Not taking my eyes off the pit, I stepped inside the structure. The top of the tower was partly open, and the north wind blew a steady beer-bottle C-sharp across it.
“How deep is it?” asked Harry.
“I didn’t ask.” Paul’s flashlight beam followed me like a spotlight as he spoke.
As I got closer to the edge of the pit, it seemed as though the ground were actually sloping inward towards it, growing unsteady beneath my feet. A smell of machine oil and something like must wafted out of the hole. I stepped back.
“That’s good, Graham,” said Paul, motioning me back to the wall with the flashlight. “Don’t get too close to the opening. I’d hate to have to tell your mother we left you at the bottom.”
Both Jim and Harry sniggered at that, and I laughed as well, with deliberate good humour. I backed up a few more steps, until my shoulders were pressed against an old wooden ladder. The wood felt soft, ancient; like it would crumble under my weight.
“You find this place inspirational, do you, Paul?” I asked, fighting to keep the quaver out of my voice.
“The Art League ladies swear by it.”
The ladder shifted minutely behind my back. From up high, a sprinkle of sand fell, catching like a miniature nebula in the flashlight beam. I tried to imagine how far that sand would fall into the earth before it found something to settle on.
“Well, we can’t let Graham here soak up all the juice,” said Harry. He stepped inside and peered up into the dark, nose wrinkling.
“Smells in here,” he said finally. Jim stepped inside, sniffing.
Behind me, the ladder shifted again, and more dirt fell into the mine. The wind shifted up a half-tone in pitch and with it, the timbers high in the tower creaked. I let go of the ladder and inched further along the wall. I felt like a reluctant suicide on a high-rise window ledge.
“Paul, be a good man and swing that flashlight up there,” said Harry, pointing to the top of the ladder. His voice was quiet, almost a monotone. Paul obeyed, and slashed the beam up through the cascade of sand, to the place where Harry pointed.
“Jesus H. Christ!”
I don’t know which one of us yelled it; it might have been me, for all the attention I was paying. The only thing I know for sure is that it didn’t come from the narrow platform at the top of the ladder, where the light-circle finally came to rest.
There was a man at the top of the ladder.
The light reflected back at us three times: dimly in each lens of the round safety goggles that he wore underneath his helmet, much brighter from the Cyclops-lens of his own helmet-mounted light. He wore a snowsuit, bright yellow underneath, but obscured by thick, hardening smears of mud. A shadow from a cross-beam fell on his chest and chin, enshrouding his features utterly. His arms dangled at his side, and in the mitten of his left hand, he clutched a crowbar.
Harry lifted his hands — as though the crowbar were a rifle, and the miner were a policeman placing the four of us under arrest.
“Hey, fellow,” he said. “Just thought we’d take a look around before it got too dark up here. Hope we’re not trespassing.”
The stranger stood stock still, and didn’t answer immediately. He was about fifteen feet above us, on a narrow platform that seemed to extend around the entire second storey of the minehead. The ends of the narrow-gauge tracks that the mine carts rode on extended out into space from the platform near his feet.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Peletier.” The voice was deep and gravelly, and the man up top didn’t move as he spoke. It was almost as though the voice had come from somewhere else — the top of the pit-tower, maybe the depths of the mine itself. But Paul answered readily enough, and with an easy familiarity that sent a premonitory chill through me.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Tevalier. Ils sont ici — oui, mon père, ils sont tous ici.”
Paul’s Northern Quebec French has always been a challenge for me, but even without the benefit of my Grade 10 French, the meaning of that simple sentence would have been unmistakable:
They are here — yes, my father, all of them.
No sooner had Paul spoken than the miner’s left hand opened and the crowbar clattered to the floorboards over our heads. He stepped back, and for the briefest instant as the shadows passed from his face, we could see him — an absurdly weak chin framed by mutton-chop sideburns the colour of dirty snow; hard yellow flesh, drawn tight as a drum skin across high cheekbones; and of course, we could see his teeth. They were like nails, hammered down through the gums so far that they extended a full inch over the lips.
Paul turned the light away as the creature leaned forward. As it raised its arms to fall, I heard the flick of a flashlight switch and that light disappeared. Something moved in front of the door, and the darkness of the pit-head became absolute.
The creature took Harry first. He was the oldest among us, he’d been slowing down for years, and from that sheerly practical standpoint, I guess he made the easiest target. There were no screams; just a high whimper. The sound a beaten dog would make, if that dog were Harry Fairbanks.
“The rest of you, stand where you are,” said Paul, his voice preposterously calm. “One wrong move, and you could find yourself dead at the bottom of the shaft.”
“Oh, you bastard,” said Jim, the words coming out in sobbing breaths. “Oh, you think you got us trapped in here, oh you Goddamned bastard.”
“Only for a moment,” said Paul. “Only a moment. Stand still, and we’ll all walk out of here together.”
The whimper had devolved into a low moan, and it was quickly joined by another sound: dry clicks, the sound old men sometimes make with their throats, as they swallow their soup.
It was at that point, I think, that it occurred to me that Paul’s warning to Jim didn’t really apply to me: my back was still against the wall, and so long as I kept in contact with that wall, I’d be safe from making a wrong step into the pit. And the ladder to the second floor was only a step away.
Harry let loose a horrible, blood-wet cough, and with it, my decision was made: left hand still pressed against the rough tarpaper wall, I reached out and grabbed a rung of the ladder with my right. It was just as soft as I remembered it, but I didn’t take the time to worry whether or not it would hold and in a single motion, swung myself around and started to climb.
The bottom rung snapped under my foot, but I was working on momentum at that point and managed to pull myself past it. The climb couldn’t have taken more than a second or two, but it seemed like hours. I was torn between two dreads: of the moment the rungs snapped — beneath my feet, or my hands, or both — and I fell back into the mine; and of the instant that the creature below stopped swallowing, and reached up with whatever kind of claws it had hiding under those big miner’s mitts, to grab my ankle and pull me back towards the pit.
But the clicking continued, and the ladder held, one rung and the next rung and the next, and finally when I reached for another rung, my hand fell instead on the rim of the second floor. As I scrambled to get up, my hand closed around the cold metal of the crowbar the creature had dropped, and when I got to my feet, I hefted it in front of me like a club. There was marginally more light up here, and I took a moment to get my bearings. What remained of the day filtered in through cracks in the far wall, and reflected dull steel gleam off the mine-cart tracks even as they converged toward that wall. I couldn’t see clearly, but I knew there would have to be a door there — those tracks would lead out to the trestle, and the jagged heap of rocks that it traversed.
“Graham! For Christ’s sake!” It was Paul, but I didn’t take time to answer him. Something more important had suddenly occupied my attention: