The Pit

Thick sulphur coiled into Tucker's nostrils as he struck the match, overpowering the heavy damp of the earth around him. The sounds of the pit workers down below echoed and struck hard against the still of the night air, and in the darkness his hands cupped tightly around the flame to shield it from the clawing drizzle. He inhaled longingly on the roll up cigarette and thought once more about giving up smoking. “Those things’ll kill you Tuck.” His wife's voice hanging in his mind, the noise of the tree branches skittering against themselves in the night behind him. He tossed the spent match to the ground and mashed it into the soft earth with his boot. From below him the rhythm of the shovelling stopped. He peered down into the pit before him, its mudding walls criss-crossed with amber bulbs that turned the mineshaft into a rotten yellow maw.

‘Why y'all stopped for?’ In the dark swirl below him he made out the shapes of the pitters, clung to the walls of the shaft-way by their ropes like flies in a web, their headlamps barely giving their figures more than deformed outlines against the soil and rock.

‘Air’s gettin’ sour boss.’ A sickly voice echoed up the pit, as the scattered  headlamps pointed downward towards the small blotch of a man forty feet down. Tucker spat off to the side, the thick glob lost to the wet ground at his feet.

‘Y’all still shoutin’ ain’t ya?’ 

The swaying lamps seemed to rally on the point below them for a moment before twirling upon each other in desperation.

‘We’s seein’ the glow down here too boss.’ Another voice offered up in a cowardly squawk, this one further up the wall-side. Tucker stepped to the edge and peered over the rim, nothing but a stark outline against a darkened sky to the pitters below.

‘Ain’t no glow.’ He flung the burning cigarette down into the hole, its tip a flying red pin prick in the gloom as it descended. The headlamps crowed and swayed to avoid the burning tip. The glowing end vanished into the depths with a whimper.

‘Ain’t no sour neither. Y’all get back to work. Only four hours till dawn, I want them walls slick before tonight.’

The lights slowly turned to the inside of the shaft, and the steady clunk and draft of the hand tools resumed from the dark. Tucker stepped backwards and pulled another cigarette from his heavy slicker pocket. “Kill you dead, Tuck. Just like them boys with the glow.”

‘Horseshit.’ He muttered to himself before lighting his smoke. He was alone in the field around him, the ragged whips of treetops set against the sky in jagged rows, a border to the prairie that hosted the wolves and foxes and cowardly creatures that hid in the shadows of the forest, away from the field, away from the pit. He smoked in peace for a while, studying his cracked hands. Damned if he hadn’t done his time down there, and damned if he was going to be hollered at by some cowardly town boys who’d spent their youth pecking at crops and shingling roof tops. He’d done his time down in the dark and now it was his turn to watch.

A harsh breeze ripped at the air around him, the pine branches cracked and moaned in the black, and he rubbed his palms and smoked his peace and listened to the pounding of earth and stone below him. Those walls would be clean by morning, oh yes. Even if he had to lance some fire down there to scare them boys into working faster, those walls would be clean, and it would be on his watch.

Earl’s eyes were fixed on the smoking man. He crouched coldly at the foot of a great dark pine, studying the lone man through the branches with burning intent. From afar and through the night cold, the smoking man looked calm, at ease with his feet atop the jaws of hell that he presided over. Earl knew the type of man. A man who thought himself brave and wise, his hands weathered from the work. A man who thought his place was earned and justified by his toils in the dark earth that cracked and wounded at his soul across the years. Earl knew those men as the trees around him knew their roots. Men who thought nothing of the boys they sent to clean the walls and put their lives to the rocks and the glow. And Earl knew of the glow, oh yes. 

He had seen the glow, and his shadowed eyes were alight with their hue. Diamonds of blue in the darkness of the forest, watching the smoking man with hatred, and with patience. Earl knew the glow was angry, he knew the glow would not abide this smoking man, or his chattel boys whose fingers worked the earth from the stone walls below and angered the will of the world.

Earl shifted his weight with the rhythm of the wind against the branches, his legs finding their place to ease the encroaching numbness. He crouched still and silent, and his glowing eyes watched across the darkened field while the creatures of the forest whimpered and slunk away from his presence with the knowledge of those who fear the glow of the earth and its roots. Earl waited in the dark.

The boy pawed wildly at his headlamp, its grimy yellow bulb flickering against the darkened rock-face. The light was fading, all around him the shadow encroached and grew and pulled at his limbs. He wanted to panic, the thought of screaming surging up his gullet and caught in his young throat. He was the lowest lad, bottom of the chain, eighty feet down and two dozen other lads above him scouring at the rock. His mother and father had sent him off to earn his keep and clean the pit. Honest work for a young man of sixteen, it would teach him how to grow, how to learn to be a man. And now down here in the lowest parts of the world he fumbled alone and scared, a boy in the abyss, his light failing about him along with his nerve and his sense.

He knew the stories of the glow, about the men gone mad with the rage of the earth, their souls given up in the dark and taken by the desperate need for the light, any light to pierce through the dark and take over their sight. But they were stories, only stories told around the fires at night, told to scare the boys and make the older pitters sound brave. The earth was not alive, and it couldn’t have reason to scoff at the lives of men who dared to undo its work against the rock, for how could the earth know vengeance if it had no heart to feel fury. Nothing but mud and stone, his brother had told him. Nothing but mud and stone, and the mud needs to be cleaned and the stone exposed for them men to take and sculpt and fashion and work so that they could build upon and claim the earth as their own. 

But down here in the dark the earth seemed as though to move, it seemed as though to breath and pulse. The boy could watch as the shadows grew and waved, and he begged and prayed for more light as his bulb flickered and grew faint. He begged for just some more light, any light to keep the dark away. And around his fingers as they clung into the sodden wall, the earth began to glow, and the glow answered his plea.

The first scream was stilted and caught across the wind, and Tucker hardly heard the voices above the din and rhythm of the working tools. At first he took it for a calling bird in the night among the trees, but the sound lifted and waved and grew from behind. He turned and started to the edge of the pit, and looking down he saw the chaos unfolding below. 

The yellow lights along the walls that stretched below were bobbing back and forth in a chaotic riot, each one discordant and frantic. The walls of the pit were strobed in amber flashes, the shapes of the men writhing and bobbing around in their harness’, dangling like mice caught over the jaws of a lion. The noise of clamour and fear ascended from the gloom as tools clanked and smashed into the rock as they were thrown or dropped, the sound of screams and shouts starting from the bottom turning into a crescendo of panic as it made its way up the chain from man to man. The great round hole before him that plunged into the chasm of the earth became alive with the wriggling masses of blackened shapes, their headlamps flailing wildly in the choking dark as they groped and clutched to the chain ropes and tried to writhe their way up and around the inner wall.

‘Goddammit, stop that now!’ Tucker screamed down into the shaft, unable to direct his command to any one man, as now the frightened tangle was no more than a melee of flickering yellow dots amidst silhouetted terror. The sounds of yelling and screams were broken by the groaning of the weight of the bodies and the smashing of their hands against the walls, the chains and ropes singing in strain against the weight. And from the blackness of the depths he saw the faintest shimmer of blue light, a swirling azure mist upon the void. His eyes widened in terror as the glow rose and encompassed the outlines of the lowest men, their lamps absorbed and wrapped over by the coming tide.

When he heard the first snap of the chains he began to turn, but with time enough to hear the chorus of pleas as the lines gave way, and the webbed tangle of pitters bounced and ricocheted down and down into the darkness of the shaft. He turned and ran across the field as the trials of glow snaked and crept up and over the rim of the pit behind him. “Come to get you Tuck. Come to get you dead.”

Earl watched as the smoking man fled, saw him weave blindly into the trees. He sat quietly and waited as the smoking man's cries became absorbed by the foliage and the night. He stepped out into the field and started over towards the mouth of the pit. Each footfall crackling the frosted grass underneath, wisps of diamond blue air hissing out underfoot, and his glowing eyes fixated on the aperture of the earth before him.

The screams had silenced, and the air was cold and still, the wind abated and the sounds of the animals paused as if in reverence. He stood atop the lip, the mud sluicing between his feet, and he stared over and into the dark. And slowly, from the depths of this puncture within the earth, this wound carved into nature itself, dozens of shining blue points of light blinked open and stared back up towards him, curious and newborn with the glow of earth. And Earl smiled.