‘I can’t do this. I want to go back. Get me out of here.’ Added to this it sounded like she was kicking at the walls. There was nothing I could do. I called out to her, but she wasn’t listening. I was helpless. I had heard of people who couldn’t handle enclosed spaces, and this definitely qualified as ‘enclosed’. I needed to be able to get to her, to help her, but there was no way I could turn around. I thumped my own fist on the floor in frustration. Then I heard Pitr yelling over the top of Alyssa’s screams.
‘Hey! HEY! Alyssa, you have to listen to me.’
He went on like this but he wasn’t getting through to her. Then I heard Alyssa make a squeal of pain, rather than panic.
‘Shut up or I’ll do it again,’ Pitr yelled, his voice hard and uncompromising. ‘You can’t stop. You can’t go back. You have to go on. I’m right here. If I can do it you can. Feel my hand on your ankle?’
‘Yes!’
‘I’ll keep touching your ankle, every few seconds.’
‘And I’ll wait for you in front, Alyssa.’ I said, ‘It gets better further on, honest. You can do it.’
There was a lot of sniffling and a muffled ‘OK’, so I started forward again, this time moving more slowly. After only a couple of ‘steps’ I felt a small hand pat onto the back of my ankle. I froze for a moment, waiting until Alyssa had realised what she had touched, then moved on.
When we got to the wider section, I stopped and waited for the others. I figured we could all do with a break for a few minutes. I twisted myself around until I was in a sitting position, and the roof was almost touching my head, and left my torch on so we could all see what we were doing. Alyssa was out of the narrow section seconds later. She didn’t stop, but crawled straight over to me, threw her arms around my neck and started sobbing into my shoulder.
I never felt so strange in my life. Stuff woke up and started running around inside me that I had never felt before and, even though Alyssa was upset, I couldn’t get over how nice it felt to have her hanging off me like this. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that it was wrong, but I got my free arm round her and start rubbing her back between the shoulders.
Pitr had just enough space to turn himself into a sitting position, his back to the other side of the tunnel, and I saw him give me a strange look before he busied himself pulling a food block and a water flask from his pack. Good old Pitr, always thinking of the practical stuff. He broke the food brick into three, and passed a piece forward. I managed to get Alyssa to unwind herself from around me and helped her sit up. She took the food and water automatically.
‘Hope we don’t get many more like that,’ said Pitr, casually. I was watching Alyssa as he spoke and, even though she didn’t comment, I saw her shudder.
We concentrated on the food, and it wasn’t until we had finished making crinkling noises with wrappers that I realised the sound I had been hearing was not the packaging. I held my hand up for silence, then had to wave it in front of Alyssa to get her attention. Softly, but getting louder – and presumably closer – was a metallic skittering. Pitr looked at me with furrowed brows.
A maintenance ‘bot clattered towards us on spidery metal legs, partially illuminated by a red light on its ’belly’ reflecting off its legs and the floor beneath, making it look menacing and dangerous. Alyssa shrank away from it as it got closer, but I turned my torch on it so I could see it better. The ‘bot stopped in its tracks and started to emit a soft beep. I thought at the drone, and asked it to tell the ‘bot to ignore us and pass by. A moment later, the ‘bot let out a satisfied chirp and picked its way carefully over our legs before tapping off into the distance. We looked at each other for a moment, then we all burst out in a fit of giggles. Still chuckling we packed everything away and got moving.
Five minutes after we set off, the conduit flattened out again. This time I stopped and waited to call a conference.
‘How do we want to do this?’ I asked, hoping that Alyssa would come up with something that would make her life easier. She looked very pale even in torch light, and her face was pinched and drawn. I looked past her to Pitr.
‘Any ideas?’ I asked.
Pitr looked blankly at me, then his eyes flickered to Alyssa and he shrugged. I was about to look away when his eyebrows lifted. ‘Well, how would you feel about going on ahead and seeing how bad it is?’
It wasn’t a bad idea, but I didn’t know how much I liked the idea of going on alone for any distance. I looked away while I thought about it. I didn’t want Pitr or Alyssa to see the idea scared me.
‘If I don’t come back you’ll have to come find me,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ Pitr replied, but Alyssa didn’t even acknowledge I had spoken. I took my torch off my pack, pushed the pack back to Alyssa, and scrunched down to enter the conduit.
I was back in five minutes. Going backwards was even more uncomfortable than going forwards.
‘Are we that close?’ Pitr asked, and Alyssa’s face came up with hope all over it.
‘Sorry, no,’ I said. ‘A couple of minutes in we have to go up again, but it’s so narrow we’ll have to go up to that point on our backs. We have to figure out a new way to do this. Once I get around that corner I won’t be able to come back. Not easily, anyway.’
The hope had washed off Alyssa’s face and she was looking tense again. I touched her shoulder.
‘It will be OK. The drone wouldn’t have chosen a route we couldn’t get through.’
And that might have been an outright lie, but I would have said anything I thought would make Alyssa feel better. I turned back to Pitr.
‘You’ll have to come up this end and listen for me. If everything is OK, I’ll bang on the wall like this.’
I banged once, then twice, then three times. Not a combination I could see myself making by accident. I rolled over on my back and started pushing myself along with my heels, rocking my shoulders from side to side to make myself slide more easily. It seemed to take much less time to get back to the point where the shaft turned upwards again, and I thumped my head into the end. I made the turn up, then had to twist all the way around to make the turn back to the flat again. There was another twenty metres of flat corridor, and then it opened out again.
And now I had a problem. It wasn’t practical for me to go back and report. I turned around, shone my torch back the way I had come and started banging; once, then twice, then three times. I stopped and listened, but heard nothing, not even the sound of someone trying to crawl along. I tried again, this time hitting the side of the conduit as hard as I could. This time, very faint, I heard the same sequence but backwards. Pitr being clever again. I waited for Alyssa to appear, then yelled advice to her on how to turn the corner. All three of us were quickly back together again, and this time Alyssa didn’t seem so upset.
‘Do you want to do the same thing again?’ Pitr asked. I looked at the conduit, which was again high enough to crawl along and shook my head.
‘We should keep together. Besides, we must be nearly there by now.’
I hadn’t checked with the drone for some time, so I pushed my mind towards it and got it to show me the map. I couldn’t resist a triumphant ‘Yes!’ when I saw how close we were to the end. I told the others and we pushed on, turning a corner into another conduit the same size, then there was a grating over our heads. I wriggled myself around until I was on my knees underneath it, then braced myself and tried to lift. It shifted but not enough.
‘I can’t move it,’ I said, quietly. ‘Alyssa, can you go past me so Pitr can come up and help me?’
Alyssa didn’t say anything, but a moment later it was she who squeezed in beside me and not Pitr.
‘I can push as hard as he can,’ she said, and I could feel her breath on my face as she spoke. My skin prickled. I tried to put everything out of my mind except getting the hatch cover off.
‘If he heard you say that and you can’t, he won’t let you forget it.’
I felt her hands next to mine on the cover.
‘Ready?’ she said.
It started to lift, and I slid it to the side. Alyssa kept the upwards effort going, and I pushed it out of the way. Heavy metal scraped on stone. I pushed myself up out of the hole then reached down and offered Alyssa a hand. A light panel above us blinked on and seconds later, Pitr threw the packs up before we helped him out. Light panels either side of the first also flickered weakly into life and we looked around to see where we were.
‘Look,’ said Pitr, and pointed. No more than fifteen metres away from us was what could only be the back side of the door we had been unable to open.
‘Right on the button,’ said Pitr, sounding impressed. I patted the little drone on my chest and thought ‘thank you’. Looking the other way we could see about thirty meters before the light faded out. I thought ‘Show me’ to the drone and the red light shone straight down the corridor.
‘That looks easy enough,’ said Pitr, laughing. ‘I could do with walking upright for a while to get the kinks out, unless anybody wants to take a break?’
‘I just want to get away from that cursed hole,’ said Alyssa, with another shudder. ‘There is no way I will ever be able to do anything like that again.’
We started walking, and lights blinked on ahead of us and faded out behind us as we plodded on for about an hour, curving slowly to the left and ignoring the few side passages we encountered. Without warning the tunnel opened out into a wide chamber.
There was a thump of big switches somewhere and a flood of lights came on above us. The chamber was square and maybe fifty meters on a side. The tunnel carried on through the wall opposite, but in each of the other walls was a door. Not functional like the one out to Boreetum, but heavy and imposing. Bigger even than the doors that sealed the corridors off back home.
‘The Halls of the Dead,’ whispered Alyssa.