Peter James: Dead Man's Grip

Tooth pulled a length of blue, high-tensile rope from his rucksack and tied it carefully around the boy’s ankles. Then he lowered the boy, who was struggling now, thrashing in terror and making a whining, yammering sound through the duct tape across his mouth, a short distance down the shaft and tied the rope around the guard rail.

‘I’ll be back in a while, kid,’ Tooth said. ‘Don’t struggle too much. You wouldn’t want your ankles coming loose.’

Tyler’s glasses were falling up his nose. He was scared that at any moment they would drop into the void below. But worse, he could feel the rope slipping, especially down his left ankle. He was swaying and starting to feel giddy and totally disoriented.

Something tiny was crawling over his nose. A cold draught blew on his face, the air dank, musty and carrying the fainter, noxious odour of something rotting.

The rope slipped a little more.

Was the man going to come back?

Where was his phone? Was it in the car? How would anyone find him here without Mapper?

He began to panic, then felt the rope slip further. His glasses fell further, too. He froze, stiffening his legs and feet, pushing them against the bindings to keep them as tight as he could. The creature was climbing over his lips now, tickling his nose. He could feel the rush of blood in his head. Suddenly, something touched his right shoulder.

He screamed, the sound trapped inside him.

Then he realized he had just swung into the side of the shaft.

The walls had looked rough, he thought, in the brief moment he had seen them in the beam of the torch. The edges of the ladder would be rough, or at least sharp. As gently as he could, he tried to swing himself around, swaying, bumping into the shaft again, and again, then painfully against the ladder.

Yes!

If he could rub the bindings around his arms up and down against the rough edge, maybe he could saw through them.

His glasses moved further up his forehead. The insect was now crawling over his eyelid.

The rope slipped further down his ankles.

This place had worked well for him last week, Tooth reasoned. It was dark, no one overlooked it and there were no cameras. Aside from the power station, there were only timber warehouses, closed and dark for the night, on the far wharf. And the water was deep.

Someone had replaced the padlock on the chain-link fence. He cut through it with his bolt cutters and pushed the gates open. The southerly wind, which seemed to be rising by the minute and was coming straight off the choppy water of the harbour basin ahead, instantly pushed one gate shut. He opened it again and hauled an old oil drum, lying on its side nearby, in front of it.

Then he jumped into the Yaris and drove it forward on to the quay, passing the skip crammed with rubbish that had been there last week and the old fork-lift truck that had been conveniently left for his use. Not that he would need it now.

He got out of the car and took a careful look around. He could hear the lapping of water, the distant clack-clack-clack of yacht rigging in the wind. He could also, in the distance, hear the clatter of a helicopter again. Then, with the aid of his flashlight, he did a final check on the interior of the vehicle, pulling out the ashtray, taking the contents to the water’s edge and throwing the butts and melted SIM cards into the dark, choppy water. Satisfied he had left nothing else in the car, he prepared himself by taking several deep breaths.

Then he backed the car up a short distance, opened all the windows and doors and popped the boot lid. He slid back behind the steering wheel and, keeping the driver’s door open, he put the car into gear and accelerated hard at the edge of the quay. At the very last minute, he threw himself sideways and rolled as he hit the hard surface. Beyond him he heard a deep splash.

Tooth scrambled to his feet and saw the car floating, submerged up to its sills, pitch-poling backwards and forwards in the chop. He was about to snap on his flashlight, to get a better view, when to his dismay he heard an engine. It sounded as if it was approaching. A boat coming down the basin.

He froze.

Bubbles rose all around the car, making a steady bloop-bloop-bloop sound. The car was sinking. The engine compartment was almost underwater. The sound of the engine was getting louder.

Sink. Sink, damn you. Sink!

He could see a light, faint but getting brighter, approaching from the right.

Sink!

Water lapped and bubbled, up to the windshield now.

Sink!

The engine sound was louder now. Powerful twin diesels. The light was getting rapidly brighter.

Sink!

The roof was going under now. It was sinking. The rear window was disappearing. Now the boot.

It was gone.

Moments later, navigation lights on and search lights blazing, a Port Authority launch came into view, with two police officers standing on the deck.

Tooth ducked down behind the skip. The boat carried on past. For an instant, above the throb of its engines and the thrash of its bow wave, he heard the crackle of a two-way radio. But the sound of the vessel was already fading, its lights getting dimmer again.

He breathed out.

Tyler heard a loud, metallic clang . Then a sound like footsteps. For an instant his hopes rose.

Footsteps getting nearer. Then the smell of cigarette smoke. He heard a familiar voice.

‘Enjoying the view, kid?’

Tooth switched on the flashlight, untied the rope from the balcony and began lowering the boy further, carefully paying the rope through his gloved hands. He could feel the boy bumping into the sides, then the rope went slack.

Good. The boy had landed on the first of the three rest platforms, spaced at fifty-foot intervals.

With his rucksack on his back and the light on, Tooth began to descend the ladder, using just one hand and taking up the slack of the rope as he went with the other. When he reached the platform, he repeated the procedure, then again, until the boy landed face down on the floor of the shaft. Tooth clambered down the last flight and joined him, then pulled a small lamp from his rucksack, switched it on and set it down.

Ahead was a tunnel that went beneath the harbour. Tooth had discovered it from an archive search during the planning for his previous visit. Before it had been replaced because of its dangerous condition, this tunnel carried the electricity lines from the old power station. The tunnel had been replaced, and decommissioned, at the same time as the new power station had been built and a new tunnel bored.

It was like looking along the insides of a rusted, never-ending steel barrel that faded away into darkness. The tunnel was lined on both sides with large metal asbestos-covered pipes, containing the old cables. The flooring was a rotted-looking wooden walkway, with pools of water along it. Massive livid blotches of rust coated the insides of the riveted plates, and all along were spiky cream-coloured stalactites and stalagmites, like partially melted candles.

But it was something else entirely that Tooth was staring at. The human skull, a short distance along the tunnel, greeting him with its rictus grin. Tooth stared back at it with some satisfaction. The twelve rats he had bought from pet shops around Sussex, then starved for five days, had done a good job.

The Estonian Merchant Navy captain’s uniform and his peaked, braided cap had gone, along with all of his flesh and almost all of the sinews and his hair. They’d even had a go at his sea boots. Most of his bones had fallen in on each other, or on to the floor, except for one set of arm bones and an intact skeletal hand, which hung from a metal pipe above him, held in place by a padlocked chain. Tooth hadn’t wanted to risk the rats eating through his bindings and allowing the man to escape.