Dan Vyleta - Smoke

They keep on falling.

Water starts falling alongside them. Livia hears it before she feels it. First it is a patter against the roofing of the cage. Then it runs freely along the walls of the shaft, is cut up by the protective netting, its spray pinpricks of cold on the skin of her face.

The cage stops. The arrest is so abrupt, she nearly loses her footing, bounces first against Charlie, then against Jake, whose hands, thrown out to steady her, recoil as though bitten no sooner has he touched her. Matches are struck, both he and Mr. Mosley light their lamps. Their dull light shows a bricked room, oblong and narrow, and closed off by a large metal gate. They swing open the cage door. A moment after Livia steps out, the cage is yanked away, upward, like a marionette banished from the stage. Behind them, the hole looms, too dark to offer any sense of depth. It might as well be filled with Soot.

Charlie, pale, eyes torn open in the gloom, lingers longest at its lip.

“How far does it go down?” Livia hears him ask of Jake who is helping Charlie with Thomas.

“All the way? Don’t know. It’s a game we play, counting on the way down. One lad will sing out four, another six minutes forty-five. There’s no man here rich enough to own a watch.”

He spits, pulls Charlie away from the lift shaft, points him inwards, towards the metal gate. “But this level here, we know the measure. Eight hundred and seventy feet. Quiet now, we must hurry. Here, help me with your friend.”

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The metal gate functions as a sort of air lock. Beyond lies the mine proper. Here, a different climate reigns, the air cold and clammy, tasting of mould. Only now and again a gust of warmer air catches them at intersections, furnace-hot, a relief to skin and lungs, but itself dead and heavy as lead.

They walk along rail tracks. It takes a while for this to register with Livia, and then to grow into an image: the iron bulk of a steam engine bearing down at them from out of the dark. But as they continue walking in a drawn-out procession, nothing emerges from the tunnel ahead of them, no train, no colliers, no beam of light. The tunnel itself is man-high and sloping. Steel supports bend into Gothic arches at every fourth step: cathedral cloisters built from brick and rust. Low tunnels branch off from time to time, dark gates leading into further darkness. Strange sounds carry along these shafts, the groan of steel and timber, the rhythmic whistle of moving air. They walk steadily, their heads in a stoop: gallows birds with broken necks, patrolling the warren of their afterlives to the stench of cold rot. Eight hundred and seventy feet of rock pressing down on them.

The train tracks end. Beyond, the tunnel narrows, the ceiling lowers. The steel supports give way to crooked timbers, the brick of the walls is replaced by sheer rock. And still they carry on, bent double now, humbled by the deadweight of the earth.

At long last they reach a destination, or at any rate, an ending. The tunnel widens into a long chamber, then is blocked abruptly by a pile of boulders that fills it floor to ceiling. To their right, a deep alcove yawns, not four feet in height, but some thirty feet wide and ten or so deep. Its far wall is so black it swallows the light. With a start, Livia realises this is the face of the coal seam that has been hewn away by men who must have worked it lying on their sides. Now there is no sign of recent work. Instead, the beam of Mr. Mosley’s lamp catches a series of sheets that have been hung from the supporting timbers and divide the space into narrow niches, each furnished with some dirty straw. A strange noise permeates the collapsed room, a sort of slurping, as of air sucked greedily through a half-closed ventilation trap. The mine’s breathing has grown laboured, the air heavier. It sticks to the skin like Soot.

“What happened to this place?” Livia asks.

It’s Jake who answers. “What does it look like? Gas explosion. This whole area has been closed down. The seam runs into a fault line there.” He gestures at the rock. “Not worth the trouble.”

“And that?” She points to the makeshift beds, each in its cubicle, filthy with coal dust. “Who comes here?”

“Young couples. Sneaking an hour, during their shift. For privacy.” He shines his lamp in her face. “In winter mostly, when the woods are too cold.”

She feels her skin blush in the lamplight.

“That’s sordid.”

“Is it now, miss? It’s hard, waiting, when you’re in love and don’t have the money to set up a house. But you wouldn’t know about that.” He snorts, turns the light away from her, and walks over to where rockslide meets wall at the opposite end of the grotto. “You’ll have to be quiet, in any case. You’ll be staying within forty feet of them.”

She wants to ask what he means, when he suddenly disappears, swallowed up by the rock. Only his light remains visible, oddly refracted, painting shards of light onto the floor.

“Go,” Mr. Mosley encourages her. “I will help Mr. Cooper with the sick lad. This will be hard going, this part.”

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There is a path that leads through the wall of rubble. No, not a path: a cut, so narrow she has to squeeze through sideways, and twisting in ways that suggest that the way forward is blocked off. But somehow it never is, each twist opening to another wedge of space, in between the fallen rock. The lamp ahead gives so little light that Livia has to feel herself forward with hands and feet. Her touch is slight. She fears dislodging the rubble, causing a rockslide. It is hard to shed the feeling that she is walking to her own grave.

Then, abruptly, the rock maze ends and spills them into a low tunnel. Jake’s lamp finds a row of wooden crossbeams disappearing into the darkness, like railway sleepers in a topsy-turvy world. They don’t follow the tunnel, however, but rather branch off left, where a narrow doorway opens on a large, square room, its low ceiling held aloft by twin rows of wooden supports. Livia’s eyes take in the tables and benches, the shelves with provisions and tools, and marvels at the sudden abundance of space. Fifty people could assemble here without feeling cramped. To one side stands a hulking structure not unlike a shelf but deeper and segmented into long rectangular boxes, coffin-sized. It takes her a moment to decipher its purpose.

“What’s that for then? Don’t tell me it too is for trysts. Lovers don’t require bunk beds.” She is surprised at how cold her voice sounds. Unsympathetic. In judgement. “You are up to something. What is it?”

When Jake does not answer at once, she walks over to the wall where a small wire cage has been screwed into the wall. It houses a group of limp canaries that press their beaks against the mesh. Beneath it stands a box, neatly stacked with a score of wooden clubs, each handle wrapped with rope for a better grip. A newspaper article comes to Livia’s mind, something she has read in the county circular, written by an Oxford don, worried for the body politic.

“This is a meeting hall. You are organising the malcontents, is that it? A ‘workers’ union,’ that’s what you call it. A gang of thieves.”

A look at Jake’s face tells her she is right. There is anger there, at the ease with which she has guessed his secret as much as at her tone. He walks over to her, holds up a hand, spreads out his fingers in front of her face like he wants to smother her. But the hand remains where it is, a five-spoked fan spread out thickly in the gloom.

“By itself, each of these can be broken by a child.” He wriggles his fingers, then crumples the hand into a fist, the knuckles standing out white in the half-light. “Try breaking this, Miss Naylor!”

A fist the size of a ham hock. Black, casting a shadow over her face. But Livia feels outrage rather than fear.