I’ve never really understood the appeal of caving. At the beginning of Year Eleven, Cardy and Marie and me and a few other people from school went on this student leadership camp with people on SRCs at other nearby high schools, and caving was one of the activities. It wasn’t mandatory, though, so I went with the indoor option, which was a session on student-led strategies to stop bullying in schools. It was approximately the 3,693,274th session on bullying that I’d attended (when you’ve been on an SRC for your entire high school career, the same information tends to come around a lot more than once), but I didn’t mind. I’d rather be bored than risk the earth collapsing in on me, burying me alive.
If I’d known that a land beneath the ground could look like this, stone walls glimmering in flickering warm light, rich veins of iridescent gems glittering, maybe I would have chosen differently.
The walls of the passages soar upwards, impossibly tall. There’s no way the hill we walked into was this big. We must be going down, down, down, into the depths of the earth.
Most of the passages are narrow. If we tried, Phil and I might be able to walk beside each other, but Cardy and Julian wouldn’t be able to.
The passages aren’t straight, either. They twist and turn back on each other, like a road going up a mountain. And maybe we are on a road going up a mountain, not down at all. I can’t tell. What little I have left of my sense of direction I lose almost instantly.
The only light comes from lanterns, fixed at irregular intervals down the walls. Sometimes, there are two or three close together, but other times, none at all for long stretches. The darkness reaches in then, velvety fingers reaching out to brush against our skin, moving closer, dancing behind us, opening its mouth wide, trying to swallow us whole. At the end of our wool-bound line, I can feel it, walking behind us, footsteps muffled by the fabric in my ears, like if I turn and look back it’ll be right there, grinning at me, with a mouth full of teeth.
I turn. More than once. It’s never there.
And then we come round a corner and it’s ablaze with lanterns, catching veins of ruby and emerald and opal and gold in the walls, and I forget all about the silent follower, because how could darkness stalk us through a place full of so much light?
We stop for a quick food break, eating tiny packets of salty chips and two six-packs of supermarket cheesymite scrolls, slightly squashed from Cardy’s backpack. Julian goes through four scrolls and three packets of chips, eating ravenously, barely stopping to breathe. He’s constantly in motion, hand to mouth, hand to mouth, hand to mouth.
‘Hey!’ Phil exclaims, as he plucks the last of her scroll right from her fingers and shoves it in his mouth.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, crumbs spraying from his lips. ‘I’m just so hungry.’
Passages branch off endlessly. We’re in a maze, a labyrinth, a spider web, but Holly doesn’t falter. She pauses a few times when we come to crossroads – seven, eight, nine, a hundred, a thousand paths snaking off in different directions – but never for more than a moment or two.
‘Isn’t this the same crossroads we were at twenty minutes ago?’ Phil asks.
We haven’t heard a single sound since we walked through the door in the hill, so when we took our food break, we each removed one earplug. The cavern of the crossroads is so vast that her voice should echo, but instead it’s almost hard to hear her, like the air is sucking the sound away before it gets to our ears.
‘Shhh,’ Holly says, the sound of her voice equally deadened. ‘Give me a minute. I’m not sure which one of these it is.’
The two passages she’s deliberating between are right next to each other. One is wide, well-lit, full of blazing lanterns. There’s a vein of ruby down the left side, and it looks almost liquid in the flickering light, like you could stick your hand in and it would come away in your fingers like jelly.
The other is dark and snaky, walls tapering to a point not far above the entrance. Cardy and Julian will have to duck. So will Holly, probably.
I don’t know why she’s even bothering to deliberate. It’s obvious which path we need to go down.
But it’s the well-lit one she chooses.
‘Are you sure?’ I call up the line.
The answer comes not from her, but from Julian. ‘She’s right,’ he says.
I’m surprised for a second, but I guess it makes sense. He was Emily’s servant too. The prince’s aren’t the only powers that would have had their switch flipped in his mind.
We keep walking.
We walk.
We walk.
We walk.
‘What’s the time?’ Cardy asks.
Phil looks at Julian’s watch. ‘Just after four.’
‘Even if we find Finn and the others,’ he says, ‘how are we possibly going to get out in time?’
We keep walking.
‘Pearl,’ Phil says to me in an undertone, when we make another quick pit stop, ‘I don’t like this.’
‘I’m not exactly a huge fan myself,’ I say, glancing at my phone. It’s nearly five.
‘Not that,’ she says. ‘It’s just … doesn’t this seem too easy, somehow?’
‘What?’
‘Not easy, but … we’ve been here for literally hours and in this whole time – this whole time – we haven’t seen one single fairy.’