Gone

45

There had been two rainfalls that day and the canal was deeper than it had been yesterday. The air smelt heavier and greener, and the constant plink-plink-plink of water filtering through the rock and falling into the tunnel wasn’t as musical as it had been. Tonight it was loud, insistent, like standing in a shower. Flea had to wade through the silt in her leaded boots with her head down, the water bouncing off her helmet and trickling down the back of her neck. It took her almost an hour to get back to the rockfall she and Wellard had burrowed through. The hole they’d made was still there, and by the time she’d squeezed through the gap and come down the other side she was wet and filthy. Mud clung to every inch of the immersion suit, there was grit in her mouth and nose, and she was cold from the water. Very cold. Her teeth were chattering.

She pulled her dive light out of the rucksack and shone it at the far end of the section, to where the back of the barge was visible, wedged under the next rockfall. Maybe the missing air shaft was on the other side, in a hidden section of the tunnel. She waded to the bottom of the fall and clicked off her head torch and the dive light. The canal fell into blackness so quickly she had to put her hand out to steady herself in the dizzying darkness. Why the hell hadn’t she thought to switch off the torch yesterday? Because there was light – from about ten feet above the ground. A faint blue glow. Moonlight. Coming through the loose earth at the top of the scree. This was it, then. The nineteenth air shaft on the other side of the rockfall.

She tightened the rucksack on her back and clambered up in the dark. The marker line unreeled behind her, slapping against the backs of her legs. She didn’t need a torch: the blue chink of moonlight was enough for her to see what she was doing. At the top she used her hands as spades and fashioned a ledge in the clay for her knees. She dug a second ledge for the rucksack. Then she knelt and pushed her face into the gap.

Moonlight. And she could smell what was on the other side, a sweet scent: the mixed odours of vegetation, rust and accumulated rain. The smell of the shaft. She could hear the echoey, dripping space. She pulled back and rummaged in the rucksack until she found the chisel her father used to use for cave digging.

The fuller’s earth at the top wasn’t packed but friable – quite dry. The chisel went through the loose stones quickly – she scrabbled them away in handfuls, hearing them clunk down the scree behind her and splash into the water. She’d cleared a gap about a foot from the ceiling and could see the moonlight lying blue ahead of her when she hit rock. A boulder. She slammed the chisel into it once. Twice. It bounced away. A spark flew off. It was too big to move. She sat back, breathing hard.

Fuck it.

She licked her lips, examined the hole. Not big, but it might just be wide enough to get through. No harm trying. She took off her helmet, rested it alongside the chisel, and inched her right arm through the gap. It moved forward a foot. Two feet until it was stretched out as far as it would go. Her head now. She turned slightly to the left, eyes screwed shut, and pushed her face in, bracing with her knees, pulling herself along with her fingertips until her hand was through and she could feel the cool air on it. The sharp chips of stone in the clay scratched her cheeks. She imagined her hand at the top of the rockfall – disembodied, clenching and unclenching in the moonlight. She wondered if it was being watched. And stopped wondering straight away. That sort of thinking could paralyse you in a second.

Clay fell from the ceiling and down the back of her neck, granules running into her ears and settling on her eyelashes. She braced her knees and levered herself further. There was no room to pull her left arm through – it had to stay trapped at her side. Her leg muscles tightened, but with one more push of her aching calves her right arm and head popped out into the light.

She coughed, spat, rubbed the muck out of her eyes and mouth, shook it off her hand.

She was looking down at another section of canal, which was dominated by a column of moonlight streaming from the massive air shaft above. Strange humps lay in the water where fuller’s earth had tumbled into the canal and half dissolved. The rockfall she lay on wasn’t that wide: six feet below her, the front end of the barge poked out, lifted up in the water by the weight of the rocks on its mid-section, the deck slightly buckled under a rusting windlass. About fifty yards ahead, just visible in the darkness, were the footings of yet another wall of rock and earth. Maybe that was the westerly end of the long rockfall she and Wellard had been looking for. So this new section was also enclosed, like the one she’d crawled in from, which meant the only access to this area was via the shaft.

She stared up at it. Water plinked steadily down – tight little sonic dots in the silence. The grille at the bottom was half-broken, hanging precariously from the roof and matted with dripping plant debris. But it was what was hanging through the gap in the grille that caught her eye. A length of climbing rope attached to a hook, with a karabiner that was looped into the handles of a huge black kitbag that cast a mangled shadow into the water below. It was strong enough to lower a large object down into the canal. A body for example. And there was something else out of place in the tunnel. A smudge of light further out in the water, its colour slightly different from that in the rest of the tunnel. She lowered her chin and concentrated. Something was floating among the debris on the water, just past the column of moonlight. A shoe. She knew the type: a cross between a plimsoll and a Mary Jane. Pastel-printed and soft, with a little buckle over the top. The sort of thing a child would wear. And exactly what Martha had been wearing when she disappeared.

A line of adrenalin shot down Flea’s chest and out to the ends of her fingers. This was really it. He’d been here. Maybe he was here now, somewhere in the shadows . . .

Stop it. Don’t imagine. Act. He couldn’t follow her back through this hole – the only smart thing was to withdraw, retrace her steps back down the canal, and raise the alarm. She began to pull back but halfway through found she was stuck, her shoulders wedged in the tiny gap. She tugged frantically at her right arm, twisting sideways, trying to loosen it that way, but her ribs were jammed into the roof, her lungs squashed. She forced herself to stop, reminding herself not to panic. In her mind she was screaming. But she let her head go slack on one side and took the time to calm herself, keeping her breathing slow to allow her lungs to open against the pressure.

From somewhere in the distance came a familiar sound. Like thunder. She and Wellard had heard it the other day. A train racing along the track – she could picture it – the air flying off it, earth and rock shuddering under it. She could picture, too, the metres and metres of stone and clay sediment above her. And her lungs: two vulnerable oval spaces in the darkness. The smallest movement of the earth could squash them to a place where nothing would open them again. And Martha. Maybe little Martha’s body somewhere ahead in the canal.

A rock fell, close to Flea’s head. It tumbled down the scree into the water with a splash. The tunnel was shaking. Shit shit shit. She took the deepest breath she could, jammed her knees against the opening, braced her left hand against the boulder and pulled with all her strength. She came through into the first chamber in a rush, reversing feet first, scraping the underside of her chin on the boulder. The caving line slipped down the slope and she toppled after it, the rucksack with her, landing on her backside in the water.

All around her the chamber creaked and screamed. She fumbled for the torch in the rucksack, clicked it on and shone it upwards. The whole cavern was vibrating. A fracture in the ceiling lengthened in a shot – like a snake going through grass – and a deafening crack ricocheted around the little chamber. Bent double, she staggered through the water to the only shelter she could see – the stern of the barge. She had just managed to squeeze herself into the space behind it before the air was filled with the roar of falling debris and the whistle of rock racing past her ears.

The noise seemed to last for ever. She sat in the muck, hands over her head, eyes closed. Even when the noise of the train had dwindled she stayed there, listening to little rockfalls somewhere in the darkness. Every time she thought it was over there would come another trickle of small stones slithering down and splashing into the water. It was at least five minutes before the chamber was quiet and she could raise her head.

She wiped her face on the shoulders of the immersion suit, shone the torch around and began to laugh. A long, low, humourless laugh, like a sob, that echoed around what was left of the chamber and sent noises back that made her want to cover her ears. She dropped her head against the hull of the barge and rubbed her eyes.

What the fuck was she supposed to do now?