Page 7 of Dark Possession

He was so close. It was...thrilling. He had been chosen. His little bird had been given the choice between two things that frightened him deeply and he had picked that which frightened him less. Toran had come out as the lesser of two evils. Shocking. And what was more surprising was that he had chosen of his own free will to follow Toran down into the darkness. Such beautiful courage.

Toran wanted to crush him to his chest and press kisses to his trembling, cupid-bow mouth. He remembered the fragile ladder of his ribs when it rested against his forearm and the curve of his hip where Toran had gripped it in order to lift him up. He’d been a dead weight in his arms, but so far from dead and so very beautiful with his pale, wind-chapped cheeks. He wanted to hold him again, to lift him up and see if he was as light as he remembered, to see if his waist was just as tiny…but, somehow, he didn’t think that would be much appreciated.

It was enough that they were alone in the dark together. The lamp on Toran’s helmet was bright and strong. His little bird’s was dim and sputtering, barely putting out enough for the boy to even see his own feet. That forced him to stay close to Toran, closer than he otherwise would have. He was close enough to reach out and grab hold of. But Toran knew that was not how to capture a bird, because even if he was lucky enough to catch hold of it, he’d have to hold it so tight it would crush it. No, he’d not take it by force. That would only drive it further away in the end. With a bird so lovely, he knew all he had to do was simply fill his hand with treats and leave his palm open and wait for it to come to him. All it required was patience.

When his hand reached out, Jesse startled away. The Bull just looked at him and continued to hold out his hand. In it was a plain white handkerchief. The boy felt foolish, but he didn’t reach out to take it. His eyes asked the question.

“You take it and tie it over your face. It will help keep the dust out of your lungs.”

Suddenly Jesse was overwhelmed by an image of all the black coal dust around him creeping inside him by way of his mouth and nose, the dust settling inside his chest until it choked him and he couldn’t breathe except for to cough out thick globs of black phlegm. It would look like grease…or dark blood.

He took the handkerchief. It was big enough that he could tie it behind his head and it hung down past his neck. It stayed in place easily over his nose.

“Thank you,” he said with his voice somewhat muffled.

The Bull grunted in response. He turned around and walked away and with him, he took the light. Jesse scurried to keep up. His big hands grabbed hold of a stack of coal buckets. Jesse was dismayed to see how large they were. They would not be easy to fill and even harder to lift. The big man threw them into a mine car with a loud clang that made the boy behind him jump. The car groaned into motion. The wheels clicked over the joints in the track. It picked up speed as the incline steeped. Jesse trotted behind with his pickaxe on his shoulder and his hat bouncing on his head. His light bounced erratically off Bull’s broad back. The tunnel was black and the walls pressed in around them ominously.

He spoke mostly just to hear himself speak and to remind himself that this was real and not some nightmare his mind had made up just to scare him.

“What is your real name? Why do they call you Bull?”

“They call me Bull because I am large, have been known to be violent and they are afraid of me. Calling me by the name of an animal dehumanizes me. I do not mind, because it increases their fear of me and that serves my purposes well. My real name is Toran. You may call me that.”

Jesse was for some reason shocked by the simplicity of his name and how easily it was given. Feeling obligated to reciprocate, he offered in return, “My name is Jesse.”

“That is a lovely name. I am glad to have something to call you other than little bird.”

“You called me that when I was up on the wall.”

“I did.”

“Why did you call me that?”

“Because when I saw you climb, when I saw you perched atop the spikes, I thought to myself- if only you had the wings to fly, because you certainly had the will. It was a shame to see one’s spirit failed so completely by one’s body. I pitied you in that moment yet also admired you. It was a strange sensation.”

Jesse realized he was talking to someone who was far more intelligent and empathetic than he had realized. His mouth opened and closed, but he had nothing to say. He had a lot of questions he wanted to ask, but he did not voice them, for the tunnel came to a sudden end and Toran stopped. Jesse nearly ran into his back.

Toran applied the handbrake to the minecart, then lifted the coal bins out and placed them in a row on the ground.

“Normally, for each coal car there is a supervisor who keeps count of how many buckets each prisoner contributes. When the car is full, it is replaced by an empty one and the credits are assigned. There are only so many credits allotted per fully loaded car so there can be no cheating. It has been a long time since I worked under supervision, but I will count the buckets you contribute and ensure you receive the proper credits. Fair?”

“Yes,” Jesse said.

“Very well.”

Nothing more was said for a long, long time. The tunnel was consumed by noise. It was an awful crunching, scraping, jarring noise. The tip of Toran’s pickaxe tore into the wall and ceilings at the end of the tunnel and jerked free great clumps of coal that tumbled into the buckets. He filled them quickly and easily, lifting them, overturning them into the car and then filling them again. He made it look so easy.

It was not.

Jesse started with hope and good intentions, but his body failed him yet again. The axe became heavier and heavier the longer he held it. Most of the time, instead of catching, the tip of the blade merely bounced back off the wall. When it did, it jarred his entire body and made his teeth clack together. The force was enough to knock him off his feet a time or two. It was humiliating. Toran never said a word and Jesse was somehow strangely grateful for that. It wasn’t that he needed instruction- the technique was perfectly obvious. Toran used a wide-spaced grip, he swung the axe down in a large arc and he aimed for preexisting crannies and cracks and used the tip of his axe to split them wide. The coal came tumbling down.

The problem was simply that Toran had the heft and weight to go up against the wall and win, while Jesse did not. Toran had the strength to power the axe through the stone. Jesse did not.

All the force the boy had in his tiny body was not enough to break open the stone and his efforts merely bounced off the wall and back at him. The cut across his bicep burned and the warmth that trickled down his arm told him he had split open the scab. His ribs ached. The pain in his hands was horrific. The joints were already swollen and the skin on his fingers scraped and worn thin. Trying to hold the rough handle of the pickaxe hard enough to drive it into the coal was torture in itself. Once it hit, he lost control of it almost every time, the blade driving this way or that, twisting. He hadn’t the strength to drive it into the wall. All he could manage to do was chip off little bits at a time.

Two hours into it, he had hardly filled one bucket. And then to his horror, when that bucket was filled, he could not lift it.

Without asking, Toran grasped the handle, and with just one hand, emptied it into the car. He sat it back down in front of Jesse. The boy wanted to be angry, or embarrassed, but he couldn’t manage it.