David Gilman - The Devil's breath

The suddenness of the eruption and the silence that quickly followed left them both mute. It took a moment for their ears to stop ringing. Max pulled a piece of something slimy off!Koga’s head, a ragged piece of weed, and presented it to him.

“A present from the monster,” he said, but!Koga was not smiling. Instead he was retreating slowly backwards, never taking his eyes from the crater.

“!Koga, it’s OK. I promise. It can’t harm us.”

!Koga stopped and shook his head. “We must leave this place now. That was a warning. We are not welcome here. It is a bad sign, it is as my father told me. A bad place.”

Max knew he could not argue with a belief so rooted in nature spirits. He would never deride such strong feelings. His experiences so far had taught him that the Bushmen’s secrets and their understanding of the natural world were far beyond anything he had ever come across. He deferred to his friend and nodded towards their resting place that overlooked the void.

“Come on, let’s get back up there.” He turned away but felt the light touch of!Koga’s hand.

“Wait. You are planning something.”

Max nodded. There was never going to be a good time to tell!Koga his plan. It might as well be now. The same dread of frightening his friend away still lingered. “I think my father could be in that fort. If he isn’t, then the people in there may know what happened to him. I reckon at the very least there have to be some clues.”

He gazed across the landscape. In an hour the sun would scorch and they would be hard pressed to find shelter, not so much from the heat as from anyone seeing them move across the ground.

“Max, if your father is in that place, how can we get inside? The men in there might be the same men who attacked us. They searched for us and we escaped, now you want to knock on their door. Are we giving up?”

“No, we’re going inside. There’s a secret passage that should lead straight into the fort. At least, I think there is. Come on, I’ll show you.”

He turned towards the hole, hoping!Koga would follow. When he reached the chasm’s edge he held back a couple of meters, nervous of the drop despite the firm footing the embedded rock provided. He turned.!Koga was walking forward nervously, as wary as an animal seeking to drink at a dangerous water hole. But he kept walking until he joined Max. They steadied each other and falteringly shuffled to the edge. It was a bottomless shaft, and saw-toothed sheets of rock clung to the sides.

A fetid, quivering air breathed malevolence on them. The sibilant whisper of the unseen water beckoned them closer. Edge forward, see what lies below, see how far it is to fall . Max seemed mesmerized by its lure and stepped to the very edge, his gaze locked firmly on the black, unblinking eye far below, where the light ended and the totally unknown began. It had to be more than four hundred meters deep. That volume of water, under pressure, could blow a double-decker bus to the moon. So what was stopping all that power? How come the water never burst above the surface in any great quantity? The whole area should have been a wetland.

So intense was Max’s concentration that!Koga thought he was about to step into the abyss. He whispered Max’s name. Max turned and faced him. “Follow me. I think I know what we have to do,” he said grimly.

Both boys now squatted at the other side of the crater, watching the rays shine down into the hole. Even if anyone in the fort was on lookout-and there was no reason to suppose they were-there would be little chance of being spotted. Not at that distance, and not with the glare of the sun directly in the watcher’s eyes. Max pointed. About sixty meters down was another hole which looked like the entrance to a cave, almost unnoticeable. It was no more than five meters across and as high again. Around it were about a dozen smaller holes, each no more than a meter wide, punched into the rock face. “I think that’s the underground passage,” Max said, pointing to the cavelike entrance.

“You cannot know that. You cannot be certain.”

“No, but look at this.” Max opened the hydrology chart. The thin, almost inconsequential line that wriggled across the plan from the Devil’s Breath to the fort could be nothing but the conduit they were now looking at. At least that’s what Max told himself. “I reckon the water gushes up, and it’s so powerful it forces itself into that hole-that’s like a channel, and I bet it’d be strong enough to power a turbine or something closer to the fort.”

!Koga looked doubtful.

Max scratched his head, his fingernails scraping away some of the caked dirt in his scalp. “At least I think that’s how it works. Something to do with ventricular power, whatever that is. I should have paid more attention in science class.”

“And those other holes?”

“Er … yeah. Not sure. Probably some kind of natural venting system. Y’see, I think it’s so powerful that when the water surges, it wallops down that big hole and either blows back pressure through the smaller ones, or …” Stuck again. What else? He looked at!Koga, who now, for the first time, smiled.

“You don’t know.”

“Not a hundred percent. I reckon it has something to do with releasing pressure from the main surge.” He hesitated and said almost to himself, “My dad would know.”

They sat quietly for some time.

Max finally spoke. “It doesn’t seem as though this thing is going to erupt again. Next one’s probably at the end of the day. Yeah, that makes sense, maybe. Twice a day. Morning and night.” It sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.

“We go? Down there?”

Max shook his head. He had already made his decision. “I’m going. On my own.”

!Koga stood up quickly. “No! I am not afraid!”

“No one said you were. I know I am, but I’ve been scared more times these last couple of weeks than I’ve ever been, so I can probably manage it once more.”

“I will not let you go alone. My place is with you.”

“But I can’t risk us both getting hurt or captured-not now,!Koga, not after all this bloody effort.”

!Koga went quiet and shook his head slowly. He would be held responsible if Max did not survive.

“You cannot stop me from following you, Max. You will not know I am there. I will be the hunter tracking your shadow.”

Max touched his shoulder. “!Koga, you will always be with me. I’ll carry your friendship with me. But I need you to do something else.” Max took out his father’s Ordnance Survey map. “You remember the place where the earth bleeds? And the marks my father made on his map. You know this is where Bushmen died. And all those other marks, in different places, these are places my father found. This is what he was going to report. Now, this isn’t enough evidence, I know that, but it’s all we have right now. My father had been in all these places because of this….” He showed the hydrology map. “He found what was killing your people. And maybe there’s a lot more we don’t know about. And I know he must have other evidence hidden somewhere, real evidence, something really concrete that can’t be disputed, but I have to find him first and you have to go.” He gazed down at the vertical drop. “I reckon I can free-climb down to that entrance, then in a few hours I’ll be under the fort.!Koga, don’t give me a hard time on this, I need you to take Dad’s map to the police.”

“Police?”

“You said there was a police post, a few days from here. Get to them, don’t give them the map, give them this.” Max undid his watch strap. The old stainless-steel chronograph was his dad’s when he’d climbed Everest, twenty years ago, and he’d given it to Max for his twelfth birthday when he enrolled at Dartmoor High. Engraved on the back plate were the words To Max. Nothing is impossible. Love, Dad .