The Moon Tunnel

39

The first sight of the blood-red shadow sent a shudder through the crowd which pressed up against the security fence. Dryden stood on the roof-rack of the Fiat and looked towards the halogen lights illuminating the site. Between the car and the fence he judged the crowd at 300 strong, all heads tilted upwards, catching the amber moonlight, their hands raised in salute. Speedwing, sitting on someone’s shoulders, pointed his staff at the moon and began a chant. The crowd swayed with him, transformed into a congregation, and for the first time a sense of anger and menace emanated from the protesters, good natured high spirits evaporating as the white moonlight died, to be replaced by the shadow of the eclipse.

At 11.36pm precisely the earth’s shadow had clipped the moon. Even Dryden, immune to the romantic nostalgia of the druids, felt the change: the black hair on his neck bristled as the pine woods fell silent. Despite himself he sensed his heartbeat quicken, and the individuals who made up this shimmering crowd began to pulse too, as if to a common beat. But it was the silence which lent credence to the charge of desecration, and seemed to bless the hungry souls who had come to worship. Here they stood, where they felt thousands had stood before, to watch an eclipse plunge the night into blackness.

The police, who had thrown a loose cordon behind the demonstrators, stood back amongst the pine trees. By the gates a single squad car sat silently, only its rotating blue light indicating it was on duty. A walkie-talkie crackled but was hurriedly stifled. The silence, again complete, ushered the hypnotic shadow across the moon and as the pale rose red took the place of the high-voltage white the shadows deepened on earth. The glare of the moon faded, and stars – normally unseen at the moon’s edge – emerged from the black sky. Finally, only a single sliver of the full moon remained, a brilliant shard of white light, exploding at the edge of the red sphere like a sunburst.

Then the eclipse was complete. Speedwing stood on his supporters’ shoulders, a black figure against the site’s halogen floodlights. Above them the moon, in its subtle new radiance, hung for once like a sphere, not a mundane, flattened disc. On its surface the familiar seas and mountains reappeared more clearly, intimate, closer. And still, the impenetrable silence, until Speedwing spoke.

‘The fence!’

The crowd turned and pressed forward, the sound of buckling metal accompanied by the sharp cracks of the thin bands breaking between the reinforced poles. Then came the shot, and the screams. Dryden guessed it was an airgun, and the second shot found its target as one of the floodlights crackled and cut out, followed almost immediately by the others as the circuit was broken.

Dryden blinked, trying to get his eyes to adjust, but it was as if the world had become a giant photographer’s darkroom, lit only in infrared. He heard a bark and turned to see Boudicca bounding past the line of white police vans from which uniformed officers in riot gear were being disgorged into the puddles of red light beneath the pine trees, where Gaetano had parked the Fiat. He saw fear in the dog’s eyes, which doubly reflected the red moon, so he grabbed the leash and joined the throng of demonstrators pushing through the gap in the security wire.

Ahead of him, just a few yards ahead, a hooded figure in black moved with the others, fair hair showing at the shoulders. The rest, agitated, cast round for Speedwing’s staff to follow. But the figure in black moved purposefully towards the ladder that led down into the main diggers’ trench, retrieved a torch from a pocket and checked the beam by shining it once into the face beneath the hood. Then, quickly, the figure descended.

Dryden followed, his scalp prickling with fear. At the top of the ladder he paused, holding Boudicca back on the leash, before climbing down, the dog bounding down beside him into the gloom of the ditch. Above him on the edge two demonstrators struggled with a policeman in riot gear, but below the way was clear, the only light the lunar red, and by it, ahead, he saw the figure pause at the central crossroads and turn east towards the moon tunnel.

He walked on, encouraged by Boudicca’s confident tugs, his own knees buckling with fear, as he relived the moment when the flailing figure of the mutilated Azeglio Valgimigli had thrown itself at his feet. He stumbled badly, falling to his knees, but the greyhound returned to snuffle his neck, the fetid breath of the dog on his face, and despite the otherworldly light he could clearly see her white incisors.

He made it to the crossroads and looked east towards the point where the archaeologist’s trench had cut through the moon tunnel. The ditch was empty. A clean sweep of neatly excavated earth. He felt his guts twist, knowing instinctively where his quarry had gone. Boudicca had the scent now and loped forward, still silent, until her head plunged inside the tunnel’s opening. Dryden, catching up, pulled the dog back and clicked on the torch Gaetano had retrieved from the boot of the hired car. The tunnel was clear for about twenty yards, then turned north. The police team had cleared it as best they could, but here and there the thin wooden packing-case panels had buckled, and little avalanches of soil lay across the way forward, lumps of the grey-green clay glistening. Boudicca eyed him, eager, confident in their courage.

Dryden’s life was made up of moments like this. He knew he didn’t have the courage to go on, but knew that he would, more fearful of the verdict that he was a coward. What was in it for him? He thought about what might lay around the slow curve of the tunnel. Had Valgimigli’s killer returned to the place of execution? Was the Dadd buried here? There was, he knew, another item missing from the scene: the gun.

‘Stay here,’ he said to the dog, his voice catching horribly in his throat. Boudicca whined and slumped down like a sphinx.

He tossed the torch into the hole and crawled forward for twenty feet before the first wave of nausea made him stop. He craned his head back over his shoulder and could see the distant rose-tinted square of the tunnel entrance, Boudicca out of sight. A curtain of sweat had dropped from his hairline and trickled into his eye, the salt making his vision blur.

He tried not to think of the earth above, the sand of his dream, waiting to fall like a judgement.

His hand, set against the wooden tunnel wall, left a moist print on the pine. Each wooden panel was a potential hiding place, too numerous for the police to have safely checked them all. He forced himself to look ahead where the tunnel turned to the north still, continuing its long gentle sweep. The claustrophobia which haunted him pressed in, and he found it almost impossible not to kick out with his feet, or press his elbows into the thin panelled walls, craving space and air. He rested his forehead in the dirt, and felt the despair of failure, knowing now that he would turn back. He saw an image of Vee Hilgay, slumped dead in one of the high-sided chairs of the old people’s home, and still he began to edge back, desperate for the sight of the night sky.

He raised himself on one elbow and froze; the sounds from the site were a distant distortion, but much closer was a new sound. Once, twice and then a third time, the clicking of the earth above him fracturing, a fissure opening in the sticky, soaking, Gault clay like a crack in soft cheese. He listened, sensing the movement above, and then the earth fell, dropping onto the roof of the tunnel with a deep, visceral blow. Dryden heard the wood splinter, closed his eyes and waited for the impact to crush him as it did in his nightmare. But it wasn’t the weight that hurt, it was his ears, the changes in pressure tearing at the drums. And then the almost soft caress of the trickling earth. He lay there, encased, his heart audible, waiting to die, as he felt the soil trickling down beside his neck and beginning to clog his lips and nose. A minute passed, and the panic left him unable to move. Each time he breathed he thought it would be his last, each time there was less to breathe.

‘Jesus help me,’ he said.

Detached from the process of his death he waited, his heart rate dropping, the lack of oxygen beginning to lighten his head. Through the debris he inched his hand until it found the torch, and bored it towards his face until its yellow light stemmed the panic. He held it to his eye and thought of Laura, wanting desperately that she should be with him. He buried his face in her hair, the torch beam flickered and died, and he passed out.