The Journey Prize Stories 28 (11 page)

When she crests the ramp and rounds the corner out of the subdrift the warm circle of the loci's lights glows in the near-distance, showering gradients of penumbra closer and closer until her feet break the light and she is no longer as dark as the darkness; she can see a part of herself again. When she reaches the loci she sits down in the driver's seat and turns it on and starts to drive before she even tries to catch her breath.

“Don't read too much into it,” says Gloria when he's taking her up to the surface. “It was a nasty joke. Just somebody messing with you. One of the old-timers giving you a hard time. It'll teach you to never shine your light in someone's eyes, anyway.”

Roxane's next shift's cancelled because a slow trickle of water built up somewhere above 1000 level and then blasted out of a ten-by-ten chute holding five hundred tonnes of muck. Someone was taking muck out of the raise at the bottom with a scoop, and when they'd taken enough the water gave way all at once, burying a brand new scoop in rubble after moving it two hundred feet down the drift. It could have killed somebody. As it was, the scoop operator who got hit was in the hospital with a collapsed lung and a broken wrist. Roxane realizes, only after she sees the muck blown down the drift, that she was tramming near the chute on the day the water gave. If the man in the dark hadn't broken her light she might have been the one laid up in the hospital, or worse.

“Maybe that's what Wycliffe was talking about,” Roxane says to Gloria. She's trying to sound like she doesn't believe.

“In a place like this it's a miracle accidents don't happen more often,” Gloria says. “And if they keep happening, they're going to close this place down. They won't shut us down just because people keep getting hurt. They'll close when the bad morale causes production to get so low there'll be no point in keeping it open anymore.”

Roxane knows what'll happen if they close the mine. She remembers growing up playing on streets lined with derelict houses and broken fences hemming in overgrown lawns. The downtown strip was burned down and boarded up. Everything slept quietly, lying nascent until another company came in wanting to refine the old tailings or strike down to another mother lode.

“They dug too deep,” Gloria says. “And they didn't fill in the ground properly. It's dangerous here. Why does a nice, pretty girl like you want to work in a hole like this, anyway?”

“I need money,” Roxane says.

“You can get money working on top of the ground.”

“I can't make enough money working anywhere else. I have a little girl, and she's got nobody but me.”

“What about her daddy?”

“He was one of the boys who went missing in the forest fire a few years back,” Roxane says.

On the news they said that the fire front changed direction in the wind at the last minute, trapping the crews that were working at the front. They had to resort to their emergency survival plan: digging a big trench in the ground, as deep as they could get it before the flames and smoke got too close, and then pulling a big fireproof tarp over their heads in the hope that the fire would burn over them. But they were never found.

“I'm sorry,” says Gloria. “I am sorry to hear that. But your little girl's the reason to get out. You're not planning on staying down here forever, are you?”

“What about Wycliffe?” Roxane asks, trying to change the subject. “He looks like he's seventy, anyway.”

“He was retired until just a few years ago. It's funny you should mention the fire. Wycliffe had a hobby farm, and he lost everything in the fire—his whole property went up. He had to start working again. But he's done now, after that with the Kubota. Good riddance, I say. He's too old to work anymore. He's dangerous. Crazy.”

At the end of her next shift, just after Roxane has parked the loci and she's walking back to the cage, she sees the solitary headlamp again. The light starts to roll in the dark—“come closer.”

This time she stays where she is. “Who are you?” she calls. “What the hell do you want?”

The light stops rolling and starts to bob gently up and down. He's walking toward her.

“Stop!” Roxane shouts. “Stop right there!” She shines her lamp at the man's head.

“Will you get that fucking light out of my eyes?” the shift-boss says.

“Sorry.”

“Listen, I think there's a power outage. The phones are down, and I can't get ahold of anybody. I want you to go to the refuge station and wait there till I come back. If you meet anybody on the way, tell them the same thing.”

“What's happening?” Roxane asks. “Is something wrong?”

“It's nothing,” he says. “Don't worry about it.”

His frame jitters in the light while he walks away. No jokes now. He hurries over the uneven ground, splashing through the puddles without seeing them.

When Roxane gets to the refuge she finds it empty. The lights don't work, but she still has her headlamp. She closes the big steel door behind her. It's set in a concrete wall, designed to block the refuge off from the rest of the mine. The refuge floor is concrete too, but the other walls are jagged, bare rock. She picks up the phone that's mounted beside safety procedure posters on a piece of plywood backing. But the line is dead.

She sits down on one of the picnic tables in the middle of the room, the dark air pressing down on her shoulders. Maybe it's just a power outage. Or maybe there's something wrong with the cage. It happened three or four times a year that the hoist got tangled or something went wrong with the winch. The last time a shift got stuck underground, they had to wait for hours. The Captain was thinking about making them climb up to the surface in the escapeway.

Roxane feels the air stir, a herald of movement unseen. She holds her breath. There it is. The steady wheeze of slow, deep breathing.

Slowly, she shines her light around the circumference of the room, starting in the corner nearest to her. Her light catches in the crags, playing tricks on her eyes. She's almost swept the entire room; still, there's nothing. But in the last corner her light slides over a bundle of rags, slides back. Roxane leaps to her feet.

A pair of eyes blink open, glassy and reflective in the light. It's Wycliffe Nichols.

“Why the hell didn't you say anything when I walked in?” Roxane asks.

“I didn't know who you were,” Wycliffe says. “I couldn't see your face. You might have been
him.”

He's curled up in a dozen pairs of old, dirty coveralls, Roxane realizes.

“What's going on out there?” he asks. “Why's the power down?”

“Shift-boss sent me to the refuge,” Roxane says. “He says he's going to find a radio. The phones are down. He's coming back soon.”

“He won't be back,” Wycliffe says. “No, we've seen the last of old Roger. Old Roger who likes a good joke.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Wycliffe's voice is hoarse, as if he hasn't spoken for days. His breaths rattle around a moist cough that sounds like it issues from infected lungs. Though he's sleeping in a nest of them, he's not wearing any coveralls—just dirty jeans and a flannel shirt. His boots are tall, insulated rubber ones like the kind Roxane's father used to wear to shovel the driveway. He has no hardhat.

“Where's all your gear?” Roxane asks. Wycliffe makes no answer.

“I thought you were out with broken ribs? Gloria said you weren't coming back. I didn't see you in the cage today.”

“I didn't come down in the cage,” Wycliffe says. “I know how to get in from the surface. I climbed down, a few days ago.”

“You've been
living
down here? But why would you come back?” she asks. Then it hits her. “It was you who broke my
light, wasn't it? You've been creeping around in the dark—”

“Break your light? What are you talking about? I didn't break no light. It was
him
who broke your light.”

“You're a crazy bastard.”

“You've seen him too, haven't you?” says Wycliffe. “That day you found me hanging in the chute you felt him. I could ask you who he is, as much as you could ask me. Does he ever come up on you so you can only see his legs in the shadows outside your headlamp? Does your light chase him away when you try to get closer? His breath smells like sulphur, doesn't it?”

“You're crazy,” she says again. She heads for the refuge door.

“I wouldn't go out there if I were you,” Wycliffe says. “He says there's trouble.”

Roxane pauses.

“I know why he's after me,” Wycliffe says. “I know what sleeps on my conscience. But why's he after
you?
There's only one reason he finds you in the dark.”

“What do you mean?” Roxane asks.

“He's not bad. You might think he is, but he's only trying to help you.”

Roxane remembered how the drift had flooded and crushed the scoop, how she'd been saved.

“You said he pushed you down the chute,” Roxane says.

“I didn't say that. I said it was his fault, and it was. He told me to jump from the Kubota at the last second. Otherwise, my spine would have snapped like a twig. He wasn't trying to hurt me. He was telling me how to survive.”

“Is that what
he
told you the day those two boys got killed in the fire?” Roxane asks.

Wycliffe's silent for a long time. Then he says, “He tells me lots of things. He tells me when the rock's about to burst. He tells me when they're laying charges and one doesn't go off. He's been keeping me alive for a long, long time.”

Roxane remembers what Gloria told her, about Wycliffe saying he was saved by Jesus. “He's been keeping
you
alive,” she laughs. But she doesn't like the way her voice sounds hollow and scared in the darkness, so she asks, “Why?”

“I don't know. There's no rhyme or reason for it. He told me about today. That's why he let me get in that Kubota with my lanyard still on. He wanted me to be far away from this place, safe in the hospital. But I came back. I'm not going to let him help me no more.”