Hugh, with some impulse of bravado to compensate for his earlier moment of embarrassment, sat down at the edge, rolled, and dreeped. His feet landed with a thud on the scree and he took a step backwards.
Then another step, as he took in what he was seeing. The side of the gully right in front of him wasn’t what he had expected. Just beneath the heather at the lip was a flat slab of rock, and under that slab was a dark opening about a metre wide and a metre and a half high. Two upended slabs of rock propped the sides, from the scree floor to the rock above. The rest of the bank was like the other side, hard black peat. Hugh had the impression that it was recently exposed, perhaps by a sudden slippage or even a flood.
He glanced up at Malcolm and Donald, who stood looking down at him.
‘Hi, guys,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve found something.’
He could hear his own voice boom a little, echoing, he guessed, in the hollow. He took another step back, squatted, and skited a pebble into the dark hole. Far away, something rattled.
‘There’s a cave here,’ he said.
The other two, for whatever reason – perhaps suspecting a prank on his part – didn’t drop down the way he had, but went around to the end of the little gully and walked in, crunching and slithering down the slope of scree.
‘Well, by Jove,’ said Malcolm.
‘That’s not a cave,’ said Donald. ‘That’s dug out. It’s like yon Neolithic place in Orkney.’
‘Dug out in peat?’ Hugh said. ‘Don’t be daft.’
‘Skara Brae wasn’t dug out either,’ said Malcolm. ‘It was made of stone and got covered in sand.’
‘Maybe this got buried in the peat, not dug out,’ Hugh mused.
‘How long would the peat take to build up six feet?’ Malcolm wondered.
‘Longer than your bodach thinks the world has existed,’ said Hugh.
They scuffled for a moment.
‘Quit it,’ said Donald. ‘Anybody got a torch?’
Hugh had: a nifty little high-power multi-LED one. He dug it out of his trouser pocket and flicked it on. Ducking down, he led the way into the opening. Even with the torch on, he couldn’t see a thing.
‘Turn it off,’ Donald advised. ‘Let our eyes adjust.’
They crouched for a minute or so in the entrance with their eyes shut. The air smelled of peat dust, dry bracken and ash.
‘Right,’ said Hugh, opening his eyes. He could now see dimly in the light from the entrance – what little of it got past their bodies. He switched the torch on again.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘It goes way back.’ His voice echoed.
Donald and Malcolm crowded behind him, peering over his shoulders.
‘Man,’ said Donald.
Hugh flicked the beam around as he took a few steps forward. The ground – peat, with some ash, he guessed – felt springy underfoot. The bones of mice and rabbits lay here and there, fragile and brown. The walls were of close-fitting slabs, their bases sunk into the ground, supporting a ceiling of the same. He brushed his fingertips across a join above his head and could hardly feel a gap. Though the sides of the slabs weren’t exactly straight, or evidently worked, they fitted almost to the millimetre. Without thinking, he ran his thumb across his fingertips, and felt grit.
‘Just a mo,’ he said.
He shone the torch on his fingers, and saw grey dust. He stooped closer to the side wall, and peered hard at it, angling the torch a little. The surface of the slab was grey, with a sand-grain sparkle. He rubbed his fingertips across it, and touched one with his tongue.
‘Cement,’ he said. ‘Concrete.’
‘So much for your thousands of years,’ Malcolm jeered, after confirming the identification.
‘The Romans had concrete,’ Donald pointed out.
‘And they never got here,’ said Hugh. ‘This is recent, all right.’
They huddled, looking down the cone of light. The passage went on at least another five or six metres, and the torch beam wasn’t reaching the end of it.
‘Go in a bit?’ Hugh asked.
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the others doing the same. The bright rectangle of daylight was a reassuring few steps behind them.
‘OK,’ said Malcolm.
‘No so sure about that,’ said Donald.
‘Why not?’ said Hugh.
‘I think we should go back and tell…’ His voice trailed off, as if he’d been about to say ‘a grown-up’ and had been too embarrassed.
‘Nah,’ Hugh said. ‘What is there to tell them, anyway? We’ll just go in a bit and have a look.’
With that he walked forward, leaving the others the choice of following or going back. They followed. After a few steps it became apparent that the passage had a slight downward slope and a curve to the right. About ten metres in, a backward glance revealed that the entrance was no longer visible. Hugh’s neck and knees began to ache with the awkward, stooping walk. He felt chill air on his face, and smelled peat smoke. A moment later he saw a thin glimmer of light ahead.
‘Light at the end of the tunnel,’ said Donald, in the tone of having made a smart remark.
As they walked on, the glimmer took shape as a rectangle like the entrance. It was difficult to be certain what colour the light was, but it seemed to be the blue of a bright sky. The boys reached the end of the tunnel in a couple of minutes. The draught became stronger and colder as they moved forward. Hugh looked out, with Malcolm and Donald peering over his shoulders again. He blinked hard and shaded his eyes – the light was dazzling. The tunnel exit was evidently on the side of the hill, a steeper slope than the one they’d climbed. He saw the village and the sea-loch below, and the hills around, under the broad sky. But the houses looked different: darker, smaller and less regular in shape than the grey cement-block houses and slate roofs of the village he knew. The tide was far, far out, the sea-loch a distant glimmer. And the ground was covered in snow, of that he was certain.
He leaned forward, peering down the slope. A hundred metres below them, a tall figure was striding up the hill. A black shape against the white, with a gleam of eyes under a hood. Hugh recoiled. The other boys took his fright, and all of a sudden all three of them were scurrying back up the passage, the shadows of Donald and Malcolm weird and long in Hugh’s wildly swaying torch-beam. Hugh could hear, above their own hurrying steps and rapid breaths, something or someone in the tunnel behind them.
Almost tumbling over each other, they hurtled out of the tunnel into the little gully and the blaze of sunlight, and scrambled up the far side, hitting the bank at a run and hauling themselves up on the heather. Only then did they glance back. No one else came out of the tunnel. They could hear nothing but their own breath and hammering heartbeats and the cry of a curlew.
They looked at each other and ran – around the end of the gully, with fearful sidelong glances, and across the moor, past the loch, across the bare rock and down the hill. They charged through heather and waded through bog and skipped and leapt over gaps in the outcrop and, on the way down the slope, hurdled erratic boulders. If any of them fell, they were up in a second, racing on.
At length they ducked through the fence of the glebe above Hugh’s house and collapsed in the long grass, gasping, sides aching from the stitch, legs filthy to the knees, shirts ripped, heels of hands scratched, shins bruised.
None of them could have said why they felt safe on this side of the fence, but they did.
Hugh stood up, hands on knees, panting.
‘Did you see it?’ he asked.
‘See what?’ Malcolm asked. Donald, too out of breath to speak, scowled and shook his head.