‘I know what you’re hoping, John,’ Jeff said, smiling. ‘You’re hoping that you’ll find us a nice wide exit full of bright trees, so we can just walk easily down to whatever’s at the bottom, and you won’t have to try and persuade us all to go back up over Dark.’
I didn’t answer that.
‘I can’t see a gap anywhere, can you?’ I said. ‘Dark seems to go all the way round without a . . .’
I broke off because I noticed three of those monkeys watching us from a tree. One by one they jumped out into the air. As they fell they reached out forward with their front hands, backward with their back hands, and straight out to the sides with their middle hands, so that their loose wrap-like flaps of skin were stretched out tight like the skin of a bat wing. They glided fifteen twenty yards and landed, one after another, on another treetrunk, with a little clack — clack — clack each time as their claws took hold.
‘That stretchy skin could be useful stuff,’ I said.
I put an arrow on my bow and lifted the bow to take aim . . .
But Jeff leaned over from Def’s back to push my arrow towards the ground.
‘Leave them be, John!’ he said, laughing. ‘You don’t have to make everything serve your purpose all the time.’
Gela’s tits, who was he to tell me what to do? He might have saved us from Dark, but he was still only a funny little clawfoot kid, with no new hairs even, except maybe a first bit of fluff above his dick.
‘You don’t get it,’ I said crossly, lifting my bow again. ‘We’ve got to use everything we can if we’re going to . . .’
But the monkeys jumped off again — one, two, three — down towards main forest. As soon as the last one had landed, the first one was off again, and then they were gone.
As I lowered my bow, I noticed I felt relieved that I hadn’t had to try and shoot them. I wouldn’t admit it to him of course, but bloody Jeff was right. It did feel good to just let things be for once. I took the arrow off the bow, and for a little while me and him stood there quietly, looking out over the valley.
‘There is a big waterfall somewhere,’ I said. ‘Can’t you hear it? That faint faint roar, under the sound of the trees?’
But though we went right round until we could see the smoke from the fire ahead of us again, softly lit up by forest, we found no break in the wall of rock that surrounded Tall Tree Valley. Where did the water go? Where was that waterfall roar coming from?
‘Do you remember once when we were little kids,’ I said, ‘you, me and Gerry used to make those little boats with dry fruit skins? We used to grease them to stop them going soft.’
‘Yes, of course. All the kids played with those.’
‘Remember one time we dug out our own little pool for them? But the water sank into the dirt and turned to mud, so we had to keep filling it up again, and in the end we gave up. Me and Gerry chucked stones into the mud, remember? Each one went splat and made a neat little hole with a ridge round it in a circle. This valley’s just like that, like a giant stone splatted it out.’
‘Well, that’s what probably happened,’ Jeff said.
‘Don’t be dumb, Jeff. A stone would have to be huge huge to make this.’
‘There are much bigger stones than that in sky, aren’t there? Eden is one, isn’t it, and so is Earth. Sky is full of stones.’
It was weird. I knew all that stuff, the same as he did. It was part of the True Story. But I’d never once before thought of those stones as really being in the same world as me.
‘Let’s follow a stream,’ Jeff said, ‘and see where the water goes.’
He led the way downhill. Soon we heard the waterfall roar quite definitely ahead of us beneath the humming of forest. A bit later we started to feel drops of spray on our faces. And then, in the lowest part of the valley bowl, forest just stopped and there was a huge jagged hole right in front of us, with water pouring into it over steep cliffs from streams on every side, and warm steam rising up from below.
The bottom of the hole was full of steam, but, as we stood at the edge of it looking down, the steam thinned out for a few seconds, enough for us to make out the blurry lights of trees far far down below, red and blue and yellow and white.
‘Michael’s names,’ I murmured.
It was a way down into Underworld, where all life on Eden began, all life except for us.
Def was restless with all the noise, and Jeff was stroking its head to calm it down, all the time looking down into Underworld. I saw his lips move and, though I couldn’t hear him, I knew quite well what he was saying.
‘We are here,’ he was murmuring to himself. ‘We really are here.’
Then he pointed. Four monkeys had gathered on the edge of the cliff over to our left. They were peering down into the steam with their flat Eden eyes, and, strangely, each one of them had shoved a big stone right up to the edge. Suddenly they jumped into the hole, not stretching out their arms to fly like the ones we’d seen in the trees, but grasping their stones beneath them with all six hands, so that the flappy skin puffed out between their arms and slowed their fall as they disappeared into the steam.
‘We could do that,’ I said to Jeff, after a bit. ‘We could sew up skins and make something like that to break our fall.’
That made him laugh. He laughed and laughed, until even I couldn’t help smiling.
‘I never give it a rest, yeah? Is that what you’re thinking?’
‘No, you bloody don’t, John. It’s like everything in the world is just stuff for you to use for your plans.’
He carried on stroking Def, and watching the water dropping down through the steam.
‘And anyway, how would we get back out again?’ he said after a bit.
‘We could make ropes.’
This made him laugh again.
‘Big big ropes they’d have to be.’
The woollybuck groaned and snorted, and Jeff turned to attend to it. I leaned over the edge to look straight down. The steam had cleared a bit again, and I could see those shining trees again, way way down below: red and blue and yellow. And then I saw something moving down there, a row of ten twelve red lights weaving through the lights of the trees.
‘Jeff! Quick! Look!’
But steam blew back before Jeff had a chance to turn away from Def, and when it next cleared the moving lights had gone. It was only me that saw that long long creature winding its way through the trees.
‘What did you see?’
‘Just those trees down there again,’ I said.
Suddenly I jumped to my feet with a gasp and backed away from that dreadful hole. It was weird. I was shaking. It was like it had almost sucked me in.
‘What’s the matter, John?’
‘I don’t like this place.’
‘This hole, do you mean? Or Tall Tree Valley?’
‘Neither.’
‘You really don’t, do you?’
Still standing with Def by the edge of the hole, Jeff looked back at me and smiled.
It was horrible to think that, even for a moment, I’d suggested we might go down into that hole. It was like Underworld had been trying to trick me, to suck me away from sky and Earth.
‘We can’t stay here, Jeff. We’ll have to go back up on Dark and carry on to other side.’
‘No one will go up Dark with you now, John,’ Jeff said, climbing back onto Def’s back. ‘Not even Gerry.’
I pulled off Gela’s ring and started to twist and turn it between my fingers.