The Last Coal

I was twelve when my grandfather, Elias, finally gave up the ghost. He was a man of few words, but those words were heavy as the coal he’d hauled from the earth for forty years. I was his shadow, a scrawny kid trailing behind his stoop-shouldered frame as he shuffled through his garden or whittled by the wood stove. My father, Marcus, was the opposite—all sharp angles and sharper opinions. He hated Elias’s silence, his stubbornness, his refusal to acknowledge the modern world. The rift between them was a chasm I could never bridge.

Elias’s health had been failing for years. First the tremors, then the cough that rattled his ribs. The doctors said it was a combination of black lung and the malaria he’d caught in some godforsaken jungle overseas. Finally, the day came when he couldn’t get out of bed. My mother, Clara, and my father took him to St. Mary’s Hospital, a sterile place that smelled of bleach and despair. I was sent to my aunt’s house, as usual.

I remember the last time I saw him alive. It was two days before the end. He was propped up on pillows, his face a map of wrinkles and age spots. He beckoned me closer with a gnarled finger. ‘Boy,’ he rasped, ‘come here.’ I leaned in, and he pressed a cold, rough object into my palm. It was a small chunk of coal, polished smooth from years of handling. ‘This is the last piece I ever dug out,’ he said. ‘You keep it. It’s got the spirit of the mine in it.’ I didn’t know what to say, so I just squeezed his hand.

That night, my mother called. She said Elias had asked to see me one final time. ‘He’s asking for you, honey,’ she said, her voice tight. But my father got on the phone and said, ‘No. We’re not dragging him up there for that old man to croak in front of him. It’s best he remembers him like this.’ I heard my mother argue, but my father’s voice was final. I cried myself to sleep, clutching that coal.

The call came at 3 a.m. My grandfather was gone. The funeral was a blur of black clothes and murmured condolences. I didn’t cry at the service. I just kept feeling the coal in my pocket, heavy and cold.

Years passed. My father and I grew more distant. My mother told me the story of how he’d refused my grandfather’s plea. She said it with a hint of anger, but also resignation. ‘He was always like that,’ she sighed. ‘Stubborn as a mule. But that coal… your grandfather told me to make sure you got it. He said it was important.’

I carried that coal with me everywhere. It was my talisman, a piece of the man I loved most. I went to college, became a mining engineer, ironically, following in the footsteps of a man I’d sworn to emulate. I took the coal with me to the mines, to the surface, everywhere.

It wasn’t until I was 30, standing in an abandoned mine that my grandfather had worked decades ago, that I understood. I’d gone there to photograph the ruins for some project. The air was thick with dust and the smell of decay. As I walked deeper, my flashlight beam dimmed. I felt the coal grow warm in my pocket.

I pulled it out. It was glowing with a faint, orange light. The heat intensified, and I felt a sudden, overwhelming sense of dread. I tried to drop it, but it was stuck to my hand, searing into my flesh. I screamed, but only a hollow echo answered. Then, the glow enveloped me, and I was no longer in the mine.

I was standing in a hospital room, but it was wrong. The walls were blackened, the ceiling dripped a thick, black liquid. There was a bed, and on it lay my grandfather, but he was not as I remembered. His skin was stretched taut over his bones, his eyes were sunken pits, and from his open mouth came a low, rumbling moan that sounded like the shifting of coal deep underground.

I tried to move, but I was rooted to the spot. My grandfather’s head turned to me, and his hollow eyes fixed on mine. ‘You came,’ he said, but his voice was not his. It was a chorus of whispers, like a hundred miners speaking at once. ‘You brought me the coal.’

I tried to speak, but my throat was constricted. He raised a hand, and I saw that his palm was covered in coal dust, and from it, a swarm of small, dark shapes crawled out—millipedes, but with eyes that glowed with malevolence. They swarmed toward me, and I felt them crawling up my legs, biting, injecting their poison.

I woke up in my own bed, drenched in sweat, the coal lying on my nightstand, cold and harmless. But the nightmares didn’t stop. Every night, I’d return to that ruined hospital, and my grandfather would be there, waiting. He’d tell me stories of the mine, how he was trapped there after his death, unable to cross over because of the coal. ‘You have to free me, boy,’ he’d say. ‘Return the coal to the mine, and I can rest.’

I knew what I had to do. I drove to the old mining town, now a ghost town, its buildings crumbling. I found the entrance to the mine, a gaping maw in the hillside. I took out the coal, and for the first time, I understood its true weight. It wasn’t just a keepsake; it was a key.

I entered the mine, deeper and deeper, until I reached the chamber where my grandfather had worked his last shift. In the center was a rock altar, covered in a thick layer of coal dust. I placed the coal on the altar. The ground trembled. A fissure opened, and from it poured a black, oily liquid that began to rise. I turned to run, but the entrance was gone. The liquid swallowed the room, and I felt myself sinking, suffocating.

I woke up again, but this time I was in the hospital bed, my grandfather’s bed. My hands were covered in coal dust. My reflection in the window was that of an old man, gnarled and sickly. I heard my mother’s voice, from memory, saying, ‘I know my time is close, Clara. Read me the verse one more time.’

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words that came out were my grandfather’s: ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…’

I have been trapped here ever since, a prisoner in my grandfather’s dying body, waiting for someone to bring me the coal so I can finally be free. But no one comes. And the mine’s dark spirit grows stronger with each passing year, whispering to me, telling me that my father’s refusal was not out of cruelty, but out of fear of this very fate. And I know, with a certainty that chills me to my core, that I am doomed to repeat this cycle until the coal is returned, and even then, there may be no escape.

I can feel him, my father, watching from the shadows of the room, his eyes glowing with a coal’s light, and I understand now that he, too, was a victim of the curse. The coal has claimed us all.