7 #2
Kent cleared his throat. I was so used to him quietly arranging things in the background that it was startling to hear him speak up. “Perhaps someone wishes to reopen the mine?”
“It’s failed twice as a coal mine,” said Denton doubtfully.
“There are other things than coal, sir.”
“That’s true,” said Ingold slowly. “If they found some valuable deposit, that might explain why they wish to keep people away.”
“More importantly,” said Denton, “ who left it? Our friend from the telegraph office?”
“Maybe he came back for his clothes,” I said. No one laughed.
“Whoever it was, they came in here where we were sleeping,” Angus pointed out. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t have woken up if they tried to get into one of the buildings, but I don’t much like the thought of someone slinking around here at night.”
“But did they come from town or up from the mine?” I asked, and then realized, by the quality of the silence, that everyone had been carefully not asking that question. I took a hasty gulp of coffee and burned the roof of my mouth.
“Either way is possible,” Ingold said. “But they’d have to be awfully small to fit through that gap, assuming they were the one with the light.”
“Go armed,” Angus said. “A small man can kill you as dead as a big one.”
Ingold grimaced. “A gunshot down there could bring the ceiling down.”
“So maybe you’ll take him with you.”
There was no arguing with this logic. Denton holstered a gun and then he and Ingold went back down into the shaft to clear more rubble from the cave-in. I didn’t volunteer to go along this time. Even I eventually run out of the need to prove myself to myself.
Instead I stayed up top and watched Angus and Kent watching each other.
It’s always a crapshoot with two extremely competent aide-de-camp types.
Either they recognize a kindred spirit and begin sharing recipes for boot polish and how to feed fifty people on two turnips and an elderly onion, or they get along like a house fire, the kind with lots of screaming and hideous injuries.
Fortunately for domestic harmony, neither Angus nor Kent showed signs of incipient combustion.
They divided the camp chores neatly between them and went to work.
I went out and checked the horses, then came back and asked if I could help and was set to peeling potatoes.
(Ironically, I did not actually peel many potatoes in the army.
I was an officer. But prior to that, when I was a wide-eyed youngster in my mother’s kitchen, I peeled my weight in potatoes weekly. This is not a skill you forget.)
It was, overall, an uneventful day. Denton and Ingold came up a few hours later, blinking in the daylight, and announced that they had cleared most of the rubble.
“No sign of any red light,” Denton said.
“But there is a tunnel leading down. Though our mother hen here won’t let me go into it just yet. ”
“Cluck cluck,” said Ingold, unruffled. “You’ve got to give it a chance to air out. I want to build the fire up at the top of the ventilation shaft and see if we can’t draw more air through.”
So, after peeling potatoes, the rest of my day was spent gathering firewood. Honestly, it was like being back in Gallacia. It was even cold that night, and the bedroll felt like sheets of ice on my skin, which would have made me homesick if I had any desire to ever go home again.
I woke in the middle of the night because I had to piss like a racehorse.
(Which is an odd phrase when you think of it.
Do racehorses piss more than other horses?
Why single them out for an analogy?) I made my way down the little steps of the overseer’s shack and out past where we’d picketed the horses.
The wooden latrine was of the board-with-a-hole variety, though Kent had cleared out the cobwebs and evicted any local spiders.
One thing that no one warns you about is how loud the nights are in America, or at least in West Virginia.
There were the horses, of course, shifting their feet and making the occasional quiet snort, but that was almost drowned out by other things .
Things that buzzed and chirped and croaked from every direction as I attended to matters.
Were they all insects of some sort? Frogs?
Birds? All three? The buzzing was probably an insect, but what was the thing that sounded like someone dragging their nail over a comb, or the one in the distance singing “Hwwih-poor- will ! Hwwih-poor- will !” with monotonous enthusiasm?
There is nothing like having your trousers around your ankles and your arse hanging over an empty space while a veritable army of unseen nature screams at you to make you feel vulnerable. I finished with as much haste as I could and scurried back to the relative safety of the mine.
My foot had just hit the stairs to the overseer’s office when I saw the red light coming from the mine shaft.
If it had not been so dark, I don’t know that I would have seen it at all, but in the absolute blackness of the mine, it shone with a dull scarlet radiance.
I froze, one hand still on my buttons, watching the red light shift across the stone ceiling.
It didn’t look like a lantern. This was a wriggling, moving light, slowly growing fainter as I watched.
I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t armed and had no lamp. Probably I should have woken the others at once. But all I could think of was laying eyes on what was causing it. I scurried across the floor to the entrance to the shaft and peered down.
Partway down, something glowed.
It was low to the ground, almost flat. At first I thought it was a person lying spread-eagled on a blanket. I could make out arms and legs, head and trunk, all shining a strange dull red. Recognizably human, even if it looked like it was made of melted candle wax.
Then it moved.
What I thought was a blanket was actually a thick ribbon of flesh that crawled , undulating with the too-fast ripple of a centipede’s legs, as the thing went slithering across the ground, engulfed in bloody light.
I think if it had not had the human-shaped form atop it, I could have borne it better.
It would have been shocking and unexpected, but my first thought would have been slugs or snails or flatworms. But the merging of alien movement with a half-melted human form was too much, and I stumbled back with a curse on my lips and my mind full of wailing horror.
Instantly the light went out. I stood frozen in the sudden darkness, terrified to move. Had the thing seen me? Had it heard me?
Was it already coming back this way?
If I moved, would it pinpoint my position and come rippling up the shaft to engulf me with no-longer-glowing flesh?
The mine’s breath moaned out past me, bringing with it a scent of old buried things. It broke my paralysis and I bolted.