Rebecca Lim - Fury

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.’