Dad's Coal Pit Hid a Dungeon, Now Guilds Pay Me to Enter novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Ten O'Clock Turn

In the lamp house the old miners tell him what the hole paid for, he reads twenty years of his father's ledger, and at the first turn he sets his first rule and kills his first crawler, and at dawn Daewon's vans are at the gate.

The lamp room stood at the foot of the headframe, a one-story block of cinder brick the miners had called the lamp house.

By seven that evening it held four people and a thermos.

Seok-hyun had never really looked at it.

A long counter ran across one end, with a wall of brass hooks behind it.

On the hooks hung two hundred tags in rows, the way tags had hung since the pit opened.

A miner took a tag from the board when he went down and hung his own in its place.

If a tag was still missing at shift's end, somebody went looking.

His father had run the board alone for twenty years, with one tag on it.

Sun-ja set a bowl of rice and kimchi stew in front of him and did not sit down until he had picked up his spoon.

Two of the old miners sat on the bench by the stove with their oxygen bottles between their boots.

They were two of the nine men who had walked out of this pit in 2006, and there were five of the nine left.

"Eat," said Sun-ja. "Then ask."

He ate three spoonfuls and found that he had been starving for nine hours.

"The Pit," he said. "Everyone out there knew."

"We knew there was a hole," said the one with the thin white mustache. "We knew what it paid."

"Your father asked us never to say more."

"What it paid," Seok-hyun said.

Sun-ja counted on her rubber fingers.

"The oxygen plant at the clinic. My rent. The school bus fuel for the Cheoram kids."

"The burial society's coffins, for forty years of coffins, because your father said no miner would be buried in cardboard."

"The loan was the plant," said the other old man. "The embers paid the loan every month. Now there's no one to carry them up."

"He sold them to a briquette dealer in Gangneung," Sun-ja said. "As reclaimed coal, at forty percent, in cash."

The Association's ember desk paid sixty thousand won for one ember.

His father had sold them for twenty-four thousand, because an honest buyer would have asked where they came from.

Seok-hyun put the spoon down.

"The clinic's electric bill is due Wednesday," Sun-ja said, and her chin shook once. "One million nine hundred thousand won. I would have paid it."

"I can't."

On the wall behind the counter hung the only photograph in the room.

It was the lamp room crew of 2006, eleven people in white helmets.

In the front row a woman of thirty-one handed a lamp across the counter, laughing at whoever held the camera.

She was his mother.

On the fourteenth of November that year she had gone down with an armful of spare lamps.

The Number Four drift had come in on nine men.

She had led all nine out through a side drift that was not on any map, and she had not come out herself.

He had been six, and for twenty years the story had ended there.

Now he stood in the room where she had worked and heard the hum again, low in his head, a tune without words.

He turned from the photograph before the stew went cold.

"Show me what he wrote," he said.

Sun-ja took a school exercise book from under the counter and set it by his bowl.

It was the pit's ledger in his father's square hand, twenty years of it.

The last page was dated the fourth of November, the day before he died.

Nothing was written there but a line.

The Heart asked for the boy again. I told it not yet.

Seok-hyun read it three times and did not ask what the thing had wanted him for.

Near the front his father had written.

Lay one in ten on the Heart's table and never sell it. The Pit grows on what we give it.

The last rule in the book, ruled off in red, read: Eat first.

At nine, he took a lamp from the rack and rode the cage down alone.

The Door still held, and the Ledger told him so in the corner of his eye.

[Door: shut until tomorrow, 8:41 a.m. Entry: the Gwon house, and any bearer of a tag from the keeper's hand.]

He had not decided what he wanted to look at until the cage came to rest in the hall.

Now that the three of them were gone, the hall was only large, and he walked its length with the lamp swinging.

It was a drift longer than the yard above, wide enough for a truck.

It was so tall that the amber seams in the ceiling were hard to see.

Brass lamps burned along both walls on iron hooks, about ten steps apart, and the floor between them was swept clean.

Past the last lamp the hall went dark, and in the dark something moved.

The ledger book said the keeper only had to think the word, so he thought it.

Ledger.

[Hwangji Pit. Level 1. Tithe: 82 of 100 embers.]

[Floors open: 1 of 3. Lamps lit: 38.]

[Rule slots: 2 of 2. Door: set. Spawn: default.]

[Store: 30 embers. Keeper: Health 100 of 100.]

[Leash: 30 km. Today's farthest: 0.4 km.]

A fifth line opened below those, a card, as if he had pointed.

[Spawn: slag crawlers. Level 1. Dog-sized. Drops an ember, one kill in three.]

[Default: no limit. They breed in the dark until the lamps hold them.]

He read the last line again, and his skin went cold.

Tomorrow an Association inspector would stand on this floor, and he wanted her to find a hall that was safe.

Past the last lamp lay a hundred meters of dark with no limit on what bred in it, and a turn every eight hours.

That was how a pit overflowed.

The turn was at ten.

His father's ledger had said so, in a line near the front.

The Pit turns at six, two and ten, like the old pit shifts, and any rule but the Door holds from the next turn.

It was five minutes to ten by his phone.

He had no time to think about what a good rule was.

"Spawn," he said to the dark. "Slag crawlers. Forty at a time. No more until one dies."

[Spawn set: forty. Takes hold at the turn.]

Far above, in the yard, a bell began to ring.

Seok-hyun turned toward the shaft, where the lamp-house bell rope swung in the updraft.

He understood that he had heard this bell all his life and taken it for a pipe knocking.

At the last stroke, the dark past the lamps unfolded.

They rose out of the black floor one after another, a long coal-colored shape and then another.

Each had too many legs and a flat head.

He counted forty in the amber light, and then the counting stopped, because a line of them had turned toward the lamps.

The first came on at a trot.

It reached the edge of the nearest lamp's light and stopped, quivering.

The lamps held them, and he had hoped they would, because his father had written LANE on the hook tags along the left wall.

His shoulders came down for the first time since Saturday.

A crawler near the end of the wall found the one gap.

The lamp on the thirty-first hook had burned out, and the crawler slid along the wall in the dark and went for his boot.

He felt its teeth go through the leather before he saw it.

He grabbed the pick from the rack by the cage and brought it down on its back twice.

Then a third time, and it fell apart into black grit.

Something rolled out and lay glowing on the floor.

It was about the size of his fist, warm as a hand, and the glow inside it moved slowly.

[Slag crawler slain. Ember +1. Store: 31.]

He picked it up and the heat went through his glove.

Sixty thousand won, in his palm, and the clinic's electric bill was one million nine hundred thousand.

He set the ember in the store, a brass-bound coal bin by the cage that he had taken for a seat.

Then he lit the dead lamp from the next one.

His boot was full of blood.

He sat down on the bin, took the boot off, and looked at the wound, which was shallow and ugly.

He thought about what his father had done every shift for twenty years, in this hall, alone, from thirty-seven to fifty-seven.

His father had come home at dawn, slept two hours, and gone to the clinic to pay for the old men's breath.

Seok-hyun had spent those years believing his father was a caretaker who drank tea in a shed.

He felt the shame of that in his teeth.

Seok-hyun put the boot back on.

At the foot of the cage he found a message waiting in the amber wall, glowing, in his father's hand.

[The Heart asks: will the keeper sleep above?]

He scratched the answer into the coal with the pick, because he did not yet know how to speak to it.

Yes.

The lamps along the wall eased, all of them together.

He rode up at half past ten and slept in the lamp house on the bench.

His wounded boot stood on the floor beside him, and Sun-ja had brought a quilt for his legs.

At ten to six, a sound woke him that was not the bell.

He went to the window and looked out at the yard.

Three vans stood across the gate in the gray, and two had satellite dishes on their roofs.

A drone hung over the headframe with a red light on it.

Seon Tae-gyu climbed down from the first van with a megaphone in his hand and his two raiders behind him.

A young woman held a microphone out toward his mouth.

"Good morning, Taebaek," Seon said into the megaphone, with a smile Seok-hyun could hear. "We're live."

"We're going into an unregistered dungeon, and the owner has no right to stop us."

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