Master of the Moor (27 page)

Stephen objected, ‘The air’s bad up there. You can’t keep a match alight.’

‘Can’t you, lad? I never tried. I breathed it all my comings and goings and I’m still here — worse luck.’

Half a dozen yards farther on and the water was over their ankles. It rose rapidly after that and it was icy cold. Stephen felt it like pain mounting up his legs, past his knees, to his thighs. When the water was up to his waist the candle flame began to sink. He pushed on through the water, Dadda’s back ahead of him like the back of some great ox, and he watched the flame sink and quiver and die.

He said like a child in the dark, ‘Dadda, I can’t see. My candle’s gone out.’

A wave of black water rippled over his chest as Dadda turned round. It was light again from the yellow beam of the lantern. The air Stephen was breathing smelt worse than coal gas, it was like inhaling vapourized metal. He began to cough.

‘Does it get much deeper?’

Dadda didn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t know. His face, haggard and ghastly in the yellowish gloom, told Stephen how much deeper the water was now than when he had come in.

‘Stephen,’ he said, ‘I’d best go on alone, lad. I’ve got the height. When I get up top I’ll drop your rope down.’

Stephen meant to say yes, all right, but the words came out as a choked sob. He cried out, ‘I’ll be left in the dark!’

‘Aye, there’s no help for that.’

He stood in the water up to his shoulders, watching the light move away from him. Dadda couldn’t swim and neither could he. The faint receding light filled the narrow space between the surface of the water and the coffin curve of the roof and against it he could see Dadda’s
head, a silhouetted head as black as Tace’s. There was a bend in the winze and the light went out.

Stephen shuddered, he wanted to scream, there in the dark, in the black water. He only whimpered a little. He began to wade and thrust back the way he had come, a blind man in an invisible flood.

The silence was total and the darkness absolute. In the space of seconds he had been deprived of his principal senses. That of touch remained, though the cold of the water was numbing his limbs, and he could smell the metallic sourness of the air. But he struggled slowly on back. If he could only make it without succumbing to panic, without losing his foothold, without breaking out into screams in this black silence, rescue awaited him at the other end. Even now the lifeline might be dropping down the shaft of Apsley Sough. He ground his teeth against his whimpering and imagined his hands at last grasping the rope.

Into the silence came a distant rumbling sound. It wasn’t very loud, a muted roar very like the noise the thunder had made when he lay among the Foinmen on the day he killed Harriet. Without having experienced such a thing before, he knew it was a rock fall he had heard, a fall somewhere inside the mine. As the reverberations died away something told him, some sense heightened by the deprivation of his other senses, that the fall was a threat to him, a danger to him. Instinctively, he flattened himself against the coffin curve of the wall and clung with his fingers to the tool ridges. He did so just in time. The tidal wave swelled and rolled the water up to his face and over his head, engulfing him. If he hadn’t been holding on it would have swept him away. Under the water, up against the rock, he thought that this was what drowning must be, and
then the wave passed. He threw up his head and gasped in a breath of the leaden bitter air.

There came a second wave, a smaller one. It swept a heavy object past his face. He reached out for it and, feeling its shape and its hardness in the dark, knew it for Dadda’s lantern.

The water subsided and lay still. He began to push back through it once more, one hand on the wall, the other holding the lantern. The level sank to his waist, to his knees, until he was free enough from it to shiver and feel once more the pain in his ankle. Almost on dry land now, he came to the branching of the passage and there he flung the lantern on to the floor and heard it shatter against the rock.

There was no object now and no hope in taking the left-hand passage, for the rope would never come down the shaft. He was enclosed in the mine for ever. He began to make his way along the tunnel to Rip’s Cavern and after a while he fell on his knees and crawled like an animal, thinking that there would be light there for a little time. There was nothing left now but an hour of light before the perpetual night time and, longing for that light as he had sometimes longed for the sun, he crawled and dragged himself towards it.

In the implacable rain Goughdale was as grey and unearthly as it had been in the mist. Men were advancing from the Reeve’s Way up between the crushing circle and the coe. They carried ropes and picks and a ladder and through the shrouding downpour they looked like the shades of those lead miners of old. Malm walked ahead of them with Manciple.

‘A piece of luck for us,’ Malm said, ‘that woman seeing him bury that stuff last night.’

Manciple nodded. ‘Let’s hope hell tell us who killed the first two.’

‘If he knows.’ Malm pulled up his coat collar, shivered in the wet. He kicked at a stone. ‘You’d better be right he’s down there.’

‘I’d bet a good deal on it.’ They had come to the shelf at the foot of Big Allen. Manciple stared at the rain pounding on the boulders and running down the hillside. He said in his diffident way, ‘I reckon I can find the place, though it’s years and years,’ and then, his eyes bright as if those years and years had fallen away, ‘I was just a kid. I was up here on the moor and I spotted this rope going down a hole, so I looked down and there was this boy climbing up … Ah, here it is and a rope lying ready and waiting for us!’

‘Go down and take him,’ Malm said.

Chief Inspector Wexford Novels:

Short Stories

Author of nearly thirty acclaimed mysteries, Ruth Rendell has won three Edgars,
Current Crime
’s Silver Cup, and the Crime Writers’ Association’s Golden Dagger Award. She lives in England.