Chapter Twelve

Stinging with fine rain the wind slashed steadily by. The BMW’s engine seemed to like the wetness in the air, gnawing its way south with gusto. The tyres made a whipping noise as they bit through the film of water to the tarmac below. Other traffic flung up belts of spume—land-spume, smelling of oil and dust, quite different from the salt-spume of the North Sea. The cars that overtook the BMW came past sedately, slowed to the legal speed-limit on catching sight of the police car which was escorting the Bertolds home. On empty patches of road Jake could hear the swish of its tyres and the purr of its engine right at the limit of his hearing.

The police had wanted to drive the boys home and ship the BMW down separately. They were scared of losing their prize witnesses in some silly spill, but Martin, trapped now in the machinery of a big trial, had been stubborn about this small patch of freedom. He would drive his own bike and Jake would come with him.

With his head tucked sideways out of the rain, huddled against Martin’s shoulder, Jake could sense his brother’s misery and shame at the role he now must play, the accuser of his comrades, the tool of the very system that scarred the green hills, poisoned river and sea, murdered plant and creature, and spun mankind faster and faster towards destruction. Poor Martin, the official hero, the self-known Judas. He didn’t even think that what he was doing was right. It was the result of escaping from Annerton Pit, and that had been right. But the rest, the chain of results that followed from that escape … Martin wouldn’t talk about it. Jake thought Martin might still refuse to give evidence, but would that be right, either? The police had plenty of evidence without him, but by allowing himself to be a tool he might be able to show that the G.R. movement didn’t have to lead along the road that ends with rows of the innocent dead laid out on stretchers in front of the TV cameras.

They had nearly begun on that road this time. It had been touch and go with Granpa, a doctor at the hospital said. Jake had spent three days in the hospital, recovering from what the doctors called shock and exposure, but they hadn’t been able to give him the healing he most needed, a long talk with Granpa. Granpa had been too ill, too weak to do more than whisper, “Hello, Jake,” and listen for a couple of minutes while Jake explained that he himself was quite all right now. Granpa would do, the doctor thought, but Jake could see that it would be a long time before he’d be well enough to listen to what Jake had experienced in the Pit, and explain it away.

Explain it away. Now, swishing south through the drizzle, Jake began to realise that no one could do that. Granpa might explain it but he couldn’t explain it away. Inside or outside Jake it had still happened. When he had first realised the bitterness of Martin’s misery Jake had begun to try to tell him about the thing in the Pit. Suppose, Jake thought, he could persuade Martin that there had been something there. Suppose the something could affect people’s minds. Suppose—not meaning to, but only as an instinctive defence—it surrounded itself with a network or shell of nightmare. In some people that would come out as terror, but in others it would come out as anger and violence. It would make them think and say and do things like Jack Andrews had done …

Martin had cut Jake short before he was properly started—he didn’t want to be helped, not that way. Now, sheltering against Martin’s back from the stinging wind of their drive, Jake was thankful he’d got no further. Gradually, without settling down to think it all out in an orderly way, he’d come to be sure that that was no way out. “Good” people can do “bad” things. Because they’re good it doesn’t make the bad things better—it only makes them sadder. And what they do comes from inside themselves. It’s no use going into the deeps of Annerton Pit and finding a creature there and blaming it. If you mine down through the maze of your own being, perhaps in those deeps you will find the explosive gas of violence, the springs of love.

But the creature, the thing in the Pit. Was that inside Jake? He called it a creature, but was it his own creation, a dweller in the maze of his being? How would he ever know? The more hours that passed, the further south they went, the less likely it seemed that it had any existence outside his own mind. He could no longer be sure that he wasn’t inventing details. He hadn’t once been able to reshape in his memory the act of “seeing” the glowing tunnel or the crawling blob—himself—at its end. All he was left with was one last flutter of contact.

It had been the cry of a gull that woke him. The wind off the sea was shrilling between thick-set twigs. He was lying in a sleeping-bag.

“Granpa? Martin?” he whispered.

“They’re all right, Jake,” said a woman’s voice. “How’re you feeling?”

“Sergeant Abraham! Martin found you! Where is he?”

“Talking to the Superintendent over by the cliff. He wouldn’t leave you till I turned up. And your grandfather’s in an ambulance on his way to hospital. You lie still. We’ll have you moved away from here in a jiffy. How are things going, Mr Cowran?”

For answer, veined down the threshing wind, came a new noise. Jake had heard it before, but only on TV and radio. It was an automatic weapon firing three short bursts. Close by, a man muttered into a walkie-talkie. A helicopter bumbled overhead.

“Stupid git,” said the man. “We’ve got most of them, no fuss, but there’s two or three holed up in a sort of shed against the cliff. Better hang on a bit longer, Sergeant, just make sure we’re not in anyone’s line of fire.”

He returned to his walkie-talkie.

“What happened?” asked Jake.

“Oh, we were lucky,” said Sergeant Abraham. “I was a bit worried when I got Martin’s message about you going north of a sudden—somehow it didn’t seem like you. Then things started coming together, the way they do when police-work’s going right. I got a report of your granddad getting off a bus at Annerton, and when I wanted to send a man up here to ask questions my chief told me to lay off. I found your Mr Smith, too, so we asked around Sloughby and Penbottle. Yes, you’d been there, but there wasn’t any trace of you going north, where Martin said. It all stopped at Annerton, and the high- ups warned me off again. They were dead interested, though. You see, there’s been a big police operation going on, looking for these people, and Annerton was one of the places we were watching—not me, of course—I don’t work at that level. But when I started putting in reports and requests they knew something was going on, and soon. We weren’t quite ready to move, but we got a section up here disguised as a road repair team. So there they were, digging a dirty great hole in the road and pretending to like it, when Martin crawled out of the fields into their arms, with his face all covered with blood.”

“Blood?”

“Just scratches. There’s a thicket round the top of this shaft like you never saw. My guess is when they shut the mine they planted a thorn-hedge round it and it’s grown and grown. It took Martin half an hour to wriggle his way out, and it took our men that long to cut their way in to come and find you. We can’t leave it like this. It’s dead dangerous. The army are going to cave it in when we’ve finished here … Scuse me …”

The soles of her shoes creaked as she rose. Her skirt rustled away. Find me, thought Jake. Where did they find me? Martin would take them straight to Granpa. After that they’d look for me. Was I still at the bottom of the ladder, where I fell? Or did I really crawl to the main shaft? He eased a hand up to feel the chest of his anorak. It was musty damp, not soaking. If he’d really lain face down in the stream by the rock-fall … It must have been a dream. Only a dream.

The man with the walkie-talkie was making quacking noises of disgust and disbelief. With another rustle and creak Sergeant Abraham crouched down beside Jake.

“Listen,” she said in an urgent voice. “Did you meet a man who called himself Andrews?”

“Yes. He was the boss. Why?”

“There were three of them holding out. The other two have come out with a message. They say that Andrews …”

He didn’t hear the rest. His attention was blanked out by a sudden shudder of excitement, too fierce and brief for him to tell whether it was agony or thrill. That happened first, he was sure of it, just as he was sure that it came from outside him. Then came the explosion.

It reached him through the air and the ground and the mine in a confused hurl of noises and vibrations—one sharp, enormous slap followed by a booming rumble. A gust of heavy, dead mine-smell whooshed into the clean dawn. The grumble of tumbling cliff drowned out the grumble of the sea. Those noises ended, but still from below came the boom of falling rock. Somewhere down there Mr Andrews, unable to kill for his cause, had deliberately died for it, and at the same time, not knowing what he was doing, he had begun to close the wound of Annerton Pit.

Dyingly the air moved up the shaft as the last compression of the explosion eased itself out of the maze of galleries below. To Jake it sounded like a whispering sigh of content.