Stephen Booth - One Last Breath

Of course, Quinn was a man who had stifled any real feelings long ago. Any feelings except that deep, consuming anger.

Quinn tensed, watching him intently in the yellow light.

‘I just wanted to tell you that,’ he said.

Against his will, Cooper closed his eyes. He knew it was going to happen now, and he didn’t want to see the look in Quinn’s eyes as he squeezed the trigger of the crossbow.

In that moment, Cooper felt his senses heighten. He could feel his clothes sticking to his body with sweat, and the bite of the underground chill on his hands and face. He could taste the dampness of the air in his mouth. Around him were the smells of mud and rock, and water draining through layers of earth, like the odours of the grave.

Cooper listened for the sound of breathing, but couldn’t even hear his own. He heard only the faint hissing of the light stick and the trickle water from the roof, as he waited for the thud of the bolt leaving the shaft.

By the time Diane Fry found Alistair Page’s house in Lunnen’s Back, she was feeling sick. Her spell in the cavern had built up the pressure in her head until she thought it would explode. She couldn’t blame the hay fever alone, although it had left her feeling rough for days. Now it was compounded by anxiety. Not anxiety — fear.

When the boat had finally brought them back to the landing stage, they’d climbed the steps only to discover that Alistair Page had disappeared. And she still had no idea where Ben Cooper was.

‘Mr Hitchens isn’t happy,’ said Gavin Murfin as he finished a call to the West Street station. ‘He wants to know what your justification is for diverting the task force from Speedwell. He says you don’t have the authority, Diane.’

‘I’ll give him justification,’ said Fry. ‘Let him wait.’

‘Is that Page?’ said Murfin.

‘Where?’

‘On the corner there, just below the house. There’s somebody lurking underneath the street lamp.’

‘No,’ said Fry, ‘but it’s somebody I want to talk to. It’s Raymond Proctor.’

After a few moments, Ben Cooper opened his eyes, expecting to find Mansell Quinn still there, his face yellow in the glow from the light stick. But Quinn was gone, and so was the light. Around him was darkness. Real darkness.

Cooper stood up. It was the only thing he felt confident enough to do. Even so, he almost lost his balance. His head swam dizzily, and he had to flap his arms as he struggled to orientate himself. Without light, there was no way of knowing which way was up or down. But after a moment of panic, he calmed down. He practised standing still for a while to ease the pins and needles in his legs. The damp rock he’d been sitting on had chilled him through to the bone.

He had no idea which direction Quinn had taken. In fact, it was impossible to tell which way the passage ran. All he could do was find the wall and feel his way along it. It would be slow going, but it was the best he could do for now. He might at least be able to work out whether he was going up or down — out of the cavern, or deeper into it. All Cooper knew was that he was in the Devil’s Dining Room. In the light from Quinn’s torch, he’d recognized the black stalactites in the roof: the Devil’s Hooks.

He began to move in the darkness, then stopped after a few paces, feeling anxious about bumping into something hard. He waved his hands in front of his face, like a blind man. Maybe the more sensible course would have been to stay where he was and wait to be rescued. But he was wet from the cascade of water, and when he stood still he began to feel very cold. He knew hypothermia was a real danger if he was down here too long. There was no Little Dragon handy to provide warm air for him to breathe.

He started to move again. It felt as if the darkness had diminished his powers of logic and perspective, as well as disrupting his physical senses. He tried to remember how far he was from the place where Neil Moss had died, trapped in the limestone and running out of air. It had seemed a long way into the cave system on the map, yet Moss’s presence felt suddenly very close.

And who knew what could be around him in complete darkness? The chamber could be full of dead bodies, stacked to the roof sixteen deep, heaps of buried carnage that no one would ever see. The damp smell in his nostrils could be the stench of their bones, picked clean by pale, fat insects that had fallen off and died in the pools of ice-cold water, bloated with human flesh. If Cooper reached out a hand, his fingers might not touch stone at all, but the smoothness of a skull, the crevice of an eye socket, the dusty fragments of a young man’s hair.

Cooper felt like a man walking through his own dreams, stumbling across a darkened, illusory landscape, where anything could be true, or everything could be false.

He stopped when the toe of his boot hit a solid obstruction. He felt around with his foot, and stretched a hand out, moving it carefully downwards through the air to judge the height of the obstacle. It was a low boulder, no more than two feet high. If he hadn’t been moving so slowly, he would probably have tripped over it. He could feel nothing but empty air on the other side.

It dawned on Cooper that he’d expected the cavern to be silent. Darkness and silence seemed to go to together. But he’d been wrong. The river that ran deep in the limestone was a long way below him, but he could hear its roar through the rock. And water was running through the streamways, trickling over sheets of flowstone, seeping down the walls, dripping from the roof. Water was moving constantly everywhere.

But there was something else, too — something that he heard only if he concentrated hard. It was a more subtle sound, a gentle rhythm that might have been caused by the movement of air, or could have been inside his own head. It was the swishing and pulse of a distant tide, invisible in the endless darkness. As he stood in the depths of the cavern, deprived of sight, Cooper found the sensation oddly reassuring. The sounds he heard around him were like the liquid stirrings of a womb, and the distant beat of a mother’s heart.

Of course, there was no such thing as silence. Not on Earth, anyway. Even the movement of the atmosphere made the planet hum, made it ring like a bell at a frequency beyond the reach of human hearing. If you were able to listen closely enough, you might be able to pick up the vibration. But of course, it was never quiet enough to do that. You’d always be able to hear the wind and the movement of the trees, the beating of your heart, and the sound of your own breathing. There was no such thing as silence.

And that meant it would be very easy to hear voices in here. There were strange echoes among the murmurings and tricklings of the water. He wondered if cavers were superstitious and populated the caves with their own ghosts and demons. He wondered if they ever thought they heard Neil Moss, calling them. Heard Neil Moss, breathing.

Cooper could hear a voice now. It sounded a long way off, but it bounced softly off the walls, drawn towards him on the cool air.

‘ You should never have come back. You should never have come back into my life .’

He didn’t recognize the voice. Its resonance was distorted and flattened by the rock, and the words were overlain by echoes. Cooper turned his head from side to side, trying to locate it, to identify the direction it had come from.

‘ But you knew that I would, one day .’

A second voice. This one was Mansell Quinn, he was sure. In Quinn’s case, the flatness of tone wasn’t entirely due to the acoustics. It was an intonation Cooper had been listening to during the last hour — the voice of a man on the edge.