Pictures in the Dark

Penelope Hill

March 8, 1956

 Darkness and choking air; the thick taste of bitter dust and the velvet weight of silence wraps around me. I seem to be lying on cold rock, its surface a texture of grit beneath my fingers. Carefully I draw in my first breath and regret it, the action triggering a reflexive cough that tears at my lungs and leaves me weak and shaking. The sound of my distress pulls other noises from the absence of light that has engulfed me; the shift of protesting timbers, the impact of fine grit shattering on stone, and the voice, a human voice, weak and desperate in the dark.

"Mikey? Is that you? Help me Mikey. I can't move. Help me ..."

Oh boy.

I heaved myself free from a tumble of debris and set about exploring my unexpected prison with careful hands. I was in a tunnel, or something similar, cut into cold rock, the roof of it so low I was forced to keep to my knees as I crawled towards the source of the voice. It was pitch black; not the darkness of a starless night, but darkness so complete that it made no difference whether I had my eyes open or not. Since the fine dust in the air stung more than my lungs I snapped my lids shut and concentrated on the textures under my hands.

Smooth stone, rough gravel, the shaped line of wood - no, a tool of some sort, a pick or hammer lying across my chosen route - a slope of debris, soft sand and larger pieces which shifted as I touched them ... The tunnel was blocked by a fall of some kind, the angle of supporting props revealing an eloquent story. I groped along it until my fingers met a softer resistance. Cloth - and with it the firmness of flesh.

My indrawn breath was involuntary reaction. My hands had slid over the contours of a face, unmoving in the dark. The figure's flesh was cold and my hesitant hands found no pulse in the slackness of its throat.

"Mikey?" The voice was closer now, the sprawl of the corpse between us, the confines of the oppressive tunnel narrowed down by the shift of rock and the angled wood that held it at bay. "Are you all right, Mikey?"

"Uh - " I had no words to answer him. I wasn't even sure I was Mikey - whoever he might be. The name might belong with the silent witness of death that lay under my hand. "Hold on," I extemporised. "I'm coming."

I steeled myself to crawl over the unmoving form, snaking my way through the narrow opening beyond that my explorations had revealed. Behind it the tunnel opened out a little, the echo of my movements briefly obscuring the effort-filled breath of the man I sought.

He lay under a toppled beam, his legs half buried by the fall. A hand, a strong, broad hand, met my groping in the dark and closed over mine with convulsive reaction. "Mikey," he gasped. "Thank god."

"Don't move," I advised, my mind racing as I tried to decide what to do. I didn't know who I was, or where, but this man was hurt and it looked as if I were his only hope of help. If only I had some light ...

Cursing my own stupidity I groped about my new body in search of anything that might aid me. I found rough clothing, the feel of denim and cotton under my hands. There were pockets; the first was empty, the second full of string and unidentifiable paper, the third ... I pulled out the unmistakable shape of a lighter and flicked at it desperately. The first couple of times I saw the spark jump, and then I could see.

The tiny flicker of flame was almost blinding after the engulfing darkness. It revealed the oppressive nature of our prison, the loom of rock walls on every side, and the still drifting dust that filled the air. Beside me lay a man in his early forties at a guess, rough cut hair and a tumble of coarse beard edging a face black with dust and streaked with sweat. He was wedged up against the tunnel wall, his lower limbs buried and the offending beam pinned across his hips.

"Kill the light, Sam."

Al's voice, crisply close, startled me. I dropped the lighter and the darkness plunged back like a smothering of molasses. Beside me my unknown companion found a wheezy laugh. "Do I look that bad, Mikey?"

I groped for my discarded source of light, grunting some reassurance or other. The movement turned me round a little, to confront the uncanny sight of Al's face where he crouched beside me. He was luridly lit by the patterns of lights on Ziggy's handlink. They shed no illumination on my surroundings, just painted his skin with flickers of red and green, so that he loomed out of nothingness like a disembodied ghost. Which, in some ways, of course, he was.

He was glancing around with a distinct frown, and I realised that, like me, he was blind but for the gleam of electronics in his hand. "Al," I hissed, conscious of the man close by who would see and hear nothing of my friend. "Talk to me."

"Ah - yeah. Yeah." He looked uncomfortable and I couldn't blame him. "Your name is Michael Hannigan, you're a miner - and technically a minor too. You're sixteen, but only just. It's your first day on your first job. That man there is your uncle. Henry Hannigan. He brought you up, and he got you the job with the mining company."

"What happened?" I asked, and got an answer from both directions.

"The tunnel caved in, Mikey. Don't you remember?"

"There's been an explosion, further into the mine. It brought down part of the central shaft and trapped over one hundred men. You and Henry are the last two they find. Except," he hesitated, his eyes trying to find mine in the dark and not succeeding, "neither of you makes it."

"Damn," I exclaimed.

"Don't you use language like that, boy," 'Uncle Henry' growled. "Not even now. I raised you better than that."

I winced, unseen in the darkness. "Sorry - "

"Unca," Al chipped in. "You call him Unca."

"Unca," I completed, staring at my holographic companion since he was the only thing I had to stare at. A snatch of memory bubbled unbidden from my Swiss-cheesed brain; I was standing with Al, somewhere, and the lights on his face were much the same, red and green, much as a TV set might throw in a darkened room. If there was a TV I didn't recall it. What came to mind was my own voice, calm and certain, telling him not to blame himself. That it hadn't been his fault. What hadn't been his fault ...?

"Ziggy says there's a 98% probability that you're here to keep Mikey and Henry alive until help comes. But not with the lighter, Sam. A naked flame could ignite the dust and whoomph - you're both history."

I nodded, remembered he couldn't see me, and caught back another curse. The whole situation was impossible: I couldn't see the man I was supposed to help, and I couldn't talk to Al because Unca Henry would think I had gone mad. Not that Al would be much help in the pitch dark. He could perceive even less than I could, since he couldn't touch anything. The Imaging Chamber was focused on my signal and used sources of light in local time. Not even Ziggy could see in the dark ... or could he?

"Gee, Unca," I said with a false brightness, squeezing the hand that held mine with a reassurance I wasn't sure I could convey. "I wish I were Superman, or somebody. Then I'd be able to get you out of here, just like that. At least I'd be able to see you with that heat vision thing."

I heard him sigh, a sound that had too much effort in it. "I've told you about those trashy comics, Mikey. This is real life, okay? Nobody's gonna bust in here and save us with anything but hard work and honest sweat."

Al was staring at me - or rather, trying to, his head turned in the direction of our voices, his face furrowed into anxious confusion. His lips moved silently as he went over what I had said, then revelation dawned with a wicked grin. "Heat vision. Infrared. Sam, you're a genius!"

"I know," I whispered, unsure if I were answering him, or Henry Hannigan. Al wasn't paying much attention anyway. He punched a couple of things into the handlink, shook it, then stepped back as the white light of the Imaging Chamber door flared behind him. I blinked, and my oddly illuminated ghost was gone. Henry and I were left alone in the dark.

It was some time before he returned. I couldn't tell how long, since all I had to go on was the echo of my own heart and the ragged drag of Henry's breathing. I'd tried to make the man more comfortable, digging around him to remove some of the softer debris and bundling up my jacket to pack it under his head. There wasn't much more I could do with groping hands and guesswork. Henry impressed me enormously. He was much more concerned about what he thought was a frightened sixteen year old than he was about himself. I was trying not to disillusion him, since his concern for Mikey would help give him the will to survive.

Al's words haunted me: neither of you makes it, he had said, implying that Henry and Mikey Hannigan had both died, down here in the dark, waiting for a rescue that took too long to come. Perhaps they had both given up, the waiting eating away at their resolve until they had nothing left to give. Henry was badly injured - I didn't need my medical training to tell me that - and it was almost certain that he would succumb to those injuries unless he was helped. A sixteen year old apprentice miner would not have been able to save him, but Sam Beckett just might. If I had the means to find out what needed doing. If I could be guided in the pitch darkness. If Al had been able to fully understand my hint and if Ziggy could be rejigged to provide the miracle of vision in a world of total darkness. It was a lot of ifs, and I wasn't holding my breath over any of them. The thought that focused my mind and kept me from the panic that Unca Henry thought I was suppressing was a simple one: it had to be possible to survive this, or I wouldn't be here at all. Leaping for a living was bad enough. Leaping into certain death seemed to break all the rules somehow.

"... and they'll be digging their way back into the main shaft by now, boy, so don't imagine that they've forgotten about us. There are over a hundred men on this shift and most of them would be working in the lower galleries, like us ..." Henry trailed off into a hacking cough. His words were meant to be reassuring. I knew differently. The rescuers would find the Hannigans all right, but far too late to help either of them.

"You should save your breath, Unca," I advised. He gave me a wheezed "uh-huh" in assent and the world went back to oppressive silence. It was just about at the point that I wanted to scream for the sake of it that Al made his reappearance. Or rather, didn't.

I heard the distinctive fizzle-pop of the Imaging Chamber focusing in on me, followed by the equally distinctive whine of Ziggy's handlink. But nothing materialised anywhere in the darkness, not even the weird half-glow that had identified Al's earlier arrival.

"Sam?" I heard him say, then a rustle and a low whistle of astonishment. "Say, Gushie, this is great. A little weird, but just great. I got full view of everything ..." His voice trailed off, to be completed by a discomforted swallowing. "Ah, Sam?"

He was right beside me by the sound of it, crouched down, or else brought level to my hunched posture in the low tunnel. Had I been able to I might have felt his breath on my cheek. As it was, the proximity of his words made me jump.

"It's okay, Mikey," Henry murmured, his grip tightening on my hand.

"No it ain't, Sam," Al contradicted from the other side of me. "You got four dead bodies down here, and Ziggy says Henry ain't that far behind them."

"I can't see you," I said softly.

"I know, son," the miner on my right answered.

"You can't?" came the simultaneous reply from my left. "Hold on, Sam, Ziggy's working on it."

Another fizzle-pop and a second dying whine. Al shimmered into existence beside me, a monochrome image of shaded greys. At least, he did from the waist up. Below that the darkness had to be solid rock. He carried the inevitable cigar in one hand, the handlink in the other, and he was wearing a wildly patterned shirt topped by an embroidered vest. I didn't dare think what colour they might be. "Is that it?" he was asking the general air, then turned and grinned at me. I grinned back, mostly with relief. "Oh boy, Sam, this is great, you know? Infrared imaging, and I can see you as if it were daylight ..." He frowned at me suspiciously. "You're a funny colour - oh, I get it. Okay, Gushie. Hold it there."

His image stabilised into translucent greys and he poked at the handlink with triumph. "Ziggy thinks this is a first, but then practically everything we do is a first these days." The cigar trailed broadly in the darkness. "It's not exactly a beauty spot, is it?"

I couldn't see a thing, other than his ghostly torso and I pointed at myself and then covered my eyes with my free hand, hoping to convey that message. What I desperately wanted to do was talk to him, but the man holding my other hand had enough to cope with as it was without thinking his sixteen year old companion had finally flipped. Al frowned over the gesture, half repeating it, then nodded a smile.

"I can see you and this place, but you can only see me, right? Okay, Sam. Listen up. Ziggy says that Unca Henry there has internal bleeding and isn't going to last more than a couple of hours. The history books indicate that the systematic search by the rescue parties didn't find him for another six. Which was too late, of course."

"I'm going to have to go for help," I realised out loud. Henry gasped in alarm.

"No, Mikey. You can't. Not in the dark. The shafts are dangerous enough normally, but without a light and after that kind of collapse ..." He broke off in another cough and I reached to steady him.

"He's right, Sam," Al insisted worriedly. "Everything seems to point to Mikey trying just that. They found Henry eight hours into the rescue - but they didn't find Mikey for two more days. He was down at the bottom of an air duct with a broken neck."

"I can make it," I decided, loosing Henry's hold with reluctance. "I've got to."

"No, boy ..."

"No, Sam ..."

I ignored both voices and turned to crawl back the way I had originally come. Al cursed, struck at the link, and rematerialised inches from my nose. "Sam!" he growled.

"Al," I hissed, only too aware of how well sound would carry. "I'm not Mikey. I'll make it. Get Ziggy to dig out all the structural maps he can. And make it fast."

I crawled on, closing my eyes so I wouldn't see his hologrammatic shape flow around me as I went through it. I still flinched. Al is too real to me for that kind of thing ever to be comfortable.

"Don't do it, Mikey," Henry's voice called after me. "They're gonna come in the end. Just wait for them. I don't matter. You do."

"I'll find 'em, Unca, " I yelled back. "I promise, I'll find 'em."

The journey was a nightmare. Not my worst one, but a nightmare all the same. I was grateful for the blackness as I steeled myself to slide across the broken body I had encounter earlier. Beyond that was a fork in the passageway.

"Right," Al announced, appearing in the recommended branch. "This way. And be careful."

There are times, in many of my Leaps, when it seems as if Al is the only constant in an ever-changing world. Sometimes he bullies me, confuses me, criticises me, even angers me, but he does it for the best of reasons, and he's always there. When it comes down to it he's my lifeline in the stormy sea of time, and he proved it that day as we worked our way through that maze of shattered shafts.

My world had become a darkness in which the textures beneath my hands were the only clues. Once I had Leaped into the life of a blind man, my own sight replacing his and enabling me to live in his world only by proxy. I had been, albeit briefly, blinded for real in the course of that Leap, but it had been a blindness of shimmering lights and blurred vision. The darkness of the mine was absolute, inky blackness unrelieved by any loom of shadow or shape. Al's ghostly company was superimposed on that nothingness, like a chroma image in a TV special effect from which the background has been removed. He waded beside me, waist deep in nothingness, occasionally obscured by an overhang or protruding rock. Even with that I had no real sense of my surroundings. It was as if the mine simply bit chunks from his existence without defining the teeth that consumed him. I crawled with infinite care, inching my way through twisted tunnels and over tumbled debris, sometimes skinning my hands on the rock, sometimes sinking up to my wrists in fine dust or scree. All the time I was conscious of the man I had left behind me, still hearing in the back of my mind his laboured breath.

"Sam," Al berated me with passion, "this is crazy, you know that? Ziggy doesn't have all the maps, and even if he did they wouldn't identify the damaged areas. You could crawl into a vertical shaft, or straight into a gas pocket, or have the roof fall in on you ...."

"Not if you keep your eyes open," I interrupted, discovering myself at a fork in the tunnel. "Which way?"

He frowned, and lifted the handlink, thumping it with the edge of his hand, half to make it work, and half in frustration. "Left. We think. The shaft should slope downward, and then turn sharp left again."

I paused to gather breath, considering him with mild puzzlement. "I thought I needed to get up, not down."

"You will," he insisted, tugging his cigar free from his lips and tapping Ziggy's link with vigour. "Ziggy says that the main shaft is blacked - no, blocked, so you have to get around the obstruction by following an older tunnel that will access the secondary shaft further on."

"How much further on?"

His lips quirked in apology. "About a mile and a half."

"Oh, great." I went back to my stumbling crawl. "How much longer does Henry have?"

He went to look, popping out of existence then reappearing just as abruptly. "Roughly an hour." His face was set into grim lines. "This isn't going to work, is it?"

"No," I realised, turning to rest my back against the rock. "Look - the rescuers must be digging in from somewhere - can't I meet them halfway?"

He frowned, hit the link and disappeared, a snapping away of vision that left me immersed in nothing at all. I took the opportunity to rest my aching body against the nearest wall of rock, trying to ignore the way my muscles were all screaming for attention.

"I don't like this, Sam." Al emerged from darkness, the ink stain of shadow flowing off him like a stream of water in reverse. "Ziggy thinks you might be able to meet the rescue party partway along the central service shaft, but the whole of that section is unstable. That's what took them so long - shoring everything up as they went along. You could bring the entire roof down on top of you."

I shrugged. "Al," I said resignedly, "If I go the long way round Henry's had it, right? Just read me the odds if I take the short cut."

He winced. "About thirty percent," he offered. I stared at him patiently and he grimaced, chomping down on his cigar. "Okay, thirty five. But those aren't good odds, Sam. They really aren't."

"Which way?" I asked quietly. I was too tired to get involved in possibilities. I had something to do and I had to do whatever was necessary to do it. He gave vent to a frustrated sigh and hit the link harder than he probably needed to.

"Back ten feet and then the passage to the right. Sam are you sure ...?"

I was already crawling. It didn't take me long to find the opening he was talking about and I scrambled up the pile of rubble that lay in my way, ignoring the bruised sensations in my hands. Al waded up beside me, half obscured by the narrow entrance.

"Okay," he allowed. "Just take it real easy and try not to make too much noise. You gotta go about a hundred yards, then turn left and up. The rescue party is making its way through right now."

I nodded. This new tunnel was scattered with debris and every move I made lifted a cloud of throat-clogging dust. Something shifted as I passed, sliding a spattering of scree across my feet. The roof was low and uneven and I had to feel my way both on the ground and above me, a cautious progress that was half crawl, half crabbed walk. Timbers jutted out at odd angles, one coming too close to my face for comfort. Al was suddenly in front of me, a grey image of warning, and I jerked to a halt, reaching through him to find the source of danger. I withdrew my hand with a wince. I didn't feel anything when I plunged my hand through his face, but the image of it was decidedly disconcerting.

"A little to the right, now duck a little more - okay, clear floor for a few yards ..."

We went on that way for a while, his voice not just my companion but also my guide. Somewhere above it I began to hear the sound of impact on the rock, the echo of distant work filtering through the walls around me. The sound was encouraging and gave me strength. I pushed onward, sliding through narrow cavities and twisting myself into odd angles in order to move forward.

On and on, a grating world of grasping stone and the sound of a friend, his image flickering beside me. I could see light, or thought I could. The grin came to my face with a sense of triumph.

And then the world fell down.

A rumble of rock was the only warning I had. After it came the pressure, an engulfing of stone and scree that drove all the air from my lungs. It rolled me over, pushed down hard on hip and shoulder; I threw my arms above my head and I screamed.

"Sam! Sam! Can you hear me, Sam? You've got to hear me. You have to move. You have to. I know you can do it. Sam! Please!"

Al's voice hammered into me, an intrusion I wanted to just push away, to sink back into the oblivious darkness from which it dragged me. To return to consciousness was to return to pain and effort, a return to choking dust and tearing stone. I groaned softly and tried to wave him into silence. The bare movement of my hand sent stabs of agony down my arm.

"That's it," he insisted. "That's it. Come on. They're only a few feet away, Sam. Make them see you. Move! Come on!"

I wanted to let go, but he wouldn't let me. I was pinned by nothingness, held in hands of solid stone that pressed the air from my lungs and twisted my limbs at the barest move. Still he yelled in my ear, insistent, determined, refusing to let me ignore him, until the sheer irritation of it forced me to respond.

"The odds are falling, Sam. You've gotta do something. Ziggy, I got twenty percent here. Nineteen. Eighteen ... Sam! All you have to do is move. Just move and you can make it. They'll find you ... Over here, guys! He's over here!"

There was frustration and anger in his voice, and fear too. A cold fear, half bitten back by the tightness of tears. Tears? Al wasn't a man to get emotional like that. Blow up in passionate reaction perhaps, but not tears. Never tears. I was oddly distant from events, and I wondered what was scaring him so much.

"Please," he begged. "Sam, just move, goddammit! Just put out your hand. Ten percent. Oh my god. Nine. Eight. Put out your goddamn hand!"

He was screaming, a tight sound that pierced the fog that held me. Just my hand? I considered it, flexing my fingers and feeling the answer in a wave of fire.

"Yes! Yes!"

The triumph was irresistible. I risked the fire a second time to hear that sound again.

"That's it. That's it. Just a little more. Reach out just a little more ...."

I didn't want to. I wanted to let go, to slide down into the cocoon of sleep that promised release from the pressure and the effort; but his voice was there, refusing to go away, refusing to let me seek oblivion.

"Come on," he growled. "You can do it. You can do it. Sam - Henry's depending on you. We're all depending on you."

For some reason my mind summoned an image I didn't recognise; a gathering of people, lifting champagne glasses as they toasted me in achievement. Al was there, and others I knew to be my friends and could not name. The memory swirled away into darkness and I fought for it, fought for the faces that belonged to me, for the names my mind could not recall. That was home, that was real, and to get it back all I had to do was reach out my hand ...

I reached. Through pain and imprisonment, through ripping talons of rock and endless weight, I reached; reached for Al, desperation driving me, desperation and a sudden determination that I could make it, just because he told me I could.

Another hand caught mine. I thought it was his. Thought for one insane minute that he had reached through time and used his hand to pull me back to life, to reality. Perhaps he had. I was grasping the hand of an astonished miner, the light from his helmet lamp blinding and impossible. I could see nothing else.

"Unca Henry," I gasped, echoing the words that came to me in familiar tones, tones of relief, of emotional pain. "Shaft 7, level A2. Help him ..." I turned my head the barest amount, seeing Al's face, grey and shaded, leaning over me. He was crying. God help him, he was crying, the fear and the effort written deep into his eyes. He was clutching Ziggy's link as if it were a lifeline, hugging it close as he gave me the word.

"That's it. That's it, Sam. You did it. Henry gets saved. You did it."

"No," I answered. "You did." And I Leaped, time dissolving into a flare of brilliance, pain and sensation fading into nothing at all ....

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Disclaimer:This story has been written for love rather than profit and is not intended to violate any copyrights held by Donald P Bellasario, Bellasarius Productions, or any other holders of Quantum Leap trademarks or copyrights.
© 1994 by AAA Press. Written and reproduced by Penelope Hill.