The rat was the size of a house cat and sat on the brickwork, staring back at Sara, its red eyes flashing in the darkness.
She threw a brick at it, and it disappeared.
Steeling herself, she stuck her head back through the opening in the chimney, angling her light down into the dark. The shaft was square and two feet in each direction. The brickwork was soot-covered, causing the light to bounce off it. Sara tipped the angle of the light vertically. The vent plunged down, deeper than the reach of the beam.
She took a coin out of her pocket, held it over the opening of the abyss and then let it go. In her mind, she counted slowly:
‘One. Two. Three …’
No sound.
‘Four. Five. Six …’
An aching stillness.
‘Seven … eight …’
Nothing.
She considered for a moment. It was possible that the coin had landed on something soft and she hadn’t heard it. But she knew that wasn’t likely. It was so quiet around her that her ears were actually ringing. She would have heard it land, whatever the surface, especially given the echoes that would likely come from the enclosed space. Which left one solution, which was that the flue went straight down over a hundred feet and possibly more.
She stared down into the darkness. The duct was the width of a coffin. And she had no idea if it tapered as it descended. If she were to lower herself into it, she could become trapped, her body wedged in tight, unable to descend or move her arms to ascend. She could become entombed there, most likely to lose her sanity before she starved to death.
An image flashed in her mind – a young girl buried alive in a porcelain box, slowly losing her mind, abandoned and alone.
The epiphany landed like a blow to her solar plexus. For the first time since her teenage years, she realized all those images, those sights triggered by her claustrophobia, were of her. She was that young girl. She had been witnessing the moment of her transformation.
As terrifying as it was to consider heading into the chimney, she knew that she would never have peace until she had followed the path she was on to its end. She ignored the palpitations in her chest and the sweat that pricked her palms and reached back into the chimney.
An examination of the sides with her light showed the brickwork was uneven, with some bricks jutting out further than the others: some by centimetres, others by inches.
She took off her belt and created a makeshift noose around her neck from which she hung the flashlight.
She hoisted herself up and then braced as she dropped feet first into the shaft. The width of the space was just wide enough for her shoulders to pass through, and the tips of her shoes felt for irregularities in the brickwork on which she could find a purchase. The beam of light shone down her torso and straight into the blackness below her feet.
She descended slowly, her feet feeling for holds while her arms were pinned to her sides, holding her weight against the bricks. After a few minutes, her limbs were shaking with fatigue and a sheen of sweat covered her body.
She had gone about thirty feet down when the first wave of panic hit her. She could not see the gap in the chimney above her any more, and the walls suddenly felt tight around her body. There was nowhere to go, and even if she did start to ascend, she had no idea if she could find the same footholds. Before she could think, the scream rose up from her sternum and then her throat, and then finally out through her mouth as she howled in the dark. Her arms began to shake, and her elbows pummelled the walls around her, causing shooting pains up her arms.
A snapping sound, like branches splintering, stopped her cry short.
To her right, her elbow had smashed the side of the wall with such force that the wall had ruptured. She looked closer to see that it was actually composed of wooden slats, which ran the length of the side wall. Sara slammed her elbow into the slats repeatedly, until she could discern a space on the other side. The hole she had created was large enough to crawl through.
As she lifted her arm back to shove the wooden slats a final time, the belt came undone, and the flashlight slipped from her neck. She made a grab for it, but it was too late. The light made a banging sound as it disappeared down the shaft, its beam piercing the dark like an erratic Klieg light as it caromed against the walls. After what seemed like an eternity, it became a speck below her and then disappeared.
Sara threw one arm and then another into the hole she had created, and lifted herself in.