Changes: Coming Home A novel in progress

by Roger Vaughan

Chapter 1: Winning

It was beyond dark. Andy and Becky were proceeding with care, using their flashlights sparingly in case there happened to be someone else in the mine. It was unlikely. The mine had closed for the day many hours ago. But if Becky were right about what she had seen, it was possible that whatever they might find was operational full time.

That afternoon they had been part of an official group tour of the inactive mine. Their guide, Karl, had stopped and brought them together for a word. Not that the group of tourists had spread out. The hostile environment had been keeping them close. And it did feel hostile, Becky thought. The tour had taken them about 400 yards into the mine. For 200 yards they had been walking past the entrances to small working tunnels where for many years men assuming prone positions had drilled and shoveled out the veins of coal. “No claustrophobes need apply,” Andy had murmured to Becky. Talking in a normal voice was out of the question. It seemed prohibited, as if they were in a cathedral. Everyone felt it. No one was chattering. The only sound was the soft crunch of shoes against the dirt surface packed hard by a hundred years of mining traffic.

Karl hadn’t said anything once they had all stopped, after they had focused their attention on this humorless guide they were counting on to get them in and out of this scary place. It was the sort of heavy focus that causes one to almost hold one’s breath. In doing so, they collectively felt the oppressive silence of the large tunnel they were in that had been drilled horizontally into a mountain.

The mining had started in 1906. Before that, early arrivals in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago 450 miles north of the mainland, 500 miles south of the North Pole, had spotted the thick, black layers of coal showing on the rocky faces of the mountains. When they weren’t covered in snow. Coal, so far north?

That morning, before the tour, Andy and Becky had visited the small museum in Longyearbyen,