One Last Breath

37

Within a few minutes, Mansell Quinn was too far in to feel the movement of air. He noticed the stillness by the lack of sensation in his hands, an absence of touch on the skin of his face. For the first time, he was beyond the breathing.

He shone his torch on to the sides of the passage. He had no spare battery, and the light wouldn’t last long. It was better to use it just to orientate himself, to be sure that he didn’t fall into some unseen shaft as he felt his way along the walls. There was no need to go too far. There would be nobody along this way to find him. Not tonight, anyway. Nor would there be anybody to bring him out safely if he fell and broke his ankle. Not tonight, or any other night.

Moving through complete blackness was like walking through the dreams that came whenever he managed to sleep. That was the only darkness Quinn had ever found terrifying, the darkness behind his eyes when he lay down at night. And that was because too much light filtered through his eyelids, creating pictures, shapes dancing and gesturing, dim figures silently playing out scenes of a life he didn’t recognize. The shapes were like those of people on the TV screen in one of his prisons, when the reception had been so bad that the picture was a fog. Behind his eyes, those figures might be no more than a faint glow of colour, the suggestion of a human shape. What were those people doing, there behind his eyes?

Quinn moved on a little further, going gradually deeper. In Death Underground there had been a map of the Peak-Speedwell cavern system. All those miles of branching and winding tubes resembled a huge set of lungs. That set him thinking about Will Thorpe and his emphysema. It had been a mercy to kill him, really. He pictured the postmortem, imagined Will’s lungs being taken out and examined. They would be a shrivelled black mass, the disease-ravaged lung tissue replaced by fleshy pustules.

He felt a jolt of pain in his side, and touched the reassuring weight of the crossbow over his shoulder. It hadn’t been right tonight, but he could wait a little longer. For now, he was enjoying the feeling of calmness within himself. It felt good, as if the deep, dark mouth of the cavern had sucked the anger from his blood.

Down in a cave, cut off from the real world. Quinn repeated it to himself. Yes, he was cut off from the real world. Whatever the real world was.

He was splashing, head-bowed, through an underground river bed, the noise of his boots echoing on the walls as he rattled over the stones. He moved to the sound of constantly running water. It cascaded out of holes in the roof, ran down the walls and trickled into rock pools.

If you stood still in here, it could get chilly. Some of the chambers had a bad atmosphere, too. From time to time, he had the conviction that he must be following someone, because he could hear noises ahead, like another person’s boots dislodging stones or splashing in a pool. But Quinn ignored the noises and the illusions, taking his time, feeling his way along the walls as he walked through the stream, the water sometimes over and inside his boots.

What would it be like if the cavern flooded? He thought of white foam and the roar as the water rushed over the rocks, the rumbling as it grew in volume and reached the roof.

Quinn reached another pool and turned on his torch. He saw flickering movements in the water and realized that life existed down here after all. Minute creatures were wriggling along on their sides, like tiny fragments of fingernail. Troglodytic shrimps, living in an environment free of predators. He wondered why they didn’t they get washed out when the caves flooded.

Here, the floor was covered in flowstone with water running over it. Quinn crouched close to the ground. He could hear voices all the time now, though he knew it was just the echoes of the cave. These caverns should be as remote and unaffected by man as the furthest reaches of the planet. Time meant something here, because the cave had gone through millions of years like this, experiencing the slow dissolving of rock in water. It made him feel tiny and transitory.

Yet the curtains of flowstone had been splattered and smeared with mud by hundreds of pairs of cavers’ boots over the years. He’d read about members of one of the caving clubs going into Moss Chamber with scrubbing brushes to restore the flowstone to its original gleaming whiteness. Apparently they’d not been here, for he could see imprints left by the recent passage of many boots. If he wanted to, he could leave his own mark. The mud would stick to him, too. It would cling to him like a dirty memory.

Now he was here, he knew the cavern was the right place. He could have waited above the house in Castleton and made the shot whenever he wanted to, but it wouldn’t have felt right. He’d waited so long that another day was nothing, if it meant doing it properly.

Quinn knelt to take a drink from the pool in his cupped hands. Unlike the water from the well in Edendale, this was freezing cold, and it made him gasp. It left an aftertaste on the back of his mouth — a strange, acid bitterness. It was the bitterness of stone.