One Under

by JL Merrow

“Apparently they cared about people getting injured even if it didn’t directly cost them.” Jory walked past a footpath sign pointing off at a tangent, and opened a gate marked PRIVATE—NO TRESPASSERS.

  One of those Roscarrock boundaries, Mal guessed. He followed Jory through and closed the gate behind him. “You’d never believe that of the tossers they have in power these days. I don’t mean just here. Anywhere you go, politicians are a bunch of smarmy, lying bastards. Don’t matter if they’re Westminster or local government.”

  Jory’s smile was wry. “Bran was a local councillor, until he decided it was taking too much of his time away from the property business.”

  Mal gave him a sharp look. “Or he’d made enough contacts already to make sure all his planning applications would go through no questions asked? Shit. Sorry. I know he’s your bruv.”

  “It’s okay. You haven’t exactly seen him at his best.”

  Technically he hadn’t seen him at all, but he also hadn’t seen any evidence the bastard actually had a “best,” either. Mal bit his tongue on that one. “So how do you know it’s a smugglers’ tunnel?” he asked instead. “Could it be, like, an old mine, or something?”

  “There’s no tin in these lands. Or anything else worth having.” Jory made a sound that could have been a grim laugh. “You can bet Bran would have exploited it if there was. It’s possible the excavations were started in a search for minerals, but nobody knows for sure. Anyway, there’s only one use around here for a tunnel that goes down to a secluded cove.”

  “Shagging?”

  Okay, the next noise was definitely a laugh. Maybe a bit of a splutter. “Smuggling. As if you didn’t know. Here we are.”

  Mal stared. “It’s a hole. In the ground.” It was like some giant had pressed the fingers of both hands into the earth and then pulled them apart, leaving a narrow gap about ten feet long and maybe two feet wide. Or if you saw it another way . . . well, with the grass and weeds growing all around it, it looked like a bloody great green minge. There was even a roundish bit of rock at one end to complete the picture. Not that Mal had anything against minge, but . . . “We’re going in there?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve been doing this since I was a boy.”

  “Early starter, were you?” Seeing Jory’s baffled face, Mal went on quick. “Right. Uh, don’t we need ropes and stuff?”

  “This way into the tunnel was created by a cave-in, so it’s pretty steep for the first few yards, but you can easily manage.” Jory sounded a lot more confident than Mal felt as they stepped up to the edge.

  “Bloody hell, it’s like the entrance to the underworld. You sure we ain’t gonna meet a welcoming committee of orcs, morlocks, and a bloody great dog with three heads?”

  “Not unless they’ve moved in here since last summer. And I strongly suspect I’d have noticed if so.”

  “That the last time you were down here?”

  Jory nodded. “I was thinking of bringing Gawen, but he’d been having nightmares at the time, and Kirsty thought it might make things worse.”

  “Did you see a lot of him, back when you weren’t living here?”

  “As much as I could. Which wasn’t really enough.”

  “That why you moved back?”

  “Yes. He’s . . .” Jory sighed and crouched down at the edge of the hole, staring into it. Mal tried not to fixate on those muscular thighs, lovingly outlined by the skintight leggings. “He’s getting bullied at school. It’s always been a problem, but last year it suddenly started getting much worse. Puberty, I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if he would have done better with a private education, but Kirsty wanted him to go to school locally, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to push the issue. That was the one good thing about my school, though. Being bright didn’t automatically make you a target.” Jory glanced back at Mal. “Did you have that problem? I mean, you’re obviously bright and well-read.”

  Mal blinked. Then he forced a grin. “Nah, mate. Me, well-read? Bollocks. I just remember odd stuff.”

  Jory raised both eyebrows. “Sorry,” he said after a long, awkward moment. “Not the sort of thing you’d want to be reminded of.”

  “Hey, no worries,” Mal said automatically. He really wasn’t comfortable with the whole topic of conversation. Which was why it made bugger all sense when the next minute he blurted out, “It was crap for a bit, but it stopped when I got friendly with Dev. No one wanted to mess with him.”

  Jory smiled. “He stood up for you?”

  “Nah, it was more, people left me alone cos I was with him.”

  It was stupid, cos it wasn’t even true. Well, it was, but it wasn’t the whole story. Yeah, hanging around with Dev had pretty much instantly made Mal, who’d been the weediest, swottiest eleven-year-old on the planet ten times cooler, but . . . Shit. No way was he telling Jory the other reason the bullies had laid off him.

  “Gawen came up with a different method of dealing with it, I suspect,” Jory said, looking away again. “He’s never admitted it, but his school grades suddenly went right down last year. I think he was getting questions wrong on purpose in the hope that the less able children would like him.”

  Mal closed his eyes briefly. Nail on the head or what? Fuck his life. “Yeah. I get that.” His voice came out rough.

  Jory gave him a look that did weird things to Mal’s insides, and grasped his arm firmly.

  Mal coughed. “Right. We going in, then?”

  “If you’re ready.” Jory switched on his lamp and started to clamber into the hole. It was like watching the world’s buffest baby getting born in reverse.

  Mal shook himself and switched on his own lamp.

  “Careful on this bit,” Jory said.

  “Don’t worry. I’m well careful, me.” Mal tried to lower himself into the gap the way he’d seen Jory do it, feetfirst and inching down a steep, uneven slope. He ended up sliding the last few feet on his arse. Jory held out a hand to help him up, which Mal didn’t take for a mo because he was so busy looking around.

  There was enough light coming from above, and from their headlamps, to show him that they were in a rough tunnel that extended down into darkness. It was sort of man shaped. But bigger. Yeti shaped, maybe? The walls were greyish and uneven, and the floor was only mostly flat.

  At least it was tall enough to stand upright, even for Jory. “Ready to go?” he asked.

  Mal nodded, the light cast by his headlamp bobbing. “Yep. Lead on.”

  Mal soon realised that following Jory down the tunnel with his headlamp on gave him a fantastic view of that Lycra-covered arse. Trouble was, he also realised he was going to have to be a lot more careful where he looked. Unless he wanted Jory to notice there was a big glowy spot parked permanently on his backside. He hoped he’d be able to remember to keep his eyes above the waist when Jory was facing him, or that’d be even worse.

  Then again, there was that skintight T-shirt with his nips practically poking through the fabric . . . Maybe Mal had better keep his eyes above Jory’s neck. Or not look at him at all.

  Right. Eyes on the ground. At least he’d be less likely to fall over anything like old brandy barrels, dead excise men, whatever. “Hey, you ever stumble across a load of blokes in armour snoring away under here?”

  “Sadly, no. Nor any sleeping dragons.” Jory had turned to answer, and Mal’s headlamp showed a tiny smile on his face. “I did my best to find them. After a trip to Tintagel, where I got all fired up on Arthurian legend. God knows what I’d have done if I’d actually found Arthur and all his knights. I think I had some vague idea that they’d teach me how to be a knight, because of course when you wake up from centuries of slumber, your highest priority is going to be the tuition of small boys.”

  Mal laughed. “Yeah, and you gotta ask yourself, if you wake ’em up, are they gonna be happy about it? We’re talking about heavily armed dudes here. And well-dodgy morals. Sod all that crap about chivalry.”

  “Next you’ll be telling me you don’t approve of
murder, rape, and incest.”

  “Not exactly my three favourite things, no.” Coincidentally, Mal’s gaze went back to what was one of his favourite things right now. He got his comeuppance a moment later—he tripped and ended up grabbing hold of Jory’s shoulder to keep from face-planting on the tunnel floor. “Whoa—sorry mate.”

  Jory’s hand briefly patted Mal’s where it lay on his shoulder. “My fault. I should have told you it gets a bit uneven around here.”

  Mal remembered to let go of him. He was proud of that.

  There was silence for a few minutes as they scrambled over a bloody great boulder in the middle of the path—if that was a bit uneven, what would Jory call a total cave-in? Mildly impassable or some shit?

  Then the ceiling got low, and they had to walk bent over. “Oi, you sure you shouldn’t be wearing a hard hat and all?” he asked after the third time he’d grazed his helmet on sticky-out rocks.

  “Ah . . . Well, I only had the one.” Jory’s voice sounded guilty as hell. “But strictly speaking, yes. Anyone from my old climbing club would be horrified. So if you ever meet them, please don’t tell.”

  Huh. Not much chance of that, was there? Mal’s spirits dropped.

  Jory was speaking again. “It’s just . . . I’ve been down here so many times. And there’s never been a cave-in in my memory.”

  “So, what, we’re just about due one now?”

  “If I said no, it’d be tempting fate, wouldn’t it? But fingers crossed.”

  It felt like they were going down to the centre of the Earth. There wasn’t any light apart from their headlamps. And yeah, Mal was used to tunnels, but this was different. It was more . . . real, somehow, feeling his way along uneven ground, rather than sitting in a train cab in stale air that smelled of sweat, packed lunches, and burnt diesel. Here, the air was cold and had a different kind of flatness, the salt of the sea mixed in with a dry earthy odour.

  It was well creepy too. So quiet, the only sounds were their own breathing and footsteps. And Mal hitting his helmet on the ceiling, but he was getting better at avoiding that. Every now and then a jagged rock would stick up from the floor like a single broken tooth in the mouth of a monster, or a seam of lighter-coloured rock would flash in the light from their headlamps and make Mal think he’d seen a ghost.

  Probably not a friendly one, if it was some long-dead smuggler who thought they were after his booty, and not in a sexy-times way. Or even if it was a murdered excise man, who’d sworn with his dying breath to haunt the smugglers for eternity.

  Mal shivered. Didn’t they ought to be seeing daylight by now? “You sure this comes out somewhere?” he said, only half-joking. His voice was dry.

  “Trust me,” Jory said, and right at that moment, they turned a tight bend in the tunnel, and there was more light than Mal knew what to do with. It was blinding, after the darkness underground. He half stumbled out of the tunnel after Jory and found himself walking on soft sand.

  He blinked. They were on a tiny beach, in a perfect mini cove. The cliffs curved around the sand in a sort of granite hug, casting long shadows. Even in the shade, the air felt warm and fresh on his exposed skin, with barely a hint of breeze to cool it. Mal took a deep, heady breath.

  “Like it?” Jory asked, smiling triumphantly.

  Mal shook his head, grinning back. “Fuck me, did they do that on purpose? That hairpin bend just before the end?”

  “I think they must have. If by they you mean the smugglers who first dug this tunnel. Probably something to do with lanterns not showing out to sea—I expect they used to douse them when they got to the bend, in case there were Revenue vessels out there instead of the cargo they were expecting.”

  Mal turned round slowly, taking the place in. “It’s like . . . There’s no way in, is there? You can only get to this beach by sea or by that tunnel.”

  “Well, given a minimum of gear, I could rappel down the cliffs easily enough. But generally speaking, no.” Jory’s smile seemed to grow as he pulled off his headlamp, leaving his hair sticking up in cute little tufts. “For all intents and purposes, this is our own private beach.”

  “And there speaks a man who knows how to show a bloke a good time.” Shit, did that come over as suggestive? “Hey, you hungry? I brought sandwiches.” Mal took off his helmet and shoved up his sleeves to dive into his rucksack.

  “Snap. I’ve got tuna mayo or cheese—how about you?”

  “Yeah, I brought cheese too. But mine’s got pickle. And there’s ham. And pickle.” Mal grinned. “Jago’s gonna slaughter me next time they have a run on ploughman’s lunches.”

  “Did you bring drinks? I’ve got a couple of bottles of Rattler.”

  “I see your Rattler, mate, and I raise you a couple of packets of—ta-dah—bacon fries.” Mal pulled them out of his rucksack with a flourish.

  Jory laughed. “Okay, I think we can agree we’ve hopelessly over-catered.” He sat down on the sand and pulled a couple of bottles of cider from his own pack, one of which he passed to Mal.

  Mal took a long swallow, then breathed out in satisfaction. “Fuck me, that was like liquid gold going down.”

  Jory gave him a sidelong look. “Except minus all the throat-searing agony you’d expect from actual liquid gold.”

  Mal gave him the finger and took another gulp of cider. “Yeah, stuff’s never as good as it sounds, is it? Like, I used to wish Mum had called me Arthur. I mean, if she’s so into all them stories, why not name me after the hero, not the bloke who wrote ’em? Then I read Morte d’Arthur, and, well.” Mal sighed. “He’s a bit of a shit, ain’t he, Arthur? He’s a mass kiddie murderer for a start. There he is, supposed to be this hero, all chivalrous and stuff, but one of the first things he does is kill a bunch of kids—babies—cos Merlin tells him one of them’ll grow up and kill him in like twenty years’ time.”

  “No, I never much liked the casual way Malory refers to that. But to be fair to Arthur, Merlin was correct.”

  “Yeah, but he deserved it after that, didn’t he?” Mal took a bite out of a cheese and pickle sarnie. It was pretty good, if he said so himself.

  “I always felt sorry for Mordred,” Jory said, grabbing a sarnie from the opened foil package. “He didn’t get a very good start in life. But then again, neither did Arthur, being taken from his mother’s arms at birth.”

  Just like Dev, poor bastard. “Nah, Arthur was fine. His foster family all got top jobs after Arthur was crowned king, so they must have treated him right.”

  “Still . . . it can be hard, growing up in a family you don’t quite feel you fit into.” Jory’s voice went quiet.

  “Yeah, you don’t look much like your sister. Dev showed me a picture off the internet.”

  “Bran’s very like her. In pictures of them as children, it’s actually hard to tell them apart.”

  “Was your mum like a second wife or something?”

  “Most people just ask if we had a particularly friendly milkman.”

  Oops. Sore point there. Mal opened his mouth to apologise, but Jory got in again before he could speak, so Mal grabbed another sandwich instead.

  “No, it’s simply a quirk of genetics. I look a lot like the portrait of my great-uncle Lochrin Roscarrock, as it happens, but the men on my mother’s side were tall and fair too. Bran used to tell me I must be a changeling, and the fairies would come back for me one day.” Jory gave a twisted smile. “I don’t think my mother realised why I always refused to sleep with the window open, even in the hottest summers.”

  Christ. “The worst lie my big sister ever told me was that the hazard warning lights button in the car worked the ejector seat on the back, and if I didn’t stop kicking her seat in the front, she’d press it.”

  “That seems fairly harmless. Did you believe her?”

  Mal laughed. “Course not. Least, that’s what I told her. Then one time my dad had to slow down really quick on a motorway cos there’d been an accident, and when he turned on the hazard lights, I screamed t
he bloody car down. Dad reckons he practically had a heart attack, and they nearly had to send a second ambulance along for us lot.”

  They ate in silence for a bit, but it didn’t feel awkward. More like they were comfortable enough together not to need to fill the gaps with words, and that was such a scary thought Mal gulped down his mouthful and said the first thing that came into his head. “So, you were working at a university before you came back here, right?”

  “Yes. I’ve spent all my time since leaving school in the hallowed halls of academia.”

  “Yeah? I nearly went there on holiday once, but I didn’t fancy the food and I couldn’t afford it anyway.”

  Jory laughed. “That’s actually a pretty accurate description of most universities these days.”

  “Which one did you do your degree at? No, wait, lemme guess. Oxford?”

  “The other place. Cambridge.” Jory shrugged. “It’s traditional, in my family. For a first degree, at any rate. What wasn’t traditional was staying there. Bran wasn’t impressed. He thought I should be doing something useful, which you can read as either ‘lucrative’ or ‘liable to contribute to the family’s political interests.’”

  “Huh. My mum would’ve loved it if I’d gone to uni, but, well . . . Who wants that debt hanging over them? I wanted to be earning, and I didn’t really need any more qualifications.”

  Jory nodded. “That’s more or less what Bran said to me after I graduated—the qualifications thing. The fees weren’t so bad back when I went to college—they’d only recently started bringing them in.”

  “So what, you stayed and got a master’s or a PhD or whatever?”

  “Both.”

  “That’s just showing off, that is,” Mal said, because Fuck, you must be well intelligent would sound pathetic. “And . . . you were like a lecturer?” He had a vague idea you had to teach if you worked at a university, alongside doing . . . whatever university doctors did.

  “And a supervisor for undergraduates. That’s the bit I miss most, actually. Teaching small groups, discussing texts with them . . .”

  “Don’t you hate it in that museum where nobody goes?”