"The Deep" by Anthony Doerr

His mother operates a six-room, underinsulated boardinghouse populated with locked doors, behind which drowse the grim possessions of itinerant salt workers...

Tom imagines his descent, sporadic and dim lights passing and receding, cables ratcheting, a half dozen other miners squeezed into the cage beside him, each thinking his own thoughts, sinking down into that city beneath the city, where mules stand waiting and oil lamps burn in the walls and glittering rooms of salt recede into vast arcades beyond the farthest reaches of the light.

Tom imagines his descent, sporadic and dim lights passing and receding, cables ratcheting, a half dozen other miners squeezed into the cage beside him, each thinking his own thoughts, sinking down into that city beneath the city, where mules stand waiting and oil lamps burn in the walls and glittering rooms of salt recede into vast arcades beyond the farthest reaches of the light.

Tom imagines his descent, sporadic and dim lights passing and receding, cables ratcheting, a half dozen other miners squeezed into the cage beside him, each thinking his own thoughts, sinking down into that city beneath the city, where mules stand waiting and oil lamps burn in the walls and glittering rooms of salt recede into vast arcades beyond the farthest reaches of the light.

Every day, all day, the salt finds its way in. It encrusts washbasins, settles on the rims of baseboards. It spills out of the boarders, too: from ears, boots, handkerchiefs. Furrows of glitter gather in the bedsheets; a daily lesson in insidiousness.

In the lulls between Mr. Weems’s words, Tom can feel explosions reverberate up through a thousand feet of rock and shake the fragile pump in his chest.

Children run the snowy lanes and lights glow in the foundry windows and train cars trundle beneath elevated conduits.

Tom moves through the colony that first Tuesday with something close to rapture in his veins.

He keeps his hands in his pockets and his head down and his gait slow, but his soul charges ahead, sparking through the gloom.

One of Mr. Weems’s similes comes back to him from some dingy corner of memory: You’re trembling like a needle to the pole.

They peer into a foundry where shirtless men in masks pour molten iron from one vat into another; they climb a tailings pile where a lone sapling grows like a single hand thrust up from the underworld.

Mr. Weems passes in front of his eyes, but Tom hears no footsteps, no voices: only an internal rushing and the wet metronome of his exhalations.

Mother catches a fever in 1931. It eats her from the inside. She still puts on her high-waisted dresses, ties on her apron. She still cooks every meal and presses Mr. Weems's suit every Sunday. But within a month she has become somebody else, an empty demon in Mother’s clothes—perfectly upright at the table, eyes smoldering, nothing on her plate.

He finds her upstairs sitting on her bed, fully dressed in her coat and shoes and with her rosary clutched to her chest.

He passes catatonic drunks squatting on upturned crates, motionless as statues, and storefront after storefront of empty windows.

The streets are filled with faces, dull and wan, lean and hungry; none belongs to Ruby.

Ten hours a night, six nights a week, Tom roves the halls with carts of laundry, taking soiled blankets down to the cellar, bringing clean blankets up.

The reticulated glass roofs of the flower conservatory reflect a passing cloud.

They see translucent squid with corkscrew tails, sparkling pink.

Iridescent green tiles gleam on the domed ceiling and throw wavering patterns of light across the floor.