The last thing the Harlow Mine's emergency radio transmitted was sixteen seconds of static.
This was unremarkable. The Motorola base unit in the surface office had been temperamental since the Nixon administration. Miners joked that it worked best during thunderstorms and worst when you needed it. Hank Price, who would later marry Darlene Foley and father a boy named Caleb and die beneath an equipment loader in this same mine twenty-four years from now, had taped a handwritten label to the unit that read WORKS WHEN IT WANTS. Management made him take it down. He put it back up. Management stopped noticing.
On the morning of September 14, 1971, the radio was behaving. Elias Harlow, mine foreman, great-great-grandson of the man who'd driven the first stake into this valley in 1889, conducted his 6 AM check-in with the surface crew the way he did every morning. Voice clear. Steady. The mundane cadence of a man who had been underground ten thousand times and expected to go underground ten thousand more. He reported the Shaft 4 crew's position, noted a temperature shift in the lower tunnels he attributed to seasonal water table changes, and requested an additional case of timber supports for the new lateral.
Surface acknowledged. End of transmission.
At 6:47 AM, the lower gallery of Shaft 4 collapsed.
The sound was not what the survivors would have expected. Not a crash or a boom. More like a long, slow exhalation, as if the mountain had been holding its breath since before the coal formed and finally, after millions of years, decided to let go. The ceiling came down in stages, each failure triggering the next, a chain reaction of stone and timber and compressed time that sealed the passage in under thirty seconds.
Thirteen men were on the wrong side when the dust settled.
They were not dead. Not yet. The collapse had created a pocket in the lateral tunnel, roughly forty feet long and eight feet wide, shored up by a stubborn arrangement of support beams that had no engineering reason to hold. But they held. The men gathered in this space and did what miners in Appalachia had been doing for a hundred years when the mountain closed its fist: they counted heads, assessed injuries, rationed what they had, and waited.
Elias organized them. He was forty-five, built more for endurance than speed, with a lined face and quiet hands and the kind of authority that didn't come from rank but from the widespread suspicion that the man had never once, in his entire life, lost his composure. He assigned tasks: Harry Combs and Walter Flynn on supply inventory. Dale Messer Sr. and George Keller checking the structural integrity of the remaining supports. The younger men were told to sit, rest, conserve air.
The radio was dead. Elias tried it every hour, pressing the transmit button and speaking calmly into nothing. Static. The rescue crew above them would already be digging. They knew the drill. Clear the collapse from the surface side. Could take hours, could take days, depending on the density of the fall.
They waited.
The first day was bearable. They had water, mineral-heavy seepage from the tunnel walls that tasted like the inside of a penny, but it was wet and it was cold and it kept them from dying. Food enough for thirty-six hours if they split it thin. Injuries were minor: cuts, bruises, one cracked rib on a man named Jessup who waved off any concern and said he'd had worse falling out of his deer stand. They talked. Told stories. Sang, quietly, because singing in a mine felt like asking the mountain to pay attention, but the silence was worse.
The second day was harder. The air thickened, got heavy, tasted wrong. Darkness became a physical thing when they shut off the headlamps to conserve battery. Three working lamps among thirteen men. They used one at a time, and even that single cone of light started to feel like a luxury they couldn't afford. Sleep came in broken shifts, and it wasn't really sleep. It was something the body did when the mind ran out of ways to stay afraid.
On the third day, Elias heard something.
It came from deeper in the tunnel, from a section beyond the collapse point. The cave-in had broken through a wall of stone into a natural passage that descended at a steep angle, a passage that was not on any mine map and had no business existing. Elias had noted it on the first day. He'd chalked a warning on the nearest beam: UNSTABLE. DO NOT ENTER.
The sound was laughter.
Not hysterical. Not frightened. Conversational. The sound of a man enjoying a joke at a dinner table, the easy rhythm of genuine amusement, drifting up from the passage the way woodsmoke drifts through autumn trees. Elias listened. He checked the others. They were sleeping, or trying to. None of them were laughing. None of them seemed to hear.
He took the last working headlamp. Told Harry Combs, the most senior man awake, that he was going to scout the passage for a possible alternate route to the surface. Harry told him to be careful. Elias said he would be.
He walked into the passage.
The headlamp cut a narrow cone through darkness so complete it seemed to push back against the light. The walls were not mine walls. They were smooth, almost polished, and they curved in a way that suggested not a tunnel but a throat. Something being swallowed. Something going down. The air was warmer here, and it smelled different. Not coal and stone and thirteen men's sweat. Something older. Ozone before a thunderstorm. The charge that hangs in the air before lightning finds its target.
The laughter grew clearer as he descended. It was directional, not an echo. Whoever was laughing was just around the next turn. And the next. And the next after that. Elias followed it for what might have been an hour. His watch had stopped. The second hand frozen at 6:47, the exact minute of the collapse, and he did not know what to make of that so he stopped looking at it.
He emerged into a cavern.
It was vast. His headlamp, which had been adequate in the tunnel, was swallowed by the space the way a match would be swallowed by a cathedral. The ceiling, if there was a ceiling, was beyond the reach of light. The walls glowed with a faint blue-green phosphorescence that pulsed in a rhythm Elias felt in his chest, in his teeth, in the base of his skull. Slow. Regular. Unmistakable.
A heartbeat. The cavern had a goddamn heartbeat.
In the center of the space, something stood.
Elias Harlow had been a miner for twenty-seven years. He had worked in darkness so total that his hand vanished at the end of his own arm. He had felt the mountain shift above him and known, with the calm of a man who understood the terms of his employment, that he might not make it home for supper. He had never been afraid of the dark. The dark in a mine was simply the absence of light. Light could always be brought back.
This was not the absence of light. This was the presence of dark. It stood the way a man would stand, upright, still, with something like shoulders and something like a head. But where a face should have been there was only a sound. Not a sound coming from the shape. A sound that was the shape. That constituted it the way bones constitute a body and breath constitutes a voice.
The sound was laughter.
It noticed him.
The laughter shifted. Not stopped. Shifted. The way a radio shifts between stations, catching fragments of different broadcasts. For a moment Elias heard voices he recognized, his wife, his mother, his own voice from the morning check-in, all overlapping and dissolving into something new. Something that was all of them and none of them. Something that had learned the shape of human speech the way water learns the shape of whatever holds it.
"Well," the voice said. "Hello there. I was wondering when one of you would come looking."
Elias stood in the cavern and the standing dark stood before him and neither of them moved.
"You look frightened," the voice said. It sounded amused. Not cruel, not mocking. Genuinely tickled by the expression on a forty-five-year-old mine foreman's face. "That's understandable. Most things are frightened of what they don't understand. It passes. Everything passes, Elias. Even mountains. Even fear. Even you."
The smile appeared. Not on the shape. The shape had nothing for a smile to attach to. The smile appeared in the air itself, a curved line of cold luminescence, like the grin of something that had studied the gesture from a great distance and reproduced it from memory. It hung there in the dark of the cavern like a signal fire with no one tending it.
"But we've got a little time before all that," the voice continued. "So what do you say?"
The smile brightened.
"Shall we talk?"
Fifty-three years later, Nora Caldwell drove into Harlow Hollow with a cracked windshield, half a tank of gas, and the distinct feeling that she was making a mistake she'd spend the rest of her life explaining to herself.
The town appeared the way it always appeared if you were coming from the east on Route 7: suddenly. One moment you were driving through hills so green and steep they blocked the sky, hardwood forest pressing in on both sides of the two-lane, and then the road crested a ridge and the valley opened below you like a wound. Harlow Hollow. Population 2,400, according to the sign at the town limits, though Nora suspected that number was optimistic by several hundred and at least three years out of date.
She'd been gone for sixteen years. The town had not improved in her absence.
The mine entrance was the first thing she passed, because the mine entrance was the first thing everyone passed. It sat to the right of Route 7 at the edge of the valley floor, behind a chain-link fence topped with razor wire that had rusted to the color of old blood. The entrance itself was sealed with concrete blocks, steel plates, and a sign that read DANGER: NO TRESPASSING, HARLOW COAL COMPANY, the company's name a ghost word for an operation that hadn't pulled a ton of coal since Bill Clinton's first term. Weeds grew through the fence. The parking lot was cracked and buckled, saplings pushing through the asphalt. Nature was taking it back, the way nature takes back everything that people abandon.
Nora looked at the mine entrance as she drove past. She'd looked at it a thousand times growing up, the way you look at a scar on a family member's face. You know the story. You don't ask about it. You learn not to stare.
The rest of the drive into town confirmed what she already knew. Harlow Hollow was dying, and it was dying the way a thousand small American towns were dying: not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a series of closings. The hardware store: closed. The pharmacy: closed. The movie theater that used to show second-run films on Friday nights: closed and boarded, the marquee still reading THANK Y U FOR 47 YEARS, missing its O. The buildings that remained open had the look of things surviving out of stubbornness rather than profit. Rosie's Diner. The Dollar General. A pawn shop. A church.
[End of excerpt]