The Pit-Heads: Short Story Read Free

depths of the mine itself. But Paul answered readily enough, and with an easy familiarity that sent a premonitory chill through me.
    “ Bonjour, Monsieur Tevalier. Ils sont ici — oui, mon père, ils sont tous ici. ”
    Paul’s Northern Quebec French has always been a challenge for me, but even without the benefit of my Grade 10 French, the meaning of that simple sentence would have been unmistakable:
    They are here — yes, my father, all of them.
    No sooner had Paul spoken than the miner’s left hand opened and the crowbar clattered to the floorboards over our heads. He stepped back, and for the briefest instant as the shadows passed from his face, we could see him — an absurdly weak chin framed by mutton-chop sideburns the colour of dirty snow; hard yellow flesh, drawn tight as a drum skin across high cheekbones; and of course, we could see his teeth. They were like nails, hammered down through the gums so far that they extended a full inch over the lips.
    Paul turned the light away as the creature leaned forward. As it raised its arms to fall, I heard the flick of a flashlight switch and that light disappeared. Something moved in front of the door, and the darkness of the pit-head became absolute.
    The creature took Harry first. He was the oldest among us, he’d been slowing down for years, and from that sheerly practical standpoint, I guess he made the easiest target. There were no screams; just a high whimper. The sound a beaten dog would make, if that dog were Harry Fairbanks.
    “The rest of you, stand where you are,” said Paul, his voice preposterously calm. “One wrong move, and you could find yourself dead at the bottom of the shaft.”
    “Oh, you bastard,” said Jim, the words coming out in sobbing breaths. “Oh, you think you got us trapped in here, oh you Goddamned
bastard
.”
    “Only for a moment,” said Paul. “Only a moment. Stand still, and we’ll all walk out of here together.”
    The whimper had devolved into a low moan, and it was quickly joined by another sound: dry clicks, the sound old men sometimes make with their throats, as they swallow their soup.
    It was at that point, I think, that it occurred to me that Paul’s warning to Jim didn’t really apply to me: my back was still against the wall, and so long as I kept in contact with that wall, I’d be safe from making a wrong step into the pit. And the ladder to the second floor was only a step away.
    Harry let loose a horrible, blood-wet cough, and with it, my decision was made: left hand still pressed against the rough tarpaper wall, I reached out and grabbed a rung of the ladder with my right. It was just as soft as I remembered it, but I didn’t take the time to worry whether or not it would hold and in a single motion, swung myself around and started to climb.
    The bottom rung snapped under my foot, but I was working on momentum at that point and managed to pull myself past it. The climb couldn’t have taken more than a second or two, but it seemed like hours. I was torn between two dreads: of the moment the rungs snapped — beneath my feet, or my hands, or both — and I fell back into the mine; and of the instant that the creature below stopped swallowing, and reached up with whatever kind of claws it had hiding under those big miner’s mitts, to grab my ankle and pull me back towards the pit.
    But the clicking continued, and the ladder held, one rung and the next rung and the next, and finally when I reached for another rung, my hand fell instead on the rim of the second floor. As I scrambled to get up, my hand closed around the cold metal of the crowbar the creature had dropped, and when I got to my feet, I hefted it in front of me like a club. There was marginally more light up here, and I took a moment to get my bearings. What remained of the day filtered in through cracks in the far wall, and reflected dull steel gleam off the mine-cart tracks even as they converged toward that wall. I couldn’t see clearly, but I