Dark Tides (18 page)

You almost can’t believe it when you first see them. The situation is so perfect that it strikes you as absurd. But then you understand that it was always meant to be this way. It’s supposed to be easy because what you’re doing is the right thing to do. The same forces that have worked with you in the past are co-operating again.

Not that you’re prepared to take anything for granted, which is why you’ve been lurking behind the derelict cafe. But the longer you wait, the more you come to believe that your caution is unnecessary. Callum and Rachel haven’t even glanced in your direction. They’re too focused on what they’re doing. Too caught up in one another. For a moment – just a brief half-second – you see them lock eyes and you’re sure that they’re about to kiss. Then Callum smiles and looks down, suddenly bashful, and he checks a rope attached to Rachel’s harness for something like the twentieth time. But Rachel refuses to let the moment go. She takes Callum’s face in her hands and presses her mouth to his lips.

You feel your confidence growing – the cosmos is on your side, after all – and while they’re distracted you seize the opportunity to sneak around the side of the building to an opening that looks a bit like a bus shelter. The space offers a commanding view of the Chasms, but when you duck down to your haunches and press yourself into a far corner, you’re almost certain they won’t see you, even though you can see them.

The spot is sheltered, which is good, but it smells of urine and sheep waste. There’s a lot of litter. Crisp packets and sweet wrappers and soft-drink cans and beer bottles and even a broken hunk of white chalk that someone has used to crudely graffiti the walls, drawing noughts and crosses, love hearts and initials.

You crouch low with your forearms on your thighs, gloved hands clasped loosely together, and you think of the knife in your backpack.

You stay very still and you watch them kiss, waiting to make your next move.

I cupped my hands to my eyes and stared upwards in the light from my helmet torch. All I could see was the dreary sky, the dangling ropes, the swollen bulge and the tall stone canyon. Then two figures appeared. Callum was on the left, using the red rope. Rachel was attached to the green rope on the right. Callum swooped out over the lip of the opening and crabbed nimbly to one side. He reached over to Rachel and fitted his hands around her waist and supported her weight.

Rachel’s movements were taut and abrupt. Her rope twitched and jerked. She snatched a leg down but her knee gave way and she slammed into the rock. Callum guided her back again. She shook her head very fast, her blue helmet swivelling in a blur. Callum pressed his mouth to her ear and smoothed his hand around her back.

If she was scared now, she’d hate it when she got down here. And how would she get back up? How would she climb? I was starting to think this was one big mistake. A distraction too far. The pub would have been safer. Warmer, too. We should never have let Callum convince us otherwise.

The wind howled through the slash in the cliff wall, smelling of mineral deposits and brine. The seawater surged up, streaked with suds, then subsided. A tangle of blackened seaweed spun in lazy circles. The walls dripped with moisture.

The temperature seemed to be dropping. It was more than just a cave-like chill. The frigid water and the blustering wind were having a cooling effect. I was shivering. I stamped my feet and did a few squats. The ropes jinked and twirled in front of me.

Rachel was taking tiny jumps off the rock wall, dropping with a jolt. Her balance still wasn’t great. She was listing too far to the left. Callum swooped over, grabbing her arm and straightening her, then moving clear.

Rachel composed herself and sprang out into the air once more, pushing off from the rock. It looked graceful from below. Looked, in that first instant, as if she was arcing away with just the right amount of power and distance. But things changed when she reached the peak of her swing. Just as she applied the brake, just as the pendulum effect was due to kick in, something happened.

Correction:
nothing
happened.

She just hung there, as if freeze-framed against the dismal sky, and it was her sudden lack of movement, the peculiar absence of momentum, that told me something was wrong.

It was only for a mere fraction of a second but it was a fraction too long. Perhaps it wasn’t enough for me to understand what was happening in that very moment. Perhaps it was only later, when I replayed the sequence over and over in my mind, that I was able to comprehend what I was seeing.

She dropped. Straight down. Legs first.

Callum plummeted too, only very slightly later, his arms and legs flailing wildly, clawing the air.

The ropes slackened and unspooled, zigzagging down.

Rachel screamed very loud in a high plea that echoed off the rock. Callum let out a shocked bark.

Rachel didn’t hit the bulge with her feet. She struck it with her hip as she was passing through. She was flung to her side and her helmet smacked the opposite wall. She kept falling towards me, her body slack and bent double at the waist, her hands and feet pointing upwards, her head pitching over and down.

I screamed and jumped clear on to a clump of sea wrack. I didn’t see the impact. Hearing it was enough. First the plastic smack of her helmet. Then the wicked crunch of bone and the wet slap of limbs.

Callum had landed high up on the bulge. He yelled in pain. I couldn’t see him but his rope was jerking and jinking and swinging around.

‘Callum?’

I was standing now. Couldn’t remember finding my feet. I didn’t look directly at Rachel. She wasn’t moving. Wasn’t making any noise.

‘Callum?’

‘My arm.’ His reply was plaintive, disbelieving. ‘Is Rach OK?’

I looked down then. My friend was crumpled, her arms bent at wayward angles, her legs splayed, one boot hanging over the lip of the seawater pool. Her face was pointing away from me, her broken helmet shunted back from her gashed forehead. I stepped closer. Blood glimmered darkly in the light of my helmet torch. Her eyes were shut fast.

‘She’s not moving. She hit her head.’

But in truth, she’d hit everything. She was in a very bad way.

I got down on my knees on the hard ground, braced my palms on either side of her and lowered my cheek to her mouth. Was that a wisp of breath I could feel?

‘Rachel?’

No response.

‘Rach? Can you hear me?’

Thickened blood was running out from her ear. I placed two fingers against the pulse point on her neck. Waited. Waited some more.

An irregular flutter. It was there, I was sure.

‘I think she’s alive,’ I called up.

I unzipped my jacket and laid it over her. I had a jogging fleece on underneath but the cold still gnawed at me, goose bumps sprouting on the backs of my wrists.

‘It’ll be OK,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to get you out of here.’

I didn’t believe it. Not then, anyway. I couldn’t climb. Not by myself. Callum would have to help.

I craned my neck and shouted up again. ‘What do we do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What happened?’

‘Ropes went.’

Both of them? That didn’t sound right. I scanned the confusion of red and green rope on the floor. I grabbed the green one and pulled it through my hands in the halo of yellow light from my helmet torch and kept feeding it until I found the end. It was sealed in plastic. No sign of shearing. Nothing to suggest that it had snapped.

So maybe it wasn’t the abseil ropes. Maybe the anchor had failed. I didn’t think the boulder could have moved but there might have been a problem with the rope Callum had wrapped around it.

‘Tell me you have your phone,’ Callum shouted.

‘It’s in the minibus,’ I called back, trying to hide the crack in my voice. ‘You?’

‘My pack.’

I felt my heart drop into my gut.

‘What about Rachel?’

I swivelled and fixed her in the torch beam again. The water lapped against her toes. Her smart green jacket had a lot of pockets. They were sealed with Velcro and zips. Maybe her phone was in one of them.

I squatted beside her, lifted my raincoat and gently patted her down. Her phone wasn’t in her jacket. It was in a side pocket of her trousers. But when I fished it out it was crushed. The screen was splintered and the back was smashed through the middle. I tried the power button but nothing happened.

‘No phones,’ I told Callum, and in that moment, the rocky chasm seemed so much deeper and darker than before.

I heard a scuffle up on the bulge and I imagined Callum shuffling towards the edge. But if he thought he could look down at me, he was mistaken. The rocky swell was too big. I was hidden from him. He was hidden from me.

‘Did you see anybody up there?’ I asked.

‘Nobody.’

‘What about in the field? Walking by?’

‘No.’

This was it, I thought. We were utterly alone. Some people survived incidents like this. Some people thrived on them, summoning impossible powers of strength and resolve. But I wasn’t one of those people. I couldn’t be.

‘Help!’ Callum yelled louder than I might have believed possible. There was a wrenching tear in the back of his throat.

‘Help!’ I screamed, an octave higher. ‘Somebody!’

We kept screaming, kept appealing. I shouted until I was hoarse. Until my throat was raw from it. I wondered if the doomed sheep had cried, too, or if it had been dead long before it struck bottom.

‘Claire?’

Callum yelled my name over my appeals. I didn’t stop to begin with. I didn’t want him to stop, either.

‘Claire, nobody’s coming. There’s nobody there.’

He sounded beaten. Sounded lost.

I caught my breath, wiping spittle from my lips. ‘Someone might come.’

‘I’ll watch. If I see someone, I’ll shout.’

‘What about me?’

‘You have to climb, Claire. I can’t do it. Not with my arm.’

The bulge was way above me. More than a hundred feet up. The opening to the chasm was at least another thirty feet beyond that. I trawled the rock with my helmet torch. It was smooth and lined with algae in places. Jagged and brittle in others. There were areas where the walls were close enough for me to try bracing my arms and legs against the sides, but then the rock would flare outwards, leaving me nowhere to go. I couldn’t begin to see a route I could follow.

But there was the red rope. Maybe I could use that.

I tied a knot at about chest height and fitted it to the carabiner on my harness. I doubted it was a perfect climbing knot but it seemed sturdy enough. I glanced down at Rachel. Her skin was pinched and colourless.

I gritted my teeth, then jumped and grabbed hold of the rope and heaved with my arms and gripped with my feet.

And immediately let go again.

Callum’s howl was unlike anything I’d ever heard.

‘What happened?’

It took a while for Callum to respond. He was panting hard. Breathing raggedly. His groans rebounded from the rock with a muffled stereo effect.

‘Hurts.’

‘Your arm?’

‘My pelvis. And my leg. I think they’re broken. Dislocated, maybe.’

I stepped back from the rope.

‘I’m bleeding, Claire. It’s pretty bad. I didn’t want to tell you before.’

I stared at the rope, swaying uselessly in front of me, and I let go of a small gasp of disbelief.

‘Can you attach the rope to something else?’ I was thinking of the string of gadgets I’d seen clipped to his climbing harness.

‘I’ll try.’

I stepped away and knelt down beside Rachel again, holding my palm above her as if I was some kind of spiritual healer. She was so still that for one awful moment I thought she was gone. Then I saw her throat gently pulse. I reached out and cleared some hair from her face. The strands were smeared with blood. I removed my fleece until I was wearing just my vest top and I lifted her head very gently and pushed the fleece under her cheek. A risk. Moving her could be fatal. But I didn’t know how long she might last and I didn’t want her to lie there with her face squished against the cold, wet stone.

‘It’s OK, Rach,’ I whispered. ‘I’m going to get us out of here. I’m going to get you the help you need.’

I could hear muted grunts from up on the bulge. The red rope was twitching. I watched it dance and jink. Watched it hoist up a little.

Then I watched it drop.

‘Shit!’

Callum’s curse tore round the chamber.

The rope thudded against the ground. It settled in a loose, fat coil, tangled up with the green rope that had come down with Rachel. I stared at the ropes for a long moment, as if the light from my torch might magically reanimate them.

‘What happened?’

‘My arm. It’s really bad.’

So was our situation. And it was only getting worse. Rachel needed immediate medical attention. It sounded like Callum did, too.

‘How serious is your bleeding?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where’s it coming from?’

‘Not sure.’ A pant. ‘My side, I think.’

And maybe he wasn’t just bleeding on the outside. Maybe he was haemorrhaging internally, too.

I cast my helmet torch around the dim chamber, the jaws of the sheep’s skull parted in a sadistic grin. We were running out of options. At some point, the water would start rising. I could tread water and cling to the sides of the chasm if I had to, but there was no way I could support Rachel, too. We could keep shouting for help but the chances of anybody wandering through the Chasms in this weather were growing more remote with every passing minute. It seemed unlikely that anyone would hear us yelling against the wind tearing over the headland. Maybe someone would see our packs. Maybe they’d become curious and look down and spot Callum. But I didn’t think we could rely on it.

I called up, ‘Did you tell anyone where you were taking us today?’

‘No.’

One word, but it seemed so loaded with meaning.

How long before someone became concerned about us?

There was David, possibly. He might try and call one of us later. He might want to apologise for bailing, or suggest meeting for a drink. But when he got no answer, I didn’t think he’d panic right away, and he wouldn’t know where to find us, in any case.

We needed help now and only one option remained.

If I couldn’t go up, I would have to go down.