by Mark Morris
When I was a kid, two friends and I found the remains of an old air-raid shelter close to some allotments, left over from when a row of houses had been demolished. We’d all got cuts and bruises from going down there, and Gavin had ended up in hospital having a gashed thigh sewn up. But we’d all come out with something too. I still had the old gas mask I’d found in its cloth bag, tucked away in the attic at home where plenty of old memories withered and faded.
Faded until something like this brought them crashing back again.
I remembered Jimmy’s taunting when the three of us were egging each other on, all afraid, all trying to be brave enough to go first. Gavin had been the brash one, but his fear of the dark had made itself apparent. We’d gone exploring down there three times before Gavin slashed his leg open on a ragged shard of metal protruding from the old brick wall. They were good times. I hadn’t seen either of them in over fifteen years.
“Not worth it,” I said, glancing down at the sheep’s skull one more time. It grinned up at me. Maybe I’d seen this creature alive on an earlier run that year. A memory of me might once have resided within its now-empty cranium.
I put the head torch around my head to free up both hands, then slipped feet-first into the low tunnel.
Enveloped by the tunnel’s darkness, everything felt very different. The smells of the hillside changed, becoming wet and dank, the scent of old things and decay. As I made my way down the gentle slope, my boots dislodged clumps of mud and rocks, and the rich fug of darkness rose around me. The cool, wet ground soaked through my long-sleeved T-shirt, and my shorts were soon heavy with mud.
I shone the torch all around, moving slowly, checking the tunnel structure above and around me, and the floor ahead. I probed with my boot, digging at the ground in case any holes had been covered over with detritus. Fall in, break a bone, shatter my torch, and over time my bones would join those of the dead sheep guarding the entrance.
Soon the tunnel levelled and the ceiling grew a little higher. The floor was comprised of damp, hard silt rather than leaves and loose soil, and I guessed the leaves would not have been blown in this deep.
I turned and crawled on head first. It would have been easy to lose track of time down there. I checked my watch and realised it was still ticking along recording my run, although it had lost satellite reception so the GPS would no longer be working. I paused it and switched it back to showing the time. 11:18. I’d been in the tunnel for maybe five minutes.
It felt longer.
I should turn around and go back, I thought. There’s nothing down here. It’s just an old drainage tunnel or something. Goes nowhere. I should go back.
But I didn’t go back, because that old curiosity drew me on. Though there was still a vague light behind me from the entrance, my main source of illumination was now the head torch, and I played it around as I continued to crawl. The walls were wet and slick with moss, the ceiling broken here and there where tree roots had grown through. I had to push some of them aside and they trailed cool fingers across my skin.
The tunnel seemed to be growing wider and deeper. I crawled on all fours, careful where I placed my hands, watching every move. Glancing left and right, I saw hollows in the vaulted walls that might once have led elsewhere, but each one was blocked from a cave-in, bricks and soil forming solid barriers.
This tunnel will cave in one day, I thought. I was moving deeper on trust, hoping that my being there didn’t cause a fault, a tumble, a roar of old frost-shattered bricks, soil and rock thumping down from above to trap me there forever. Jayne knew where I’d gone, but there was no phone or GPS reception this deep. If a search party did come looking and eventually found me, it would likely be way too late.
The danger was something like a thrill.
Next time I glanced at my watch, twenty minutes had passed. I paused at that, staring at the illuminated digital time blinking back at me. It hadn’t felt like more than a couple of minutes, but I couldn’t doubt what I saw. I’d reached a place in the tunnel where the walls were slick and wet, the floor increasingly boggy, and the roots protruding through the joints between bricks in the ceiling were pale and fine, hanging still like an upside-down forest. Some of them snapped as I brushed by, as if dead and petrified. Others caressed the back of my head and neck.
“Time to turn around,” I whispered. My words carried, and as I glanced ahead––imagining my voice winging its way deeper, into a darkness that might not have heard a human voice since this place was built––I saw the faint glow of daylight.
Excitement took me once again. The idea of seeing where this tunnel ended gripped me, and I felt like a true explorer. Maybe I’d emerge wet and muddied, and surprise someone looking into the far entrance and wondering where it went.
I scrambled onwards, and this lowest part of the tunnel was also the wettest. I slopped through mud, shaking my hands and spattering it up the walls. It was thick and black, and it smelled of forgotten places and age. I hurried on towards the glow, and soon the ground sloped up enough for me to see daylight.
Minutes later I approached the opposite end of the tunnel. I could see that it was somewhere still within the woods, and for a moment I was disappointed. I’d imagined emerging into an old tumbled building, or perhaps on to part of the barren hillside where I had never been. In truth, it was probably only a hundred feet from where I’d gone underground.
As the daylight grew stronger, so I anticipated its touch even more. I had no wish to go back into that gloom. There was nothing down there to concern me, but something about the darkness I was leaving behind started to repulse me, urging me onwards into the light.
Close to the entrance I saw the pale gleam of a skull.
I frowned. I was convinced that I’d crawled into the tunnel at one end and out the other. I moved closer, and as the sun touched my skin I realised that it was the same lamb’s skull.
Weird.
The sun felt good, dappling down through the tree canopy to speckle my arms and face. I stood and stretched, shaking mud from my hands, brushing it from my knees and bare legs, hearing the slosh of water in my backpack’s water bladder. I hadn’t taken a single drink while I’d been underground, and now thirst burnt in with a vengeance across my throat and tongue.
I sucked at the nozzle. The water was warm but welcome. I blinked and sighed, then looked up.
The sky past the trees was a blazing blue, scorched by sunlight. Wispy clouds streaked the heavens high above. Closer, the trees swayed in a gentle breeze, leaning back and forth as if whispering to one another about me. I looked up as they looked down.
I shivered. It was an unsettling thought.
Dropping back onto the path leading down through the woods to the road, I pushed through a spread of nettles. They kissed against my bare legs and fire tingled there, spiky, almost pleasant in its low burn. I didn’t recall the nettles being there a couple of hours before when I’d climbed towards the summit. Their leaves were speckled with some sort of fungus, making them hang heavy and low. I crouched down to look. Maybe being underground in the dark had made me so much more receptive to detail.
The fungus was pale grey in colour, each growth the thickness of a matchstick and just a few millimetres long, topped with a darker, globular speck. There were perhaps a hundred stems on each leaf, all of them curved and pointed in the same direction like miniature soldiers stood to attention. Although the nettles were still a rich, healthy green, I couldn’t help thinking that the fungal growths were parasitic.
Energised by my unexpected mini-adventure, I scanned the ground ahead as I started running downhill, dodging rocks, leaping down some of the steps that had been built into the path by local scouts a few years before. I always enjoyed running downhill, even though I was heading towards fifty and becoming more concerned about my knees. I needed to look after my joints if I was going to continue doing what I loved into my old age. But every time I thought that, I countered with, But this is looking after myself.
> Something about my visit down into the tunnel niggled at me, like a whisper behind a door I couldn’t quite make out. It worried and scratched, and as I glanced around I felt unsettled in this, one of my favourite places, for the very first time.
The path followed a wide gulley carved into the mountainside over millennia by a stream. There were a few small waterfalls along its course, and now I noticed that the pool at the base of one was dammed with several fallen trees and debris accumulated against their trunks and branches. It formed an expanded lake where water gathered before slinking its way past or through the blockage. I briefly considered stripping off and taking a dip. The water looked cool and inviting.
It also looked dangerous.
I paused and frowned, catching my breath and trying to open the door on those niggles and whispers. Being below ground had unsettled me more than I’d believed, and I’d brought that feeling up with me, carrying it down towards the road, car park, and the car where a fresh change of clothes and a flask of coffee awaited.
I haven’t seen this pool before, I thought. I had no recollection of the falls being dammed like this, but then I always climbed the hill with my head down, checking the uneven path for trip hazards, pushing down on my knees so that I could achieve the best climb possible. My record so far was a little under half an hour. Maybe today I’d have broken it.
I glanced at my watch. It was still searching for a satellite signal.
Passing the pool I carried on, and it was only as I approached the bottom of the winding path that I acknowledged what was worrying me. The door opened and the truth roared in.
Everything was different. Only slightly, but there was a rough edge to things, like a sheen of wilderness smothering my surroundings.
The trees above me were heavier with leaves. A few had fallen, with several lying across the path and forcing me to squeeze underneath or climb over them. They had not been there before my ascent, and I could tell from one of their exposed root balls––the hole filled with a swathe of nettles, no bare soil showing, and the cracked timber pale from weathering—that it had not happened recently.
The path emerged onto a gravelled area beside the canal, the wide driveway and parking area attached to a low wooden house. There was a narrow tunnel leading beneath the canal and down to the car park beyond, but this side was a private residence, the public footpath running across the gravel to the tunnel. I’d seen the elderly owners of the house several times, and they always spared a wave or nod for those passing across their land to or from the steep path up the mountain.
The gravel was churned, and in places overgrown with weeds. The house looked abandoned, with smashed windows and paint flaking from its previously pristine woodwork. A Range Rover rested on flat tyres beside the house, its windows misted with a hazing layer of moss on the insides.
“What the hell?”
I stopped and looked around. Birds flitted from branch to branch, a few of them landing in the long grass of the canal’s towpath on the opposite bank. The towpath was overgrown. I could just make out a bike leaning against a wall. Plant tendrils had curled around its spokes and uprights.
“Hello?” I called. Some birds took flight at my shout, but they quickly landed again and started singing as if I wasn’t there. I frowned and shook my head. Maybe I was dehydrated. I took a drink and suddenly the taste of my water had changed, from warm but clean to stale and dirty, as if I was sucking up water from the canal.
This was all wrong. There was so much I hadn’t noticed on the way up the mountain, so much that I’d been certain of but which now was being proved less certain. When had the old couple moved out of their home and left it to decay? Why leave their vehicle behind?
I took a few steps towards the tunnel beneath the canal, and paused.
It had caved in. The steps down to it were piled with tumbled stones, and the tunnel itself was filled with dried mud and rocks, blocking it completely. If I hadn’t known it was there, it would not have been at all obvious.
“That’s just not right,” I said. “I came up through there two hours ago. Just a couple of hours.” I checked my watch. It was still searching for a satellite signal. Not right. “Hello?” I shouted louder, the sound of my voice the only thing pinning me to the world. Birds took flight again, but I didn’t seem to trouble them unduly. If I remained silent, if I did not interact with the world, I might as well not be there at all.
The canal bridge was fenced off, meant for exclusive use by the owners of the dilapidated house and enclosed within their garden and land. The tunnel was the public access, but now that it was blocked there was no other way across the canal. I skirted around the garden, pushing through waist-high undergrowth until I passed the garden area and stood close to the canal.
The water level was vastly reduced. That’s what’s happened, I thought. Maybe there’s been a breach and everything has changed. But a breach in the canal wouldn’t have changed so much in such a short time.
And this damage had been wrought a long, long time ago. There were still pools of water across the canal bed, but most of it had gone, perhaps flowing downhill from the fracture that had filled the tunnel. The pools remaining looked surprisingly clear, reflecting the blue sky and fluffy clouds as if presenting a memory of better times. Weeds grew across the rest of the canal’s uneven, dried-silt bed.
I climbed down, walked across, and scrambled out onto the towpath. It was deep with knee-high weeds.
It was impossible, yet the evidence was there before my eyes. Everything has changed.
I made my way to the steps that led down to where the tunnel emerged on the other side, at the top of the gentle slope that descended to the car park where I’d left my car. I needed to be there. I had to reach the comfortable Mazda, to see whether it was new and clean from the polish I’d given it last weekend, or old and rusting, wheels flat, windows grimy, metalwork fading from so long sitting unused and exposed to the harsh sunlight.
While I’d been down in the tunnel the world, and time, had moved on. All I could hear was the chatter of birds and the conspiratorial whispering of the trees as they observed my growing panic, laughing amongst themselves.
I climbed down the steps and saw that much of the landscape on this side of the canal had changed. The breach must have caused the cave-in, and tens of thousands of gallons of water had cascaded down the slope, carrying silt and rocks with it and washing away the gravelled road, hedges, and many tonnes of soil. The resulting slick had spread wide, and in the time since the breach had provided fertile ground for new plant growth. I ran through the low shrubs and long grasses, hearing creatures scurrying from my path, kicking my way from the canal and down what was left of the path to the car park. I heard no traffic. I smelled no fumes, and I realised just how clear and clean the air seemed, untainted by humankind.
I’m still underground, I thought. I fell and banged my head. I’m semi-conscious in that tunnel, and unless I wake and move I’ll be there until dusk, and then I might never find my way out.
The grasses felt cool and sharp against my bare legs. Seeds carried on the air tickled my face. Sweat ran down my back. Everything looked lush and rich, as if the plants were relishing this new-found freedom. And yet many plants were also home to that strange fungus I’d seen on the nettles back up the slope. It provided a haze across everything that seemed to knock my vision out of focus.
If I was still beneath the ground, my imagination was running riot.
I reached the road and ran straight across. The buildings to my right were familiar, but I barely glanced at them. I knew what I would see.
I knew because I could see my car. It might have been there forever.
* * *
I ran the three miles home. It was the strangest journey of my life, but running gave me the rhythm, pace and room to try and rationalise what was happening. It didn’t work, but just as concentrating on my breathing and footfalls helped occupy my mind, the attempt to make sense of what I was seeing, he
aring and smelling diluted some of the terror that was settling over me.
I’d tried starting the car, of course, but the battery was flat. It was strange sticking the clean, shiny key into a vehicle so obviously degraded by time.
I was worried about Jayne. If everyone and everything had gone, then what about her? Where was she? On the other side of the tunnel, I thought, but I tried to silence that idea.
I lived three miles from the bottom of the hill. Usually I would have run that distance in a little under half an hour, but today I was faster. Everything I saw gave me energy, fear driving my legs and muscles.
Strange, faded red circles decorated the doors of at least half the homes, hints at something terrible. And although the town was empty of people, it was far from dead. By the Indian restaurant where we had celebrated our tenth anniversary I saw a small herd of deer, milling in the overgrown car park, wary as they watched me pass. A pack of half a dozen feral dogs stalked from an alley a few minutes later, and the hairs on the back of my neck bristled as they growled. I threw stones at them and they stalked away. Squirrels sat on rooftops and window ledges, rabbits frolicked across roads where weeds grew through cracked tarmac, and what might have been a big cat flowed through the shadows beneath a bridge. Nature had made this place of people its own now that the people were gone.
If I wasn’t so terrified, so confused and frightened, it might have been beautiful.
Just past an old car showroom, now displaying a score of vehicles resting on flat tyres and with rust eating at bodywork, I drew level with the local park. It had once contained a playing field, a bandstand and a play area for children, but now all that was gone. Close to the park gates and fence were three JCBs, motionless and dead. Beyond them, the park had been excavated in several long, wide strips. Some of these massive trenches were partly filled in, but most remained open to view. One was filled with rough timber coffins, piled in without any real care, like a tumble of giant Jenga blocks. The next trench along was filled with skeletons. They had run out of time to box up the dead.