All Hollow

by Simeon Courtie

  ‘No way!’ said Dane.

  ‘Really?’ asked Ed.

  She tentatively manoeuvred her thumb across the screen, as if the lone bar of signal strength might be frightened by sudden movements and flit away into the ether. ‘Nine, nine, nine,’ she said, tapping the screen. The phone started to dial and she heard a tiny voice. ‘Hello! Hello!’ she yelled and tapped the speaker icon. The tinny voice resonated more clearly: ‘… number you have dialled is not valid. Please check the number and re-dial.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Dane. ‘Try again.’

  She hung up and even more slowly started to redial, muttering, ‘Nine, nine –’ but before she could finish the phone burst into life playing an upbeat pop hit by Pharrel Williams. The words ‘Big Krish’ lit the screen. ‘It’s Krishna!’ she yelped, and tapped the green button.

  ‘Krish!’ shouted Dane.

  ‘Dane? Hello?’ Krishna’s voice was loud and made Petra laugh with relief.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ smiled Dane, and Petra said, ‘Krishna, it’s Petra. Get help! We’re lost in here!’

  Out on the hillside Krishna stopped in his tracks, panting, clasping his phone to his ear. ‘What? Wait. Where are you? Did you find the ring?’ He heard Petra’s voice say something about lower tunnels and a side entrance but it crackled and bits were missing. ‘Say that again!’ he said. ‘I’m losing you.’

  In the barrack cave she shouted again. ‘We’re in the lower tunnels! We came through a side entrance! There are men …’ Then the three of them heard the crackle and pop of Krishna’s voice saying, ‘Right … What?’ Petra repeated herself and added, ‘We can’t find Carly.’

  Krishna put his hand over his other ear and heard a man’s voice – Dane, he guessed – saying something about barracks. ‘OK, OK, stay put!’ he shouted. ‘I can see a police car near the tunnel. I’m bringing help.’

  The three prisoners were craning their necks, desperate to hear their rescuer’s plan, but the phone crackled, then beeped. The call had been dropped.

  ‘Has he gone?’ asked Ed.

  ‘Lost the signal,’ reported Petra.

  ‘Well, it sounds like help is on the way. Thank God for your friend.’

  Chapter 12

  This is it, thought Krishna. This is bloody well it!

  Finally, after years of being the hopeless hanger-on, the fifth wheel, the also-ran, this was his time to shine. He would fetch help, find his friends and be the hero of a story they would tell until their dying day.

  Spurred on by the scent of glory, with Petra’s pleas for help ringing in his ears, he scrambled up the steep slope to the level ground near the mouth of the Rock’s main tunnel. Panting, scratched and filthy, he staggered across to the squad car, peered in at the driver’s window and found it empty. His heart sank. As quickly as that his wondrous fantasy of heroism was dribbling away, like rain through his crappy trainers. He looked around but he was alone. ‘Hello?’ he said into the gloom.

  A few metres inside the mouth of the tunnel was the gate he’d watched Ed lock up at the end of their tour. He stood at the bars looking into the black hole beyond. ‘Hello? Anyone?’ He thought he heard a noise from within and lit the torch on his phone, but its tiny light was swallowed whole in the endless cavern. He stood silent for a few moments but heard nothing.

  Recalling the half-heard snatch of what Petra had said, he started scouting for a side entrance and quickly found the path his friends had used earlier. At the old iron gate he gave it a shove and it scraped open with a grinding moan. With none of the gentle caution his mates had demonstrated, he stomped through the litter, oblivious to the ape-corpse, ducked under the low ridge and into the inner tunnel, shouting their names.

  ‘Dane! Petra!’

  It was so dark, even the light from his phone-torch only served to illuminate black walls surrounding yet more black, empty space. After a few strong paces forwards, he slipped. The ground to his right dropped away and in a blink he was on his side, sliding out of control. With his phone still clamped in his hand, his flailing arms failed to find anything to arrest his descent. A flimsy plastic fence escaped his flapping grasp and scratched his back as he skimmed underneath it. Slippy rock got steeper and faster … then vanished. He screamed for the second that he was in space, without rock, without light, without any sense of up from down, falling helpless into death’s abyss.

  A colossal SPLASH took his breath away and he was instantly consumed by icy, black water.

  A strange noise, an echo of a distant slap reverberating from the belly of the Rock made Petra, Dane and Ed stop talking. Petra felt her ears prick at a nearer sound, a scuff outside the barrack cave, and then Mary appeared in the dark. Ed swung the torchlight onto her. She was breathless, dishevelled, had a scratch on her face. She also appeared to have lost her torch.

  ‘Where’s Carly?’ asked Dane.

  ‘I was about to ask you the same thing,’ she replied. ‘I thought she’d come back.’

  Petra swore, and Ed asked, ‘What happened to you?’

  Mary wiped her face with her forearm. ‘It was the smugglers. Had to run. Don’t worry, they didn’t see me.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ asked Dane.

  ‘They might have followed you back!’ Petra said, her sinews suddenly alive with fight-or-flight energy.

  ‘We should go,’ commanded Ed.

  But Petra fought the urge to flee. ‘No, wait. Hang on. Krishna’s getting the police. We should stay here. We told him where we were. He said stay put.’

  ‘You spoke to Krishna?’ asked Mary.

  ‘You’re wrong, Petra,’ said Ed. ‘We need to keep moving.’

  ‘Ed’s right,’ agreed his ragged partner. ‘They could still be following me. We should go.’

  ‘We need to find Carly!’ Dane bellowed.

  ‘I heard the smugglers back up there,’ Mary continued, moving towards the entrance with Ed. ‘We should head this way.’

  ‘I’m not going any further without Carly. I’m not walking away from her.’

  The crystal lake had slept undisturbed deep in the heart of the Rock of Gibraltar for decades. In all its millennia of silent formation it had never had such a rude awakening. Flapping, gasping, coughing and retching, Krishna clawed his way through freezing darkness until his feet found firm ground at the water’s edge. Firm, but slippy. He was on his belly, elbow-crawling out of the icy pond, panting, his shocked heart racing. After a few seconds of resting flat out on the cold rock, enough time for him to comprehend what had happened, to realise that he was not dead, he hauled his soaking legs from the water, turned over and found he could sit up.

  He blinked drips of water from his eyes and peered into … nothing. It was utterly black. He’d never experienced complete blindness like this. He knew his eyes were open and yet they may as well have been empty sockets. He turned his head, sure he would see a shimmer, a glint, anything that would feed his optic nerve a crumb of information; but the blackness was complete.

  He huddled, shivering, terrified. From nowhere, his stomach cramped and he vomited a bellyful of beer. He was in shock, shuddering, crying.

  After a few minutes the only sound was his own shallow breathing, which gradually slowed to normal. He felt cramp in his fingers and realised he was still gripping his phone.

  He lifted it, unable to see his own hand in front of his face, shook away the water and pressed its screen. To his complete amazement, it worked. Its ‘waterproof’ claim had been more than hollow sales patter. ‘Huh. Unbreakable,’ he muttered to himself. Predictably, it showed that he was without a phone signal, but the glow from its screen immediately lit the space around him: wet rock beneath him, to his left and right, even a foot or so above him. He pressed his thumb on the screen but the lock-screen didn’t move. ‘Oh. Not unbreakable.’ He could live without fingerprint recognition. He rebooted it and entered the eight-figure unlock code. ‘Fixed,’ he smiled, then swiped to activate the torch, but nothing happened. He repeatedly tapped the
torch icon, to no avail. ‘Broken,’ he admitted.

  Then he had an idea. He selected the camera and pointed the phone ahead of him. The screen was predictably black, the lens on the phone pointing into the same dark space that had rendered his own eyes blind. But when he swiped through the options, past Video, Square, Pano and a few others, he saw it. Night.

  Immediately, the screen showed a ghostly green image of the lake before him. ‘Woah,’ he murmured, impressed by the camera’s ability to pick out such detail in utter darkness. He gasped as he panned the camera around to see the size of the cavern he was in. Green ripples on black water stretched away. He couldn’t see where they met another wall. This pool was huge.

  And now a new fear gripped him. He spun the camera around. He saw the hole above, a black space through which he’d plummeted, way up high in the cavern’s roof. He saw stalactites dangle in a million shapes and sizes, green and black fingers pointing down at the cavern’s newest victim. He felt small. He felt lost. He felt completely fucked.

  There was no way back. The water stretched to God knows where, the walls rose high and slippy on either side. He was on the only bit of rock he could see that was above the water – alive but doomed to die without help.

  ‘DANE!’ he yelled. ‘CARLY! PETRAAA!’

  He listened until the last of his echoing cries dissipated into silence. An occasional drip was the only reply.

  He pulled himself onto his knees, turned away from the lake and started feeling the wall with his hand. As he reached up above head height, his hand disappeared into empty space. He yelped and yanked it back in surprise. He pointed his phone camera above him and saw, in the grainy green image, a black hole in the wall. He stood, a squatting crouch all that the low rock above him would allow, and pointed the phone into the hole. Carefully he reached in, dreading what his hand might touch. Monkeys, bats, killer spiders, his imagination was conjuring all these and more.

  At full stretch he let out a sigh and finally breathed again. His hand met nothing but air. This moment of relief only compounded a greater dilemma for him to overcome: he’d found a tunnel. A tight one, but big enough to crawl along. He looked back at the lake again. Then back down the black tunnel. He hated them both. He was no swimmer, and yet there was nothing he’d rather do less than squeeze down a dark tunnel into unknown horrors.

  He slumped back to his knees and soon found himself weeping. This was utterly hopeless. His stupid attempt at heroics had got him completely stuck, and now he was faced with impossible choices: swim to his death, crawl to his death, or sit still and starve to death. Not even his state-of-the-art phone could save him now.

  Unless … His shoulders stopped their sobbing shudders and he wiped his sniffly nose with the back of his arm. He tapped his phone. Again it requested the unlock code. This was going to get tiresome. He growled, went straight into ‘Settings’ and disabled the security locks. He was beyond worrying about being hacked. Swipe, swipe, swipe, so many pages of apps, every one entirely useless to him now. Apart from one. Swipe, swipe – there! He tapped an image of a black pool ball bearing a number 8: the Magic Eight Ball app, which he and Dane had once used it to dictate an entire pub crawl.

  ‘Please work,’ he said, shaking the phone. Slowly the yellow words floated into view from inside the black ball: ‘Don’t count on it.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He shook the phone again and said, ‘Should I go down the tunnel?’ Holding it flat in his palm, he saw it reveal its answer: ‘Ask again later.’

  ‘Hmmm. Should I swim for it?’ Shake, shake, and the words were again replaced: ‘My sources say no.’

  ‘I like your sources.’ He shook again. ‘Should I wait for help?’ Like rising mist his answer appeared: ‘Outlook not so good.’

  He took a breath, rolled the tension out of his shoulders and shook again. ‘Should I crawl down the unbelievably frightening dark tunnel which is probably full of poisonous spiders and angry bats?’ He stopped shaking the phone, let it sit like a tiny bird cradled in his hand, and waited. His head dropped when he read the message. ‘Signs point to yes.’

  The relief Petra had felt hearing Krishna’s crackling voice on the phone had deserted her. Leaving the barrack room filled her with dread. Dane had insisted on heading up to where he’d last seen Carly, and despite Mary’s protests Ed had agreed. Better to stick together, he’d reasoned. Dane was leading the four of them slowly, calling Carly’s name in a raised whisper. His nervous caution made Petra feel all the more intimidated, as if deadly gangsters might leap out at any moment.

  ‘Carly! Carly! If this is your idea of a joke, Carly …’

  ‘This doesn’t feel right,’ Petra said. ‘Something’s not right. Something’s wrong.’ The feeling of dread within her was reaching boiling point. Every step felt like the wrong move.

  But Dane pushed onwards, calling Carly’s name, Petra sweeping the one working torch around the black cavern ahead. She turned back to check that Ed and Mary were still with them, and in the moment of casting the torch beam behind her, Dane suddenly swore and fell. He’d tripped. Petra apologised and ran to help him. She looked down in the paltry light, Ed and Mary now with her, and saw Dane sprawled across something in their path. As he heaved himself up Petra saw a splayed body in jeans and sparkly pumps. She clasped her hand to her mouth and reeled back. Dane still hadn’t realised. As he pushed himself up, Petra saw Carly’s frayed pink denim jacket, but as the full horrifying image became clear she also saw that something was missing. Where Carly’s face should have been, a huge rock was squashing the top of her chest, obliterating her head.

  A scream pushed through Petra’s fingers. Ed clasped Mary’s face into his shoulder. It was only after a second or two that Dane realised what he was sitting on. His hands and chest were smeared in the blood of his fiancé. His eyes widened and mouth gaped, unable to make sound.

  Ed was the first to speak. ‘My God. Dane.’

  ‘Carly …’ whispered Petra.

  ‘C-Carly?’ blurted Dane.

  ‘Those fucking animals,’ Ed said.

  Mary stepped forward to look at the mess. ‘I’m so sorry, Dane.’

  Dane pushed himself off, and knelt beside Carly’s corpse, unable to take in the abomination. Then he blurted, ‘Did you see that?’ He pointed to her feet. ‘She moved!’ Petra hadn’t seen anything but Dane was convinced. ‘She’s alive!’

  Chapter 13

  Krishna wasn’t built for commando crawling and he certainly wasn’t dressed for it. Wet shorts clung to his chafing thighs as his knees scuffed and slipped on the rough stone. His only light was the soft green glow of his phone’s screen, held aloft in front of him, its night-vision camera working hard to pick up anything in the utter blackness. Stretched forwards on his belly, squirming, shuffling, panting and moaning, eventually the tight tunnel opened up enough for him to pull himself onto all fours. He glanced back. Nothing. Ahead: the same. His mind suddenly jumped to the worst-case scenario. What if this was a dead end? Was he trapped? He doubted he could shuffle backwards. If there was a rock fall behind him, he’d just spent a lot of effort crawling into his own coffin.

  Fear spurred him on but almost immediately his knee sliced down a sharp ridge and made him yelp. Puffing and groaning, he managed to twist around to inspect it. The green phone screen just showed a blurred shape. The black blood of the cut was barely visible but he felt the warm slickness on his fingers.

  He lay on his back, gathering his breath. He’d have to live with it. Just a scratch, he told himself. Then he felt something touch his shoulder. He twitched and felt a scratch on his neck. He yelped and twisted away and saw, illuminated by the green phone screen, a long, lean rat scurry across his belly. Before he could swipe at it, the matted rodent was at his knee, lapping and tugging at the fresh wound. In a blind panic Krishna pulled up his other foot and kicked at it with the back of his trainer. The rat dodged and the heel slammed into Krishna’s sore knee. He howled in pain and lost his target, too fast, too slee
k and too black to be seen.

  ‘Fuck this,’ he growled, and squirmed onto his stomach to crawl further into the Rock, his phone swishing ahead, more as a weapon than a visual aid. He didn’t even see the blockage. His phone swiped against something with a hollow clonk, and then his head hit it.

  Running his hands against it he felt a smooth, flat surface, not cold like rock, and too uniform to be natural. Flipping the phone, he saw in its dim screen-light that he’d reached the tunnel’s end: plasterboard. He rapped it with his knuckles and the hollow knock was unmistakable. This tunnel had been boarded up.

  He laughed. Damp plasterboard wouldn’t present any barrier to him. With as much force as he could muster in his cramped space he slammed his fist into it, then howled again. It stayed firm, and now his knuckles were bleeding.

  Furious, he reverse-crawled a few metres to the tunnel’s widest point where he could turn his body around, a complicated, painful process that involved banging his head, swearing constantly, imagining rats in every crevice, and almost dislocating his spine. Eventually, with a roar of victory, he was on his back with his feet just yards from the stubborn barrier.

  Shimmying his wet bottom forwards, crawling on his elbows, he soon felt the board against his feet. He pulled himself a little closer, his wet Hawaiian shirt now ridden up around his nipples. A couple of kicks made plenty of noise but the board stayed in place. He was certain it would give. He adjusted his position, pulled his scratched and bloody knees up as high as possible and slammed them forwards.

  With an almighty, splintering crunch, he was through.

  Like a massive, wet baby being born, Krishna’s plump frame squeezed through the ragged hole. Wailing like the grotesque breeched infant he resembled, soon his tummy was through, red and angry, then his rumpled shirt gave way around his shoulders and his flailing feet fell forwards, pulling him out of the hole and slamming him down onto a hard floor.