Afterdamp

by The Weight of Unbelief, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Four hundred yards in from the bottom of the downcast the heat began, and Idris Mathias did not let himself think about what it meant.

It came at them along the roadway like a breath out of an oven door left ajar: not yet a burning, only a thickening, a weight laid on the skin of the face above the rubber of the mouthpiece and the steel of the nose-clip, so that the sweat ran down inside his goggles and he went half blind and could not wipe them. The five of them walked in single file up the main intake with the lifeline running from belt to belt, bent under the low ripping, the Proto sets on their backs creaking at every step, the breathing bags on their chests filling and emptying with a sound like a slow animal. Nobody could speak. That was the rule of the apparatus and the mercy of it. A man who has a rubber mouthpiece clamped between his teeth and two hours of oxygen in a cylinder on his spine cannot say what he is afraid of, and so need not hear it said.

Behind him Dic Pritchard carried the canary.

It was a small brass cage with a hinged glass front and a bottle of oxygen no longer than a man's finger screwed into the base, so that a bird which fell could be shut in and revived; and Idris had watched birds fall and be shut in and revive more times than he cared to count, in practice galleries at the rescue station where the smoke was made from sulphur and damp straw and nobody was waiting for anybody. The bird was yellow, with a grey cap. Elwyn Ty Isaf had named it Lloyd George, because it talked so much. It was not talking now. It sat on its perch in the beam of Dic's cap lamp with its feathers drawn tight to its body, and turned its head, and turned it back.

The main intake was a good roadway. Steel arches every yard, lagged with timber over the crown, set by men who knew their work. Idris had walked it as a collier boy and as a fireman and as an overman, and he knew it the way a man knows the stairs of his own house in the dark: the low place by the old Number Three junction, the puddle that never dried, the arch that had been knocked askew by a runaway tram in 'twenty-six and never put right. He passed under it now with his hand up against the steel, by habit, and the steel was warm. Not hot. Warm as a horse's flank.

He did not think about that either.

At five hundred yards the air ahead of them went brown in the lamplight, and then grey, and then they were walking in it: smoke, thin, drifting against the ventilation where the ventilation should have been carrying it away, rolling along the roof in slow coils that the beams of their lamps turned into something almost solid, a ceiling of dirty wool. Afterdamp. The breath of an explosion, or of a fire, which is an explosion that has not yet finished. It would be carbon monoxide mostly, at this end; the fan was still running at the surface, and the fan was all that stood between the fire and the five of them, drawing fresh air in at their backs and pulling the smoke away through the district toward the upcast. That the smoke was here at all, rolling back along the intake against the wind, meant that the fire had grown strong enough to push. If the fan stopped they would know it by the wind dropping off their backs. He found that he was listening for that with his whole body, as a man in a lifeboat listens for the change in the sound of the sea.

Dic tugged twice on the line.

Idris turned. In the cage the canary had stopped turning its head. It stood very upright on the perch, as if it had been called to attention, and then it toppled sideways off the perch as softly as a dropped glove and lay on the floor of the cage with its feet curled.

Dic shut the glass front and turned the little valve, and the oxygen hissed. Nobody watched to see if the bird would rise. They had a fall to reach.

The fall lay across the intake at five hundred and forty yards. Idris had known it was there; the overman who had come out on his knees at midnight had told them, between bouts of vomiting, that the roof had come in at the old Number Four junction and that the fire was beyond it, in the district, among the men. He had not said how many men. Everyone at the pithead had known how many. Forty-one had gone down on the night shift to Number Four, and eleven had come out, and the lamp-room had thirty lamps on its board that nobody had handed back.

One of the thirty was Tegid's.

The fall was stone and shattered timber and a twisted arch laid over on its side like a rib torn out of a carcass. It went up into the dark beyond the reach of his lamp. Through the top of it, where the stone had not quite met the roof, came the heat, and a light that was not lamplight: a dull, sullen, breathing redness that rose and sank, rose and sank, as if somewhere on the far side a great dark thing lay asleep and its sleep was uneasy. There was no flame to be seen. There did not need to be. The coal was burning in the seam itself, and the seam ran the whole length of Number Four, and the men of Number Four were somewhere in it.

Sam Horrocks went forward with the sampling tubes and climbed as high on the fall as he dared and drew the air into them, two, three, four, and sealed them, and came down. Wil Bevan held the lamp for him. Elwyn stood with his back to the side and his hands open at his sides, as he always stood when there was nothing for his hands to do, and looked at the red light through the top of the fall, and did not move.

Idris looked at his gauge. Ninety atmospheres. They had gone in at a hundred and twenty. At sixty they must turn, by the rule, and the rule was written in the blood of brigades that had not kept it.

He put his palm flat on the twisted arch where it lay across the fall.

It was the old miner's way, older than the apparatus and older than the canary: a man buried by a fall will knock, if he can, on the nearest steel or on a pipe, three and three, and the knocking will go along the steel further than any voice; and a man on the other side will put his hand on the steel and feel for it. Idris had been taught it as a boy of fourteen by his father, who had been taught it by his. He had never once in thirty years felt it answered.

The arch was hot under his glove. He could feel the heat come through the leather and into the skin of his palm. And he could feel, beneath the heat, very faint and very far and very regular, a knocking.

Three. A space. Three.

He did not move. He did not take his hand away. He stood with his palm on the hot iron and the sweat running into his eyes and the breathing bag on his chest filling and emptying, and he felt it again. Three. A space. Three.

He knew what it was. That was the thing he would afterwards be unable to forgive himself, or to stop knowing: that he knew, in the instant of feeling it, exactly what it was, and that what it was had nothing to do with men. Steel heated unevenly will move. It will expand in one place and hold in another, and the strain will build until it slips, all at once, with a tick, a knock, a sound like a fist on a door; and then it will build and slip again, and again, and an arch heating on one side from a fire in the seam will knock on its own account as regularly as a clock, for hours. He had heard it in the practice gallery when they lit the braziers. He had heard old men at the station tell of it: the brigade at such and such a pit that had dug for a day and a night toward a knocking that turned out to be girders in the heat, and had lost two of its own to a second fall on the way, and found at the end of it nothing but cinders. He knew all that. He had taught it to Elwyn.

And under his hand, through the glove, through the hot iron, it went on. Three. A space. Three.

He turned his head and looked along the line at the others. Sam was stowing the tubes. Wil had his lamp on the roof, watching the coils of smoke. Dic was bent over the cage. Elwyn was looking at the red light. None of them had a hand on the steel. None of them had felt anything; or if they had, their faces behind the goggles and the mouthpieces showed nothing, because the apparatus shows nothing, and that is its mercy too.

He could have brought them to it. He could have taken Elwyn's hand and put it on the arch. He did not. He did not do it, and he did not then know why he did not do it, and he would come to know, and it would not help. He took his hand off the steel. He looked at his gauge, which said eighty-two. He tugged the line, once, long, which meant out, and the brigade turned and went back the way it had come, and behind them in the cage the canary lay on its back with its feet curled, breathing its little bottle of air.

---

The sky over the pithead was the colour of dishwater when they came up the shaft, and it was raining in the thin cold way that does not fall so much as hang. There were women at the gates. There had been women at the gates since one o'clock, and the police had moved them back once and then had not had the heart to do it again, and now they stood along the railings under shawls and coats held over their heads, very quiet, as the cage came up out of the dark with the five of them in it in their apparatus like divers out of the sea, and every face turned to look and then turned away again because there were only five.

In the manager's office it was warm. Somebody had built up the fire. Mr Gethin Rhys sat at his desk with his hands folded on the blotter, and beside him, standing, in a wet overcoat, was the Inspector of Mines for the district, a man called Hartshorn whom Idris had met twice and liked once. They had the samples off to the laboratory at the power-house by then, and the first figures came back while Idris was still in his wet flannel shirt with a mug of tea he could not drink going cold in his fist.

Hartshorn read the slip and gave it to the manager without a word. The manager read it, and closed his eyes.

"Firedamp three point eight in your samples," Hartshorn said. "Rising. It was two point one at midnight. Carbon monoxide off the top of the scale." He looked at Idris. He had grey, steady, tired eyes. "You know what that is, Mr Mathias."

He knew. Firedamp under five in a hundred will not burn. Between five and fifteen it will go up like a powder magazine, and the flame of it will run back along every roadway the gas has filled and out of the shaft mouth into the morning, and take with it any man who stands in its way, above ground or below. The fire was in the seam. The gas was coming off the seam, faster, as the heat drew it out. In an hour, or two, or six, the one would find the other. Unless the district was sealed: walled off, both roads, the intake and the return, so that the fire was starved of air and choked on its own smoke, and the whole of Number Four lay shut in the dark until it cooled. Which would be months. Which would be a year.

"Did you see any sign of life," Hartshorn said, "at the fall?"

It was the question. It was the only question, and everybody in that room had known for an hour that it would be asked, and that it would be asked of him: not because he was the captain, but because they all knew about Tegid, and a man who had a brother behind the fall was the one man whose no would be believed.

He thought of Elwyn. He thought of Dic and Wil and Sam, who had not put their hands on the steel. He thought of the women along the railings, and of Nansi among them, Tegid's wife, whom he had seen as the cage came up and had not looked at, in her brown coat with the boy's hand in hers. He thought of what would happen if he said yes. Another brigade would go in. Two brigades, three; they would bring them from Wrexham and from the Rhondda if they had to, and men would dig at the fall in apparatus with the red light breathing through the top of it and the firedamp creeping toward five in a hundred, and they would dig for a day and a night, toward a knocking that was a steel arch in the heat, and the gas would find the fire. He thought of all of that very clearly and in great detail, as if he were reading it from a report already written, and he despised himself for the clarity of it, because the clarity was a kind of permission, and he knew that he was giving it to himself.

And he thought of his palm on the iron. Three. A space. Three.

"No," Idris said. "No sign."

Hartshorn looked at him a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, and took the pen from the manager's blotter, and the manager put his face in his hands.

---

They built the stoppings in apparatus, because nobody else could go where they had to be built. Idris would not let anyone else lead the intake team. Hartshorn tried to forbid it, and the manager tried, and at the last Elwyn tried, standing in front of him at the shaft-side with his helmet in his hands, saying, Not you, Idris, not you, for God's sake, let me; and Idris put him aside the way one puts aside a door that is in the way, without heat, and went down.

The stopping went across the intake a hundred yards out from the fall, where the roof was sound and the heat was only heat. They carried the bricks in on their backs, a dozen at a time, and the sand and the cement in sacks, and mixed the mortar in a tray on the floor in water they had carried too. It was slow. Brick-laying in a Proto set is like brick-laying in a dream: the goggles mist, the gloves are thick, the mouthpiece runs with spit, and every movement costs half again what it would cost in the open air. They built it two bricks thick, with a pipe through the bottom for the water to drain and a plug for the pipe, and a second pipe at the top with a valve on it for samples, as the book laid down. Course on course. Idris laid, and Wil buttered the bricks and passed them, and Sam and Dic went back and forth with loads, and Lloyd George, in his cage beside the mortar tray, went down off his perch within the first hour and was shut in with his bottle again; and the wall came up out of the floor of the roadway between them and the fire as a wall comes up in a nightmare, too fast and not fast enough.

He did not put his hand on any steel. He did not let himself. He kept his eyes on the bricks and his mind on the mortar and the bond and the plumb of the line, as his father had kept his mind on the coal face, because a wall well built was the only thing a man could still offer when there was nothing else to offer. Course on course. The red light was not visible from here. The heat came along the floor and up through the soles of his boots. There was no knocking. There was no sound at all but the wet slap of the trowel, and the creak of the sets, and the long slow breathing of the bags on their chests.

At the last course he made the others stand back.

He laid it alone, brick by brick, with the gap closing in front of him and the darkness on the other side of it growing smaller: a slot, a window, a hand's breadth, a crack. When there was room for one brick left he stopped. He knelt there in his apparatus with the last brick in his left hand and the trowel in his right and looked through the gap, into the dark of the intake beyond, where the smoke lay along the roof in its slow coils and his lamp could not find the end of it.

He put the trowel down. He made a fist of his right hand, in its glove, and knocked on the brick of the stopping, the way his father had taught him. Three. A space. Three.

The wall took the sound and held it. He could not hear it, through the helmet and the noise of his own breath; he could only feel it, in the bones of his hand and his wrist.

He opened his fist and laid the palm flat on the brick, and waited. He knelt on the floor of the intake with his knees in the mortar and waited, and the gauge on his chest went down by one atmosphere, and by another. Behind him nobody moved. The breathing bag filled and emptied. Somewhere beyond the gap, a long way beyond, past the fall and into the burning seam, the steel arches of Number Four were heating in the dark on one side and holding on the other, and slipping, and holding, as they would go on doing for hours yet, as steel must.

He felt it come back through the brick. Or he did not. He was never afterward able to say. Three. A space. Three. Faint as a pulse in the wrist, so faint that it might have been his own blood beating in the hand he had pressed against the wall; so regular that it might have been the arches; so much what he had asked for that it might have been nothing in the world but the asking.

He did not knock again. He picked up the last brick, and buttered it, and set it in the gap, and tapped it home with the butt of the trowel, and pointed the joints around it, carefully, all the way round, as his father would have pointed them. Then he took the stick of chalk from his breast pocket and wrote on the face of the stopping, in letters as large and as square as he could make them with his glove so stiff and his hand shaking, the date and the hour and his own initials, because the regulations required that a stopping bear the mark of the man who closed it.

When they came up out of the shaft into the daylight the rain had stopped. Dic was carrying the cage. He held it out to Idris at the bottom of the steps, without saying anything, and Idris looked down at it. The canary had come round, some time in the long walk out, in its little breath of bottled air. It was standing on its perch with its feathers puffed against the cold and its grey-capped head going this way and that at all the faces along the railings, and as Idris looked at it, it opened its beak and began, loudly, foolishly, without the least idea of what it had been through or what it had been for, to sing.

THE END

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The Weight of Unbelief, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Kalendās Novembrēs (27 October 2026), ā Pondere Incrēdulitātis per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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