Anna Smaill - The Chimes

Halfway down the rubble slope, in the wall of the tunnel, I find a small jagged hole broken in the brick. I work my legs back so my head is level with it and I whistle the first few bars of the comeallye and Lucien’s whistle floats back up. No other way but head first. I push the rubble clear of the gap and then worm my way backward so I can get my head and arms through. My shoulders barely fit. I stretch out far as I can and my hands swipe air.

‘Push through,’ says Lucien’s voice below. No traction behind, my feet scuffing in the cramped tunnel. Then one plimsoll finds solid wall and I push through until I’m half suspended. ‘Further,’ he says. I stretch and the bricks round the hole break a bit and my balance shifts. Down below, there is nothing, only panic and a drop without measure. Then Lucien’s hand grips mine.

‘Give me your weight,’ he says.

I push back again behind me, pray he’s strong enough to take it, and kick free. Then Lucien is gripping me by the chest and I’m half over his back and falling for a moment. Then I’m down and my feet on flat ground and I’m standing close to him, both of us breathing hard.

Something is different. In the air is a low and constant ringing, silver and steady. The Lady tells her presence in drops of silence. But this silence is a constant flow, sure and so loud it’s deafening. My whole body echoes to it. I start to speak, but Lucien is already off. The space lengthens as we run, a long tunnel that leads ahead wide and curving. Underfoot are narrow mettle tracks, shoulder-width apart, big enough for a trolley or a jigger. The silver silence seems to fill the tunnel, flowing down the tracks to me.

On the next turning, something strange happens. Like a magic trick, the silver ringing disappears. Normal echoes of brick and mettle, and the matter-of-fact light tread of Lucien’s feet ahead. I shake my head, as if this might clear my ears. I keep following. Large, wide tunnels, brick and tile, by their echo. Left, left, left, right. We are returning in the same direction. With the final turn and another five beats, it is back. A sustained, silent peal. I feel light-headed.

The great current is now running perpendicular to us. As I listen, it seems to grow stronger: a full stream, a torrent that will pull us along. After a while Lucien stops and I can hear him breathing in the dark. I hang back, piano, listening to the pattern his halting breath makes in this vast, grand ringing. I wait for him and listen. I let the peals of silver settle over me.

His voice comes to me through the dark, as it always does.

‘Simon?’

He knows that I am here. He hears me as clear as I would see him in daylight.

‘Yes,’ I say. I try to say it without expression, without panic. I doubt that I succeed.

‘Can you hear it?’ he asks. His voice has the familiar excitement in it, and my heart rises up as it always does.

‘It’s… it’s vast,’ I say, finally. ‘I don’t understand what it is.’

‘I have to show you. You won’t believe it otherwise.’ He moves forward again slowly until he is about ten beats ahead. He hums soft and then places his hands against the side of the tunnel. The sound of this is hollow and resonant. I can hear him grip something, and then the noise of a short, violent pull. Mettle creaks and strains heavily, and then the tunnel is filled with a different light, a pale glow. In the glow I see Lucien’s profile, with the curled hair pushed back high off his forehead. He turns to me and his eyes are reflected in the light like a cat’s.

‘This way,’ he says, calm, and then he disappears into the door in the side of the tunnel.

I stand there alone. The door stands just ajar and the milky light appears to be flowing from it. The door is thick and made of mettle. Circular bolt heads ring the edges of the door, cruel and ornamental at the same time. In the pulsing glow, I see where they are bleeding dark red rust. The colour sounds something in me and I hesitate. But there is no choice. I hold the levered handle tight and swing the door open and hear its underwater creak. I draw a breath and hold it deep, seal it tight inside me. And then I step inside.

When I open my eyes, I am surrounded with an intense, silverwhite glow. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and Lucien was right. I would not have believed him if he had told me. We are standing in a vast tunnel. Its roof arcs high over our heads, and the walls are wider than my arms, stretched out full. The tunnel is made of pure palladium. Its glow is blinding. I feel its pulse rolling over me in steady waves, pure peals of resonant silence. My whole body is dripping with silver, humming with it. The resonance seems to begin inside me, in the bones behind my ears, and run down my spine and out to the tips of my fingers. I feel as if my spine is a candle and there’s a white clear flame emerging from the very top of my head.

I am grinning mad and huge, and I turn to Lucien, who is standing close, and he is grinning too, his smile wide and hilarious. The space around my lungs and where my heart is beating is opening up, stretching. I think of the picture in my mother’s book, those creatures with their dark wings stretching too, until they’re full of light and air. The strangest thing of all is that I can feel my parents there, in the tunnel. Their faces come into my mind without effort. I see the two of them alone, standing in the field next to one of the parahouses. They are healthy and young, and their faces are calm. The silvery space opens somewhere inside my throat and middle, and of all things I realise that I am going to cry. Standing in a tunnel under the river somewhere — who knows where?

Lucien is several feet ahead of me in the tunnel, walking with his stately lope, and reaching his arms out towards the tunnel’s sides as if he wants to pull the light in to him.

Then something changes. It starts slow, somewhere down in my feet. A sense of unease. Nothing has altered around me. The silver glow is as milky and clear and beautiful. There is no sound in the thronging silence. Nothing has moved or shifted in the tunnel. I start walking in the same direction that Lucien is going in, and I have the sense that I am moving impossibly slow, as if through silted murky water. Nothing there. But round my ankles a feeling of coil and release, coil and release. The feeling moves up from my feet to my knees and hips, and rises then up my spine, where moments before I’d felt the light coming through.

How to describe it, except as the opposite of the opening, lengthening feel of the Pale. It’s as if my joints are shutting, seizing, refusing. My whole body is saying no. I form the word with my lips as the black current reaches my hands and they seize and grip and try to push against something that isn’t there.

There’s pressure under my ribs, around my heart. The creature that had opened its wings within my chest now has my insides trapped tight in its claws. And then I no longer seem able to walk. I try to put my hands up to break my fall, but I land hard on the flat of my knees in the silver tunnel. The glow is still playing piano around me, like something cruel, as I retch and feel my back curl, without my control, inward and prone.

‘Lucien,’ I say, or try to say, or just think. ‘Lucien. What have you done?’

The next thing is my arms being pulled from where they’re curled under me, hugged in around my ribcage. Pulled out in front of my head. Pain in the shoulder joint. Hard, pointed pain, not the dry, refusing pain that has taken up everything else. I try to lift my head up to swear at him, but I am pathetic. I have no strength. Lucien pulls my two crumpled, useless arms together so he can grab both and then there’s nothing, followed by a painful wrench that has his whole weight behind it. He’s dragging me. I feel my forehead bump over the pitted silver. We are moving in slow jerks down the corridor. From time to time I hear Lucien go to his knees. Then his feet at my sides as he rearranges his grip on my wrists.