The Diggers
I am a digger.
I'm one of a thousand and we were born to be diggers. We were bred into darkness, with soil in our mouths and hands already curled to clutch at chisel and spade. We were bred for this, in rows upon rows of tiny individual cots hollowed out of clotted earth, segregated by hard ridges because although we were born to be nameless and identical they did not want us to touch each other, could not have our formative days and years spent with limbs tangled around other limbs, touching, fighting, hugging, guiding, for that might cause us to develop diseases like empathy, friendship, speech, and those could kill.
From our damp earthen cots we were dressed in rough clothing as soon as we could walk and, sightless, shovels were placed in our hands. Before I could speak I knew how to shovel earth and cut rocks out of their pitted sockets. And when we did learn to speak our education was basic, focusing on what we needed. Words like 'above', 'below', 'yes', 'no', 'blockage', danger' formed my vocabulary, refined with an elite lexicon of equipment. We moved from our cots to the tunnels to the refectory where we ingested food which had no taste and which we could not see. I know our supervisors could see, for they directed and taught and led and punished us. But in the darkness, our eyes had never had a chance to develop. You do not miss what you have never had.
I was number 665. I slept and ate and dug between 664 and 666. We never spoke beyond what was required for our work, there was nothing for us to say. There was no time or purpose, we knew nothing of these ideas. We worked like machines, in the darkness, digging.
One day there was a new supervisor. This was not unusual, I don't think, for different voices often came and went in the alien chain of command. Unlike us diggers, the supervisors did not spend all of their time in the tunnels. Where they went and how it differed from my world I did not think to wonder.
But this one was different. I noticed her smell, first – it was not the stench of sweat and earth and damp I knew so well – there was something sharp, caressing, high-pitched to this scent. I stopped dead when it hit me, breathing it in, and 666 bumped into me from behind and the harsh voice of Supervisor #1 barked at me to get in line. But the fragrance recurred and recurred, I began to sleep badly, which had never happened before. I woke from dreams of ensnaring, twisting, bewitching scent that obliterated the dull darkness of my existence, a blade, clean, clear, terrifying – and I'd wake with salt water upon my cheeks and lips and not know why nor understand what tears were.
One day I woke from one of these dreams needing to use the latrine in the corner. As I was leaving I scented that alien perfume and realised that the new supervisor was in our chamber, close to me. I was not surprised by this, we were always under surveillance. But then the new supervisor did something nobody had ever done before – she spoke directly to me.
“665,” she said, softly, so softly, in a voice that rang with so many tones and timbres and inflections it physically hurt me, I who was so used to the lumpen monotone of the digging commands that had formed my brain. “Tell me – do you want to leave this place?”
I turned my head in the direction of that entrancing scent, that impossible voice. “There is no other,” I said.
“But there is,” she replied. “There is sunlight, and rain, and air, and...” Her voice trailed off. “You can't understand,” she said sadly. “But 665, I have been sent here to try and help you.”
“To help me?”
“Do you know what it is you are digging for?”
I didn't understand the question. We were just digging – that was what we did.
“Very, very far below us,” she said in her sorcerer's whisper. “There is a great deposit of oil. Some people think that if they can get to it before anyone else can, they will be extremely rich. And so they need diggers.”
None of this made any sense to me, But the sound of her voice enthralled me – it was like what I now know to be music, I could have listened to her for hours without needing to understand a single word.
“But the diggers are getting sick,” she went on. “The chemicals in these tunnels are toxic and I have been sent here from the outside world to help you before it is too late.”
“I don't understand,” I said. It was true, I didn't. There was no other place or time, I did not know what she meant by 'people' or 'rich' or 'world'. I was a digger. I dug. I ate and slept to fuel my digging. Before me came 664 and after me came 666. That was all.
She sighed. I smelt her breath, she stood close to me. It was sweet, fresh, alien.
“Maybe it is too late,” she said.
…......................................
A few digs later I woke to a new commotion. Usually we would rise and move immediately in our lines to the refectory to fuel ourselves, then pick up our shovels and file out into the tunnels. But now I opened my eyes and there was chaos, panic, shouting. And a closer voice, it was 664 from the earthen cot next to mine, pleading piteously, wordlessly in pain. And horrific stench, putrefaction and sickness and my stomach twisted because it smelt like what a body should not smell like unless something was very, very wrong.
“Diggers – out!” the shouting voice finally commanded, cutting through the din and we obeyed, but I followed 663 now and the last I knew of 664 was a long strangled gurgling cry and that rotten stink bulging in my lungs like a fungus.
I was collecting my shovel some time later when the new supervisor drew close to me again. “I am sorry about 664,” she murmured. “More and more of you are catching the sickness.”
“Will that happen to me, too?” I asked her. She hesitated.
“I think, in time, it will happen to you all.”.
“Will it happen to me in the other place?”
Her silence this time was longer, it was hung with scent and colour and fear and hope and everything that I was not.
“No.”
…..........................
I know how to find my way in the dark. It is all I know. I don't need to be able to see to navigate unknown tunnels.
She guided me to an unfamiliar tunnel and told me to walk straight and keep to the passage, that eventually I would emerge and that there would be someone there to meet me and they would tell me what to do next. All I knew was that I did not want to get sick like 664, I did not want my body to make those terrible smells and sounds, to turn into that dead flesh and rotting pain, while I was still alive. I felt the crumbling soil of the walls with cold fingers and gathered my breath.
“665!”
It was the voice of 666, who always came after me. I froze.
“665, are you going? Are you going to the other place?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
And then 666 did something very strange – they put both of their arms around me and squeezed. I was shocked, for I had never been touched so before – but also there was a strange throb of comfort in it. They broke away, we were both trembling.
“Good luck,” 666 said. “I will come later.”
I hesitated, torn – and then I set down my shovel, and turned and walked into the unknown.
With my left hand upon the earthen wall to guide me, trailing calloused fingers through the familiar cool, clotted soil, I walked slowly, blindly, away from the diggers and the world that I had known. I don't know why I chose to do it – why I had followed the advice of a voice, a beautiful voice, an alien, entrancing scent. I was driven merely by the desire – to understand, I suppose, how my heart could be so lifted by the variation in sound, in smell, what the meaning was of that yearning for an elusive, invisible newness which tugged at my stomach, my bones, my blood. And above all that fear – that fear of 664's putrefying flesh which was, after all, no different to my own, that drive to stop that rot setting into my own body, too – I was a being of body and work, I knew my body as an entity which took in fuel, gave out labour, experienced pain and tiredness and hunger – and pain was the only 'bad' I knew, and it seemed it was to overwhelm me, should I stay. Although I had been born and bred in accordance with the directive to obey, the primal drive to survive still beat, like a pulse I had not known I harboured.
And so I walked through the silent darkness, and walked, and walked. There was no sound, no scent, though it seemed to me that the temperature of the air around me was growing gradually cooler. Then I came up against a solid wall of caked earth – the tunnel was blocked. I stopped, thinking: I had three options. I could turn back, try to conceal my attempted flight from the supervisors and take the consequences of returning. I could sit down on the ground and simply wait, for discovery or death, whichever came first, whichever was worse. Or I could go on.
I was a digger and when we diggers encountered an obstacle, we dug through, around or over it.
I had left my shovel at the mouth of the tunnel, so I used my hands. Dogged and steady and calm I dug my hands into the earth and scooped it out, and so I continued, clawing my way into the earth and on, and on, and on. I was aware of the soil falling about me, the air grew musty and wet, I could hear my breath choking in my ears. Pain flowered in my hands, hot, grinding, my nails were bloody and torn. But somehow I kept digging, kept on inching my way through the earth, because I was a digger and I had come this far.
And then – my hands grasped at air – I stumbled and the wall before me crumbled away and I went to my knees in the clear space beyond. Panting, my hands trembling, cold sweat soaking my hair and clothing I knelt, astonished to find myself still alive – and then I realised that something enormous had changed. The air was cool, clean, it flowed into my lungs without effort or obstruction, it tasted like there was nothing in it but motion. There was a warmth on my skin and a kissing breath, as if a great mouth blew gently upon my face and arms, cooling my battered skin. What could it be? An immense lightness filled me – my head spun, unaccustomed to this new air. Was this the 'beyond', the 'other place' the new supervisor had referred to? All I knew was that it was a very, very different world than the one I had come from.
I could feel the vibrations of footsteps coming towards me through the earth, the footsteps of several people. Voices raised, calling out, I did not hear or understand what it was that they were saying. I just knelt there, gulping down this alien air, reaching out my arms to the clear swaying warmth falling upon me, my bloody digger's hands clawing up into the emptiness where there were no more tunnel walls or ceilings and whatever it was seemed to go on forever. I knelt there and I knew that this was the other place and that, come what may, it was a mighty thing I had done to reach it.
About the author
Anna Rivers is an English Literature PhD student at Warwick University in the UK. She has been writing all her life and most recently had stories published in STORGY, Idle Ink and Peculiars magazines. She is currently working on a novel based on some of the folk tales and ghost stories of the South of England.