Somehow, we, the people of Evendale, awoke something down there. Now that something is in turn beginning to awaken all of us.

The change is undeniable. Everyone Below feels it, but because it is so indefinable, we do not speak of it. We simply accept its presence within us, like a growing contagion, an elusive virus.

This is a cold, unwanted revelation, like happening upon a lump in one’s breast or testicle; the kind of discovery that makes one yearn for normalcy, tedium, for all those ditchwater-dull afternoons and daily routines that we so foolishly felt needed to be stripped away by novelty and change. Yes, it is that kind of wordless knowledge that there is no going back. Even racing up to the sunlit yards of Evendale would be a small and flimsy defense. And so, we wait for what I hope will be, if not an answer, then, at the very least, an ending.

I’m told that early on some of the men wanted to place bright orange sawhorses before the mouth of that unmapped tunnel as a warning to keep away, but before they could return with their barricade, the mine had produced its own.

The vine sprouted from one carbon wall, drooped across the down-sloping chute and then poked through the black rock of the opposite wall. Blooming out of this twisting verdant cable were five bellflowers, vibrantly red, as though coloured by arterial blood that raced through transparent petals. Deeply fragrant; even the methane fumes were made sweet, so strong was their perfume. The flowers hung inversely. Set against that gaping hole in the mine wall they were positively incandescent, the beginnings of some fresh new garden of paradise. I studied those flowers often, perched upon my plastic lawn chair, coughing into my sooty hands.

I still watch the flowers and I wait. Wait for my father.

Two weeks ago, much to my shrieking protests, he left the camp here on the tract and he became a pit-canary. He said he’d dreamed my mother had come to him through the emerald light and that she’d encouraged him to experience what dwelt on the outer rim of that light. Dad once said he believed the light was actually the breath of some living thing, large and ancient and wise. An entity that had been here long before we crawled out of the swamp, something nested, something waiting…

He’d also said he thinks this creature, whatever it is, is calling us to descend farther and farther down so it can give us some new kind of fire, the kind that lights up the depths of space.

I’d asked him how he came to know this, but he said nothing.