Petra saw the distinctive shape and pulled her head back with a muffled yelp. Her heart pounded, but she didn’t scream. She clamped her mouth shut and concentrated. Reaching across her chest, she placed the back of her hand to her shoulder as a flat platform and held it as still as adrenaline would allow. The spider, taking its cue, crept slowly forwards, placing its two front legs on her hand. The audience held their breath. After a cautious pause, the bony arachnid progressed forwards again. Krishna had his hand over his mouth. The moment the last leg lifted from Petra’s shoulder, she started to move. In one gentle, balletic motion, she unwound herself and crouched, her spider-platform-hand gliding without shocks or jerks down to ground level.
‘There you go,’ she said with the affection most people have for a puppy or a baby bird. ‘No hitchhiking today.’
As each long, agile leg, the colour of old bone, explored a way off Petra’s hand onto the dirt of the path, Carly made a little retching sound. When Petra’s passenger had disembarked, she stayed crouching, felt her breathing relax, and watched the huge thing tread with meticulous resolve over rocks and sticks and into the gloom of a shrub.
‘Jesus, look at the size of that thing,’ Dane said.
‘Beautiful, in its way,’ Petra murmured. ‘I feel blessed.’
‘Blessed?’ Krishna baulked. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t … I dunno, kill it. Swipe it off. Stamp on it.’
‘Awwww, never,’ Petra said, her nose crumpling at the thought.
‘What, Petra?’ said Carly. ‘The world’s greatest animal lover? I don’t think so.’
‘What species do you think that was?’ Petra mused.
‘Krishna’s probably got an app for that,’ joked Dane.
‘Wolf spider, maybe?’ she said as it crawled into the undergrowth. ‘They’re common in Spain, so probably here, too.’
‘At college Petra must’ve joined a million animal charities,’ said Carly.
‘Four,’ Petra corrected.
‘She nursed a hedgehog back to health when we were kids. Kept it in a shoebox. Called it Reebok. She wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
‘Unlike that thing,’ added Dane, still watching the shrub cautiously.
‘A fly?’ said Krishna. ‘That thing would eat a toddler. C’mon, let’s go.’
As they walked up the path, Carly patted her friend and said, ‘Gold star, Petra. Another life saved.’
Chapter 2
The sun was warm and welcome as they climbed the gentle gravel slope, each of them glowing and glistening. Krishna led the way, panting but purposeful.
Behind him, Petra said, ‘Carly tells me you’re a climber, Dane.’
‘Boulderer, actually.’ He smiled.
‘That’s not even a word,’ piped Krishna.
‘It’s a sport,’ his mate asserted.
‘I’m Googling it.’ Krishna pulled his large new phone from his pocket, where it had rested untroubled for almost half a minute.
‘I’ve never been bouldering,’ Petra said. ‘But I did a bit of abseiling on a wildlife expedition in Belize. Tight harness digging into your crotch and all that.’
‘Ay, ay,’ winked Carly. ‘Fifty shades of Petra.’
This made Dane chuckle, then Krishna muttered at his phone screen, ‘I think I’ve turned my central heating on.’
The effort of the climb was equal to Petra’s effort to socialise with these new friends. A natural introvert, it would never have been her preference to spend a long weekend away with two strangers and a friend she hadn’t seen for the last six years. The slump of post-break-up depression and a grinding resolve to pull herself out of her fug had prompted her to take a risk, grab at the opportunity dangled by long-lost Carly. She knew she’d find it hard, but she also knew she needed a jolt, new people, a change of scene.
Ignoring the twinge of jealousy she felt at the easy, tactile affection Dane showed Carly, she dug in. Made an effort. ‘So, Krishna. If Dane’s the climber … sorry, boulderer. What about you?’
‘He’s the boulder,’ Dane quipped.
Carly snorted a laugh but Krishna said, ‘Ignore him, Petra. We do. Unfortunately I work with him, so that’s my cross to bear.’
‘What d’you do?’
‘Sums, mainly. Data analyst is what my business card says.’
‘When did they give you business cards?’ asked Dane.
‘All right – would say.’
Carly nudged Petra and said, ‘Krishna’s our nerdy friend, so I thought you’d get on.’
Petra clammed up, feeling the weight of the loaded statement, and was relieved when the corner of the path led around to a distraction: three people idly chatting at the entrance to a large, gloomy tunnel in the side of the Rock. One of them, an ageing Hispanic man in a light blue short-sleeved shirt, was sitting on a tatty camping chair at a small card table, typing on a heavy old laptop. Standing with him were a man and woman, both a little older than Petra, early thirties. He had an outdoor-man tan beneath his stubble, short-cropped hair, wore combat trousers, an army-green T-shirt and sturdy boots. The woman was toned, the strength that was visible in her arms and across her shoulders at odds with the softness of her face, a gentle oval with kind eyes framed by slightly shabby surfer-blonde curls. She wore a small backpack over her tight, short-sleeved checked shirt, cut-off combat trousers and open-toe beachcomber sandals.
‘A-ha, just in time for the last tour of the day,’ said the man, greeting the arrivals. ‘Our online bookers, I assume.’
‘Puram? Party of four?’ asked the woman, picking up a clipboard from the tiny table.
‘That’s us, I’m Krishna.’
‘Welcome,’ smiled the man, shaking Krishna’s hand. ‘I’m Ed, this is Mary, and this cheerful chap is Hector. Say hello, Hector.’
The Spanish man’s cracked-leather face maintained the crumpled frown of a disgruntled bulldog. He said nothing.
‘I hope you remembered your passports,’ said Mary, with a warm smile. ‘If you could give those to Hector, please.’ The gang fished out their passports from bags and pockets while she went on. ‘You can trust Hector with them. He’s a professional.’
‘He actually is,’ confirmed Ed. ‘When he’s not working for us he’s a border guard down there.’ He pointed down to the distant crossing between Gibraltar and Spain.
‘How easy is it to get into Spain?’ asked Petra. ‘We’re here for a few days.’
Ed took her passport and flicked it open, looking for her name. ‘I’m glad you asked that … Petra Collins. First amazing fact of the tour,’ he announced to the group. ‘Gibraltar is not an island. It’s an isthmus.’
‘And a merry isthmus to you too,’ said Krishna.
Petra smirked but Carly rolled her eyes. ‘Sorry about him,’ she said to Ed. ‘My boyfriend brought him.’
Dane cocked his head and corrected her. ‘Fiancé.’
‘Oh God, yeh!’ she squealed. ‘I forgot! Oops.’
‘Congratulations,’ smiled Mary.
‘Thanks, hun,’ whispered Carly as Ed continued.
‘An isthmus basically means it’s joined on, not an island; so should the delights of Gibraltar not be enough, beyond that border crossing is Spain, Africa, the world.’
‘Believe me,’ said Mary, ‘there have been many Gibraltarians who’ve taken that short walk and never come back.’
‘To give you an idea of how easy it is, we often go over there just for dinner. Our favourite tapas bar is only half an hour walk from here in La Línea.’ He pointed somewhere towards the coast across the water. ‘You should check it out one evening. I’ll give the details. ’
‘Krishna, I’ve got your mobile number,’ Mary said. ‘I’ll send you a link. The food is delicious.’
‘If you’re lucky you might even see Hector on your way through.’ The sour-faced Spaniard glowered at his screen. ‘We always give him a smile and a wave even if he’s not in the passport booth,’ Ed continued. ‘He controls all the cameras!’
Kri
shna was standing at the small table, the last to hand over his passport. Hector had placed each passport on a small scanner that had beeped and sent all of their details to his screen. He was holding out his hand for the final one but Krishna seemed reluctant to give it to a surly stranger with unkempt grey hair and a sweat-stained shirt . ‘Why do you need my passport?’ Krishna asked.
Hector took the dark red booklet, shrugged a little, looked him straight in the eyes and said in a deadpan tone, ‘I scan it so I can sell your bio-data.’
Dane laughed but Krishna and Hector looked deadly serious.
Ed stepped in to ease the tension. ‘Relax, Krishna. It’s just red tape.’ He patted him on the shoulder. Petra noticed how Ed carried himself with self-assurance and an air of seniority, like the calm commanding officer welcoming visitors to his barracks. He explained to the group, ‘It takes Hector ages to fill out a multitude of forms. These tunnels are still jointly owned by the Gibraltar government and the British military, hence … paperwork. Part of what we pay him for is to be getting on with all that while you’re enjoying the tour.’ He took the stack of scanned passports and, glancing at each photo page, returned them to their owners.
‘So if you’d all like to follow me,’ said Mary, and started into the gloom.
‘Wait!’ shouted Krishna, and there was a sigh from the rest of the group.
‘What now?’ asked Carly.
‘I need a picture!’
Dane groaned as they gathered in a group while Krishna extended his futuristic selfie-stick, all black carbon fibre and brushed alloy, and lifted a wobbling smart-phone high above them.
‘Smile,’ grinned Krishna.
‘Eyes and teeth,’ smiled Mary, and the phone emitted a satisfying shutter-click. ‘All right! Let’s go inside the Rock of Gibraltar!’
Carly made a little whooping sound that sounded more pitiful than she’d intended, and Dane laughed. Within a few short steps into the cavernous mouth of the tunnel, everything changed.
Chapter 3
First it was the smell. Just a few steps into the gloom, the summer scents of flowering shrubs and salty ocean were beaten back by the heavy funk of old cellars and damp walls. Carly crumpled her nose a little as they trod further into the oppressive greyness. The afternoon daylight retreated from their backs as the group walked into a carved tunnel more than twice their height and as wide as a country road. Ahead of them the wall was strung with dim electric lights, the yellow bulbs illuminating little more than the rugged sheen of the black walls around them.
‘Welcome inside Gibraltar,’ announced Ed holding his arms wide. Petra noticed he walked with a slight limp. ‘We’re inside what we on Gib call the World War Two tunnels, but they’ve actually been around far longer. They’re an extension of the great siege tunnels of 1779. They weren’t fully excavated by the British army until 1939. Seventy years ago it would’ve been my comrades in the Royal Engineers who completed the incredible engineering task around you.’
That explains the officer swagger, thought Petra. Ex military.
‘Sappers. The branch of the army that does all the manual work – like digging.’ He turned to face the darkness ahead of them and raised his voice. ‘Over thirty miles of tunnels!’
He walked onwards and Dane asked, ‘Thirty miles? How big is Gibraltar?’
‘Cool fact, actually,’ Mary replied. ‘Gib is only two point six square miles, but this tunnel network runs to thirty-four miles of twists, turns, tangles and drops. Everything from huge tunnels like this, which was cut large enough to drive a truck down, to tiny crawl spaces.’
Petra looked back and the light from outside was long gone, defeated by the damp, black walls of the last couple of turns they’d made. The dim yellow light from the string of bulbs gave each of them a pallid complexion. Even Carly’s spray-tan looked washed out.
‘It’s all hollow, this place we call home,’ Ed continued from the front of the pack. ‘Very pretty on the outside, but a cavernous, empty space within.’
‘Like Carly’s head,’ Krishna quipped, which got a laugh from Dane, swiftly halted with a dig in the ribs from his fiancée.
Their jocular mood and slightly nervous giggling continued for a few more minutes while Ed and Mary pointed out various features on their journey: ventilation grilles and iron drainage grids, tool marks on the rock walls made by the soldiers, many of them former miners, who’d hacked this natural fortress from within the Earth. Dark, lonely and devoid of life, it seemed to Petra the exact opposite to the vibrant jungles or forests she’d have chosen to explore. Weird thing for Krishna to have chosen. That probably said quite a lot about Krishna. Besides, right now she’d take almost anything over moping in her crumby post-break-up bed-sit.
And what of this couple, Ed and Mary? Married? Boyfriend and girlfriend? As Petra watched Ed talking, the dim lights sparking an occasional twinkle in his eyes, a hint of old-public-school accent, the assured stride with the slight limp, she envied Mary. Just slightly. They seemed perfectly lovely, far too normal to be making a living this way, and Petra was just about to satisfy her curiosity by asking them how they’d ended up here when they rounded a corner into a huge cavern that drew gasps and aahs from the visitors.
Unlike the hand-hewn tunnels they’d just walked through, this large cave was entirely natural, lined with hundreds of stalactites above a large pool of water. What nature had turned into an acoustic bowl, humans had turned into an auditorium. There was raked seating down one side, a stage cut into the rock on the other side of the pool, and the entire space was tastefully lit with green, blue and orange splashes of light. Multicoloured reflections shimmered on the surface of the water, making shadows around the stalactites dance silently above.
‘Welcome to Saint Michael’s cave,’ said Ed. ‘The most famous place inside the rock.’ Krishna was making ‘whoop’ noises to hear the reverberations bounce around, but Ed pressed on. ‘As you can see, these days it’s used as a concert venue, partly, as Krishna has discovered, because of its incredible acoustics.’
‘Sound travels a long way inside the rock due to the hard stone surfaces,’ explained Mary. ‘It can be quite unsettling. Sometimes when you’re in a tunnel you hear noises and have no idea how near or far away they are.’
‘The sound literally bounces around the rock. If you stand in just the right spot in here you can sometimes hear you own voice come back at you a second later. Try it, Krishna.’
Krishna cleared his throat, pulled in a chestful of air, and shouted, ‘HELLO!’ at the top of his voice. The resonance fell away and they all stood in silence, expectantly waiting.
After a few seconds Dane slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Literally no one wants to talk to you.’
‘When they were digging these tunnels during the Second World War they found a much larger freshwater lake, deep in the middle of the rock, even lower than this,’ Ed explained. ‘That’s harder to get to. The further down you go, the more inaccessible the tunnels. In fact most of the tunnels in this rock are below us but the lower levels were sealed off by the military years ago. Too dangerous.’
‘But we can still take you to our favourite place,’ Mary said, heading out of the beautifully lit cavern into another dark tunnel. They dutifully followed and found themselves in more cramped space, certainly too small for any truck. Petra stretched out her arms and could touch the walls either side. The rock felt cold and slippery. The crocodile of explorers crept through an opening where a huge steel door, brown with rust, hung on massive hinges driven into the rock.
‘Mind your fingers,’ said Ed. ‘This is a blast-trap. These doors were fitted during the Second World War.’ He pointed up to the ridge cut into the stone where the door would close. ‘See? They only open one way. If there’s an explosion, a bomb dropping outside, the force of the blast pushes the steel door against the rock and is diverted into here.’ He gestured off to the side and Dane and Carly poked their heads around the smooth pillar of a corner. Carly gave an unimpre
ssed grunt and Krishna and Petra pushed themselves past to see a large, hollowed-out cave, the shape of a mushroom lying on its side. ‘The theory being that the blast is trapped here and on the other side of the door you’re safe.’
‘Did that really work?’ Dane scoffed.
‘It was never tested. Gib was never attacked.’
‘What’s this?’ Krishna picked up a clear plastic tube with some liquid in it.
‘The place is littered with these. The military boys used glow-sticks during their exercises back in the nineties.’
‘The lighting down here gets pretty poor,’ Mary said, slipping off her backpack. ‘So if it was good enough for them …’ She handed a few glow-sticks out to each of them. ‘Just one of the perks of Ed’s forces contacts,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’ve got a few torches, plus you can use your phones, but if you need it, bend the tube until you hear a crack, it’ll glow for about an hour. Just in case you get separated or lost. Here you go.’ She handed Dane and Petra a torch each and grabbed the last one from her bag for herself.
The final attraction on the tour was the most macabre. After five minutes of treading carefully along black, uneven floors, their torch beams sweeping along layers of wet, craggy walls, occasionally striped with green or black strips of sedimentary rock, they turned sharp left and Petra could tell by the change in acoustics that they had entered a large room.
‘Hold on a second. There’s lots to trip you up in here and I don’t want you to get hurt.’ Ed walked away from them and Petra heard a large switch click before a battered fluorescent strip-light arced into life. There were gasps and ‘woah’s as their eyes adjusted to the buzzing yellow glow. They were standing at one end of a long, rectangular hospital ward. Eight rusting bed frames formed two neat rows on either side. The space was cluttered with decrepit IV stands, broken metal drawers and rotting steel cupboards slumped drunkenly on broken wheels. The air felt cold and Petra smelled the metallic tang of rust in the atmosphere.
‘This hospital was built in 1940. During the war thousands of British troops lived and worked inside the Rock. Under a full-scale attack they could have survived in here for years.’
All Hollow Page 2