“I don’t think you quite did,” Lucinda says as I protest “What, all of them?”
“Even the latest one. Somebody ought to be pleased.”
He’s staring at me, and I know he means my father, but I demand “What do you mean?”
“Someone who objects to them,” the woman says. “He even said the people who blocked them up with rubbish knew what they were doing.”
“He put off several of our customers.” Quite as accusingly the man adds “Have you been in a fight?”
“Something like that,” I admit and give up fingering my bruise once I realise this may suggest a threat. “You haven’t told us why you’ve shut the tunnels.”
“You haven’t asked.” Barely in time to head off my retort the man says “Water.”
“How badly are they flooded?” says Lucinda.
“Never this badly. It must be the weather.”
“It can’t be that bad,” I object. “There’s someone in there. I heard them.”
I haven’t since I started speaking outside the door, but the friends of the tunnels compete at frowning. “There certainly shouldn’t be,” the woman says.
Lucinda seems about to speak until I send her a quick grimace. As the woman inserts a key in the lock I hear a sound like surreptitious wallowing beyond the door. She throws it wide, revealing an arched sandstone passage at least twelve feet high, illuminated by spotlights that leave stretches of darkness untouched. A rough stone ramp slopes down from the entrance, to be cut off by a drop of twelve feet or more, over which a catwalk of planks on scaffolding extends to a cleft through the back wall. “Is anybody in here?” the woman calls.
“Here.”
The muffled answer sounds mocking, but it’s just an echo. She advances down the ramp, followed by her colleague. The shapes swelling up to meet them are their deformed shadows. Though Lucinda tries to restrain me I hurry after the pair, who turn to me as I reach the catwalk. “Would you mind—” the woman says while the man contributes “Could you please—”
They’re interrupted by a large loose splash in the deep pool that has gathered under the scaffolding. I venture onto the catwalk in time to see dark ripples spreading through the gloom. The water is too murky for the floor of the pool to be visible. “What was that?” I gasp.
“Something someone left fell in,” the man says. “If you would—”
“What, though? I didn’t see it, did you?”
“We didn’t have to. It couldn’t be anything else,” says the woman. “Will you please go out now. This area isn’t for the public.”
Of course it is, and I don’t move, because I’m trying to free my mind of an illusion. Half a dozen trickles of water glisten on the sandstone at the far side of the subterranean pool. There can’t be any question that they’re streaming down the wall, but the glimmers that the ripples cast on the stone make the trickles appear to be crawling upwards, reaching for the surface of the earth. The glimmers subside, drawing my attention to the ripples themselves. Am I seeing a pale object through them? Surely it’s part of the floor of the pool, though it appears to be changing its irregular shape more thoroughly than the distortions of the ripples can account for. I could think it isn’t alone down there, and I’m craning over the edge when the man’s shout almost overbalances me. “Will you both—”
“I’m just taking him away,” Lucinda says, having caught my arm. “Come on, Gavin. That’s all there is to see for now.”
“You heard it, didn’t you?” I’m close to pleading.
“I’m sure it’s what this lady and gentleman said.”
“Not that. Someone singing in here before.”
Perhaps it’s because I’m staring into the water that she sounds uneasy. “I didn’t, Gavin.”
Are the pallid blotches in the depths not just changing shape but growing? I clutch her hand on my arm and lean out further from the catwalk. “Can’t you see that?”
She hasn’t responded except for gripping my arm harder when the woman says “Kindly leave or we’ll be forced to call the police.”
“Shall I give you the names to ask for? Wrigley or Maddock. They love hearing about me.”
“Gavin,” Lucinda says and steers me away from the edge. “Sorry,” she tells the staff as they tail us to the door. “He’s worried about his father.”
I barely manage not to warn her to stop bringing him up. As we emerge into a cobbled yard that’s darkened by the imminence of rain she says “Shall we go home?”
I feel as if the glimpses in the tunnel are lying dormant in my mind. Perhaps they were only ever there, which suggests that I may not be much good just now at searching for my father or identifying clues to his whereabouts. I’m also thrown by remembering “I thought you thought I didn’t need to.”
“Home to my house.”
I’ve never seen it. Besides, I wouldn’t mind a drink. “I’d like that,” I assure her.
A wind twitches the windscreen wipers as we climb into the car outside the yard. Lucinda drives uphill past tenements that have overwhelmed the site of the village of Edge Hill. Until the city surrounded it the village had a clear view of the river, which may have distracted the villagers from the labyrinth under their houses. We must be passing over it as Lucinda turns the car across the slope. Another street of tenements, where the dark sky transforms dozens of small windows into slates, brings us onto the brow of Edge Hill.
A terrace from Williamson’s time stretches along the brow to St Mary’s Church, where one of his tunnels is rumoured to have opened into the churchyard. That’s the tunnel the restorers think they’re clearing from the far end. Lucinda’s house is in the middle of the terrace. Its door and window frames and the railings of the small neat garden all gleam black. She parks in front of the spiky gate, and as I climb out I see two large blind eyes at her bedroom window.
In a moment I see they’re binoculars. They must give her a fine view across the river, although just now they’re slanted towards the church. She makes for the house with her key at the ready, and I’m on the path when my mobile starts to sing about love. I silence the song as she opens the door. Close to the ground the high white hall is green—the carpet, the pots of ferns along the party wall. Some of the ferns are restless, and I’m reminded of leaves jerking with moisture in the Calderstones greenhouse. There’s a draught along the hall, and my mother is on the phone. “It’s getting in,” she says, her voice ragged with sleeplessness. “It’s everywhere. It’s destroying all your father’s work.”
Chapter Twenty-one
SOMETHING UNEARTHED
Even with the boot loaded to capacity and the backseat and the floor in front of it piled high, there’s nothing like enough space in the Spirita. At least we still have plenty of the cartons we fetched from shops along Breck Road. I’m not just dismayed by how much the damp has affected the books and loose papers, I’m angry with myself for not ensuring they were farther from the walls. Wherever print’s visible it has blurred, and quite a few items are stuck together. I’ve little chance to examine the damage, because my mother keeps urging us to carry out our burdens as fast as we can, now that she’s convinced nowhere in the house is safe. She bustles around us with an umbrella in case it begins to rain, but she’s so distracted that most of the time she holds it over herself. My final cargo on this journey is the computer tower, which Lucinda hands me once I’m strapped into the passenger seat. “Hurry back as soon as you can,” my mother pleads and then delays us. “I forgot to ask, did he call you? Not Deryck.”
“Who?” I say less gently than I should.
“Whatever his name was.” She appears to be inviting me to supply it until she adds “The workman. He rang me and I said he should ring you.”
I hug the computer tower in case this lets me feel less inclined to throw my hands up. “But what about?”
“Your father, of course. You remember, I asked on the radio for people to get in touch.”
“Couldn’t you have found out what he had to say? I
f he wouldn’t even give his name he mightn’t want to ring twice.”
“I did find out, Gavin. I only wanted him to talk to you as well in case I’d missed anything while I was so worried about Deryck’s things.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, which falls well short of my feelings. “Where was he when dad saw him?”
“He wouldn’t say, and he didn’t know where Deryck rode off to.” She leans forward, and so does the umbrella that’s shading us from a momentary flare of sunlight through a rupture in the clouds. “I did get something out of him,” she murmurs. “I’m not completely useless.”
“Nobody thinks you are, Gillian,” Lucinda says. “What did you learn?”
“They’ve been digging up things all over town but they’ve been told to keep it to themselves,” my mother says and looks even warier. “Be careful what you say about it, won’t you? You don’t want to make any enemies who could harm your work.”
I suppress more than one thought and say only “What things?”
“Some of them looked like bits of poles for holding houses up above a swamp, but he wouldn’t say where.”
“That sounds like a Mesolithic settlement,” Lucinda says.
As I wonder how anyone except an archaeologist could know, my mother pleads “You won’t tell anyone, will you? It could put him out of a job.”
I’m not sure who she means, and so I say “Anything else they unearthed?”
Something claws at the roof of the car—the tips of spokes of the umbrella. My mother jerks it up, adding to the darkness inside the vehicle, and blurts “What he saw.”
“What would that have been, Gillian?”
“People standing up.”
“You’re not saying they stood up when they were dug up,” I protest and try to laugh.
“I’m saying they were buried that way.” My mother’s eyes drift from side to side before she adds “Alive.”
I don’t want to believe it. “How could he tell?”
“Because even though they were so old he could see they’d been trying to claw their way out.”
As I attempt not to imagine the burial Lucinda says “How old?”
“He said very because of how deep they were digging, the contractors, I mean, but they were told not to hold the work up.”
“That’s disgraceful,” Lucinda says. “They shouldn’t treat our history that way.”
As my mother visibly regrets having spoken, I ask “Did he say anything else about dad?”
“Just that Deryck said it sounded like another sacrifice.”
“Another.” When my mother seems equally bemused I say “I can’t imagine him saying anything like that.”
“He has been.” More optimistically than seems entirely rational she adds “At least he’ll know where they found those bodies.”
I’m at a loss for an answer that would feel anything like safe, and it’s Lucinda who says “Had we better be moving?”
“I’m sorry. It’s my fault for keeping you. I should have thought.”
“Someone will be back before you know it,” says Lucinda.
The car speeds along the ridge and downhill, past a maze of narrow streets cut off from the main thoroughfare. They’re crammed with houses, some of which are boarded up and sprayed with illegible weather-beaten graffiti, but in the days when windmills flanked the main road, one side street harboured a circus. Even though it was several hundred yards from the highest reaches of the Pool, it was flooded around the time Lucinda’s house was built, and an infestation of amphibians delayed the reopening, which in any case was unsuccessful. During its decline the theatre in Christian Street became known as Croaker’s Circus, though the pro-prietor’s name wasn’t Croaker. The main road leads us onto the Dale Street flyover, and as we pass Waterworth’s office a face blurred by breath on the pane appears at the window, so that I have to resist an absurd impulse to crouch low over the computer tower. The halting homebound traffic eventually lets us pass the town hall, and soon Lucinda leaves behind the fitful descent of vehicles towards the river.
The basement puts on its lights to greet us as she drives down the ramp. A few vehicles occupy their spaces on the stone floor of the car park that serves all the buildings on this side of the street—the apartments, a sandwich shop, a tobacconist’s, an employment agency. Lucinda parks within the outline beneath a giant’s handiwork—my apartment number stencilled on the bare brick wall. “You carry that up and I’ll be unloading,” she says.
I plant the computer tower on the top step while I unlock the door to the lobby. It thuds shut as I climb the stairs. I have to dump the tower again in order to open my apartment. I leave the tower in the only empty corner of the main room and, having closed the door, hurry downstairs. Lucinda is waiting by the car, beside which are the boxes of material. “I could drive back if you think these are safe to leave here.”
The basement is meant to be secure. Once the street door has tilted shut I heft the nearest carton and make for the steps. It’s too much of a struggle to let myself into the lobby without setting down my burden, and I only just save it from toppling into the basement, since there’s so little room on the step. I block the door with the carton and fetch the next. By the time I’ve trudged upstairs with it and lowered it to the floor so that I can unlock my apartment again, I’m sweating with frustration as well as exertion. I hold my door open with the second carton and head for the basement once more.
The energy-conscious lights have gone off, and I wave my arms to alert the sensors as I descend the steps. I clutch another box to my chest and plod upstairs, where I leave the carton next to the computer tower, then hurry down to gesture at the lights. That’s the way it continues to go: tramping upstairs only just ahead of exhaustion, dropping my burden, sprinting down to magic the light out of the subterranean darkness, grabbing the next box with my clammy hands…I don’t rest until the task is almost done, and then I sit on the floor with my back against the wall that bears my number.
On top of the carton next to me is a copy of half a dozen lines of verse. My father has scribbled William Colquitt’s name beneath them. Colquitt was an early Victorian poet, but hardly a good one. Apparently I’m looking at part of his epic poem Description of Liverpool, including these lines:
“Behold the Pool, where Neptune’s kin doth dream
Of antic life in marsh and secret stream.
Nay, though the Pool be buried furlongs deep,
This stifles not the maggots of its sleep…”
My father has scrawled a ring around the second couplet and written in the margin Record Office copy, not later one. The Record Office is the other name for where Lucinda works, and there’s a further note: “John Strong?” I’m pondering this when the page goes out as if it’s a dream from which I’ve wakened into blackness.
I wave my arms, to no avail. The sensors can’t detect movement so close to the floor. I try to stagger to my feet, but my legs are too busy prickling to support me. I can just distinguish the walls and the vehicles by the dim glow that leaks around the door at the top of the ramp, because the door to the lobby is no longer blocked. Did it edge the carton aside without my noticing? In that case, why hasn’t the carton fallen down the steps? Someone in the lobby might have moved it, but they would have had to be exceptionally surreptitious. I’m struggling again to rise to my feet when a light comes on.
It’s in my pocket, accompanied by the song about love. I snatch them out and see Lucinda’s number. The display blinds me, but I didn’t glimpse a figure in the corner farthest from the ramp. “Hello?” I urge, pressing the clammy mobile against my face.
“I’ll be on my way back in a minute. I tried to persuade Gillian to come away from the damp but she’s insisting she has to stay by the phone.”
“Good,” I’m sufficiently distracted to respond, having barely heard her second sentence, as I turn the mobile towards the walls to prove that nobody is hiding in the corner.
Perhaps nobody is. The light i
s too feeble to illuminate much at that distance. The blurred object, if it’s even there, resembles a growth—a huge pallid fungus with stalks like fat limbs and a lump that’s only something like a head. The lump does have features, even if too few: a pair of holes that might suggest irregular nostrils, and beneath them a wide gap from which an item surely too large for a tongue is dangling. That’s the only sign of movement. As the dangling object squeezes out it grows larger still—bigger than the orifice—before it drops to the floor with a moist flat thud.
As I sprawl backwards I glimpse it hopping away into the dark. I must have cried out, because Lucinda’s tiny voice calls “What’s wrong?”
I scramble to my feet, and the sensors turn the lights on. The carton I planted on the top step is balanced at the edge. The corner farthest from the ramp is empty except for a misshapen stain, and in a moment I’m not sure I even saw that. I retreat to the steps, lying as I go. “Nothing,” I do my best to hope.
Chapter Twenty-two
SINGING TO SLEEP
Lucinda scrutinises my face as she climbs out of the car. “What was wrong?”
I glance past her at the corner, where any trace of moisture has vanished into the bricks. I’m sure of that, having ventured close, and I couldn’t see or hear a creature hopping or lying low beneath any of the cars, the only concealment. “Just the light,” I say. “It went off.”
“You sounded as if it was something worse. Didn’t you sleep?”
“When? What are you talking about?”
“Last night, Gavin. Did you get any sleep at all? You seem so on edge.”
“What do you expect with everything that’s happening?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t expect it, but I’d like to take some of the pressure off you if I could.”
“You can. You have. Think how long I’d have taken to bring all this stuff here by myself.”
She seems disappointed that I’m being so impersonally practical, but I’d rather not discuss my fears down here. “Let’s finish unloading,” I say, “and then we can relax.”
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