Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,227

sharpish.”

“You’re not going down there!”

Stan pulled up short. “I said I’ll be back sharp,” he whispered in a way that settled the argument. Andy’s mum returned to the back garden, where the boys had their heads down and the hose was still dribbling water onto the leek-bed.

With the dog going berserk behind the mesh fence Stan had knocked on the door and had taken a step back. It was some moments before Ike Thompson appeared blinking in the doorway, puff-eyed, looking like he’d just been disturbed from a nap. His eyes were lined with coal dust like a woman’s mascara. He sniffed. “Stan,” he said.

“A word in the yard, Ike?” Stan turned his back and walked into the open expanse of the disused coal merchant’s yard.

Ike shuffled in the doorway, slipped on his boots without lacing them, and followed Stan across the yard.

The men knew each other well enough. They’d mined the same districts, notably the 42s and the 56s; they nodded to each other whenever their paths crossed; they’d even once been part of the same Mine Rescue Team; and they knew that their boys were good pals. They just didn’t like each other.

The two miners stood in the cinder-black yard at a distance of about five paces. The dog was barking mad, flinging itself at the fence. “Your Bryn’s up at our house just now.”

Ike was a big man. His grizzled face bore the blue signature scars of coal mining, like someone had scribbled on his face with a ballpoint pen. He stood a head taller than Stan. But Stan was trunk-necked with a barrel of a chest and muscle packed like coiled wire. He had his own mining scar, a blue and white star right in the middle of his forehead, like a bullet wound.

Ike lifted a hand to his mouth, squeezing his bottom lip between a coal-ingrained thumb and a coal-ingrained forefinger. “Yup.”

“Says he fell off of a ladder.”

Ike let his hand drop now he knew what this was about. He glanced to the side, and then back at Stan. “Yup.”

The Alsatian barked, and slavered, and seemed to try to chew its way through the mesh fence. “He won’t be falling off that ladder again, now will he Ike?”

Ike turned to the dog, and in a low, throaty voice, almost a hiss, said, “Shut iiiiiiiiiitttttttttt.” The dog lowered its head and crept back into its kennel. “That it?” said Ike.

“That’s about it.”

“Right. You can go now.”

“Happen I will go. But if that lad should fall off another ladder, then I’ll come down here again. And we’ll have another talk. More serious.”

“Oh aye?”

“Too right, we will. Too right.”

The two men stood off each other for another minute. Then Stan said, “I’ll be seeing you, Ike.”

Stan retraced his steps along the cinder path. He felt Ike’s gaze drilling into him at every step.

“Stop thinking about it,” Bryn said. “They’ll get him out. My old man will get him out.”

Andy knew they would get his dad out all right. He just wished everyone would stop telling him. He hadn’t been allowed to go up to the pit-head, where the wives and grown-up sons and daughters and the rescue teams and the camera crews all congregated, waiting. It had been twenty-four hours since a roof had collapsed half a mile underground, trapping seven miners, one of whom was Stan. The rescue teams had made an early breakthrough, piping air and passing food through to the trapped men, but the rescue efforts had hit a snag when a second roof-fall had threatened. Ike was on one of the rescue teams.

“They’re right under here,” Bryn said. “Right under this spot.”

“How do you know that?”

“My old man told me. He said the seam runs north and under these rocks.”

Andy thought about his own dad half a mile directly below him, waiting.

“You’re not crying are you?” Bryn said. “Not crying.”

“Dust in my eye. Dust.” Andy’s fingers found a flake of red stone. He flung it from the back of the cave into the crack of light, and it dropped, skittering down the slope. “Anyway you wouldn’t care if anything happened to your old man.”

Andy wished he hadn’t said that. Bryn started whipping the end of his rope. “He might be a shit but at least he…”

“At least he what?”

“Nah. Come on. Let’s climb the Edge.”

The boys scrambled out of the cave and walked up to an outcrop of red stone known as the Witch’s Face. Bryn hoisted himself over the chin and nose of