My head smacked a wall and dropped me on my haunches. Panic shrieked through me and was gone. I fumbled to either side and understood that I was at a smoothly curving intersection and needed to choose my way. I sat still, peering for light, listening for sound, and hideous thoughts flocked like crows to a corpse and fear welled up in an instant, slamming into my heart. I jolted forward, scrambling down the closer tunnel. I would not stop again, I swore: I would not pause and let myself consider. Moving kept the dread at bay, and moving would keep me alive. But I had chosen my tunnel badly: this one was smaller and my head grazed the ceiling, my elbows scraped the floor, I had to slip to my belly and wiggle like a worm in my efforts to get through.
I came, soon, to another crossways, and very soon another. Sometimes I had to choose between three or four directions and I made the decision without care or calculation. My head ached from the times it struck the roof, my backbone was missing skin from when it had done the same. My kneecaps cracked on invisible rocks and tree roots netted my fingers and legs. It was cool in the tunnels but it was warm work getting along them and my jaws unlocked to pant noisily. There was no breeze, and no smell to the air that wasn’t the ancient smell of earth – there was nothing I could sniff that might show me the way. My muscles were hurting, my eyeballs were smarting from the strain of trying to see. I blundered and
lurched forward, crippled by a flourishing sympathy for myself. My bottom lip wobbled; my voice came out as a gurgle and I sounded like a baby. I formed the words with difficulty, like someone who’s never spoken before. ‘Help me,’ I gagged pitifully. ‘Help me, help me.’
I shouldn’t have said it, because the sound awoke my sluggish brain. Before I could catch it my mind had bolted screaming, hauling me along a path as sunless and sinister as the tunnels themselves.
It began with thoughts of Caffy – Caffy, like me, in the ground. In the ground now, after a lonely little funeral with just the few people who had known him to bid him goodbye. Caffy had always cried so sorrowfully at night, made forlorn in the darkness: now he, like me, lay buried in blackness, cold to the sun and blind to its rays. But Caffy had been in the ground before that, too, entombed in the well. In the grave he slept in the arms of angels but he had been awake and alone down that well, and crying, afraid. I had never let myself think of the terror he would have known down there and when such thinking stalked near me I’d do anything, anything, to make it go away. Now though, in the tunnels, the thoughts shook me like a dog shakes a rat and my mind spun agonised, my ears began to ring. What happened to Caffy had been my fault – I was the only one who could properly be blamed. He was just a baby and I had sent him to a place where he would slowly die, all the time cursing him and cross with him and wishing he would be quiet. And he was quiet, in the end: when we found him, his mouth was full of dirt. Had he been able to hear Tin coming closer and had he opened his mouth to shout with excitement, to yell for Tin to hurry? Or had the noise of Tin’s claws ploughing toward him made him shudder, and had his last sounds been whimpers of dismay? Because Caffy had always been frightened of Tin, who had never seemed familiar, who had looked like a wild animal then and truly was one now, a wild thing not just in face and figure but deep in his heart too, wild. No one had been down the well with Caffy, so no one knew what Tin had seen when he’d broken through at last, into the well. We simply supposed he had seen a boy already dead. But maybe he had seen a child reaching gladly out to him, or a child not dead but dying? Maybe he saw a child die of horror just to see him – or maybe he saw a child who could be easily made to die. Because Mrs Murphy always said Tin had his resentments against Caffy. I had always argued vehemently that what she said was wrong. Now, all of a sudden, I felt sick with apprehension. My blood banged and squirted fiercely in my veins. Tin was wild, much more so than he had been when he dug for Caffy. He wouldn’t come near us any more, he wouldn’t answer to our calls. He took flight if anyone came too close to him and like any untame creature he might fight the one who threatened him. Tin: there was less that was human in Tin than there were bits of something else. He was not a boy, but an unowned and wilful animal. He had claws and teeth and a territory he must defend, and I was lost within it. And I knew then, as if I’d heard him whisper, that he was close and watching me.
That was the moment when I knew what Tin had done. None of the words for it came to my mind but I knew as sure as if the knowledge had been in my head for a lifetime and was just now draining through. Thoughts fitted into each other like a tidy chain of pawprints left behind a cat. I remembered the blood on the pigs, fresh some time that morning; I remembered the emptiness of Cable’s home, not empty as if he’d just stepped out but empty as if he’d never lived there. And every atom of me shrivelled because Tin could do it, for sure: he had done it once and maybe twice and I was helpless in his labyrinth, where he could easily do it again. Maybe he would do it because I was trespassing and he didn’t recognise me – I hadn’t seen him for the longest time. But maybe he would recognise me, because there had been times when I thought he saw me, although I could not see him – and maybe he would do it anyway.
I sped, then, as if speed should save me. I plunged headlong into the blackness, my knees slipping from under me and limbs tangling up with each other, my chin hitting the earth when my haste toppled me. I knew I would not escape him, not even if I could stand and run. I was used to the sky over my head and rangy open spaces and in the warren I was hampered, pathetically clumsy, a living thing thrown into a pinched catacomb. But this knowledge didn’t stop me from powering feverishly onward, colliding and collapsing and hauling myself to my hands and knees. Pain shrilled from a hundred places on me and I was wheezy with the dust in the air. He must have sniggered at my efforts, as a hawk must snigger when a mouse races for the shelter it won’t have time to reach. I thought I could hear him give the thinnest subterranean laugh. Once more my teeth unlatched themselves and I heard my voice, babbling. Words were sputtering out of me, ones I didn’t even choose.
‘Tin, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry Tin, I am – I fell, I couldn’t help it, I didn’t mean it, I’m frightened, Tin, I’m sorry – I won’t tell – I won’t tell! – I want to go home, Tin please, let me go home, I want to go home, I want to go home! – Tin, Tin please, don’t touch me, Tin, I’m sorry, please, Tin leave me, please, don’t touch me, help me, Tin, I’m sorry, I’m afraid –’
And he did touch me: I felt his claws grip my ankle. I yanked free and howled, galloping blindly on my fists and knees, knowing I would kill him if it came to that, understanding he would certainly kill me. Stones and clods rained on my back and my head was pounding, my eyes were pouring, my throat was closing on undrinkable air. Behind me I heard him scurrying, surefooted, bounding with unhurried skill and ease. He wasn’t laughing but loping in silence, no longer playing any game. It was he who decided the moment and brought things to an end: I felt his touch and whirled to face him, prepared to have it over and done.
But I whirled and whirled, the air punching out of me and squealing with surprise. Rough silver glass whipped around me and my eyes were seared by the blazing red of the sun. Over I rolled and over, my arms and legs flinging about and dumbstruck with confusion before coming finally to a sliding stop, spat from the tunnels like something gone foul.
I climbed unsteadily to my feet and stared. I could see the crest I had tumbled down but I couldn’t see the tunnel’s exit hole. The grass wove over it so cunningly that I hadn’t even seen it from inside. Perhaps I had crawled past dozens just the same. I sank to the ground and stayed there, filling my lungs with gratitude and warming in the sun. I noted that I was covered in blood but knew it wasn’t blood of my own, and the knowledge linked into the chain of pawprints with a placid certainty.
Tin wasn’t anywhere. In the tunnels I had not doubted he was behind me, my toes a whisker from his razor fingers, but now, sagging in the peaceful evening and, but for the birds and fluttering insects, absolutely alone, I didn’
t know what to believe. It didn’t seem possible that he could have been so petrifyingly there, and suddenly not anywhere. I brought round my ankle and stared at it, searching for a mark from his hand. My foot was grubby and smeared with blood and if Tin’s grip had left a mark, it wasn’t anything I could see.
The sun was setting and I guessed it was about six o’clock. It seemed like I had been in the tunnels forever, but it mustn’t have been very long. There were a couple of hours of daylight left to me, to make a start for home. I didn’t recognise where I was and I couldn’t see anything built by people, but it was comfort enough that this world was my own. I got to my feet and began to walk. A buckle on my sandals had broken and the shoe flopped from my heel. I coughed raucously, hacking up dirt from inside me. Flies gathered in a cloud, entranced by the stench of me. I hummed a little song to myself and waved a flimsy hand to drive the bugs away and staggered along through the grass, resigned to walking forever and not minding if I had to, too tired to object to a thing.
But soon I found myself deep in scrub and then, pushing through it, standing on the edge of the road. I smiled amiably at it, as though it were my oldest friend, and sat down to rest awhile. I sat in a dreary, thoughtless daze, watching the ants rush about in hysteria. When I lifted my gaze and saw Da striding toward me the sight was a curious yet sensible one, as things in a dream are skewed yet understandable. Seeing him made me want to chuckle, not because of happiness but because everything felt so charmingly peculiar. He seemed to be older and smaller than he should have been, an elderly elf of himself. ‘Harper,’ he scowled, ‘I told you to go home.’
I nodded, wearing an imbecile’s grin. ‘I know, Da,’ I answered. ‘And I tried to go home. I really tried.’
And I told him how I’d fallen through a trapdoor and found myself in the mad black knotting of tunnels and how I had fallen out, rather than found my way out, and how I would like to go home now, if that was where he was going, and that I regretfully seemed to have ruined my new sandals. While I told him the story I watched his eyes get bigger and bigger. When I stood up and he saw all the dried blood on me, I thought his eyeballs were going to rocket from their holes and go tearing down the road. I gurgled with laughter, remembering the pop-eyed pigs. Da looked hard at me. Then he swung away, and marched up and down for a time. I put my chin in my palms and felt myself drifting.
‘Harper? Harper!’
I came awake in a hurry. ‘Yes, Da?’
He was still pacing, his fingers tight around the rifle and glaring at the ground. He said, ‘If Tin was chasing through the tunnel after you, he wasn’t trying to hurt you. He was trying to guide you out, to safety. That’s what I reckon he was doing – and see, here you are, safe with me. Don’t go thinking that other way again, hear me, chicken? Don’t breathe a word of that wrong thinking ever, not to your Mam or sister or anyone. As for the rest of it, you had better come with me.’
Those words he said, and what we did next – it’s important to remember that Tin was Da’s pet, though long gone from him and sometimes overthrown, and that the rest concerned Vandery Cable, whom Da wasn’t cringing from any more. Da hoisted me on his shoulders and I fell asleep drooped upon his head; I woke up as he lowered me and found we had returned to the hog farmer’s, where Da got a shovel and handed me a spade.
FROM WHERE I’M SITTING I cannot see the water but if I go into the other room and kneel on the padding of the window-seat I can see it glinting between the laced branches of the cypress trees, a long flat line of reflective blackish-blue. From down on the sand the ocean looks, I think, exactly as I had imagined it must do, for it could never look otherwise – and yet I remember how it took my breath away to see it for the first time, how I pressed next to Audrey meek and shyly, how I felt, at the sight of that never-ending greatness of water, somehow drowned to see it all.
Now, though, I go down to the shore every day and I’m familiar with the rockpools and the crevices, I wade into the breaking waves to the depth of my knees. Now the ocean is a companion of mine and I like to look at it, admiring how vast it is, how restless and churny. I wouldn’t need to wander, if I wanted to see the world, because the ocean is everywhere and touches everything, and could do my travelling for me. The water that licks my toes will be, next day, far away lapping the coast of some exotic foreign land. But I am not a roamer, and I never have been – even at home, I never used to ramble far. I’m a bit like a stone, content to stay where it is put. Whatever was in Tin and made him such a gypsy, that thing has never been in me.
I am twenty-one years old now and for being so I was given a gold locket, which I wear on a chain around my neck. Clipped face-to-face inside the locket are pictures of my Mam and Da but every time I break the clasp to stare inside I think, instead, of my younger brother Tin. Not my youngest brother, Tin, because I always count in Caffy.
This is a strange and different place from where I used to live. Here, the strew from the cypress trees makes the earth light and feathery and it crumbles and smells sweet in your hand. Here there is often rain and thunder and the sky is thick and tumultuous for days and weeks on end. It’s only after I came here, where everything is windy and waterlogged, that my heart stopped beating so furiously at my ribs and at night I would lie limp and depleted, weak with relief that I no longer endured its efforts to tear loose and abandon me. My heart is calm now, although it is an uneasy, fitful calm, like the sleep of an ailing person. Here, we are far from where we once were, and years and years have gone by. I will never feel truly safe, I think, but after years I have grown tired of staying afraid. Now I am simply watching, and waiting to see what will happen.
It’s only now, years later, with the fear being blunted and some space opened up in my head, that I find myself thinking, sometimes, of the pig farmer Vandery Cable. My stomach doesn’t quiver now, at the thinking of his name – instead I feel a drifting ashy sorrow which is soft around its edges. It is sad, I think, that a man might have no one to mourn for him, no one to care that he is gone.
I don’t want to think about this, but almost every day I do.
Da and I did a good job with the spade and the shovel that night. My eyes were wide awake after my nap across Da’s shoulders but I remember my mind was moving dense and sluggish, Da had to tell me carefully what it was I had to do. Between the pendulum swings of the hogs’ bulky carcasses we caved in and backfilled the tunnel that led up to the hanging-room before nailing shut the trapdoor and scattering clumps of sawdust everywhere. There was nothing suspicious to notice, when we had finished in that room. I filled a bucket with water and we washed away the blood from the cobbles, purging the stains with the heels of our shoes. In a kitchen drawer we found candles and with them we walked quickly from one end of the house to the other, pausing in each of the rooms. I held Da’s hand and said nothing, too tired to ask what we were looking for. I went to take a penny I found on a bureau, but he told me to leave it alone. We shut the front door when we left and you would have sworn, on seeing things, that Cable was expected to return any moment: you wouldn’t have seen a clue to what had really happened to him. You wouldn’t have guessed that Tin had ever been near.
We set off in thickening darkness and as we walked my mind turned on Tin, upon the long white teeth he bared warningly, upon his strength and rending claws. I remembered the pickaxe Da had given him years earlier, its brutal weight, its rust and curve. Bursting from the floor beneath Cable, Tin must have seemed like a lunging tiger. You can’t shake a cat that wants a piece of you and Tin would have swarmed over the farmer, the scuffle sending the carcasses slamming, Cable screaming uselessly for the station-hand he’d sent away. I saw again the blood splashed on the hanging-room walls, the snubbed gristled point of the pickaxe. My body jerked as if I felt the strike, and Da glanced down at me. ‘Harper?’
Tin would have wrenched the farmer through the trapdoor without difficulty, Cable being a small man, Tin being able and strong. I clutched Da’s hand tensely, struggling to keep my
balance. ‘I’m all right, Da,’ I mumbled. My eyes felt round and huge as the moon, my body felt scooped hollow – I wasn’t stepping on the road, but floating giddily above it. In my mind I saw Cable kicking feeble as a kitten as he was towed into the tunnel and I understood, then, that if Tin had wanted to catch and harm me in the labyrinth, he could have done that easily. If he had put a hand around my ankle I would not have pulled free of his grip unless he had decided to let me.
After a time I stopped floating – after a time my legs were turned to lead. Da picked me up and carried me and I slept in his arms, sleeping through the night and the miles. Before we reached home he woke me and we washed ourselves in the creek. I took off my dress and scrubbed out much of the bloodstains and then hung it over a branch to dry. We sat side by side as we waited, the sun rising around me in my bloomers, Da plinking stones into the creek occasionally. After a long while of saying nothing he asked, ‘How are you feeling, chicken?
‘I’m better now, Da.’
‘Good. Good … I’ve been wondering what we should tell your Mam. We don’t want to worry her.’
I smiled and nodded, closing my eyes to the balming breeze.
Mam was sitting at the table wan-faced and wringing a kerchief when we pushed open the door: the sight of us made her jump from her chair and a yelp of gladness sprang from her throat. She held her arms out and I ran to her, hurled myself at her, burying my nose in her hair. ‘He was gone,’ I heard Da say. ‘When I got to the property, the coward was already gone.’
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