Annerton Pit

by Peter Dickinson

  It didn’t seem at all impossible or strange. Jake accepted it the way one accepts the impossibilities of a dream, though he was sure he was awake. He began to crawl painfully along the gallery, dragging his leg so that his hurt hip bothered him as little as possible. In a yard or two his right hand touched a raised ridge in the floor, running along the gallery, the remains of a wooden rail that had once carried the little coal-trucks to the main shaft. Now in the picture he could see two faint markings along the floor which must be the same rails. Near the furthest end of them, deep in the glowing tunnel, he saw a movement.

  It was all of the same colour as the rest, but somehow more intense. He stopped to concentrate on it, but it seemed to have gone still so that he could barely make it out. He tried to listen for it, but his hearing was somehow muffled, or his brain wasn’t working properly. Perhaps the balance of his senses was upset by the new problem of sight. He had lost confidence in sounds and echoes, and the ripple of the stream seemed to drown out more distant whispers. Irritably he clicked his tongue against his palate.

  At once the tunnel quivered and, without losing shape, receded violently. Jake thought that perhaps the picture was in his mind after all, and that the vibration of the click had shaken it out of place, but as he started to crawl on he saw the thing on the floor, further off now, beginning to move again. It was a small, rounded mass, shadowless, moving stumpy legs. He thought it was coming along the tunnel towards him.

  A piercing shaft of excitement tingled through him, a sort of pure inquisitiveness, having nothing to do with his exhaustion or the danger he was in. It seemed almost to come from outside him and race along his nerves like an electric current. Yes, the blob was coming nearer, although (he now realised) his own crawl along the tunnel didn’t seem to have anything to do with this. He could hear when he passed the entrance to a side-gallery but he didn’t see it happen. The walls of the tunnel—if that was what the red streaks were—didn’t move or change. Now he could see that the blob did indeed have legs, two front legs, each with a joint near the middle, and two back legs, thicker and apparently jointless, but each trailing a sort of extra bit behind. It looked very clumsy.

  This was near enough. Jake stopped, and at once the blob became still. Vaguely, beneath the surface interest and excitement, Jake was aware of something else, something not felt through his senses and especially not through this new strange sense of seeing, but still known. There seemed to be two Jakes, one of them watching the clumsy blob and the other one (who was really the same one) aware of another presence in the tunnel, a presence that had nothing to do with the blob, something quite different, quite different from anything Jake had ever known, a sort of tension, as sharp and definite as the smell of acid in a laboratory.

  “Hello,” whispered Jake.

  Instantly the tunnel did its trick again, quivering, leaping away and steadying while the sound of Jake’s voice still hung in the air. He didn’t think the sound-waves of his whisper had met any obstacle, certainly nothing large enough to fit the presence he had felt filling the gallery—filling, it had seemed for a moment, the whole of Annerton Pit. Anyway it was gone now, and there was the dumpy, glowing blob in the distance. Once again Jake felt the same shudder of electric fascination with it; and again, too, he felt the existence of two linked Jakes, this obsessed, inquisitive person who was doing the probing and seeing, and a more familiar Jake, very hurt and tired, longing to get back to Granpa but all the time being dragged into this unwanted, dream-like adventure.

  By now the first Jake’s attention was so focused on the crawling blob that it took him some time to notice with his other sense that the gallery was changing. The stream a little way ahead had begun to run with more of a rattle, and the echoes came back from a wider space. Once he’d registered this he saw that the picture had changed too. It was the same at the centre, with arching streaks surrounding the dark hole of distance, but near the edges the streaks had opened out. The floor was rough and tumbled. To one side, out of this roughness, rose an angular shape, which without thinking he knew was not important to what was happening now, a bit of old mining machinery, perhaps. It barely entered Jake’s consciousness, which was fully engrossed with the crawling blob, and also with the large, strange presence he had felt before. That was there, bodiless, beneath the tingling surface of excitement. He was puzzled because he ought to have been able to feel with his hands the tumbled mess in the foreground of the picture, but the floor was just as before, smooth and slippery, with the rotted remains of the old track running steadily on.

  He was beginning to feel that a trick was being played on him, that the floor of the gallery was somehow being made to flow backwards like a conveyor belt, keeping him always at a distance from whatever it was, however far he crawled, when the blob reached the edge of the tumbled area. At the same time his forward hand touched rock, with water trickling down it.

  Down it.

  The stream was running the wrong way.

  The small shock of contact with the icy water became an explosion in his mind. All his perceptions seemed to burst apart. He just managed to bite back the yell that flowed to his lips. The debris of that explosion in his mind settled back into new places. He found himself hearing the same things, feeling the same things, seeing exactly the same picture as before. But it was all different.

  He wasn’t seeing, he was “seeing”.

  The picture was happening inside his mind.

  It was being put there.

  There was a something in the tunnel, a large, bodiless presence.

  The tingling excitement was its excitement. The inquisitiveness was its inquisitiveness. The picture was its picture which it was somehow putting into Jake’s mind.

  This glowing tunnel, this crawling blob were what it was perceiving.

  The tunnel was Annerton Pit. And the blob was Jake.

  Those jointed fore-limbs were human arms, those hind-limbs with the useless trailing parts were the legs of a crawling boy—a boy who had been crawling away from Granpa, away from the pool, out of the section of tunnel where the air-current flowed, against the stream.

  Jake stayed motionless for a long while. This was not the rigid trance of nightmare but a willed and deliberate stillness. He could see clearly now that the blob in the centre of the picture, the glowing focus of the thing’s attention, must be himself; but at the same time he became aware that this was only the focus. Somehow at the same time the thing was observing other parts of the mine, tunnels which must be far out of any line of sight; the whole maze was in its consciousness, and thus dimly in Jake’s consciousness too; but all its attention was gathered into this one spot where a bit of old winding machinery rose gawkily from the rubble of rock that had fallen when the main shaft of Annerton Pit had collapsed in the Disaster. Jake knew that he had come to the place where the miners had died.

  He was afraid, but his fear was like his pain, something he must ignore now and cope with later. He knew the creature didn’t like noise—at least three times it had leaped away— flicked along the tunnels in a single quiver of retreat—when he had clapped or spoken or clicked. It was timid, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous. Jake didn’t know whether it could actually harm his body—it seemed to have no body of its own—but he had felt its touch on his mind. It mightn’t know what it was doing, but when it had finished …

  He willed a question, concentrating on that and nothing else, trying to push it out like a radio beam.

  What are you?

  He felt the response coming at him like a squall hitting a sailing dinghy. The mine seemed to heel and wallow under the blast of it. It came not in words or in pictures, not in ideas or knowledge. Just as the wail of a small baby comes out of it as a pure expression of its own hunger or fear or discomfort, without any thought taking place between the feeling and the yell, so the creature’s answer flooded out of it. How did Jake experience it? At the time
it wasn’t like that. He was part of the experience, like a whine in the dinghy’s rigging or a vibration in the baby’s wail. But afterwards he thought that he had felt the answer with whatever sense it was that allowed him sometimes to feel things which didn’t come to him through his bodily senses—things like Granpa’s presence in the caravan or Martin’s unhappiness. Only this sense was normally used for very faint signals. Suppose somebody has lived all his life in a world of very faint sounds, then if he is suddenly exposed to normal every-day sounds he will be deafened. In much the same way Jake was stunned by the force-flow of the creature’s being. It became unbearable. He straightened from his crawling position and put his hands to his face. At the first flick of movement the force-flow stilled. The creature was still there, though, watching him, wary and thrilling.

  He knelt for a while, trying to shiver himself back on to an even keel. Then again he formed a thought in his mind and pushed it out.

  Too much.

  It wasn’t any good. The same thing happened, the same overwhelming blast of the creature’s being, the same dazing chaos. This time he knew what to do and deliberately flung out an arm like a conductor stilling an orchestra. The blast stopped at once, but this time Jake immediately tried to echo back what he had felt. He allowed the echo to die, and waited. The presence seemed to withdraw, to contract. The picture in his mind became very faint. The drips along the galleries and the rustle of the stream were suddenly louder, and he was aware that his hip was throbbing with a steady, painful pulse. Then the creature asked a question.

  ?

  It was like that. Not a question with any shape. Just a question on its own, like a note of music. But Jake knew how to answer because he had asked a question himself. What am I? he thought, and immediately tried to answer. Words were no good. It was no use thinking I am a human being, a boy, lost, trapped. He had to think sensations to explain what it was to be human, what it was to be Jake. He hadn’t time to order his thoughts into any shape—in any case he was too exhausted to think that way. He simply allowed the memories to come: the taste of peanut butter thickly spread on fresh white toast, while coffee made the warm kitchen smell like a shop, and Mum rattled at the stove getting Dad’s egg just right; the thrum and hurry of riding on the BMW pillion; the shrilling of a school playground; lying on sand with the basting sun above and small waves flopping a few yards below; a Rock concert—Deep Purple bashing it out and the fans screaming; the main road in the evening rush-hour, with the churning traffic and the sense of all those people, each a little cell of his own concerns, going past in one solid tide; waking in a warm bed, feeling one’s bones long and loose; Mum laughing; the baby next door crying; the sense of gone-ness when Granny—Dad’s Mum—had died; a picnic on Old Winchester Hill, with thin sun and chill clean air; pain; small worries; swimming; measles; laughter; homework; climbing a tree; fear …

  The creature cut him short, echoing the remembered fear of an old nightmare of Jake’s—one about being shut in a cupboard with a snake—with a pulse of terror, terror like an amplified drum-beat that vibrates right through the listener.

  Everything Jake had been trying to do, to think, to send across, was blotted out. He might have yelled. He didn’t know what happened next. There was a gap, and then he was lying half across the wet rocks, dazed and sick. He struggled to his knees and realised that the creature was still there, watching.

  Not only watching but waiting. Now it was Jake’s turn. He saw it was no use making his thoughts gentle in the hope of a gentle response—if a voice only reaches you faintly you try to shout back—so he put his last energies into beaming the question across the cavern.

  What are you?

  The answer came strongly but not in that first impossible blast. There was very little in it Jake could grasp. It was like hearing music so strange that you can’t even recognise that it’s music at all. Pressure of rocks. Growth like roots along the shifting pressure-lines. Waiting that wasn’t waiting, because time wasn’t the time Jake knew. A curious caution and wariness, as if the life that was fulfilling its nature in this way was somehow a frontier life. Other lives—not the scurrying crowds of Jake’s experience, but few, remote, deeper, safer, know along fine tendrils of contact, all waiting through the time that wasn’t time. Not simply waiting. Waiting for …

  Then, as if in an instant, the pain, the wound. The thing in the pit might have no body, at least not a body of animal cells like Jake’s, but it knew about pain. Pain.

  Jake returned to consciousness and found himself lying on his chest with his face turned sideways and water seeping along the sleeve of his anorak, but he felt too weak to move. The pain was over but the wound was there. The wound was Annerton Pit—these tunnels that led to the world of light, where the wind moaned through, scouring the maze with faint wafts of the living sea. The thing in the pit was powerless to heal the wound—it couldn’t make one splinter of rock fall from roof or wall. That was not its nature. But it would grow its own protection, like a shell—a shell of fear, a barrier to drive back any creatures from beyond the frontier that might probe along the galleries of the wound and reach the central web of nerves where the thing crouched, aching for the old inviolable dark of its waiting.

  That was a long time, but at last it changed. Something had come into the wound, a creature from beyond the frontier. There were others with it, but there was this one … It had moved through the maze, at first with others, then alone. It had crawled to this place. It was Jake.

  There was a pause. Once more the creature asked its question.

  ?

  (Are you what the waiting was for? Do you belong in this dark?)

  No, answered Jake.

  His lips moved.

  “It isn’t dark for me,” he said.

  The glowing tunnel faded in his mind. The stream tinkled into silence. Smell died. Feeling died.

  “It isn’t dark for me,” he whispered.

  Then it was.

  Chapter Twelve

  Stinging with fine rain the wind slashed steadily by. The BMW’s engine seemed to like the wetness in the air, gnawing its way south with gusto. The tyres made a whipping noise as they bit through the film of water to the tarmac below. Other traffic flung up belts of spume—land-spume, smelling of oil and dust, quite different from the salt-spume of the North Sea. The cars that overtook the BMW came past sedately, slowed to the legal speed-limit on catching sight of the police car which was escorting the Bertolds home. On empty patches of road Jake could hear the swish of its tyres and the purr of its engine right at the limit of his hearing.

  The police had wanted to drive the boys home and ship the BMW down separately. They were scared of losing their prize witnesses in some silly spill, but Martin, trapped now in the machinery of a big trial, had been stubborn about this small patch of freedom. He would drive his own bike and Jake would come with him.

  With his head tucked sideways out of the rain, huddled against Martin’s shoulder, Jake could sense his brother’s misery and shame at the role he now must play, the accuser of his comrades, the tool of the very system that scarred the green hills, poisoned river and sea, murdered plant and creature, and spun mankind faster and faster towards destruction. Poor Martin, the official hero, the self-known Judas. He didn’t even think that what he was doing was right. It was the result of escaping from Annerton Pit, and that had been right. But the rest, the chain of results that followed from that escape … Martin wouldn’t talk about it. Jake thought Martin might still refuse to give evidence, but would that be right, either? The police had plenty of evidence without him, but by allowing himself to be a tool he might be able to show that the G.R. movement didn’t have to lead along the road that ends with rows of the innocent dead laid out on stretchers in front of the TV cameras.

  They had nearly begun on that road this time. It had been touch and go with Granpa, a doctor at the hospital said. Jake had spent three d
ays in the hospital, recovering from what the doctors called shock and exposure, but they hadn’t been able to give him the healing he most needed, a long talk with Granpa. Granpa had been too ill, too weak to do more than whisper, “Hello, Jake,” and listen for a couple of minutes while Jake explained that he himself was quite all right now. Granpa would do, the doctor thought, but Jake could see that it would be a long time before he’d be well enough to listen to what Jake had experienced in the Pit, and explain it away.

  Explain it away. Now, swishing south through the drizzle, Jake began to realise that no one could do that. Granpa might explain it but he couldn’t explain it away. Inside or outside Jake it had still happened. When he had first realised the bitterness of Martin’s misery Jake had begun to try to tell him about the thing in the Pit. Suppose, Jake thought, he could persuade Martin that there had been something there. Suppose the something could affect people’s minds. Suppose—not meaning to, but only as an instinctive defence—it surrounded itself with a network or shell of nightmare. In some people that would come out as terror, but in others it would come out as anger and violence. It would make them think and say and do things like Jack Andrews had done …

  Martin had cut Jake short before he was properly started—he didn’t want to be helped, not that way. Now, sheltering against Martin’s back from the stinging wind of their drive, Jake was thankful he’d got no further. Gradually, without settling down to think it all out in an orderly way, he’d come to be sure that that was no way out. “Good” people can do “bad” things. Because they’re good it doesn’t make the bad things better—it only makes them sadder. And what they do comes from inside themselves. It’s no use going into the deeps of Annerton Pit and finding a creature there and blaming it. If you mine down through the maze of your own being, perhaps in those deeps you will find the explosive gas of violence, the springs of love.