Creatures of the Pool (39 page)

She sounds less convinced by the message of the song than my father seems determined to be. I’m lifting my free hand to help me send a shout to them when Lucinda says “I can hear something. Is that your father?”

“It’s both of them. They’re in here. They’re somewhere down below.”

“Shush, then.” She plants her fists outside the gap, and her face appears between them. “Let me listen,” she says.

She’s making more noise than I was, and my parents have gone quiet. I’m on the verge of accusing her until they start another verse. Her intent face loses its expression, and she wriggles through the gap, so much more deftly than I managed that she makes me feel clumsy and bloated. Once she rises gracefully to her feet I say “Hold this for me till I’m down.”

As I extend the flashlight to her the walls quiver. Shadows stream up her face, playing with its shape. Her features grow steadier, outlining her concern, as soon as she takes the flashlight. I give her a quick hug, which feels softer than I like, but I’ve no time to improve on it. Though the song is still audible, mostly in my father’s voice, it’s retreating into the depths.

I stand on the brink of the hole and reach with one foot for the ladder. I teeter on the edge, stretching my leg down, until Lucinda extends her free hand to grasp my right one. She keeps hold, leaning so far forward that it begins to look precarious, while I balance on the top rung and grope for the next and establish a slippery foothold. As I step down again she releases me and straightens up to her full height, training the flashlight on the hole. I rest my hands on the gritty pavement and stretch a leg downwards, wishing I weren’t so bulky. My foot locates the next rung, and I close my fingers around the topmost. Apparently I’m less out of shape than I feared, because twisting my body a little allows me to descend without touching the clay on any side. Only a trickle of soil dislodged by the ladder makes me afraid that the hole may collapse.

In a few seconds I’m through it and clambering down the rest of the ladder. As my head clears the underside of the ceiling, so does the flashlight beam. It expands, becoming dimmer, to show me an arched brick tunnel about eight feet high, leading both ways into blackness. Is it one of the disused sewers? I can hear the faintest lapping to my right, from the direction of the river. The dogged song is off to my left, however far away. I clutch at the rungs, which feel moist enough for many years of condensation, and hasten down the ladder. Fragments of the roof crunch underneath, though most of the debris is piled against the walls. The instant I set foot on the floor the light is snatched away, and I have more than a moment of breathless panic. “Here it comes,” Lucinda calls.

Kneeling at the edge of the hole, she lowers the flashlight towards me. She’s holding it by the lens, muffling the glow, which blurs her face and her outstretched arm. As I start back up the ladder she opens her hand. She must expect me to catch the flashlight, but I barely do, clutching it with splayed fingers and thumping it against my chest. I’m reclaiming my breath from a gasp when the ladder begins to shiver as if it’s magnifying the panic I experienced. “Hold it so I can see where I’m going,” says Lucinda.

I’ve barely left the ladder and raised the flashlight beam when she descends into it with the swiftness of an acrobat performing a familiar routine. Of course she must have gained experience in the Williamson tunnels. Her progress drags the light down, stopping up the hole with blackness—that is, I lower the beam. It probes the empty dark that leads towards the river. Brick dust crunches beneath Lucinda’s feet as she steps on the floor. “Which way are we going?” she says.

Her call from above silenced my parents. “If you didn’t shout you could hear.”

“I’m not shouting, Gavin.”

“You need to keep quieter than that.” The tunnel amplifies my whisper while rendering it thin and shrill. “His text said not to look for them,” I resent having to admit.

“Why would he say that? Do you think they’re—”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. I just care about saving them.”

“I’ll surprise you how quiet I can be, then. You won’t even know I’m here unless you want to.”

I see her mouth this more than I hear the words. It’s less reassuring than she presumably intends, because it makes me wonder if anybody else is being stealthy in the dark. As I swing the beam past the ladder, the tunnel appears to dilate while the shadows of rungs scurry over the wall. Darkness floods up from the river when I turn the beam inland. At its farthest extent, which is as dim as the glow of a guttering candle, I’m just able to distinguish that the tunnel starts to curve to the right, in the general direction of the Castle and the mouth of the Pool. I’m pacing away from the ladder, putting on speed once the floor is clear of rubble, when the song is revived somewhere ahead.

At least my parents aren’t troubled by the light, because they’re too far off to see it. Surely they won’t be able to hear my footsteps for a while, although I wish I could be as discreet as Lucinda; I have to keep glancing over my shoulder to confirm she’s still following me. She must be staying back in case we bump into each other, though the tunnel is wide enough for us to walk abreast. Can I be quieter? Working on how fast I can stride without making any appreciable noise brings me no closer to my parents, but they don’t seem to be receding either. By the time I reach the bend in the tunnel my footfalls aren’t too far from noiseless. The hush is broken mostly by my parents’ unequal duet until I hear voices at my back.

The lit section of tunnel reels around us as I twist to face Lucinda. A glistening shape swells up behind her on the wall that’s blackened with patches of damp, but it’s her shadow. The passage must have amplified the voices, unless my nerves did, because the speakers are out of range of the flashlight. They aren’t even in the tunnel; they’re above it. As I strain to understand them, my ears feel as if they’re expanding. In
a few moments I manage to hear “Sounds like somebody’s having a singalong.”

“Let’s see what they’ve got to sing about,” the answer comes, so muffled that the speakers must be outside the bridge. This isn’t as reassuring as I would like, because they’re Wrigley and Maddock.

Lucinda looks transfixed by the light I’m directing past her. Her face has grown blank, the eyes in particular. She must be concentrating on the sounds outside the tunnel, unless she’s doing her best not to distract me or to make any inadvertent noise. At least the police can’t reach my parents before we do. For a change I’m glad they’ve taken so long to discover where my father’s message came from. They won’t be able to follow until they clear more of a way, since I was barely able to fit through the gap. I put a finger to my lips and point around the bend with the flashlight. As I turn in that direction the first speaker says “They won’t be singing when they see us.”

“They’ll be singing on the other side of their faces.” I want to believe the tunnel is playing another acoustic prank. How can they already sound closer? Surely I would have heard them enlarging the gap in the bricks. Then one of them says “Black as a Paki’s arsehole down there” with a laugh I’d rather not understand—I feel as if the darkness is releasing his true self—and there’s no question that he’s inside the bridge, because his voice is directly above the hole in the roof of the tunnel. “Just like home,” says his companion.

I would prefer not to interpret this either. Any inclination I might have had to confront the men has fled into the dark. I ought to be using the time it will take them to squeeze through the hole in the pavement—using it to ensure that we and the light are hidden by the bend. It curves as far as I can see, and I lengthen my strides, even when the light
sways like a vessel in a storm. I’ve advanced just a few yards when a body drops into the tunnel, followed almost immediately by another.

They sound like large soft heavy sacks. I have the quite unnecessary notion that they expanded as they struck the floor. Mightn’t they be bags of some kind of equipment? Apparently not, since one remarks “Didn’t know I could still do that.”

“We never lose it, us.”

They’ve silenced my parents—indeed, the impacts did. I can’t let the newcomers or any thoughts of them delay me, and I stride along the tunnel as its depths work like a parched throat. Stealth is still with me, though I hardly need it, since I hear heavy footfalls padding at my back. I can’t help glancing over my shoulder, but only Lucinda is to be seen. She widens her eyes, asking a mute question or simply acknowledging me. I mustn’t speak, though I’m disturbed by the sight behind her. The beam in front of me lends a tinge of visibility to a short stretch of the passage we’ve traversed, but beyond this there isn’t a trace of light. Despite their speed, Wrigley and Maddock seem to be in total darkness.

Surely the bend is concealing whatever light they have. The tunnel curves for another hundred yards or so before straightening to release the unsteady beam into the depths. What’s barring the way in the distance? It can’t be a dead end, unless my parents have turned aside somewhere I’ve yet to locate. Suppose I didn’t notice a side passage, and the police are now between me and my parents? What am I afraid the men will do to them? I would rather not dream of that, even in daylight—the daylight I suppose is still above us in the world. In a few seconds I’m able to distinguish the prospect ahead. Though it isn’t a blockage, it’s almost as unwelcome. It’s a fork that splits the tunnel in half.

One narrow passage carries straight on, while the other bends sharply to the left, further inland. The bend is the nearest place to hide, but tracks lead along the second passage.
There are none in its neighbour. I go swiftly but as good as silently to the junction, where I turn to Lucinda. I finger my lips again and point ahead, then indicate the flashlight and wave my hand over it as though extinguishing a candle. I have to hope this is eloquent enough as I hurry into the tunnel.

How far can we go before the men are close enough to see our light? I would run if I could be sure of staying unheard. The soft footfalls behind me sound closer—they can hardly be growing larger. I glance back to find Lucinda wide-eyed with the dimness. I’m sure the men are nearly at the bend, and I repeat my gestures to conjure silence and darkness. The gestures won’t work by themselves. I press my spine against the wall and take hold of Lucinda’s arm to help me communicate or perhaps just for reassurance as I switch the flashlight off.

At once I might as well have no eyes. In one sense the absolute blackness is reassuring; my parents must be safely out of sight, since whatever light they’re using is. I have time to wonder how irrationally I’m behaving, not to mention why, before the large flat footsteps reach the section of tunnel that splits in half. At once my anxiety makes far too much sense, because Wrigley and Maddock are finding their way with no light of any kind.

I feel as if I’m dreaming their approach, an impression the blackness exacerbates. Can’t they be wearing equipment that lets them see in the dark? It seems unnecessary, and it would mean they can see us. I wish Lucinda wouldn’t draw any attention by moving, even though she has only closed a hand over mine on her arm. She increases her grip as the loose heavy footfalls advance. They sound too soft for shoes, and I have the unpleasant fancy that the men have left their clothes elsewhere—under the bridge, perhaps. There’s a slithery element to the footsteps, and a clumsiness that might suggest the searchers haven’t quite decided how to walk. As
they halt at the division of the tunnels Lucinda clenches her hand on mine, and I imagine eyes swelling huge to peer at us out of the dark. My mouth is parched with holding my breath by the time the footsteps veer into the adjacent tunnel.

They haven’t reached the bend when I almost drop the flashlight. Either Wrigley or Maddock has begun to bellow “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and his colleague is quick to join in, though not to find the same key. At least the disordered chorus should keep my parents away from them. As the song recedes around the bend, I have to assume that the performers are mocking the version they heard. Perhaps the tunnel is distorting the sounds, which are growing so parodic that I could imagine they’re emerging from mouths without much of a shape or at least lacking a constant one. It isn’t a notion I enjoy having in the dark. I wait until the voices seem muffled by distance, and then I force myself to wait for another few breaths before reviving the flashlight beam.

Lucinda clutches at my arm, and I turn to see her squeezing her eyes tight as if they’ve grown too used to the dark. Some seconds pass before she blinks. In a moment she does so more widely, and she speaks—her lips move, at any rate. “What is it?” she seems to be asking.

I shake my head and shrug and raise my brows to their fullest elevation and stretch my arms wide, thumping the wall with the flashlight. The rubber casing mutes the impact, but I’m yearning to take the noise back as Lucinda repeats her question loud enough for me to hear, unless it’s a variation. “What are they—”

“Talk later,” I just about murmur. When she looks dissatisfied I nod in the direction of the song, which is so malformed by now that it suggests the croaking mouths have grown even more uncertain of their shape. “Do you want them getting to my parents?”

“What do you think they—”

“I don’t want to think.” All this whispering is no good for my nerves. Lucinda’s fingers stretch to cling to my arm, but I ease it free. “No time,” I mutter as I set off along the tunnel.

Has hitting the wall damaged the flashlight? The beam appears to flicker, and my heartbeat flutters in response. Surely the light is wavering just with my haste. Wrigley and Maddock have fallen silent, even their ponderously purposeful tread. Either they’re out of earshot or they’ve halted to listen. They can’t hear Lucinda if I can’t, and I’m finding more stealth myself. I do my best to steady the beam as it discovers an object as tall as the roof ahead. It must be another division of the tunnels. The blurred prints on the discoloured floor will show which way my parents have gone. The dim edge of the flashlight beam snatches at the obstruction as I make for it, until I’m forced to acknowledge that I’ve been seeing and then trying to see what I wanted to be there. It isn’t a junction. The roof has collapsed.