Tuesday, May 20`, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 38
by Orwell King
Part 2
Instead, I was alone. Sweating through my overalls. Trying not to think about the hundred thousand tonnes of rock above me. Wondering if Davey made it to another chamber. Wondering if he was dead.
I started counting things.
There were seven oxygen cylinders.
Fourteen ration packs.
Three jerry cans of water.
One toilet bucket.
No windows.
No clocks.
And a growing sense that time was bending in here. Ten minutes felt like an hour. An hour felt like nothing at all. The only measure was the LED panel, which blinked its green reassurance over and over: SAFE – PRESSURISED – STABLE.
I didn’t feel stable.
I started talking to myself. First out loud, then inside my head. It was a trick I’d learned in my first year underground—keep talking, keep sane. But it didn’t help this time. Not when the quiet was so loud it felt like it was pressing in through the walls.
I laughed. Actually laughed. The kind that sounds too loud in a sealed room. “Losing it already,” I said out loud, just to test if I still could. My voice came back strange. Flattened. Hollow.
The lights flickered again. Just once, like an eye half-blinking.
I pressed my back harder to the cold chamber wall. Tried to focus on the things I could see. The metal. The bench. The laminated evac sheet. Anything solid. Anything real.
But the mine… it had other plans.
A vibration ran up the soles of my boots. Subtle. Musical, almost. Like a low note struck on a cello. Then another. Louder. Closer. I felt it not in my ears, but in my ribs. Like it was playing me.
I stood, heart hammering, trying to guess if it was another tremor. But it wasn’t. The floor wasn’t shaking. The walls weren’t shifting.
The sound was.
It was like the mine was breathing again. Slowly. In. Out. The air moved, not from the scrubber, but from the very rock itself. A warm current, like an exhale from deep within the stone.
I pressed my hand to the wall.
It pulsed.
Just once.
I pulled away fast, stumbling back. Dust sifted down from the seams in the ceiling, catching in the emergency light.
And that’s when I heard the tap.
Just once. Sharp. Deliberate.
It came from the outer wall, right by the air vent. I froze.
Another tap. Closer.
I moved to the door, pressed my ear against the seam.
Nothing.
Then—tap tap tap.
Three, in rhythm. Like knuckles on metal.
I grabbed the radio. “Is anyone outside? This is Chamber 5. Hello?”
Nothing but static.
The tapping stopped.
I stared at the door for a long time. Too long. Long enough that the silence afterward felt like mockery. Like the rock was laughing at me.
I didn’t sleep. Couldn’t.
The taps didn’t come back, but the idea of them did. Echoed around my head like ghosts of sound. Maybe it was the air getting to me. Maybe someone else was outside, trapped, lost, dying. Maybe I was the one who didn’t make it out, and this was what the afterlife looked like—metal walls, stale oxygen, and the creeping certainty that none of it mattered.
I don’t know how long it had been, but suddenly I heard it again. The tapping. But this time it was different. It was faster. Aggressive.
The light changed.
TAP TAP TAP.
And then I heard footsteps.
Not boots on metal. Bare feet on stone. Deliberate. Slow. Coming from inside the mine. From the sealed corridor beyond where the door stood firm.
That was when I stopped thinking like a miner. Stopped thinking like a man. Started thinking like part of the place. Like a cell in a body that had decided to grow around me.
like a cockroach.
The footsteps stopped just outside where the door should be.
Silence. Then..
TAP TAP TAP.
A voice, low and calm, that didn’t echo but landed directly in my chest:
“You came too deep.”
I backed away, heart clawing at my ribs. “Who’s there?” I asked, though I didn’t want an answer.
“You don’t remember,” it said. “But the mine does. It remembers everything you bury.”
TAP TAP TAP
I blinked. Rubbed my eyes.
When I opened them again, the door was gone.
Not blown open. Not caved in.
Just… gone. Replaced by a solid, seamless, rock wall. No seam, no handle. No escape.
TAP TAP TAP.
Thick cracks appeared in the bare stone wall, I saw movement, shapes forming in the rock, pressed faces in the ore, hands reaching through seams in the stone. They weren’t ghosts, exactly. More like fossils trying to come back.
One of them looked like Davey.
One looked like my father.
One looked like me.
The mine was showing me things. All the things I’d buried. Arguments. Accidents. That one time I skipped checking the heading bolts to catch smoko early. The lie I told to keep the bonus. The way I joked when that kid got airlifted out after the charge misfire. My regrets were etched in these walls. Preserved in strata like core samples.
And the mine was reading them.
The voice came again.
“Do you want out?”
I didn’t answer.
“DIG.”
I don’t know how long I was down there before the rescue crew arrived. Could’ve been five hours. Could’ve been twenty. When the chamber door finally opened, the light from their helmets was blinding.
They told me I was lucky. Said the geo event collapsed the main haulage drive. Some didn’t make it to chambers in time.
I asked about Davey when I reached the surface. They found his helmet. Nothing else. Like the mine swallowed him whole.
Management called it a “displacement event.” Said he was likely buried beneath twenty meters of rock. No chance of recovery. I didn’t argue. Just nodded.
They didn’t mention the tapping.
Neither did I.
I’m back on shift now. Few weeks later. Same cycle. Same crew… Short a few names.
But sometimes, when I’m loading charges alone, I catch myself listening to the silence again.
Just in case it taps back.
