The Hiding Place(54)

“I’m okay!” I shouted back up. “But I’ve hurt my fucking ankle.”

“Boo hoo. What can you see? What’s down there?” Hurst’s voice. As caring and compassionate as ever.

My helmet had been knocked sideways. I propped myself against one rocky wall, relieving the weight on my bad ankle, and adjusted it. I looked around. More wooden beams were set into the walls. They ran straight up from the ground. Between them I could see other shapes and patterns. They looked like they had been made by white sticks embedded into the rock. They formed intricate designs. Stars and eyes. Odd-looking letters. Stick men. I fought back a small shiver. On some of the walls there were fewer patterns. Instead, piles of sticks and yellow rocks were stacked tightly in large arched alcoves.

I didn’t like it. Any of it. It was creepy. Weird. Wrong.

I heard the others descending. Chris stepped slowly down into the cavern. Hurst jumped and landed beside me with a thud, almost immediately followed by Marie and Fletch. There was a pause as they all looked around, taking it in.

“Whoa. This is well cool,” Marie said. “It’s like something out of The Lost Boys.”

“Is it summat to do with the pit?” Fletch asked, displaying his usual abundance of imagination.

“No.” The word came from Chris, but he snatched it from the tip of my tongue.

This wasn’t something forged by miners. Mines were hacked, punched and hewn from the rock; it was clumsy and rough and industrial, done with heavy tools and machinery.

This was something different. It had not been formed by necessity or stoic workmanship. It had been created by, I sort of wanted to say, passion, but that wasn’t quite right either. As I gazed around, another word thrust itself into my head. Devotion. That was it—devotion.

“Shine your flashlight round, fuckwit,” Hurst said to Fletch, who duly obliged.

He turned in a circle, pointing the flashlight around the cavern. It only just reached the far walls, and rather than illuminating it seemed to accentuate the deep hollows and corners filled with blackness. It was probably just some weird effect of the light, but if you glanced quickly, out of the corner of your eye, it almost looked like the shadows were moving, shifting and ebbing restlessly.

“This is really weird,” Hurst muttered. “Doughboy’s right. This ain’t no mine.” He turned to me. “What d’you think, Thorney?”

I was trying, but thinking was hard down here. Even though the cavern was big and far less stifling than the narrow tunnel, I was still finding it laborsome to breathe. Like the air was wrong. Like the oxygen had been replaced with something else. Something heavier and sort of foul. Something no one should breathe, ever.

Poisonous gases, I thought suddenly. My dad had often spoken about the fumes released from deep down in the earth. Was that it? Were we slowly being poisoned while we stood here? I glanced over at Chris.

“Chris, what is this place?”

He still stood near the steps, venturing no farther. His face in the grimy gloom was pale, streaked with dirt, not scared exactly but tense. He looked much older than his fifteen years, like the man he would never become. Then his vivid eyes met mine and I understood. He hadn’t found this place. It had found him, and now he desperately wanted it to let him go again.

“Don’t you know yet?” he said. “Don’t you get it?”

I looked back around the cavern. At the high, vaulted roof. The wooden beams. And that was when something in my head clicked. Because when you looked again, it was obvious. Air that shouldn’t be breathed. A huge underground chamber. Like a church but not.

“Get what?” Hurst asked.

And right on the heels of that thought came another. The white sticks in the walls and the rocks piled in the alcoves. I limped forward, toward the nearest wall. The light on my helmet illuminated a star, a symbol like a hand and a stick figure. Up close, they weren’t pure white. And they weren’t sticks. They were something else.

Something you would expect to find in a place like this.

In a grave, a burial chamber.

“Thorney, are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?” Hurst snarled dangerously.

“Bones,” I whispered, horror leaching the strength from my voice. “The rock—it’s full of bones.”





23





Sometimes, it takes a while for you to realize that something is wrong. Something is off. It stinks. Like when you stand in dog shit and it’s not until you’re sitting in the car, wondering where the bad smell is coming from, that it sinks in: the stink is coming from you. You brought it along for the ride.

When I get back to the cottage I notice that the front door is ajar, just a little. I’m sure I remember closing and locking it. As I get closer, I see that the frame is splintered and cracked. Someone has forced it. I push the door all the way open and walk inside.

The cushions on the sofa have been thrown off and sliced open, spilling their foamy guts all over the floor. The coffee table has been tipped up, the drawers from the small cabinet yanked out. My laptop is in pieces.

The cottage has been ransacked. I frown, my mind taking a while to assess the situation. And then it dawns on me. Fletch and his sons, probably on instruction from Hurst. I guess he didn’t want to negotiate after all. Typical Hurst—if someone won’t give you something, you take it, by any means.