Spylark

by Danny Rurlander

  Tom pressed himself against the wall. The bead of sweat was moving slowly down the ridge of his nose. He was desperate to wipe it away but he could not move a muscle. It slid further until it stopped, suspended on the tip of his nose, gravity willing it to loosen its grip. That dangling globule of sweat was all Tom could think about. In the irrational, paralysing fear of the moment, he imagined it falling off and hitting the floor at his feet like a drop of water on a hot griddle, steaming and hissing, giving his presence away.

  But the man continued his noisy explanation.

  ‘Under the box is the manhole cover with a ladder down to the aqueduct. The escape route is an overflow pipe that comes out through a culvert into the river. It’s a drop to the right after half a mile. The outflow comes out into the river through a metal gate, which is completely submerged. That’s why you have to mask up.’

  ‘How do we get through the gate?’

  ‘Whoever’s first at the bottom of the culvert needs to unlatch it. We kayaked up the river last night – the one that drains into the north end of the lake – and I got it ready. Long time since I’ve used an underwater angle grinder. Anyway, then we scuba down to the river mouth, where the boat will be waiting for us. Full throttle over to the island to meet the helicopter, then it’s au revoir England for a while!’

  At last Tom understood why the Invincible needed so much power. He was beginning to piece things together and he could not help feel a sense of awe at the terrible genius of Rufus Clay. The location of the farm above the route of the Thirlmere Aqueduct gave the criminals their road to freedom if everything went wrong.

  How clearly he remembered Mr Woodburn talking about ‘the greatest engineering project of its time’. To his geography teacher it was another chance to waffle on about those ingenious Victorians, hewing rock with nothing but pickaxes, boring the longest man-made tunnel in the world right through the mountains, deep underground, at a perfect gradient so no pumping was needed. But to Tom, this artery of silent black water under his feet was the stuff of nightmares. And now he understood that, if he were ever to breathe the free air again, it was his only way out.

  The men were leaving. ‘Oh, and whatever you do, don’t miss the overflow pipe. If you do you won’t be able to swim back to it against the current – you’ll be swimming the ninety miles to Manchester, mate. And you don’t want to do that!’

  ‘What, swim ninety miles, or go to Manchester?’

  The door slammed and Tom heard their laughter recede up the stairs. He wiped the sweat from his face in the darkness. He was shaking so much he had to use one hand to steady the other as he reached to switch on the light.

  CHAPTER 34

  Maggie’s heart was pounding against the carpet of needles. She sat up and blinked into the blackness, listening to the sound of her own breathing.

  ‘Joel? Are you there?’

  He answered with an owl call.

  ‘I can’t see a thing,’ she called as loudly as she dared.

  Suddenly Joel’s face was illuminated like a ghost in the trees. ‘Come this way,’ he whispered. When she reached him, he flicked off the torch and the darkness seemed even more complete than before.

  ‘Why didn’t they follow?’

  ‘Follow? Maggie, I doubt those three will ever dare to get anywhere near you after that! You were like a knight in armour, the way you were waving that branch around!’

  ‘I don’t suppose they’ll be speaking to each other for a while either. Hear that?’

  From the direction of the tarn they could hear shouting and swearing.

  ‘Let’s get out of here anyway,’ Maggie said, getting up. ‘Snakey will want his bike back.’

  ‘Listen!’ There was a snap of a twig nearby. They froze, grabbing each other in terror. Maggie held her breath. Then she felt a nudge on her leg as Archie snuffled around her feet. She picked him up and let him lick her face, relieved at the warmth of his body.

  ‘Come on,’ said Joel. Holding hands, they half-scrambled, half-crawled up the hillside towards the ridge. The ground became steeper and after a while they could make out the shapes of branches silhouetted against the night sky. Then they were out of the trees and a cool breeze brought them the vinegar scent of bracken from the other side of the ridge.

  They were standing on the crest of the limestone escarpment, looking down, as they had done earlier that afternoon, on the valley below, which was now washed in soft-filtered moonlight. The tiny beck in the middle of the gorge was lost in moon shadow but they could hear it gurgling away in the darkness, carried to their ears by the gentle updraught.

  ‘There are a lot of lights on at the farm,’ said Maggie.

  Joel raised a hand to silence her.

  There were other voices cutting through the night. Men shouting, dogs barking, a clang of metal. An engine started and they could hear the spit and crackle of loose stones on tyres, as headlights swept out into the dark and disappeared down the track.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Maggie whispered.

  Hurried figures were moving around the floodlit yard, and torch beams were sweeping the ground around the farm.

  ‘They’re looking for something,’ said Joel.

  ‘Or someone,’ Maggie replied.

  From the centre of the farmyard four lights lifted off the ground and spread apart in different directions, like a firework in slow motion. One became brighter than the others, and Maggie realized the drone was coming towards them. She felt Joel’s hand on her back.

  ‘Get down!’

  They rolled into some deep bracken and lay still.

  ‘Keep your face to the ground,’ commanded Joel, ‘and don’t move a muscle. I’ll tell you what’s going on. Tom must’ve escaped. And those guys are not happy.’

  There was a shrill buzzing as the drone tracked up the side of the valley and drew level with them, a powerful searchlight fixed to its underbelly, hunting for movement. As it passed overhead Maggie could see every hair stand out on the stalks of bracken in front of her face. It didn’t stop, but continued behind them, down towards the tarn.

  ‘That would make sense,’ said Maggie, thinking hard. ‘I wonder . . .’

  As they combed the valley, the drones were casting cone-shaped shafts of light through patches of mist. They moved methodically, exposing everything in their path: sheep standing mutely in the dark; stone walls; the grassy bumps of the limestone valley. Unless they could dodge the lights as they came, anyone out there would soon be spotted.

  ‘Well, if Tom has escaped,’ said Maggie, ‘let’s make sure we find him before they do. Come on!’

  ‘Right,’ said Joel. ‘That means getting as close to the farm as possible. He can’t have gone far.’

  CHAPTER 35

  The box was heavier than Tom had expected, and after shunting it to one side to reveal the manhole cover, he lifted the lid and saw the reason why. Inside was a pile of diving equipment: wetsuits, masks, fins, oxygen tanks, an assortment of tubes and dials, some rubber-coated head torches.

  Tom stared into the box, trying to remember what caused the water level in the aqueduct to vary. Presumably rainfall was a factor. Or was it more about need? He wished the groggy feeling in his head would go so he could think clearly, but he knew that until he had the sky above and a lake breeze on his cheek, thinking would feel like swimming through porridge. For a moment he had a blank and couldn’t even remember what time of year it was. It felt like he had been in this place for ever.

  Tom forced himself to focus. It was August. It was the school holidays and that must mean less demand for water in Manchester.

  Or would it mean more?

  The fact was he had never been scuba diving and wouldn’t know where to start. He picked up a head torch and pulled it firmly over his head.

  The manhole cover was in a slight depression in the centre of the concrete floor, like a plughole at the bottom of a sink. For a moment he felt as if he were outside his own body, looking down, and he was a spider trappe
d in the sink, nowhere to go but down the plug to drown.

  When he lifted the metal cover, the familiar smell of lake water hit him. He switched on the torch and the bright beam was swallowed up by a black hole that disappeared into nothingness. The light picked out a series of metal rungs that descended beyond counting and then faded into utter blackness. He rummaged in the box and found a spanner, which he tossed into the shaft. The torchlight picked out its spinning form for a few seconds, then it was gone, and sometime after that he heard the faint splash.

  Tom felt something inside his belly twisting like cut glass. He knew he couldn’t do it. When even an underground car park made him feel a silent scream rising in his chest, how could he climb down that ladder, into that great intestine that wound through the earth, billions of tonnes of rock and mountain weighing on his mind, and not crack under the strain?

  That’s what had happened that day in the summer term of his first year at the new school. They had been on the back row as usual: Snakey, Sam and Podge. As soon as he stepped on to the bus with its nauseating smell, Tom thought he would vomit, and had been given a seat at the front next to Manky McDonald, as usual, who chatted endlessly about Minecraft, as they growled their way up the hairpin bends towards the slate mines. But it was not travel sickness, or even Manky’s smell, that was the problem.

  In the car park everyone put their wellies on and Mr Woodburn handed out clipboards and worksheets and they set off up a winding gravel track between towering slag heaps of broken slate. At a narrow opening at the bottom of a wall of rock, they were met by some men dressed like miners, all hi-vis waterproofs and helmets and ropes. One of the men gave a safety talk and then handed out hard hats with miners’ lights on the front.

  After the muttering and faffing of getting everyone kitted out had died down, Mr Woodburn gave a little lecture about the importance of the slate mining industry, and everything he said made Tom’s fear grow, like an animal eating him from inside. While Mr Woodburn praised the ‘sheer grit’ of the miners who had carved out these tunnels beneath ‘millions and millions of tonnes of earth and rock with nothing but a few hand tools’, Tom wished with every fibre of his being that the miners hadn’t bothered, or that there would suddenly be a flood, so they couldn’t get in, or that Mr Woodburn would have a seizure and need urgent medical attention, or that the bus driver – who had remained in the bus with a flask of coffee and a bag of doughnuts – would haul himself out of his seat and come waddling up the track with a message that the school was burning down and they all had to get home.

  But none of those things happened, and they had all filed through the entrance, with one of the hi-vis men counting them in with a clicker, and Tom had found himself in the middle of a pack of shoving bodies, all hoo-hooing to hear the echoes, fifty feet underground, ankle-deep in water, stooping and stumbling through the clammy tunnel and all he could think about were the millions and millions of tonnes of rock and earth that those gritty miners had put between him and the beautiful sky.

  He could hear Mr Woodburn up ahead calling cheerfully for them to keep up, but the pack was thinning out and he soon found himself some distance away from the person in front. He was aware of Snakey and his friends behind him by their constant prattle. He wished they were in front. He wanted as few people as possible between him and the entrance where, as he looked over his shoulder, a slit of daylight fell on the puddled water like a token of another world, and then disappeared as they rounded a bend.

  Ahead the tunnel opened up into a cavern and the class had assembled into a hushed clump. Mr Woodburn made everyone switch off their lights in order to experience, he said, the sort of darkness they would rarely, if ever, have experienced before. Finally Mr Woodburn turned his light off.

  ‘I’ve gone blind!’ shouted some joker and laughter echoed around the cavern. But Tom pressed his hands on to his temples, begging himself to keep calm, telling himself it would soon be over and vowing to savour every breath once he was out.

  The tunnel descended deeper. Further on there was another hold-up and this time everyone was gasping about a sheer drop, where the tunnel wall had fallen away into emptiness. Mr Woodburn was droning on about sedimentary rock . . . water . . . millions of years . . . and one of the hi-vis men was telling them to stand clear. Tom couldn’t take in what was being said. He was looking ahead to where the tunnel narrowed to a hole no bigger than the entrance to a dog kennel. One by one, everyone was lining up to get on their hands and knees and squeeze, head first, through the tunnel. Someone was sniggering about Aiden Smith’s belly getting stuck like a cork in a bottle, and suddenly Tom was aware that Snakey was right behind him.

  ‘Enjoying yourself, Hopkins?’

  Tom’s stomach was clenched like a fist and his throat was too dry to make a sound.

  ‘Not speaking? Just trying to be friendly, Hopkins!’

  ‘Hey, Snakey.’ It was Podge. ‘I have a feeling Hopkins doesn’t like it underground.’

  ‘Scared of the dark?’ said Sam Noyland, with a quiver in his own voice.

  Then it was Tom’s turn to go through the tunnel and Mr Woodburn was pushing his head down to get clear of the rock. He could see the feet of the person in front and nothing else. The passage was two feet high, floor to ceiling. He could not go on. He put his head on the floor and closed his eyes. He could hear Snakey behind him, but nothing went in. All he could think about was rock, rock, rock. Millions and millions of tonnes. Rock. Collapsing, falling, crushing. Trapped in darkness, no air.

  Then he was screaming.

  Many times later, Snakey would tell the world that he had been ‘crying like a baby’.

  His arms and legs were jammed. He wanted to stand but couldn’t. He wanted to run but his legs were stuck fast. He had to get out. He wanted to strap himself to a stick of dynamite and blast through the mountain and out and up and away and above until the air grew thin and he overlooked the valleys and fells, and his lake with its islands and bays and wooded headlands, a dazzling silver ribbon, stretching into the sun.

  He could hear Snakey hissing behind him with genuine exasperation. ‘Move! You useless, snot-faced baby. You totally pathetic moron.’

  Someone was holding his ankles, pulling him back. Then there was a light in his face, Mr Woodburn asking if he was OK, calming him down, telling him that he would wait with him in the gallery, take some breaths, then he would take Tom back outside.

  But as he stood up his head torch had shone in Snakey’s face and he’d caught a glint of triumph in his eye that he would never forget. He tried to push past him to get to where the tunnel widened, but Snakey was in the way, smirking. Suddenly the panic turned to wild anger, and Tom shoved the boy in the stomach with both hands. Snakey jolted backwards towards the wall, but Tom lost his balance, caught his foot on a rock, and plunged into the crevice.

  He had come round in the air ambulance. His whole body was bound tight in a stretcher, his leg was in agony, both shame and anger fighting within. He opened his eyes to see a man with a red helmet bending over him, injecting his arm with a needle. Before he closed them again, he was able to move his head enough to get a glimpse through the window, and the sunlight filled his head like a drug and coursed through his blood and bones and the vibrations of the engine and the pulse of the rotor blades beat in rhythm with his heart and he remembered nothing more.

  Now the memory of that day was like a living thing that mocked him from the shadows, awake or asleep, always ready to punish him with the fact of his own cowardice. And he knew it had finally won. Tom put the cover over the hole and sat on the box, waiting to be found, longing for it to be over.

  CHAPTER 36

  The breeze had blown the mist away and the pale glow from the half-moon gave enough light for Joel and Maggie to pick out their route. As they stumbled down the valley side they called Tom’s name in the loudest whispers they dared.

  ‘Let’s hope those drones don’t have night vision,’ said Joel as they scrambled blindly do
wn a gully, scraping their shins on bracken one minute, sinking their feet into waterlogged layers of moss the next. ‘Or heat-seeking equipment,’ he added grimly.

  They were heading for a clump of larch trees that fringed the farm track. This was the only cover near the property and they figured that if they could get that far without being spotted, they would be able to take stock and have a closer look at what was going on. What had looked from the ridge like a gentle curve down to the stream, close up presented an agonizing series of obstacles. A drystone wall loomed out of the darkness and they had to hoist themselves over it with a clatter of stones. A shelf of limestone suddenly gave way to scree that twisted their ankles and made them stumble and shudder like drunks. A grouse blasted out of some bracken, making Maggie cry aloud with shock. The bird rattled off into the darkness and, in the hush it left behind, the buzz of drones seemed closer.

  As the valley bottomed out Maggie squelched, knee-deep, into a bog. She pulled her foot out, almost leaving a shoe behind, lost her balance and landed with a splash in a mire of sodden mosses. She groped her way out, now soaked to the skin, and joined Joel and Archie, who had somehow bounded across on tufts of sedge, and were waiting for her on the bank of the stream.

  Joel raised his voice over the sound of the rolling water. ‘This is the most exposed part of the valley. If a drone heads this way, we need to play musical statues. Crouch down and pretend to be a rock. Let’s hope they think Archie’s a sheep!’

  They began to tiptoe gingerly across wet boulders, ankle-deep in water that numbed their feet. Archie was already across, sniffing the ground on the other side, when the drone that had disappeared over their heads earlier now shot over the ridge behind them.

  ‘Get down!’ shouted Joel. ‘Archie, stay!’ Maggie had never heard such fierceness in her brother’s voice. They crouched into balls, folded their arms over their heads, and waited. She held her breath. The scream of the drone cut through the patter of water on stone, piercing and urgent. It was hovering over them at fifty feet, like a hawk spying a vole by the roadside. As the beam of light began its pitiless journey across the stream, Maggie saw the black water at her feet illuminated green with weeds swaying in the current. And then she could have kissed the velvet darkness as the drone passed on at last.