Ike studied me for a moment, nodding slowly. “I believe you’re right about that, Tom Hale.” He cleared his throat, then continued. “Something is listening to us. It got quiet when we got loud. I got this sense something’s looking down on me. Makes me uneasy, like it’s picking me apart.” He looked around the room. “Don’t y’all feel it?”

  Deborah rose and tapped John on the shoulder. Together they walked over to David and began collecting an assortment of items: ropes, a couple of unlit lanterns, and a few other things I couldn’t make out in the dim light. I heard the scrape of iron on stone and guessed they had either scavenged gear, or had the foresight to bring supplies in with them before the unrest on the other side of the slide.

  “There’s something happening here, it ain’t right and that’s plain,” Ruth said. She held Ike’s gaze and sighed. “It’s all the more reason to get out while we can. Won’t you? For me?”

  “Ruth.” Ike exhaled through his nostrils, flaring them. He climbed to his feet, testing his weight on his leg. He took a long time to answer. Finally he sighed. “I just can’t leave folks to whatever was coming after us. You don’t know what it was like in here before. Right after that rock slide it went pitch black, and I don’t know if that thing caused it or was released by it, but there was something in here. Something hunting us. Maybe more than one thing. I don’t doubt some didn’t make it. But you don’t understand. I flat out knew I was a goner. Then I heard your voice. Then you healed me. Felt like being cooked from the inside out, but I got another chance at living when I’d despaired, and I won’t waste it slinking away when I can help those folks. Some of them’s children, Ruth!”

  Deborah came to stand just over my left shoulder. An unlit lantern in one hand, a pick in the other, and a hempen rope slung over her shoulder like a bandolier. She cocked an eyebrow and tilted her head slightly. Esther immediately rose and joined her, extending her hand. Deborah placed the pick into Esther’s palm. Esther turned toward the tunnel and gripped the handle with both hands, her knuckles whitening.

  Ruth got to her feet. “All right, Isaiah. But you better watch yourself. I can’t leave my kinfolk to do this alone.”

  Ike looked at the rest of us and grinned. “She only calls me Isaiah when I’m in trouble. I’m liable to catch hell tonight.”

  I grinned back. I couldn’t help it.

  I noted that no one bothered lighting a lamp, but several were dispersed amongst the rescuers. The pale light glowing from the stone was unsettling, but useful. Still no miner would set foot underground without a lantern handy.

  I rose to my feet and looked back toward the rescue tunnel. The smart thing would have been to go back. I didn’t have any kin down in this mine.

  Or did I?

  I wasn’t truly related to anyone in the mine that I knew of, but I thought of Silas.

  Shortly after the war, Silas had returned to Arno. He hadn’t much changed from how I remembered him. A few more gray hairs, a couple more lines on his face. He always wore that tattered old rebel coat, even in the mine. I didn’t think it was pride. It was stuck to him, like he couldn’t figure out how to peel it off.

  One day he came up to the parsonage, ostensibly to talk to my father, the Preacher. They’d grown up together. I think Silas knew I felt low down about how my father had talked me out of going to war.

  I didn’t even know which side I would have fought for if I had gone. Before the freedfolk showed up in Arno after Lee surrendered, I’d never laid eyes on a slave. I’d never even been out of the holler more than fifty miles. It all seemed like a world away. Something I couldn’t touch.

  After speaking with the Reverend, Silas came up to my room and set something on my desk. I looked down at my Colt Navy for the first time. The belt and holster wrapped around it neatly. He drew his hand back quick, like he’d touched a hot stove. “Keep it clean, Tom,” he’d said. He nodded and turned away, stepping a little lighter. I touched it for the first time, reverently.

  I saw the others disappearing around the elbow of the newly formed tunnel. Ike and Ruth were at the rear. I quickened my step and arrived a breath behind the rest of the party.

  Ahead lay a junction. I remembered this spot from my stints in the mine over the years. I relaxed a bit, willing a rough map to form in my head. This was just off the east side of the main mine entrance where the cars were loaded. Or rather, what used to be that chamber, but was now the place of Ike’s healing in my mind.

  The group was huddled before the junction, whispering cautiously. I presumed the debate was about whether to take paths leading to lower or upper sections of the mine. As the workings snaked deeper into the mountain over time, building upper shafts to hollow out the bones of these mountains had become possible.

  My cluster of companions ceased their discussion and, as their susurrus dissipated down the tunnels, I noticed why. From the leftmost portal came a much brighter light. It wasn’t until later that I realized it was the same strangely pale color that now seemed to suffuse the very stone of the mine.

  No one moved. I sensed we all strained our ears for clues as to what gave off the strange illumination. I heard nothing but the panting of the folk about me.

  David stepped forward without a sound. He crouched slightly and crept forward in a toe-heel fashion into the bright light spilling forth from the tunnel. His movements were fluid and swift. Though thinner than John, David was a tall long-legged man. I found myself enraptured, watching him move with such speed while remaining entirely silent.

  I knew from my visits with Henry that his brother David spent a great deal of time in the wilds surrounding Arno. Most Arno men of each race, and many of the women, hunted here and there, but David held some special place among his people. I had never fully grasped the details. Some things don’t translate. I could see his position was one born of merit.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I realized that, without my notice, David disappeared into the leftmost tunnel.

  After a breathless interlude, he returned just as swiftly and soundlessly. He conveyed the situation to John and Deborah in his people’s tongue. After a moment he halted and turned to gaze at us with knitted brows.

  I thought, as he spoke, that I caught the word for small or little, a word that often comes up in trades. “Chee.” I’m not sure on the spelling of any Siouan words. The Monacans never wrote in their own language that I ever saw.

  John stepped into the role of interpreter. “There is a… guide ahead. I never heard any white man speak of such a thing, but,” he paused and looked to Mother Deborah, who nodded, “we have a story of the spirit light. Any of our children could tell it. They say it leads everyone one day.”

  He lifted his unlit lantern and shook it, growing more animated. “Like this, but floating on its own above the ground. It waits until you get closer, then keeps going further down the path, to guide your spirit back to the ancestors.”

  John bit his lip and looked back at David, whose face had become a blank slate. Then he looked at the rest of us. “It’s death. David thinks he’s seen his death guide.”

  “Will o’ the wisp,” Esther said. We all turned to her. “Seamus has a song about a will o’ the wisp.” She smiled. “From his song, a wisp can be tricky, but it’s just little tricks and adventures you didn’t plan on. Not something that takes you to heaven.”

  Behind Esther, I saw Ruth shake her head and gaze up at the rough ceiling of the junction.

  We gathered ourselves and made our slow procession down the tunnel, David at the lead. I was confident everyone tried their best to move silently. We did not succeed. David slowed his pace to give us every advantage, but boots still scraped stone and iron tools knocked together. Compared to David’s grace, the rest of us sounded like a crate of pots and pans tumbling down stairs.

  I saw it.

  I was behind David and John. Between them I caught sight of a bright ball of white light. I was already thinking of it as a will o’ the wisp.

  A grin spread across my face. I too had heard Seamus’s song in town once or twice. I could see him in my mind’s eye, lifting his fiddle from his shoulder, vaulting atop a tavern table, launching into a verse.

  I glanced behind me. The others were fixed on the wisp. I could see it reflected in their eyes. I wondered if that meant it was guiding us all to the afterlife together. Then I shook off that gloomy thought and breathed deep. It felt good.

  We stood motionless, taking it in. It bobbed and flicked this way and that, then hovered for a time. It reminded me of the hummingbirds we see in Arno for the spring and summer. After a few heartbeats, it darted down the tunnel. I paused for a moment. My heart was beating fast and my hands felt clammy.

  Before I knew it, I was running after it. I knew I shouldn’t be. You never run in a mine, but I needed to see it again. Make sure it was safe. Watch it dance. I was vaguely aware of others running beside me. I felt a humming sort of feeling creep in at the back of my mind.

  The tunnel opened into another, much larger junction. Three passages met here, but these were much more widely hewn. Wisps bobbed merrily out from each one. I looked back down the tunnel we’d emerged from. Another wisp came to meet us, dancing its little jig. I assumed it was the first one we’d seen, though how it managed to get behind us in a tunnel uncrossed by side passage, I didn’t know.

  As the wisp drifted toward us, I heard Ike’s booming laughter. Then another laugh, female. Mother Deborah had come to stand beside me. I had never seen her laugh before. She was always so solemn. I noticed her sharp front teeth again. A rising elation bubbled in my chest.

  The wisp no longer bobbed up and down, it moved forward slowly and deliberately now. Then I noticed something odd.

  The wisp wasn’t floating. It was just the tip of a larger creature. Trailing behind it was a many-veined appendage, muscular and lithe.

  How perplexing. How silly. What a clever thing.

  Such were my thoughts. I did not question them.

  All at once, every wisp went dark, like the last candle blown out before bed. We were plunged into absolute blackness. Even the faint glow that, since we began our rescue attempt, had suffused the stone now vanished.

  How jarring that instant veil of darkness was. It wasn’t just the absence of light. It felt like being snapped sober in an instant when you’re falling-down drunk. All that artificial happiness ripped away, regret crashing down in the same breath.

  Then the buzzing returned, louder, insistent. For the first time I recognized its source. I thought I was losing my mind. I heard, faint but unmistakable, the jaunty tune of a fiddle. There was a message hidden in fiddle song. Not words, but a warning all the same. It was too late.

  Something huge twisted around me and held firm.

  Pressure wrapped me from knees to shoulders, lifting me from the ground as if I weighed nothing. The strength was immense. Hideous. I felt muscle and sinew ripple around my body. Sticky wetness soaked through my clothes. I smelled sulfur and, overpowering it all, the stench of dead fish.

  I struggled against that unseen strength, but I was helpless against its raw size and power.

  Much of what I heard in that ink darkness I couldn’t untangle, but some sounds cut through. Heavy, wet things sliding over stone. A deep, bestial roar descending into something like trees cracking in a gale.

  I felt the pressure in the chamber change, the way it had when Ike called that diamond pillar forth from the coal.

  Close by, something tore with a wet rip. A spray of viscous fluid struck with the force of floodwater. The mine answered with a roar that shook the bones of the earth. I heard a heavy sound, like a side of beef slammed hard against the stone followed by dust and debris showering me and sticking to the jelly-like substance coating me.

  The fiddle returned. I don’t know if it had stopped or if I’d simply lost it in the chaos. Of all the thoughts to have in that moment, I was surprised to realize I knew the tune. Perhaps I was just going mad.

  Then I felt the squeeze.

  Pain exploded. My vision went purple in the dark. My ribs cracked, my shoulder wrenched. My mouth opened to scream but nothing would come out. I knew that I would burst or crumple like paper.

  Another wet ripping sound.

  Then I fell.

  From then on, I must have been drifting in and out. These are the fragments I remember, and even now I can’t tell which were real. Firelight flared in a far corner, harsh after the total darkness. Holding it was something both like a man and like a charging bear, shifting between forms with each stride.

  Behind it, the fiddle changed timbre as it entered the junction. The instrument floated in the air, bowing itself. I heard Seamus’s disembodied voice belting a patter song as if we were back in the tavern, though it rang harsh and shrill as it never had in my memory.

  Then I was on the floor again, slick with something foul, coughing as I tried to rise. Shapes moved toward me.

  The last thing I remember is being rolled over by a firm grip and looking up into the grizzled face of Silas.