"I'm too old to keep telling myself that," she said. "And after the noise your house made last night, and the gas in that cellar, I don't believe the dark is going to wait much longer on our convenience."
Chapter 22 — The Descent
They planned it the way Marcus planned every piece of work that could kill somebody: out loud, on paper, twice.
He drew the shaft on the back of a feed sack at Pearl's kitchen table while the two women watched, and he talked as he drew. The vent shaft dropped from the cellar's capped mouth down through the hill's shoulder — the cap itself was 1911 iron and timber, rotted now, sagging on its frame, done holding anything. Below it, the shaft fell, by the old mine plan Pearl had copied out of a surveyor's notebook, some sixty feet to the bell chamber: the chamber where the warning bell had hung at the shaft's foot, where a man could stand and ring up and down the workings, and where — if Pearl's fifty years of knowing counted for anything — Tomasz Marek had ended the night the hill closed.
"We don't go through the cap," Marcus said. "We take it off like a roof. Section by section, cribbing as we go." His pencil moved. "I'll frame a collar over the mouth — four-by-fours, cross-braced, bolted into the cellar floor joists so the whole thing can't rack. Block and tackle on the collar. Main rope, safety rope, separate anchors, so no single failure takes a man. Lamps electric, not flame — I am not carrying fire into a gassy hole. Air first: we rig a blower and a canvas hose and we pump the chamber full of fresh air for an hour before anything with lungs goes down it. And nobody goes down alone. Ever."
"You've thought about this before," Ilsa said.
"I've thought about every hole I've ever had to work near," Marcus said. "It's the same thinking with worse stakes."
The argument, when it came, was not the one he'd braced for. Pearl objected to everything in general and nothing in particular, which he understood to be terror with good manners. Ilsa simply said, "I go down," in the tone of a woman reading weather.
"You are the keeper," Marcus said. "The sphere can't go below ground. Your grandmother's rule, your rule. It never leaves the keeper, and the keeper never takes it down. You said it to me the first day."
"I said it never leaves the keeper," Ilsa said. "I never said the keeper stays up." She held his look without blinking. "Listen to me, Marcus, because I will only make this speech once. If there is a log book at the bottom of that shaft, it is the last thing my great-grandfather touched that the world can still read. The truth of my family is down that hole, in the dark, in his own hand. I have run three states with his name being a word for shame. You do not get to climb down into my family's grave and hand me up its one remaining sentence like a library book while I hold your coat. I go down. The sphere goes down with its keeper, and if the rule breaks, the rule breaks on me, which is where it was always going to break."
He tried twice more, once with reason and once with something less dignified, and got nowhere that mattered, and in the end he did what he did with every immovable thing in a build: he planned around it, heavier.
"Then you go down harnessed to me," he said. "Not behind me — to me, on the same system, so if I fall you fall and if you fall I catch us both or neither. You wear the sphere. You touch nothing until I say the ground's true. And if I say climb, you climb, no discussion, no last look, no reaching for one more thing. Those are the terms, Ilsa. In my house, over my shaft, those are the terms."
"Agreed," she said, too fast, and then, more honestly: "Agreed. On the rope terms."
He spent the rest of the day in the cellar with the doors and windows of the house standing open to bleed the gas away, and he built the collar the way his grandfather had taught him to build anything meant to hold weight over a drop: overbuilt, honest timber, every joint pegged and bolted, the whole frame racked and braced until he could hang his full weight off the tackle and feel nothing give, nothing even think about giving. He ran two ropes and dressed them with his own hands. He set cleats down the shaft wall as far as the lamp light reached and tested each one with a hammer and his boot heel. He lowered the air hose and ran the blower until the sweet smell thinned and died and the shaft breathed back at him only cool and mineral, like a cellar in any ordinary house in the world.
Twice, working, he stopped and listened — not for knocking. The hill had been silent since they'd left the house, silent in the daylight way of things, and it was Ilsa who named it, standing in the cellar doorway above him with the light behind her.
"It's waiting on us now," she said. "That's worse than the noise, Marcus."
"It's a hole in the ground," he said, and drove the last bolt home. "It can wait like one."
At dusk he walked the whole rig once more, rope by rope, knot by knot, and set the lamps charging, and brewed coffee nobody drank, and tried not to count how many ways a sixty-foot hole in a poisoned hill could argue with a plan. In the morning, he told himself, they would go down and settle it. He did not tell himself what they would find. Carpenters don't. They just make sure the ladder holds.