The Journey Prize Stories 28 (12 page)

“What do you mean?” Roxane asks.

“Today's the day,” Wycliffe says. “I don't know if it's a cave-in or a rock burst. Or maybe it's another fire. But it's coming. And it's going to happen soon. From the looks of things, it's happening already.”

“Stop talking shit,” Roxane says.

“I've had a good life,” he says. “God knows I didn't deserve what happiness I got. I had a little place on the water where the thrushes sang in the morning and the mallards came to nest in the spring and swam in between the shore and the ice on the lake. And every night in summer the loons called out over the water. When the sun set after real hot days and the gulls flew through the mist the barges would float by, playing music. And there'd be the sound of people laughing. I'd give anything to get just a taste of that place one more time. I'd give anything—”

“I said shut up,” says Roxane.

The darkness stretches between them, hardens, and grows cold. She wants to leave the refuge; she wills herself to get up again, open the door, but it's only a dream. She's sitting still.

“Maybe I'm wrong,” Wycliffe says. “Maybe it's all right this time.”

“Gloria says you should have died in that fire twenty years ago,” Roxane says. She's keeping her eyes and her light on him, as if worried he'll suddenly spring at her, or slither off into the darkness.

“I should have,” Wycliffe says. “But I didn't.”

“So what did you do? How did you
really
survive?”

She expects him to tell her the same crock of shit he's been spouting for twenty years, but instead he says, “You ever smell the stench?”

“Stench?”

“I was down on 4000 when I smelled it. They make it smell that way, so you can't confuse it with the taste of second-hand air, or anything else. It wrenches your gut. They flood the mine with it when there's an emergency. If you smell that smell something's gone wrong. The first thing you're supposed to do is get to a Femco, tell someone where you are. But when I got to the phone the lines were down, and that's how I knew the power was out. So I headed for the refuge. I couldn't see or hear anything out of the ordinary, except that it was too quiet. But I wasn't in any special hurry as I made my way down to the refuge station. It wasn't until I came out of the subdrift that I started to see smoke. Soon I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. My headlamp didn't help. It just shone on the smoke and threw the light back in my eyes. I didn't know how far away the refuge was. And the smoke was getting thicker. It
was getting difficult to breathe. It didn't take me too long to realize that there was a fire burning somewhere in front of me. I got all turned around. I didn't know which way I'd come from. The smoke was so thick that I knew it'd be a matter of minutes before I lost consciousness…But I could see the smoke eddying a few feet in front of me. I realized I must be close to a ventilation raise. So I kept on, feeling my way along the drift until I came to the raise. And I stood there, breathing in the fresh air from the surface. I was stuck at the raise but the air kept me alive.”

“That really works?” Roxane asks.

“Of course it does. But the ventilation raises are also what they use to spread the stench around the mine. So when you're squatting under there, praying to God that someone will find you, you're breathing in each breath of the worst smell you've ever smelled in your life, and you're thinking all the while that each breath is sweet because it could be your last.”

“How long were you there for?”

“I don't know. Time passed differently. If nobody had come for me by now, I thought, it probably meant that the fire was bad, and getting worse. Other people must be trapped. I was the only one on 4000. Knowing this didn't make the time go any faster. I knew I needed to get to a refuge. Once you're in there, you can clay up the door and wait—you can last for days. When I first found the vent I didn't know where I was, but as I stood there things started to become clear. I was almost sure I knew which way to go. But picking the wrong way would kill me. I guess I was waiting for a sign.”

“A sign?” Roxane asks.

“Something to let me know, beyond a doubt, that it would be better to try to find the refuge than to stay under the ventilation shaft. And I did see a sign.”

“What did you see?”

“A flash of light through the smoke. Just a flicker. It might not have been anything at all. I thought maybe it was somebody from Mine Rescue, looking for men on the drifts. I called out, but there was no answer.”

“Then what?” Roxane asks.

“I blacked out,” Wycliffe says. “Maybe I inhaled too much smoke. Or maybe I had some kind of panic attack. I woke up in the dark and I thought I was dead. My light was off. But it didn't take too long to figure out I was in a refuge. And I could
feel
that I wasn't alone in the dark. I heard the sound of a door opening—the refuge station door, I knew that sound. ‘Hello?' I called, but my voice was torn up by the smoke. Nobody answered. I tried to turn on my headlamp, but the bulb was smashed. I remembered I had a flashlight in my pocket. I was so nervous when I pulled it out that I almost dropped it. ‘Wait!' I called. ‘Wait!' I wanted to see the face of the man who'd saved my life. I got my light out just in time. I saw him.”

“Who did you see?” Roxane asks, even though she knows what Wycliffe's answer will be.

“His face was long and thin and white. He had a big, round, black hole for a mouth. And his eyes…I'll never forget his eyes. They were more like teeth than they were like eyes. Sharp and white. They ate me up. Then spat out the bones, and now the bones are all that's left.” Wycliffe's face is stretched in agony. “It was the
Beast,”
he whispers. “It was the Devil who
saved my life. And it's been him following me around in the dark all these years.”

Roxane swallows. “I thought…I thought you said you saw Jesus.”

The smell hits both of them at the same time. It's gut-wrenching, breathing in the first lungful, just like Wycliffe said. It's so thick Roxane thinks it'll crowd out all the oxygen in her lungs, fill up her blood.

“What is that?” she asks, but she already knows.

“Stay here, and I'll be all right,” Wycliffe mutters. “Stay right here. Clay the door, sit tight, and wait for someone to come get me. I'll be all right if I wait…”

He rises to his feet and heads for the refuge station door, kicking the tangle of coveralls away from him. He opens one of the lockers and pulls out the emergency supplies and lays them on the ground near the door.

“You make sure you use this,” he says.

“What?”

“Clay the door, and then crack an air header on the two-inch pipe. That'll fix the pressure so no smoke can get in.”

“What do you mean?” Roxane asks. “You're not going out there—”

Wycliffe heaves the door open. The curling tendrils of smoke pause upon the threshold, then pull him out the door and into the drift, so white with smoke she can't see the rock on the other side. He hauls the door shut behind him.

Roxane's headlamp reflects off the steel, showing her a ghostly shape—a long, white face with shaded eyes. She starts, looking behind her. But no one's there. It's her own reflection staring back at her.

The crazy bastard
, she thinks.
He won't get a hundred metres. I'm not getting myself killed going after his sorry corpse—

An image of Johnny flashes into her thoughts. Twenty men died huddled under that tarp, waiting in the dark for the flames to burn overtop of them.

If you sit tight you'll be all right
. That's what Wycliffe said.
Someone will come for you
.

Roxane drops back down to the picnic table. Minutes pass. The rock walls writhe. She hears something; her light sweeps the room, finally focusing on a shape, matte shadow in the moist grey-black, a shape that shouldn't be there. It's another fossil, small and jagged and curved upward like a smile, jabbering through clenched teeth. The word
“escapeway”
dissipates in the air like a whisper. Roxane can't tell if she heard it in the darkness in front of her eyes or the darkness inside her head.

She climbs to her feet and opens the locker near the door, digs through until she finds a breather—a “self-rescuer,” they're called. They can last up to one hour.

If she could only get to the escapeway…It's four thousand rungs to the top. She had to climb it once, back when she was in training. There was a bum-ledge every twenty metres, where you could sit and rest. When you got to within five hundred metres of the surface you started to see the top of the tunnel, just a tiny prick of light. All you had to do was keep pulling it closer. That wouldn't be the hard part, anyway; the hard part would be finding the escapeway in the smoke.

When she opens the door smoke billows into the refuge. The two hundred metres to the ladder might as well be two kilometres. If she misses it and has to double back…

No. Don't think about that
. The escapeway would be safe because they send air down the raise from the surface. And the fire will be downwind of the escapeway, if it's on 4000 at all.

She keeps her hand on the side of the drift, measuring each step at a metre, counting her steps to keep track of the distance. Two hundred steps, then four thousand rungs. Then she can breathe the clean, free air and see the daylight.

As she walks through the white, the smoke clawing at her eyes, she thinks of Johnny again.

There were no fires in the north that year, so Johnny and his crew were being shipped off to California to help put out the wildfires that were burning up the state. He ended up having to stay at the last minute because of the fire that broke out and ate up half the town.

Roxane's hand slides into nothing and she knows she's found the entrance to the escapeway. She gropes for the first rung, latches on, pulls herself up. Starts the long climb.

Just past 4000 level, she hears footfalls sounding on the rungs below her, a split-second after her own.

“Wycliffe?” she calls, but the sound's thrown back in her mouth by the breather mask she forgot to take off. She pulls the mask down and takes a slow, deep lungful of air, fresh and sweet like it'll be on the surface. There's a landing in front of her and she wants to stop and rest and breathe deep, free lungfuls—but she doesn't dare. She keeps pulling herself up and up and up, arms burning, chest heaving.

A pinprick of light blinks into existence above her head, like the first star in the night sky. She makes a wish, chances a look down. Sees only darkness. Maybe she imagined the footfalls, after all. Maybe she only dreamed the heavy breathing, the
broken headlamp, the long, shadowy legs rooted just outside the circle of her light. She keeps climbing.

Soon she can see her hands on the rungs, her knuckles white when they close around the cold steel. She can almost feel the rosy warm touch of the sun on her cheeks. She tells herself,
The burning in your arms and legs is nothing to what you'd feel if you were burning up in the fire. Nothing like what Johnny felt
.

When she finally reaches the top she stands, hollow and heaving, on the ledge beneath the Plexiglas and wire grating of the trap door that covers the escapeway. Through the glass she can see the rafters of the building that houses the escapeway. Her hands find the trap door's latch. She pushes up.

Nothing happens.

Roxane tries again, heaving with her shoulder. The trap door is stuck. She knows something must be wrong—the escapeway is always open. She pulls a flashlight out of her pocket and shines it through the Plexiglas, shimmying along the ledge, twisting the beam this way and that to try to see what's blocking the trap door. The light refracts strangely around the trap door's edges, turning thick and sluggish like the Plexiglas is coated with lacquer.

“It's ice,” Roxane realizes. Frozen shut. Maybe a water main broke; maybe there was a leak in the roof. The mechanics were supposed to check the escapeways but so many things had been going wrong in the mine lately that they must have forgotten.

She'd have to wait.

Eventually, when they couldn't find her underground, the Mine Rescue teams would search. They'd check everywhere. Nobody disappears in a goldmine.

Except the shadowy man
, Roxane thinks. Did she hear the scrape of a boot on the rungs of the ladder, just outside of the light that arcs down from the trap door? She looks down into the darkness. Wonders if someone is staring up at her.

“Wycliffe?” she calls.

There's no one
, she tells herself.
Wycliffe is dead
.

She could climb back down the ladder, use the breather to get back to the refuge. But the fire might be worse; she might get lost in the smoke. She knows now that she should have stayed, clayed up the door like Wycliffe said. But she couldn't stand the thought of being trapped inside the rock while the world outside was burning. It's better to be trapped by ice than by rock, she thinks—at least there's light.

But it isn't sunlight. The golden fluorescence shining down through the Plexiglas turns the skin of her hands sickly yellow, making her feel like an insect suspended in amber. She remembers what Gloria said:
You can put whatever's in your head into that dark space in front of your eyes. And once it's there it never goes away again
.

Is it Johnny on the ladder? Roxane wonders. Is he the one who's been stalking her in the dark?

A boot scrapes on the rungs again. And now she can hear the deep, wheezing breaths of someone just below her, just out of sight.

“Johnny?” she whispers.

It was only a few days after her seventeenth birthday that she found out she was pregnant with Johnny's child. They'd only had one night together. And now he was leaving for California; he'd be gone for months. He wasn't returning her calls.