Crow Stone

Jenni Mills

For my mother, Sheila Mills

‘A Fathomless and boundless Deep

There we wander, there we weep.’

William Blake,

‘My Spectre around me night and day’

Contents

Epigraph Level One: Corax Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Level Two: Nymphus Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Level Three: The Soldier Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Level Four: The Lion Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Level Five: Luna Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Level Six: The Runner of the Sun Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Level Seven: The Father Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Literary Corner Acknowledgements Copyright About the Publisher

Chapter One

Look at this. A sea urchin, so close we could snog each other. My eyes are crossing with the excitement of it, let alone the proximity. I feel like calling to Martin to get his fat arse down here, so I’ll have someone to share it with. But Martin couldn’t care less, and neither could the sea urchin.

I’d guess it’s been dead for a hundred million years or so. When it was pottering about, doing whatever sea urchins do in the warm, shallow sea, dinosaurs tramped the shore. It looks like a bun, doughy white, slightly heart-shaped. The stuff of life turned to stone.

I’m lying on my back. Stone is digging painfully into bone; the floor is nodules of chalk and outcrops of flint, none of them dovetailing with the knobbles of my spine. My nose is a couple of inches away from the white ceiling with the sea urchin in it. Until I saw it, I was trying to turn over, so I can wriggle back the way I came in–feet first, because there isn’t room to turn round. This is a fairly delicate moment. I don’t think the entire lot is going to come crashing down on me, but it’s always possible. The tunnel’s hardly more than body-width. Even by Neolithic standards, this is poky.

‘You OK?’

Martin, in dusty red overalls, is waiting at the end of the passage where it opens into the main gallery: a luxurious four feet high, so he can crouch on hands and knees and turn round, lucky bugger. He’s too big to crawl any further so, being the woman, I get all the shit jobs as usual.

‘Happy as a sunbeam,’ I hiss. We rarely shout underground, unless it’s ‘Get the fuck out quick.’ I’ve perfected a penetrating whisper that seems to travel down tunnels. Martin’s heard me, because he grunts. It’s hard to know who are the sparkier conversationalists: archaeologists or mining engineers.

This wouldn’t be most people’s idea of Saturday-afternoon fun, but I’ve lost count of how long we’ve been doing this kind of thing. We even did it right through the years of my marriage. Martin’s favourite archaeology happens underground. It’s dirty and it’s dangerous, and you can’t have much more fun than that. We’ll probably go on doing it as long as our joints hold out, or the luck.

Luck shouldn’t come into it, of course. As the engineer, I’m the guardian of the luck, the one who understands stresses and loads and how water seeps through stone, and can therefore take an educated guess as to whether we’re going to die today, entombed in a flint mine.

These galleries were dug out between five and six thousand years ago, by people who had only recently discovered farming. They’re amazing: they have proper air shafts, and pillars to support the roof. The light of my head-torch picks out five-thousand-year-old carbon stains on the walls, from the oil lamps the miners worked by. The gallery I’m investigating is a dead end, never properly dug out, a speculative tunnel that either failed to produce any decent flint or perhaps was one of the last to be opened before stone tools were superseded by bronze. Sorry, mate, no call for flint axeheads any more. Ever thought of reskilling in metalwork? Poor old flint miners. The thought of a Neolithic Arthur Scargill pops disconcertingly into my head, reminding me of those little yellow ‘Coal Not Dole’ stickers Martin and I used to wear in our student days. Flint Not Skint.

Sea urchin apart, though, I don’t like this place. There’s something claustrophobic about it, even for someone who makes a living out of going underground. The side galleries nip and pinch spitefully as you crawl down them. I keep thinking I should have brought a ball of string to make sure we find the way out again.

We’ll look bloody silly if we can’t. Particularly as no one knows we’re in here.

The point is, if Martin’s right and he can raise the money for a proper dig with the university’s blessing, I might get paid for this afternoon’s spur-of-the-moment expedition. That would be useful, because if I turn down the Bath job there may be lean times before I get a better offer.

And I will turn down the Bath job. No doubt about that.

I say goodbye to the sea urchin, and finally succeed in wriggling on to my stomach so I can start shuffling backwards down the tunnel. It seems much further when you can’t see where you’re going, and it’s with enormous relief that I feel Martin grasp my ankles to let me know I’ve made it out to the main gallery.

‘Whew. Don’t ask me to do that again in a hurry.’ I flip over on to my bottom, and bang my hard-hat on the tunnel roof. ‘Next time it’s your turn to slither up the miners’ back passages.’

Martin giggles, easing back on to his haunches. He may be six foot four and built like a bear, but he’s as camp as a Boy Scout jamboree. He’s had my arse in his face more times than I care to count, crawling through underground tunnels, and never shown the slightest interest in it, which suits me fine.

‘So, what do you think?’ he asks, offering me a swig of water. It tastes of chalk dust.

‘Well, it’s going to be expensive to dig. You’ll need to prop it to make it safe.’ I look around, my head-torch casting wild, wobbling shadows over the walls. ‘And I think you should steer clear of the side galleries altogether.’

‘Which are, of course, the most interesting from an archaeological point of view. Most of the main shafts were worked over thoroughly in the nineteenth century. Damn …’ Martin is chewing it over. I can see his heavy jaw grinding away as he nibbles the inside of his cheek. ‘… and blast. And fuck. If I had the money to employ diggers who knew what they were doing, I might risk it, but I’m going to have to take on students and anoraks. “Ooh, durr, Dr Ekwall, I seem to have brought down the ceiling with one blow of my mighty trowel.”’

‘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.

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.

The sea urchin floats above me, set for ever in its chalky ocean. It couldn’t be more indifferent.

Chapter Three

I can still see the sea urchin so I know I’m not dead. It sits in a circle of light that’s ominously yellow. My head-torch battery must be failing.

That’s not a pleasant thought. Even if I’m not dead I might as well be, once the torch goes. It’s just about possible to be ironic while I can still see, but in the darkness I suspect I’m going to cry. I don’t want to do that if I can help it. I don’t want to die feeling sorry for myself, though I suppose it’s the one time you’re justified in feeling that way.