Chapter Nine
In his dream the hooting ghost returned. In a curious way he knew where he was all the time he was asleep. He was trapped in a tunnel next door to the main Annerton Pit, where the ghost lived, and he and Martin had opened a crack between the two mines, thus letting the ghost come through. It chased them, hooting, down the tunnel. But at the same time the tunnel wasn’t just a drift-mine; it was also the long, echoing corridors of school, and the passages of Newcastle Police Station, and a hospital where Granpa was waiting for a doctor who never came while the blood dripped away from a wound in his wrist, splash, splash, splash. Down all these windings and through all these rooms Jake stumbled, looking for the doctor, with the ghost sometimes hooting almost at his shoulder-blades and sometimes advancing at monstrous speed from the furthest distance. All the time Granpa’s life was dripping away, splash, splash, splash.
He woke between one splash and the next. His hands were puffy and sore. His clothes were dank. All his body ached. The can was full. It had been full for some time, splashing in his dream. Martin was sprawled beside him on the groundsheet, breathing slow and deep.
“Mart! Mart! Wake up!”
“Uh?”
“The can’s full.”
“Uh? What? Rotten sort of alarm-clock, Uh? Lordie, but I needed that. You were dead right, Jake, not to let me go. How’s Granpa?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t hear him breathing.”
“I can. It’s all right, Mart.”
“He’s got to last another day. He’s got to! It isn’t just because he’s our grandfather, Jake. I’d feel just the same if I’d never met him in my life. They mustn’t start not minding if people die. What’s the point of busting yourself for peregrines and orchises if you stop worrying about people?”
They ate and went back to the flagstone. Stiffness and aches made Jake feel weak at first, and his hands winced from every touch, but he took off his socks and used them as gloves, and once they’d bullied their still sleep-drugged bodies into making the effort they found that the flagstone came up quite easily. The hoot changed its note as though they’d removed a stop from a giant musical instrument. The fresh, live sea air smelt like springtime. Martin knelt and craned through the gap.
“I can see a blob of light,” he whispered. “It’s still night but it’s not as dark as here. I’m going down. I wonder how deep that water is. Whee, it’s icy. Hang on, Jake. I’m just going to take a look-see. I won’t go without saying good-bye.”
Once more the note of the moving air changed, becoming muffled and erratic as Martin twisted through the gap. The ripple of the water changed too, so that for a few yards Jake could keep track of Martin’s progress down the adit by the swirl of the stream around his feet. He waited, crouching by the hole in the tunnel floor, thinking, This is too good to be true. This is King Solomon’s Mines. You’re trapped deep underground, but of course there’s a secret way out which you just happen to stumble on … He’d managed to suppress all hope by the time he heard the splash and ripple of Martin coming back up the adit. Something, even in those faint signals, told him that he’d been right.
“No good?” he said as Martin came slowly through the slot, all his tiredness back.
“How did you know? Never mind. Of all the foul luck!”
“What’s up?”
“There’s a sort of iron grating over the opening. Set into the rock. I don’t think I can shift it.”
“But Mr Smith’s Granny’s uncle got out.”
“It’s newer than that. Not dead new, but not a hundred years old either. They might have put it there to stop people climbing in—you know, when the hotel started or something —kids on holiday—you don’t want them disappearing into old coal-mines—of all the foul luck!”
He sat in silence, on the edge of tears. Jake knew it was better not to say anything for the moment, so he moved round the hole, knelt and poked his head through. The water raced past about two feet below him. The adit seemed to be a little wider than that, a smooth shaft, circular in section and running dead straight into the hill. As far as he could reach it was lined with brick.
“Hell and hell again!” said Martin. “No point sitting here. Hell! No point in going back to Granpa either—I’m not going to sleep again tonight. You’d better try, Jake.”
“I wonder what happens the other way,” said Jake.
Even as he spoke a curious tremor ran through him. It was as though the ghost, which so far had only haunted his dreams, had suddenly reached out an intangible tentacle and caressed his waking mind. If they were right—if this was the shaft down which Mr Smith’s Granny’s uncle had been washed—it led to Annerton Pit itself.
“Not much point going deeper in,” said Martin. “Out is what we want.”
“If the explosives blew up …” began Jake, then cut himself short. But it was too late.
“Hey, that’s a thought! Even if it brought the cliff down it wouldn’t matter. Somebody would come, and you could signal or shout from the grating!”
“No! Mart!”
Martin gave a sad chuckle.
“It’s OK, Jake, I couldn’t do it, not in cold blood. Actually walking up to the partition and kicking it in and blowing myself up. Suppose I’d been alone when I first thought of it … You know, I don’t think I could have done it that way, either. Being angry isn’t enough. You needn’t worry, Jake.”
A big load lifted. Consciously or subconsciously the idea had been nagging Jake’s mind all the time, almost like his silly notions about the ghost that came and went so erratically.
“That’s great,” he said.
“How far does it go, d’you think?” said Martin.
“No idea. I can’t hear beyond the hoot.”
“Let’s go, then. You up to it? Take off your shoes and socks and roll your trousers up. The water’s icy, but it’s only about six inches deep.”
Jake led the way. Beyond the flagstones the shaft was circular in section and lined with brick, a bit under three feet wide and high. He had to move at a baboon-like crouch with his hands trailing in the bitter stream and his back rubbing the brick arch above. In a few yards he had no feeling in his feet at all. Their bodies muffled the flow of wind so that the hooting came now in wavering and gusty spasms, almost as though the hill were trying to make up its mind whether to swallow them or spit them out.
The stream swished and chuckled. The far shuffle and grunt of the sea dwindled until even Jake could no longer hear it. The shaft became a lifetime, endlessly reaching into the earth and never arriving. Its slope was very slight, only enough to make the water run down, but even so Jake began to feel that they’d climbed so far that they must soon come out into open air. The endless sameness of the journey, and the exhausting gait, and the cold all began to drug his mind and body, so that it took him a while to notice that something was different after all—there was a change in the soft, relentless hoot that had filled his hearing since first they’d climbed into the shaft. For a long time it had been all round him, shapeless and borderless; now it was behind, back, somewhere else, and he was outside it.
“We’re getting somewhere,” he said.
“Great. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life doing this. Go careful, Jake—you don’t know what this drains out of.”
Jake crouched his way forward, feeling for footholds with his hands in the numbing water. Abruptly, in a very few yards, the floor of the shaft disappeared and at the same moment his head poked out into openness. He was still surrounded by rock but the new space seemed huge compared with the cramping shaft. When he clicked his tongue the echoes came sharply back from either side, but ahead of him they reached into distance. For a little way along that distance the water surface lay still, but further off it began to slither again. Water drips fell. A long way off something made a creaking groan. Jake froze at
this new sound, shook his head and clicked loudly back, listening and checking. Just beyond arm’s reach to his right sheer rock rose from the dead surface of the water, but to his left the wall was several feet away, and between it and the shaft-mouth was another surface, rising about two feet above the water. Bracing his right arm against the roof of the shaft to prevent himself toppling out into the pool he reached as far as he could to his left—yes, textureless under his numb fingers but perfectly solid was a wide shelf, the actual floor of the tunnel. The pool lay beside it, long and narrow. The mine drained into this pool and the shaft took the overflow out to the sea. Once more in the distance something groaned. He backed away down the shaft and explained what he’d found to Martin.
“Could you get out on to the shelf?” said Martin.
“Yes. Easy. Not so easy getting back, but I think I could do it. Do you want me to try?”
“No. Wait. We’ve got to think things out. Let’s go back for Granpa.”
“Mart, we’ll never get him up here! He’s much too ill.”
“Uh-huh? He’s lying on an inflatable rubber mattress. If we can get another of those flagstones up—I don’t see why we shouldn’t, now we can get our shoulders underneath— then we can drag him up the tunnel, lower him into the shaft and just float him up here.”
“What good’ll that do?”
“I’ve been thinking. If we can get him out of the way, then we can walk the flagstones down the tunnel and I think I could use their weight to rig up a sort of deadfall. You can unravel the food-sack for me. That’ll give me enough cord …”
“It won’t be very strong.”
“It won’t have to be. The stones will be balanced. It’ll only need a touch to topple them. If I’ve got enough cord to get right away up the tunnel into one of those cells, then I can topple the stones against the partition and set the explosives off …”
“It sounds hellish dangerous, Mart. And complicated.”
“Yeah. Two to one it won’t work. If it doesn’t, then we’ll have to explore further, see where this air-current goes to, see if I can get out that way.”
“Why not do that now, Mart? Leave Granpa where he is and …”
“Because I’ve got to give the other thing a try. If we can set the explosives off, then the whole oil-rig caper will be off. They won’t be able to do it. They’ll pack it in. But if I go and get the cops while they’re still setting up the oil-rig caper, then they’ll get charged with that. It’ll be almost as bad for G.R. as if they’d brought it off. Sorry, Jake …”
“But, Granpa … “
“Look, even supposing there’s a way out, I’d be lucky to make it before daylight. Then there’s every chance they’d spot me. So there’s no point in starting till after dark, anyway. Give me till then to try and set this other thing up. We can tell when by looking out the other end of the shaft. Please, Jake.”
Jake said nothing. While they’d been arguing he’d forgotten about the cramping shaft and the icy stream. He thought Martin was wrong, though he didn’t understand about the deadfall, but Martin was good at that sort of thing. If Martin said it might work, then it might. Even so, it was obviously better sense to go on, to try and find a way out now. There must be one for the wind to blow so steadily up the shaft. But he didn’t go on arguing, partly because he thought he wouldn’t win, but partly because he was afraid—afraid of the whispering, groaning maze of tunnels beyond the pool. Annerton Pit itself. He would rather go back than face that, now, so he gave in.
Martin said nothing on the way down until they reached the slot they had made into the drift mine. They were standing in the tunnel, enjoying the feel of straightening out hunched backs and cramped limbs, when he laughed.
“I’ve realised something about G.R.,” he said. “About life, I suppose. It’s not much of a problem being right. It’s doing right where the trouble begins—doing it and going on doing it while life comes up and hits you with situations where there aren’t any rights to do. Feel like lifting this flag? We’ll do it from this end. I’ll get under it and you stay up there. Right?”
To Jake’s astonishment it took them about a minute, though the stone must have been twice as heavy as the earlier one. They propped it against the tunnel wall and went to find Granpa. He was awake and in his right mind, though he couldn’t speak above a whisper. Martin explained his ideas.
“If you must you must,” said Granpa. “You’ll need to be at least forty yards away, lying flat on the floor in one of the cells. And there’s a good chance you’ll bring the roof down, even there. But provided you can get Jake clear …”
“Then it’s my funeral,” said Martin, very cheerfully. “Now let’s see about packing you up. We’ll drag you up on the ground-sheet so that we don’t puncture the mattress …”
That part of the plan went easily too. They were manoeuvring to lower Granpa and the mattress into the drainage shaft when Martin said, “Hello, it’s getting light. Good. I’ll be able to do some of the work up here, see what knots I’m tying. Ready, Granpa?”
The actual lowering was tricky, but didn’t take long. The journey up the shaft was torture. Jake shuffled along backwards, huddled and icy, with his fingers hooked through the two brass rings let in to the corners of the inflatable mattress. Martin pushed behind. Every twenty yards or so they had to rest, but resting in that position was almost as painful as moving, and seemed to let the chill of the stream soak deeper into the body. Then movement brought no warmth back, but only reminded the body how tired it was. The bruise on the side of Jake’s face, which so far he’d mostly forgotten about, began to wince with fresh aches. He lost himself in the endless ritual of rest and shuffle, rest and shuffle. The water swished round the mattress and the wind whimpered as if it were complaining of the way their bodies blocked its flow.
Jake was resting when he realised that they’d at last reached the end. He knew before he noticed that the wind-noise had changed. As soon as he consciously listened he could hear the difference, but before that he had been aware of something else—the sense of narrowness ending, the wider space beyond, and in that space something waiting.
“On we go, Jake. Can’t be much further now.”
“It isn’t. I can hear the end.”
“Great. It’s beginning to give me the creeps, this hole.”
The something didn’t seem to move or react as Jake, swallowing hard, backed painfully up towards it. At the end of the shaft he stopped, twisted round, swallowed again and clicked his tongue. The noise floated out over the pool, meeting no new obstacles. At the same instant the something seemed to withdraw, to vanish without one tremor of movement into the dripping galleries beyond. It was here, down in this dark maze, that the miners and their wives and children had rushed and huddled. For a moment Jake knew the same panic. He almost turned back down the shaft, but the thought of Granpa stopped him. What could he say to Granpa? At the same instant another thought came to him. The miners had been used to the dark, but even so they had been sighted people—used to the dark but used, too, to the prick of light at the end of a gallery where candle shone, to the approaching glow of a lamp carried by a comrade. If Granpa was right and there’d been an explosion that would have blown out all the candles and they’d have been afraid to light another for fear of more explosions. They’d have been in total dark, where the mind breeds its own terrors.
“It isn’t dark for me,” Jake muttered.
He moved at once, giving his own mind no time to hesitate again. Crouching at the mouth of the shaft he reached out with his left hand and as soon as it touched the shelf which was the main tunnel floor he threw his weight on to that arm and brought his right arm over beside it. He stayed poised for an instant, bridged over the pool, then bent his knees and jumped up and sideways in a gawky half-vault. His left leg dragged in the water but it was already soaked from the stream in the shaft. His right knee found the ledg
e. Done it!
“All right,” he said, lying down and reaching out across the pool to feel for the mattress as Martin floated it clear. Nothing happened. Martin was muttering to himself—swearing quietly. Jake realised that he too was recovering from a sudden wave of fright.
“Come on, Mart. It’s OK. I’m ready.”
Deliberately he spoke in a louder voice. The gallery beyond him echoed, “Ready, ready, ready.” Martin stopped swearing. The mattress floated smoothly out into the pool, so that Jake, tugging at one corner, could drift it up alongside the shelf he was on. He pulled it well clear, went back, found Martin’s groping hand and showed him how to cross the gap. At last they stood panting side by side.
“What a place!” whispered Martin. “What a place!”
Jake could hear the shudder in his voice but knew that he wasn’t going to admit that he’d been on the edge of panic. Jake didn’t want to say anything either—he didn’t like the idea of his imagination playing tricks on him like that. It was over now. The world was real and sensible again. Even the hoot in the shaft seemed reassuring, steadied to its normal note now that their bodies were out of its path.
“How are we going to get Granpa up here?” said Martin. “It’s too far to lift.”
“Let’s try the far end. The water isn’t falling in, it’s more sort of slithering,” said Jake.
He walked up beside the pool and found that it ran for almost twenty yards. Half-way along it a side-gallery opened on the left and a thin smear of water ran across the ledge and trickled into the pool, but at the far end a much larger stream, as big as the flow in the drainage shaft, rustled down a shallow slope to the water.
“It’s all right,” he called. “We can drag him out here.” Behind him, loud as a voice at his shoulder, the echo answered, “Here. Here. Here.”
Ten minutes later Jake was sitting on a pile of coal at the entrance to the side-gallery trying to think himself warm. Granpa lay on the floor beside him breathing so faintly that Jake could barely hear him. Martin was further along, leaning against the wall while he massaged his own legs, and muttering under his breath, still occasionally caught in the backwash of the retreating wave of terror.
Annerton Pit Page 12