Stories

Stories

Fairy stories told of a wondrous world underground where, if one went deep enough, heroes feasted in eternal halls and the fairy folk lived in fabled bliss under a diamond sun.  It was an idyllic world where the deserving were rewarded, the undeserving punished.

The miners had different stories.  The bowels of the earth were as black as coal and bodies walked, blanched as dead fish floating in brackish water, eyes unseeing, mouths agape - they walked in revenge against the living.  Pity the fool who went too far down for nothing could save him.



Fifteen year old Walter Williams followed his companions deeper into the old Number One.  He had quit school to work in the mines so Nicky could go to college.  Nicky was the smart one.  Walter was a scrapper better suited to spending energy on the coal.  He was educated enough to know that there was nothing more than coal underground.  Coal came from ancient sunshine and plants.  He had seen those plants carbon-frozen in the coal.  He had never seen a fairy or a ‘Walker’.

There was an inevitability to the profession, the certainty that a man would follow his father and his grandfather before him into the mines.  There was only one shaft in life, and he had taken it.

At least he was getting recognition.  He was the youngest chosen to explore the old mine.  It had closed down shortly after Walter’s birth, the miners refusing to enter the pit.  ‘Walkers,’ they had said, those bleached and soulless bodies of the dead come back to claim more victims.  The company couldn’t fight the superstition.  The old mine closed.  Now, fifteen years later, they needed Number One.

Something groaned.  Evans stopped, his lamp a stationary beam in the dimness.  He hoisted his pick.  Tunnels led away from them in all directions.  Lamps flashed this way and that as the five men scanned their surroundings.  Something moved at the edges of the light.

The tunnels were filled with walking grubs in human form.  Their faces were pasty, their eyes clouded over.  “Run!” shouted Evans.  Walter backed up, stumbled, turned and ran.  Footsteps pounded behind him, three healthy men and old Palmer.  Walter stopped and reached back for the old man.  He saw Jones stumble and fall and Davis stop to help him.  He started to go himself.

Evans stood like a thick oak, his pick raised, between Walter, Palmer and the Walkers.  “Get him out of here!” he shouted.  Walter and Palmer grabbed each other and hurried to the cage.  They waited but all they heard were the screams of their dying companions.  There was nothing they could do.



The company called it a cave-in.  The mine stayed closed.  Palmer spent his last months in church atoning for the sin of living on.  Walter went back to Number Two and told how the three men held off the Walkers, with Evans holding out the longest, so he could get Palmer out.