The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

The Narrows by Simon Bestwick

Except for the drip of distant water and the soft crying of the children, there is only silence.

Torches pick out brickwork, nearly two hundred years old and holding firm. Handmade bricks; nineteenth-century workmanship. Thank God for small mercies.

Ochre sludge clotted at the edges of the canal. The damp chill. The black, black water.

Jean's body presses close to mine in the small boat. We're well-wrapped. Thank God we're dressed for the winter; it's cold down here. Another small mercy. Despite that, I can feel her warmth, and something stirs in me; for the first time since I've known her, I think of her in a sexual way, what she might look like naked, and I feel sickened at myself.

Is she thinking of me the same way?

I think of Anya and force myself to concentrate on the tunnel ahead. The torches give us only a few yards visibility. I try not to think of how long they'll last.

We travel on down the canal. And the others follow.

And the only sound is the soft, occasional plash of our paddles in the water.

And the drip of water from the ceiling and the walls.

And the crying, the crying of the children.

My own is silent.

When the sirens wailed, I took charge.

I don't know why that was. I wasn't the newest member of staff, but still far from long-serving. I'd only been at the school about a year.

But I took charge nonetheless.

I knew what the Headmaster, Mr Makin, was thinking. He was in his sixties, due to retire next year. All the years spent caring for others' kids, and none of his own-unless you counted a son who lived in Australia and never called or wrote. All those years, and all he'd wanted was to spend the last few with his wife.

"Ethel… " I heard him breathe in the stricken hush of the staff room.

Jean was as stunned as the rest. She was the Deputy Head and should have said something, but for the first time I could remember, she was at a loss. No one could think of what to say or do. No one but me.

I'd never been in serious danger before. Nearly had a car accident three years ago, avoided a collision by a hair-hardly in the same league. But they say a crisis shows you who you really are. I'd always assumed I'd fall short, feared I'd be weak or frightened.

But, come the moment, I wasn't. Even when Makin said his wife's name and sent Anya's face fluttering round my head like a moth round a light, I made it go away. She worked in the city centre; with a terrible coldness I realised there was nothing I could do for her.

I wish I'd at least called her on her mobile, said I loved her, said goodbye-but, no, I can't see that happening, can you? Switchboards have to be manned, after all. I wonder if anyone kept on mechanically doing their duty as the last few minutes ticked by.

Four minutes. That was all we had.

That endless moment broke and I was on my feet.

"The kids," I said. "Jean?"

She blinked at me. Outside, the playground had fallen silent.

"Get in the playground," I said. "Any kids live in the next couple streets, get home. Otherwise, get them down the basement."

"Basement?" She blinked again. It was a filthy place, not even used for storage anymore.

"Best chance we've got." I clapped my hands. "Come on! Everyone! Go! Go!"

Where did it come from, the sudden authority? I ask myself again and again, and have no clue. And then I stop asking, because I mustn't. The ball is rolling now, and I have to stay like this. Responsibility. It's like a millstone round your neck.

The staff ran out of the room. Except old Makin. He just sat there, blinking, old eyes full of tears.

I knew what I had to do. I reached across and touched his arm. "George?"

He stared at me.

"Go home, George. Be with your wife."

"I… " He wanted to, of course, but duty pulled him the other way. I absolved him.

"We'll be fine, sir," I said. "Just go. You deserve to… " I stopped.

He nodded once, rose. "Thank you, Paul," was all he said. His head was down and he couldn't look at me, but as he left the room, he began to run, surprisingly fast for a man his age.

A moment later, I was running too.

The tunnel, and the tunnel, and the tunnel. Endless, the brick arch, low above our heads, passing by. Coming out of darkness, yard by yard, coming towards us, passing overhead and back into the dark again.

The same, and the same, and the same. Again, and again, and again.

"Paul?" Jean's voice is a whisper. Her hand on my arm. "Where are we going?"

"I don't know," I say, and then remember I have to. I have to know something. "Not yet." I think. "There'll be a gallery soon, or a landing stage. Or something."

"What then?"

How should I know? I want to scream. But of course I can't. "We'll have to see, Jean. Might be fish here." I wouldn't bet on it, though. Rats in the tunnels? Did you get them down old coal mines? You get them everywhere, surely?

Worry about food later, I think to myself. Once you're underground and safe somewhere.

Safe? Where is safe?

I stop thinking that way. It may all be pointless, just delaying the inevitable, but what am I supposed to do? Just stop and wait to die, when the poison seeps down here into the mine and the canal? No. I can't. As much for me as anyone else. If I stop, you see, I'll think of Anya. And I mustn't. I mustn't do that.

Anya was… well, Anya was my girlfriend, of course. You must have worked that out for yourselves. Except that doesn't cover it.

Girlfriend always sounds so casual, so teenage. And it wasn't like that.

We weren't married or engaged. Hadn't even talked about it. Weren't even living together, although we had talked about that. Just weren't sure where we'd live. Her poky flat, my poky flat, or somewhere new.

I first saw her in a bar in the city centre, near where she worked-I went over to her, to talk to her, of course, but I never thought I stood a chance. She was blonde, with blue eyes, a classic beauty. But she liked me. More than "liked" as it turned out

You see loads like that from the old Eastern Bloc countries. God knows why. I once joked that if Polish women looked like her, it was no wonder they kept getting invaded. She whacked me round the head with a pillow as I recall. But she was laughing when she did it.

She wasn't a dumb blonde. She was a student. A mature student, I should add. At twenty-eight, two years older than me. And me a teacher. She already had a degree, taken back in Poland. English Lit. She could hold her own in any discussion about poetry. Which was good. We had lots to talk about. Keats and John Donne, Wilfred Owen (her favourite) and R. S. Thomas (mine). She was taking a Business Studies degree at Manchester Uni.

We'd been together about a year. Around the same time, give or take, as I got the teaching post at the school. A good little school, a small suburb with small classes, a plum job. I had that and Anya. I was so lucky. So bloody lucky.

I ought to have known it couldn't last.

She would've been working. She was in her final year, had two or three days free each week, so she'd taken an office job to pay the bills. Right in the city centre. Practically at Ground Zero, I'm guessing. She wouldn't have stood a chance.

I tell myself it must have been quick.

The caretaker, Mr Rutter, forced the basement door open, then stumbled away. Never saw him again. Well, I did, but I wouldn't have recognised him if not for his shoes. Old brown brogues, they were. He never wore anything else. All that was left intact of him.

He stumbled away. I have no idea where he thought he was going. I had other things to worry about.

We herded the kids down the stairs and into the basement, slammed doors shut behind us.

"Lie down," I shouted over the scared babble, then shouted it again, louder. "Lie down. Everybody. Shut your eyes. Put your hands over your ears and open your mouths." As far as I remembered, that was how you prepared yourself for the blast. I'd seen it in an old war movie, somewhere.

"Paul-" Jean's face was scared. She was about ten years older than me, competent and attractive, but didn't look much older than the kids, now. I wondered what I looked like.

"Yeah."

"What are we going to do?" she asked.

"Lie down," I told her, clambering to the floor myself. "And if we-"

That was when the bomb hit.

Brilliant light blazed, outlining the door at the top of the stairs. I looked away fast. Someone screamed-they hadn't, not in time.

A heat equal to that of the sun was consuming-had consumed-the centre of Manchester. The CIS tower, the Arndale Centre, the Lowry Hotel-all gone.

And Anya. Among all the rest, Anya too.

Then there was a distant rumbling. The sound was coming. The sound and the blast.

"Hands over your ears! Mouths open! Shut your eyes!"

And then, as I followed my own advice, the blast wave struck the school.

I've almost forgotten I'm in a tunnel. It's like watching a visual effect, a bit like one of those fractals you get on a computer, or the light effects a computer screen can create if you play a CD on it.

Got on a computer. The light effects a screen created. If you played a CD. It's all past tense now. I have to get used to the idea. All past tense.

Someone once asked Einstein, what would be the weapons of the Third World War? He said he didn't know. But that the weapons of the Fourth World War would be stones and clubs.

If anyone's left in a hundred years, and they read this-will they even understand what I'm talking about? So many reference points I took for granted, and they'll mean nothing to whoever-whatever?-survives, landmarks and signposts of a world long gone.

Christ, in a hundred years, will they still even read?

We used to bandy that one round the staff room, but then we were worried about literacy declining because the kids'd rather play on their Playstations and cruise porn sites on the internet. Reading? Who needs it if you can get rich and famous making a dick of yourself on a reality TV show?

Old Byerscough, the History master-he said it was capitalism's final and cleverest game to keep the working class in its place. Time was, you couldn't get an education if you were poor. Now? Now, they convince you education's for nancy-boys. Books? Being clever? Bollocks to that. Just get pissed or E'd up and have fun. And you think that's the best way, when you're just being kept happy and docile and stupid.

Past tense again. Byerscough too. He was close to retirement as well, and lived nearby, just like Makin, but he never thought about leaving. His wife had died a few years before. He died at the school. Not in the blast, but after when-

"Paul! Paul, wake up!"

Anya was shaking me. I must've slept through the alarm. But she'd be the one running late, wouldn't she? She had to get up before me. Neither of us could afford a place in the village where the school was, but I lived closer to it than to the city.

"Paul!" Desperation, terror. I smelt smoke. Not the alarm. A fire. The house was burning.

"Paul!" Not Anya's voice. Who was she? The bomb'd set the house on fire.

The Bomb. And I remembered where I was, and Anya-

"Paul!"

"Alright!" I sat up. My brain seemed to slosh around in my skull, water in a bowl. Fingers gripped my shoulders. Jean.

I could see light through the ceiling. The sky glowed. Sunset already? No, a fire.

Fire.

The school was gone. And the ceiling with it. Well, mostly. Some had blown away. The rest had fallen into the basement. And was burning. I was lucky; I'd been under the bit that'd blown away.

The air was full of screams. Kids and staff, trapped and burning.

And the sky-

I knew if I looked, I'd see the mushroom cloud, over the city, full of ashes and dust. Some of those ashes would be Anya's. And in a few minutes, she'd rain down on me.

And she'd be bringing the bomb with her.

"Everybody out!" I shouted. Things cracked and crackled all around me. And screamed.

We got up the stairs. Byerscough stopped at the top, then turned back, starting back down.

"Alf!" I shouted. "What're you-"

He turned wild eyes on me. "There's kids still down there, man!"

And he ran back down, even though the smoke was billowing and choking.

He stumbled back up, a few seconds later, smoke-grimed, red-eyed, coughing and choking, one of the girls in his arms. He set her down, ran back into the smoke. He never came back out.

Jean knelt by the little girl. When she looked up, she was crying. She shook her head.

"What do we do?" she said. "Oh God, what do we do now?"

Three of the staff were still alive: me, Jean and Frank Emerson, the Physics teacher. About a dozen kids. They were all looking at me.

"I've got an idea," I said.

The tunnel changes at last. A fork. The water laps around a big central column. The canal, going off in two directions. "Which way now?" Jean whispers.

Have to choose. Which way now? Have to pick. But what leads where? Where does each go? Which is better? Safer? Is there meaning to either word now?

"That way," I say, pointing right.

So we veer to the right. It only occurs to me later that veering to the right was what got us into this mess in the first place.

Minutes pass. I haven't looked at my watch in-not since before the bomb fell. Does it have any meaning anymore, anyway?

Then one of the kids screams.

"What is it?" I shout, trying to keep panic out of my own voice.

It's one of the boys, one of the younger ones. "A man," he shouts. "A man in the water."

I flick the torch-beam over the black surface. "There's no one there."

"He was there, Mr Forrester, sir. He was."

"What'd he look like?" A drowned miner? But no one's been down here in years. There'd only be bones by now.

"White," the boy sobs. "White."

A chill up my back, and it's not just being down here. The boy's hallucinating. Who can blame him? I'm surprised I'm not. Will I sleep later? And will I dream? God, please not.

"Let's keep going," I say.

We stumbled through the remains of the school. Passed what was left of Mr Rutter on the way. "Don't look," I told the kids. Bile crept into my throat. The smell of roast, charred pork.

To get where we were going, we had to pass the Physics lab. It was, for God knows what reason, the only part of the building left more or less intact. Frank Emerson let out a shout. "Wait up!" he yelled, and dashed into the lab.

"Frank!" I yelled. "We haven't time-"

"Trust me." He forced the store room door open and came out again seconds later, clutching what looked like a metal box with a microphone attached.

"What-"

He clicked the "microphone" on and there was a soft crackling, ticking sound. "Geiger counter," he said.

I was about to ask where that'd come from-not exactly standard-issue in schools these days-but it didn't matter. Never look a gift horse in the mouth and so on. "You're a genius," I said. "Come on."

Worsley village-now it's a posh, desirable residence sort of place (was, then; past tense once more, Mr Forrester) but in the Industrial Revolution it'd've been anything but. The Bridgewater and Liverpool/Manchester canals all met here, and the whole area was a big coalfield, bringing up about 10,000 tons of coal a day.

Why do I mention this?

Because of the Delph, where we were heading.

There was next to nothing left above ground. The houses were gone, and where most of them had been there was only fire. There was nowhere to hide from the dust that would soon be falling.

It might already be too late, of course. I'd been to the Imperial War Museum up at the Quays the year before; one of the exhibits had been an atom bomb. Deactivated, I presumed. Beside it had been a diagram, a sequence of concentric circles marking out distances from the blast, and a table showing what would happen within them.

Nothing would be left for a mile or so around the blast site. Anya was dust, again. But where Worsley was:

All those not killed by the blast would be dead of radiation poisoning within hours.

Were we dead already? How long would be a fatal exposure? I didn't know, but I couldn't just stop, couldn't just quit. Easy to do so; easy to stop and spend the last of my time railing at the sky and the mad, sick bastards who'd done this to us. The politicians on both sides…

I'd grown up in the shadow of the Cold War; when it'd ended, I'd been in my teens, but I knew enough by then to have felt some of the dread that my parents-who would also be dead now-must've spent most of their adulthood under. And a weight had lifted. One less worry. Or so I'd thought.

Now…

Beside the Delph was a shed, belonging to the local boating club. We smashed the doors down. Inside, boats. Dinghies and open-topped canoes. And paddles. We took what we needed.

And torches, too. We were lucky. There were half a dozen, and a box or two of batteries. We took them as well, and then scrabbled over the fences, lifting boats and children, and headed down into the Delph.

"Delph" simply means a delved place. Delved; dug. An old sandstone quarry, half-filled with orangey-coloured water. The canals round Worsley are full of it-iron oxides from all the heavy industry.

If you go into the Delph, you'll find a hole, a tunnel entrance. Gated up. We forced the lock-me, Jean and Frank Emerson, chest-deep in that water. And then we climbed into the boats and paddled through, into the dark.

You see, the Delph is an entrance, to one of the biggest engineering feats of the Industrial Revolution.

I said the whole area had been a big coalfield. The coal had to be transported. And what was the main means of transport in those days?

Canals.

Entered, via the Delph, are forty-six miles of underground canal. Extending down on four levels, deep and deep and deep. To the galleries of the mines.

That was where we were headed. Deep underground, the one safe place I could think of.

If you're so clever, tell me where else we could have gone.

I knew the Delph had been closed off because of carbon monoxide seeping up from the old mines. I could only hope it'd dispersed by now. But even if it hadn't, it beat radiation sickness. Carbon monoxide, you got groggy, disorientated, queasy, yes, but in the end you just drifted off. That had to be better than the alternative.

And so we paddled, and soon the light died and we used one of the torches to destroy a tiny portion of the dark ahead, so we could see where the hell we were going.

I tried looking at my watch a moment ago. Blank. Of course. It was a digital. EMP: electromagnetic pulse from the blast. Wiped it out. Thank God the Geiger counter still works. I wonder if anyone here has an analogue watch. Only chance of keeping track. Mobile phones might have clocks but they'll have likely gone the same way as the digital watches.

There's no way of gauging the time. The same unending tunnel, after the brief variation of the fork, in unending repetition. It just goes on. Perhaps it'll be like this forever. Perhaps we're all already dead. Perhaps we died in the school, or on the way to the Delph, or at some point on this journey and this is all the last hallucinatory moment of dying, stretching on out forever…

No good thinking that way. I force myself to keep paddling. My hands are numb. The damp chill of the air, a nip at first, but like a swarm of soldier ants eating through to the bone bite by tiny bite.

The air is stale and foul. An olfactory memory skitters across my nerves; the summer just gone, walking in a meadow, the smell of fresh-cut grass, flowers breathing perfume into air, soft, clean, clear air.

Treasure that memory, Paul. You aren't likely to have another like it.

Cold. The air stinks. My teeth have begun to chatter. What it must be like for the children, back in the smaller boats, I don't like to think. Is Frank Emerson alright back there? I ought to shout at him but I can't seem to. My jaw won't let me, refuses to let me waste the energy.

"Paul?" It's Jean. She's been crying. So have I, silently. I can feel the burn of the dried salt on my cheeks. Anya.

I'm wandering, vague, keep greying out. Radiation sickness? Or carbon monoxide? Or just going cold and tired? Be ironic that, if it's hypothermia and exhaustion that finishes the job. Maybe a kind of bleak triumph there, a bitter laugh at the death that thought it'd've have us.

"Paul?" Jean again. Her voice is cracked. She's been thinking about her husband, must've been with all this time on our hands, just paddling-well, the endless tunnel can sort of hypnotise you. Better if it does, in a way. If not, your mind begins to wander. I'd've been thinking about Anya so so much if not for that lucky effect. But Jean-

I met her husband once. A small, quiet man, balding and moustached. Bespectacled. Smoked a pipe. Scottish, like her. Glaswegian, or was he from Edinburgh? Sipped a Britvic orange in the pub at the staff do last Christmas while Jean got tipsy on Dubonnet. Did he work? From home, I think she said. What was he? An accountant, I think. They lived in the village. His-their-house was-

Can't remember. Burned to ashes anyway. Doubt he'd've had a chance. But at least, with Anya, I can be sure she's dead. Horrible, how easy you can accept that, the fact that the person you love the most in the world is gone. Oh, my heart's been ripped out of my chest. Well, there it is. There you go. Never mind.

Except I do mind, but what to do? It's keep going or stop and die. Some instinct or drive, something in me, won't just let me lie down and quit. It's not the responsibility for the kids that keeps me going. That's getting it backwards. That's why I seized control when the sirens went. It was my excuse for living. Anya would have approved.

"Just because I'm dead, Paul, doesn't mean you can give up."

No ma'am. I know that, darling.

"Keep going. We'll be together again one day."

Yeah, right. Now I know that's my imagination. Anya would never have said anything so trite, so twee, not even to motivate me. She'd been raised a Catholic, but lapsed long ago.

She was the most honest person I knew.

When you're dead, she'd told me bluntly, once, you're dead, that's it. You're a match that flares in the dark. You burn a few seconds and then you go out. A little poetic, but it was the small hours of one morning and we'd been smashed on bisongrass vodka and a couple of joints. In vodka veritas. You have seconds in the dark. Out of the dark and back into it. You have to use it while you can. Don't waste it.

It would be nice to think of my survival as my tribute to Anya, that I'm doing it for her, but-

"Paul?"

God damnit. I turn to Jean. "What?" My voice is gravel.

Her teeth are chattering too. Hard to tell in the gloomy backspill of light from the torch, but I think her lips are bluing from the cold.

"We can't keep going much longer," she whispers. "Look at us. We're nearly all in. The kids must be finished. I don't know how they keep going."

"Yeah. I know."

"We're gonna have to stop soon."

"I know." But where? That's the big question, isn't it?

I'm about to confess I have nothing left, no ideas, when I become aware of something. A current in the sluggish water, pulling the boat sideways.

"What-"

I flash the torch. There's a sound too, a new one-I've missed it from being so lulled by the repetitive journey. It's water, rushing. I flick the torch-beam ahead. It skates along the wall on the left, and then plunges through into darkness.

"What's th-"

Something's punched a hole in the tunnel wall, or it's caved in. What could do that? I don't know. But water's draining through the hole, pouring through.

We draw level, and I use an oar to brace us, stop us sliding through till I know.

I shine the torch through the hole.

Water slides down in a low black gleaming slope, into a deep pool-no, not a pool, a small lake, on the floor of a great big fucking cavern.

I let out a shout. There are yells down the tunnel; the kids, startled.

"Paul," says Jean.

"Sorry." I shine the beam around. A big chamber. A natural cavern. A high ceiling. Stalactites. Stalagmites. And around the pool, a shore of crumbled stone. Dry land. A place to rest.

"Is it safe?" asks Jean.

I laugh. "God knows," I tell her. "What's safe?" I turn back to the others. "Through here," I call.

We pull the boats onto the blessed dry land and stumble on up, legs weak and shaky. A couple of the younger kids, deathly tired, have to be carried ashore.

We sit and take stock. Frank Emerson stares at the clinker on the ground and grubs through it, picks up a lump of something black and brittle. A grin spreads across his cadaverous face; not a pleasant sight.

"What?" I ask.

He grins the wider. "Coal!"

Of course. We grub together a heap of it. Thank God for my lighter. Anya used to nag me about my smoking, but thank God for it now.

What'll we do, I wonder, when its fuel is all gone?

The fire smoulders into life and we switch off the torches as a little puddle of heat and light spreads and gathers round.

We're all tired. Time to sleep. No strength to consider what other dangers there might be down here. If we don't wake up, so be it. We're too tired to care now, after all we've been through.

We have no blankets. I'm shivering-of course, we all were standing in that water-God, so cold. How have I held out this long? I'm lucky to still be alive. Thank God for the coal heat.

We huddle together for warmth as we sleep. Jean on one side of me, one of the younger boys on the other. Yesterday I'd've run a mile before being in this kind of proximity to one of the kids. Inappropriate contact. Now it's irrelevant; now it's about survival.

Anya, I think, and then, thank God, I drift off to sleep before I can think anymore.

I dream of fire. A room of fire. In the middle of it, a table. Anya sips coffee there, putting another cup in front of me.

"Thanks," I say.

"It's alright."

"No, I mean it. Specially with you being dead and all."

She snorts and flaps a hand, the way she always used to when she thought I was being silly. She keeps the left side of her face turned to me. The right side is eyeless and black, charcoal, the skull beneath half-bared. Grins at me whenever she turns without thinking. "Are you alright, Paul?"

"I think so. Relatively speaking."

"Relatively speaking."

"Well, you're dead."

"Don't go on about it."

"And the world's ended."

"Don't be so dramatic. The world's still there. It's just the people that are gone."

"Of course. I forgot."

"Don't worry about it. You've a lot on your plate right now. Just be careful."

"Of what?"

"Of everything, Paul." Her hair catches fire, her clothes. I don't. I remain unscathed, just watching as the flames crawl over her and the rest of her face blackens and her one blue eye melts and trickles down her charcoal cheek like a tear. "Of everything."

I wake up. Jean's gone. Sound nearby.

I rise, looking round. Jean squats nearby, gathering up more coal. The fire's almost dead, smouldering. How can I see down here? The darkness should be total. Then I see dull green patches of luminescence smeared on the rock. "What's that?"

"Fungus of some kind, I should think." She isn't shocked by my sudden whisper. She's almost glacially calm. "Are you alright?"

My joints are a little creaky and I've a banging headache, but otherwise I feel fine. "Just hungry. And thirsty."

"You think that water's safe to drink?"

"We may have to chance it. We could try boiling it."

"Aye." She heaps coal on the embers of the fire, watches it start to smoulder. "Alan probably looks like that now."

"Alan?" I realise she means her husband.

"Aye. He has to be, doesn't he? I mean, no way he could've survived."

I don't know if that's true as yet-he might've got into the cellar, if she had one. I don't know if he did, and it doesn't matter. Things like that she doesn't need or want to hear. "No," I tell her, "no way."

"Anya worked in the city centre, didn't she?"

"Yes. She wouldn't have had a chance either."

"No." She sits beside me, huddles close, takes my hand. Is it just warmth she wants, companionship? I can't see myself having anything else to give, but I seem to-I feel my body stirring in her presence. It never has before today. But we never so narrowly escaped death, losing so much in the process, before.

It might be good for us, or it might not. I can't tell and I won't risk it. Not so soon. I squeeze her hand, and when she puts the other on my knee I gently but firmly remove it, but don't let it go.

Her sigh's a warm breath in my ear. "OK," she says. "For now."

We settle back down to sleep once more.

This time I don't dream.

The next-day?-God knows. There is neither time nor light down here, save the light we make. But I have to call it something. The next day, we explore the cavern.

Big, roomy. Plenty of coal, big chunks of it in the walls. We can hack bits loose with rocks. We won't freeze. We might starve or die of thirst, but we won't freeze.

Thank God, in one of the boats, someone had stored a kettle. I don't know what for. One more piece of luck, like the torches and the Geiger counter and the whole ceiling of the basement not falling in on us. Blind chance, saving us all.

Well, the fifteen of us, anyway.

Me, Jean and Frank Emerson are the only adults. The rest: eight boys, four girls. Most of the kids are the older ones, between fourteen and sixteen years of age. Two ten-year-old boys, one nine-year-old girl. The older kids-stronger, more grown-up, more independent. They were the ones who fought their way out of the basement. The younger ones-scared, huddled, either frozen where they were or running around in hopeless panic-never had a chance. All the little ones… I think of Alf Byerscough going back down there, never coming back. There was a brave man. A hero.

And dead. Better a live coward… or is it? Look where it's got me: a hole in the ground. But still alive.

Frank heats water in the kettle, lets the steam collect in the upturned hull of a boat, angled so it trickles down and collects in a corner. There's a tin cup too. A small water ration for everybody.

Food is a more pressing concern, at least until one of the younger boys yells and points at the water-the same one thought he saw a man in the canal yesterday. But he's seen something this time, something big and white and floundering. A fish, a big one. I whack the water hard with an oar-it flops to the surface, stunned.

"Bream," pronounces Frank, who used to go fishing. It's white and eyeless. "They tend to go for muddy water."

Muddy isn't the word for this water, but I'm grateful nonetheless. It's a big fish, but among fifteen people it doesn't go far. We need more.

"There might be rats," says one of the boys. Jeff Tomlinson. Sporty, practical, goes camping a lot, reads books on wilderness survival. Should've known he'd make it. "We could eat them."

"If we can catch them," says Frank.

"Maybe the rats'll be blind too," says Jeff.

"Have hearing like a bat."

I wonder if there'll be any of those down here too.

"Mr Forrester." It's one of the girls. Jane Routledge. She's at the end of the cavern, pointing.

"Look at this, sir." She's a scarily calm girl. A kind of brittle shock, a shell around her.

At the end of the cavern, the path branches off down channels, streams disappearing into holes in the walls. Small narrow caves, winding. I could just about get down one if I was hunched over like Quasimodo. Looking round I see others in the walls. Some are draining off the water. Others are dry, dusty. Off into the mine. Or maybe not. Was this cavern part of the mine? I doubt it somehow.

I venture a few feet into the nearest cave. Not far. Something about it makes my scalp prickle. I touch the walls. They feel-ribbed. These are not natural. These have been dug.

I say nothing about it, but something about the caves draws the kids.

By what I guess to be the end of the day, they're going into them, but not far, never out of sight of the main cavern, on my instructions. Last thing we need is any of them getting lost.

Also, by the end of the day, the caves have been given a name.

The children call them the narrows.

"Like a big worm's been through them," Jean whispers. "Isn't it?"

I give her hand a squeeze. "Don't."

We're at the far end of the cavern. It's late, as we reckon time now. The children and Frank are asleep around the dying fire. Jean and I… we're warm enough and restless enough to pull away. I shine a torch down one of the narrows. It glances off the ribbed, irregular stone. I can see about ten yards down it, before it bends right and is lost to view.

"They're weird, aren't they," she whispers.

"Yeah." We move to the neighbouring entrance. "The kids seem to like them, though. Gives 'em something to occupy themselves with."

"Aye, well. Just don't let them go playing in it. Bloody easy to get lost or stuck, place like this."

"Mm." I shine the torch again, then frown. "Hang on."

"What?"

"Look." I cross back to the first cave. "See that?"

"Bends right. Aye. So?"

"Look." I step to the right and shine the torch down its neighbour. "See?"

The neighbouring tunnel extends in a straight line for longer than the first-fifteen, twenty yards, easily-before veering off and up. Its walls are smooth and unbroken, right the way through.

"That can't be," says Jean.

"I know."

We cross back to the first one and look again. "Must be a dead end," Jean says.

"Mm. Hang on." I venture down the tunnel, shining the light.

"Paul!" she hisses.

"It's okay. I'll be right back. Just… "

I trail off; I've reached the bend in the first narrow. No dead end; the torch picks out another long low tunnel, stretching away from me.

I can't see a break in its walls either. But there must be. Some trick of light and shadow the composition of the walls lends itself to somehow. Must be. An optical illusion, that makes the entrance invisible.

"Paul?"

"There's a tunnel," I say. "It must… Jean?"

"Aye?"

"Go to the next narrow," I say. "Just hang about there."

"But-"

"Just try it."

Muttering, she does. I start down the cave, stooped, flashing the torch side to side. This narrow and the second are about five yards apart, if that. A yard; that's about a pace for me. I count my steps: one, two, three, four… "Jean?"

"Paul?" Her voice is faint.

"Jean?" I shout a little. "Can you hear me?"

"Where are you?"

I shine the torch around. The walls are unbroken. I flash the beam ahead. "Can you see that?"

"See what?"

"The torch light. Is it coming through into your narrow?"

"No, it bloody isn't, Paul, and it's bloody dark out here. Will you come back now, please?"

"Okay." I feel a beading film of sweat on my forehead. The narrow looks straight and level but it must go under or over the neighbouring one. It's the only explanation.

I backtrack to the bend in the narrow. Shine the torch around-

This isn't right.

I left a long straight tunnel, with the main cavern at the end to my left, but where the main cavern and Jean ought to be there's just a flat wall of black and yellow stone, the narrow branching left and right. And to my right, where there was a dead end, the narrow now extends on for as far as I can see and there are very visible openings in it-two on the left and one on the right-where other narrows branch off.

Panic squirms low down in my belly. I turn back towards the T-junction. "Jean?" I shout, and I can't quite keep my voice level.

"Paul?"

It's coming from behind me, down the mysteriously extended narrow. "Jean!"

"What?" She sounds pissed off. "Where are you?"

Good question. "Jean, just keep shouting to me, alright? I'm sort of-lost here."

"Lost? How the hell are you-"

"Jean, just do it!" I yell. First time I've really lost it since we got down here. Since the bomb, in fact.

"Okay. Okay. Can you hear me?"

"Yes, just about. Keep talking."

"Talking? More like shouting."

"Just keep it up."

I head towards her voice. My hand is shaking on the torch.

"What should I say?"

"Anything. Sing if you want."

"Sing? I canna sing for toffee."

"It doesn't have to be tuneful."

She breaks into a halting rendition of "Scotland the Brave." I can see what she meant. At least it's not "You Canna Shove Yer Granny Aff the Bus." Small mercies again.

It rings in the narrow. I pass the first of the entrances on my left. When I reach the second, I realise her singing's coming from there.

There's no guarantee that sound's a reliable indicator of location, as everything else I'd normally rely on has gone screwy, but what else can I do? I start down this new narrow. It slopes steeply upward, but I follow it.

The singing gets louder. Water splashes around my ankles. Something white and blind wriggles past on its way down. I keep on climbing. The water flowing down this narrow is fast and cold and quite deep. Why didn't any of it spill out into the other, longer one I've left behind?

The singing stops. "Jean?" I shout.

"Alright, alright." I hear her coughing. Then she starts again, the

Mingulay Boat Song this time.

"Heel ya ho, boys, let her go, boys, sailing homewards to Mingulay… "

Where is Mingulay anyway? The Hebrides? Orkneys? Shetlands? I'm pretty sure it's an island of some kind anyway.

The singing's good and loud, at least. The narrow steepens till it's almost vertical. I clamp the torch between my teeth and use my hands to climb.

At last, I reach the top. Been climbing too long. Flat floor, water gushing across it, and I can hear Jean's voice, loud and clear, close to. I look up; the narrow has a mouth and water glistens beyond it. It opens out. I hear voices, too.

Someone shouts as the beam of my torch flashes from the narrow-mouth and I stumble out, almost falling headlong into the lake. Across the water on the bank, Jean and Frank and the others spin from the mouth of the narrow I entered and stare at me dumbfounded.

"No one goes in there," I say later, huddled round a fresh fire some way from the circle of children, sharing its warmth with Jean and Frank. "No one."

Frank looks at me doubtfully. "Paul, I know you've had a shock, but-"

"No buts," I say. "I didn't imagine what happened in there."

"Are you sure?" he asks gently.

I glare at him. "Frank-"

"Paul, all I'm saying is we've all been through a hell of a lot. You especially. You've been responsible for all of us. It'd be unbelievable if you didn't feel the strain somehow. And you have to keep everything so bottled up and reined in, it's not surprising if-"

"Are you a psychoanalyst now?" I know I'm overreacting, taking it out on Frank, but I can't stop myself. Luckily he seems to understand that too.

"No, Paul, I'm not. All I'm trying to say is this: stress, lack of sleep, grief, trauma, all those things, they can cause you to hallucinate. As can simply being underground, in the dark, in tunnels. I've been caving once or twice You'd be surprised what… look. All I mean is this. What you saw down there is physically impossible. Right?"

"I know that." I rub my face. "But I saw it."

"I'm not questioning that." I look up. "All I'm questioning is whether it was objectively real. Be honest. What's the most likely explanation? Either the tunnels really did shift and change around like you say, or you experienced a hallucination brought on by your emotional state and the conditions down here. And I don't doubt the narrows themselves could be disorientating too, once you got out of sight of the main cavern. You obviously lost your bearings and were lucky to find your way out again. But out of those two explanations, which makes more sense? Which is more probable? That's all I'm saying."

I bow my head. I have to admit he's right on that one. But that's what really frightens me. Because if you can't trust your own senses, the evidence of your own eyes, what can you trust?

In the cold light of day… I've had the occasional weird experience in my time, and most could be put down to hallucinations, like Frank says about this, or something more mundane. But it helps when you can get away from the place where you saw the weird thing or heard the weird sounds and go somewhere normal, four-square, the land of Starbucks and McDonald's, busy city streets and cars, brand names and day jobs. The cold light of day.

Except that it might still be cold back up there, but light? I think of all the predictions I heard and read, the nuclear winter, the great clouds of smoke and ash blotting out the sun and plunging the world into a new Ice Age. And even if we could get back up there, even forgetting that the radiation would kill us in hours, the world of Starbucks and McDonalds, busy city streets and brand names-it's all gone. The day job, the worries about bills and rent and mortgages, shopping at Morrisons or the local market- it's all gone. There is no normal anymore. The world is what's around us now, wherever we're clinging on to life a bit longer. The world is this cave. And reality… what's reality? Frank's right. We can't trust what we hear or see-with everything we've been through, it'd be a miracle if we didn't see or hear things that weren't there. And it isn't safe to be here. Nowhere is, anymore.

Panic wells up; I fight it down. I know that if I give into it once, that'll be it, nothing will ever make sense anymore and I'll either curl up catatonic or run screaming into the water till I drown to escape the knowledge, or not believe a real danger till it kills me or run to my death from an imaginary one.

So I push it down and instead I let myself realise the magnitude of our loss. Not just Anya, but Poland is gone. Not just the school, the village, Manchester and Salford, but Britain itself in any meaningful sense. America, too? Or-what if the bombs only fell on Manchester? If there weren't any others? It's impossible to say. And impossible to believe.

It's all gone. Names fly past, already robbed of meaning: Adidas, Reebok, Microsoft, BBC, ITV, Sky TV, Sony-all the brand names, all the twenty-first-century totems. They mean nothing now. Will mean nothing to anybody till whatever archaeologists of the future there might be dig them up and mount them in museums, try to decipher what they meant to us.

I can't get a handle on it. Only think of Anya, imagine her there in front of me. And there she is, sitting beside me, whole and unharmed, unmarked. Not burnt up like in my dream, but the Anya I kissed goodbye the morning before the bomb fell. There are now four of us round the fire: me, Jean, Frank and Anya. Jean holds my left hand, Anya my right. She looks at Jean's hand on mine, then up at me, raises an eyebrow. I pull my hand free of Jean's, embarrassed, caught out, almost caught cheating.

"Paul?"

I blink, and Anya's gone. But I can still feel the warmth of her hand where it held mine. Jean. Jean drove her away. I turn to shout at her, then stop myself. She was never there. Never here. It wasn't real, however real it was.

"Paul, are you okay?"

"Yes." I nod, but I'm not. God, how could I be? Come that close to raving and shouting over something that wasn't there. I'm crazy. Or going crazy. But what's crazy? What's not? What's mad and what isn't? How much more food will we find down here? And if there isn't enough to eat-how long before we start eyeing each other like that? Before we're killing each other, smashing each other's heads in with lumps of rock, roasting pieces of each other in our coal fires?

I try not to think about it, but I can't stop. What criteria will we use, to choose who lives or dies? The smaller children are of least use. Will we eat them first? But there's less meat on a nine-year-old kid than on a grown man or woman. Will it be the biggest of us, to go the furthest, last the longest, before we have to do it again? Me? Frank? Jean? Or are we of more value? In what way? We've as little idea as anyone else of what to do next. Hell, Jeff Tomlinson probably has more idea. And we're adults, we're authority, the powers that be, as far as the kids are concerned, who killed Mum and Dad and their friends and brought them down here to this. How long will the shreds and threads of our authority as teachers last? How long before they realise there are more of them than there are of us and like any who hold power, we only do so because they allow it? I see myself, my torso and an arm, all that's left, lying by the fire, flies crawling across my glazed eyes, the gnawed bones of the rest of me in the embers of the fire. Kids' famished faces, eager and greedy and animal, smeared with my blood and grease.

When are you insane? When you think about this? When you imagine it? Plan it? Or when you do it? Or is it insanity, will it be when it comes, or will it be only necessity, need, do or die? Will the mad ones be the ones who won't do it, clinging to an outmoded way, as mad in this time as worshipping the Sun God would be to the people we were last week?

Oh God.

Oh. God.

I can smell the roast pork stink that came off Mr Rutter's corpse, and saliva fills my mouth.

I'm crying. Softly. Again.

"Paul, it's alright." Jean's arms are around me. "It's alright. We've all been through so much. It's alright."

I nod, squeeze her hand. I look at Frank. "Get some sleep," he says. "You'll be okay."

We both know that's a lie. For all of us. "Frank," I say.

"Yes?"

"I still think-the kids mustn't go into the narrows again. Whatever it was in there. If it happened to me… "

"Then it could happen to anyone else." He nods. "Yes. I thought of that too. I just wanted to make sure."

That I knew it wasn't real. I nod. But, of course, I don't know. None of us can, anymore.

Taking Frank's advice, I get some sleep. It's deep and dark and blessedly silent. I wake once, and in the dim emberlight of the waning fire, someone tall is standing over me.

"Wh-"

"Sh." Anya kneels by my head. Warm light glows on her face. She strokes my forehead, my matted hair. "Sh. It's alright, Paul."

"Anya."

"Sh." She bends and kisses me: my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks, my nose, my mouth. The last, long and deep.

At last, she squeezes down next to me and huddles close, kisses me again. "It's alright, Paul. Sleep now."

Polish women, I think, are so beautiful.

And I sleep again.

In what passes for the morning, when some vague consensus of reality is established by enough of us all being awake at once, I have no idea if I was dreaming or not.

When we were journeying, searching, at least we had some momentum, a purpose, a goal, a quest. Now-now all we have is an increasingly desultory routine, with too little in it to fill the aching gaps of time in these days that aren't days and nights that aren't nights.

We hunt the lake for fish, catch two more blind bream. We consider the greenish fungus on the cave walls, and can't be sure if we dare eat it or not. Soon we'll have no choice.

Jeff T sees a rat skitter across the cavern floor and chases it, but it bolts into one of the narrows and is gone. "No," I shout as he makes to follow.

"But sir-"

"No, Jeff. It's dangerous in there."

He looks at me with a smirk playing round his lips, a smirk that says coward, weakling, but more, worse, nutter. And he was one of the good kids, respectful, obedient, yes sir no sir. Now it's a direct challenge, open insolence, and I have nothing to back me up, I daren't meet it. It could be the blow that shatters all discipline, all balance.

I look away. Jeff wanders off. He mutters something. There is muffled laughter in response. I look up, fists clenching. Jeff and a couple others smirk back at me. Jean takes my arm and draws me aside.

We catch two more bream in the lake. Have to take one of the boats out on it to find the second; only one's dumb enough to come close to shore. How many does the lake hold? And what will we do when they're all gone?

We cook and eat the fish. Hunger rumbles in us. Fish are low-calorie. We're getting weak, tireder quicker. At least it makes for an early night.

I sleep-

And am shaken awake. A boy, crying. "Sir! Sir!"

"Wh-" I sit up. Everyone's awake. "What? What?"

"It's Jeff, sir, Jeff and Mike."

Mike? Mike Rawlins, one of the smirkers. This was the other one-James? No. Jason. Jason Stanton.

Not so cocky now, I think. His face is grimy and cut and he's soaking wet. Tears have cut clean streaks down through the black coal dust on his face and his eyes are red.

"What about them? What happened?" I look around. No sign of the boys in question. Torches are lit, flashed around the cavern. "Where are they?" I demand.

For answer, Jason Stanton points a trembling hand towards the back of the cavern, and the black mouths of the narrows.

Jeff said I was crazy, apparently. A nutter, fruitcake, a screwball, a patient. And other things too. A stupid cunt, for one.

Kids, eh?

He reckoned we could catch rats for food. Not a bad plan. Good source of protein. Reckoned we could get lucky in the narrows. Asked for volunteers. Jason and Mike stepped up straight off the bat.

Jeff, of course, was the man with a plan. He had a ball of string; tied one end around a rocky outcropping near the mouth of the narrow they used. They took a torch and two of the "spears" we'd made lashing sharpened rocks to the hafts of oars. And they went a-hunting. Stupid, stupid kids.

But I can't deny a sneaking, ugly relief; the first challenger to my authority, to ours, that of the adults, is gone. The most capable. The one who sneered. Major challenge removed and an object lesson in daddy knows best. Adults are always right, because we say so. It's a lie and I've always known that, but right now I've never been so grateful for it.

The three of them went in, paying out the string as they went. They'd go a distance, wait. Listen. Switch off the torch at times. Listen. No sound. Any rats there were silent.

So they moved on. And paid out a little more string as they went.

Time passed. And in the end they started to get bored. And tired. And fed-up. And low on confidence.

See, Jeff? It's not so easy, is it, being in charge? Wait till you have the responsibility. Easy to criticise, from the sidelines. When it isn't you.

And yes, I realise, thinking that even to myself, how like the politicians I always most despised I sound.

Wait till you see what I've seen, then you'll know I'm right. Oh God. All the things happening to me that I can't bear. Is this the price of survival? How much of myself will I give up to stay alive, of what I was?

So they retraced their steps, following the string, and then they found-

The string was lying in the middle of a narrow, the tied end frayed and unravelled.

Shouted recriminations, near-panic, quelled by Jeff's fists-Jason has the split lip to prove it. Jeff taking charge. They headed back up the narrow. The string couldn't have trailed far. They can follow their tracks in the dust of the narrow's floor. Retrace their steps to the cavern. If they stay calm.

They follow the marks in the dust.

To a fork they don't remember.

And the dust of each branching narrow's floor is disturbed (by what?) and it's impossible to tell which is which, which they might have come down.

Panic in the air again; Jeff quells it. They go right. More narrows branching off.

Which way?

At last they hear the trickle of water. We go towards that, Jeff tells them. It'll be runoff from the cavern. See? We'll be okay. Forrester found his way out like that, didn't he?

Not quite, Jeff. But it was worth a try.

They keep going and they find the water, alright. But it's not the cavern. Oh, it's a cavern, yes. But not the one they were looking for. A small chamber, almost wall to wall water, running down from a narrow high up in the cavern wall.

Mike yelping, shouting that he saw something in the water. Big, white, moving. Not a fish. Jeff slaps him into silence, the crack of flesh on flesh ringing in the wet, trickling dark. He saw nothing. Imagining things, seeing things that aren't there. Like that puff Forrester did.

They climb the wall to the narrow the water's coming through, none of them admitting what they know; the torch's beam is starting to dim.

They follow the stream that trickles down the narrow's floor, praying for the cavern that's hearth and home in their mind's eye now.

And it opens out into another cavern. The floor awash to ankle or maybe even knee height with fresh water. They don't check the depth in this cavern. There are houses there.

("What?" "Houses?" "What're you-" "Sh. Go on, Jason.")

Not like houses you'd see up top, Jason says. Crude ones. Can't even call them huts. Just stacks of rocks, heaped up drystone, covered over with big heavy flat pieces, slabs. No windows, but a hole that might be a door. Jason reckons he counted about a dozen of them.

And the cave is not silent. Things are moving around. Inside the houses. Slithering and shifting, slumping and flopping around. And there are other noises too. Not noises a fish or even a very big fucking rat could make.

The boys start to go back the way they came, and then-more sounds, the same as from the houses, coming up the narrow, towards them. The dying torch shines: shadows flick across the wall.

They have to go round the edge of the water, past the houses, towards the only other narrow they can see. The noise from the houses grows louder; none of them look back at the sound of splashing in the water.

The torch goes out a few yards into the narrow.

Jason breaks and runs. He's screaming, but he thinks they aren't the only ones he hears.

He runs on-in the dark, cannoning into walls, scrabbling on, feeling ahead with his hands, terrified of what his fingers might touch.

But somehow-by pure, blind, lucky chance, it can only be-he finds himself crashing headlong into our own little lake. Screaming, splashing, blundering, and then he sees the dim distant glow of the fire, catches its gleam off the upturned hulls of boats, flounders and staggers to the shore and shakes me awake, all believing in Mr Forrester now, wanting answers, wanting someone to make it alright.

"This is why I warned everyone not to go into the narrows," I say. "As soon as you get out of sight of this cavern-they can start playing tricks with your head. It's very easy to get lost in there. We don't know where they all go."

Jason cries like a baby, and no-one blames him. Jean holds him tight, rocking him. All the kids' eyes are wide.

"Sir-" it's one of the little ones. "Sir-what about the monsters?"

"There aren't any," I say.

"There are," sobs Jason.

"No," I say. "Jason, listen. That place-the narrows-they play tricks on you, remember? They-" I look up, catch Frank's eye. He nods.

Frank Emerson-one thing about him, he can explain anything. Always had the highest pass rates in the school; he could make anything crystal clear and easy to understand. I've never been so grateful for that as now.

Hallucinations, Frank explains. It happened to Mr Forrester too, though not as badly because he didn't go as far in, wasn't so badly lost. Jeff and Mike are still in there somewhere, but there's nothing we can do. We can't go in there or we could end up lost as well. The best we can do is call them, shout down the narrows, hope they hear and find us that way.

The kids are wide-eyed. We're just leaving Jeff and Mike in there. Teachers don't do that, abandon their charges. But it's different now. The rules have changed. I used to despise people who said that too.

And so we try. In relays, groups of us, all through that night that is not a night, screaming ourselves hoarse.

But from the narrows, there isn't a sound.

Waking in the 'morning,' the mood's sullen and still, scared. We know they're dead. If they're lucky. My big fear was that we'd hear them but not be able to call them home. We'd have to listen to them dying slowly. At least it looks like they're doing that out of earshot.

Unless the things in the houses that don't exist got them.

Otherwise-we try not to think of them, still hopelessly lost, starving, dying by inches in there, wandering around.

As we are, will be. Jeff and Mike are just us in fast forward.

Jason has slept the night in Jean's comforting, maternal embrace. She releases him, comes over, leans against me.

I feel her weariness, her need, and I know I will sleep with her tonight.

We catch a bream. It's all we eat today. We've all lost weight; I've tightened my belt as far as I can, but my trousers still keep threatening to slip down.

We go to sleep still hungry.

No one goes near the narrows today.

Jean and I wait till the others are asleep. Then she crawls to me, takes my hand, draws me to my feet, and we head off to as quiet a part of the cavern as we can. There's little in the way of privacy here-we have a corner for purposes of nature, but even that's not very private. And we'd hardly go there. Inside one of the narrows might be private, but we'd fuck in the middle of a circle of the kids before we did that.

We kiss and fumble with each other's clothes. In the dark, I fondle the pale blurs of her breasts, rub at her cunt till it's wet enough to push my fingers inside. She moans into my neck, muffling her cries in my flesh, rubbing my cock. She moans with Anya's Polish accent.

We fuck on the gritty floor, taking turns on top. In flickers of chancy firelight, I see Anya looking down as she rides me.

I wonder if Jean sees Alan.

Our fragile, glass-brittle equilibrium, such as it is, shatters for good and all the next day.

At first it looks lucky. A dead bream bobs in the shallows when we wake, wafts to shore. An easy breakfast.

It's only later that Frank takes my arm.

"Paul, we've got a problem."

"What's that?"

For answer, he picks up the Geiger counter and walks towards the shore. I look round. Jean and the remaining ten children are further down, towards the top end of the cavern. We're up near the narrows; everyone else is, understandably, giving them the widest possible berth.

Frank switches the microphone on. A moment later, the Geiger counter begins to crackle and tick. Before he switches it off, it's risen almost to a screech.

"It's bad, isn't it?" I ask. Foolishly.

"You know it is." Frank nods towards the breach in the tunnel wall, the one we came through. "The radiation's seeping down here."

I sag. This doesn't end. It just doesn't end. "Oh shit."

"Yeah. Yeah."

"What can we do?"

"Get away from it," Frank says, simply. "Go deeper in. It's the only way."

I turn and look unwillingly at the narrows.

"Look-Paul. I know it's freaky in there. But if we just keep going-"

"Are you mad?"

"No. Look-most of the disorientation was about trying to find your way back. We won't be. We can survive: we know there's water in the narrows."

Water and what else, Frank? Low, crude houses? White things that flop and grunt and hiss in the water?

"We don't know where any of them go anyway," he says. "So we can't get lost as such. It's as good a chance as any of finding somewhere safer."

"What about… " I point back towards the breach in the wall. "We could head on down the canal."

"And go where?"

I shrug. "We don't know what else could be there. Might be something better than this place. And whatever you say about that-" I point at the narrows "-I don't want to go back in there. I know-" he opens his mouth "-it's not about what I want. But it's bad in there, Frank. You talk about it but you don't know what it's like."

"I've got an inkling," he said. "I heard what Jason said, like everyone else."

"That stuff, about the houses… "

He spreads his hands. "Let's not go there, mate."

"But that's the point. We'll have to."

"Alright. Maybe the houses were real. Maybe some people got trapped down here back in the day one time and had to rough it, or they were used for storage. Or something. Doesn't mean they've got something out of a midnight movie living in them."

I find myself wishing he hadn't put it into words. "I don't like the idea of putting the kids in there."

"I know." He chews his lip.

"If we tried the canal," I say, "at least we'd know where the hell we were."

"Yeah. Yeah."

In the end, a compromise is reached. Frank and two of the older boys-volunteers, one of whom is Jason Stanton, unsurprisingly up for anything that poses an alternative to the narrows-will head down the canal in one of the boats. I can see why Frank's reluctant-we spent hours-even days, it felt like-heading down the canal before we found the cavern, and that was sheer luck. By the time we give up and turn back, the radiation might've seeped so far down we can't get to the narrows at all.

But that's no loss to me; Frank doesn't understand. He can't. He hasn't been in there.

They row the boat off. Jean and I stay with the rest of the children and the Geiger counter. Frank told me what to look for. When the radiation gets too high, keep moving away from the water's edge, and if you have to, head into the narrows.

I'll die first, I think.

The plash of oars recedes. Long silence falls. Jean sits beside me. We haven't spoken since we fucked last night. Don't know what to say to each other. I try to pretend it didn't happen. I saw Anya while I fucked her. I'll call it a dream. In this blurred twilight place that comes easy.

"Do you think they'll find anything?" she asks at last. Perhaps she's made the same decision as me.

"I hope so." But I doubt it. It's almost as if Frank wants to go into the narrows. Maybe he does, because he never has; he wants to experience it for himself.

That's crazy, I tell myself. But we'd all be crazy not to be crazy, in one way or another, down here. I know my own madness pretty damn well by now. But Frank's? He seems so together, so calm and controlled. But that could only make him the craziest one of all, just waiting to-

Then the screaming starts.

Jason. I know that voice. Howling, pleas and promises and threats. "No! No! Please! I'll-no! You fucker, I'll kill y-"

And Frank screams too, and the other boy. Terror or rage, I can't tell.

The water thrashing and churning. Who's fighting who, or what?

At last, silence falls.

Much later, a broken oar drifts over the lip of the breach and bobs slowly across the lake to the shore. I pick it up. Its blade is smudged red, and cracked.

After a time, I remember to switch on the Geiger counter.

The screech is piercing. I turn it off. But they're all looking at me now. All but the youngest kids understand what it means.

Jean looks to me for a lead. No help, no decision there. Once again, it's all down to me.

"Alright," I say. "Now. Whatever happens, you stay close to me. Hang on to the person in front of you. Do not stop unless everyone else does. Understand?"

"Yes, Mr Forrester."

I meet Jean's eyes. She's pale, close to welling up.

Torches, batteries. No food. There isn't any. We've brought what coal we can, stuffed in our pockets, tied up in an old jacket.

I flick the torch into the mouth of one of the narrows, and then another. Where do you start? Which do you pick? It's all terra incognita.

In the end, I pick the longest narrow in sight. It extends a good fifty yards without a bend. This one.

"Alright," I say. "Let's go."

We start down it, torches shining ahead. A small hand is hooked into the back of my belt. It's the same all the way down the line.

I'll die first. That's what I thought. But-what was it pushed me on? The same refusal to die that drove me down here? Or was that what it was, after all? Was it something else? Did something call me down here, lead me into this? A secret love of the dark, a curiosity about places like this? If so, the narrows are the logical conclusion. Was it really a struggle to avoid going back in or a struggle against what kept me out?

Everything's coming apart; even my own motivations. I can't be sure what I want anymore, who I am, what makes me tick.

Or maybe it was simpler. Maybe I could've faced dying, but the kids-the kids and Jean-I know enough about radiation sickness, read and seen enough to know it's a bad death, maybe the worst. Could I have even put myself through it? In the end I couldn't put the children through it. Couldn't watch them die like that because of me.

Or… I just don't know anymore. It feels as if everything's been pushing us-me-towards the narrows. The radiation, whatever happened to Frank. Sooner or later, I had to give way.

What

did happen to Frank and the others? Something in the water? Something like what Jason heard in the narrows? Or did Frank decide it was a non-starter? Was the tunnel blocked further down? Was he going to turn back and the fight was between him and Jason?

We'll never know. No-one was going to chance trying it again. Maybe we should have.

Too late now.

"Paul?"

"What?" I snap out of the reverie. Snap being the operative word. I look back. Jean, scared face above a line of others like hers.

"I-sorry-Paul. If we go any further we'll be out of sight of the cavern."

She's right. We're about at the first bend. When we round that, the real narrows begin.

"Okay," I say. "Let's stop. Everybody sit down. No-one go anywhere. Not even to pee."

We sit. I can just see the rocks and the glimmer of the lake. Now we're so close to leaving it behind for good, I feel a pang of loss. Like it's home we're leaving.

This is the furthest we can go and hope to turn back. But of course we can't. The radiation…

After a while, I switch on the Geiger counter. It ticks and it crackles, but it's not too loud. Not yet. I switch it off again.

One of the girls, one of the older ones-Laura, Laura Rodgers-is crying quietly. I can find nothing to say to her.

Time passes. I switch on the counter again. It screeches in the narrow like a wounded bat. I switch it off. My eyes meet Jean's.

I force myself to stand. "Alright, everybody," I say. "Let's go."

The tunnel is endless.

Yard after yard. It stretches on forever.

A torch gives out. Dead batteries fall to the floor. New ones are pushed into place.

They will not last forever.

We keep walking.

Laura Rodgers keeps crying.

Finally we reach a fork. Left or right? I pick the left. We've gone right enough times now, and look where it's got us.

We've stopped twice. The first time, I waited till the Geiger counter screamed at me to move. The second time, I didn't even switch it on.

I just keep walking, leading the children on. Like a Pied Piper, going into the magic mountain. Hushabye. No trees sprouting candy canes here. My stomach growls. I don't think about it. Something scurries, small, somewhere. I can't see it. A rat.

Food. No. Don't go looking. You'll get lost and you'll never find your way back. Back to what?

I keep walking. And walking. And walking.

Laura Rodgers keeps on crying. It gets harsh, worse. I should tell her to stop, but I can't seem to. All I can do is put one foot in front of the other.

Her breath starts hitching. It's building. To a scream.

Stop her. Calm her down.

But even as I think it, she shrieks.

Yelps, cries of alarm, a struggle, blows.

"No! No!" She screeches, and breaks out of the line and blunders back down the narrow. She's not a big girl, only about fifteen and hardly tall for her age, but she knocks Jean aside like a puppet when she tries to hold Laura back. She runs off, still screaming.

"Laura!" I shout. "

Laura!"

But she's gone. Running back down the narrow towards the cavern. Except of course it won't be there. Still screaming, all the way.

The shrieks and sobs die, echoing into silence. And Laura's gone. We wait for a last screech, the sound of her meeting some final doom, but it doesn't come. She just recedes. Disappears. Is gone. Swallowed up.

The kids are crying. The three little ones, back at the far end with Jean, are almost in hysterics. She holds them tight.

"Everybody stay still!" I shout. I flash the torch, do a quick head count. Everybody here. Except one. Laura Rodgers. The first of us to go.

Me. Jean. And seven kids now.

"Everyone grab on to the person in front of you," I say hoarsely.

And we move on.

We stop again for a rest. I switch on the Geiger counter, remembering this time. A faint crackling murmur. Safe. For now.

We're all tired. And hopeless.

But this has to end somewhere. Doesn't it? There has to be a place where the narrows end.

Yeah. Maybe a blank wall.

An hour-?-later, I switch the counter back on. It's louder. Much louder. Too loud.

"Come on," I say, and stand.

We walk, and walk, and walk.

New narrows everywhere now. Gaping in the walls, beckoning us down them, like sellers in a bazaar.

Come this way. No, this way. No, that. That. The other.

"Shut up!"

"What? Paul?"

God I've spoken aloud. Cracking up. "Nothing," I say. "Sorry."

We keep going. "Rest stop," I gasp. We sit. I do a head count and-

"Jean?"

"What?"

"Someone's missing."

One of the boys. Danny Harper. "Where's Danny?" I say. "Where did he go?"

No-one seems to know.

"Who was behind him?"

A hand goes up. Lisa Fowler. "Where did he go?"

"I don't know, sir. I didn't see. I was just holding on to him. Whoever was in front of me."

"Did you let go? Even for a moment?"

"I… I don't know, sir." But her eyes are downcast.

I glare at Jean. "Didn't you see anything?"

"We're all tired, Paul," she snaps. "Can barely focus on whoever's in front of us. Don't start-"

"For Christ's sake! We've lost another one!"

The shout fades to silence. Pale faces stare at me, angry and frightened.

I can say nothing to them. He must have slipped down one of the narrows. Saw something, or thought he did. Heard something, or thought he did. And now he's gone.

Let's go.

Further on up, the narrow begins to twist and turn. Like we're riding a snake that's realised we're there and is trying to shake us off.

It bends cruelly, sharply, pinching almost too narrow to climb through at all.

And for one boy, it is.

Toby Thwaites. His panicked scream explodes like a bomb. "

Mr Forrester!"

I stumble to a halt. Turn back.

"I'm stuck! I'm stuck!"

Toby, halfway down the line, is wedged solid. Stuck behind him, Jean and the three little ones. Leaving me with the two girls, Lisa Fowler and Jane Routledge.

Jean and I stare at each other, past Toby's shoulder.

We try everything we can to move him, but it's no go.

"Don't leave me," sobs Toby. He's fifteen years old. "Don't leave me."

"We won't, Toby," I promise him. "We won't."

But we all know it's a lie.

So we wait, and eventually he falls asleep.

"What do we do?" whispers Jean.

"Have to try and go around," I say dully. "Meet up again. We can't stay."

No. We have to keep going. Have to try and find a way out. Even though we know now we never will.

Jean reaches through and clasps my hand.

"Good luck," I say. We know we'll never see each other again.

And we don't.

I watch Jean and the kids go back down the narrow, back the way they came, into the dark, and gone.

"Come on," I say to the girls.

The narrow straightens out again soon enough after that. It's done what it set out to do. We all hope we'll be out of earshot before Toby wakes up and starts screaming at us to come back.

We aren't.

Further down, the voices start.

First one is Laura Rodgers. "Mr Forrester? Mr Forrester?" Crying, desperately. "Please.

Please."

We keep walking.

"Help! Help! Hello?

Hello?" I know that voice. It's Jeff Tomlinson.

"Can anyone hear us?" A stripped, hysterical scream: I think it's Mike Rawlins.

"Paul? Paul? Are you there?" It's Jean. I shout her name. She shouts mine. But she only gets further away.

Until she's gone.

The last set of batteries for the last of the torches. I'm stumbling, shuffling. So are Jane and Lisa. We press close, link hands; I lead them on. My left hand holds Lisa's right; her left holds Jane's.

"Listen." It's Jane. Her voice is a croak. "Can you hear it?"

"Hear what?" asks Lisa.

"Water. Listen."

Yes. It's there. Trickling. I realise how swollen my mouth and tongue are. How dry.

"Keep going," I manage.

The trickling seems to get louder and louder.

"Keep g-"

There's suddenly less weight on my left hand. I turn. Lisa stares back at me, then looks round to stare down an empty narrow. A few yards behind us, the sound of water echoes from a hole in the wall.

We go to it. A narrow, extending for maybe five yards, then branching off into three new ones.

"Jane? Jane!"

But there's no reply.

Walking on. So tired. Sounds of things moving in the darkness beyond. Big things. Heavy things. A hissing sound, close by. Lisa gasps, clutches my arm. A grunt from behind us. We walk faster.

Water, trickling.

At last, too tired to keep on. We need a place to stop, but the endless narrows-there's nowhere.

But at last, the narrow opens out. Only briefly, two new ones beyond, but it's a small chamber.

We lie down. I curl up; Lisa huddles against my back.

I sleep. No dreams. I wake once; I hear Lisa, crying. "Mum?" she calls. Her voice cracks with terror and relief. "Mum? Mum, is that you? Where are you?"

I should wake up and stop her. But I'm so, so tired. I go back to sleep.

I wake up alone.

I've been walking a long time now.

The beam of the torch is faint and flickery. I don't have the Geiger counter anymore. I don't know when or where I left it behind.

Voices. All around me. Calling my name. Pleading. Praying. Damning me.

Jean.

Lisa

Jane

Danny

Laura

Toby, poor Toby,

The little ones

Jean.

The torch goes out.

I shake and rattle and bang it, but it's good and dead this time. At last, I let it fall.

The darkness is total.

I walk into it, hands in front of me.

Dreading what they might touch.

Can barely walk now. So tired. So hungry. So thirsty. Oh. God.

Plod. Plod. Stumble. Shuffle.

Hit a wall. Ow. Feel at it. Push myself clear. Arms out to either side, then in front. To the sides again. And out front. And so on. And on.

Something stings my eyes. What…?

Light. It's light. It's been so long since I saw it.

Where is it?

Up ahead. I can see it now. There's a bend in the narrow. I stumble towards it. An exit, at last?

I round the corner. And stop.

Anya steps out; she is in silhouette and her outline looks thinner than I remember, but it's her. "Hi, Paul."

A noise comes out of my throat. I want to believe this, but-

"Paul?" She takes a step forward; a slow, dragging step. I stumble backwards. "Darling?"

I backpedal faster. Then, with a horrible crack, my ankle goes as a lump of rock gives underfoot. I fall down, crying out.

"Sh. Baby. Sh." She's holding out her arms. "It's alright."

I cover my face as her dragging footsteps approach. "It's alright."

I pray for death to reach me before her.

But it doesn't.