by S D Wasley
But what of the boom Helen and Liz had both predicted? The explosion?
I scrambled across the room and snatched up our ledger, opening it to our more recent entries. There were visions of trucks rumbling by at night, people in the town square showing alarm at a loud noise. One vision hinted at an emergency involving a number of people, a cry to involve the Health Department. Was the premonition of Sara in Québec―the morgue―a crossed vision? One of the visions intended for us?
A board creaked above me and I went rigid, listening in breathless tension. Léon couldn’t be back here already. I had more to discover, I knew it. But then, maybe I’d transformed. I tested my strength on an empty drink can lying on the floor and was deeply disappointed to find I was as normal as ever. Dammit. A little superhuman power would be pretty useful right now. The trapdoor made a distant squeak when it opened, and then silence fell as the mystery person made his or her way down the short tunnel to the door. The metal bar scraped stone as it was dislodged and, a second later, the door opened.
Chapter 15: Concilio
“Cain!” I leapt up and ran to him.
Cain held me off, a deep frown on his face. He ran his eyes over me, stopping at my elbow which had swollen and reddened alarmingly without my even noticing. He touched a point on my cheekbone. There must have been blood or a bruise there.
“Did he hit you?” His voice came low and dangerous.
“No, he just tried to kill me by driving us into a damn train!” I said with a shaky laugh. “Don’t worry, I’m okay. But Léon’s totally crazy. He’s talking about taking me back to Québec to save his little boy. I don’t know where he went. To get his stuff from Owen’s place, maybe.”
“Jesus. Let’s get out of here before he comes back. I want Jude and Liz with us before we face him.” He tried to pull me out of the chamber but I hesitated. Something wasn’t finished here. “Francesca?”
“Wait a minute.” I went for the ledger. “Where have you been tonight, Cain?”
“I ... I think Léon must have used Owen’s phone to message me and arrange to meet in Solomon Ridge to help with a rescue. I fell for it, like a dumbass. I hoped it was true. It wasn’t till I was halfway there that I realised what he must have done. Then you called and―” He stopped. “Wait, you can’t have called ...”
“I didn’t call,” I said. “I don’t even know where my phone is.”
“You did it again,” Cain said, sounding awed. “You called me without calling me.”
I barely heard him. When I picked up the open ledger I noticed the word crvix. That was from a vision Helen had seen, that baffling word none of us could work out. But it wasn’t crvix, of course. It was CrVI, chromium six. I pictured a dirty page on a clipboard held in a gloved hand, writing: CrVI x 678. 24PN=28D to clear. All of a sudden, through this anonymous person’s eyes, the meaning was perfectly clear: CrVI ... chromium six ... 678 containers. At a rate of twenty-four per night, carted out of the subterranean tunnels and removed under cover of darkness, it would take a couple of workers twenty-eight days to clear them.
Cain said my name but before I could respond I was pulled once more into another time and place. A man was talking to the driver of a truck through the vehicle window. Night air cooled my skin and my nostrils filled with the odour of a diesel engine. Beside me the truck’s motor throbbed low, idling.
“Shed eight’s full,” said the driver. “That’s the last one. And if you get another locked shed on site the other blokes are going to ask questions. They’re already talking about why they can’t get into some of the sheds. Speculatin’.”
The man on the ground groaned. “I can get the drums out of the sheds and to a facility in the next week or two. There must only be a handful more down there.”
“Yeah, I’ve got the last five or six on board. Really rough-lookin’ drums in this lot, corroded. Dunno what’s in them, either. Doesn’t seem liquid like the others.”
“Just put them behind shed four. It’s supposed to be off limits anyway because of the unstable bank. Have you seen any of the men going down there?”
“Nah, they don’t go down there. It’s pretty well hidden, too. They should be okay there. If anyone asks I’ll say it’s just sewage from a blocked drain ... or waste cooking oil from the café, somethin’ like that.”
“Good man, Jason. God, I’ll be glad when this shit’s over and done with.”
“You and me both.”
I followed, trailing behind the truck as he drove it down a winding roadway toward the stream. There, he used the hydraulic lift on his truck to unload half a dozen drums of toxic waste, relocating them neatly against the shed ... which was also, I guessed, filled with drums of tannery effluent. The last few were indeed heavily corroded as though much older. He peered at them curiously and made a couple of bemused noises as he shuffled them into place.
A noise came from behind me, a scuffling and heavy breathing. Turning, I spotted what seemed to be a child hiding behind a tree.
“Coming ready or not!” came a holler from the distance.
A game of hide and seek? I checked what the truck driver thought of this but he was gone, as was his truck. That vision was over―this must be another part of the story. But those toxic drums still sat beside the locked shed.
“Caitlin!”
The girl hiding behind the tree breathed softly and stayed put. She wasn’t going to expose her good hiding spot. She wore odd clothes for a kid hiding out at a construction site at night: a red velvet dress and shiny patent leather shoes. She scratched at her leg absently.
I recognised her.
This was the girl from the grand opening, the one with two brothers, who’d asked to play in the playground behind the café tonight. I was seeing a vision of tonight, but I had no idea if it had already happened or was yet to occur.
“Caity, I’m coming!” The boy drew closer, the brightly lit Marie-Celeste building perhaps fifty yards behind him. He dropped to his knees and crawled beneath a gap in the ring-lock fence so small only a kid could fit through. Caitlin ducked down, holding her breath, but her brother trotted straight past her hiding spot, passing so close by me I smelt his sweaty, sticky kid smell. He’d spotted the drums.
“Hey!” Caitlin called with a laugh.
He turned. “Found you,” he said automatically. “Look at these,” he added.
He ran toward the drums and kicked at one.
“What’s in it?” Caitlin called.
“Dunno.” He tried to prise off the lid but it had long fused to the container so he picked up a fallen tree branch and thumped it on the lid. I wasn’t sure why he did that but maybe he wasn’t sure either. It was a metal drum and he had a stick ... why not thump it on top? He experimented with the sounds, stretching his arm to whack another barrel like it was a full drum kit before him. Caitlin found her own stick―two, in fact―and joined him. Pounding with all her might, she could have been the drummer in a rock band. The boy found himself a second drumstick, too. She and her brother grinned at one another, beating the hell out of those drums in a messily syncopated rhythm.
“Drum solo!” Caitlin yelled, and raised her drumsticks high above her head before bringing them down with all her strength upon a corroded drum.
A sound like none I’d ever heard before split the night. It was like a balloon’s pop, but not in the usual scale of a pop; it was like a pop might sound if the balloon were gigantic and made of metal. But if some invisible giant was popping metal balloons he’d taken to the entire bunch with his pin. With a microsecond’s pause in between, there were two more sucking metallic pops, then another big one. And then the final one, even bigger than the rest. A fireworks finale without the fireworks. From the first explosion I was hit with a blast of air, fluid, and grit which changed direction and grew in fury with every pop. I fought to see but then wished I’d kept my eyes closed because both children were lifted, hurtled past me, limp and helpless as dolls. Through the roar of air came the sound of glass s
mashing and then screaming. The air filled with a fine grey dust. Amid the screams, there came a low hissing, gushing noise. The ground was wet.
What was left of the shed, now a bent tangle of metal, had peeled back to reveal its stash: dozens of toxic effluent containers. But most drums hadn’t survived the blast. They were upended, punctured, sheared open; gushing liquid and glistening powder across the ground in a flood. The fluid poured from busted drums down the gentle slope into the stream ... which led straight into the Augur’s Well reservoir. I looked beyond the inert, shining bodies of Caitlin and her brother, a good twenty yards away, to the tannery building where the Marie-Celeste café was still full of people.
Then I was inside the café. The air was hot and the place was in chaos, dozens of windows smashed by the force of the blast. One waiter wailed as she cowered, a hand clamped over her eye, blood seeping out between her fingers. People lurched across a carpet of broken glass, bleeding from shrapnel injuries to their faces and limbs. They kicked and trampled a man lying unconscious on the ground in their rush to escape. I couldn’t see Vanessa or Albion, my uncle or anyone else I knew. People rushed for the exits, shouting and crying as they ran. I caught sight of the parents of Caitlin and her brother.
“Where are the kids? Find them!” the woman shouted at her husband, holding a bleeding wound on her forehead.
Now I was in the parking lot, standing beside Albion’s small pink car. The grey haze of chromium six powder was spreading and people were coming right outside into it. They ran for the road or their cars, obliviously sucking in lungsful of powder in their panic. Within moments panic turned to distress as people’s eyes burned and streamed. They stumbled, coughed, scratched at their faces, the powder haze of chemicals burning their skin and membranes. At last I caught sight of Vanessa, assisted by a waiter, weeping as she ran. Blood ran from glass wounds in her face and she held her hand over her mouth. She tripped and fell, struggling up for a moment before lying still on the ground.
I blinked into the sight of Cain’s eyes. His face was dirty and scratched. My hands hurt. I looked down and found them bleeding, nails broken and filthy. We were in the underground chamber ... in the room where Patrick and I had heard voices.
“What happened?”
“You’re back,” he said in a relieved gasp. “You were digging and scratching at the wall with your bare hands. I tried to stop you but you lashed out at me.”
There were gouges in the wall in front of me. I looked back at Cain.
“There’s going to be an accident. At the old tannery. We have to get there right now.”
He didn’t doubt me. We ran for the door and were shocked to find it barred shut again from the other side.
Blind with panic, I heaved on the doorknob. “He’s back. Léon’s come back. We’ve got to get out! We have to get to them.”
Cain pushed me out of his way and with a well-aimed kick, broke the doorknob’s latching mechanism. Then he put his shoulder to the door. He gave a heave but it barely moved so, taking a few steps back, he stormed the door. It budged this time, opening several inches before the metal bar bit into the rock wall again. One more run-up and he knocked the bar clear, the door flying open. I scrambled up the ladder and gave the trapdoor a shove.
“Ow!” I cradled my jarred hand. “That bastard’s blocked it.”
Cain swore and tugged on my leg to tell me to come down and get out of his way. He climbed and thrust the trapdoor with all his strength but this one wasn’t so easy. Because of the angle, Cain couldn’t get the strength behind him he needed.
“It feels like he’s loaded something heavy on top of it.” He gave another shove to check but it was clear we weren’t going to get through there. Cain descended again and we stood together in the dim tunnel.
“Francesca ...” he began softly.
I knew what he was going to say. He couldn’t get us out.
We couldn’t save them.
“Maybe if Jude and Liz come, they can let us out,” Cain tried.
His words made something stir in my head.
“Wait a moment,” I said, focusing on the sensation.
It was as though my mind broke through a solid surface; like pushing beyond an obstacle. Then abruptly, it was gone. Cain watched me expectantly. My hands tingled. The wall.
“Oh!” I said. “I know, now.”
I ran for the antechamber where I’d been digging at the wall, pausing only to snatch up the metal bar on my way. When I got there I lined up and, with all my strength, swung the bar at the sandstone wall. A chunk chipped off and hit the floor as Cain watched me in astonishment.
“What are you doing?”
“I think there’s a way through here.”
“What?”
“This chamber, it’s part of a tunnel that leads to the tannery.” I punctuated my words with more blows of the metal bar. “Gaunt used it to send the poorhouse women to work there.”
Cain was only bewildered for another moment before he went into action. Taking the metal bar off me he gave a mighty swung and a large chunk fell away from the wall. He did that a couple more times until a good few inches of rock were lying on the floor. Then he stabbed at the wall and, despite being absolutely certain I was right, I was as startled as he was when the bar punctured the rock.
“Holy shit,” he muttered, bending down to peer through the hole.
He resumed bashing at the wall and I went to find another tool. The only thing in the room was a piece of dirty cloth: a remnant of a woman’s dress, I realised as I kicked it aside. A relic of Gaunt’s working women. In the next chamber I found a broken wooden box. The timber was too dilapidated to be of any use but when I moved it to check, a rusted iron railway spike clanked on the floor beneath it. That would do. I ran back to the antechamber and hacked at the wall with my makeshift pick. Cain had much more success than me, with his combination of the metal bar and massive strength. Within minutes he had made a hole big enough for us to crawl through one at a time. He used his phone for a flashlight―about the only thing it was good for down here―and we ran.
We navigated partly by instinct and partly by luck. As the crow flew, it was around a mile to the tannery and the tunnel seemed to go pretty directly there without many twists or turns. There were one or two dark turnoffs to who-knew-where but we stayed on the main trail and it took just minutes for us to arrive, panting, at a closed door. Above us footsteps thumped, voices chatted, and crockery clinked. We must be under the café. The door looked new, if battered and dusty. Fitted by the Grace Creek construction team to prevent access to those tunnels full of deadly chemicals, I thought.
“Is it locked?”
Of course it was. We’d left the metal bar back in the antechamber but Cain lined up and did his kick trick again. The doorknob broke off immediately and he felt around through the hole with his fingers.
“Slide bolt, padlocked,” he grunted. Another kick showed us that this padlock wasn’t going to snap. “Is there anything lying around we could use?”
I held out my hand with the railway spike. “I’ve still got this.”
He considered it. “Your hand’s small. Do you think you could get the spike through and wedge it between the plates and the slide bolt? Anywhere really, just to create a pressure point.”
I manoeuvred my hand through the hole and felt around, hoping like hell I wouldn’t drop my rusty weapon. Eventually I found an opening between the slide bolt and the door and pushed the spike carefully into the gap. I tried to hammer it in a little with my palm so it wouldn’t fall out the moment we bumped the door. Then I extricated my hand, nodding at Cain. He gave it another massive kick. Something scraped, metal on metal, and the door budged. A couple of heaves and it came open, scattering half-filled paint tins and cleaning equipment across the stone floor of a storage room. A short wooden staircase led up to a door open to the twilight sky.
Triumph washed through me. We’d made it! It hadn’t happened yet. But then came a noise that made
my heart skip: a high-pitched scream of panic.
Chapter 16: Vinco
I seized a couple of cloths from a shelf―napkins or dishcloths―and shoved one over my face, thrusting the other at Cain. He followed suit and we ran up the stairs. We found ourselves in a courtyard behind the café, fenced off from the children’s playground where kids scampered in and out of a plastic fort and swing set, watched over by several bored dads. An employee taking a smoke break on a garden chair stared at us in amazement. Where had that scream come from? Then another shriek caught our attention from the playground.
“Stop squealing, Maddie,” a boy said crossly. “It’s my turn.”
He was holding her feet to stop her from swinging. She gave a kick and another frustrated squeal before climbing off the swing seat, defeated. “I’m telling Mummy!” she declared, flouncing away.
With a slump of relief I pulled the napkin away from my mouth. A quick scan of the playground didn’t reveal either Caitlin or her brother.
“Come on!”
I grabbed Cain’s hand and led him into the café’s rear doorway, which took us straight into the kitchen. Scurrying kitchenhands and cooks shot us hostile glares as we passed through. We emerged through the serving door into the café itself. There was Vanessa, still on the coffee machine, praise the saints. Things had slowed down since I’d been there earlier and she was now chatting to one of her customers.
“Frankie-boo!” Albion’s delighted voice cut through the sociable roar. “I thought you left ages ago!”
I was still bee-lining for the front door, looking around for Caitlin or her parents, but somehow Albion managed to intercept us before we got there. He waved a glass of wine at us, sloshing a good amount onto the floor. I grabbed hold of him.