Clunk Clank Clunk Clank Clunk Clank. The sound of pickaxes resounded all around. The sun was finally setting. His shift would be over soon. Malthus wielded his axe again and again, violating the reddy-brown seam in the rock.
Clunk clank clink. There it was, the telltale sound. He put down the axe and inspected the clink. He could see a small piece of silvery grey showing through the red. A story stone. He retrieved hammer and chisel from his belt and leant in to finish the job. Chink, chink, chink. A more controlled, subtle sound now. More pleasing to the ear. The sound of a quota filling, and money in his pocket. Slowly the silvery purple surface of the stone came into view. Caked here and there in rock, but still recognisable. Slowly the edges of the stone appeared, bit by bit, reclaimed from the rough red rock. He reached out a hand, but couldn’t grip it with his gloves. Sitting back on his haunches he removed his gloves and reached for the stone. As soon as his fingers touched its surface he heard a voice. Like the stone it was partially obscured, like it was coming from underwater, faint and slightly garbled. He let go. The voice stopped. All he could hear was the regular Clunk, Clunk, Clunk. He reached for the stone again and there was the voice. Trying to reach him from some unknowable place. It wasn’t coming from the stone itself. It was as if it was just appearing in his head. Though the words were unclear, the cadence was unmistakable. He was hearing a story. But that was impossible. He was just a miner, not a scribe.
Suddenly he felt a heavy clap on his shoulder, causing him to let out a gasp and drop the stone.
“Hey, you ok Mal? Looked like you was havin’ a stroke or summit.” Jensen gave him a mildly concerned grin.
“Oh no, thanks I’m fine,” Malthus said, scrabbling hurriedly back to his feet. The stone lay innocently where he had dropped it. Just another story stone.
“Come on then, whistle’s gone,” Jensen said, turning back towards his bag.
“Right...yeah…coming.” He was still staring at the stone. After a quick glance round, he knelt down and put it in his pocket, getting a brief hit of the garbled voice as he did so.
He shouldered his bag and joined the steady flow of grubby people as they walked up the trail to the cabin at the top of the quarry. The bag was heavy on Malthus’s back, and the straps cut into his shoulders. Its weight was reassuring. He was above quota for the day.
Conversation buzzed around him. It seemed to grow with every step closer to the gate, to the promise of the weekend. Jensen was discussing an anniversary party he was throwing. Apparently there was going to be “beer by the barrel” and “shitloads of food”. Previously, he would have been jealous of Jensen’s party, though he didn’t really know him very well. Today, the prospect of a party held no interest for him. His hand hovered next to his pocket. There was his promise. He could hear his blood in his ears, rhythmically pounding with every thought. He worried that he had been mistaken about the voice, and then, that he hadn’t.
The line snaked agonizingly slowly. Wasn’t that always the way? Like relativity or something? It only seemed long when you had somewhere else you burned to be. Malthus fought to relax his face, to steady his breathing as he slowly progressed towards the cabin. Finally he was next in line, and despite all his efforts his heart rate spiked again.
“Next”, came the gravelly bark. He stepped into the cabin. Floor thick with dirt from the stream of boots that had been through it. He stood beneath the strip light, feeling naked, as Pinker, the supervisor, found his name on a list.
“Bennet…Bennet…Bennet,” she grunted, cigarette drooping out of the side of her mouth. “There.” She thumbed over to the scales in the corner and Malthus crossed the room to dump his bag onto the plate. The needle of the scale swung round, and Pinker raised her glasses off her head to read the number before entering it against his name in the log. He saw her smile. “15.4, nice.” She entered the number and spun the book around on her desk so that he could sign it. His signature noticeably scruffy against her impossibly neat handwriting. He stood and let out a breath he had hardly been aware he had been holding, before heading for the door.
“Hey,” Pinker called behind him. He felt cold blood prickle in his hands while the contraband stone practically burned in his pocket. He turned to face her. “Don’t forget to store your shit properly.” She took the cigarette from her mouth and flicked the ash onto the floor. It settled onto the dirt like grey snow. “I don’t know who it was but there was kit all over the floor yesterday so I’m telling everyone. Neat and tidy, got it?.” Her eyebrow raised. Malthus gave a nervous smile and nodded.
“Right…yeah…got it.”
“Next.”
Every minute of the bus ride home was torturous. He had to fight every instinct to touch the stone again, hand hand practically hovering over his pocket in the effort. Finally he got off, slung a goodnight to the driver, and walked home in the dark, periodically haloed by the streetlights. He quietly let himself in and made straight for the bedroom, cracking the door softly. Bastian was sleeping soundly. Malthus softly closed the door and went to the kitchen. His movements started to grow faster, becoming frenzied. He pulled open drawer after drawer, eventually finding a screwdriver and an old blunt knife. So armed, he sat at the table, momentarily stilled, breathing heavily, and finally pulled the stone out of his pocket.
The voice sounded again. He gripped it hard, as if that might help him understand the words, but they were still obscured. There were a handful that occasionally broke through the watery static. Break… door… field… now. But there was no flow or connection to them, nothing he could make sense of. He released the stone and set it on the table. Looking at it closely there was nothing special about it. It looked the same as every other story stone he had pulled out of the rock for the last 15 years. Silvery grey with a purple tinge, caked in pieces of rusty rock. Nope. There was nothing special about this stone whatsoever. So why was this one speaking to him?
He pushed himself back from the table, making the chair squeak and waiting for a moment to see if he had woken Bastian. Nothing. He made himself some coffee and went to the hallway where the coat cupboard was. After a few moments of searching he found Bastian’s old black leather gloves. They were too tight on him but they would have to do. He put them on as he walked back to the table and picked up the stone again. No voices. He got to work.
Screwdrivers and blunt knives were clearly not the ideal tools for this job, but neither he nor Bastian were into DIY so their tool stash was minimal. Malthus had no idea how the stones were officially processed. His interest in the stones began and ended with pulling them out of the ground and getting paid to hand them over. Slowly the floor around his chair gathered a ring of chipped bits of red rock as more and more of the stone was revealed. Piece by piece it became a beautifully irregular sphere. All the story stones had this shape, but varied by size, presumably because some stories were longer than others. He had never asked. He wasn’t much of a reader. The few books in their house were Bastian’s. He had never even visited the library. It felt too close to work.
He took the stone to the sink and, almost reverently, washed it in the stream of cold water, watching the last of the red dust and grime leave its surface. He was getting nervous again. What if he still wouldn’t be able to hear the words? What if he had damaged it while chipping away all the rock? He gently dried the stone with a tea towel and laid it on the sideboard while he cleaned up. He was aware that he was procrastinating. Having been almost mad with desire to hear what the stone had to say, now he was worried about the story it would tell him. He swept up all the dust and rock, wiped down the sink and cleaned the screwdriver and knife, returning everything to the drawers.
From another drawer he dug out an old notebook and a pen, testing the pen on the first page and ripping out the first handful of pages that had various old phone numbers and shopping lists written on them. And finally, he sat at the table, took hold of the stone, and began to write the story that was meant just for him.
