Emma Tupper's Diary

by Peter Dickinson

  She fidgeted with her shoulder-blades and found a place where the rock wall seemed to welcome her and said “I’m going to sleep.”

  “No you mustn’t,” said Roddy. “You’ll be much worse when you wake up. Let’s talk about something, anything.”

  “Oh, all right. I wonder what General Kranz is doing now.”

  “He’s inspecting the new nationalised billiard-ball factory.”

  “Why does he want a billiard-ball factory?”

  “Because he’s promised the Great Lovers that his scientists are going to develop a liniment that will grow hair on billiard-balls, that’s why. So he’s standing there in front of all his colonels in white uniforms with nine rows of medals on them. The General has eleven rows of medals, but zowie, a chimpanzee has thrown a banana at him and spoilt his white suit.”

  “They don’t have chimpanzees in Central America.”

  “Wait for it. Wait for it. The colonels are ordering the chimpanzee to be stood up against a wall and shot, but Hernando the Merciful has given it a free pardon. He has ordered the zoo superintendent to be shot instead.”

  “Oh, I see. But why is their billiard-ball factory in a zoo? Oh . . .”

  “Wait for it. The billiard-ball factory consists of two elephants, and Kranz and his colonels are inspecting them to see whether they’ve fallen in love yet, so that they’ll have baby elephants which will grow tusks which can be turned into billiard-balls.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “But, you mean. But the trouble is that the she-elephant was once in a circus, and all she wants to do is play cricket. She keeps trying to teach the he-elephant, but he isn’t interested in cricket. He’s an intellectual. It’s all very worrying for General Kranz, I’m glad to say.”

  “Bull elephant,” said Emma automatically. “Thank you, Roddy—I’ll put that in my diary.”

  “I thought of it yesterday, actually, but I didn’t get a chance to work it in to the conversation. Shall we go back now?”

  “Not yet. Five minutes more. I won’t go to sleep, I promise.”

  But it wasn’t an easy promise to keep for a mind drained with terror and a body worn with the ordeal in Anadyomene. She propped her eye-lids open with her finger-tips, but even so images began to jostle and shift in her head and words and phrases flutter in and out like nesting martins. Her lips moved.

  “The dark abysm,” she said. “This is the dark abysm.”

  “Whassay?” said Roddy, sounding just as sleepy.

  “I said this was the dark abysm. And it is.”

  She was awake now. But into her relaxing mind had slid a whole jumble of ideas and pictures on which the two mysterious words had acted like words of power, ordering them all together into the one shape that made sense. As when God had spoken, in just such a dark as this, “Let there be light.” And there was light.

  “Listen,” she said. “This is important. Your grandfather hated Darwin, but suddenly he built a cairn to him. He put it in the wrong place on the hill. Miss Newcombe smelt something up there. He built it the year after he built Anadyomene, which he built to explore the loch to see if there was a monster in it. He put a curse on it, against anyone moving it. You got half-way there with your joke about Mother Mulligatawny. When somebody builds a monument to somebody he hates and puts it in a place that doesn’t look right, it’s because he has something to hide underneath it. And listen, that bit of Shakespeare. In the dark backward and abysm of time. It makes sense about Darwin and evolution, but it makes much more sense if you know that this cave’s here, with the creatures in it. It’s a sort of joke, and what’s more it’s a typical McAndrew sort of joke, building a monument to a man you hate to hide something which you know about and he doesn’t . . .”

  “Darwin was dead by then,” said Roddy.

  “That wouldn’t make any difference to the McAndrews—and putting that line on it, with two meanings . . .”

  Roddy thought about it.

  “You’re a good guesser,” he said at last. “I said so the first day I met you. You might be right. Poop did smell something—she’s got sensitive nostrils, too. You think there’s a way in up there and Grandfather blocked it off?”

  “A way out,” said Emma. “What’s the time?”

  “Quarter past one.”

  “We might try and find it for an hour. There’s no point in going back to Anna before daylight. How long will this battery last?”

  “It’s almost new and it’s supposed to do twelve hours.”

  “Then that’s all right. Roddy?”

  “Yes.”

  Emma hesitated, then spoke very quickly, to get it over.

  “You’ve got to be sensible. You mustn’t rush up anything you won’t be able to get down. I can’t carry you.”

  He laughed, felt for her, put his arm round her shoulders and kissed her clumsily on the ear.

  “I’ll be as sensible as a . . . as a Tupper,” he said.

  The hour was up. They were so far from the water that whichever way they shone the torch not a yelp protested. Emma’s elbow was grazed from a fall down a sloping rock, and Roddy’s face was white in the torch-light.

  “No luck,” he said. “It looks like you guessed wrong, for once.”

  “It’s still the only thing that makes sense,” said Emma.

  They had found that the back of the cave was wedge-shaped, the floor and the tilted ledges rising to meet the roof. The meeting was not even, the point of the wedge didn’t end all along the same line, but raggedly. This meant that among the huge boulders fallen from the roof there were openings that seemed to lead further into the hill. Most of them ended in a few yards, but three had seemed more promising; the first, though, had merely led them round to the far side of the cave and started down to the water; the second had gone up-hill for another forty or fifty yards and been blocked not by rock but by a black and oozing mass.

  “Peat-hag,” Roddy had said hopefully. “At least it means we’re pretty near the surface.”

  “Couldn’t we dig our way out?”

  “With this?” he asked, brandishing the boathook. “We’d probably just get a lot of stinking water pouring all over us. Some of these hags are forty or fifty feet deep. Back we go.”

  And now they were at the end of the third tunnel, which ended in a chasm; a crack in the rock, four feet across, and beyond it the blank rock of the hill.

  “Let’s have another rest, anyway,” said Roddy. “Then we’ll go back. It ought to be light in half an hour. Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Smoke? Do you?”

  “It steadies the nerves, that’s what they say. Let’s experiment.”

  “Not me,” said Emma quickly.

  Roddy laughed.

  “I’ve been nicking Andy’s cheroots,” he said. “He’s trying to cut down to five a day by putting only five into that little case each morning, but he’s never quite sure when he’s halfway through whether he’s had two or three; so I try to catch him when he’s had two and nick one then, and he thinks he’s smoked it. I’m being very brotherly, really, cutting him down to four. But I suppose you’ll want me to give it up, as part of the bargain.”

  “I don’t know,” said Emma, too tired to think about it.

  His first match went out in the draught, but he shielded the second and puffed busily away. Emma sniffed at the sweet smoke streaming past her nose—usually she hated tobacco smoke of any kind, but although the stench of the creatures was far less up here in the tunnel, it was still nasty enough to make this treacle-and-bonfire odour bliss by comparison. It was going to be hell going down to the real stench again, and . . .

  “Roddy!”

  “All right. I’ll put it out. It’s rubbish about the nerves, but at least it didn’t make me sick—sicker than I am already, I mean.”

  “No don’t.”

  She seized his wrist before he could stub the cheroot out on the rock.

  “There was a draught,” she gabbled. “It blew your match out. And lo
ok where the smoke’s going!”

  Roddy moved his hand to the edge of the crack, while Emma held the torch. She had to hold it at just the right angle for them to see the thin trail of smoke at all as it whirled away, down over the edge and sideways along the crevasse. She flicked the switch to the search-light position and they lay on the edge of the crack and peered down. The rock walls narrowed towards each other, and became no more than a slit, six inches across, but they could see no bottom.

  “Ugh!” said Roddy, shivering, and drew back. Emma stayed where she was and played the beam sideways in the direction in which the smoke had gone.

  “Look along there, if you can bear it,” she said, and he crawled back. To their right the walls of the crack shelved in more sharply under the tunnel wall, and where they touched there was a floor of sorts, fallen scree which had been unable to fall further, only about ten feet below the level at which they lay.

  “If we could get down there . . .” said Emma.

  “Not me,” said Roddy.

  She played the beam along the near wall of the crevasse. It had never weathered. She wondered if this was the place at which the two vast layers of rock had torn apart when the hill tilted, leaving the cave between. The surface was rough, with plenty of handholds.

  “Let me go and explore,” she said. “I’m sure I can climb down there. You wait here, and if I don’t find anything soon I’ll come back. We must be near the top, because of that peat-hag.”

  “OK. I’ll tie the torch on to the loop at the back of your trousers.

  In fact it was harder than it looked, although Emma had spent most of her seaside holidays climbing along the cliffs at Plettenberg Bay, because she hadn’t been allowed to swim. But now there was no strength in her arms, hands and fingers; even a simple grip was exhausting, and began to slip from her grasp before she was ready for the next move. Suddenly, when she was half-way down, her fingers failed her altogether although her foot was firm in a crack. With a gasping grunt she reeled outward from the rock; something caught her a huge blow between the shoulder-blades and a sharp and painful jab further down her spine. Almost she allowed her legs to crumple, but she kept them stiff and hung there, wedged between wall and wall, while the glass of the torch tinkled below her in the dark.

  “Not too good,” said Roddy’s voice above her. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. I think I can work along to the passage like this. I don’t think I can come up.”

  “What about the torch? Try using the other switch if you can reach it.

  She fumbled round behind her and clicked the little piece of metal over. No light came.

  “Not too good,” said Roddy again. “What now?”

  “I’ll have to go on. I might be able to get out and go and get help. I didn’t have far to go when I fell.”

  “It won’t do,” said Roddy. “There’s nothing to tell you that the crack doesn’t widen out again. You might simply fall down.”

  “If I had something to prod with. Can you try and reach me the boathook?”

  “Hang on, I’ll lean over and swing it your way. It might just reach. Talk, Emma, so I can guess where you are.”

  “Make me a willow cabin at your gate,” said Emma, “and call upon my soul within the house, write loyal cantons of contemned love and sing them loud even . . . that’s it, that’s my ankle, you’ve lost it, yes there. Hold it there and I’ll see if I can reach it . . . No, if I lean any more forward I’ll fall. Work it out, away from the wall, along my leg, if you can. Got it!”

  “Wow,” said Roddy above her. “My wrist wouldn’t have stood much more of that. Cousin Emma, I’ve still got some matches.”

  “Keep them for the minute. I think I’m all right. We might need them if we’ve got to go back.”

  Roddy snorted.

  “We can’t go back,” he said. “Without the torch the creatures would get us in five seconds flat.”

  As if to agree with him, a far yelp echoed up through the tunnels.

  Knowing there was nothing else for it, Emma eased to her left. The boathook was a nuisance until she hooked it into her belt, and the torch clattered behind her every time she shifted her back. She guessed each move was two inches, about, so she counted up to thirty of them before she rested, unhooked the boathook and waved it vaguely to her left. At once it rapped into stone. Prodding below her she found stone again.

  “I’m there,” she said.

  “Take it easy,” said Roddy. “You don’t know whether any of that will bear you.”

  Gingerly she worked herself down, felt with a toe, eased her weight over, and stood. Prodding with the hook and her free hand before her face she crept shrinkingly forward. The floor was as uneven as the bed of a stream. Each step took several seconds. After a few minutes she was overpowered by the loneliness and dark, and called aloud, wordlessly.

  “All right?” said Roddy’s voice, echoing and distant behind her.

  “Yes,” she called, “so far. It’s quite firm.”

  Her ears were singing, and her eyes seemed to have a grey film in front of them. A rock tilted under her feet, and flung her off balance. She dropped the hook and flung out her hand to steady herself against the wall, then straightened and stood reeling. It was several seconds before she understood what her body had understood already, that her hand had known where it would find the wall. That the grey film was light.

  Not daylight, but the light that prisoners see between the bars of their cells when the sunlit streets and squares are along two corridors and up a flight of steps. If she hadn’t been so long in the dark her eyes would never have been able to see that it was light at all. She called the news to Roddy, picked up the boathook and stumbled on.

  It took about forty yards to bring her to a place where the crack began to close to a narrowness that would not let her through, and here she stopped and looked up. The light was still faint, about thirty feet above her, but strong enough now to see that it filtered in in several places up there, and that the crevasse stretched right up to it. She let out a long breath and, now feeling immeasurably stronger, felt her way back towards Roddy.

  It meant going into total blackness, prodding again and stumbling, and falling twice.

  “Talk to me,” she called. “Where are you?”

  “Here,” came the echoing voice. “I’ll tell you the story of my life, shall I? And how I got into these evil ways. It’s a sad story.

  “A sad, sad, story,” said Emma automatically. The words took time to reach him, and he had already begun to talk again, but he stopped and laughed before telling her about the miserable little house in Bootle where he’d been brought up by a sailor-uncle who used to beat him with his wooden leg. Emma stumbled towards the stream of nonsense thinking about her cousin and wondering whether this was his way of nerving himself for what he was going to have to do. That climb, for Roddy, was going to be worse than anything Emma could think of, worse even than if she’d been told to pick up a poisonous snake.

  “Can you strike a match?” she said at last. “I think I might be near the edge. I’ve had an idea.”

  “So’ve I,” said Roddy.

  The spark of light flared, dimmed, and then surprisingly transformed itself into a dark yellow light, with smoke streaming over it. His frowning face, lit from below, was peering intently at the flame.

  “Not very good,” he said. “It might last a minute. Quick, I’m going to throw you the matches and you’ve got to find them before it goes out. One, two, three, go!”

  Emma scrabbled and picked up the precious box. The curious flame still burnt.

  “Now this,” said Roddy. It was a stone wrapped in rag, which dodged into black shadow. Emma found it just as the light died to a faint red glow and vanished completely.

  “What is it?” she said. “What did you light?”

  “Bit of my aertex shirt. You’ve got the rest. But I’ve been sweating like a pig and some of it’s not dry enough to burn. Have you still got the torch?
”

  “Yes.”

  “Right, take the battery out and use the boathook to bash in the side-reflector. Then you can find a dry bit of shirt and put it in and light it—it’ll protect the flame from the draught. I built myself a little sort of hearth up here, but it wasn’t very good.”

  Emma did as she was told, though it was harder than Roddy made it sound. She was too weak to tear the shirt, so had to light a match while Roddy threw her his knife, and then two more to find the knife by, but it was done in the end and the flame lit the inner wall of the crevasse.

  “Right,” said Roddy in a gasping voice, “here goes.”

  “No, wait,” said Emma. There was a crack in that wall which she had stood in, and now she could see it. She worked out over the gap, back against one wall and feet against the other, and as the flame died she wedged the butt of the boathook into the crack and then settled the hook against the other side, pulling down as hard as she could. Then she worked back in the dark, found the torch, now too hot to touch so that she had to empty the ash out by holding it with her jersey, and lit another square of rag.

  The boathook lay like a rigid bar across the crack.

  “That’s better,” said Roddy. His legs came over the edge of the rock, blind and groping. Emma talked to him, coaxing him on, watching every move. She had another square of shirt ready as the flames died; now his whole body was clinging to the wall; in the eerie light she could see the sweat streaming down his cheeks; but still he managed to keep moving. His left foot reached the boathook. “Now!” he cried, and hurled himself back, letting his body fall with a grunt against the rock behind. Then he inched across, as Emma had done, bringing the boathook with him.