Annerton Pit

by Peter Dickinson

  “But that’s against the Propositions!” cried Martin, sounding merely astonished. Jake had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Yeah?” said Mr Andrews. “You know what? I used to think being committed to a cause, really committed, meant that I was ready to die for it. Now I can see I was only half way there. Being committed means I’ve got to be ready to kill for it. See you.”

  His steps moved out towards the sea-noise, only to return almost at once. He dumped something heavy and soft close to Jake, said “That’s your rations,” and left again. Wood. slithered and grated and the sea-noise dulled almost below hearing. Once again Jake noticed the curious throbbing hoot that seemed to fill the tunnel; the Disprin had taken the edge off his headache but the sound hadn’t changed, so he thought it must be coming from outside his skull. It vanished again when Mr Andrews started work; it was so faint that even the clink of pliers or the burr of a hand-drill was enough to catch the hearing and tune it out.

  “What did he mean ‘Out there’?” said Granpa suddenly.

  “I can’t tell you. Sorry,” said Martin.

  “Come off it,” said Jake.

  “It’s against the Propositions,” said Martin, furious with doubt.

  “That means a lot to me,” said Jake.

  Granpa sighed.

  “Out there,” he said. “Out in the North Sea somewhere. Are they using a helicopter, Martin?”

  “How did you …” began Martin, then stopped.

  “Listen, Martin, we’re all pretty tired and shocked. But in a mess like this we’ve got to keep our wits about us. It’s our only hope. The less we know about what’s happening, the more chance there is we’ll make a mistake which’ll cost us our lives—other people’s too, perhaps.”

  Martin drew his breath to speak and let it out in a gust of frustration.

  “Do you believe what he said?” said Granpa. “A cause is something you have to be prepared to kill for?”

  “No,” snapped Martin.

  “I’ve never killed anybody, that I know of,” said Granpa. “I suppose, as an engineer in the war, I helped to kill people, but I’ve never actually pulled the trigger with my sights on a man. I thought I was going to have to once. There was a tribal uprising against the government and both sides got out of hand, whole villages wiped out, neutral ones as well. Some of us fetched up at a missionary settlement and laid on some ramshackle defences, and the only bunch of thugs who came our way—they were government ones—decided to leave us alone. I think I would have pulled the trigger then, though there weren’t many causes around. Just my own life, and a couple of hundred villagers and a few Baptist missionaries.”

  “That’s different,” said Martin.

  Mr Andrews hammered something into the partition. The tunnel boomed like the inside of a drum. Jake thought he heard the echoes answering from its farthest end.

  “What’s a drift-mine, anyway?” said Martin, obviously trying to push the talk away from his own miseries. “Is this part of the pit where the ghost is?”

  “Don’t you remember?” said Jake. “Mr Smith told us. It’s where the coal seam comes to the surface and you can get at it sidelong.”

  “That’s right,” said Granpa. “But there are a lot of faults in the rocks round here, places where there’ve been slips, so that the seams of coal break off and start at another level. They probably stopped digging here when they reached a fault-line. The main pit’s farther inland. They’d have sunk a shaft to get at that part of the seam.”

  He paused. He sounded very tired, and Jake guessed he was only talking in order to let Martin think his own way through.

  “How far does this part go?” asked Jake. “It sounded pretty deep.”

  “Could be several hundred yards,” said Granpa, “but it isn’t likely. If it’s an early mine, it’ll probably branch into two or three main tunnels, with a whole lot of short side- passages, like cells. They call it monks’ working, not because of the cells, but because most of the mines up here belonged to the monasteries. Very wasteful way of winning coal. To stop the roof coming down they left more between the cells than they took out. Probably left as much as two-thirds of the coal behind.”

  He paused again. The water-drips marked the tunnel more clearly, now that Jake had been told what kind of shape it might have. The main passage curved raggedly to the right. Some of the irregularities were the openings of cells. One, with a couple of syncopated drips in it, opened only a few yards up on the left. Jake wondered whether it wasn’t time to put a little more pressure on Martin, not directly but obliquely.

  “How’s your head?” said Granpa. “If I’d thought that might happen I wouldn’t have let you go.”

  “It’s better,” said Jake. “One of them gave me some Disprin. It hurt a lot when it happened.”

  Martin stirred but said nothing.

  “I think we’d all better get some sleep,” said Granpa. “They’ve made me quite comfortable. I’ve got one of those inflatable lilo things. What about you two?”

  “Hang on a minute,” said Martin in a low voice. “Has he gone, Jake?”

  The hammer answered before Jake could, a series of light taps in groups of four or five, with pauses in between.

  “He’s stapling a bit of cable along the other partition,” said Jake. “I bet he couldn’t hear anything through that.”

  “Damn,” said Martin. “I’ve been sitting under a drip.”

  “Come up here,” said Jake. “They brought me a tarpaulin to sit on and nothing’s fallen on it yet. There’s room for you.”

  Martin came groping along and settled down. Time measured itself in drips and echoes. The boys shared a sandwich. Granpa’s breathing slowed and deepened. At last came the chink of tools being gathered together, movement of wood on wood and the final dulling of the sea-surge.

  “He’s gone,” said Jake.

  “Shh,” whispered Martin. “Are you awake, Granpa?”

  No answer.

  “Don’t wake him up,” said Martin. “Let him stay that way. I’ve got to tell you first, Jake. I’ve made a mess of things.”

  “So’ve I.”

  “No. You brought them out into the open. I was furious with you when it happened, but when he hit you … Listen, do you know who these people are?”

  “No. They haven’t told us anything.”

  “They’re the G.R. headquarters. Jack Andrews made the bombs which the Epping Five used. Made them himself. Here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me.”

  “Told you!”

  Jake was frightened. If Mr Andrews was prepared to tell Martin things like that, things that might send him to prison for thirty years, then perhaps he didn’t mean to let them go after all.

  “They took me off to a room to question me,” said Martin. “On the way there I heard one of them use a bit of G.R. jargon, so as soon as I got the chance I let Jack know that I knew the Propositions.”

  “Come again.”

  “The Propositions. They’re not exactly oaths you swear when you join. They’re … well, they’re propositions. You have to give them total assent. They’re about what the world ought to be like, and how we’re going to get it there.”

  “How do you know them.”

  “That’s what’s been screwing me up,” said Martin. “You see, you go in steps. You’ve got to assent to each Proposition before you’re told the next one. If you can’t assent you’re allowed to withdraw. So the first Proposition of all has to be about secrecy. You assent to that, and they don’t tell you any more for a couple of months at least. They watch you, test you, and if you come through they tell you Props Two to Five. Prop Five is the no-violence one.”

  “Bombing motorways is violent.”

  “It’s the building motorways which is violent. Bombing them is only trying to
undo that—and G.R. went to fantastic trouble to see no one got hurt. That’s how the Epping Five got themselves caught. But Prop One’s what’s been bugging me—I just don’t talk about G.R., even to you. I bet you’d no idea how far I was into it.”

  “Well, I knew you’d been to demos, and you were collecting for the trial …”

  “Yeah, but those are outside things … Once you’re into G.R. you find it’s a darned big organisation. There were twenty-seven in our Southampton group, for instance, but only two of them were in contact with the next group in, and we didn’t know who those two were. When you move inward you’re told more Propositions. And so on, further and further in, till you get to Jack and the Epping Five and three or four more bods at the centre. It’s not such a coincidence our stumbling in like this—I mean, supposing someone about my age had come along here, there’d be a fair chance he’d be a G.R. member.”

  Jake wasn’t interested in coincidences. That was over—it had actually happened, so it didn’t matter now what the odds were.

  “But there’s more than three or four of them here, aren’t there?” he said.

  “That’s what Jack was talking about when he said some of them hadn’t recognised necessities. They planned this caper before the Epping Five got caught, so now he’s had to pick members from outer groups, to do the Five’s jobs.

  “They had to have the right skills, you see, so he couldn’t guarantee they’d be prepared to be as tough as he was.”

  “Mart, he did say you could tell us what they were doing.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. There’s that. But what he says isn’t the Propositions. They’re themselves. He’s ready to bust Prop Five, so you can’t take his word on the others. Hell. I don’t know what to do.”

  Jake said nothing. Granpa’s breathing had changed. It was quick and shallow, as though he was finding it difficult to breathe, but he was still asleep.

  “All right,” whispered Martin suddenly. “I’ll tell you. They’re going to try and hi-jack an oil-rig—one of the big, important ones. They’ll let the crew go, and then they’ll tell the Government to let the Epping Five out of prison or they’ll blow up the rig. They’ve got it all worked out. It isn’t just the rig—though that’s several million quid—it’s the oil coming ashore and helping the balance of payments. They think they can set North Sea oil production back enough to matter.”

  Jake sighed. It was interesting. It was the reason why he was sitting with an aching head in this dank cavern. But knowing about it wasn’t going to help much.

  “Why’ve they only got three days?” he said.

  “It’s something to do with relief helicopters. There’s a point in the rota when a big helicopter goes out with a dozen bods aboard. They’ve modified their own chopper to look like it. They’ve been monitoring the radio signals between the shore and the rig, and they’ve found a way to put the shore radio out of action. They’ve got their own transmitter on the yacht, and as soon as the shore radio goes phut they’ll take over. If they time it dead right they ought to be able to get their own chopper down before anybody realises what’s: happening.”

  “It sounds pretty complicated.”

  “Yeah. They’d worked it out in principle before the Five got caught. Their first idea was to hold the rig to ransom in exchange for better pollution safeguards from the oil companies. Now they’ve brought it all forward to try and get the Five out.”

  “When they land on the rig they’ll have guns?”

  “Yeah. Jack told me that in a situation like that you’ve only got to fire a shot into the air and everybody does what you want. After what he said just now I don’t know. Anyway, far as we’re concerned, it’s academic. We’re stuck here. Oh, hell, Jake!”

  Jake grunted sympathetically.

  “They’re right, you see,” said Martin in a furious, hissing whisper. “They’re right! G.R. is right! The Propositions are the only hope! Anything else, and by the time our kids are grown up the world will be spoilt! The whole world, and nothing will unspoil it. Time’s running out, Jake.”

  Jake grunted again. His mind was fixed on a different scale of time. Three days. He didn’t like the way Granpa’s breathing kept changing.

  “I wonder if there’s a drier place further in,” he said. “One of the side cells might do. I suppose we’d better move away from here in any case. Sergeant Abraham will come and look for us before three days, and if Mr Andrews was telling the truth about the explosives …

  “No dice,” said Martin sourly. “I told you I’d made a mess of things. You never asked me why Jack told me what they were up to. He didn’t have to. I’d only assented as far as Prop Five. But he wanted to get me on his side. And I was on his side till I woke up and looked out of the window to see what the row was about and saw him hit you. But before that I’d rung up Sergeant Abraham—I couldn’t get on to her because she’d gone home but I left a message with the desk sergeant—to say we were OK and we’d had an idea about some ghosts up on the Scottish border and we were going up there and we’d be in touch in two or three days’ time. She won’t come, Jake.”

  “Oh.”

  Chapter Eight

  In his dreams Jake remembered the ghost.

  On the whole Jake didn’t believe in ghosts. There were several reasons for this: he’d listened to Granpa’s arguments since he was five; he’d three times joined Granpa on ghost hunts, and had not only thought but felt there wasn’t anything there, no sad presences or tremors of old horrors—though one of the places had been a very spooky, echoing, creaking old Vicarage near Petersfield; but mostly he didn’t believe in ghosts for family reasons—when Granpa was away somebody had to stand up for him against Dad and Martin, so Jake had really argued himself into a position of sensible disbelief.

  But that was the waking Jake. Dreams were different. In this dream he was running across a vast, shapeless, echoless upland, studded with tussocks of whippy grass which slashed his bare legs or tripped his feet. The ghost hunted him without pursuing him. Whichever way he ran it was there, creeping towards him, hooting. When he woke it was still there, faintly filling the dead air of the tunnel. It was all the life there was, the ghost of Annerton Pit. He forced himself wide awake, into the world of sensible disbelief.

  His head was sore, but only on the outside. His left ear felt the wrong size. His whole body ached from the chill and damp of the tunnel and the discomfort of its floor. But the pain inside his head had faded. He remembered yesterday the fear and shock and exhaustion. That had somehow faded too, leaving only worry and waiting. He wondered how long he’d slept. There was no way of telling, no morning traffic clatter or birdsong. He strained to listen to the sea, to guess where the tide had reached—it had been high just before they’d caught him, hadn’t it? But the sound was too faint and his memory of it too imperfect to compare. He might, with practice, learn to tell the difference in a few days’ time. A few days!

  As he stopped listening for that particular sound the hoot came back, seeming to creep down the tunnel now. He spoke to drive it back.

  “Is anyone awake?” he whispered.

  “Haven’t been asleep,” said Martin aloud. “I couldn’t stop thinking. Granpa, you’re awake, aren’t you? I wonder what the time is.”

  “Seven or eight,” said Granpa. “How are you feeling, Jake?”

  “Much better. Only stiff. My headache’s gone. What about you?”

  “A bit feverish. Is there anything to drink?”

  In the ration sack were several cans, presumably from the hotel bar. You couldn’t tell what you were getting till you opened one. Jake’s was plain soda-water. He ate half a dozen Garibaldi biscuits with it.

  “Listen,” burst out Martin. “Granpa, if I tell you what’s up, will you promise not to tell anyone else, even the police, without my say-so?”

  “Reluctantly,” said Granpa, after a pause.

 
“Good enough,” said Martin. “Well …”

  “And situations could arise in which I felt I had to break my promise.”

  “OK,” said Martin, who was now clearly just as determined to tell as the night before he’d been determined not to. The story was the same, only told more tidily, with fewer interruptions. When it was over Granpa said nothing.

  “Well?” asked Martin angrily.

  “They’re like some people I knew once,” said Granpa. “Africans—a really fine group, intelligent, and brave, full of good ideas. That’s how they started off. They finished up with half of them killing the other half and then terrorising sixty villages—they called it liberating them—all in the name of those ideas.”

  “You’re talking like a bloody racialist,” said Martin.

  “It isn’t race—it’s people. You could put your finger anywhere on a map of the world and find it had happened like that there, once. You could pick any date in history and find it was happening somewhere in the world then.”

  “Well it isn’t going to happen here, now!” shouted Martin. “If it wasn’t for you two I’d go and kick that panel down and send up their whole explosives store. That’d bring the cops running, and Jack and his friends would never get to their famous rig. That’s what makes me sick. They’re going to get out there and somebody’s going to get killed and that’ll bring the whole G.R. movement into discredit. We’ve got a lot of people on our side now, or half on our side, because of the way we’ve done things. As soon as somebody gets killed we’re going to lose the lot of them!”

  The echoes of his anger died down the tunnel. Granpa groaned slightly as he shifted his position on his wuffling air-mattress. The hoot, thin and vague though it was, seemed to fill the whole space. Jake began to fancy it was mocking him. There was only one way to drive it out of his mind, to exorcise the hooting ghost in his dreams, and that was to find out what was making it. He stood up.