Annerton Pit

by Peter Dickinson

  Jake kept telling himself that he’d got over that. It had been a product of his own shock and tiredness, and possibly too he’d picked up a feeling from Martin—that’d explain their shared fright—and Martin had every right to be frightened of what he was going to have to do down in the drift-mine. There’d been nothing there—only Jake’s fear. Anything else was nonsense.

  And yet he couldn’t help listening with pricked ears to the noises of this place as though a real monster stalked its galleries. Far off in various distances he could trace the rustle and pattering of water. The stream slithered in at one end of the pool and out at the other. The wind in the shaft hooted steadily. Then, loud and near, came the creaking groan he’d heard before. His nape prickled and his breathing stopped. “What the hell’s that?” whispered Martin.

  “Timber,” muttered Granpa. “Old pit-prop. Nothing. Nothing.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Martin. “Right. Back to work, all. Jake, I’ll need you for a bit, if you can face it.”

  “OK.”

  “Right. You go first. I’ll anchor you here while you find the hole. Where are you? Got you. Right.”

  Leaning across the pool Jake found the curve of brickwork that marked the mouth of the shaft. He focused his hearing on the ripple of water, trying to judge the swing of his leg to bring his foot down at the point where it left the pool. The moan of wind in the shaft wavered, almost died, rose again and dwindled. Jake froze on the brink of movement.

  “There’s someone in the shaft,” he whispered.

  “Can’t be.”

  “Listen.”

  Now he was sure of it. When he’d been in the middle of the shaft the wavering and whimpering had sounded different because it was all round him, but he knew it was the same effect.

  “Hell!” said Martin. “Oh, hell!”

  “They’re quite a long way down,” said Jake. “We might be able to find the way out. This air must go somewhere.”

  “They’ll have torches,” said Martin. “They’ll be able to move quicker than us—quicker than you, even, Jake. And if we’re dragging Granpa.”

  “You leave me here,” whispered Granpa. “I won’t last long, in any case. I’m pretty well done for.”

  “No you’re not!” snapped Martin. “Jake, look, they’ve still got to get out of that hole and cross the pool. They can’t fight while they’re doing that. They’ve got to come one at a time. If you could find something to chuck at them …”

  “I was sitting on a pile of coal. There were some pretty hefty bits.”

  “That’ll do. A dozen good lumps, at least.”

  Choosing the pieces of coal and ferrying them to where Martin waited tense by the mouth of the shaft, Jake didn’t pause to think what they’d do, supposing they won this skirmish. His mind was filled with a pounding fury, a lust to lash out, to wound and kill, to show these people that if they hurt him they’d get hurt back. Supposing Martin got in a good shot with his first lump it might lay the leading man out—he’d fall into the pool and drown. Jake thought eagerly about this. His fingers caressed the jaggedness of the chunk of coal he was carrying.

  “If they’ve got torches,” he whispered, “you’ll be able to see to aim.”

  “Right. How near are they?”

  “Long way still. They’re probably checking the grating at the bottom. I won’t know till I hear the water-noise change. The wind-noise is too difficult.”

  “OK. Fetch us a few more missiles. I’ll probably see their torches first.”

  It was a long time before that happened. Jake found more than twenty good pieces of coal and arranged them against the end wall of the gallery where he could pick them up without fumbling. He was crouched beside them, shivering with tension, when Martin whispered, “There’s a light coming … no … yes …”

  Jake strained to listen. Yes, the stream had changed its sound and was lisping past obstacles that came and went. He heard a distinct splash and the mutter of a voice. He found his jaw was aching from the force with which he’d been clenching his teeth. Martin was breathing in slow, deep gulps, as if he was in a trance. A voice, hollow with the resonance of the shaft, said, “We’re getting to the end. Hang on.” The sound of the stream steadied, rustling past an obstacle only a foot or two from the pool.

  “Hang on,” said the man—it was the one Jake thought of as the schoolmaster. “Deep water. I thought you said the old boy was too groggy for this sort of thing.”

  “Get on,” said the muffled voice of the man behind. “See what’s round the corner.”

  The ripple changed. Martin’s arms swooshed down. The man’s grunt of surprise became a yell of pain choked off in a splash. There was a rattle and a different yell inside the shaft. Jake found he was screaming in a strange, harsh voice like a parrot’s, “Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” The yells and thuds and screams came moaning and whining back from the echoing depths of the mine. When Jake tried to pass Martin a fresh lump he found he must have thrown the one he was holding ready—and only then he remembered his round-arm swing at the mouth of the shaft. A ricochet off the brickwork must have caught the second man hard enough to make him yell. As the echoes died there came a soft, threshing noise where the stream ran into the shaft. Martin was still breathing with dream-like slowness as he bent to scrabble up another lump of coal. He stood upright, paused an instant and grunted with effort as his arms swooshed down. This time there was no yell, only a thud and splash.

  “Oil Stop that! You’ll kill him!” shouted the second man.

  Jake had a fresh lump ready but Martin twisted the other way to find one for himself. Before he was upright again Jake heard a sloppy, dragging sound in the mouth of the shaft. Once more the stream changed its ripple, as though an obstruction had been pulled away.

  “Hold my arm,” said Martin. “Stop me falling in.”

  He found Jake’s hand without hesitation. Jake took the strain, leaning away from the pool. Martin’s free arm swished through the air. At almost the same moment came another thud and yell from the shaft, followed by more dragging sounds, dwindling as the man hauled his unconscious comrade out of range. Suddenly Martin laughed. The wild sound echoed among the tunnels like the cry of a hunting beast. He picked up another lump, leaned out again over the pool and swung. This time there was no more than a rattle and a splash. Jake realised that he’d been moving with sudden certainty.

  “They’re too far down, Mart. Can you see?”

  “He dropped his torch in the pool. It’s one of those waterproof ones and it’s still shining down there. I can see just a bit. I laid him out, Jake … I may have killed him … You know, I wanted to kill him … I never thought …”

  Martin took one more long, deep gasp and let it go as a sobbing sigh. Jake too, felt the tension going. His throat was sore with shouting. He was very tired. It was an effort to force himself to listen to the noises in the shaft. Murmur of voices, one asking a question, the other gasping an answer.

  “It’s all right,” whispered Jake. “He’s alive. I can hear them talking.”

  “Thank God!”

  “Hold it! He’s coming back. He’s moving carefully.”

  “Hell! All right, if that’s the way they want it …”

  They took up their positions again. Jake’s prickling awareness reached out into all the maze of the mine. He tried to concentrate on the small sounds in the shaft, but the drips and creakings in the galleries kept snagging at his mind. They seemed to come nearer and then retreat in slow pulses, as though they were sounds set up by the movement of a live creature, like the erratic crackle of dry leaves made by a predator stalking through undergrowth. The man in the shaft, carefully though he was moving, couldn’t prevent the stream rippling around his feet. The ripples came nearer. They were close. Jake touched Martin’s knee and pointed to the shaft. He heard Martin’s arms rise above his head, but this time his br
eathing was normal. The man paused just inside the mouth of the shaft. Jake could hear no change in the noise of the water, but all at once Martin’s arms whooshed down. There was a light, puffing sound blotted out by a splash. Martin grabbed at the lump of coal Jake held ready and as he threw it an appalling clamour filled the galleries, numbing Jake’s hearing for several seconds. Then Martin was shouting, sour and angry.

  “… keep this up all day if you want!”

  More echoes.

  “He’ll have the roof down,” whispered Granpa as they died.

  “You hear that, Dave?” snapped Martin. “You fire your gun again and you’ll have the roof down.”

  “Come off it,” said Dave.

  “You come off it. My grandfather’s a mining engineer. He knows what he’s talking about. That brickwork in there’s a hundred years old and the mortar’s soft as bread. You want it down on you, and the water piling up, and you drowning underneath?”

  Silence.

  “What happened?” whispered Jake.

  “He rolled up his jersey or something,” muttered Martin. “Made me think it was his head. Took a shot at me before I’d got something else to chuck. He won’t catch me like that again.”

  They waited in aching tautness. Slowly Jake began to feel that they were not alone, that somewhere close by in one of the galleries a presence had appeared and was waiting. Angrily he shook his head. He’d been through all this. When you’re tired and frightened your mind plays tricks on you. That was all.

  As if to prove it the imagined horror vanished at the sound of Dave’s voice.

  “All right,” he said, speaking quietly and quickly. “If that’s the way you want it. You’ve caused enough trouble already, and I’ve got better things to do than sitting here arguing. You can stay here or come down after me. It’s up to you. You’ve got half an hour to make up your minds. If you aren’t out by then I’m going to block this tunnel. The water’ll pile up, like you say, and you’ll be the wrong side of it. You think anyone’ll come and look for you up here? Not bloody likely. Got it? Half an hour. So long.”

  He seemed almost to scuttle away down the stream. The movement made Jake realise something that he hadn’t noticed while he’d been absorbing the actual meaning of Dave’s threat. On the surface Dave’s voice had been in key with that meaning, impatient, angry, decisive. But underneath had been something else. Dave had been frightened. Not frightened of Martin’s missiles—with a little more effort he could surely have forced his way out of the shaft and on to the ledge where they huddled.

  But he hadn’t, because he’d been frightened of Annerton Pit.

  Chapter Ten

  “Half an hour,” said Martin. “We’d better get going.”

  “Where?”

  “See if we can find where this wind goes out. How far will it be, Granpa?”

  “I don’t know,” whispered Granpa. “Not too far. Not a big mine.”

  “Dave maybe bluffing, but I’m not risking anything on that. Say ten minutes there. See if it’s any use. Ten minutes back if it isn’t. That gives us ten minutes to get back down the shaft before he blocks it. We’ll be going with the stream. OK?”

  “What about the torch?”

  Martin hesitated.

  “Too deep,” he said. “I don’t think I can make it. You can take me, Jake. That’s just as good.”

  “OK. Give me your hand.”

  “Fast as you can go. So long, Granpa.”

  The gallery was lower and narrower than the drift-mine had been. Martin had to stoop, and Jake was constantly aware of the rough-hewn roof only an inch or two above his head. The floor was treacherous—there seemed to be a series of ridges across it, sometimes squishy but sometimes hard enough to trip over. Martin kept stumbling. Galleries opened to right and left at much more regular intervals than in the drift-mine, and at some of these entrances the air-current swirled and flapped, but mostly it drove steadily on. The tunnel shaped itself ahead in drips and the rustle of the stream and the echoes of their own stumbling footsteps. Hurry drove out fear, except that once or twice Jake had to make an effort of will to ease his grip on Martin’s hand. If it hadn’t been for the ridges …

  Martin caught his foot and fell sprawling.

  “These damn things,” he muttered. “You’d have thought they’d have had the sense to make the floor level.”

  Jake hadn’t thought at all. He’d just accepted the mine as it was, an obstacle to be got through. But now Martin had made the point he noticed that the ridge he was standing on was firmer than most and flat-topped. He probed sideways with his shoe and found a soft line of something—rotten wood, by the feel, running at right-angles to the ridges along the floor of the tunnel.

  “They’re sleepers,” he said. “There must have been a railway track along here, one with wooden rails.”

  “Right,” said Martin. “Let’s try taking longer steps. What’s that noise?”

  “Falling water, I think. But there’s something else first.”

  They moved on more smoothly, now that they’d found that the sleepers were regularly spaced, but in another thirty yards Jake almost tripped over a sudden soft obstruction. He’d been pacing automatically from sleeper to sleeper, concentrating on the area ahead where the air-current audibly moved in a muddled way, and the small echoes came back as if from a blank wall.

  “Hold it,” he said. “We’ve reached a sort of junction. Left or right?”

  He realised that they had come up the leg of a T, whose arms now stretched to either side. From both directions he could hear the ripple of a drainage stream but from the right this was confused by the splash of falling water. What he’d tripped over was the point of the crossing rail-tracks.

  “Left,” said Martin. “The other way sounds a bit wet.”

  A stumble or two among the irregular sleepers of the junction, and Jake could move forward again at a smooth pace. Everything was just the same as in the other tunnel—the stream, the drips, the creaking echoes, the guiding air-current—but it felt quite different. Suddenly it was harder to take the full pace from one sleeper to the next, and Martin’s grip on Jake’s hand was so tight that it hurt.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” muttered Martin.

  “The wind’s not so strong,” whispered Jake.

  “Let’s try the other way.”

  “OK.”

  They turned back into the wind, but the intangible pressure behind them seemed stronger, blowing them through the muddle of the junction and on into the tunnel beyond.

  “That’s more like it,” said Martin in a normal voice.

  Jake grunted. Consciously he was aware that the air-current was no stronger in this arm of the galleries, but still it seemed easier to follow. Ten minutes, he thought. How long have we had? Four minutes? Five—only five? The noise of falling water grew steadily nearer, a thin stream tumbling from a height, like a cistern overflowing from an upper storey into a street below. The sound set up a mess of echoes, but among them Jake was aware of a low mass blocking the gallery almost from side to side. He slowed, clicked his tongue and stretched out his free hand. Three more paces brought him into touch with what at first seemed just a pile of coal, only too high for its width. He moved his hand and found that the stuff was heaped into a square sided wooden container, about three feet wide—a little truck—no, a whole line of trucks. He nudged with a foot and found a small iron wheel which had pressed right through the rotted rail below.

  “Trucks,” he said. “We’ll have to squeeze past. It sounds like there’s a blank wall beyond.”

  “The air’s still blowing.”

  Jake stood still and tried to tune out the water noises. He could just hear the faint rub of wind passing a narrow place, quite high.

  “We’re going to have to climb,” he said. “You can’t see daylight or anything?”

 
; “Nowt. This doesn’t look too good, Jake.”

  “Let’s give it a try.”

  Edging up beside the trucks Jake found that the gallery widened as if to make room for miners to work alongside them. He was beginning to stride forward when his shin banged into a hard bar.

  “Hold on,” he said. “There’s something here. It might be a ladder. Yes. Iron rungs. They go into the rock on that side. It’s a big wooden beam this side …”

  He clutched gingerly at the timber. It was slimy with the spray of the tumbling water and as he grasped it more water oozed out between his fingers, like juice from a squeezed orange.

  “The wood’s dead rotten,” he said. “I’ll try the first rung.”

  The rusted iron was stout and round at each end, but in the middle it was bowed down and flattened on top, worn and bent to that shape by the endless climbing of miners, children no older than Jake, very likely, carrying their own weight of coal in baskets on their backs. Jake trod right at the wall end of each rung, counting as he climbed. The fourth was loose and the soggy timber barely held it in place. The ninth was missing and the last three were loose like the third. There were sixteen in all. At the top Jake found the rotted remains of a large trap-door through which the up-draught funnelled. It opened into yet another gallery with its rustling drainage-stream, the water of which fell to the floor below. This gallery sounded lower and narrower than the one they’d been in. Somewhere along it a different movement of wind made a steady, dull snore.

  “I’m up,” he called. “It’s all right if you put your weight close to the wall. I’ll tell you which rungs are dicey.”

  Martin came steadily up, counting the rungs as he climbed. At the twelfth rung he stopped.

  “Where are you?” he said.