Robin put his suitcase and backpack in the room and turned the small television on, but couldn’t settle. He felt there was one last thing he needed to do before he went to sleep.
He had to see it for himself. He had to see Standedge. Even though he knew he couldn’t go inside. He had to see it with his own eyes.
So he turned off the television, got his coat and went back out.
The evening had turned to a bitterly cold night. A wind was blowing through the empty streets with alarming speed. If Marsden seemed empty before, now it seemed like a ghost town. Robin retraced his steps up to the station, knowing from the maps that Standedge lay to the left instead of the right he had taken to get to the town.
He took the left and found himself almost instantly walking parallel to the canal that had made its way under the bridge he had crossed earlier. He followed the canal, hearing the soft lap of water between the gusts of wind. He continued down a country path until he turned a corner. And paused as he took another bridge over the canal.
And there it was.
The entrance to the canal tunnel looked incredibly small—almost like a mouse hole in some old cartoon. But this was real—a little mouse hole in the side of the landscape. It felt rather unassuming—the canal just ran up to it and disappeared inside. As though it swallowed the canal. Boats were moored by the tunnel entrance—blue and white narrow boats with plastic seating. Tour boats.
Next to the tunnel stood a building that looked like a large holiday cottage. The Standedge Visitor Centre with an empty parking lot in front of it. The path from the bridge went down to the Centre and closer to the tunnel and Robin found his step hurrying.
He wanted to see closer.
The hole—gated up and chained, as though a prison for some horrific monster—grew larger with every step. Amber had said the children were afraid of it, and he could understand why. Staring into it, into the darkness inside, felt like staring into a void.
He came to the center but couldn’t take his eyes from the tunnel. The wind was whipping through it, and somehow it was creating a whistling sound. Almost as if it were talking to him.
He thought of the game Amber talked about. Where you had to stand beside the tunnel and see how long you lasted. Would he have been able to do that as a child? Could he even do that now?
He chuckled to himself. No use getting spooked. It was just a tunnel, after all. But he had to find out what Matthew’s interest in it was. And why it brought the group close together. Did something happen on that trip?
Robin turned and started back toward The Hamlet. It was definitely creepy, and the ghost stories were warranted. But now Standedge was the location of a very real crime.
When he was crossing the bridge, he looked back at the tunnel. People don’t just disappear, Robin thought again. And nodded to himself.
The tunnel whistled as if in agreement.