Spider Light(59)
Maria Robards said excitedly, ‘It’s a door.’
‘And it’s propped open,’ said Donna, moving the torch again. Her heart beat faster. There had been the possibility that the vague village talk she had heard had been wrong or misleading, and that Twygrist did not have any underground levels at all. Or the kiln room might no longer be accessible. But it was all right, and her plan was unfolding with almost mathematical precision. Her heartbeat increased; it was no longer fear but excitement that drove her.
‘There are steps leading down,’ said Donna’s father. ‘Shine the torch a bit more to the right. That’s better. Maria, if you’re definitely going down there, we’ll have to be careful. It might be dangerous.’
‘Nonsense, if one of us stays at the top of the stairs…’
Really, thought Donna, her mother might almost have been reading from the script. She said, ‘I’ll stay. Going into filthy underground rooms isn’t my idea of fun.’
‘We’ll leave you the smaller torch,’ said Maria. ‘You’ll want some light. And we’ll keep calling out so you know we’re all right.’
Donna did not care if they recited the entire works of Shakespeare or sang hymns. She did not care if they left her in the pitch dark or with enough light to illuminate the whole of Cheshire. She just wanted them to go down the bloody steps and towards the kiln room. In a don’t-care voice, she said, ‘OK.’
‘Ready, Jim?’
‘If we must, we must,’ he said. ‘I’d better go first, to test the weight of the stairs, though. The wood’s probably rotten.’
‘They’re stone steps,’ said Donna’s mother. ‘Stone doesn’t rot.’
‘No, but it crumbles.’
Donna sat cross-legged at the head of the stairs, leaning her back against the stone wall, rather unpleasantly aware of the silent waterwheel directly behind and above her and of the chasm beneath it. She flicked the torch’s beam beneath the wheel, pointing it straight down, and caught the black glint of water, with patches of grease lying on the surface and amorphous shapes within. Horrid. She brought the torch hurriedly back up.
Now that she was on her own on this floor, she could hear the rhythmic beating of the memorial clock. She glanced round, trying to work out where the clock was. That wall to the left? So the clock was actually quite near. It was somehow very eerie to think of the clock in this lonely darkness, steadily ticking its way through the hours and the months and the years.
It sounded as if her parents had reached the foot of the stone steps. Maria’s voice floated up to Donna, calling out that they had reached the bottom without mishap, and there were some brick-lined tunnels in front of them. Imagine not finding all this on those other trips, she said. They were setting off into the tunnels now–was Donna all right?
Donna shouted back that she was all right. Had they expected the ghost of the old miller to come lurching in and smother her with a flour bag?
‘Your voices are getting a bit faint, so I’ll come part way down the steps, so I can hear you better,’ she said.
‘Well, be careful. They’re very worn at the centre, and there isn’t anything to hold on to. Don’t slip and break your ankle.’
‘I wish you’d stop fussing,’ said Donna, and directing the torch onto the ground, she began to descend the steps to Twygrist’s subterrenean rooms.
The tunnels were wider than she had expected, in fact they were more like small rooms leading out of one another. She tried to fix the position of the walls in her mind so she would not crash into them or trip over the bits of discarded machinery and alert her parents, then she switched off her torch. At once the darkness reared up, like a solid black wall, but it would have to be coped with. Her mother and father must not suspect she was creeping along the tunnels towards them. After a moment her eyes began to adjust, and she saw that it was not pitch dark; a trickle of light from her mother’s torch came back along the tunnels.
Donna hesitated. Am I really going to do this? Don came strongly into her mind, and she knew it had to be done.
She could hear her parents–her mother was saying surely they must be nearly at the kiln room by now. Her sharp heels clacked loudly in the enclosed space, and Donna, who was wearing trainers, thought only her mother would come into a place like this wearing shoes with two-inch heels.
As she went silently forwards, she had the feeling that Twygrist was coming alive all round her, and that its dark and ancient heart was beating in exact synchronization with the unseen clock overhead. She began to time her footsteps to match the ticking so that the sound would be smothered.
The tunnel-rooms were not as labyrinthine as they had seemed, and were exactly as Donna had hoped: a series of stone and brick rooms opening out of one another, protecting the rest of the mill from the kiln-room fires.
She heard her mother’s heels halt, and Maria said, ‘This must be the kiln room. D’you see, Jim, those are iron doors.’
Another wave of thankfulness engulfed Donna, and she edged nearer.
‘Steel,’ her father was saying. ‘Good God, they’re heavy. For goodness’ sake stay clear of them–they’re pretty antiquated, but the hinges are still in place. They’d swing shut and trap you before you knew what was happening. Stay here–just shine the torch inside.’ His tone said, let’s see what it is you want to see, and then let’s for Christ’s sake get out of this dismal place.