Inspired by Experience Writing Halloween Flash Fiction Prompt: SCREAMS

Nellie Fletcher lived alone in her little house on Fletcher Road—and by alone, I mean it was the only dwelling on a four-mile stretch of road that led straight up to Gravesend Mine. Nobody ever came up Nellie’s way unless they were lost and they were dead set on staying that way.

In its heyday,  Gravesend produced just enough gold to keep the miners and Gravesend’s ( the only mercantile and saloon was owned by Nellie Fletcher’s family)  dangling on the hook of one day striking it rich—though that day never came.

Part of the reason that day never came, or maybe a lot of the reason, that the mine was never really fully worked was that with some gold, the miners also found bones and scraps of clothing, and—on the coldest nights—the faint, rhythmic sound of pickaxes striking rock drifted up from deep beneath their feet and found its way into the head of all of the miners.

“It sounds like someone is digging their way up from below, ”  Silas Martin told Nellie  Fletcher’s great-grandfather Franklin. “That mine could be paved in gold, but the sounds coming up from the ground are scaring the men out of the mine. Something is working its way up from below.”

“The Devil, you say.” Franklin Fletcher said to Silas.

” Well. I didn’t, but that’s what some are saying.”

As time wore on, some miners held on and kept working as others fled, – they ignored the bones, the bits of clothing, the loose teeth, the charred bits of wood, and the sounds of pickaxes ringing up from below their feet for a while. If there was a ghost of a chance they could strike it rich, they told themselves, they were going to keep working.

So they kicked the bones aside and kept looking for their gold.

The Gravesend Mine ended, without fanfare, on November 1st, 1860. On that day, a group of six workers went in, and they never came back out. Franklin, the sheriff, and three men from the saloon went into the mine to see if there had been an accident, but all they found were oil wick lamps running dry. They found miners’ tools neatly propped against the walls. They found the ever-present bones, but they didn’t find a single miner.

They went down into the mine as slowly as condemned men on their way to the gallows. On their way back out, the sheriff stopped the small group and asked, “Did you hear that?”

The men looked at each other, and then said, almost in unison, “I didn’t hear anything. Not a sound.”

Of course they heard it: the sound of pickaxes thudding and scraping against the earth, coming from deep beneath their feet. They ignored it as they hurried out of the mine, but later, each of them would hear those echoes late at night, just as they were drifting off to sleep.

And it kept them awake all the way to dawn.

Nellie Fletcher died alone in her house five years ago on October 31st.

As far as I know, she is still in her bed, covered with her homemade quilt. Her head is still turned to her left, where her now-empty eye sockets stare at the hardwood floor—the very floor that vibrated with the last sound she ever heard: pickaxes thudding and scraping against the earth in a mine just a few miles away from her home,  echoing right up through her floorboards.