the ridge. Despite straining his eyes he couldn’t judge how far the flashlight beam reached; the glare from the retail park was still hindering his vision. He dodged around the shaft to turn his back on the problem, and saw that the beam of the cheap flashlight fell short of illuminating the tunnel itself. “Can you see the light?” he called.
“I see something.”
Tom found this wilfully vague. “What?” he yelled.
“Must be you.”
This was vaguer still, particularly for Lucas. Was he trying to unnerve his cousin? Tom peered into the shaft, waiting for Lucas to dart into view in a feeble attempt to alarm him. Or did Lucas mean to worry him by staying out of sight? Tom vowed not to call out again, but he was on the edge of yielding to the compulsion when an ill-defined figure appeared at the bottom of the shaft. He didn’t really need it to turn its dim face upwards to show it was Lucas. “What am I doing now?” Tom grudged having to ask.
“Holding the light.”
“I’m saying,” Tom said more bitterly still, “what do you want me to do?”
“Stay there till I say,” Lucas told him and stooped into the other section of the tunnel.
Tom tried to listen to his receding footsteps but soon could hear nothing at all — or rather, just the sound he’d previously ascribed to plastic. Perhaps the bag in his cousin’s pocket was brushing against the wall, except that Tom seemed to hear the noise behind him. Had Lucas sneaked out of the far end of the tunnel to creep up and pounce on him? Surely his shadow would give him away, and when Tom swung around, only the trees were silhouetted against the glare from the retail park. He’d kept the flashlight beam trained down the shaft on the basis that he might have misjudged Lucas, but how long would he have to wait to hear from him? He had a sudden furious idea that, having left the tunnel, Lucas was on his way home. “Where are you now?” he shouted.
“Here,” Lucas declared, appearing at the foot of the shaft.
So he’d been playing a different trick — staying out of sight until Tom grew nervous. “Finished with the light?” Tom only just bothered to ask.
“Go and meet me at the end,” Lucas said before ducking into the dark.
Tom felt juvenile for using the flashlight to search among the trees around him — he wasn’t the one who was meant to be scared — and switched it off as he hurried down the path. He was waiting at the mouth of the tunnel by the time his cousin emerged. Lucas looked dully untroubled, unless the darkness was obscuring his expression, and Tom wished he’d hidden long enough to make his cousin nervous. “What’s it like?” he tried asking.
“Like I wasn’t alone.”
“You weren’t.”
“That’s scary.”
Tom thought he’d been more than sufficiently clear. He was feeling heavy with resentment when Lucas said “Now it’s your turn.”
As Tom switched on the flashlight, darkness shrank into the tunnel. “You can’t do that,” Lucas protested. “I’m supposed to go on top with it so you’ll be in the dark.”
Was he planning some trick of the kind Tom had spared him? When Tom hesitated while the unsteady shadows of weeds fingered the moss on the walls of the tunnel, Lucas said “I have to say what we do with it. It’s mine.”
Tom was so disgusted that he almost dropped the flashlight because of his haste to be rid of it. “I’ll have to shout,” Lucas told him. “You won’t see.”
He hadn’t extinguished the light, which scrambled up the path ahead of him, leaving Tom to wonder if Lucas was uneasy after all. Suppose that distracted him from keeping the beam down the shaft? Once his cousin vanished over the ridge Tom peered along the tunnel, but it might as well have been stuffed with earth. He hadn’t distinguished even a hint of light when Lucas called “It’s waiting.”
His voice was in more than one place again — somewhere down the tunnel and on the ridge as well. It occurred to Tom that he should have extracted a promise, and he cupped his hands around his mouth to yell “Say you’ll wait there for me.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
Tom could have fancied he was hearing another voice imitate Lucas. “Say you will,” he insisted, “as long as I want the light.”
“I will as long as you want the light.”
This had to be precise enough, and surely Lucas was incapable of acting other than he’d said he would. Wasn’t his saying it in more than one voice like a double promise? Tom had no reason to hesitate, even if he wished Dianne were with him to be scared and then comforted. He wouldn’t be comforting Lucas, and he ducked into the tunnel.
The darkness fastened on his eyes at once. They felt coated with it, a substance like the blackest paint. It hindered his feet too, as if they had to wade through it, shuffling forward an inch at a time, which was all he felt able to risk. He extended his arms in front of him to avoid touching the slimy walls, though he could have imagined his fingertips were about to bump into the dark. Of course there was nothing solid in front of him. Lucas hadn’t switched off the flashlight and sneaked down the ladder to stand in the blackness until Tom’s outstretched fingers found him. Just the same, the thought made Tom bring his hands back and lower his arms. “Are you really up there?” he shouted.
“You’ll see.”
His cousin’s voice was somewhere ahead and above the tunnel. Otherwise the exchange didn’t reassure Tom as much as he would have hoped if he’d needed reassurance. It wasn’t simply that his shout had been boxed in by the walls and the roof that forced his head down; his voice had seemed muffled by some obstacle in front of him. Was he about to see it? There appeared to be a hint of pallor in the blackness, if that wasn’t just an effect of straining his eyes or of hoping to locate the flashlight beam. When he edged forward the impression didn’t shift, and he kept his gaze fixed on the promise of light until his foot nudged an object on the floor of the tunnel.
He heard it stir and then subside. He had no room to sidle around it, and he didn’t care to turn his back. By resting his foot on it and trampling on it he deduced that it was a mass of twigs and dead leaves. He trod hard on it on his way past, and worked out that the material must have fallen down the shaft, which was just visible ahead by the light that nearly reached down to the tunnel roof. He could scarcely believe how long he’d taken to walk halfway; it felt as if the darkness had weighed down the passing of time. A few waterlogged leaves slithered underfoot as he reached the shaft and was able to raise his head. “See me?” he called.
Lucas was an indefinite silhouette against the night sky beyond the flashlight, which almost blinded Tom even though the beam on the wall opposite the ladder was so dim. “You were a long time,” Lucas protested.
An acoustic quirk made versions of his voice mutter in both sections of the tunnel. Before Tom could reply, less irately than the complaint deserved, Lucas said “When you’ve been through the rest you have to come back this way.”
That he had needn’t mean Tom should. Lucas wasn’t frightened yet, which was among the reasons why Tom intended to leave the tunnel by the far end so as to tiptoe up behind him. He shut his eyes to ready them for the darkness as far as he could. He hadn’t opened them when Lucas enraged him by calling “Are you scared to go in?”
Tom lowered his head as if he meant to butt the dark and advanced into the tunnel. He wouldn’t have believed the blackness could grow thicker, but now it didn’t just smother his eyes — it filled them to the limit. He’d taken a very few steps, which felt shackled by his wariness, when his foot collided with another heap of leaves. He heard twigs if not small branches snap as he trod several times on the yielding heap, which must be almost as long as he was tall. Once he was past it the floor seemed clear, but how far did he have to shuffle to catch his first glimpse of the night outside? It couldn’t be so dark out there that it was indistinguishable from the underground passage. He was stretching his eyes wide, which only served to let more of the darkness into them, when his foot struck a hindrance more solid than leaves — an object that his groping fingers found to be as high and wide as the tunnel. The entrance was boarded up.
So Lucas hadn’t just been setting out the rules of the game. Perhaps he’d believed he was making it plain that Tom couldn’t leave the tunnel at this end. Tom thumped the boards with his fists and tried a few kicks as well, but the barrier didn’t give. When he turned away at last he had to touch the cold fur of the wall with his knuckles to be certain he was facing down the tunnel. He shuffled forward as if he were being dragged by his bent head, and his blacked-out eyes were straining to find the light when his toe poked the mass of leaves and wood on the floor. If he
