The Journey Prize Stories 28 by Kate Cayley Page B

chest heaving.
    A pinprick of light blinks into existence above her head, like the first star in the night sky. She makes a wish, chances a look down. Sees only darkness. Maybe she imagined the footfalls, after all. Maybe she only dreamed the heavy breathing, thebroken headlamp, the long, shadowy legs rooted just outside the circle of her light. She keeps climbing.
    Soon she can see her hands on the rungs, her knuckles white when they close around the cold steel. She can almost feel the rosy warm touch of the sun on her cheeks. She tells herself,
The burning in your arms and legs is nothing to what you’d feel if you were burning up in the fire. Nothing like what Johnny felt
.
    When she finally reaches the top she stands, hollow and heaving, on the ledge beneath the Plexiglas and wire grating of the trap door that covers the escapeway. Through the glass she can see the rafters of the building that houses the escapeway. Her hands find the trap door’s latch. She pushes up.
    Nothing happens.
    Roxane tries again, heaving with her shoulder. The trap door is stuck. She knows something must be wrong—the escapeway is always open. She pulls a flashlight out of her pocket and shines it through the Plexiglas, shimmying along the ledge, twisting the beam this way and that to try to see what’s blocking the trap door. The light refracts strangely around the trap door’s edges, turning thick and sluggish like the Plexiglas is coated with lacquer.
    â€œIt’s ice,” Roxane realizes. Frozen shut. Maybe a water main broke; maybe there was a leak in the roof. The mechanics were supposed to check the escapeways but so many things had been going wrong in the mine lately that they must have forgotten.
    She’d have to wait.
    Eventually, when they couldn’t find her underground, the Mine Rescue teams would search. They’d check everywhere. Nobody disappears in a goldmine.
    Except the shadowy man
, Roxane thinks. Did she hear the scrape of a boot on the rungs of the ladder, just outside of the light that arcs down from the trap door? She looks down into the darkness. Wonders if someone is staring up at her.
    â€œWycliffe?” she calls.
    There’s no one
, she tells herself.
Wycliffe is dead
.
    She could climb back down the ladder, use the breather to get back to the refuge. But the fire might be worse; she might get lost in the smoke. She knows now that she should have stayed, clayed up the door like Wycliffe said. But she couldn’t stand the thought of being trapped inside the rock while the world outside was burning. It’s better to be trapped by ice than by rock, she thinks—at least there’s light.
    But it isn’t sunlight. The golden fluorescence shining down through the Plexiglas turns the skin of her hands sickly yellow, making her feel like an insect suspended in amber. She remembers what Gloria said:
You can put whatever’s in your head into that dark space in front of your eyes. And once it’s there it never goes away again
.
    Is it Johnny on the ladder? Roxane wonders. Is he the one who’s been stalking her in the dark?
    A boot scrapes on the rungs again. And now she can hear the deep, wheezing breaths of someone just below her, just out of sight.
    â€œJohnny?” she whispers.
    â€”
    It was only a few days after her seventeenth birthday that she found out she was pregnant with Johnny’s child. They’d only had one night together. And now he was leaving for California; he’d be gone for months. He wasn’t returning her calls.
    She’d climbed over the wire fence that marked the borders of her parents’ land, ran out into the forest, first following an old bridle-path, then the pipeline, the sand smooth and firm beneath her feet. She stopped to catch her breath only when she couldn’t breathe, lying with her shoulder blades pressed upon a bare slope of granite, her flesh and the rock made unbearably hot by the sun. If she