasting,” Denton said. He picked up another rock and tossed it behind him.
“You can do that tomorrow,” Ingold said firmly. “It’s late and some of us have been down here for hours already.”
I made another mental note to have Ingold canonized.
Denton sighed. “Tomorrow,” he agreed, turning back. “We’ll ... ah ... Easton, I can’t help but notice you’re going through that fellow’s pockets.”
“I’m part quartermaster,” I said. Denton laughed. Ingold looked at us, baffled. I pulled a handful of bills from the trousers on the ground, all wadded up in the pocket, along with several loose coins.
“No wallet. No coin purse. But ... oh, here we go ...”
Wedged in among the bills was a receipt from the telegraph office.
***
“You’re telling me this fellow sends a telegram pretending to be your cousin, comes back here, and changes clothes halfway down a mine,” Angus said, after we had climbed back up the shaft. “On the other side of a cave-in.”
“If you’ve got another explanation, I’m listening,” Denton said.
“Perhaps it’ll be clearer in the morning,” Ingold said hopefully.
Angus’s mustache expressed definite skepticism on this point, but he didn’t argue. We went to bed, but it was a long time before I got the image of that strange, facedown pile of clothes out of my mind.
In the morning, not only was nothing clearer, it had gotten, if anything, murkier. I crawled out of my bedroll to find the others standing around one of the tables about ten feet inside the mine entrance, staring at a sheet of paper.
“Christ’s blood, now what?” I asked. Kent appeared and pressed coffee into my hands. I blessed him and all his kin and swore undying fealty to his house. It took several sips of coffee before I realized I’d been speaking Gallacian, which was probably just as well.
“It appears that someone has left us a note,” said Denton when I repeated myself in English.
The letter was oddly written. I don’t mean the content, because I didn’t focus on that for a few seconds, but the writing itself.
It was written in ink, in a large, neat script, all the letters of the first line slanting to the right.
And the next line was almost the exact same script, except that all the letters slanted to the left.
It looked almost as if the writer had gotten to the end of the line, dropped down, changed direction, and begun writing from right to left instead.
It reversed again at the next line, then stopped because it was quite a short note.
PLEASE GO AWAY AT ONCE. THE MINE IS UNSAFE FOR HUMANS AND YOU WILL BE IN GRAVE DANGER IF YOU CONTINUE TO STAY. THERE IS NOTHING OF VALUE FOR YOU HERE.
“... Huh,” I said. The word humans jumped out at me.
I was pretty sure that wasn’t the sort of word that you’d normally use there—you’d say people instead.
In Gallacian, they’d be the same word, of course, but using the wrong one in English was the sort of mistake that pegged you as not a native speaker.
Probably no one would correct you, or if they did, they’d be sure to say how well you spoke English, as if you were performing a trick.
But it was still not quite the right word.
Ingold agreed with me. “But I don’t think it’s a threat,” he added. “I suppose you could read it like one, but I don’t think that was the intent.”
“So what was the intent? Why scare us off?”