By Ashley Dryden
According to Papa, the news had been talking about the collapse of the Beryl mine for several weeks. At least fifty miners got trapped in a small cave during a coal mining incident in Pennsylvania. After about three days, someone discovered that the miners had access to one of the air vents in the middle of a field after some faint shouting was heard coming from a rusty pipe sticking out of the ground where Grandpa would do photography.
When the miners tried to ask for supplies, their voices were too faint and distorted by the length of the pipe to be understood. The first responders could not make out what was being said, so they dropped a bottle attached to a string into the hole. When the bottle was opened, there was a piece of paper, a pencil, and a flashlight. After a tug was felt on the string, emergency services finally established communication. The pipe had a hole in it that people could reach through, and the inside had been eroded so that supplies could be sent through. The first responders would let out a tap to make sure that the pipe didn’t have any idiots standing underneath when they dropped stuff and the donations would only stop every so often so that air could circulate in and out before the pipe was used for transportation once again.
Strangers would send bottled water and food down the pipe. This was meant to tide them over until they could find a way to get people out of the mine because the air shaft was too small for anyone to crawl through. Each time something was dropped into the mine, a flashlight would shine to the top of the pipe to let the workers on the surface know that the package had been received. Loved ones would surround the hole and listen to talking and cheering as they could rest easy knowing their miners were alright.
It had been three weeks since the food had started being sent down when the light stopped turning on. The committee had sent down more batteries, flashlights, and screwdrivers, but nothing had changed. When the messages in the bottle would return as blank paper, people began to fear for the worst.
Then the tapping started. Every so often during the day, grieving family members began to hear a soft tapping and scratching coming from inside the pipe. After some food was sent, the tapping would stop for a few hours before starting again the next day. Nonetheless, the operation to free the miners started once more and people began to send more food and water into the pipe.
After two weeks, the mining company became curious as to the source of the tapping. There shouldn’t be anything moving around in the mine to create such a noise unless there was a breeze. If the wind was in the mines, perhaps the miners had found an exit. So, early one morning, the workers on the surface hired Grandpa to attach a wireless night vision camera to a fishing wire and lower it into the pipe. It was left there for a whole day before the commissioner pulled it out. Papa managed to catch Grandpa watching the video from his living room when Grandma thought he was asleep; that’s how he knows enough to tell me these things. Grandpa was going to have the first glimpse of the miners before the footage was to be released to their worried families.
However, the footage was never released.
The first few minutes after the camera lands showed a menagerie of skeletons at the entrance of the pipe. The bones looked brittle and moist with limbs and headless torsos scattered about the cave floor like the bedding of a hamster, some with pieces that could not be identified due to how badly they had been shredded. The only one with any flesh left was the rotting severed head that gazed longingly at the base of the pipe. It had just one eye that wasn’t gouged out and a puddle of rot began to form where the tongue should have hung out of the jaw. The others were dismembered, often with the rib cage broken open and some looking like they had been turned inside out like a freshly peeled sock.
As the shock of the carrion began to seep into the eyes of Grandpa, something else began to creep onto the scream from the corner of the room. He could see it clearly but he did not know what it was. It had a fleshy body and three twig-like legs entered the frame, its feet being nothing but a small set of toeless circular lumps and its body being covered in a long, thick ocean of dirty hair. Its face appeared to be nothing but a thin sheet of skin wrapped around a dog’s skull with two black marks where the eyes should be. After reaching a three-clawed appendage out, it grabbed the severed head and stuffed it into its maw full of tiny wet teeth, only pausing to spit out the bare skull with a disgusted expression at the flavor of the stale meat. Then it hobbled over to the hole in the pipe and sniffed at the camera before taking a long, starving lick. After a few more disappointed sniffs, it used its bony claw to tap the side of the pipe before humbling back into the tunnels of the cave.
As of now, the Beryl mine has been sealed off for several years. Frankly, that’s something I’m grateful for.
END