Hollow air, p.22
Hollow Air, page 22
The darkness felt full. Men had died in this place. Their dead bodies lay close now, not far below her.
Sarah turned the torch back on, let her vision swim in the light, then tied the torch strap through the buttonholes of her shirt. Took a deep breath and squirmed over the edge of the hole, dropping her legs down into the narrow space, feeling for the ladder.
Letting go of the edge of the rock and allowing the ladder to take her full weight was an awful moment. The ladder creaked and groaned as the hundred-year-old wood shifted beneath her feet.
She took a step down. The ladder quaked beneath her tread. Another. Small pieces of wood crumbled off the rungs where she placed her foot and showered into the void below her. She climbed down metre by metre, each step taking her further from Cole and from the surface.
When she reached her foot down to take the next rung, it broke with a crack. The ladder swayed as all her weight was taken by her hands, splinters biting deep into her fingers, her feet swinging in empty space. It took every ounce of will she had to pull herself back up, to find purchase again on the rung above.
She stood for as long as she dared until the trembling stopped, but Sarah knew she needed to move, that the ladder would not hold for much longer. A foot reaching down to the next rung found it missing too. With a shaking hand, she angled the torchlight below. There was still at least a five-metre drop. If she fell, she’d break both her legs, and she would die in this mine. Cole too.
Another two bodies claimed.
There was only one way to get down, and she shivered with dread at the thought. But it had to be done, so she steeled herself, took a deep breath and turned, facing away from the ladder to balance on the last rung, holding on with her arms behind her. She reached her feet out to the other edge of the hole.
Sarah could brace her body like this in the narrow aperture, feet to the wall, back to the wall and shimmy her way down to the bottom. The rock behind her back was not smooth, and this was good—it helped stop her sliding—but she could also feel it tearing long gouges in the skin of her back.
Now Sarah counted the movement in centimetres, not metres, trying to get low enough that when she inevitably fell, she would not be injured. The shaking in her legs grew. The torch bounced against her chest and filled the space with crazy light.
She found herself at the ceiling of the level below. It was still several metres, and now Sarah had to jump. How to let go when her body was screaming at her not to? Dropping would mean totally severing herself from Cole, but Sarah could not stay braced in this chimney of rock forever; the shaking in her legs had grown so intense she would drop soon, whether she willed it or not.
Finally, she let herself fall.
The fall was painful, but it did not injure her. This tunnel was more open than the one above; there was airflow here. It was a relief after the stagnant air she had been breathing. Spider webs hung in curtains above her head, stirring in the invisible underground breeze. Sarah didn’t like to think of the eyeless spiders that had made those webs, pallid creatures that preyed on the other blind things creeping through these dark spaces. But the torchlight illuminated nothing; they had disappeared into cracks and holes, startled by the first visitor to this place in a century.
She headed towards the passage she knew would take her to the lowest level. The closer she got to it, the more her body told her no.
Down there lay the dead men.
But Sarah wouldn’t get through to them. The other miners had never managed. She would only pass close to their resting place.
The map had shown another vertical drop to Level Four, but as Sarah made her way through the tunnel, the floor became uneven with rubble and small collapses, and there was no sign of the opening.
As she pressed forward, Sarah felt a sudden sense of open space above her, of air where there should have been rock ceiling, and it felt so abnormal after the closeness of the tunnels that it made her skin crawl. She shone the torch upwards, and there was a stope opening into the rock, studded with wooden matchstick stulls fibrous as broken bones. Something about it was horrible in the gloom, like an open mouth with grinning teeth, like looking into a throat. As though the stulls were the only thing keeping the rock from snapping shut forever. Maybe that was what it wanted, to rid itself of these unnatural spaces.
Sarah reached the end of the chamber and she hadn’t found a ladder. It must have been destroyed in the cave-in. Shit. There was no way down. But before her was a huge slump of rubble, and there was a gap, a ruckle between the boulders that had fallen. She remembered the way Cole had shown her to contort her body and squeeze through a space; she curled herself around the rock and pushed through to the other side.
The end of the level was a mess; the floor had caved in here. Sarah’s feet stuck to the ground, pulled free with a squelching sound. The mud was a strange colour. Reaching down, she brought it to her fingers and smelled. Drilling fluid. The drillhole. It must have destabilised the structure. Each footstep she took could bring the whole thing crashing down around her.
Sarah looked down into the space made by the drillhole slump. Could she get through it to the bottom level? She picked her way down through the hole in the floor and the great slope of rubble the collapse had caused. Down over the fragments of mine, the pieces of twisted wood from the cavern bracing, each step sending a small shower of dust slithering to the bottom with a hiss.
She reached the lowest level. The air was stale—Sarah couldn’t stay too long or she’d suffocate. Above her head was more than 130 metres of rock, not solid but perforated with space bored open by men. Sarah felt the pressure of it in her chest, the way she couldn’t take a deep enough breath. She tried to make no sound; it felt like the scarcest disturbance might collapse that space, close it up with a thud, as if it never existed. All that would be left was the trace of it, like the fossilised tunnel of a worm. And bones.
Samuel’s and Thomas’s bones.
Sarah’s bones.
It was hotter down here. She was soaked with sweat and dust, and very thirsty. She shone her torch down the tunnel, and everywhere she looked there was rubble, dislodged pieces from the mine’s ceiling and walls.
A buttery gleam.
Sarah moved closer to it, unstringing the torch from her shirt to get a better look. Along a quartz vein, there was a soft yellow glow. She reached out her fingers, stroked it, put her face very close to it, and yes, in the light, there was a haze of gold smattered along the mine wall.
The gold was real.
Sarah traced her fingers along the seam, following the gold, and almost tripped over something at her feet.
Bringing the torch down to see what it was, the gore rose in her throat.
A body.
There was the loud sound of breathing in the tunnel, and for a moment, Sarah thought the body at her feet had come alive, that the bones twitched and began to move, until she realised it was only her breath.
She knelt beside the body. Nothing left but bones and the odd scrap of ancient clothing clinging to them. Staring dark holes in an empty skull. Thomas? Or Samuel? Her eyes moved over the body, and she saw what had trapped him there. Like Cole, his leg was pinned by a large boulder. How long had he lain in the darkness before death finally found him? She reached out her hand towards him, gently touched the curved bones of his fingers, and something fell from his grip and rolled towards her foot. She picked it up; it was a large tourmaline crystal.
Her eyes were drawn to another white shape in the rubble. Without thinking, she pushed the tourmaline into her pocket and went over to the body of the other man. He had suffered more when the roof came down, though, mercifully, would have died a quicker death. Rocks obscured his body, but the bones she could see were fractured or crushed, and a great split had opened up in his skull.
She noticed a metallic glint: a shotgun beside his uncurled hand.
She picked it up, wary of a misfire, and stared at it. There was a shimmer on the gun’s muzzle. With trepidation, she stuck her finger into the barrel and brought it out again. Her finger shone golden.
And finally, she understood.
Now she could picture it, what these men had done. Pouring in panned gold dust and letting it splatter a bright fire onto the mine wall. She’d heard stories of men salting mines in this way.
Sarah hadn’t been wrong. She’d known it to be the truth. There was no gold in Dulcie Ada. The mine had been salted. Her drillhole had angled right through one of their false seams.
The elongated grains from the SEM images were misshapen from the malleable gold hitting the mine wall. The strange distribution of grains . . . a blast pattern.
The sound of the shotgun firing must have been immense in this constricted space. Dislodging at first just a small shower of dirt, then a whole cascade of rock.
They had brought the roof right down on their heads.
Sarah’s breath in and out. No sound but that hollow wheeze and the trickle of water in this black place. Down here every surface was wet with it. Torchlight off. She needed to think.
In the absence of light, the bodies of the men stirred, rib cages moving in and out like hers. Fingers reached out towards her, skulls turning to the small sounds she made, the click of bones as they tried to wriggle free from the rubble.
Light on. Nothing. They lay where they had for a hundred years.
How long would she lie here before this tomb was disturbed again?
There was no way out. The paths she knew were closed up. She switched off the torch again. Breath in and out. The air was rancid; she felt it in the struggle to pull enough down into her lungs.
Who above ground would mourn her when she died? Her mother. They had not spoken in so long, finally fracturing apart when her father died, but still Sarah knew she would take it hard. The awful finality of it. Scott? Of all the things she’d done, it might be this that would break him. She felt an ache at the further grief she’d cause. He carried things close against himself; did not lay them down lightly. He would nurture his sorrow with the same possessiveness he had his love for her.
Joe would miss her. This she knew. Intense suffering would break over him like a hailstorm. But he was pragmatic. It wouldn’t take him long to forget.
Cole would be dead. She wouldn’t feel his loss but there would be others who would mourn him. Wife. Son.
Maybe he was already gone. She mustn’t think that.
What had been in the minds of Samuel and Thomas as they had lain here? Sarah imagined their lives as full of loved ones and friends as hers was empty of them.
She would close her eyes. Just for a minute. It felt good to let sleep slip over her. The darkness was not so terrible; the air thick, velvety soft.
Her eyes flew open. Hadn’t there been fresher air in the level above? Sarah thought of the spider webs’ slow movement. She’d come down here thinking it the only way, but what if the shaft was still open to the level above?
There’d be no way to get across it to the other side. The drop would be thirty metres or more to the bottom. Could she climb it? Better than suffocating down here.
Sarah reached out her hand in the darkness, slid it along the floor until her fingertips touched the bones of the closest man’s hand.
‘I’m sorry for what happened to you.’
There was a sigh in the darkness, but it was only her own.
‘I wish you didn’t have to stay here.’ She felt heavy at the thought of leaving them in this oppressive place.
She switched on the torch, stood and made her way back up the slump and into the tunnel above.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
1910
‘I cannot believe how real it looks!’ Tom peered at the wall of the mine.
Samuel laid down the shotgun and walked up beside him. ‘Well, that looks fair dinkum, doesn’t it?’
He pulled his spider out of the wall and put his face up close to the rock to get a good look. The dust had spattered across the quartz vein in a way that so closely resembled a real show, even he would have trouble telling the difference.
‘I think we’ll need another shot here, and then work on that other space we’ve opened up.’ Samuel pulled out a cartridge, opened it and tipped the lead shot back into the sack, making sure not to spill any of it. He held out the empty cartridge for Tom to pour gold dust into.
After reloading the shotgun, Samuel waited until Tom got into position with the hammer and spike further down the tunnel and close to the ladder opening.
‘Are you ready?’ Samuel called out. ‘One, two, three!’ He fired the shotgun at the wall, reeling from the kickback, at the exact moment that Tom struck hard with the hammer. The noise of the blast was huge in the enclosed space and seemed to make the very walls around them shake. Hands full of tasks, there was no option to cover their ears. They had stuffed rags into them to muffle the sound, but still, Samuel’s ears had been ringing since the first shot.
He had to hope the sound would not carry. The mine should be empty of men, but he was not willing to take the risk of any stragglers. This was why he had Tom working with the hammer and spike, standing close to the opening above and making a sound the other workers would expect. Samuel hoped the noise could be mistaken were anyone to hear it.
‘That looks even better, Sam. They get a look at this, there’s no way the mine is closing.’
‘It will give us time. Not much. They will not waste too long digging once they realise it doesn’t go back very far. But it should suffice. Now let’s get started on this other vein.’
Samuel strode further down the tunnel. He ran a hand along one of the wooden supports holding up the roof and tutted. ‘Do you see how rotten this is here? There’s too much water coming in now they have been lazy with the pump. There will be a need to reinforce this space again, if we’re to have men working down here. I will not have anyone injured chasing our falsehood.’
Samuel felt a slight twinge of guilt at the thought of the unnecessary work the men would have to do because of his lie. It seemed an awful thing to put that kind of hope into a person only to have it snuffed. Samuel tried to tell himself again that he had Blind Luck’s best interests at heart, just as he always had, but it felt hollow now he stood in front of the evidence of his deceit. What was it that made him so certain he could find another tin lode?
‘Here is the spot. Thomas, more gold dust, please.’ Samuel reloaded the shotgun and angled it towards the wall.
Once Tom was back in place, Samuel counted out and squeezed the trigger. The blast from the shotgun flared bright, and gold sputtered from the barrel onto the rock face. The sound of the shot echoed around the small space, and Samuel felt the pressure of it in his ears, in his gut.
Tom came scuttling back along the tunnel towards him. ‘Sam, if I’m honest, I don’t much care for firing a shotgun in here. That last one gave such a great thump.’
‘We are near done. Here, take the shotgun and refill it for me, there’s a good lad. I just want to take a closer look. If I adjust the angle next time, I might get a better spray across the vein.’ Samuel handed Tom the shotgun and bent close to the wall. He rubbed a thumb along the grain of the gold, and when he brought his hand away, he was momentarily transfixed by the gold dust caught in the whorls of his fingerprint.
There was a soft creaking sound. Samuel froze. Had he imagined it? He glanced down the tunnel and saw Tom’s worried face hovering in its own pool of candlelight. Tom had heard it too. Samuel’s ears strained for any other sounds, but there was only a dull ringing from the gunshots. It had just been the mine settling, shifting as she was wont to do. He reached out and gave the wall a pat as if he was calming a frightened beast. Tom gave him a relieved smile.
He was about to open his mouth to tell Tom to bring him the shotgun, when there was a loud crack and the moan of rock shearing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Sarah shone her torch into the column of dark air that was the main shaft. The torchlight skirted along twisted metal, and she saw the crushed bucket lift far below her. How long had it hung suspended until the ropes finally frayed and sent it plummeting to the bottom? Shining the light upwards revealed the shaft was open, at least as far as the torchlight could reach. No sky up there; the top of the shaft had long ago been sealed shut.
Beneath her was an unstable slump of rubble and large boulders that sloped towards the bottom of the shaft. Sarah restrung the torch through her buttonholes, took a deep breath and began to climb down.
Water dripped from somewhere above and fell on her face, and it was like the mine had its own weather, that it was raining deep within the Earth. Her body was drenched in sweat, and the cold water on her face was a relief, but it made the rock slippery beneath her hands, and a few times she almost pitched headlong into the darkness below.
She finally reached the bottom, picking her way over the ruins of the bucket lift, great bent pieces of metal and frayed wood covered in algae and slippery to the touch. Crossing the bottom of the shaft there was the entrance to the lower level on the other side. She had made it through.
Sarah stepped into the darkness of the tunnel and plunged into empty space. The floor yawned open beneath her footstep, and it was ice-cold and the emptiness filled her mouth and there was no air in it. She lost which way was up and the light was gone and it was only turning and turning. Water. Her body in the water, and there was nothing but water, the edges of the floor and walls of the mine disappearing.
Her feet touched things, submerged things, things floating in the dark below, and she tried not to panic. It was just old mining equipment. There was nothing alive down here.
But there were dead things, she knew this, had seen them, had touched their mineral bones. The thought made her throat constrict, and she tried to slow her heart, hold her breath, but her thoughts turned to Matty and his panicked death surrounded by rock, and she would drown down here, spiralling in the dark water, and something caught around her foot, dragging her deeper.
