Work Text
For Jonathan, who never let me down
The transcripts you are about to read were found in their original audio cassette form in the ruins of the area now known as Madstone Reserve in the former United Kingdom, a nation known for its long and tragic mining history. We need only look at the disasters in the north of former England to understand it was not lightly that the first victims of the Mountainhead cult took to life underground. The site of the mine itself was first excavated nearly twenty years ago, and much has been made of what was found there, not least the seminal early work by leading researcher, Dr M.D. Spearman, and we at the Department of History thank him for his tireless work on piecing together these transcripts. Despite this, we may never know the true order of their contents. It remains entirely possible that the recordings on the tapes are an elaborate fiction, created by someone perhaps with designs on financial gain. It remains equally possible, however, that they are a true account of one person’s experiences trapped underground by a belief system they had no choice in, and it is for this reason that we consider them still to have value to our field of study. The transcripts are presented in their entirety under the name Dr Spearman originally gave them while in post at the University of North West Europe: The Silhouette Tapes. Please be aware that the transcripts may make difficult and upsetting reading at times. An endnote will follow.
Cassette 1, Side A
Hello? Hello? (coughing) Is it working? Maybe I should - maybe I can take it out and check? How do you - oh. (sound of tape being turned off and on)It is working, I could hear myself. I don’t know if I like hearing my voice. I’ve never heard it like that before. I don’t know if anyone will ever hear this, I don’t know if I should say anything about myself in case they find out how I got these. I think I can keep them safe. I hope I can keep them safe. I don’t know why I need to say anything out loud but I do. I do. It’s me, Tom. Tommy.My name is TS549, and I’m under the mountain. I live here, in block B, beds 35 and 36. I’m an excavator. At least that’s what they call it. I dig, basically. I dig and dig and dig until my bones feel like they’re breaking and then I take it back up in the wheelbarrow to be discarded on the surface. With the ground we loosen every day, they say we can get to the top of the mountain in just a few more years. I don’t know what to say now. All that bluster and I’ve never had a chance to record anything before. I don’t have much time before Jenny comes back, I think. She said she was going to meet someone. I won’t tell anyone, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s her boy. Keith? Kyle? Kevin. That’s it. Kevin.He seems nice even though his teeth are all gone already. I think she must have been giving him her food pouches lately. She must really love him. I like Jenny. We’ve been sharing our beds for what must be years now but she’s never cruel to me. She used to share her food pouches with me if she got a good one. I like the dark blue. It reminds me of something, but I can’t understand what, or even why it would. It reminds me of something I think I’ve never known.I liked sharing it more than I liked eating it. Sometimes it feels like it’s just me in the dining hall with the buckets full of other people’s sick. I was sick earlier. Not in the bucket, in the pit. It landed in the water. Splash, splash. I can’t stay that low for that long any more. Not since the cave in. (coughing)Oh, oh. Maybe this is worth remembering. Today was Raymond’s leaving ceremony. You know Raymond, the creepy guy from further up. Maybe bed 1 and 2, right by the escape door. I didn’t go because you had to be invited. And because he makes my skin crawl. I suppose I shouldn’t say that now he’s leaving, maybe it’ll give him bad luck.Maybe I don’t care. He’s going up to be a priest. A hellkite, that’s their proper name up there. Down here we just have priests and they’re all father this and father that, but on the mountain they get to be called hellkites and they’re the ones we hear drumming in the mornings. Well, it’s our morning. For the other team it’s evening. I think we’re lucky like that, having our cycle sync up with the one on the surface. It means that when we get to go up we won’t have to adjust so much. If we get to go up. My grandmother used to say her mother told her they’d be up on the surface in a few years. Like it was the truth. Like she was certain of it. No one knows how you actually get on to the mountain. You must have to do something special to be rewarded like that because Raymond isn’t even a priest, he’s just a.. I suppose he’s digging like the rest of us, but you never see him in the pit. You never really see anyone in the pit but you know them. You know the people you’re close to because we talk, even when we’re not supposed to. I learned a long time ago where the moths are and how to mostly avoid them, and some of the time we’re crouched so far down it’s like talking to the dirt. What was I - oh. Yes. Everyone’s saying Raymond’s being rewarded for hard work but there aren’t that many moths in our bedrooms and when it’s night, I hear what people say about him. About what he did to - Shit, someone’s coming. How do I turn this off again? This - oh, wait. Got it.
Side B
Dark red tonight. That one’s bitter, and sort of stringy somehow. I kept most of it down but when I threw my pouch in the bin, it looked like there was blood dripping down the sides. This isn’t actually my recorder. I stole it. I found it on Raymond’s bed when I came back up early, and I stole it for myself.I’m not sure really why I went down there to look at his empty bed. Maybe just to see that he’d really gone. It felt different than when someone dies, which is so commonplace you hardly notice it some of the time. When that happens the beds are stripped by people who knew the deceased before it’s the next night, but no one’s ever just left before. Not that I remember. His yellow suit still lay out on the yellow sheets, for someone else, I suppose. There are always babies being born and growing into adult sizes. I was in one before I turned thirteen. I think I was twelve, maybe… maybe I was already thirteen. I remember I still had to roll up the legs a little way but it fitted me and I felt so grown up. It was like putting on a costume the way they do on the big screen to pretend to be someone else. The yellow has faded on some of them but it’s still bright enough to see by. You can see just enough to avoid bumping into someone, most of the time. (tape clicks off)I had another dream last night. It wasn’t the first time. I thought you grew out of having dreams like when you run out of teeth, like poor Kevin, but I asked Jenny - oh, maybe I should say who she is. You know Jenny, she sleeps in 35 and you have 36, Tom.I did ask her, and she said that she gets them too and they wake her up even when she’s taken her medication. Suppose I could have guessed that, because sometimes I hear her in the night too. She won’t ever tell me what they’re about but I hear her, I can feel the weight of her from the top bed, struggling and scrambling even though she isn’t held down. I’ve seen her bed and there’s nothing, but anyway no one sleeps with restraints in our block. There’s no one here but I almost still can’t say it, but my dreams… well, when I dream, I dream of - I dream… (whispered) I dream of the sun. It’s so… big, and yellow. Not yellow like our suits, not like a warning yellow. It’s warmer than that. It’s like it’s so bright, it doesn’t make sense how I can even look up in the dream because we couldn’t even go outside without the special training, that’s what we’ve always been told, we need to be sensitised to light properly or else - well, or else we’ll lose all our sight and then we won’t be able to work. Like those poor bastards in the - (tape clicks off)(tape clicks on) (whispered) That was mum. It was good to see her. Sometimes she’s so tired she’ll get onto the bed with me and I can hug her like she did with me when I was tiny. Sometimes she just wants to talk. I think it must be lonely at her age, there aren’t many other people left and she can’t even see my face to recognise me any more. Tonight she brought me a bit of her pouch. I swallowed it down even though it was still horrible because it must have been tough for her to save it. There aren’t many ways she can say that she loves me. A couple of mouthfuls of dark red flavour are something I can understand, at least. I didn’t tell her about the dreams. I wanted to, but I don’t want to burden her. Maybe they are just dreams, but I don’t want her to tell me that my dad used to have them too and I’ve probably got them from him. I’m older now than he was when he died. I think, anyway. I think I’m twenty-five. Or am I twenty-four? No, I’m twenty-five. I’ve had twenty-five birthdays. I think. It’s almost lights out. Maybe I’ll get to see her again tonight. Maybe I’ll get to feel warm and orange and smell the air. I’ll keep the recorder under my pillow for tonight. Tomorrow I’ll find a better place. Yeah. A better place. (tape clicks off)