Only two pit-canaries have come back to the tract in the whole time I’ve been here, but it seems to be enough to keep people believing, waiting, wondering. The first was an elderly woman who’d owned a cake shop on Main Street. She said she’d heard trumpets and bells in that tunnel, and that the green light had welled up to touch her and for one brief but glorious moment she was able to hold her own heart in her hands. She’d said she’d weighed her heart for hefty sins. She had determined that it wasn’t yet light enough, so she’d come back up to fast and pray. She stayed above. I never found out what happened to her.

The other pit-canary who returned only lived for a few seconds. He came crawling out of the tunnel screaming in agony. He screamed and he screamed. He even tore out the vine of bellflowers. When two of the men dragged him out, they discovered that he’d been torn open, but the innards that spilled from his jagged and gaping wounds were fossilized; white and smooth and solid, like hand-carved entrails on a marble statue.

Only after the commotion ended did someone comment about how the red bellflowers had already grown back across the tunnel mouth.

*

Another tremor.

And another.

It won’t be long now…whatever ‘it’ is.

The bellflowers begin to ring. Their chiming is open and almost without a source. They swing like their namesakes in a belfry. And like those chapel bells, these glassy-sounding flowers seem to rouse the faithful to service.

One by one the people begin to crawl through the tunnel. Where they had once given a wide berth to avoid, they now scramble and fight to penetrate. The emerald glimmer is now visible within the tunnel, cresting upward like a tide of foul sewer water. Rita and I watch as the last resident wriggles toward that ill light.

Rita begs me to let her go, but I hold her back. Impulsively, senselessly, she wrestles that damned dress over her head, tugging it over her filthy T-shirt and jeans.

I feel the collapse occurring in the tunnel beneath us. It shakes the ground. The chorus of screams from those who’d raced into the forbidden chute are muffled by the falling black rock, but they are no less terrible.

Is this what you lured all of them down there for? I wonder.

“Dad!” Rita cries, over and over.

I shriek for her to follow me into the rescue pod. Eventually she does. I shut the door, praying that the cave-in won’t reach this upper level and that it ends swiftly. There is no oxygen in the tank, but we need shelter from the mushrooms of black smoke that begins to fill the tract. Chunks of coal smack against the pod like the shower of stones in Revelations. The light leaks up through fresh fissures in the ground.