Galaxy Gengar on an upper arm

The lamp-room was black as a boot. I lifted my lamp and there it was on the far wall, grinning at me out of the seam: a great plum-purple face, all cheeks and no chin, with two red eyes narrowed like a cat's and a mouth full of square white teeth. Old Mrs Seddon at the shop had told us about it when we were small, the shape the coal made when the gas got thick, the one that laughed at men who went in alone. Its body was speckled all over with light, pink and teal like the sky above the tip on a clear night, and little four-pointed glints winked at its edges where the rock had split.

I should have run. Instead I stood there with my heart going like a pneumatic hammer and said, "You're only coal." The grin widened. Something in the seam ticked, the way timber does before it shifts, and I heard my own laugh come out thin and shaky.

Dad found me there an hour later, sat on an upturned tub with his tin in my lap. He asked what I'd seen. I told him the coal had been showing off. He said it was the most sensible thing anyone had ever said about that seam, and walked me up to the cage under a sky so full of stars that the pit-head lamps looked dim beside them.