The Thing In The Mine Read online

  The thing in the Mine

  Published at Smashwords

  Copyright 2014 by J.R. Ayers

  All the characters depicted in this novel are a work of fiction and are not intended to represent any real person living or dead.

  Prologue

  For the past three years, since an on the job accident broke his left leg so badly the doctors had to replace a chunk of his femur with a titanium rod, Charlie Waddell made extra cash to supplement his disability by pulling weekend night watch duty at the Logan number 12 coal mine in Wyoming County West Virginia. The Wilcox Mining Corporation paid him a few cents more than minimum wage to keep an eye on the pump house and the generator room and to make sure nobody strayed onto the grounds in search of copper or tools to steal. It was the lonely, ill-paid sort of job that most people would shy away from, but, given his current physical condition, it was a job Charlie was more than happy to have.

  Before the accident, Charlie had been an accomplished welder and equipment mechanic, with a working knowledge of mining machinery and better than average skill at running a Joy buggy or end loader whenever the need arose. Then, on a rainy morning three years earlier, a steel girder slipped from a crane hoist ricocheted off a tipple conveyor and landed flat side up in the trench where Charlie was tacking together a twenty-foot section of slag car rail.

  He almost died that day, but the crack in his skull wasn't as bad as originally thought and the surgeons in Beckley had managed to sew up his spleen before he bled to death. His left leg was beyond repair, however; it took seven months of rehabilitation before he could walk without the aide of some type of mechanical prop—first a pair of crutches, than a clumsy four-footed walker, and finally a bone-handle hickory cane that once belonged to his late grandpa Waddell.

  Three years had passed since the accident and he still walked with a prominent limp. The repaired bone ached sometimes too, especially when a cold, late autumn rain settled in over the mountains for a two-week stay. But most days the leg didn't bother him all that much.

  Nothing Tylenol or Budweiser couldn't take the edge off, anyway.

  The miracle workers at the VA hospital in Charleston made him one of those fancy shoes with a thick sole and metal rods in the sides that helped stabilize his ankle. He actually got around quite well, given the circumstances, although prolonged standing often caused his leg and ankle to swell.

  Contrary to popular belief, Charlie didn't mind his new lot in life as much as people might think. In fact, he saw his disability as a positive thing. “A one hundred percent disabled, government sponge,” he'd been heard to say on more than one occasion. And the Wilcox Mining Corporation was willing to keep him away from a law suit by giving him the night watchman job for as long as he wanted it to boot.

  “Damn, good stuff,” the way Charlie put it when rubbing it in to his brother-in-law, Lonnie. Losing full use of a leg was a pretty fair trade in Charlie's way of thinking. When Lonnie once pointed out the fact that his leg was forever ruined, “Charlie said, “Hell, I still got one good one ain’t I?”

  The injury and ghosts from the past did affect Charlie to some degree, though. His physical limitations were obvious to the casual observer, but he kept his emotional state a closely guarded secret, even from his wife, Rachel. The accident hadn't only crippled his body, but had also taken a toll on his self-reliance and self-confidence, and, in so doing, had transformed him into a bitter, often inexplicably despondent man. It seemed lately that the only time he really felt normal was when he was working at the mine, wrapped in his aloneness, ensconced in the one place where he felt he was wanted and needed.

  If only he had had an inkling of what was going to take place that Friday night, maybe he would have called off sick. Maybe he wouldn’t have had to witness his world disintegrate around him in a most incomprehensive and terrifying way.

  Chapter One

  It was the twelfth of August, two months before Charlie's forty-third birthday. The night crew had finished their shift, showered, clocked out and headed home to start their weekend. The out-take conveyor belts and end loaders at the exit tunnels were now silent—Logan number 12 would be idle until eleven p.m. Sunday night.

  George Calicino, the swing shift section boss, had handed Charlie the keys to the generator room and said, “Keep a close eye on that new shaft the boys started drillin’ last week. Be careful though, cause' we ain’t had a chance to put up a permanent barrier around it yet.”

  “How many dern holes are they fixin' to dig?” Charlie whined. “Hell, the mountain’s gonna start lookin’ like Swiss cheese if they keep sinkin’ a new entry shaft ever month or so.” George shrugged and said,

  “Damn if I know. They pay me to dig coal. I don’t question anything the dumb asses do beyond that.”

  Charlie watched George walk away toward the fence line where the foreman had parked his Ford pickup. “Anything else I need to know?” he called before George stepped up in the cab.

  “Nope. Just make sure that new shaft don’t start cavin’ in. If it does, get on the horn to Corporate. Their numbers’ right there on my desk.”

  George drove off the property and Charlie headed for the equipment building to start his first rounds. He walked the property line looking for any breeches in the fence and then made sure the main backup generator was online before heading back to the office. He had just settled in for a bit of lunch when the lights suddenly went out. Not just the lights in the straw bosses’ office where he'd just bitten into a potted meat and mustard sandwich, but all over the vast expanse of the mine property. Even the emergency lights high above the perimeter, flickered, winked, and then switched off with a metallic pop. Sitting in the darkened office with mustard on his chin, Charlie looked out through the grimy, dust-streaked window and grunted, “Well, if that ain't the shits.”

  It wouldn't be inaccurate to say that there is no darkness quite like the depthless, all encompassing darkness of a powered down coal mine in the middle of the wilderness at two o'clock in the morning. All the more so when that mine happens to be set so far back in the mountains that the State hadn't even bothered to put it on a Forestry Service map. It had taken a road crew the better part of a month to blast, scrape and cut an access road to the mine site and another month and a half to install power and water and spread enough gravel on the dirt to allow a four-wheel drive vehicle access up the mountain during the winter months.

  The nearest town to the mine of any size was Stephenson, and that was more than twenty miles away. There wasn't much within the little town to brag about; just three two-lane streets that crossed near a tiny brick building that served as city hall, a handful of businesses—two grocery stores, a pharmacy, open twenty-four hours, a 99 cent store, a half a dozen shops selling everything from sporting goods to lady’s intimate apparel, a barber shop, and two gas stations directly across from each other, both specializing in cheap, low octane gasoline and copious amounts of scratch-off lottery tickets. They did have a nice government subsidized clinic, though, mainly because over half the residents of Stephenson suffered from Black Lung, Siliceous, alcoholism or chronic drug abuse, mostly Oxycotin or Percoset. Charlie often wondered how the town survived at all, what with its strip-mined hills, coal dust polluted air and sulfur-laden water supply.

  For those who knew him well, they would say it was just like Charlie Waddell not to get too excited about the unexpected brown out at the mine. He was content to sit in the thick darkness and eat his sandwich while he waited for the generator timers to kick in. Food was one of Charlie's passions, and for a man who weighed only a hundred and thirty-five pounds, he could really pack it away. He wanted a sip or two of coffee to wash down the sandwich, but he'd left his thermos on a small table by the doo
r and he wasn't keen on fumbling around in the dark looking for it. He figured he'd just kick back in Joe Calicino's, padded chair and wait until the lights came back on. It wasn't his fault that he couldn't make his rounds on time, right?

  Charlie had a Casio sports watch his wife had given him for Christmas and he consulted the green luminous dial for the time. Two seventeen.

  Damn.

  For the better part of the next half hour, he checked the time and cursed as it got closer to three a.m. and still no lights. Not time to panic, though. Wilcox Mining Corporation owned half the stock in the local power company, so if anyone got the raw ass because of the power failure, then they could just blame themselves, Charlie thought putting his feet up on George Calicino's desk.

  Ten more minutes passed and Charlie began to wonder why the above ground backup generator wasn’t kicking on. This power failure was lasting way too long, in his gestimation. Outages like this one usually didn't happen until late winter when Atlantic cold fronts butting heads with high pressure systems sliding down from Canada dumped enough snow on southern West Virginia to last well into late Spring.

  Charlie chanced another peek at the ghostly green glow of his watch. The three a.m. check of the pump house was overdue. He was beginning to worry, not much yet, but just enough to cause him to scratch aimlessly at the itchy spot just behind his right earlobe.

  No one ever accused Charlie of being the most ambitious person in the world, but he had always tried to do well when someone hired him for a job. The way he saw it, if you took a man's money as payment, you did your best to earn it. Liking the job was of no real consequence—it didn't make any difference to Charlie whether he liked the work or not, the important thing was that he do the best job he knew how. It ain't like people are lined up just dyin' to give me another job, he often reminded himself.

  With that in mind, he begrudgingly dug around in George Calicino's desk drawer until he found a five-cell flashlight. He switched it on and cursed out loud when a pale yellow glow barely penetrated the dusty lens. “Damn, Joe, can't you ever change out the batteries?” he muttered under his breath.

  Leaving the office, Charlie headed across a wide gravel lot toward a communal bathhouse a few yards from the parking lot. It was a long, narrow building that served the miners as both a place to change clothes and wash off the coal dust at the end of a shift. Charlie knew that the miners kept their gear in lockers in the bathhouse. Someone was always calling off work on Friday and there was a good chance that there was a fully charged mine light somewhere inside the locker bay.

  The interior of the bathhouse was stale and humid and stank of sulfurous coal dust. A bank of frosted glass windows, still damp with condensation, ran the length of the forty-foot long corrugated tin building. Rows of benches flanked a line of lockers where Charlie could see dirt stiffened coveralls and steel-toed boots so grimy with coal dust that they looked spray painted with black, glow-in-the-dark paint.

  Navigating around the benches in the weak glow of the flashlight, he found what he was looking for in an open-faced locker near the shower stalls. Good deal, Ed Kosloski had played hooky that day. His mine cap hung on a peg inside the locker, clipped to a battery pack. A glowing bright green light indicated a fully charged battery.

  Charlie retrieved the cap from the locker and plopped it on his nearly bald head. He thumbed the switch on the head lamp and a brilliant shaft of white light pierced the thick darkness. “That's more like it,” he said grinning. The hard hat looked more like an advertising prop than a safety cap. Logos and stickers, advertising everything from Beechnut chewing tobacco to Pennzoil motor oil, covered almost every square inch of the cap.

  Charlie secured the battery belt around his waist and looked around the bathhouse. The spacious room looked even more depressing in the stronger light. The metal walls were rust-laden and slimy from years of accumulated condensation. Tiny holes, where corrosion had flourished, dotted the corrugated ribs of the high ceiling. Rock dust covered everything in the room, and, all along the tops of the lockers, coal dust lay like a sparkling ebony blanket.

  The dying flashlight no longer needed, Charlie switched it off and put it in the back pocket of his Lee overalls. For a moment, he looked around the spooky bathhouse and listened to the noisy silence of the sprawling room. Water dripped from leaky faucets in the shower stalls, tin walls with loose rivets grumbled in spots, and window frames rattled at the prompting of a swirling breeze soughing through cracks where the putty had dried and fallen away.

  He walked to one of the lower windows, thumbed the latch, and pushed the frame free from its rusty hinges. A strong breeze immediately rushed against his face, bringing with it the acrid stench of wet coal dust and stagnant water from the slag pond.

  Across the long, graveled yard area an elevator cage hung suspended above the exploratory shaft the men had drilled earlier. As he stood by the open window scanning the darkness for signs of life, Charlie thought he saw a quick flash of movement slipping through the shadows pooled around the new mine shaft. It was just a fleeting, infinitesimal suggestion of movement, but Charlie was sure he had seen something that caused him a significant degree of concern. “What the hell was that?” he wondered aloud.

  The breeze picked up a bit, pushing coal grit into Charlie’s eyes. On the rising wind came the overpowering, rotten egg stench of sulfur fumes and the coppery odor of sparking ozone. A tipple boom swayed in the surging breeze, its telescopic wand creaking and moaning like a ghost in a child’s cartoon.

  Charlie shuddered and assailed the shadowy night with the beam of the mine light. At the very top of the tipple housing, a sliver of moon peeked over the tin roof as if it too was concerned about the foreboding darkness.

  Leaving the bathhouse, Charlie walked across the gravel lot trying to decide if he should check on the emergency generator, or investigate the source of the shadow he was sure he’d seen near the new entry shaft. The orthopedic shoe on his left foot crunched noisily on the hard gravel as he limped along, the cap light flinging an oval cone of light in random patterns against the blackness of the night.

  The entire mine property was as dark as the inside of a barrel. Not even the outline of the towering Appalachian Mountains lurking above the coal mine were visible in the almost total darkness. The only illumination Charlie saw as he stumbled over the rock gravel lot was the weak offering of a million stars suspended in the dark sky and the anemic glow of the shy moon cowering behind the tipple housing.

  As he lumbered along, breathing hard, the funnel of light from the cap fell on the face of the Casio and he cursed the lateness of the hour. Not only did he need to find out why the emergency generator wasn’t coming on line, the hourly check of the pump house and the boiler room were way over due. Then there was the worrisome matter of the shadowy figure near the new mine shaft. “I don’t need this crap,” Charlie muttered under his breath.

  He knew that, beyond doing something about backup power, checking the boiler room was priority. A power outage and potential strange doings at the new entry shaft were important matters to say the least, but if he let the pressure build up too high in the steam dampers, there wouldn’t be much of anything left to investigate once the four boilers located throughout the property blew.

  As he walked and sweated, Charlie talked to himself. “This sucks, big time. Damned if it ain’t hot and sticky as hell, even at three o’clock in the friggin’ mornin’. These damn mountains are either cold as a walk-in freezer, or so damn crotch sticky humid a man might as well walk around plum necked. Ain’t that right, Charlie ole boy?”

  He didn’t find it at all odd to be talking to himself. With a job like Charlie’s, he figured it was a good idea to build a cordial relationship with the person he spent most of his waking time with. He worked nearly every weekend, from ten o’clock Friday night until ten o’clock Saturday morning, pulling the solitary watch at Logan number 12. About an hour after sun up, the day watchman, Buddy Sayers, would show up with coff
ee and chocolate doughnuts and he and Charlie would sit around in the office shooting the breeze about this or that until Charlie got sleepy enough to head home. Buddy pulled the day shift at the mine, a twelve hour marathon that lasted until Charlie showed up at ten p.m. to relieve him. They repeated the rotation Saturday, Charlie working the night shift, and Buddy keeping an eye on things Sunday until the hoot owl shift guys showed up for work at ten p.m. That was the extent of the weekend crew at Logan number 12 coal mine; an overweight ex-mail carrier with a penchant for chocolate doughnuts, and a disabled cripple with self-doubt and anxiety issues.

  The boiler/generator room wasn’t really a room at all. It was a windowless block structure with a heavy steel door in front and a removable panel in the rear for draining any condensation that the built-in dehumidifiers might fail to handle on particularly humid days. The entry door was kept secure with a combination lock threaded through a double-wrapped length of 80 gauge logging chain. Only a handful of people knew the combination to the lock, Charlie and Buddy Sayers being the lone non-management types to have access to the information.

  Ten inch high granite blocks and steel girders made up the framework of the large room. It was one of the more critical facilities on the property because it housed all the equipment necessary for steam production and primary backup electricity to power the various types of mine machinery. One of Charlie’s main responsibilities was to perform scheduled checks on the boiler control valves and the gauges on the generator control panel. If adjustments had to be made to pressure or temperature controls, he would make the necessary tweaks and annotate his actions on a log sheet kept near the door. It was something he had done a thousands times in the past, but never in the dark with nothing but a miner’s cap light to light the way.