Page 93 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire
We lie on the ground, heaving for breath. Ceridwen’s arms wrap around me, holding me tight. The coal is still on her wrist, and some itches my own leg. I try to shake it off, but it won’t budge. I don’t care. I bury my head into her neck and breathe.
The shaft we’ve fallen into is littered with rubble and fallen rocks. The walls are covered in the remnants of mining equipment that dangle precariously from their metal bonds. Sandwich bags rot on ceiling hooks. The coal seam running through the wall eats any light that touches it, the roiling stone so dark it almost looks liquid. It has the same horrid, glistening sheen as the veins under the skin of the infected. Black damp sticks to the base of the rock, thick as soup and choking the air.
This is the center of a collapse. This is where men were crushed between two worlds, and their death and the iron left behind created Y Lle Tywyll.
This is where Eu gwlad and Wales meet.
We drag ourselves up, hands still joined, limbs heavy. My eyes take a moment to adjust, but there’s just nothing here save for a pinprick of light at the end. It’s all I can do to not run toward it, arms held out as if I could embrace the glow.
Ceridwen’s voice shakes. “Wait.”
A lamp flickers on. Then a second, and another. Davy lamps. They turn on one by one, up and down the tunnel, like stars coming out in the evening, and they’re attached to hands.
Thirty faces stare up at me.
Men stand clustered in the tight mineshaft. Some hold picks, ready to strike the walls. Others have misshapen heads—caved in by the collapsed ceiling, perhaps, their helmets inadequate protection against ton upon ton of rock. Mostly, though, they just look ordinary. Completely human. Dead, but unchanged.
Thirty spotlights are trained upon us as if we’re actresses on a stage, leaving no room to shy away. They stare, and I begin to recognize each dirty face.
There’s the butcher’s lad, and the three boys who always played their fiddles from a shared booth at the pub and smiled when the room began to dance. There’s Ron, Paul, Gethin and Sam—they sat across the room from me in school. Behind them stands our neighbor, who left behind four children and a wife. On and on they go, staring back at me, until I come to the man at the very front, his face so battered by the coal that I can’t recognize him. His lamp doesn’t work, but he clings to it still.
“You’re David Parry’s girls, aren’t you?” His words are garbled from his contorted mouth. “What are you doing here?”
“Is David coming?” Gethin adds.
Another calls out. “Has he got the rescue on their way?”
All these dead men, kept alive deep beneath a land frozen in time, held in a perpetual death rattle, trying to dig their way out. Their own slowly rotting bodies and the iron in their tools pollute the land, and with every gash they make in the rock, they spread it to the surface. The only way to heal it is for them to stop, but how can they?
They’re trying to get home.
Ceridwen opens her mouth, sweet untruths ready on her tongue, but I pull her closer.
“Don’t lie to them,” I whisper.
Her eyes widen in panic. “What do I say?”
Pretty words and promises are dust this far beneath the earth. These men have heard it all before from Lord Branshaw, from the foreman.The mine is safe, your equipment works. We have plans in place, and your families will be compensated. We’ll pay enough for this to be worth it, for you to live well. A job is worth your life.Lies upon lies that I can’t add to. I finally step forward alone.
“No.” I let my eyes rake over them. “No one’s coming. They’ll tryfor three days, but they won’t be able to shift the coal, and when they make a crack big enough to call into, no one will reply.”
“How do you know?” says the leader, his grip flexing on his pickaxe.
My bravery pools at my feet. “Because it’s already happened.”
“Then why are you here?” someone shouts from the back.
I point past them, to the light. They all stare, but they can’t see it, and they never will.
My body feels heavy as I answer. “To stop you from digging.”
“They p-put a memorial sign outside the mine,” Ceridwen blurts out.
Every head whips back to us. Emotions dance over their faces, exaggerated by the flickering lamps. Disgust, satisfaction, horror. I don’t know which is worse.
“What’s a sign to us?” snaps the leader.
“They’ve got to charge Lord Branshaw,” says someone else.
