Crow Stone

‘You’d still send me in and I’d get stuck, like a chimney sweep’s boy.’

‘If only you were.’ Martin sighs, and starts to undo the chinstrap on his helmet.

My nose is beginning to run in the freezing air so I reach into my pocket for my tissues. ‘Ah, shit.’

There’s nothing in my pocket. My tissues have gone. My stomach does a flip, and I go cold all over, then hot. My fingers are scrabbling down to the very bottom of the pocket, but all they find is fluff and an old sweet wrapper.

Martin looks up, his face ghostly with chalk dust. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘We’ve got to go back. My …’ I have to improvise, or no way will he let me go back in. ‘My car keys have fallen out of my pocket.’

He rolls his eyes. Yeah, well, I don’t feel like it either. But I have to go. I feel sick with panic.

‘The spares are three hundred miles away in Cornwall,’ I remind him.

‘Have you got the slightest idea where they fell out?’ The patient tone of someone really, really pissed off, but too nice to say so.

‘That last tunnel. I’m sure. I blew my nose just before I went into it–can’t have zipped up the pocket properly afterwards, and I turned over at least twice in there.’

‘You twit. Be quick. I want to be gone before dark. If the landowner sees a light, we’re stuffed.’

Something coughs behind me, and I swivel in sudden panic, just in time to see a huge black bird flap out of the beech trees and swoop across the clearing.

‘Jesus!’ There’s always something numinous about places like this, entrances to the underworld. ‘That must be the biggest bloody crow I saw in my life.’

‘Not a crow,’ says Martin, uncoupling the padlock. ‘Raven.’

‘Raven? Here? Come on.’

‘Definitely. Right size, right croak.’ Martin is the kind of bloke who knows these things.

‘I thought they hung around mountains and wild Welsh cliffs.’

‘Not exclusively.’ Martin peers towards the frost-tipped clump of bramble where the bird landed. ‘Unusual, I admit. Might have been a pet.’ The raven is hopping about by a tree stump, getting excited about the smell of rotting rabbit or something equally whiffy. Doesn’t look much of a pet to me.

‘Perhaps it’s the shade of a flint miner, come back to moan about us disturbing his nap.’

Martin throws back the cover with a crash loud enough to wake the dead. I sit on the edge of the shaft, feet dangling.

‘Get on with it,’ he says.

‘I’m just thinking maybe I should ring the AA instead.’ But of course I’m not thinking that, because it wasn’t car keys I lost. I’m thinking of the number of times I’ve tested my luck underground, daring myself to do what always scares me, and every single time, as I wait to go down, fingering the thing I always carry with me, not much bigger than a fifty-pence piece, rough on one side, smooth on the other. The thing I can’t stroke for comfort this time because that’s what fell out of my pocket, as if it had decided of its own accord to leave me. Martin would never understand why I have to go back for it; he thinks I’m enough of an idiot as it is.

‘Are you woman or are you wimp?’

‘Wimp.’ I stretch out one leg, feeling for the rungs of the ladder. Coal miners sometimes spat for luck before they got into the cage that took them underground. Gods live in the tunnels, and they can turn on you just like that. But there’s instinct too, a sense that some miners develop for where the danger lies, a feel for the state of the rock. As I start to climb down I try spitting, but it’s pathetic, just a pht of moisture off the end of my tongue, not a good rounded gob.

‘Hi-ho,’ says Martin, from the top of the shaft. ‘Hi-bloody-ho.’

There are good holes in the ground and there are bad holes in the ground. As I come off the ladder on to the chalk floor of the flint mine, this has turned into one of the bad sort. I know it from the way the shadows bounce and weave round the light of my head-torch; I smell it in the musty dead scent of the air.

Martin jumps down beside me.

‘You didn’t have to come,’ I tell him.

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘No point in us both getting killed.’

‘Ha-bloody-ha.’

I can tell he’s feeling it too. The place wasn’t exactly welcoming the first time, but now it’s positively chilly. That’s not physically possible, of course, because underground is warmer in winter than up top. We’re a couple of uninvited guests, tolerated out of politeness when we first came to call, now unmistakably given the cold shoulder when we presume to pop back for a second visit.

‘I don’t want to sound stupid, but which gallery was it we went down?’

‘That one.’

It would be. The smallest and darkest out of a set of very small, very dark openings.

This time the gallery seems interminable. My knees have stiffened; they hurt, hurt, hurt, but I have to go on putting them down over and over again on the hard, knobbled floor. There’s still a hell of a lot of razor-sharp flint in this mine.

How could I have been so stupid as to leave my pocket unzipped? I can hear Martin behind me muttering, ‘Fuck,’ softly with every breath, a mantra to get us through this ordeal. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ It bounces off my bum, matching the rhythm of the pain in my knees.

Chalk is made up of masses and masses of tiny, hard shells. When I was a student we had to take a piece of it and rub it with a nailbrush–abrade it, my geology textbook said, the same thing the chalk is now doing in revenge to my knees–then look at it under the microscope. The surface twinkled with minute shells belonging to foraminiferans, single-celled creatures that drifted aimlessly in their billions through sunlit Cretacean seas.

The Cretaceous follows the Jurassic, and is followed in its turn by…

The entrance to the side-passage. I stop. Martin’s helmet butts my bottom.

‘Do you want me to go in?’ he asks. Generous, but—

‘My keys, my problem.’ I take a deep, wavering breath. ‘Right. Ready or not …’

I wriggle in on my stomach. As Martin’s breathing fades behind me, I can hear the hush, hush, hush of my Gore-Tex trousers against the rock. I start counting the movements of my elbows against the sides of the tunnel. It probably fell out where the sea urchin floated above me, when I rolled over to examine the ceiling. Maybe, after all these years, it was seeking the company of its own kind. With every shuffle, my fingers reach blindly forward, patting the tunnel floor.

‘Found them?’ Martin’s voice sounds hollow, distorted by echoes in the passage. Of course I bloody haven’t. My car keys are where I always leave them when I go off potholing with him, sitting safely and sensibly with my handbag and credit cards in the hallway of his cottage.

‘No, but I just met Fungus the Bogeyman.’

Martin laughs. The echoes turn it into a creak that sets my teeth on edge.

Now, where is that blessed sea urchin? I roll over on to my back, feeling my hip bones scrape the tunnel walls. The head-torch shows a featureless stretch of chalk ceiling. I turn back on to my stomach and start pulling myself along again slowly, fingers still groping every inch of the tunnel floor. For some unknown reason Martin is laughing again–I can hear the creak of it coming down the tunnel, just as my fingers close on a small hard disc, polished and smooth on one side, rough on the other.

A creak, the same jarring note as fingernails on a blackboard. Suddenly it’s not Martin laughing, and it’s not funny.

Ah, shit.

The sensible thing is to stay on my stomach, shoulders hunched to make as big a breathing space as possible, but something has gone wrong in my head and instead I’m trying to turn over, as if I could push my face up through the chalk and out into the open air, while the creak turns into a crack and then a rushing, pattering sound … Arms and legs are flailing, or would be if there was space to flail; instead, I’m battering weakly at the sides of the tunnel. I have to see. I can’t bear to be trapped like a blind mole in the darkness. Just as my head-torch flicks on to the solid bun of the sea urchin, chalky rubble and stones rain down over my legs. The ceiling’s going, somewhere down the tunnel, and once one bit collapses there’s nothing to hold the rest up.