Chapter Two
The night I found the tunnel there was a big white moon as bright and hard as chalk. It was a few days before my fourteenth birthday. The air was warm, but there were goosebumps on my arms; the moon’s light was chilling. I was cold with sitting still, cold with waiting. When I started the climb up the quarry face, I didn’t care whether I lived or died.
The entrance to the tunnel was a patch of shadow on the rock, covered with long creepers and dreadlocks of ivy. There was a ledge in front, a platform just big enough to park a bum on, or I would have missed it altogether. The sweat was running off me by then, and for all my misery I was scared half to death.
The moon had climbed the sky as I went up the quarry face. It shone down like a searchlight, but missed me on the ledge. I sat there in the darkness, breathing in great gasps. I couldn’t go back down. I didn’t think I had the strength left to go up.
I leaned back, expecting to find rock, but the ivy parted, and there was the adit, the tunnel leading into the mine. It must have been part of the earlier workings, forgotten when they moved on to quarry a better seam of stone. I ducked through the leaves and crawled in.
There were legends about those tunnels. About ten or fifteen years before, three schoolboys had made their way in, as schoolboys often did back then, and hadn’t come out again. They got lost in the maze of passages that wove through the hillside like tangled ropes. When they didn’t come home, the police were called. They went in after them with torches and tracker dogs, and they got lost too.
We knew really that they came out, all of them, safe and sound, but we liked to scare ourselves with the idea that they hadn’t and were still there, doomed to wander through the veins of the rock for ever. Maybe one day we would hear their ghostly singing beneath our feet. Hi-ho.
The year after the boys got lost the entrances to the tunnels had all been blocked up. Sometimes a hole would appear mysteriously in someone’s garden, or a pet dog would vanish and people would say they heard subterranean barks and yelps, but those were the only reminders that the underground world of my imagination existed.
I believed in it, even if I couldn’t see it, and I wasn’t afraid of starving terriers or schoolboys’ ghosts. Then, I was never afraid of anything underground. Caves fascinated me; in one, I was sure, I might one day find the First Englishman.
I got to my feet and took a blind step into the real darkness, fingers brushing the rough-hewn tunnel wall to keep me straight. I won’t go far, I told myself. Just a few steps. Just far enough. Then I’ll find somewhere to curl up against the wall and wait until sunlight fingers between the strands of ivy. I walked forward, testing each step on the uneven floor with my toes.
I turned round to look back. I couldn’t see the entrance.
In my panic my fingers lost contact with the tunnel wall, and I snagged my foot on a rock. I stumbled forward, lost my balance, and ended up on hands and knees. When I managed to get to my feet again, the tunnel wall had vanished too.
I could hear my breathing in my ears, tight and harsh. The sound of it had changed, and the sound of the silence around me was different too. It seemed hollow, vast, empty. I knew I must be in some large space; perhaps a huge cavern the quarrymen had cut out of the rock.
I reached out with my hand, groping empty air. I could see nothing, feel nothing. The darkness was smothering. It wrapped itself more tightly round me the more I struggled. I told myself the wall of the tunnel had been only inches away when I fell. I just had to go back a pace or two, and I would be able to reach out and touch it. I turned, took one tentative step, terrified I would stumble again. Then I took another, my hands waving uncertainly in front of me, blind-man’s buff. Still nothing. And nothing. And nothing. And nothing again. Then I understood I could no longer be sure which way I was facing.
Oh God oh God oh God. There was nothing to tell me which way I had come or which way to go, and the darkness wound so tightly round me it was crushing the air out of my body. Please, God, let me find a way back. A safe way.
But that was Crow Stone, when I was another person.
Please, God, help me to find a way back out now.
The sea urchin floats above me, set for ever in its chalky ocean. It couldn’t be more indifferent.
I can still see the sea urchin so I know I’m not dead. It sits in a circle of light that’s ominously yellow. My head-torch battery must be failing.
That’s not a pleasant thought. Even if I’m not dead I might as well be, once the torch goes. It’s just about possible to be ironic while I can still see, but in the darkness I suspect I’m going to cry. I don’t want to do that if I can help it. I don’t want to die feeling sorry for myself, though I suppose it’s the one time you’re justified in feeling that way.
I don’t want to die
How long have I been here? It’s so quiet. Not even the creak of settling rock.
‘Martin!’
Pathetic. Hardly a bat-squeak. Throat too dry, tongue too big for my mouth. The air’s full of dust–but at least there’s still air. For the moment.
‘Maar-tin!’
My ears feel wrong. They’re ringing, maybe something to do with the air pressure. I can hardly hear myself.
‘Maaar-tin!’
Don’t want to bring the rest of the roof down, shouting. Come on, Martin, answer, you bugger.
Fuck.
Dust and chalk fragments on my upper body, one hand’s free and I can feel that, even reach up to touch my face, but from the pelvis down I’m pinned. My legs seem to be under a lot of rubble. I can feel them, though, and I think I’m wiggling my toes–I think–so the weight hasn’t broken my back. I suppose I should count myself lucky.
On second thoughts, lucky isn’t quite the word.
It reminds me of the games we used to play as children: which would you rather? Be crushed to death by an enormous weight? Slowly suffocated? Starve? Die screaming voicelessly, tormented by thirst?
None of the above, thank you. I think I will just have that little cry, after all.
But I’m not crying. I’m shaking.
Jesus
Stop it. I’m shaking hard enough to bring the rest of the ceiling down over my face.
My body won’t pay any attention to what I tell it. It goes on shaking. Big, shuddering tremors start in my legs, travel up to my shoulders and into my head. Is this what soldiers get the night before battle: a mad uncontrollable jerking dance of fear?
Judging by the silence, Martin’s in more trouble than I am. He must be under the main fall. Between me and the way out.
‘MAAAR-TIN!’
Got
