Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in The Dunmore Workings ·
The Day the Horn Called Homeward
They say the Dunmore horn blew a full shift for men no rota held, and at the off-blast the men it named walked down out of the mist.
- status: rumor
There is a rule about the horn at Dunmore, and it is not the pit's rule. The horn may call the morn turn with one long, the back turn with two, the night turn with three short, and no shift at all with a flat silence. Those are four voices, and the bank folk hold that the horn has only ever had the four. But they say there was a fifth call, once, in the year of the short night up-channel, when the winter dark began three minutes before its time and every clock in the port was sorry for it.
The horn hangs on the winding-house gable, a shoulder of iron pipework, and it has blown Dunmore's turns the better part of a century, off the bank clerk's keys, and it does not blow for weather and it does not blow for nothing. That much any man will sign.
The night in question, the fog sat in the valley like a lid on a pot, and no turn was rostered: the pit was idle between seams, every gate locked, the whole place laid off. And past the middle of the night the horn got up and blew men up for a turn that no rota held. It blew hours on the hour, the full length of a shift, the way a horn proposes and a bank disposes. The watchman at the west gate counted the pattern on his fingers and got a turn of work, and stood at the gate with his coat on, because you answer a horn out of habit, rota or no, and half the valley did the same and none of them will own to it now.
And the horn named six. A horn cannot name — that is what they say who were not there. The ones who were there say the pattern came in tallies, six numbers run through the long calls so as to be counted, the old bank shorthand from the drift days; and the watchman had kept that cipher in his head since his first year on the bank, and he wrote the six on the back of his hand and carried them to the pay office, where the tallies came off the old drift book with names against them: six hewers, every one of them long since struck off the living rolls, the six the old drift kept when the drift gave over and was sealed. There is no other door to the old drift.
The turn ran its length, to the minute. Men stood at their gates in the fog the whole dark of it, and the bank clerk's call-book, found open on his desk at dawn, had the turn entered for that date in a steady fist — his own fist, near enough to swear by, and he swore he never entered it. And at the off-blast, the fog on the bank road opened in a lane, tidy as a page being turned, and lamps came walking down it: lamps in file, at an easy walk, down out of the mist at the end of the turn — down the road, mind, toward the town lights, and not one lamp of them turning toward the drift.
Nobody on the living side will say he saw a face. The watchman counted lamps, not men, because you count what you can, and he made it six. The gate book next morning, though, held six entries signed through that turn, each in a different old-fashioned hand, each timed honest to the hour; and in the lamp cabin all six of those men's lamps were back on their hooks, wicks trimmed — though no lamp of the six had gone out over any roster drawn by a living hand.
I never set eyes on a step of it, mind. It came to my father from the watchman himself, told across the fence in better days, with the call-book shut on his knee and the back of his hand, where he had written the six, turned over and shown empty. I do not vouch for the lamps. I vouch for the fog that night, because it kept our panes blind till noon.
They tell it at Dunmore still, on the night turns, mostly to the new men on their first stand at the bank, quiet, with an eye on the gable — and the horn, they'll tell you, has never once shown the fifth call since, which is either mercy or change of bookkeeping. And what they leave you holding at the end of it is the question the pit has never answered: did the horn call that one turn up for the six to work it, or blow the six off at last, shift done, homeward — and when it has the breath to call more names, whose turn comes next?