have made some sort of mistake. The building looked more like a ruined church than the entrance to a mine. Other people had been here before him. There were a few crumpled beer cans and old potato chip packets on the floor and the usual graffiti on the wall. JRH WAS HERE. NICK LOVES CASS. Visitors leaving the worst parts of themselves behind in fluorescent paint.
His foot came down on something that clanged and he saw that he was standing on a metal trapdoor. Grass and weeds were sprouting around the edges, but putting his hand against the crack, he could feel a draft of air rising from below. This must be the entrance to the shaft.
The trapdoor was bolted down with a heavy padlock, several inches thick. Alex swore silently. He had left the zit cream back in his room. The cream would have eaten through the bolts in seconds, but he didn’t have the time to go all the way back to Sayle Enterprises to get it. He knelt down and shook the padlock in frustration. To his surprise, it sprang open. Somebody had been here before him. Ian Rider—it had to be. He must have managed to unlock it and hadn’t fully closed it again so that it would be open when he came back.
Alex pulled the padlock out and grabbed the trapdoor. It took all his strength to lift it, and as he did so, a blast of cold air hit him in the face. The trapdoor clanged back and he found himself looking into a black hole that stretched farther than the daylight could reach. Alex shone his flashlight into the hole. The beam went about fifty feet, but the shaft went farther. He found a pebble and dropped it in. At least ten seconds passed before the pebble rattled against something far below.
A rusty ladder ran down the side of the shaft. Alex checked that the quad was out of sight, then looped the rope over his shoulder and shoved the flashlight into his belt. He didn’t enjoy climbing into the hole. The metal rungs were ice cold against his hands, and his shoulders had barely sunk beneath the level of the ground before the sun was blotted out and he felt him self being sucked into a darkness so total that he couldn’t even be sure he had eyes. But he couldn’t climb and hold on to the flashlight at the same time. He had to feel his way, a hand then a foot, descending farther until at last his heel struck the ground and he knew he had reached the bottom of the Kerneweck Shaft.
He looked up. He could just make out the entrance he had climbed through: small, round, as distant as the moon. He was breathing heavily. The air was thin and smelled faintly metallic. Trying to fight off the sense of claustrophobia, he pulled out the flashlight and flicked it on. The beam leaped out of his hand, pointing the way ahead and throwing pure white light onto his immediate surroundings. Alex was at the start of a long tunnel, the uneven walls and ceiling held back by wooden beams. The floor was already damp, and a sheen of salt water hung in the air. It was cold in the mine. He had known it would be, and before he moved, he pulled on the jersey he had bought, then chalked a large X on the wall. That had been a good idea too. Whatever happened down here, he wanted to be sure he could find the way back.
At last he was ready. He took two steps forward, away from the vertical shaft and into the start of the tunnel, and immediately felt the weight of the solid rock, the soil, and the remaining streaks of tin bearing down on him. It was horrible here, like being buried alive, and it took all his strength to force himself on. After about fifty paces he came to a second tunnel, branching off to the left. He took out the photocopied map and examined it. According to Ian Rider, this was where he had to turn off. He swung the flashlight around and followed the tunnel, which slanted downward, taking him deeper and deeper into the earth.
There was absolutely no sound in the mine apart from his own rasping breath, the crunch of his footsteps, and the quickening thud of his heart. It was as if the blackness was wiping out sound as well as vision. Alex opened his mouth and called out, just to hear something. But his voice sounded small and only reminded him of the huge weight above his head. This tunnel was in bad repair. Some of the beams had snapped and fallen in, and as he passed, a trickle of gravel hit his neck and shoulders, reminding him that the Dozmary Mine had been kept locked for a reason. It was a hellish place. It could collapse at any time.
The path took him ever deeper. He could feel the pressure pounding in his ears as the darkness grew thicker and more oppressive. He came to a tangle of iron and wire: some sort of machine, long ago buried and forgotten. He climbed over it too quickly, cutting his leg on a piece of jagged metal. He stood still for a few seconds, forcing himself to slow down. He knew he mustn’t panic. He forced himself to think. If
“Okay. Okay…” He whispered the words to reassure himself, then continued forward.
Now he emerged into a sort of wide circular chamber, formed by the meeting of six different tunnels, all coming together in a star shape. The widest of these slanted in from the left with the remains of a railway track. He swung the flashlight and saw a couple of wooden wagons that must have been used to carry equipment down or tin back up to the surface. Checking the map, he was tempted to follow the railway, which seemed to offer a shortcut across the route that Ian Rider had drawn. But he decided against it. The map told him to turn the corner and go back on himself. There had to be a reason. Alex made another two chalk crosses, one for the tunnel he had left, another for the one he was entering. He went on.
This new tunnel quickly became lower and narrower until Alex couldn’t walk unless he crouched. The floor was very wet here, with pools of water rising up to his ankles. He remembered how near he was to the sea and that brought another unpleasant thought. What time was high tide? And when the water rose, what would happen inside the mine? Alex suddenly had a vision of himself trapped in blackness with water rising up to his chest, his neck, over his face. He stopped and forced himself to think of something else. Down here, on his own, far beneath the surface of the earth, he couldn’t make an enemy of his imagination.
The tunnel curved then joined a second railway line, this one bent and broken, covered here and there in rubble, which must have fallen from above. But the metallic tracks made it easier to move forward, picking up the reflection of the flashlight. Alex followed them all the way to a junction with the main railway. It had taken him thirty minutes and he was almost back where he had started, but shining the flashlight around him, he saw why Ian Rider had sent him the long way around. The shorter route had been blocked by a tunnel collapse. About thirty yards up the line, the main railway came to a dead end.
He crossed the track, still following the map, and stopped. He looked at the paper, then again at the way ahead. It was impossible. And yet there was no mistake.
He had come to a small, round tunnel dipping steeply down. But after a brief stretch, the tunnel simply stopped with what looked like a sheet of metal barring the way. Alex picked up a stone and threw it. There was a splash. Now he understood. The tunnel was completely submerged in water as black as ink. The water had risen up to the ceiling of the tunnel, so even assuming he could swim in temperatures that must be close to freezing, he would be unable to breathe. After all his hard work, after all the time he had spent underground, there was no way forward.
Alex turned in frustration. He was about to leave, but even as he swung the flashlight around, the beam picked up something lying in a heap on the ground. He went over to it and leaned down. It was a diver’s dry suit and it looked brand-new. Alex walked back to the water’s edge and examined it with the flashlight. This time he saw something else. A rope had been tied to a rock. It slanted diagonally into the water and disappeared. Alex knew what it meant.
Ian Rider had swum through the submerged tunnel. He had worn a dry suit and he had managed to fix a rope
