Jake leaned over the edge of the trap-door.
“Click your fingers,” he said. “There. Got you.”
Perhaps Jake’s touch made Martin careless, or perhaps Martin’s extra weight made the difference, but he’d climbed one more rung when there was a soft, tearing noise. Jake was jerked harshly forward. Iron clashed and tinkled. For a moment Jake thought he was going to be pulled through the trap-door, but Martin must have had some other handhold. He stopped falling when he’d seemed almost gone.
“Let go,” he gasped.
Jake did so. He heard that hand scrabble for a grip. Martin grunted with effort and seemed to flow up through the hole in one smooth rush and collapse panting, half across Jake’s body.
“Nasty,” he said. “First prize for gymnastics, though. Whew. You OK?”
“I think so. What happened to the ladder?”
“Gave completely. We’ll have to go on, now. Ready when you are.”
Now Jake had to move at a half-crouch, with his right arm checking the tunnel wall and his left stretched achingly in front of him to feel for projections from the low roof. Martin came behind with his hand on Jake’s shoulder. There was no rail-track, so the floor was easier. The windy snore came nearer, too steady a note to be what Jake had been hoping for, the thresh and gust of the true wind sweeping the outer world. The stream suddenly disappeared, flowing out of one of the blind galleries on their right and leaving only a slimy smear of gathered drops along the floor ahead. Springs in the depths of the hills must feed these drainage streams, Jake thought. The tunnelling miners let them out of the rock …
He scuttled on, dragging Martin behind him. His senses, particularly his hearing, seemed to have grown beyond the frontier of his skin, forming a sensitive shell of awareness outside his body, so that he knew the shapes and natures of the things around him without having to stop and think. Where rocks had fallen from the roof he avoided them almost unaware of what he was doing. The wind seemed to be blowing him along the tunnel like a dry leaf. The snoring noise ahead came nearer, but before they reached it he knew what it was—the miners had dug their tunnels to make a circle; down below the air-current had split, going along both arms of the circle; here it was joining up again to make its escape.
As they reached the place he paused. The dusty draught buffeted in from the left. It was only wind, and beyond it— not far on now, surely—must be the place where it rose to the outer air. The bye-pit, Mr Smith had called it. Where the men on the surface had dug their way down to fetch out the bodies of the dead miners. It was only wind, but it seemed like an obstacle.
“What’s up?” said Martin. “Hey! I can see! I had my eyes shut because of the dust. Why didn’t you tell me? Come on!”
He pushed past, dragging Jake through the mess of eddying air and on, while the wind, doubled in strength now, swirled them along. Ahead of him Martin stumbled and grunted.
“Look out, Jake. Rockfall.”
“1 thought you could see.”
“Just a patch of light. Hang on. The whole roof’s given here. Look out for falling bits …”
A dislodged stone rattled down a slope of rock. Martin’s voice moved upwards. Jake, probing carefully behind, nudged his foot against a boulder, got to his knees and began to crawl up a steep slope of scree. Behind him the air-current made its snoring noise where the two tunnels joined, but ahead he could hear the sound his ears had so long been pricked for, the swish and scurry of the sea-wind as it threshed among branches. As the rock-pile rose so did the roof, but not so sharply, so that the space into which he was climbing steadily narrowed. Ahead of him Martin wriggled and scrabbled, panting more with excitement than with effort. Suddenly these noises stopped.
“So far, so good,” said Martin in a meditative voice.
“Can you see out? How far is it?”
“I don’t know. Fifty foot? There’s bushes or something at the top. Umm. It’s not going to be that easy, Jake. Let’s see …”
“Don’t try it if …”
“I’ve got to, haven’t I? Don’t be stupid. I can’t get this far without giving it a go. The top half looks fairly possible—they’ve lined it with something—timber I think—and there’s ribs every so often. Provided they haven’t rotted. Hang on, that looks like a rung. Yes, and … There’s iron rungs up there, let into the side. If I could make it to there … trouble is, down here it’s all overhung where the shaft caved in …”
By this time Jake was crawling upward through a slot where the jagged rock of the roof touched his back. The air-current squeezed through the slot, plucking at his anorak and trousers in its rush to the outer world. The crannies between the rocks he was climbing were soft with fallen litter, leaves and twigs that had rotted to fine mould. He rose to his feet and stood beside Martin at the top of the cone of fallen rock. The air-current picked out the space around him, another cone, more sharply pointed, narrowing at the top to a shaft up which the air made its final swishing rush.
Martin was still muttering to himself in the vague, almost scholarly manner he used when he was tackling a job he thoroughly understood.
“That’s the only possible … umm … if that’s not loose … might do, provided … umm. Right, move over a bit, Jake.”
Jake shifted. He heard a grunt and crash, followed by the slither of smaller stones down the slope. Scrapings, clicks and mutters as Martin piled more stones. Time passed. They weren’t going to make it back, not in the half hour.
“Now, you come and stand here,” said Martin. “I’ve made a bit of a cairn. I’ll need you to steady me while I stand on it, and then I might have to put a foot on your shoulder, so be ready for that. Right?”
Jake did as he was told, stood, steadied, waited, took the sudden thrust of Martin’s foot, got both hands under it and heaved upwards just as his knees began to buckle with the weight. He lost his balance and fell slithering on the rough rock. Small stones pattered round him.
“Great” gasped Martin. “Better move out from there, in case anything big comes down. That includes me. Now …”
Aching from the fall Jake crawled back through the slit between the roof and the rock-pile and waited, listening. Martin climbed on, encouraging himself with mutters before each fresh effort. Once he let out a shout of surprise and a whole hail of stone rattled down. There was a long pause, then he began to mutter again. The sounds moved slowly further away. Jake sat in the nagging draught obsessed with exhaustion and loneliness. His body was full of pains, hands still sore from digging, head aching and puffy with its bruise, a different ache in his hip whose cause he couldn’t remember, and all the wincing little stiffnesses of joints and muscles that he had used to their limit and then rested on the hard earth of this chill, dank underworld.
“Jake,” called Martin’s voice softly above him.
“Uh huh?”
“I’ve got to the lining. I’m pretty sure I can make it from here. The wood’s rotten but the hoops are iron. Listen, I’m going to try and go quietly in case they’ve got someone watching. I’ll cuckoo if it’s all clear. Right?”
“OK. Good luck.”
“Same to you.”
The noises of climbing were smaller now and steadier, and moved more quickly away. Fragments still fell, but with soft paffing noises that told Jake they were things like flakes of rusted iron or splinters of rotten wood or fallen leaves dislodged from ledges. But as these sounds dwindled the noises of the mine began to seem louder again. Previously the snore of the two air-currents meeting had blanketed most of them off, but now that he was used to it he could sense again the whispering maze beyond. Jake thought of the old miners who had hacked out all these galleries, and their children hauling the coal away, bent double under loaded baskets, as tired as Jake felt now, as sore and aching, day after day, shift after shift …
A cuckoo called once, twice. He answered it, then twisted from hi
s crouch and half crawled, half slithered down to the old floor of the tunnel, He didn’t think of staying where he was. The important thing was to get back to Granpa—not to leave him alone, ill, dying perhaps, in Annerton Pit. The draught still snored monotonously into the tunnel and swished to freedom up the shaft. They must have taken more than half an hour, Jake thought—ten minutes—no, nearly twice that— to reach this place and longer still for Martin to climb out. So Dave had been bluffing. Or he’d come back …
Jake walked rapidly down the tunnel to the opening where the other draught bucketed in from the right and without hesitation turned into it. His sense of urgency drowned out the vague feelings of reluctance he’d had about facing this arm of the circuit. Because of the broken ladder he couldn’t go back the way they’d come, so this was the only chance. But it was new territory. Suppose Dave hadn’t been bluffing, but had been delayed, or was allowing them a bit more rope, then when he blocked the drainage shaft the air-current would die and it would be much harder for Jake to find his way. And at the same time the water would rise in the pool and cover the tunnel floor and go on rising. Granpa’s mattress would float, but how would Jake reach him? And if Granpa had another of his bouts of fever and started threshing about …
As fast as his sore hip allowed Jake limped along with the dusty wind in his face. There was nothing to show that this new gallery was different from one he had turned out of. It was narrow and low-roofed, with the same slimy floor, the same drips and creaks and echoes, and the same side-galleries making sudden changes in the resonance of its walls. The slime gathered and became a sloppy trickle. A spring-fed stream runnelled out from the right and joined this to make a whispering flow. That must finish up in the pool, Jake thought. If they block the air-current I’ll be able to follow that. It must be almost an hour now. Perhaps Dave has come back. I wasn’t there to listen for them. They’ve got Granpa. They’re stalking me through the mine …
The thought didn’t make him slow his pace; he hurried on, straining more carefully for sounds that didn’t belong in the pit. There was another obstruction ahead, a place where the tunnel narrowed and the wind came breathily through. He slowed as he approached it, reaching for the tangible edge of the draught until his hand touched wood, greasy and soft with decay, but with ridges like ploughland where the harder line of each year’s grain had resisted the rots. His thumb touched a rusted hinge. The remains of a door dangled half- open … Suddenly his mind spat up another little fragment of the Industrial Revolution—a child sitting hour after hour in the dripping dark by just such a door as this, opening it to let the miners through, shutting it behind them, opening, shutting, waiting, opening, shutting waiting—so that the precious air-currents should be forced to scour through all the windings of the mine. There had to be two air-shafts of course —you couldn’t rely on the drainage shaft not being full of water sometimes. Behind Jake lay the bye-pit where Martin had climbed up—that was to let the stale air out. Ahead somewhere lay the main shaft which had let the fresh air in. But that was blocked now, blocked for a hundred and forty years, and at its foot a whole shift of miners, men, women and children, had died.
The thought made Jake pause. Then with a little reluctant grunt he stepped through the door.
Chapter Eleven
The change came gradually, like the unnoticed onset of sleep, or like mist which has no tangible waterdrops in it but which you find has somehow soaked you through. Jake must have gone twenty paces before he realised that he was no longer hurrying, that he was moving with short, groping steps, that he had stopped listening properly to the mine-noises around him, that his senses had shrunk back into himself, that he was afraid. A vague fear, not of Dave, nor even of the dead miners—though it seemed to have begun with them. It was like stories of the purring growl of tigers which seems to come from every direction, so that a terrified traveller will suddenly panic and rush into the claws of the waiting monster. Jake stood still, but the vague noises of the mine seemed now to be closing in on him. It’s coming, he thought.
It’s coming, whispered the empty gallery beside him. His own lips must have spoken the words, though he couldn’t remember moving them. With a spasm of will he clapped his palms together. The wince of their soreness seemed to clear his mind just as the echoes of the clap cleared the stretching galleries. There was nothing near him, either before or behind, but as the echoes faded the muffling, almost furry gas of fear closed round him again. He could hear the mine-noises only if he actually listened to them. It’s dark, he thought. This is how sighted people feel in the dark …
“It isn’t dark for me.”
Dark for me.
He clapped his hands again and while the sound was still probing the galleries limped on, leaning forward against a pressure which wasn’t the wind. If it hadn’t been for Granpa he’d have turned back, but it wasn’t only for Granpa’s sake that he went on, it was for his own. What he needed was Granpa’s company, the protecting intelligence that would drive away these stupid terrors …
Slowly the terrors lost their power, or his own reason began to work again. The gallery he was in seemed to be reaching an end. The air-current was funnelling through narrows, close to the floor, and the stream was making a new noise, a quiet gurgle, as if it was slithering down a pipe. A larger stream whimpered somewhere beyond. In a few more paces it became clear that these noises were rising from below, so Jake dropped to his knees and crawled forward until his fingers touched the ridged softness of old baulk of timber laid across the floor—another trap-door. Of course, there must be a fault in the coal-bed, which meant that wherever a gallery reached it the miners had either to stop digging or climb down to work at a new level. If there was a trap-door there must have been a ladder. He lay flat and inched forward until his head and shoulders projected over the opening, through which the draught swirled up in wuffling eddies. He reached down.
Yes, a stout beam slanted down. A rusty rung joined it to the wall. The gallery below ran to left and right and a fair-sized stream rippled along it. Jake wriggled round to let his legs dangle and slowly eased his weight on to the first rung, gripping right to the slithery framework of the trap-door until he was sure the rung was firm. Then, just as carefully, on to the next, and the next. Not far now.
His head was just below the level of the trapdoor when he suddenly knew that something was watching him.
His limbs froze where they were. No amount of will could move a muscle, while his mind raced like a clockwork toy which has lost the part that is supposed to keep it ticking at an even pace. It raced, but got nowhere. What? Who?
Dave could have come up through the shaft again, found Granpa, followed the air-current through the maze, turned the other way at the first junction, and now be standing watching him come down the ladder. The harsh beam of Dave’s big torch might be on him now. But it didn’t feel like that.
“Dave?” he whispered.
The whisper crept into silences. There was nothing there, no one. Slowly Jake’s muscles unlocked, allowing him to finish the movement to the rung below. He was covered with sweat and shivering as though he’d woken from a nightmare, and his hand had gripped so hard at the beam of the ladder that he’d squeezed water from its surface and the drips were trickling down his wrist. Stupid boy, he thought. I wish Granpa was here. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to you when he’s around. It’s just because you’ve been so tired, so scared, bottling all your fright down, and now it’s come out like this. Get on with it. All you’ve got to do is follow that stream back to Granpa.
He started to scramble down the ladder just as if he’d been climbing on the solid bars of the school gymnasium, but three rungs down he trod into space. His left foot was already half off the rung above and his whole weight jerked suddenly on to the rung in his hand. The wood that held it ripped like wet cardboard. He grabbed at the next rung and missed as the back of his right ankle banged into the ring below the gap, t
ilting him out. For an instant he was free and falling, then the buffet of impact slammed into his back. He heard the air grunt violently out of his lungs before deafness and numbness closed in.
The “seeing” began while he lay on his back on the gallery floor. It wasn’t the instant of fierce flashes that came with a blow on the head. It happened so slowly that he didn’t really notice for a while. He was more aware of what seemed to be a huge soft weight lying on his chest. His legs wouldn’t move. The air came into his lungs in croaking pain. I’m only winded, he thought. That’s all. Winded. I’d better rest.
So he lay there, letting the jerking croaks turn to gasps and then steady into breathing, and became aware that there was colour in his mind, very misty but shaped and unmoving. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever “seen” before, neither the jagged flashes of pain nor the wandering vaguenesses of dream. It was all one colour, and made him think of heat, so he decided it might be dull red or orange, streaked with black. It was arranged in a rough swirl, with more and stronger streaks near the edges and at the centre a black hole.
It was a nuisance because it drove other things out of his mind. The strange glowing rings, which were there whether he opened or shut his eyelids, seemed to insist on his attention, when he rolled on to his stomach and levered himself to hands and knees they seemed to move with him. That meant they must be happening inside his head. Perhaps he’d done something to his brain in the fall. He felt sick, and sicker when he staggered to his feet and leaned groggily against the tunnel wall. The fall had certainly made his hip much worse. He stood shivering for a few seconds, tried three wincing paces and allowed himself to slide back to hands and knees. Crawl, he thought. Hello, the air-current’s stopped. They’ve blocked the shaft. Got to get back to Granpa. Not far now. Follow the stream. Granpa.
Back on his knees he found that the red rings were still there in his mind, more shaped and steady now. While he was wondering whether they might be connected with the damage to his balance he knew all at once that they weren’t only in his mind. There was too much depth and distance; they stretched away like the receding drips of the galleries, with the outer rings somehow near and the inner ones far. The hole in the middle was just distance beyond. He was seeing a tunnel —not “seeing” but seeing. As soon as he’d decided that he also saw that the bottom of the picture was different from the rest, flatter and not so heavily streaked with shadow. When he shut his eyes or moved his head from side to side the picture stayed just as it was. He didn’t see more of either wall. Still he was seeing a tunnel, this tunnel, the gallery he was in. In the dark.
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