The stream would lead him back to the cellar and its well if there were any means of telling its hidden course from the surface. The rock fall might help. It was probably about the middle of the hanger not far from the fox’s earth, but among thick bushes a mere dip in the ground would be hard to find at night. He could be sure of nothing except that the stream was not very far underground.
That brought to mind the culvert which carried a muddy brook under the drive to his father’s farm. The culvert? It might be possible, after all, to know the course of the stream. That twig between his hands had jumped all right when crossing the culvert.
It had happened during the drought of the previous summer. The farm always had ample water for men and beasts, pumped up by an electric ram. But in August the well began to run dry, so they had it cleaned out and the water analysed. The report from the county laboratory announced that it was quite unfit to drink.
Both his parents had been very worried. Mr Prowse insisted that he had always drunk the water and his father and grandfather before him, and that none of them was ever one penny the worse. Mrs Prowse retorted that what with home-made cider and all that beer they never drank any water anyway, and what would he think of himself if she and Mike were pushing up the daisies in the churchyard?
So his father had to buy drinking water from tankers until one day Mrs Prowse said:
‘You always used to be talking about dowsers and how they found water for the army when you were a soldier in the Western Desert. If you know there’s something in it, why don’t you try one?’
Jack Prowse jumped at it. He telephoned a professional dowser who came out to the farm in a more expensive car than they themselves could afford and walked all over their land with a steel spring between his hands. On the Upper Ley he told the Prowses that they would find water at twenty feet and that his firm would pipe it down to the house at a reasonable price. No water, no pay.
Mike’s mother was a bit doubtful, as she usually was when she had started something up and her husband had grown too enthusiastic about it.
‘Try it for yourself, Mrs Prowse!’ the dowser had said. ‘Some people can’t feel it at all. Most can feel it a little. And a few can do it well straight off. I’ll cut a hazel fork for you.’
He cut a twig of springy hazel in the shape of a Y and showed them how to hold down the forked part between the palms of both hands.
‘Now walk along the drive over that culvert,’ he said, ‘and see what happens!’
Jack Prowse was disappointed that he could feel nothing at all. Janet said she thought the fork moved but couldn’t be sure. And in Mike’s hands the stem of the Y twisted up so quickly that it startled him.
So the trick was worth trying, there in the moonlight, as a last chance. It could show him the course of the water and lead him to the well beneath the ruins. Mike hurried back to the top edge of the hanger and cut and trimmed a fork of hazel in the way he remembered.
Choosing a rough line between the ruins and the spring, he walked slowly across it. The fork seemed to twist between his hands, but he was trembling a little and refused to trust it. He recrossed the line further on and this time there was no doubt. The stem of the hazel twig jumped through a half circle like the needle on a dial.
He trotted on fast over the open ground, testing for water at intervals and then not bothering, since the line was running straight for the Abbey. When he reached the outskirts of the ruins he crossed the unseen line again to be sure of the direction of the well. The fork did not move. He went along the whole length of the Abbey. It still did not move. He had lost the water.
Fearing all the time that the gift had suddenly left him, he passed across the back of the cottage. The light was still on and he could hear voices, so there was no need for caution. He carried out a thorough search in case the cellar was after all under the floor of the building; but still nothing.
Sitting down at a safe distance he thought and thought, trying to remember if there had been a sharp turn in the passage underground. He was sure that he had never gone round a corner, but in the pitch darkness he would never have noticed a slight curve. He found that he did not much like retracing that horrible journey in memory. It made him shiver again.
And then at last he had it. Tree roots in the second cellar! Tree roots, of course! On his route over the surface there had not been a tree, and there wasn’t one in the cottage garden or the ruins, so the stream must run under the wood. He walked round outside it. Nothing was wrong with the hazel fork or with him. It jumped as if it were impatient, and at once he was into the trees, crossing and recrossing the line every few yards so as not to lose it again.
The underground water led him over the path through the wood and out the other side of it. There he stopped. For the first time it occurred to him that the fork could lead him for miles to the source of the water, but could never tell him where the well was. All he knew was that it was somewhere under trees.
He tried to recall the number of arches between the steps in the first cellar and the well at the end of the second, and came to the conclusion that the distance would be about thirty yards; but that was no help to finding the entrance. There on the surface it was impossible to say whether the steps were to the right or left of the well. He remembered keenly how Carrie, when they first met in the dark, muddled right and left because she did not know which way his head was pointing.
He returned to the path through the wood, followed it up away from the line of the water and then froze. In a clearing were two black mounds. Stalking them very warily through the undergrowth he found that they were two pup tents. He crept up closer. They were empty. Outside was a Primus stove, a frying pan and the earthenware pot in which the soup and the rabbit stew had been. Obviously this was where Screw and Chauffeur were camping. The instinct which had led him to believe that in any danger they could walk off innocently was quite correct. With pup tents and gear packed on their backs nobody would dream that they were anything but poor and cheerful tourists with a taste for old churches.
Now there was real hope; he might be able to tell which way Screw had walked from the tents whenever he was not on the path to the cottage. The most promising track was an opening in the bushes which went nowhere in particular, but he could find no hole or depression in the ground. Another led to a rubbish pit. There he wasted still more time clearing cans and stale bread, and came on nothing but bare earth underneath. A third track, just distinguishable on the moonlit grass, led into the open on the edge of the wood.
It seemed too far from the line of the water, but the low bank and shallow ditch which bordered the wood looked worth exploring. A large stone, shining white, caught his eye. Perhaps there had once been a wall, not the usual hedge and ditch between trees and the open. He poked a stick into the bank. It had never been a hedge; it was the remains of a wall hidden under grass.
Walking along it he came on a pile of dead brushwood leaning against the bank which did not look natural. The wood was untidy and uncared for; even in moonlight he could see that nobody had been cutting or clearing for years. He pulled to one side a dead branch which was not entangled with the rest and easily moved. Under it was a hole with a bundle of bramble shoved into it. That too was easily pulled out in one piece. He still was not sure, but when he ran his hands over the straight sides of the hole he found solid masonry not loose stones. That could not be part of a field wall built on the surface; it was a massive thing with its foundations far below ground. When he sat down and slid in legs foremost, his feet at once met a step-ladder. After reaching out to pull the bramble more or less back into position, he descended into the darkness, wildly excited by his success.
5
Dawn of Freedom
Almost at once Mike realised that success was still far away. He was back in that absolute blackness where he could not even see his hands. This was an outlying bit of the Abbey all right, for there was the same sort of paving underfoot. Roof and timber walls had evidently fa
llen down centuries ago; turf and leaf mould had then covered the debris, leaving beneath the surface hollows and passages wherever tree roots or stone footings prevented complete collapse. Crawling under beams and over rubble, he found the remains of wooden pillars, not stone, and piles of what felt like rotten straw, showing that the roof had been thatched. In one place he was tied up among partitions of decayed timber. He worked his way in and out of them, completely puzzled until he recognised that he was in a range of stables and that the whole buried building had been a barn.
To find the grating and the steps which led down to the cellars was going to be nearly impossible. All he knew was that the course of the stream lay to the left of the entrance and its ladder. He was still near enough to them to find his way back, and he then followed the main wall, feeling his way along the tunnel between solid stone and piles of rubbish. He stopped every few paces to hold the hazel fork between his palms, but it seemed as blind and lost as he was.
At last the fork jumped, its stem describing a complete circle. He left the wall and kept to the line of the underground water, shuffling forward very nervously into nothingness. The only hope was to find that blocked well-head by touch and work away from it. Something like a snake brushed his face and made him start back. He dabbed at it with a shaky hand and found that it was a thin, hanging root attached to a much bigger one which had crawled down from the trees above him. He knelt and ran his hands over the floor. A paving stone was tilted. The root was alongside it. The rough line of mortar was curved, not straight. All these fitted the appearance of the well-head as he had seen it from below.
Now for the worst of it – to strike out away from the water for thirty yards with no guidance at all from eyes or fork. He hoped the line of the old posts would keep him going straight, but their stumps were often missing or could not be found among the rubble. He was soon helplessly lost. The count of paces had gone wrong and he was sure that he had moved diagonally across from one line of posts to another. All he could do was to shout and keep on shouting for Carrie and pray that he couldn’t be heard on the surface if the two men had returned to their tents.
He could not recognise his voice, sometimes muffled by closed, soft spaces, sometimes echoing from an unseen wall and whining away into mysterious distance. There was no reply. He moved about at random and called:
‘Carrie! Carrie, where are you?’
At last, very faintly, coming from nowhere, he heard an answer.
‘Don’t hurt me, Mike! Don’t hurt me!’
‘Of course I won’t hurt you,’ he shouted. ‘Show a light at the grating if you can!’
‘It’s really you?’
‘Of course it’s me!’
‘I thought you were … I thought …’
‘Well, I wouldn’t have hurt you anyway.’
‘I’ve only matches,’ she said.
‘Come up the steps and strike one after another under the grating!’
He kept turning round and staring but could see nothing.
‘Set fire to a whole pile of them!’
Much further away than he expected he saw a glow and felt his way towards it. He slid back the bolt and opened the grating. Carrie caught his hands and stayed in his arms trembling.
‘How are you alive?’ she asked.
‘I got out at the bottom into a stream. Tell you all about it later. And I came in through the hole in the wall that Screw uses. But I don’t know how to find it again.’
Only two matches were left. She struck one. It was little help, for it showed only a stump, a roof beam and nothing beyond. The last match wouldn’t strike at all.
The disappointment finished Mike. He felt suddenly exhausted. He had done what he set out to do, and that was that. All the courage and effort turned out to be useless.
‘Why can’t we just walk until we hit a wall? Then if we follow it we must find where you got in.’
‘You don’t know what it’s like, Carrie. At night we could go round and round for ever and still miss the ladder and the hole.’
‘Well, we can’t wait for daylight. Suppose someone came down?’
Mike remembered that Beard intended to do so. The chance of getting out before they were picked up by the light of his lantern was slim. Carrie said:
‘I remember which way the footsteps used to come – from the right. Let’s start off that way!’
They set off hand in hand. After a while Carrie tripped over the grating. They had gone round in a circle while sure they were going straight.
‘Now you see,’ Mike said.
‘Up here is it like it was down below?’
‘No. I think this was a great barn with a cellar underneath for wine and anything that had to be stored a long time. And it belonged to the Abbey.’
‘What Abbey?’
‘That’s where we are. In the ruins of an old Abbey. But the barn just had posts instead of arches and pillars. There may be two lines of stumps down the middle.’
Carrie let go his hand.
‘You stay here and I’ll find one of them,’ she said. ‘Then you come to my voice, and we’ll go on doing it in turn until we arrive at an outside wall.’
She slipped away, hit a stump fairly quickly and hit it hard.
‘Hurt yourself?’ Mike asked.
‘Only my knee. Now I’ll keep talking and you come to me.’
Her plan at least prevented them from going round in a circle, but since they could not tell which way they were facing they must often have returned to the same post. However, eventually they reached the face of an outside wall.
‘Right or left to get to the entrance?’ she asked.
‘Oh, how do I know?’ he cried in despair. ‘I can’t tell what wall I came in by. And I’m getting awfully tired and cold again, Carrie. I’ve had nothing to eat since the bread and cheese yesterday.’
‘Then we’ll sit still for a bit,’ she said. ‘Put on my poncho, Mike, and lie down next to me!’
He went to sleep, but she could not. To know he was alive and that she would no longer be alone in that unmeaning darkness was like waking up from a monstrous dream. She was full of hope that in a few hours she would be home again, telling herself that as soon as they got out there must be people about to whom they could appeal for help. Mike had said something about the countryside around the Abbey ruins being very empty, but after all it was not in the middle of a desert.
She kept an arm over him to make sure he was always there and closed her eyes. Though it made no difference whether they were open or shut, it was comforting to know that the darkness belonged to her, not to this hell.
She dozed off and woke with a start, ashamed of herself. It was her duty to be on watch and to warn Mike if she heard one of the kidnappers coming down. She listened and stared all round. Something was different. In the distance there was a blackness which had a shape; it seemed to run diagonally between floor and roof. She woke up Mike. It took him a moment to distinguish what she was looking at.
‘It’s a bit of fallen roof, Carrie, and it’s dawn outside. Dawn! We shall see the way out. Quick, before anyone comes!’
They stumbled over rubble towards the shadowy shape. An oak post had slipped sideways and cracked. The heavy beam above it was bent in the centre, and over it the roof sagged like slack canvas of a tent. Light came through the fractures – enough to explain why, during the day, they could make out the grating above them while they were imprisoned in the cellar.
Mike climbed over a tumble of earth and stone, very careful to disturb nothing, and then at last saw the entrance showing grey-blue through the black web of its plug of bramble.
‘Don’t make a sound!’ he whispered. ‘Two of them are in tents not far away and they mightn’t be asleep.’
He went up the step-ladder, pushed away the bunch of bramble and came out on the glorious green of the bank. Carrie followed, and as he bent to help her out his foot slipped and he crashed into the pile of dead brushwood.
The two fr
oze and listened. A wood pigeon took off from its roost with a clatter of wings followed by a dozen others rocketing through branches. A pair of magpies broke the silence with a loud chatter of protest at being woken up too early. They heard one of the campers crawling out of his tent. He appeared at the edge of the wood, saw nobody, exclaimed, ‘Those blasted birds!’ and returned.
When all was quiet Mike and Carrie tip-toed along the bank, taking cover again before they came within sight of the cottage.
‘I think Beard may come out very soon,’ Mike said, ‘and then we can safely go past the cottage and put the ruins between us and them.’
‘Why do you think he’ll be up so early?’
‘Just something I overheard.’
There was no reason to tell her that she had been so near to never being seen again.
And near she was, for only five minutes later Beard emerged from the cottage and took the path down the centre of the wood to the clearing where his two assistants had their tents.
As soon as they were sure that they were out of his sight, they dashed across the short stretch of open ground and put the cottage between themselves and the wood. As they passed the front, Carrie boldly tried the door. It was not locked.
‘Wait till I get you something to eat!’ she said. ‘I’ll grab the first thing I see in the kitchen.’
Mike crouched down behind the garden hedge, keeping an eye on the wood. He remembered that they had not replaced the grating. If Beard went down at once, it would not take him more than a minute to see that Carrie had escaped. What would they all do then? Clear out quick, he hoped, after spending a few minutes arguing about it. Beard was bound to believe that one of his men had forgotten to bolt the grating.
Carrie ran out of the cottage with the knuckle end of a ham, a loaf and two bottles of milk. They circled the car park, raced through the ruins and then had to decide what was their surest route to safety. Mike wanted to take to the open grassland which he had crossed in the dusk, saying that they would probably be seen but could not be caught before they were in the valley. Then the kidnappers would have to give up any search for them as hopeless. Carrie was all for reaching the road which must be somewhere at the top of the lane which led to the Abbey. She had not been brought up in the country and did not appreciate how easy it was to disappear into cover. A road, she insisted, meant cars and people and safety.
Escape into Daylight Page 5