Jenni Mills - Crow Stone

Chalk is made up of masses and masses of tiny, hard shells. When I was a student we had to take a piece of it and rub it with a nailbrush–abrade it, my geology textbook said, the same thing the chalk is now doing in revenge to my knees–then look at it under the microscope. The surface twinkled with minute shells belonging to foraminiferans, single-celled creatures that drifted aimlessly in their billions through sunlit Cretacean seas.

The Cretaceous follows the Jurassic, and is followed in its turn by…

The entrance to the side-passage. I stop. Martin’s helmet butts my bottom.

‘Do you want me to go in?’ he asks. Generous, but—

‘My keys, my problem.’ I take a deep, wavering breath. ‘Right. Ready or not …’

I wriggle in on my stomach. As Martin’s breathing fades behind me, I can hear the hush, hush, hush of my Gore-Tex trousers against the rock. I start counting the movements of my elbows against the sides of the tunnel. It probably fell out where the sea urchin floated above me, when I rolled over to examine the ceiling. Maybe, after all these years, it was seeking the company of its own kind. With every shuffle, my fingers reach blindly forward, patting the tunnel floor.

‘Found them?’ Martin’s voice sounds hollow, distorted by echoes in the passage. Of course I bloody haven’t. My car keys are where I always leave them when I go off potholing with him, sitting safely and sensibly with my handbag and credit cards in the hallway of his cottage.

‘No, but I just met Fungus the Bogeyman.’

Martin laughs. The echoes turn it into a creak that sets my teeth on edge.

Now, where is that blessed sea urchin? I roll over on to my back, feeling my hip bones scrape the tunnel walls. The head-torch shows a featureless stretch of chalk ceiling. I turn back on to my stomach and start pulling myself along again slowly, fingers still groping every inch of the tunnel floor. For some unknown reason Martin is laughing again–I can hear the creak of it coming down the tunnel, just as my fingers close on a small hard disc, polished and smooth on one side, rough on the other.

A creak, the same jarring note as fingernails on a blackboard. Suddenly it’s not Martin laughing, and it’s not funny.

Ah, shit.

The sensible thing is to stay on my stomach, shoulders hunched to make as big a breathing space as possible, but something has gone wrong in my head and instead I’m trying to turn over, as if I could push my face up through the chalk and out into the open air, while the creak turns into a crack and then a rushing, pattering sound … Arms and legs are flailing, or would be if there was space to flail; instead, I’m battering weakly at the sides of the tunnel. I have to see . I can’t bear to be trapped like a blind mole in the darkness. Just as my head-torch flicks on to the solid bun of the sea urchin, chalky rubble and stones rain down over my legs. The ceiling’s going, somewhere down the tunnel, and once one bit collapses there’s nothing to hold the rest up.

My fingers clamp down hard on what’s in my hand, branding it into my palm. Madness to have come back for it, but I couldn’t have left it here … There’s a swirl of dust fogging the head-torch, making me cough. As it darkens I picture the thousands of tons of earth and rock that lie between me and the sky, and brace myself for the crushing weight of it all on my chest.

Chapter Two

The night I found the tunnel there was a big white moon as bright and hard as chalk. It was a few days before my fourteenth birthday. The air was warm, but there were goosebumps on my arms; the moon’s light was chilling. I was cold with sitting still, cold with waiting. When I started the climb up the quarry face, I didn’t care whether I lived or died.

The entrance to the tunnel was a patch of shadow on the rock, covered with long creepers and dreadlocks of ivy. There was a ledge in front, a platform just big enough to park a bum on, or I would have missed it altogether. The sweat was running off me by then, and for all my misery I was scared half to death.

The moon had climbed the sky as I went up the quarry face. It shone down like a searchlight, but missed me on the ledge. I sat there in the darkness, breathing in great gasps. I couldn’t go back down. I didn’t think I had the strength left to go up.

I leaned back, expecting to find rock, but the ivy parted, and there was the adit, the tunnel leading into the mine. It must have been part of the earlier workings, forgotten when they moved on to quarry a better seam of stone. I ducked through the leaves and crawled in.

There were legends about those tunnels. About ten or fifteen years before, three schoolboys had made their way in, as schoolboys often did back then, and hadn’t come out again. They got lost in the maze of passages that wove through the hillside like tangled ropes. When they didn’t come home, the police were called. They went in after them with torches and tracker dogs, and they got lost too.

We knew really that they came out, all of them, safe and sound, but we liked to scare ourselves with the idea that they hadn’t and were still there, doomed to wander through the veins of the rock for ever. Maybe one day we would hear their ghostly singing beneath our feet. Hi-ho .

The year after the boys got lost the entrances to the tunnels had all been blocked up. Sometimes a hole would appear mysteriously in someone’s garden, or a pet dog would vanish and people would say they heard subterranean barks and yelps, but those were the only reminders that the underground world of my imagination existed.

I believed in it, even if I couldn’t see it, and I wasn’t afraid of starving terriers or schoolboys’ ghosts. Then, I was never afraid of anything underground. Caves fascinated me; in one, I was sure, I might one day find the First Englishman.

I got to my feet and took a blind step into the real darkness, fingers brushing the rough-hewn tunnel wall to keep me straight. I won’t go far, I told myself. Just a few steps. Just far enough. Then I’ll find somewhere to curl up against the wall and wait until sunlight fingers between the strands of ivy. I walked forward, testing each step on the uneven floor with my toes.

I turned round to look back. I couldn’t see the entrance.

In my panic my fingers lost contact with the tunnel wall, and I snagged my foot on a rock. I stumbled forward, lost my balance, and ended up on hands and knees. When I managed to get to my feet again, the tunnel wall had vanished too.

I could hear my breathing in my ears, tight and harsh. The sound of it had changed, and the sound of the silence around me was different too. It seemed hollow, vast, empty. I knew I must be in some large space; perhaps a huge cavern the quarrymen had cut out of the rock.

I reached out with my hand, groping empty air. I could see nothing, feel nothing. The darkness was smothering. It wrapped itself more tightly round me the more I struggled. I told myself the wall of the tunnel had been only inches away when I fell. I just had to go back a pace or two, and I would be able to reach out and touch it. I turned, took one tentative step, terrified I would stumble again. Then I took another, my hands waving uncertainly in front of me, blind-man’s buff. Still nothing. And nothing. And nothing. And nothing again. Then I understood I could no longer be sure which way I was facing.

Oh God oh God oh God . There was nothing to tell me which way I had come or which way to go, and the darkness wound so tightly round me it was crushing the air out of my body. Please, God, let me find a way back. A safe way .

But that was Crow Stone, when I was another person.

Please, God, help me to find a way back out now.