скачать книгу бесплатно
My fingers clamp down hard on what’s in my hand, branding it into my palm. Madness to have come back for it, but I couldn’t have left it here … There’s a swirl of dust fogging the head-torch, making me cough. As it darkens I picture the thousands of tons of earth and rock that lie between me and the sky, and brace myself for the crushing weight of it all on my chest.
Chapter Two (#u2fe42597-c19f-5e5b-a716-c4080266fd02)
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 mefind 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.
Chapter Three (#u2fe42597-c19f-5e5b-a716-c4080266fd02)
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: whichwould you rather? Be crushed to death by an enormous weight? Slowlysuffocated? 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 to stop this shaking.
Breathe.
Think about anything other than dying.
Chalk is fossil heaven. Even the dust is a universe, composed almostentirely of tiny shells, minute cartwheels and rings and florets, the remainsof plankton, which can only be seen under the electron microscope.Coccoliths, the smallest fossils on earth.
Easier, now.
Unlike angels, they actually know how many coccoliths you can geton to a single pinhead–upwards of a hundred.
I suppose my lungs are full of the bloody things.
How long does it take to die underground?
The human body can survive weeks or months without food, but only days without water. Days like this–I’ll never stand it. My tongue’s like sandpaper. No, it’s already died in my mouth and is slowly setting, like cement.
‘Mmmm-MAA—’
Everything tightens, my lungs shut down. I can’t breathe.
I’m starting to shake again and that isn’t a good sign.
And now the bloody torch is flickering and–blink–it’s going to go and–blink–it’s back no it’s not blink it’s gone it’s dark I’m stuck here in the bloody dark I’d rather die just get it over with
The Camera Man watching with his single bloodshot eye his longpale fingers reaching for me the darkness
HOLY Mary Mother of
It’s back. Thank God. The light’s on again. Shaking so much I hit my head on the ceiling and the damn thing came back on.
Breathe, Kit, take it slow and steady. I have to get myself under control, make the most of the light while it’s still on, start trying to dig myself out instead of lying here like I’m already fossilized.
Which would you rather? Suffocate, or bleed to death, wearing yourfingertips down to raw stumps as you feebly try to claw your way out?
There’s something scrabbling around my feet.
Or be eaten from the toes up by rats? Slowly gnawed and nibbled,inch by bone-crunching inch?
Ha-bloody-ha.
A waft of fresh but sweat-scented air reaches my nose.
‘Martin, you fucker, you took your time.’
Above ground, the air has never smelt so good, even though it’s laced with rotting rabbit. It strikes me, sitting on the grass by the mine-shaft, that I can’t remember anything about the last fifteen minutes or so since Martin hauled me out by my ankles, spluttering chalk dust.
I’ve almost stopped shaking. That’s a plus.
‘Got a cigarette? I need a bloody cigarette.’
‘Kit, I don’t smoke. Never have, as you well know. Where are yours?’
‘Fuck knows. Under half a ton of chalk, probably.’
God knows how long Martin must have spent shifting rubble patiently out of the tunnel before he could get to me. I hope I was helpful, on the way out. I probably wasn’t.
‘So, nothing came down where you were?’
‘Not a sausage. Fortunately it was a fairly small collapse as roof falls go. Pitifully small, I’d say.’ He tries to smile. His face is pale, though, and it isn’t just chalk dust.
‘Yeah, well,’ I say. ‘You weren’t under it, Nancy Boy. I’m counting that as a near-death experience.’
I dust myself off a bit, and look at the sliver of moon. She’s on the turn. Funny thing, all these years of looking at moons, I’m still not sure which way round is the crescent and which is waning to dark. I promise myself I’ll find out now, for sure, and never forget.
Martin squats down beside me, and puts his arm round my shoulders in a big, rough, rushed hug. It’s so rare that we touch, I find my eyes filling with tears.
‘You OK? Really?’ he asks.
‘Really. I think. I’ll tell you after a hot bath.’
‘Didn’t you hear me calling? I could hear you.’
‘Struck deaf by terror, I guess, as well as dumb.’ My ears still feel funny. Like I was in an explosion.
‘I thought for a moment I’d lost you.’ His eyes look shiny in what’s left of the light.
‘You came and found me, though.’
‘If I hadn’t you’d have dug yourself out and come after me.’ He shudders. ‘I felt like a cork in a bottle after squashing my shoulders into that passageway. Anyway, if you can make it, we ought to start down before it gets too dark to find the track.’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ I shove him away, and try to get up. There doesn’t seem to be any strength in me, and I can’t push myself off the ground. He puts his arm under mine and hauls me to my feet. ‘I can walk.’
‘Like a geriatric.’
Did I get up the ladder on my own? He surely couldn’t have carried me. I have a dim memory of trying to cling to the rungs with no strength in my arms, Martin pushing from below. Right now, I’d love him to give me a piggyback, but I shake him off all the same.
We set off slowly through the beech trees. The ground drops away sharply in front of us. Through the last crisp copper leaves, lights glimmer on the farmland below. In the distance there is a smudge of orange that must be Worthing. I’m listening out for the raven’s cough, but there’s nothing except the crunch of our feet on the beech mast. My feet feel like lead.
One late winter afternoon when we were students, at the end of a long day walking in the Peak District, Martin and I came over a bluff with the wind in our faces. There were about two miles of darkening moorland between us and our tea, and not a glimmer of light below us, just a dipping, rolling plateau of green and brown tussocks, broken only by scattered clumps of rocks and trees.
We set off down the hillside, too cold, tired and hungry to talk. And then the wind brought us, from nowhere, the sound of singing. It was the eeriest thing I’ve ever heard, voices out of a wild twilight emptiness. I could have sworn the sound came from beneath our feet, and for one primordially terrified moment I was on the point of legging it. But then I looked at Martin. There was a wistful expression on his face. ‘Hi-ho,’ he said.
Amid a cluster of broken rocks away to our left, I saw the first bobbing light. And then another. Then a third. An orderly file of cavers in their helmets, schoolkids probably, judging by their size, came tramping out of the hidden entrance to the pothole like the Seven Dwarfs.
The next weekend I hid my fear and went caving for the first time with him.
‘You’re not thinking of driving back to Cornwall tonight?’ asks Martin, as we reach the gate to the bridleway where his battered red jeep is parked. My car is at his cottage, twenty miles away.
‘Without car keys?’ I may be emotionally screwed but I never forget a cover story. Though God knows how I’ll deal with explaining–Oohlook, my keys are in my handbag after all–when we get back.
‘Curses, knew we forgot something.’ Martin tries unsuccessfully to get his own keys into the lock of the jeep, gives up and peels back the canvas roof flap so he can get his hand in to open the door from inside. ‘You could always nip back.’
‘Fuck off and drive me to the nearest quadruple Scotch.’
He holds open the door for me: the driver’s door. The passenger side hasn’t opened within living memory. He claims he likes the jeep because it’s got a sense of humour, which is something you definitely can’t say about a Range Rover.
‘Seriously,’ he says. ‘Alcohol. Food. Early bed.’
‘Provided you’ve got some sheets on the spare bed,’ I agree. He isn’t looking at me, pretending to fumble with the keys. ‘Clean ones,’ I add. Martin’s all-male potholing weekends are legendary. In case you hadn’t noticed, there aren’t any proper potholes in Sussex.
‘I’ll change them.’
‘You’d better.’
‘And I’ll cook you crab cakes, if we stop at Waitrose on the way back.’
