Thief

"Gus," said Mags.

I was already moving. My feet had worked it out before the rest of me, the way they had with Ansel in the old road.

"Air door," said Ansel from the floor. He grabbed my sleeve as I went past. "There'll be one on the main road. Every pit's got them. Big wooden doors across the road, to keep the air going round the right way. Miners open them for the carts all day and shut them after. Open, they let the fresh air through." He let go. "They don't like fresh air."

"Come on," I said to Mags.

She looked at Ansel on the floor, and the lamp-man's back, turned away from us toward the front, and the tally in her hand.

"Somebody has to polish," she said, and went on polishing.

Pim was at the narrow door already. Bea was behind him with her bag. I went through after them, and Tamsin came through behind me before it could swing shut, and then it closed on the tally office, and the bell got louder.

The lamp station was a wide brick landing where the rails ended. Empty carts stood on them in a line. On our left was the open front of the lamp room, shelves and shelves of lit lamps, and over it an iron bracket with a brass bell on it, swinging and ringing all by itself.

Gus was against the wall beside it, by the end of the rails.

He had his long blade out in his good hand. In the other hand, the stitched one, he had a lamp. A lamp-room lamp, a bit bigger than ours, burning white and steady. He was holding it against his chest as if somebody might try to take it off him.

Somebody was going to.

They were coming out of the lamp room front, and out of two low roads at the back of the station. Five, six, seven of them. Picks on their shoulders, tins on their belts, walking. They didn't run. I'd never seen one of them hurry, not even when they took Tobin.

The first one reached Gus. Gus swung the blade.

It went into the miner's shoulder and stuck, the way Pim's shovel had stuck on the fifth landing. Gus pulled. It didn't come. He let go of it and backed into the wall, and the miner stood there with the blade in him, and didn't seem to notice.

That was when I saw where the lamps were pointing.

Not at Gus's face. Not one of them. Every lamp in that station was pointed at the white lamp in his hand.

"Gus!" I said. "They're not looking at you. They're looking at the lamp."

He heard me. He looked down at it. Then he held it tighter.

There was an empty cart on the rails near the foot of the main road, ten yards from Gus.

"If we're pushing, we're working," I said, and got my shoulder to it.

Pim got on the other side. Bea got behind. We pushed it along the rails, the wheels screaming, and every miner's lamp slid over us and away, back to Gus. We were working. We were nothing to them.

We pushed the cart right up between Gus and the miners.

"Get in," said Bea.

Gus got in. He went over the side and down on his back in the coal dust in the bottom of the cart, still holding the lamp up off the floor of it like a man holding a baby out of the bath.

We pushed it back the other way, toward the main road.

The main road went uphill from the station, rails in the middle, gently at first and then less gently. The cart was heavy with Gus in it. I pushed until my arms shook. Pim grunted on every shove. Bea pushed without a sound.

Behind us, the miners came after us up the road, walking, never hurrying. Every few seconds I looked back, and every few seconds they were a little closer, because walking up a hill is easier than pushing a cart full of Gus up one.

Tamsin was at the edge of the station, scraping at the floor with her shovel, watching. She didn't come any closer.

The air door was right where Ansel had said it would be.

Two big wooden doors hung across the road, black with age, shut tight, with a little sign screwed to one of them. KEEP THIS DOOR SHUT.

I left the cart and got my hands on one door. Pim got the other. They were very heavy, and stiff, and felt like they'd been shut for sixty years, and for a long, horrible second they didn't move at all.

Then they did.

The air came through all at once. Cold. Clean. It smelled of grass and rain and of outside, and it went straight past us and down the road.

Bea had braced herself behind the cart to stop it rolling back. Now she shoved it the last yard into the doorway and turned round to look.

The miners had slowed.

All of them, all at once, as if they'd walked into deep water. Their feet came up slower. Their heads turned slower. Their lamps flickered. Black threads of coal dust began to lift off their faces and drift away down the road toward the station.

Pim laughed out loud. I nearly did.

Then the nearest one stopped being slow.

I'd seen it before, on the fifth landing. I should have known.

The others were wading. That one had got furthest into the cold air and been in it longest, like the one on the landing, and whatever had kept it a miner had gone out of it all at once. It didn't slow down any more. It stopped walking like a man with a long day ahead of him, and it came at the cart in three long, wrong strides.

It got Gus by the bad arm.

He screamed. It pulled him out over the side of the cart, lamp and all, and dragged him toward the wall of the road, and where his boots touched the wall the brick went soft and black and wet.

Bea threw herself on top of him.

She went down across Gus with her arms round him, and the slow one's hands came off Gus's arm and onto her instead, and it pulled her toward the wall, and her leg went into the brick up past the knee.

She screamed.

Tobin's little pick was on my belt. I'd carried it all day and never once used it since the landing.

I took it out. I didn't miss this time. I hit the lamp on the front of its helmet dead in the middle, and the glass broke, and the flame went out.

It came apart. A heap of coal dust on the rails, all at once, and the cold air blew the top of it away.

The wall let go of Bea's leg.

It came out black from the knee down, and at the wrong angle, and Bea lay on her back on the rails and said, very calmly, "That's broken. Don't touch it yet."

The others were still coming.

Slowly, wading, threads of dust coming off them, but coming. Five or six of them. Any one of them could stop being slow, the way the first one had. And every lamp, flickering, was still on the white lamp in Gus's hand. None of them so much as glanced at the rest of us. He hadn't let go of it. Even with that thing dragging him at the wall, he hadn't let go.

"Give it back," I said.

Gus was on his knees by Bea, holding the lamp. His face was grey.

"Gus. Give it back."

"My father passed this," he said. "He brought one up. He had it on the mantelpiece. It's still burning. It's been burning since before I was born."

"Bea's leg's broken."

He looked at Bea. Bea looked back at him. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.

Gus put the lamp down.

He put it on the floor of the road on the station side of the doorway, carefully, standing it up straight, the way you'd put down something that belonged to someone else. Then he took his hand off it.

Pim and I got Bea onto the cart, and pushed it through to the far side, and Gus came after it, and we got our hands on the doors and pulled them shut.

Just before they closed, I looked through the gap.

The nearest miner had reached the lamp. He stopped, slowly, and bent down, slowly, and picked it up. He held it a moment. Then he turned round and walked back down the road toward the lamp room, carrying it in both hands, and the others turned and followed him, and their lamps went with it.

The doors shut.

Far away, down the road, the bell stopped ringing.

Tamsin was on the other side of those doors too. I didn't think about that until later.

On our side of the doors it was cold and clean and dark. Pim's lamp and Bea's were the only ones on anybody's head. Gus's helmet lamp had come off when he was dragged, and it was lying on the rails on our side of the doors, still burning, pointing at nothing.

Bea was telling Pim what to do with her leg. Her voice was steady. Her face wasn't steady at all.

Gus sat on the rails with his back against the doors. His hands were shaking so hard he put them under his arms to stop them.

He looked at Bea. Then at me.

"Why did you come back for me?" he said.

I thought about it. I thought about Tobin, and the rope, and Gus's voice shouting at me to keep hauling.

"I'm still deciding," I said.