Jenni Mills - Crow Stone

‘Don’t joke. It’s that delicate.’

Martin frowns. ‘I suppose the insurance will be prohibitive.’

‘And there’s one tiny technicality,’ I remind him.

‘Ah. Yes.’

We don’t have permission to be here. Martin picked the padlock on the shaft cover. We broke in and we’re trespassing. Legally we don’t have a leg to stand on, even if we could stand up. An unofficial recce saves paperwork, but the drawback is that if anything happens to us down here we’ll be waiting a hell of a long time for the rescue party.

‘Quarter to four,’ he says. ‘Better get a move on, or it’ll be dark before we’re back at the jeep.’

We crawl back towards the central shaft, the one we climbed down earlier, my knees giving me hell in spite of the borrowed pads. I didn’t come prepared this weekend for going underground, and all Martin’s gear is miles too big. I have a prickling feeling between my shoulder-blades, and fight the temptation to keep twisting round to look behind. For God’s sake, what am I expecting to see? A flare of light far away down the passage?

It’s bliss to stand up again under the shaft. The light above is fading fast, and I can just make out an early star in the violet sky as I set foot on the iron ladder back to ground level.

By the time we reach the top my arms are killing me. I could swear my belly’s on fire too. While Martin’s on his way up, I unzip my fleece to take a look. I was in such a hurry to get out of the passage that my sweater must have ridden up as I inched over the chalk floor, and there are ugly red grazes across my abdomen. Should have worn overalls. An icy wind flicks across the hollow in the hillside, and I zip up again.

Martin swings the trap-door shut over the shaft, and crouches to padlock it. The sun is almost touching the metal rim of the sea, and there’s a tiny sliver of moon in the sky, no more than a nail paring. Back in the Neolithic, the hillside was probably cleared right up to the entrance to the flint mine. Those old miners liked a spectacular view when they came up from below. Martin’s theory is that flint mines were as much sacred sites as industrial estates, the underworld being the realm of the ancestors.

‘You didn’t like it much in there, did you?’ he asks. He has the unnerving habit of reading my thoughts.

‘No.’

‘It’s funny, I don’t like this one either,’ he says. ‘Some of those side galleries feel … spooky.’

‘I just got a bit claustrophobic. It was very tight.’

‘Sorry. Get fatter. Then I wouldn’t send you in.’

‘You’d still send me in and I’d get stuck, like a chimney sweep’s boy.’

‘If only you were.’ Martin sighs, and starts to undo the chinstrap on his helmet.

My nose is beginning to run in the freezing air so I reach into my pocket for my tissues. ‘Ah, shit.’

There’s nothing in my pocket. My tissues have gone. My stomach does a flip, and I go cold all over, then hot. My fingers are scrabbling down to the very bottom of the pocket, but all they find is fluff and an old sweet wrapper.

Martin looks up, his face ghostly with chalk dust. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘We’ve got to go back. My …’ I have to improvise, or no way will he let me go back in. ‘My car keys have fallen out of my pocket.’

He rolls his eyes. Yeah, well, I don’t feel like it either. But I have to go. I feel sick with panic.

‘The spares are three hundred miles away in Cornwall,’ I remind him.

‘Have you got the slightest idea where they fell out?’ The patient tone of someone really, really pissed off, but too nice to say so.

‘That last tunnel. I’m sure. I blew my nose just before I went into it–can’t have zipped up the pocket properly afterwards, and I turned over at least twice in there.’

‘You twit. Be quick. I want to be gone before dark. If the landowner sees a light, we’re stuffed.’

Something coughs behind me, and I swivel in sudden panic, just in time to see a huge black bird flap out of the beech trees and swoop across the clearing.

‘Jesus!’ There’s always something numinous about places like this, entrances to the underworld. ‘That must be the biggest bloody crow I saw in my life.’

‘Not a crow,’ says Martin, uncoupling the padlock. ‘Raven.’

‘Raven? Here? Come on.’

‘Definitely. Right size, right croak.’ Martin is the kind of bloke who knows these things.

‘I thought they hung around mountains and wild Welsh cliffs.’

‘Not exclusively.’ Martin peers towards the frost-tipped clump of bramble where the bird landed. ‘Unusual, I admit. Might have been a pet.’ The raven is hopping about by a tree stump, getting excited about the smell of rotting rabbit or something equally whiffy. Doesn’t look much of a pet to me.

‘Perhaps it’s the shade of a flint miner, come back to moan about us disturbing his nap.’

Martin throws back the cover with a crash loud enough to wake the dead. I sit on the edge of the shaft, feet dangling.

‘Get on with it,’ he says.

‘I’m just thinking maybe I should ring the AA instead.’ But of course I’m not thinking that, because it wasn’t car keys I lost. I’m thinking of the number of times I’ve tested my luck underground, daring myself to do what always scares me, and every single time, as I wait to go down, fingering the thing I always carry with me, not much bigger than a fifty-pence piece, rough on one side, smooth on the other. The thing I can’t stroke for comfort this time because that’s what fell out of my pocket, as if it had decided of its own accord to leave me. Martin would never understand why I have to go back for it; he thinks I’m enough of an idiot as it is.

‘Are you woman or are you wimp?’

‘Wimp.’ I stretch out one leg, feeling for the rungs of the ladder. Coal miners sometimes spat for luck before they got into the cage that took them underground. Gods live in the tunnels, and they can turn on you just like that. But there’s instinct too, a sense that some miners develop for where the danger lies, a feel for the state of the rock. As I start to climb down I try spitting, but it’s pathetic, just a pht of moisture off the end of my tongue, not a good rounded gob.

‘Hi-ho,’ says Martin, from the top of the shaft. ‘Hi-bloody-ho.’

There are good holes in the ground and there are bad holes in the ground. As I come off the ladder on to the chalk floor of the flint mine, this has turned into one of the bad sort. I know it from the way the shadows bounce and weave round the light of my head-torch; I smell it in the musty dead scent of the air.

Martin jumps down beside me.

‘You didn’t have to come,’ I tell him.

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘No point in us both getting killed.’

‘Ha-bloody-ha.’

I can tell he’s feeling it too. The place wasn’t exactly welcoming the first time, but now it’s positively chilly. That’s not physically possible, of course, because underground is warmer in winter than up top. We’re a couple of uninvited guests, tolerated out of politeness when we first came to call, now unmistakably given the cold shoulder when we presume to pop back for a second visit.

‘I don’t want to sound stupid, but which gallery was it we went down?’

‘That one.’

It would be. The smallest and darkest out of a set of very small, very dark openings.

This time the gallery seems interminable. My knees have stiffened; they hurt, hurt, hurt, but I have to go on putting them down over and over again on the hard, knobbled floor. There’s still a hell of a lot of razor-sharp flint in this mine.

How could I have been so stupid as to leave my pocket unzipped? I can hear Martin behind me muttering, ‘Fuck,’ softly with every breath, a mantra to get us through this ordeal. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ It bounces off my bum, matching the rhythm of the pain in my knees.