Knock, knock, knock, knock.
Pause. The others stare blankly.
Knock, knock, knock, knock.
I hurry on—they don’t hear it, and I don’t want them to think I’ve lost it by saying something. Down another pathway, through an empty room . . . This is an old, old mine. The company reopened when they discovered the men from the 1800s hadn’t entirely cleared out the coal. It’s full of caverns, corners, tunnels that are easy to get lost in, dug with hand tools. Did someone get turned around, get sealed into an now-unused tunnel? I arrive at the retreat miners’ area—a far corner of the mine, where they use mechanical drills to plant explosives. They’ll take all the coal until the ceiling of earth above us is held up by a few precious pillars. Then they’ll take the pillars and their coal, too, and the room will collapse. They’re preoccupied with the machinery and don’t notice me passing.
Knock, knock, knock, knock.
“Hello?” I call. The knocks answer. I run toward them, around the pillars—the retreaters’ area looks like a big, empty ballroom. I reach the wall—is the knocking getting more desperate, or am I imagining things? I put my hands against the wall. I feel the knocking on the other side, the slight tremble that vibrates into my fingertips.
“Hello? Are you there?” I ask.
The knocking stops.
Silence. Long-drawn-out silence that makes me lean forward, wait for it, wait for it—
The knocking moves.
Along the wall, knock, knock, knock. I follow. The knocker and I move along the wall together to the corner of the ballroom, where he begins to knock swiftly, like he’s keeping time with a song. It moves lower, to the bottom of the wall, to a crevice in the stone.
Voids in the earth aren’t unheard of, but we usually don’t drill this close to them. They’re unpredictable, dangerous. The wall between the ballroom and the void could collapse, start a chain reaction that covers us all up. I glance back. The retreaters aren’t in shouting distance—
A hand shoots out of the crevice, covered in coal dust. I leap back and scream like a girl—a girl. The hand grasps the edge of the crevice with white knuckles. It is not the grizzled, beaten hand of a miner. It’s slender, a tiny wrist, white white white skin dusted with coal that looks like powdered makeup instead of soot.
There is a girl trapped down here.
My eyes widen and I yell for help. I duck down, shine my helmet light into the crevice. “Hang on!”
How did she get down here? I’ve heard about druggies wandering into mines, homeless people hoping for a place to stay, but these mines are so well guarded that I didn’t know it was possible. I reach into the crevice, wait for her to take my hand, Please, grab it, I’ll help you. Is she too strung out to know I’m here, to understand I want to help her? I wonder what she’s on, I wonder how old she is, who she is, how long she’s been here. Take my hand, please.
I hear her breathing; I pull myself farther through the crevice, and my body pitches forward on an incline. I start to slide away from the ballroom and into the void. It’s only a short drop, the length of a child’s slide, but my helmet falls away; the lamp flickers off. My stomach twists.
It is darker than it’s ever been anywhere, ever.
I land on my back and gasp for air like a fish until oxygen rushes to my lungs. I breathe slow, wait for my eyes to adjust, but it’s too dark in here without the lamp—I can’t see anything, literally, not even my hand when I wave it in front of my face.
“Where are you?” I cough—the coal dust in here isn’t blown away by fans, and it coats my throat. For the first time, I wish I wore my respirator.
I clamber to my feet and rub my eyes, then stand, waiting to hear a sound in the darkness. She has to be in here somewhere—does she not want to be rescued? I reach my arms out until my fingertips brush against a wall, then begin to walk, shuffling along the edge of the room.
“You aren’t in trouble,” I whisper, because it seems strange to speak loudly in the dark. “If you sneaked in, it’s okay. Come on, come to me. My name’s Will; I’ll help you. We have to leave—the air here isn’t safe.” And the dark, I want to add. The dark is everywhere.
Nothing. I walk farther. The room curves to the right, back toward the crevice that will lead me out, if I’ve got my bearings correct.
“I can help you. I can’t stay in here, though.” I pause, wait for any sort of response. My hands fall along a ridge—it’s the crevice, it must be. I duck my head and can see into the ballroom and, on the far end, a speck of light from the retreaters. I have to go toward it. I want to help her, but I’ll have to come back with a light, with help.
“Last chance,” I whisper at the cavern.
Nothing.
I turn to climb out; the air from the ballroom is fresher, cleaner, and I welcome it into my lungs. I crawl forward and then, just as I’m about to put both hands on the outside of the cavern, I feel it.
Her hand slides onto my shoulder, so soft and gentle it feels like someone is pooling a silk scarf against my neck. I freeze as she dances her fingertips along my neck, to my jawbone. When she gets close to my lips, I turn my head toward her—no, toward the darkness where I know she is. She withdraws. I sit back on my feet, back in the dusty air of the cavern.
I don’t speak, not this time. Instead I wait, eyes scanning the dark, longing to see. I force myself to stay still as she slides her palms over my cheeks, then down my shoulders, along my arms. She stops at my hands, not holding them, but touching them like she’s a palm reader. I swallow hard.
My words slip out as a whisper. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Her fingers harden on mine, like she’s fighting the urge to run.
Then her voice, the only sound and so much stronger than mine. When I hear it, I understand that she wasn’t afraid of me earlier.
When I hear it, I wonder if I should be afraid of her.
“My name is Ennor. I live here.”
“You can’t live here,” I say, shaking my head. I reach toward her, and she releases me and moves away.
“You don’t understand,” she says.
“You’re right,” I say slowly. “I don’t understand. Tell me how—why—you live here.” She must be crazy, or high, maybe that’s it—no one would live here willingly.
She’s moving, a rustling of fabrics I can’t see. I tense, wondering if she’ll touch me again, where I’ll feel her fingers first, wishing there was light. Her breath is by my ear; strands of her hair tickle my collarbone.
“I’m a Knocker.”
“A Knocker?” I say, and I can hear the doubt on my voice. The word is so silly, so stupid, that I feel the edges of my wonder crackling away into disbelief—I’ve heard the legends, all the miners have. Faeries who live underground, who help miners out or play little tricks. They were part of the bedtime stories my parents told me, the beings my mother promised would keep my father safe at work. I stopped believing when I saw the stretchers with the bodies of the four dead miners carried out of the ground.
“Yes. I called to you.” She sweeps away from me, and I hear her knocking against the stone. The sound is so much louder than skin on stone should be, and it carries through the mine, all around me, passing into my bones until I feel shaken. I’m relieved when she stops, and I reach backward until my hands find the wall. I lean against it, shaking my head.