By Isla Lader
The first thing I’d felt was lonely; I was so lonely after Helena’s fingers left my esophagus. The tendrils attached to the ends of her wrists had slipped out of my mouth and nose but lingered on my lips. The exchange had been more tender than what I’d been warned to expect. It had made me blink from the shock of its affection, and my eye lashes had disturbed the drifting, bone-white pieces of her body dousing the air. I’d imagined that was what snow might have looked like.
I’d then asked her when we would do that again.
I think Helena had smiled down at me and my question; her ovalish face always reminded me of the porcelain dolls my mother had brought with her from the surface—the simulacrums of pastoral girls and boys doing chores in overalls and little frocks. I’d loved those figurines. It was the way their smiles never wrinkled their faces, frozen in the illusion of easy labor. You could also see where, in the world above us, an artist had taken a thin brush and added dots of pink on the cheeks to imitate the illusion of blood under skin.
I’d asked Helena a second time: when again would I feel her fingers down my throat. While I’d waited for an answer, I saw everything that Helena had taken from me beginning to color her cheeks.
My obsession wasn’t complex then, and it still isn’t now; when you’re hungry, you want to be full, and when her worm coral reached down my throat and into me, I’d been momentarily made perfect. I’d been made whole, up until the instant she’d left me empty and abandoned. I’d only later learn that wasn’t entirely the case.
It was when the mining company doctors fully removed Helena’s influence from me—burning out her polyps, internal proliferations, spores, and exegesis material—that I realized I’d never truly been alone at all.
No one is born down in our mines is without Helena.
* * *
The recovery floor of the mining company’s biohazard ward is a circular and concrete room. The fluorescent lights never go off, and there are no longer any potted plants.
There was once something called a monstera. The one responsible for losing us that privilege—he’d tried shoving the leaf and stem down his throat—was thrown back into the population a few months ago. We haven’t heard if he was able to reacclimate to the air, or if the village even let him stay within its lighted tunnels; the mining company would never tell us if Helena and him were reunited.
There’s not much else to do with us, but someone seems to believe there’s a reason worth filling these cots with our bodies. Or at least attempting to fill the even emptier times in here with our rehabilitation.
Each cycle where we’re awake, the staff forces Helena’s hollowed thralls into the center of the room. We sit on the floor, and sometimes pillows are provided. Otherwise, we have to provide them ourselves from our cots.
There are fifteen of us at this moment. I’ve considered there could be more on the floors I haven’t seen. Four, including me, are still able to form recognizable sentences. The rest move through the room languidly, sometimes sitting on the floor, sprawled out as if the forces that propelled them no longer even hold them upright.
Behind me, distantly and too close all at once, I think there’s a pathologist in a mining company uniform going around the circle, asking for anecdotal stories of childhood. I fail to understand how speaking of our village and its practices will suddenly make our lungs able to breathe its air again, but the boredom makes demands of me. The fluorescents can start to make you see floaters in your eyes; I’ve mistaken them for Helena’s spores too many times to count.
So some of us talk of cobalt mining, a few others speak on the various switches of mayoral leadership in the village. Everyone does their best to avoid speaking of anything Helena showed us in the hidden places that the mining company has not been able to locate. They’re all in love with her too, I suppose.
When it comes to my turn, I keep it brief and tell a story about my mother and how she had to sell her porcelain dolls. I make sure everyone knows it was about not meeting quotas and the usual reasons why someone lets their precious memorabilia of the surface be pulled away. The pathologists give nervous looks between each other, and I grin with all my teeth showing.
They don’t push it, though, my audience are mostly limp beings cut from their strings.
A thin woman who came to Helena late in what I considered the good times starts speaking after me. I remember her name by walking backwards through my memories; Loam wasn’t Helena’s favorite, nor was she even particularly competition for Helena’s attention.
In this little ritual, she disgusts me the least for the simple reason that I can tell she is play-acting for the pathologists. Her script always begins with a story about how when she was a little kid, she loved to eat bell peppers. It became the staple vegetable that her family was willing to order imported because she loved them and they were investing in the hopes that should they one day pay off their debts, their daughter could find the surface less alien than the world of the village mines and its railway cars, chemicals, and detonative devices.
Except their daughter fell in with a being beneath the soil. She let the pale woman under the earth take her blood and breath, instead. I have to wonder if her family still lives and if they’re disappointed that they wasted so much of their lives on paying for bell peppers.
“It wasn’t the flavor, though,” Loam blows air out from between his lips before she continues with, “I was always looking for the growths inside. I collected them. My mom could never really explain why some bell peppers had them and others didn’t.”
She tells this story like a penitent, so the pathologists let it be, but any of us who aren’t totally hollow know who she’s speaking towards.
Loam is about to get to the part of the story where she sacrilegiously ate the inner green growths when a violent break in the monotony comes in the form of an attendant entering the circular room and looking towards the orderlies and me—
“The foreman has asked to speak with Miss Price.”
I fail to realize that’s me for a moment, right up until the orderlies and the other pathologists say my first name to get me to stand up. We get into an elevator I hadn’t known existed, but instead of going down, we start to rise and my stomach flips with fear for the first time since they caught me and removed Helena’s growths.
Dreams of the surface were something you had when you were a child. Nearly all in my generation had parents and a few relatives who could remember clouds, but by the time I’d stopped hoping for something miraculous to happen that involved the world above me, was when Helena found me.
The office they take me to, thankfully, doesn’t have any windows. I don’t know why, but I think seeing the outside might finally break the last part of me connected to Helena.
I initially didn’t recognize the foreman. The way her hair curls at the point of her chin gives it away, though, as she sits at her desk; she’s pale, but you can still tell she’s had sun exposure.
“Marl Price,” she smiles and the lines around her mouth wrinkle her skin, “you’re looking fuller.” She’s referencing that I was partially anemic when they kidnapped me.
I look around the room for something I can imagine hurting her with, “Am I getting released?”
“No,” her script falters and she pauses before continuing, “no you are not. No one is going back into the mines.”
I hum and rock back and forth on my heels.
She doesn’t invite me to sit. She breathes in some more of the artificial air pumped into the room before trying a different approach, “Miss Price, did your mother ever discuss if she still had family not employed by the company?”
Not employed by the company, is code word for, not indentured.
“Nope,” there are no pens out in the open, not even a plaque for me to grab ahold of, “she went in poor and alone. She died poor, but not alone. You know how it is.”
“I see.”
This foreman arrived five years ago. She’s the first woman since the installation was established, right after Helena revealed herself in full to the village. My first memory of the recovery ward has this foreman standing at the foot of my bed as I screamed from the exposure of fluorescent lights and the sensation of being emptied.
I keep rocking from my heels to the balls of my feet. Helena rarely spoke and because of that I have little care for wasted breath.
This makes the foreman finally speak in a rush, “Miss Price, as of last week, we’ve pulled all profitable caches of cobalt from this dig site. Going deeper would risk flushing out—” she swallows, “poisonous gases, potential untapped diseases, and untoward entities. A full relocation and potential contract buy out has been ordered.”
My mother used to polish her porcelain dolls and tell me that there were two ways to escape to the surface: complete your contract or die. She must have never suspected this third option.
“You’d be making all of us into refugees,” I mutter.
The foreman shakes her head, “Would you evacuate a population from an erupting volcano? Or rescue a city from a hurricane approaching the coast? The vein is tapped and the area is no longer safe for habitation.”
“There’s no way they’ll be able to breathe up there without a full flush of their lungs—” the foreman makes a face when I realize, “you’re not going to flush their lungs…”
“The reason the expensive procedures were undertaken on you and your comrades was to see if we could kill the source of the difficulties.”
I sound strange even to myself, but that’s faith for you, “She is the air we can breathe.”
The foreman folds her hands at the desk, “The move will be less cruel if original members of the community are leading the process.”
“Then I’m a horrible candidate for the job.”
I’m a traitor. I’m a saboteur. I’m some selfish kid who gave it all up to be with Helena.
“You were victimized by an alien entity, Miss Price. You were not her companion, not even her associate. The creature ingested pieces of you like a tick on a dog’s leg. I’m trying to give you the opportunity to now be the forward-facing figure of your people’s reintegration into the rest of the world.”
I laugh and this successfully gets a flinch from her. The mining company and my village’s misconception remains the same; they believe Helena to be a parasite—a vampire—without considering that this has always been about symbiosis.
When I get control of myself, I agree to play along for a condition the foreman’s only willing to fulfill because I think she wouldn’t know what to do with me should I actually leave this place.
I have not a clue, either.
* * *
There’s a level of disagreement between me and all living things in the mines that haven’t been joined to Helena. Our opinions are bifurcated things, all stemming from a generation of debtors who went down into the mines and couldn’t do much about the company that held them like chattel.
Helena is beautiful to me, but to the village she is the nightmare that is easier to hate than the mining company that started this.
Every child raised to work here knows to be wary of the pale bride whose veil is made of thick spores from deep in the soil, the parasite who walks on two legs, the obstructor of our efforts to extract cobalt and precious tithes from the earth.
The mining company has classified her as a virus. A sapient virus, but a virus, nevertheless that feeds on the company’s workers.
But I’ve never been less hungry than when I was with Helena. I’ve never breathed easier. I saw great caverns. I ate and drank from deep rivers underground. The rest of my life felt like something to look forward to because I’d never considered that I could grow up to breathe easily.
* * *
The respirator they give me makes my community hazy.
I haven’t seen it since Helena came to us in a storm of white fog and pollen. The floaters in my eyes somehow increase from being dunked back into semi-darkness of artificial lighting systems trying to imitate the sun. This is a small world.
The queue of evacuating workers looks at me in the front of a military-style tent and their disgust is palpable. Most of them remember the young people who abandoned their posts and followed the strange woman into the dark.
I start to feel bad for them, this break in their sacrosanct schedule must frighten them.
Even with the respirator, I struggle to breathe. It sounds like gravel being poured in a mixer.
Helena took me away from this. We walked tunnels of gargantuan growths, bioluminescent drawings on the walls, there were stalactites of mushroom growths in a billion colors I couldn’t name. There were others with us, yes, but I was the first who’d been touched by her hands.
“I can’t breathe,” I rasp.
The foreman is of course unsympathetic, “We’ll get you better oxygen tanks.”
Our tent of operations feels like the place you plan a war. The foreman and I then go through over fifteen names an hour. It’s a funnel of people who mostly know of the sun and surface as something mythic and unobtainable.
The ones who are the nicest to me are the ones who ask for their contract to be transferred to a new dig site. Despite never feeling Helena’s exchange, or understanding what I know, I think they suspect that they couldn’t survive without their way of life.
What would they even do with themselves?
At the end of the sorting, the foreman brings me to the twelve oxygen tanks I’ve requested, the rations I think I’ll need before I reach the deeper layer where there’s edible growths, and the headlamp which will be my only source of artificial light.
“Are you sure there are no relations left on the surface?” the foreman asks, weirdly desperate and involved.
“Sure enough.” I’ve never been more sure in my life and I can feel the phantom touch tracing the inside of my mouth and throat.
The foreman reshuffles a few pages of paperwork in a manilla folder. She fails at being casual, “I just don’t understand it.”
I feel smug; of course she couldn’t understand it.
Why do people drink if they know it makes them drunk?
Why does anyone fall in love even if it hurts?
The foreman repeats herself, “I just don’t understand it…” and she winces before she finishes her thought, “I just don’t understand why anyone would want to have children down here.”
I run my hand over the oxygen tanks and wince. I hope the foreman doesn’t notice.
* * *
Before my mother died, I asked her if she loved my father. She wasn’t sure, but her answer gave me comfort.
It was a partnership, she’d said.
I’ve heard stories of creatures I’ve never seen, of turtles and snakes who are living in burrows with one another.
I didn’t do it for politics, or because I hated the mining company, or because I wanted to rebel against our way of life or obligations to clearing our debts by pulling every piece of ore we could.
I went into the dark with someone I loved and that is all I have ever wanted.
* * *
I watch my community as they cough their way to a series of transport trucks.
I think to call to some of them, tell them of what’s to come, but I wonder if it would be worse to ruin this dream of theirs.
This is all they have ever wanted.
“They sound miserable,” I say. “I give folks my age a decade, kids under fifteen probably two decades if they’re lucky.”
The foreman intakes the air she was born breathing and her nostrils flare with frustration when she exhales. The older woman then startles me when she gestures to the darkness behind me, “You’ll never be able to reacclimate to the air in time for her to find you.”
“Says you.”
This makes her nearly breathless, “You’ll starve in the tunnels. The darkness will drive you mad. You’ll come crawling back to this door, begging. You’re abandoning humanity for a leech, a parasite, a vampire.”
I can’t tell if she’s trying to hurt me or convince me. Again, I don’t know why I’m the one that she needs to see brought low or converted. I shrug and she turns red in the face, not angry red, but like she’s about to start crying.
I cannot fathom her frustration or pain over my choice. Nevertheless, I wave to her as the vault door’s chains lower into place.
My pale bride waits for me in the mines.
* * *
Isla Lader is a writer and educator. She used to work grocery stores, too. You can find her fiction in Cosmic Horror Monthly and Heartlines Spec Magazine.
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