Underground City by Nick Peters
Photography by Sebastian Kowalski on Unsplash
Earth and dust coat my fingertips. This is the first sensation.
I open my eyes into darkness so thick it seeps into my vision, until I can’t tell the difference between closing my eyes and opening them. I call out. My voice echoes back in the damp space. I’m on my back. My heartbeat thuds against my ear drums. For a long time, all I can do is listen to my own lungs gasping in the stale air.
My limbs ache as I pull myself to my feet. As I do, my foot connects with something solid. There is a clatter, like metal on rock. My hands fumble in the dark to find its source. My fingertips brush something cold and rusted. An old oil lamp, and what feels like some matches left within a caddy on the base.
I light it. Granite glitters back. Damp slate and sandstone, strips of pale grey on the wall mark a tin lode long forgotten.
How did I get here?
I look up. A large, eight-foot by three-foot hole breaks the cave’s ceiling, clumps of dirt and grass clinging to the mouth. Did I fall through the ground? But the opening is sealed off, no light penetrates the earth covering above. I look around again.
Then, I notice the boards. Shattered pine wood litters the cave floor, the pale splinters appearing in the torchlight like the scattered ribs of a whale. I pick up a piece. A message is carved into it: Meet you again, Grandpa.
The air feels heavy, my lungs crushed by the weight of earth and stone above my head. I’m holding a coffin that’s fallen through the ceiling. I root around and find a splinter with more writing, a name carved into it. David Pascoe. It’s my name. My coffin. Where am I? Where’s my granddaughter, my son?
Muted conversation, bright lights, the smell of cleaning chemicals and rubbing alcohol, a machine bleeping, then a droning ring. Images float into my vision, but when I try to focus on them, they vanish.
The message from my granddaughter flickers in the lamplight. The polished wood reflects the flame, the varnish seeming to hold the light within itself like a small, distant star. The notches in the wood feel like Sophie’s own hand, unsteady and jittering lines like an infant makes with a crayon. I hold the message to my chest, my hands trembling. The room shifts. I take a few slow breaths.
When the room has stopped moving, I notice another opening at the far end of the cave. Clutching the piece of board, I hold the lamp up and the darkness of the opening ebbs back. The passage is low, more of a crawl space.
I remember something my father once told me. He was a miner, before the closures. He’d called the tunnels an underground city, lamp-lit streets and terraces big enough to fit London, its own starry world of passages and peoples dug out of granite.
I crouch down. There is barely enough room to breathe in. Is this the same place? I see a rivetted wooden support beam not far ahead, the lode snaking along the wall behind it. It must be. I’m in a mine. The support is rotted, almost spongy with mildew, the tunnel cluttered with debris and permeated with the musty smell of a long-abandoned house. The mine is empty.
I become conscious of the tunnels extending for miles beneath my feet. My limbs feel as brittle as the support beams, my stomach hollow. Acid rises in my throat. I look at the shattered remains of my coffin.
One thing is clear; no one will be searching for me. The opening above is sealed, and the mines were closed off decades ago. I can’t stay in this cave for eternity. I have to find another way out.
Steadying my hands, I step into the passageway.
I follow the passage, occasionally taking turns at forks in the tunnel. Since I do not know where I am or where I’m going, I choose my path randomly and hope to stumble across something useful. The sound of flowing water, the faintest suggestion of fresh air; I search for anything that could hint at a way out. It seems like an hour has passed when I arrive at another open chamber, much like the first one, only larger. I step out from the cramped tunnel and my constricted lungs relax. There must be air vents in the ceiling, because the vacuum pressure of the tunnels has cleared slightly. I can almost feel a breeze on my face.
Then, I’m struck by the lights.
I hold the lamp up, and millions of stars glitter back at me. The shimmering walls of granite throw my light across the cavern, echoing it back onto the pale glossy stalactites and the smooth body of water below them, like the sequined lights of fireflies.
I’m on the shore of an underground lake. The mineral-rich water is still and unbroken, pearly from the kaolin rock beneath. I hear nothing but the faint ebb and flow of my breath, and even that is picked up by the walls and whispered back to me.
Sophie would love this. She used to show me her drawings of fishes and dolphins, which looked more like crows. Her father, Jowan, would find this fascinating; he would write research papers on it. My wife would have been fascinated, too. I wonder if she found herself down here, twenty years ago. Maybe she’s still here.
‘Emily?’ I call out.
Only the stalactites reply.
I press my eyes shut. Then, I grip the coffin board tighter and walk along the shoreline. On other side of the lake, I find another passage. This is where I finally stop.
My eyes retrace the message from my granddaughter. Meet you again… My throat tightens. My chest heaves, and a sob escapes my lips. Then, I weep until the sound echoes off the walls and seeps into the water.
I weep because, at the end of the passage, there’s another light. It isn’t from my lamp. It’s warm and soft, like the reflection of the lamplight on the varnished wood splinters, only less distant and lonely. I feel the muscles in my shoulders loosen. I put my lamp down and reread the splintered message. Meet you again…
I will meet you again, sweetheart. I promise.
All these years of digging, below ground. I wonder at the people who made these passages. It must have taken generations. Loss and hardship went into making this place – a world below the soil greater than the world above. They spent their whole lives within these walls.
And after all that, here it remains: abandoned. They left. They’d known it was time to let go.
I gently lay the board into the water, watching the message drift off into the lake. Then, I turn and eye the passage. The coiled springs of my muscles, one by one, begin to relax.
I let out my breath.
I walk onward.
Written by Nicky Peters
Edited Tillie Holmes