Sally led him back to the Diggle entrance of Standedge Tunnel. She followed the canal a little the other way until they came to a bridge. She looked back as she started to cross.
“I’ve never gone to the abandoned tunnel, so I’m just guessing here, but I assume it’s this way.”
Robin nodded as they crossed the bridge, and watched Sally as she hopped over a fence into a probably private field. Robin didn’t even think, just climbed over the fence too—a little less easily than Sally.
There were three horses in the field, hanging around farther down the fence, and they looked around to regard the intruders. Robin stopped to watch them, and started getting left behind. He caught up to Sally halfway across the field.
“How old are you?” he said, slightly awkwardly.
Sally looked around, mirroring his awkwardness. “You wanna check my ID or something?”
“No,” Robin said quickly, “just...what you said back there made a lot of sense. That’s all.”
“I’m twenty,” Sally said.
“Your dad teach you to be so wise?”
Sally laughed. “No. No, he did not.” They got to the end of the field, and Sally hopped over the fence onto a gravel path and watched Robin as he precariously picked his way over, seemingly to enjoy the spectacle. She waited until his feet were back on the ground and set off up the gravel path, crunching with every step. Robin walked too.
“Your mother, then?”
“Mother?” She said it like it was a foreign word. “No... I don’t have one of those.”
“Everyone has a mother.”
She stopped, looked at him thoughtfully.
“What?”
She shrugged and carried on. “You just reminded me of someone for a second.” Before Robin could respond, they rounded a corner, and Sally gave a small whoop of joy. “Well, that was easy.”
They were confronted by a large train tunnel, completely fenced off and padlocked tight. Inside the tunnel was darkness. It was completely abandoned and small sounds echoed throughout. The whole place felt wrong—a structure made for life devoid of it. Robin stepped forward, looking at the fence and, specifically, the bottom of it. He saw that there was indeed a layer of concrete that spanned the width of the tunnel, just like Martha Hobson at the Visitor Centre had said, making it impossible to dig under the fence.
Sally tapped him on the arm and pointed up. He looked to where she was pointing. “There’s the camera.” There was a small nondescript box on the top of the tunnel with a red light blinking on it. Robin suddenly had the feeling of being watched.
“There really is no way you could get through here,” Robin said.
And Sally nodded. “This isn’t what we’re here for, though. I guess we’ll try and get round the side.” With that, she crossed in front of the tunnel, looking at the hedges that lined the entrance. With a shrug, she reached out her hands and started to hack through. She disappeared.
Robin looked back at the tunnel, into the same nothingness he saw inside of Standedge. Train tracks worn into the dirt disappeared into the dark. He thought of the rugged face he’d seen. He imagined it—must have. But as he looked, the likelihood of that was in flux. He shivered involuntarily and hacked his own way through the bushes.
He emerged into a clearing of trees and bushes, all bare of leaves. The cold weather had already cleared them, and after a second, he understood why. A thick and cold wind smacked him in the face, almost blowing him over. He shielded his eyes, and when it was over, he blinked away the cold.
“Jesus,” Sally said, clutching her coat and wrapping it around herself. She reached out in front of her to rest her hand against something, and through the skeletons of bushes, Robin saw the side of the railway tunnel. It was uneven and just gave the impression of a rocky hill. The surface was jagged but complete—there were no gaps, just a hill. Solid. No hint of a way through. “Well, let’s see if our mystery mapmaker has good intel.”
They started to walk—slowly and steadily, charting a course as close to the edge as they could. There was an incredible amount of undergrowth to contend with, and if it had been the height of summer when the leaves were lush, it would have been impossible to traverse. Over the next twenty minutes, they searched in silence—following the hill.
“Can I ask you a question?” Sally said, as she snapped through a bare bush.
“You want to know how old I am?” Robin said, smiling.
Sally looked at him before continuing. “Well, I do now. But no, not that.”
Robin reached out and traced the side of the hill with his fingers. The light was failing—Sally had been right about that. The sun was visible through the tree trunks. Soon they’d have to work by flashlight. “Shoot.”
“Why do you trust McConnell? How do you know he’s not lying about this phone call with your wife?”
“I know,” Robin said, looking the hill wall up and down.
“Yes, but how?”
Robin sighed. “There was something that he couldn’t possibly know. Something that Sam must have told him.”
“What was it?”
“He said ‘Clatteridges. 7:30 p.m. 18th August 1996.’ It was something I never wrote about in the book. Something hardly anyone knows.”
“What happened?”
Robin considered it, and then said, “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Okay, then,” Sally said, but not as flippantly as the words suggested. She sounded content to let it go, and Robin was thankful to her for that.
They continued quietly. Robin watched the hill, seeing nothing of note. Just a steep hillside. As impenetrable as it was unremarkable.
They carried on for another twenty minutes or so, as the sun dipped and then started to disappear. Robin got his phone out, casting its light through the undergrowth.
“McConnell give you anything to go on,” Sally said, getting her own phone out, doing the same, “except Clatteridges?”
Robin smiled to himself. It was kinda dumb. “Nothing concrete, except...” He shifted his weight, so he could get into his backpack. He reached in and pulled out the notebook. With one hand, he awkwardly shuffled the notebook to the page and tapped Sally on the shoulder. She shone the flashlight at him and took the open notebook. She stopped to look at it, and Robin took over in front.
Robin watched her, before going back to the search. “He said that Sam said something about a black hound and a horse head.”
“A horse head?” Sally said, behind him.
“That mean something to you?” Robin said, raising his flashlight to look up the hillside and then down. The hill became bare, divulging into a rock face. The undergrowth was incredibly thick here, and...
His flashlight hit on something.
“No,” Sally said, but Robin didn’t hear. He was too busy ripping through the bare thin branches, trying to see what was on the rock face, right at the base. It was a stack of wet cardboard, stuck to the rock face. He battled with the plant life and reached for it. He pulled it away, and shone the torch into the gap.
“Sally.”
He looked back.
“Sally.”
She was still looking at the notebook, and she muttered something. Something that Robin would probably have recognized as “A horse head...” if he was listening.
“Sally,” he shouted, and she looked up.
Robin smiled, as he pulled away the cardboard and shone the torch at what he’d found behind it.
A small crack in the rock that had loosened everything under it, creating a small hole. Just big enough to squeeze through.