The Sleeper

by J. Robert Janes

  Laying a brief hand on her forearm, Beck said, ‘Try not to think of your troubles. Let’s just take the day as it comes, Mrs. Livingston.’

  ‘Oh how right you are, but I hate myself, don’t you see? It’s selfish of me to want to enjoy a day. It’s been ages since I have.’ And he was nice, this handsome Danish sea captain who had unexpectedly sailed into her life and would soon be gone. The fuel injector had been no problem. They would pick it up in Helston tomorrow morning. By noon at the latest, he would be out of her life, but would he think of her and of what she had been through these past twelve months? Would he know that all her friends had gradually found it increasingly uncomfortable to visit or write, as if the presence of death were too near and the fabric of what her life had once been in the London house had suddenly ceased?

  Alfred had asked that she bring the children and come with him to Cornwall, to the house of his boyhood. At first the children had been very unhappy, but gradually they had adjusted. Children were like that, given half a chance.

  ‘Why not stop the car, Mrs. Livingston?’ said Beck. ‘Please, it is good to feel the wind as you walk across the moor.’

  Pulling the car off to the side of the road as best she could, she found her hands wouldn’t leave the wheel, Beck reaching to switch off the ignition, the wind coming in through the side windows. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Just let yourself go for once.’

  Her smile was brief and hesitant. ‘That sounds like a proposition, Mr. Jensen, and that is definitely something I don’t want to hear.’

  ‘Then rest easy. I’ve spent lots of time out on the moors. They are almost a second home to me.’

  ‘I thought you said you were a sea captain?’

  ‘Of course, but even we have boyhoods to which we must return, just like your husband. Mine was spent on the Jardelunder.’

  Wasn’t that mostly of bogs and marshes? she wondered, but said, ‘Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that I … Well, I’ve not been alone with another man, and a stranger at that, in ages. People might think …’

  Beck grinned. ‘Let’s let them think what they will.’ Getting out, he went round to open the door for her. ‘I do believe there will not be many, unless they are hiding in the rabbit burrows.’

  She had to laugh, for he had swept off his hat and bowed, before swinging an arm round to indicate the emptiness. Some farms were off-limits, others didn’t mind so long as care was taken, the stiles used when crossing over, and the cattle gates being always closed after use, but at once he was striding away from her, stooping here and there to call out the names of the various plants he recognized as old friends and stopping near a bog where sphagnum moss, cotton grass, bog asphodel and bilberry grew. There were two other motorcars on the road—tourists probably—they some distance from them. Taking off her hat, she turned to face the wind and the sea. ‘Why have you really come to Cornwall?’ she asked. ‘I know you’ve said you’re on holiday and all that, and that you’ve got to get the engine fixed, but is there some other reason?’

  The car seemed so far away now, thought Mary Anne, and there might just as well have been no one else but themselves.

  Beck motioned to her to follow, and when she hesitated, he started off, she soon catching up, and together they walked towards the rocky, broken crest of a tor. ‘I once had a wife and two children,’ he said. ‘Because of things I will not discuss—losses, yes?—I began to drink. So …’ He stopped and grinned at her. ‘Now you know I was a drunkard and am trying my best to stay away from it. Three months, Mrs. Livingston, and not a drop but I still want it, I’m afraid.’

  They began to walk again. ‘And this wife of yours?’ she asked. Had there been something dishonest in his eyes? she wondered.

  ‘Doesn’t want to see me, and I can’t blame her,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t your children miss you? I know mine would.’

  Beck searched the terrain ahead of them for a hollow, some sheltered place, for he would have to kill her. ‘Yes, of course they do. I’ve a friend in Saint Ives who might be able to help. He used to know my wife’s father in the old days.’

  ‘Then your journey has a purpose. I knew it must have. I could feel it.’

  They reached the top of the tor where lichen encrusted the granite, she lifting that face of hers up to the sun and shutting her eyes, he to settle on some wind-bent elm alongside the nearest hedge.

  ‘Let me drive you to Saint Ives,’ she said. ‘Why not see this friend who knew your father-in-law? I can pick you up tomorrow.’

  Luck again, wondered Beck, or caution on her part? ‘All right. Yes … yes, that would be perfect but let me out at Saint Just. I can then catch a bus to Saint Ives.’

  What was there about him? wondered Mary Anne. ‘We’re almost halfway round the peninsula. It’s just as easy for me to drive you. There’s no sense in my doubling back, now is there? Besides, it’ll give us more time together and I want to see all of Land’s End.’

  The light had gone from his eyes, causing her to wonder what he was really up to.

  ‘Zennor, then,’ he said, ‘but let me walk from there. It can’t be any more than three or four miles by road.’

  Everywhere the mine gave evidence of its past, thought Hilary. Sometimes there would be a heap of broken rock that had to be negotiated, it having fallen from the tunnel’s roof between the sets of pillars, each with its cross-ceiling timber. Sometimes there would be only a few rocks, but here a ringbolt jammed so hard into the wall, the eye of it had been all but flattened, here a broken powder box covered with a hair of rusty filaments in a shallow pool through which a current slowly moved, here a broken barrow that had been shoved aside. And always now if one looked ahead, that intense feeling of being shut in and closed off from all else.

  Karen, for obvious reasons, was far from happy and crowded closely, whispering, ‘Let’s go back. I don’t like it here.’

  ‘Sh, it’s all right. We won’t go much farther.’ But why were they whispering? There couldn’t be anyone else. The timbers across the entrance had been securely in place and the only way to have put them there was to have done it from the loft of the boat shed. They were not very far from the entrance, perhaps a hundred feet. When approached, light from the loft door would still be filtering in, offering its hope and release.

  The tunnel wasn’t absolutely straight. In some places a ragged wall jutted out. Protruding from a crevice, there was a rusty pick, its handle broken. An iron bar that had been used for scaling the walls and roof had been left as if the miner had but walked off the job, and when the slablike black slate and grey-green foliated schist, folded, smeared over and into each other, ceased at a mass of speckled grey granite, the whole of it was pitch-dark beyond the cone of light coming from her torch.

  As if leaping out at one, veinlets of white quartz intruded the granite. Some were as nets, others fingers, others like lightning bolts, and when Hilary shone the light over them, there were isolated grains of pyrite, the brassy-coloured fool’s gold, not yet the cassiterite, the adamantine-lustered granular masses, prisms and dipyramids of the oxide of tin, the ‘black tin’ that had been hunted for so diligently, but dear God, if one let it overcome one, it was a creepy place. Everything was wet and clammy. Water didn’t just drip constantly from the roof, many of whose rocks looked anything but secure. Each source made its own noise, the water also seeping down the scaled, still-jagged walls, and the timbers, oozing into a yellowish-brown slime from which tiny stalactites hung, and always there was this musty, acrid, fetid smell.

  Ragged, emptied slots and gashes, all of them questionable and some no more than the width of a man’s shoulders, began when well into the granite. These openings, these stopes or working areas, cut up into the rocks on either side of the tunnel and into its roof, defying the beam of the light, it being swallowed up as in a ghostly haze. And always now there were the rust-encrusted ‘steels,’ the short, two-
foot drill rods, each of about an inch and a quarter in diameter and taking three hours or more to drill a mere twenty inches, each bit lasting but twenty minutes. Sharpening had had to be done on the surface, in the smithy’s shop, the rods heated, the bit hammered sharp, and then ground sharper.

  ‘Karen, these openings are where the miners followed the tin-bearing veins. They had to drill the holes by hitting these rods with a heavy sledge. Sometimes the miner would have done it himself but far more often one of them would hold the steel while another hit it, and heaven help the hands of his partner if he missed. Once drilled to a depth of about twenty inches, they would load the holes with black powder and fuse, clear the area, and blast the ore out, after which they would come back to scale it down with pick, bar and shovel. Candles … they would have used candles for light. Only years later were they able to find carbide lamps that would last a whole core, a shift of eight hours. Six if in a very deep mine where the temperature would have been nearly a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.’

  ‘Can’t we go now?’

  ‘In a moment,’ said Hilary, noting how hollow was the sound of their voices.

  Sometimes a bit of rough, heavily planked staging, still with its ladder roads, had been left to show where the miners had stood and worked or crouched and done the same, but distances were very hard to judge, and not always was there room to stand straight up, and what timbered support pillars there now were often appeared as if far too shaky to touch. One post had a split right down its centre; another was sagging; the top of another pushed out in a mass of splinters. Rock dust and grit were everywhere.

  When some 150 feet into the mine, the adit came to a crosscut, timbered tunnels leading off to the right and left while it continued on ahead and at a slightly greater tilt so as to better carry the seepage out to the cliffs.

  Hesitant now, Hilary knew she had no business bringing Karen into a place like this, none herself as well, but she couldn’t have asked the child to wait at the entrance, and it was exactly as she had imagined. Absolutely dark when the light was switched off; silent as a tomb, except for the constant dripping and occasionally sudden, distant sounds of something sighing or popping—timbers, those? she wondered. And always now there was the thought that once beyond a certain point there could be no retreat because they had come too far. ‘Karen, please don’t be afraid. Please don’t cry.’

  Setting the torch down to give her a hug, she said, ‘We’ll go back now, shall we?’

  A rock fell and they heard the sound of it somewhere. A rush of rubble followed but that, too, was distant. The main shaft, she knew, must still be almost two miles away so the sound couldn’t possibly have come from there or from the pump shaft. When perhaps 200 feet from the entrance, she felt the floor of the adit must have risen yet again, giving still more slope to the drainage, but now they were truly in the mine and entirely alone and certainly there could be no escape, should the sleeper come after them.

  Wetting a finger, she felt the soft, cool air coming in from the entrance to eventually rise up the shafts. It must have lessened the smell of the other, and as for Colonel Hacker and whomever he had with him, he would be up there on the surface, watching the cottage, not knowing where they really were. Not unless he had seen them go along the cliffs only to drop out of sight as they had gone down to the cove.

  Rough moorland stretched away from the small stone cottage to touch the edge of the cliffs, noted Mary Anne Livingston. Between the cottage and the road where they had left the car, there was more of it, and then far more to where they were now standing. Having driven Mr. Jensen to Zennor, he must have seen someone, for he had told her in no uncertain terms to drive on and to hurry about it, and when they had stopped near the cottage to inquire, no one had been at home, but quite obviously he had known whom to expect. Refusing to leave and head for Saint Ives, he had taken her by the hand and had forced her to walk the mile and a half from the car up to these ruins, the wind making her eyes water, he probing about and knowing she would wait because she couldn’t outrun him. But was he thinking she had asked far too many questions about him? He would need to have the car, would need to go back to the house and that sailboat of his, but did he feel the latter no longer possible?

  Off to the west, a small brown sedan was parked on the crest of a low hill, facing their way. The late sunlight glinted from its roof, the car seeming to be watching them, the ruins perhaps two miles to the south-southeast of it, but distances were so very hard to gauge, the light, incredibly clear. No one seemed near the motorcar, nor indeed anywhere else, but then, and slowly too, the twice-daily omnibus to and from Land’s End came towards the cottage and she thought to run down to it, thought to be quit of this place. Picking her way along the rutted road, past ferns and sedges, gorse and blackthorn, she started out, he saying, ‘Don’t!’ That was all.

  ‘Please let me go, Mr. Jensen. I meant you no harm, only kindness. My husband needs me as never before, and so do my children.’

  When she came to the chimney stack, it was huge and towered over her, the thing of stone and nearly fifteen feet across and perhaps eighty or ninety feet high. Inside the ruins, she looked up at open portals and broken walls, the wind echoing as it gusted, he watching her now and not ten feet from her, but not beckoning, not anything like that.

  The engine must once have rested on a raised bed of concrete and stone. Down the middle of this bed there was a water-filled slot. An oily iridescence covered the water. He made no sound, said nothing further, just looked at her as though she didn’t exist, and when he went through a doorway diagonally across the ruins from her, he vanished from sight.

  ‘Please don’t do this to me,’ she said.

  A rock fell and sometime later she heard it clatter but then the sound of it ceased as if he had snatched it up.

  The blue denim shirt and trousers were faded, the knees now blackened by peaty mud, as were his forearms.

  Beck told her not to worry. ‘It’s the pump shaft they must have used to remove water from the mine. The sound of it would have been constant comfort to those working below unless, that is, it had suddenly stopped.’

  Again a stone clattered into space and she listened as it fell. Perhaps five feet of rubble lay between her and that … that hole, she sickened now for he had taken her purse and keys to the motorcar from her, had taken her by the shoulders.

  Deep in the mine, the sound of that terrified scream and the echoes it had brought were now but a memory. Having panicked, Hilary had dropped the torch, Karen shrieking in terror and flinging herself at her.

  Now the light shone from beneath a pool and the child couldn’t stop sobbing.

  ‘Karen, please,’ said Hilary. ‘We have to go back and bring help.’

  There could be no hope for whomever had fallen, and she knew this, for that scream had been suddenly cut off by a solid bump and a rush of rubble and timber. With Karen clinging to her, Hilary strained to recover the light, the water ice cold and deep.

  ‘Liebling, listen to me. You must stand here and hold my clothes. Karen, I have to go down there and get that torch.’

  Drunkenly the rescued light fled over the mined-out stope, illuminating long-left candle stubs on bits of ledges high above them, finally touching the lowest of the ladders Blind William must once have used to reach the floor of the cottage.

  Shivering, she got dressed in a hurry. Having pushed herself and Karen to come this far, she knew they had taken one of the crosscuts, but that she had lost all sense of time and only by chance had found their way upslope and into the stope. Here the mined-out vein had narrowed and gone this way and that as it had intruded the granite above, the beam of the light finally being lost in the darkness up there.

  Four ledges, thought Hilary, now drying the torch but still shivering. Four benches and four rough wooden ladders, then the floor of the cottage, and only a bit of this, a ragged opening that must lead up to the he
arthstone, but she couldn’t possibly do that with Karen. They were perhaps six hundred feet in from the entrance to the adit at the boat shed, and another two hundred or so to the east of it at a right angle. The first crosscut had ended in a winze, it rising steeply for about twelve feet, or two fathoms. Using the ropes and ladders that had still been in place—all no doubt left by fossickers and smugglers—they had then climbed from level to level until they had reached a point, she thought, perhaps some 120 feet below the cottage.

  Giving Karen another hug, she brushed a hand fondly over the child’s hair and dried the tears. Responsibility would be best. ‘Here, you hold the light. I’ll take you by the hand.’

  In Deutsch, Karen blurted, ‘Why did she fall?’

  There was another rush of tears. ‘I … I don’t know,’ said Hilary. ‘Karen, I feel awful too.’

  ‘Was it Mutti?’

  ‘How could it have been? Your mother’s … No, it couldn’t have been her, but we have to hurry. Every minute counts, so please try to be brave.’

  ‘I want my mother, Hilary.’

  ‘Yes, I know how you must feel. It’s all right. I understand.’

  ‘She was good to me, Hilary. She is very beautiful.’

  ‘Did she play cards with you the way I do?’

  ‘Opa does. Opa lives in a great big house. It … it is big like Clarington, only better, I think.’

  ‘Don’t tell Dotty that, or Albert. They would both be upset.’

  ‘Will they keep Meg for me?’

  ‘Yes … Yes, of course they’ll keep the pony for you.’

  ‘We’re never going to get out of here, Hilary.’

  ‘Please don’t say that. This tunnel will take us to a lower level. Once there, we must retrace our steps until we reach the adit from the boat shed. Here, watch out! Be careful. It’s steep.’

  Lowering her down the slope, Hilary sat on the floor and stretched out her legs. Karen waited for her with the light. All round them there were loose rocks, the child flicking the beam over them until settling it on a lonely, dirty white candle stub that had stood fastened by its wax for years as if waiting for the miner to relight it.