Black Valley

by Williams, Charlotte

By now, Jess was thoroughly alarmed. Evidently, Elinor had overcome her claustrophobia, but she seemed to be displaying a more worrying condition: psychosis, presenting with the classic symptoms of loss of contact with reality and delusions of grandeur. She should have recognized the signs earlier – all that nonsense with the blindfold, and so on – instead of taking them as part of a harmless game.

  She wondered what to do. The best course of action, she decided, was to play along, admire the paintings, and then lead Elinor gently out of the tunnel. After that, she could think about getting help for her. Elinor’s condition clearly needed psychiatric care. With any luck, she’d respond well; the condition appeared to be type one, a brief psychotic disorder with a stressor such as a trauma or death in the family – in Elinor’s case, two such stressors.

  There were footsteps in the tunnel. Elinor’s rapt expression changed, in an instant, to that of a guilty child, caught in the act of perpetrating some minor domestic crime.

  The footsteps came nearer, and then Isobel came into view. She was carrying a large torch in one hand, and a rolled-up projector screen in the other.

  When she saw Jess, she gave a sharp intake of breath. Then she looked accusingly at Elinor.

  ‘I just brought her here to see the paintings.’ There was a childish whine in Elinor’s voice. She was obviously afraid of her sister, and keen to placate her.

  Isobel’s expression turned from astonishment to rage.

  ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ she burst out.

  ‘She thought you were doing them.’ Elinor was petulant. ‘I wanted to show her it was me.’

  ‘You idiot.’ Isobel was incandescent. ‘You little idiot. You’ve really done it this time, haven’t you? Screwed everything up.’

  ‘You don’t understand, Iz. She won’t tell. She won’t tell anyone. She’s on my side. Aren’t you?’ Elinor looked pleadingly at Jess, who stood rooted to the spot, speechless.

  The twins turned away from her and began to talk in low voices. Jess strained to hear them, and realized they were speaking Welsh. She could barely understand what they were saying – her grasp of the language was very limited – and they

  She listened in, trying to follow what they were saying.

  . . . Something something Morris something something . . .

  ‘. . . cael gwybod . . .’ . . . find out . . .

  ‘. . . fydda’i ddim yn gwend wrth neb . . .’ . . . won’t tell anyone . . .

  ‘. . . ar fy ochr . . .’ . . . on my side . . .

  ‘. . . os ei di o flaen dy well, a’i yno hefyd . . .’ . . . if you go down, I’ll go down . . .

  ‘. . . bydd rhaid ei llad hi hefyd nawr . . .’ . . . we’ll have to kill her too, now . . .

  Jess felt a cold fear grip her chest. It was her they were discussing.

  Their voices rose as they argued, and then they went back into English.

  ‘Don’t, Iz. I’ll explain it to her. She’ll understand.’

  ‘Understand? After what you’ve done, you bloody psycho. No one’s ever going to understand, except me.’

  ‘You’re just jealous.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I couldn’t give a shit about you. But if you go down, I go down.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ That was Elinor, beginning to whine. ‘You love me, I know you do.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I hate you.’

  ‘Maybe.’ The whine turned to a taunt. ‘But you’re stuck with me now, aren’t you?’

  By now, the twins’ conversation was becoming more heated. Jess realized that, for the moment, they’d forgotten about her. So, very tentatively, she began to tiptoe out towards the tunnel, heading for the entrance.

  ‘Stop there.’ She heard Isobel’s voice, and turned round.

  Isobel was facing her, holding up a small aerosol canister.

  At that moment, Jess could have made a run for it. But she hesitated for a split second, and then Isobel lunged forward, pressing down on the spray can’s nozzle. Jess felt a stinging pain in her eyes and nose. She couldn’t breathe. Her head began to spin, and she staggered forward, trying to keep upright. She felt herself trip over a rock.

  Then her legs gave way.

  30

  Crouching on the ground, Jess felt a wave of nausea come over her. Her head swam, and she retched. Nothing came up, except sour-smelling bile. She wiped it away with her sleeve, and retched again. This time, there was only a thin trail of saliva. She felt a painful spasm in her stomach. Then she heard the sound of retreating footsteps. The twins were running away, down the tunnel. She scrambled to her feet, stumbling blindly about.

  ‘Help me!’ she cried. ‘Elinor, come back. Don’t leave me here.’

  Her words echoed back to her, reverberating around the tunnel walls. The footsteps died away and she knew that there was no one there.

  Her eyes were burning, and all she could see in front of her was a white fog. She felt her way around the recess, knocking into the table, and tripping over one of the buckets on the ground. Then she sat down against a wall, afraid of hurting herself.

  Mace, she thought. One of those sprays they use in America. She didn’t know much about them, except that they weren’t lethal. The thought calmed her a little. The effects of the spray would wear off, sooner or later. Then she’d be able to make her way back to the entrance of the tunnel. It was just a question of sitting it out and waiting until her sight came back.

  She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out her mobile phone, hoping that by some miracle, she might get a signal. Then she remembered that even if she did, it was a smart phone, rather than one with buttons, and she wouldn’t be able to see to make the call. Nevertheless, she tried her best, making a swiping motion with her hand to unlock the phone, touching the screen here and there, attempting to memorize the routine for making a call. But the phone remained silent in her hands.

  Her lungs tightened in her chest, and she struggled for breath. The effects of the spray, she told herself. But she knew that it was panic, too.

  OK, let’s take this step by step, she reasoned, trying to calm herself. I know exactly where I am – at Bryn Cau, the Hollow Hill. I’m not far into the tunnel, and I know where the entrance is. I’ve got light in here – the floodlight, powered by the generator. There’s a torch on my phone, too. I’ll be able to use it in the tunnel, to help me get to the entrance. This is really not a disaster.

  She thought of the clanging door she’d heard Elinor open when they’d arrived. What if the twins had locked it? What if they’d turned off the generator, and plunged her into darkness. What if they meant to kill her, to leave her here to die?

  Panic rose in her chest again, and she became light-headed. She heard a voice inside her head. Breathe slowly, it told her. In through the nose. Hold for a moment. Out through the mouth. And again.

  She did as the voice commanded, and after a while, the panic subsided. If the entrance was locked, she reasoned, she’d stand by the door and yell. Sooner or later, someone would pass by and hear her. And if no one came, she’d find another way out. She’d seen the opening of the mineshaft from the other side of the quarry, when she and Dresler had gone looking for Morris. It came out beside a pair of lagoons, one blue, one yellow. And there must be other shafts down here, too. Bryn Cau was called the Hollow Hill because it was a warren of underground tunnels. She’d find one of them, get out somehow.

  She leaned her head back against the wall. The searing pain in her eyes had subsided, but now they’d begun to itch. She had an urge to rub them, but she knew instinctively that she shouldn’t. She breathed in again, and out. She could hear the water dripping in the tunnel. It was probably clean, she thought, coming from an underground spring. When her sight came back, she’d be able go out there and splash her eyes, cool the burn.

  Time passed. Her head was aching, and her limbs felt shaky. She kept up the breathing, in the hope that the effects would wear off. She kept one hand inside her pocket, clutching her mobile phone as if it were s
ome kind of talisman. And, as she waited, she cast her mind back over what had happened.

  What the hell were the twins up to? she wondered. She tried to remember what they’d said when they were arguing. It had been hard to follow what was going on, but she’d caught a few words: one of them had said ‘If you go down, I go down’, implying perhaps that Isobel was covering for Elinor. Then the chilling words she’d heard in Welsh came back to her, their meaning as clear and sharp as the echoing drops of water in the tunnel: ‘We’ll have to kill her too, now.’

  Did that mean they’d killed before? The words ‘bloody psycho’ had been used, hadn’t they? Elinor had killed, and might very well kill again.

  The panic rose once more, cramping her gut and tightening her throat so that she retched again, but she fought it down. The twins were insane, she told herself. Insane and incompetent. There was no plan, no rationale to what they’d done. They hadn’t thought it through. They were bound to have made some stupid mistake, such as forgetting to lock the entrance as they fled. And it was also possible that Elinor, in her deluded state, would return to save her. Even if she didn’t, sooner or later someone would raise the alarm. Bob would be bringing Rose back to the house soon, and when she didn’t return, he’d raise the alarm and start looking for her.

  She cast her mind back. She hadn’t told Bob where she was going that afternoon. She hadn’t told Nella, either. No one knew where she was.

  She shivered. The air was cold and damp. She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out Nella’s beanie. The wool under her fingers felt soft and warm. She sat with it in her lap for a moment. Just touching it brought her a sense of comfort. Then she reached up and put it on her head. Thank God she’d brought it, she thought, and worn sensible clothing. She was already getting cold, but without them, she’d have been frozen stiff by now.

  There was silence all around her, except for the crystal clear sound of the water dripping in the tunnel.

  She waited. And waited. All her thoughts frightened her, so she tried not to think of anything, but simply to focus on the sound of the dripping water. The mindfulness technique. But it didn’t seem to be doing the trick. After a while, she began to hear a hissing in her left ear. Gas, she thought, and the panic rose in her throat again. No, tinnitus, she told herself. Probably brought on by shock.

  Slowly, the white fog in front of her eyes began to lift. She waited for the shapes of the objects around her to come into view – the generator, the lamps, the table, the buckets, the paintings propped against the wall. But the white was replaced by black. Fear gripped her as she began to realize that her vision had come back, but that all she could see around her was total darkness. The twins had switched the generator off.

  She brought the mobile out of her pocket, her fingers still clasped around it, and now that she could see, turned it on. A bright light shone out from the screen. The screensaver showed a photograph of her, Nella and Rose standing in front of the mirror in the hallway of the house. She, Jess, was in the middle, taking the photo. Nella was grinning, her head lolling on her mother’s shoulder, and Rose was pulling a face.

  She looked to the edge of the screen at the top, to see if she had a signal, but the icon was tiny, and her vision was still too blurry to make it out properly. So she called up the keyboard, dialled 999, and put the phone to her ear. Silence.

  There was no signal.

  She gazed down at the screensaver and began to cry. That cooled her eyes, like some miraculous balm, so she went on crying. The tears rolled down her face and plopped onto the screen, onto the faces of Nella and Rose, the two people she loved most in the world. She cried for them, and for that moment when they’d stood in front of the mirror in the hall, fooling around and laughing; and she cried for her home, and her life, and her years with Bob, and her mother, and her father, and everything and everyone that she’d known and loved until she found herself here, alone, abandoned in the darkness, left to die.

  Then she wiped the tears away, got up off her feet, and got on with the business of saving her life, and getting back to them all.

  The torch on the phone worked, emitting a surprisingly powerful beam of light. She shone it around the recess, until she saw the tunnel. She walked over to it, then shone the beam to the right. The tunnel stretched into the distance, the rock hewn into a low curve overhead. She shone it to the left. The same.

  She thought back to when she’d come into the tunnel with Elinor, but it was hard to work out which direction they’d arrived from. She remembered that they’d turned a corner, just before they came to the recess. The entrance would probably be visible once she’d got round that.

  She edged out into the tunnel, holding the torch in front of her. She knew the battery wouldn’t last long – she’d tried it once before, for map-reading in the car while Bob drove, and it had given out after less than twenty minutes. She’d go along the tunnel a little way, she decided, and if she couldn’t see the light from the entrance, she’d turn back and go the other way.

  She walked carefully, keeping well away from the walls, and trying to ignore the fact that the curve of rock above her head was narrowing, until it became perilously low. The dripping of the water around her became louder, echoing in her ears, and there was a sound of rushing water ahead.

  What if the place has flooded, she thought, and I’m walking right into it?

  Unlikely, the calm, sensible voice inside her head told her. Why would the twins set up a studio in a mine that regularly flooded?

  Wouldn’t put it past them, a fearful, doubting whisper replied. She quieted the voices, and walked on. The tunnel veered off around a corner and narrowed still further, until she had to bend her legs and her head, and the walls were close around her. She kept going, her heart in her mouth. The rock was not supported; she couldn’t see any wooden struts, as one might expect in a mine. This part of it obviously hadn’t been used for many years; it could well be unstable. There could be a fall at any time, burying her in rubble.

  She hesitated, and stopped in her tracks. She was going the wrong way, she thought. And it would be foolish to move too far away from the recess. At least there was air to breathe there, and room to move around.

  She shone the torch up ahead, this time scanning the walls of the mine. The rock was yellow, pitted and streaked with red and black. It had been hewn by hand, squared off in places, and left to curve in others, where the stone was too hard to break. Parts of it hung down like great blunt stalactites. On the ground beneath her feet was a series of ridges, as if a small railway track had once been laid there, and later pulled up. There was no sign of light anywhere.

  She gave a sigh of frustration, and turned round, pointing the torch in the other direction, so she could see what lay there. Just as she did, it gave out. Once more, she was plunged into darkness.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said out loud. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ Her words echoed around her, mocking her impotent fury.

  The panic came back, but this time it was mixed with rage. It didn’t help. She was stranded here in the dark, in fear of her life. It didn’t matter whose fault it was. It was up to her to deal with the situation, and she’d managed to blow her only chance, taking the wrong route. And now the torch had given out, and she couldn’t see a thing.

  She banged her foot on the ground and screamed – a wordless scream of frustration, of panic. When she stopped, all that came back was a ghostly echo. And then silence.

  Right. OK. That’s enough of that. The sensible voice took on a scolding tone. Now for Plan B. Stand here for a while, let your eyes accustom to the dark. You might be able to see enough to guide yourself out. You need to go the other way. The entrance must be in the other direction.

  Yes, but the fucking entrance is fucking locked, isn’t it? the panicky voice screamed back. The bloody twins have locked me in here. They want to kill me. And nobody knows I’m here. And there may be gas in here, and floods, and rockfalls, and—

  That’s enough of that, Jessi
ca Mayhew. Call yourself a psychotherapist? You’re just indulging in catastrophic thinking. Imagining the worst-case scenario. You’ve warned your clients against it often enough, haven’t you? Now pull yourself together, and get on with finding a way out of here.

  But I can’t. I can’t . . .

  Jess began to sob. Great panicky gasps that escaped from her chest and up into her throat. Her body started to shake. Her legs felt weak, as if they were about to give way under her.

  Stop that pathetic blubbing, the voice commanded, sounding like a sergeant major. You should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

  Jess did as she was told, took a deep breath in, and let it out slowly, trying to steady herself.

  That’s better. Now, can you see anything?

  Of course I can’t.

  Anything at all?

  Jess looked around her. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness. Around her she could see the shapes of the walls, and the rocks above her head, looming over her. She peered ahead, into the gloom. At the very end of the tunnel, she thought she could see a tiny pinprick of light.

  Her heart leapt.

  It could just be a chink in the rock, letting in a bit of sunlight, said the whiner. You might get there and find there’s no way out.

  Oh, shut up. The sergeant major was impatient. Now, just move towards it. Come on. At the double.

  Jess was making progress. Slowly, but surely. The pinprick of light was still far away, but it was getting bigger. She walked carefully towards it, feeling her way along the walls. Her fear was still there, but now that she’d found a way out, or so she hoped, it was tempered by excitement.

  On her left-hand side, she passed a cavern. She peered into it, but the inside of it was inky black. Then she heard a rustling, and a squeaking. A tiny creature flitted by her head.

  Just a bat, the sergeant major remarked. Nothing to worry about.

  Sars, murmured the whiner. Ebola.

  We’re not in Africa, are we?

  Bats are quite sweet, actually, thought Jess. Her own voice intervened. As long as you don’t disturb them, they won’t harm you.