The earthquake was a small one. The post office shook only slightly, the window rattling in its frame and dislodging an Advent calendar. The van outside vibrated just enough to set off its alarm, and if you were watching closely, you might have seen the traffic lights shudder and sway.
A nurse out walking her dog felt a vibration through the pavement and stopped. She would have thought nothing of it but for her Labrador’s sudden bark and raised hackles. She could hear at least two other dogs reacting with a torrent of howls and yelps in houses nearby. The nurse looked around, then shrugged and resumed her walk. Her dog followed, tail between his legs.
A man reading his newspaper in the bathtub felt a rumbling sensation. Glancing down, he noticed a tiny series of waves running from the edge of the tub to his knees. There were three sets of waves in all, each about half an inch apart. He got out of the bathtub, telling himself it was because the water had gotten too cold.
Underneath the man’s house, the foundations absorbed most of the tremor. Three feet below his basement, the peat moved and folded, and the silt that lay thirty feet below cracked and heaved for the first time in decades.
Under this was another thirty feet of sand and all sorts of crushed shells laid down over millions of years—all moving, creasing, and pushing into new shapes and layers. Below that lay sixty-five feet of slate and tin that had shaped so much of Cornwall’s history. Then came the granite; under pressure from the magma—the liquid rock heated by the Earth’s core—its veins and cracks opened and closed.
And from deeper still came a dark cluster of strange rocks, pushed up higher and higher, forced through the fissures, stopping only when it met the cooler, solidified mass of granite that ran for miles like a ceiling—north, south, east, and west.
The cluster stopped there.
Half a mile beneath the man and his bathtub.
Waiting.