Slow Ones

It followed us.

Not straight away. For the first hour after crib it worked the far side of the gallery like the rest of them, swinging its pick. But every time I looked up, its lamp was pointed at our cart. At Tobin.

When we moved the cart to a new part of the face, the lamp moved with us.

"Why's it looking at me?" said Tobin. He'd started counting under his breath again. Lamps, I think.

"It's not," said Pim.

"It is, though."

"Yes," said Pim. "It is."

Nobody knew why. Tobin was working as hard as anyone. Harder. He'd taken the crib rule to heart. He hadn't stopped moving since the whistle.

At about eleven by Bea's watch, the little one pinned to her cape, Ansel put down his shovel, picked up a heavy wooden post from a stack against the wall, and put it on his shoulder.

"Pit props," he said. "They hold the roof up. Miners carry them up and down the roads all day. It counts." He looked at Hester. "If we're going to make the cage by two, we go now."

Hester picked up a prop. It was nearly as tall as she was.

"I'm coming," said Bea.

Ansel frowned at her. "I can take her up."

"With that knee? On ladders?" Bea picked up a prop too. "She shouldn't have to climb behind one man who might fall on her."

Ansel looked insulted for about a second. Then he looked at his knee and didn't argue.

I looked at the miner across the gallery. Its lamp was still on Tobin.

"We'll all go," I said.

Pim stared at me. "Up? The lamp room's down."

"We'll come back down the air road after. Ansel knows the way."

"Why, though?"

I didn't say because that thing won't stop looking at Tobin. I said, "Six is safer than two on a ladder," and picked up a prop, and after a moment so did everyone else.

Tamsin picked one up too. She went up the first ladder ahead of all of us, as if she already knew the way.

The air road was cold.

It was a low, narrow tunnel that climbed at a steep angle, with old wooden steps cut into the floor, and every hundred yards or so it ended at a wall with an iron ladder going up through a hole in the roof. At the top of each ladder there was a little landing, and then more tunnel, and then another ladder. Cold air came down it all the time, from somewhere far above. It smelled of grass. After the gallery, it was like being given a drink of water.

Carrying a pit prop up a ladder is not easy. You put it on your shoulder, hold the rungs with one hand and the prop with the other, and try not to hit the person below you in the face. Pim hit me in the face twice.

Tobin counted the rungs. Out loud. Nobody told him to stop.

On the third landing, I looked back down the hole.

There was a lamp at the bottom of the ladder.

It wasn't moving. It was just pointing up at us.

"Keep going," I said.

On the fifth landing, there was a vent.

It was a square hole in the wall with an iron grille over it, about the size of a door, and the air coming through it was so cold and fresh that it made my eyes water. On the other side of it a shaft went up and up, and at the very top was a tiny grey square of light. Daylight. It was the first daylight I'd seen since six o'clock.

We could hardly hear the mine up here. The whistle would have been a whisper. Even the sound of picks had gone.

The lamp came up the ladder behind us.

It was the miner from the gallery. It came up through the hole slowly, one hand and then the other, its tin still hanging from its belt. It wasn't carrying a tool. It climbed onto the landing and stood up, between us and the ladder down.

Then it stood in the cold air from the vent, and something went wrong with it.

It got slower, as if the air had gone thick around it. Its arm came up a little at a time. Its head turned a little at a time. Its lamp flickered, then steadied, then flickered again. The coal dust on its face began to drift off in thin black threads, the way smoke comes off a candle when you blow it out.

"It's gone slow," said Ansel. His voice was very quiet. "There's old stories about it. Too much clean air. Too far from the whistle. They forget they're miners." He swallowed. "Then they're not anything. They're just what's left."

The miner's lamp settled on Tobin.

And it came for him.

Nothing about the next part was brave or clever.

It got hold of Tobin's ankle and pulled, and Tobin went over backwards with his prop clattering down the hole, and the miner started dragging him toward the wall. The wall was solid rock. Where Tobin's boot touched it, the rock went soft and black and wet, and his foot sank in.

Pim hit it with his shovel. The shovel went into its back as if it had hit a sack of wet coal, and stuck. Bea had Tobin by both arms and was pulling the other way, shouting at him to kick. Hester screamed. Ansel was at the far end of the landing with his bad knee and couldn't get past.

I had Tobin's little pick in my hand. I don't remember taking it off my belt.

I hit the miner in the shoulder. Nothing. In the back. Nothing. The pick went in and came out black, and the miner didn't notice.

Tobin's leg was in the wall up to the knee.

The lamp. It was the only part of the miner that wasn't coal. It sat on the front of its helmet, burning yellow, the same as it must have burned for sixty years, the same as ours.

I swung at it and missed. Swung again and hit the helmet, not the glass. Tobin was shouting. Bea was shouting. I took a breath, aimed, and hit the lamp dead in the middle.

The glass broke. The little flame went out.

The miner came apart.

It didn't fall. It just stopped being a shape. It went down into a heap of coal dust on the landing, all at once, with a soft, heavy sound. The cold air from the vent caught the top of the heap and blew some of it away.

The wall let go of Tobin's leg. It came out of the rock black to the knee. His boot was still on it. I hadn't been sure it would be.

We sat there breathing.

Tamsin was halfway up the next ladder, looking down at us through the rungs. She had her prop on her shoulder. She'd watched the whole thing. She hadn't moved to help.

She'd said she wouldn't.

Something in the heap of dust was glowing.

I knew what it was before I'd moved. They teach you in training, in the nursery lands under Warden Hall, with little Falsehoods the size of a cat. When one dies, its Law comes loose. You get a few seconds. Pick it up, or it goes back into the lie and you never see it again.

I put my hand into the dust and found it.

It was a brass tally. A small round disc with a hole for a nail and a number stamped on it, the kind miners hang on a board so the company knows who's down the pit. It was so hot it hurt.

I closed my hand on it anyway.

It burned. It burned so badly my eyes filled up and I made a noise I'm not proud of. And then it wasn't in my hand any more. It was in my hand. I opened my fingers, and across the middle of my palm there was a burn the shape of a round tally, with the number on it, raised and red.

And my hands felt different.

That's the only way I can say it. They didn't hurt. They didn't ache from shovelling, or shake from the fight. They felt like hands that had never been tired and didn't see why they ever should be. They wanted something to do.

"Tireless," said Ansel. He was looking at my palm. "Some of them carry it. My dad's mate had it, years back." He paused. "The foreman told him to clear a fall, and he cleared it. Two days. Didn't eat, didn't sleep. They couldn't get him off it."

"How did they stop him?"

"They didn't. He stopped when the work was out of sight." Ansel looked away. "My dad never said it like it was a good thing."

I knew the name. Everyone in training knows the Pit Nine Laws. Tireless: while you are working, you do not get tired. A small Rumour Law, weight two. A Provisional can only carry three, so it nearly filled me up.

Ansel's story sounded to me like a man who worked hard. I liked the sound of it.

Tobin was staring at my hand. His leg was black to the knee and he was still shaking, and he was grinning anyway.

"That," he said, "is the best thing I've ever seen."

We got to the top of the air road at about a quarter to two. It came out through a low door at the back of the big brick room at the bottom of the shaft, where we'd started that morning. The cage was gone.

At two o'clock exactly the whistle blew. Three long blasts.

All over the mine, everything stopped. Down the four tunnels, the lamps stood perfectly still. I could hear nothing at all, not a pick, not a cart. The Shift had stopped like a clock.

Then, high above us, the winding wheel began to turn, and the cage came down.

Hester got into it on her own. She'd cried quietly most of the way up the ladders and stopped near the top. She started again when the gate slid shut. She held the bars in both hands.

"Three more years of service," she said, through the bars. "And my sister's going to ask me. About Corley. And I'll have to say I didn't even get past the first day."

"You got past the first day," said Bea. "It's two o'clock."

Hester laughed, a horrible wet laugh, and then the cage went up.

Ansel stood at the bottom of the shaft and watched it go. His knee was bad. He could have got in. He'd brought her all the way up the air road to get her there, and nobody would have blamed him.

He didn't get in. He just watched until the cage was out of sight.

"Last go," he said, to nobody. "I'm thirty in March."

Behind us, in the dark at the mouth of the left-hand tunnel, something moved.

We all turned. It was a man, not a miner. He had a face, and a good coat, and a long canvas case on his back, and his left arm was wrapped in what used to be his shirt, red all the way through.

Gus Pell walked out into the lamplight and looked at us, at the cage shaft, at the air road door.

"Your lot," he said, "is going the wrong way."