Fury (19 page)

I feel Henri’s eyes on me as I pull myself up and over easily, landing silently on my feet in the tall grass on the other side. Ryan looks at me enquiringly, but before he can say a word, Henri’s flushed face appears above the wall, and he drops down, landing badly.

‘A moment,’ he puffs, embarrassed, from where he’s fallen amongst the weeds. He rises, brushes himself off, the corners of his mouth turned down in distaste, then gestures for us to follow him down the slope towards the railway line.

When we reach the tracks, Ryan looks both ways with a worried frown.

Henri laughs. ‘It is abandoned. Only ghost trains use it now.’

We walk, and walk. And the further we go, the more my fear and tension climb, like vines grappling towards a distant sun.

Finally, a vast train tunnel appears up ahead and we slip from a wan kind of daylight into a darkness that must feel absolute to Ryan and to Henri. They slip and stumble gracelessly behind me, until one runs into the other with an
ouf
, and they stop.

‘
Merde
,’ Henri says gloomily, fumbling for his mobile phone.

He lights it up and holds it forward, but it’s almost useless in here. The air ahead of us is inexplicably foggy. It has an acid-sweet smell, like exploded sugar.

‘Smoke bombs,’ Henri says. ‘Cataphiles use them to conceal their way. It is illegal to be underground, you understand.’

‘Great,’ Ryan sighs.

I hear him rummaging around in the pack and, moments later, the bright white beam of his silver torch plays across the railway sleepers, the stones beneath and around them. The light barely makes headway into the surrounding darkness, the foggy air.

‘To the right,’ Henri directs gruffly, uncertainly.

We move forward slowly, Ryan playing his light ahead of us and across the right wall. There are still only weeds and stones all around us, that strange and foggy darkness. Then the edge of the flashlight picks up a flattened juice carton, a candy wrapper, a scattering of stomped-down beer cans, a broken plastic torch. I see it first — a gap in the rock, a breach between the tunnel wall and the earth beneath it. Two, maybe three feet across at most. For a moment, we three ring the opening, quietly appalled.

‘You’re kidding,’ Ryan says incredulously. ‘This is the “grand entrance”?’

Henri’s voice seems muffled. ‘There are many other ways in and out, they say. But this is the only one I know of. I came here once, for a party. We ate
crêpes
, danced, listened to music. It was like a dream. Hundreds of people underground. I’ve never forgotten it.’

I grasp his hand briefly and he returns the pressure to show that he understands.

Aloud, he says in his gravelly voice, ‘And now I leave you two lovers to your gentle explorations of this beautiful and historic region.’ He glares into our faces. ‘I am a selfish man. Give them no reason to come after me with their questions, I beg of you.’

In his own way, he’s telling us to be careful. He doesn’t say goodbye, just drops out of our circle of light and stumbles back the way we came, his mobile phone held out before him, complaining under his breath all the way. I watch until the dim light of his phone merges with the distant, faint glow of the yawning tunnel mouth we first entered.

Ryan approaches the gap in the rock more closely, and we both crouch down, looking into it.

‘Being with you,’ Ryan says, turning to look at me with wide eyes, his pupils like pinpoints, the flashlight wavering a little in his hand, ‘I am
always
scared. Scared of what you’ll do next; scared of saying the wrong thing; scared you don’t feel the same way I feel about you. But this? This is a whole other level of scared.’

‘
Shit scared
, the Australians call it,’ I reply, feeling fear take wing through me like a live, trapped thing. I swing one booted foot into the hole. ‘It used to make me laugh whenever I heard someone say it. I didn’t understand it at all, until Justine explained.’

‘I get it,’ Ryan mutters. ‘I get it completely.’ Then he puts a hand on my arm to stop me going in. ‘I’ll go first,’ he insists gallantly, though he’s literally sweating with fear. ‘I’ve got the torch.’

I lay one hand against his clammy cheek. ‘It’s not a contest about who’s bigger, who’s badder,’ I murmur. ‘I appreciate the sentiment more than you could ever know, but I don’t need the torch. Let me go first.’

He backs down reluctantly, loosening his grip. Before I can give in entirely to the fear, I’m scrambling through the crevice in the rock, and feel my feet hit the floor of a tunnel.

What I notice immediately? There’s no light. And the air reeks of limestone, of bone dust.

We walk for an hour through a maze of tunnels that fork and branch and turn suddenly into chambers and openings and junctions. Sometimes, there’s ankle-deep water underfoot. More often, the passages are dry, and thick with dust. Occasionally, we are forced to duck our heads or crawl on all fours, and weird things leap out at us from the walls — graffiti tags rendered in brilliant colour, life-sized portraits of men or women, monstrous sculptures chiselled straight out of the stone itself as if caught mid-leap, mid-snarl. And all I hear from Ryan is ‘Shit!’ repeated over and over like a protective mantra, the laboured sound of his breathing.

In a vast, cool, eerily silent chamber we find a finely carved stone dining table rising straight out of the stone floor, and Ryan breaks out a chocolate bar and some water. He salutes me with Gia’s travel-sized bottle of whisky, offers me a sip. I shake my head, remembering the vodka laced liberally with liquid meth that had caused Irina’s heart almost to stop while I was in her body.

‘That stuff is poison,’ I say quietly.

‘I know,’ Ryan replies, coughing a little as he replaces the cap on the bottle and tucks it back into the bag. ‘But it feels as if I’ll never be warm again. Plus, being with you would drive any guy to drink.’

We grin at each other before he indicates I should lead the way again.

We start moving steadily downwards and begin to see large deposits of bones, tossed into dead-end passages like refuse or driftwood. There are broken skulls among them, vertebrae, pelvic bones and mandibles, the teeth still lodged inside.

Ryan pulls his hood up over his head, hunching his shoulders against the cold, against the weight of the stone above us, the human remains that keep appearing like a warning from God. He starts to cough from all the dust in his throat. Whenever I turn and look into his face, he seems strung out with fear, as if he’s fighting himself just to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

All the while, I desperately search for signs that Selaphiel has passed this way. But it’s been over a year now since he was taken, and I see nothing; hear nothing but the distant rumble of a subway train passing somewhere overhead, the play of water through some subterranean aqueduct, the squeak and scuff of Ryan’s boots on the dusty, rocky floor, the sound of his breathing, and of his coughing.

These passages must go for miles underground. When we come to a tunnel with an arrow painted on the wall, then a rough, life-sized cartoon of a man rendered in scarlet paint, I follow the markings with my eyes and discern a small opening, almost concealed by the uneven stone walls. There are rusty metal rungs set into the walls inside that dark space, a basic kind of ladder that extends upwards into darkness.

I grab Ryan’s right wrist and duck inside, forcing him to follow, to crowd in with me. The sound of his breathing is very loud. I point his hand, the flashlight in it, upwards.

‘I think that’s a manhole cover way up there,’ I say casually, letting go of him.

He lifts the torch higher, struggling to make out anything with his human eyes.

‘I could get you out if you feel like bailing,’ I offer.

He peers upward, still not seeing what I see. He shakes his head numbly and says, ‘But then who would get
you
out?’

I’m so overwhelmed by his words — so brave, so foolish, so certain — that I move straight into his arms, and they lock around me, tightly.

‘I’m holding you back, aren’t I?’ he murmurs against my hair. ‘This has to be the most frightening place on earth. I’ve never felt so … paralysed. It’s like I’m moving through quicksand, like there’s a giant block of stone on my chest and I can’t breathe. But I can’t leave you down here on your own. You’d never do that to me.’

I nod, because it’s true. He’s got me there.

He places his left hand against my face and runs his thumb down my cheek. ‘None of this seems to touch you. Why do you seem less afraid now, when before you were a mess?’

I turn my face into the palm of his hand and my lips meet it briefly. ‘Because I think I’m beginning to realise that this is just … scenery. The place I went to die, it doesn’t exist any more, so it no longer has the power to hurt me. When I was Carmen, and I woke to find myself in chains, with Lauren and Jennifer chained in the darkness nearby, that was real evil, living evil. So far, nothing in here even comes close to that.’

We re-enter the passageway, coming to a fork that seems a little different from the ones we’ve come across so far. I look back at Ryan for a cue, but he stumbles to a halt, saying wearily, ‘I don’t know, Merce, I don’t have a feel for any of it. You choose.’

He doesn’t say:
How much longer? How much farther?
And the sudden surge of love I feel for him is like a wave breaking through me. I may not need food or water, air or sunlight or rest to keep me alive, but Ryan? Ryan is necessary. I wasn’t lying when I said it before.

One of the forking tunnels is organic looking, in the sense that it’s hewn from the stone and stretches onwards into darkness. The other is sealed by concrete — and sealed recently — but there’s a man-sized hole drilled through the base of the concrete plug. The entryway is littered all around with empty spray-paint cans.

I start moving towards the drill hole and Ryan groans.

‘If it’s too easy,’ I say cajolingly, ‘it ain’t fun. It’s something I used to tell myself when I was Lucy, to help me survive. It helped me keep her and her baby alive when I didn’t know the first thing about her, or about me.’

I crouch down, preparing to go through, but as I stretch my hand towards the breach in the concrete, I feel a shift in the air and hear footfalls, drawing closer, fast.

I bump into Ryan as I back away and he tenses instantly, saying, ‘What?
What?
’

‘
Shhhh
, listen. Can’t you hear it?’

He’s still shaking his head when I grab him by the front of his jacket and push him hard against the wall behind him, just as a pack comes at us through the drill hole. Then a pair of hands comes shooting through the gap, then a head, and a kid covered in white bone dust slithers out and falls on the floor, like he’s just been born.

He’s fourteen, maybe fifteen at most, just starting to really grow, and he’s already snatched up his pack, is already sprinting, before we can call out to him to stop. I feel the surge of his energy as he passes us, his body a psychic scream of fear, eyes wide. He turns his head briefly, taking us in, his mouth a round O of shock, before he disappears out of sight up the tunnel we just came down, his sneakered feet seeming not to touch the ground.

Another boy shoots out of the hole — also wearing a thick dusting of white — in the same urban uniform of hoodie, canvas sneakers, distressed jeans. He reaches back in for his pack, tugging at the strap, unable to yank it through, his fear carving a sizzling arc through the air around me. Then he spies us watching him, and gives a long, unearthly scream and runs, arms around his head, abandoning everything.

Five minutes we give ourselves, before we move. Nobody else comes through, physical or otherwise.

Ryan exhales in a rush when he sees me crouch down to look through the hole again. Cool, quiet darkness beyond. But there’s something inhabiting that darkness that made a teenage boy abandon his precious swag and run, shrieking, like he’d lost the power of speech.

‘It’s the first sign of anything alive down here,’ I say apologetically. ‘You know we have to take a look.’

Ryan’s still standing, frozen, up against the wall. ‘It has to mean something,’ I insist. ‘What it means,’ he says through gritted teeth, ‘is that I’ve passed shit scared and gone into orbit on the fear-o-meter. You’re amazing, you know that? Most people would be falling apart right now.’

‘Of course I’m afraid,’ I say softly. ‘But placed in the balance against hope — which is what those two kids represent —
hope is winning out
. You, of all people, understand what it feels like to have someone you love imprisoned in darkness. Selaphiel may be the closest thing to family someone like me will ever have. He is the gentlest, the most unworldly of the Eight; so kind, so absent-minded, so intent upon the workings of the universal, that he is blind to all else, including personal danger. And I owe him my life.’

I add quietly, ‘Something is alive down here, I can feel it. And I understand if you want to turn back now. If you head up through that manhole back there, you should make it back to Henri in time. You’ve got his number. Call him — he’ll have to pick you up. If I can, I’ll catch up with you, I promise. But I have to do this. I have to keep going.’

Ryan hesitates, clearly torn, and I say fiercely, ‘It’s not about
fate
, Ryan. No one owns anyone else. I am the last creature on earth to want to trap you, to keep you here against your will. It’s about gut instinct and reaction and choice. It’s about what you can handle. If this feels bad to you, I release you. I won’t hold it against you. You are already peerless in my eyes. I have … trouble saying the words you want to hear because I’ve been burnt so badly, so literally, I shouldn’t even be here. But you know what I feel about you, and you have to know that it’s
real
. One day, maybe, we’ll have that time for ourselves, just to
be
and be with each other. But not now. You’ve seen things no human being should ever have to see. If you love me the way you say you do, you’ll
go
.’

I rise to my feet and kiss him, tasting that all-permeating dust on his lips, the familiar salt-sweet tang of him. Everything I feel for him in my mouth, in my hands.

But I tear myself away before there can be that lick of warning fire that whispers:
forbidden
. Then I bend and wriggle through the drill hole without looking back.

When I get to my feet, I’m in a long, narrow tunnel with a blind corner ahead. What I notice immediately is the uneven line of spray paint running along each wall, black on one side, green on the other. The paint’s fresh; I can smell it, sharp and heady. One boy, one can, each unimaginatively vandalising the seamed stone as he walked.

There’s a
bump
behind me and I turn instantly, my outline beginning to shred protectively into mist, into vapour. But I recognise the pack that’s come through the drill hole, and Ryan follows it, hands first, moments later. I coalesce immediately, the outline of my human form solid and unremarkable in the darkness, and watch him straighten with my green, green eyes. I know that he can’t see me in the absolute absence of light.

‘Tell anyone I almost lost my nerve, angel girl,’ he whispers, ‘and there
will
be repercussions.’ He dusts himself off self-consciously before feeling around and picking up the pack.

I grin, and look down at the skin of my hands, expecting to see them gleam with the joy that I can’t seem to contain: that he chose
me
over safety. But my hands are matte and unrevealing in the darkness, and Ryan fishes his torch out of his back pocket and flicks it on, his dark eyes settling first on me, then on the graffiti.

We walk again, me ahead, following the black line, the green. I reach the blind corner, Ryan at my shoulder, and we suddenly find ourselves standing ankle deep in bone shards. For a moment, I feel the chill flash of ancient memory rise up: of waking atop a stone dais in a chamber choked with bones, to find the Eight waiting and watching.

The chill intensifies as we walk forwards, and the ground drops away until the fragments of bone rise up to the level of our knees. Ryan scans the area around us with his flashlight, his hand shaking badly.

‘I don’t like this,’ he mutters, as the torch picks out the eye sockets of broken skulls that stare at us lifelessly from the sea of bones surrounding us. ‘I don’t like this
at all
.’

The ground rises again beneath our feet and we’re into another long passageway with the tags of green paint and black on either side. I read rising terror in the unsteadiness of the lines.

When we reach the next fork, we turn into the passageway that’s marked by spray paint, but then it peters out, both lines running partially down the wall before stopping completely.

There are three gaps in the rock wall ahead of us. The left opening leads to more tunnel, blank and unrevealing. The middle one, more of the same. But in the third tunnel, I see a faint gleam of luminescence trailing low upon the wall to the right, as if something injured came this way, and recently. I imagine broken wing feathers bleeding light.

Even Ryan can make out the smeared and glowing uneven line near where the wall and the floor meet. The fear he’s radiating spikes up, and stays up, and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to block it out because it’s in me, too.

We follow the glowing smear of light for at least a mile. I know the boys must have come this way because we pass a can of green paint dropped on the ground, then find the black one abandoned on a natural ledge of rock on one side of a narrow opening.

The opening is only just wide and tall enough to accommodate me, and I hear Ryan grunt as he ducks his head to pass beneath it. From our narrow corridor of stone we stare out into a cavern that’s vast and high and filled with murky, grey water from end to end. On the other side of the cavern, another opening leads on into darkness, but it’s what’s positioned inside the huge chamber that catches my attention immediately, makes me place a shocked and stilling hand upon Ryan’s sleeve.