Jack became fascinated with the ceiling, aiming his torch up there for long periods between brief glances at the uneven ground before him. In places it looked like a cave, with uneven rocky protrusions, stalactites made of some unidentifiable, creamy material, and dark cracks into which even his torch could not delve. Elsewhere he could see the rough concrete that sealed the canal beneath the ground. Perhaps it was an intentional covering-over, or maybe it had been hidden away bit by bit, buildings constructed to span and then smother the old waterway.
“Jack!” Sparky called. Jack paused and looked at where his friend was shining his torch. Just before Jack's feet was a hole in the canal's old bed, several feet wide and at least six deep. Its bottom was a mucky mess, the small pools of stagnant water reflecting only a sick, slick light back up at them. It stank. He'd almost walked into it.
“That would have been a good start,” Jack muttered.
“You'd have smelled worse than usual, that's for sure.” Sparky passed him by with a grin and stepped neatly around the hole.
Jack took more care after that. There was plenty to wonder at, but there was also his own safety to consider, and that had to come first. For two years he had been petrified about leaving Emily on her own. He'd had nightmares about drowning, feeling the darkness of deep water sucking him down, and all the while Emily was alone on a vast pebble beach far away, hands reaching in an impossible attempt to save him, her brother, until the last time he was pulled under, when he saw the shadows gathering at the beach's extremes…watching…waiting to make sure Jack was not about to surface again, before slicking across the beach towards his abandoned sister.
“You okay, Ems?” It was the name he'd used when she was very young, and she usually did not like hearing it. Their parents had used it all the time.
His sister glanced back and smiled, and he saw that she was more than okay. She was enjoying this. That bolstered his mood and drove away the memories of bad dreams, shadows fading on unknown pebbly beaches.
Lucy-Anne and Rosemary maintained the lead. Jack's girlfriend walked apart from the older woman, but Jack knew her well. She was trying to hide her fascination in case Rosemary saw it as a weakness. Lucy-Anne hated being beholden to anyone, and now they were all in the hands of this woman whom none of them knew.
They walked for half an hour. There was little chit-chat, but plenty of nervous energy. Jack wondered about Rosemary's friend Philippe, and how he saw routes and byways hidden to everyone else. What must that be like? How did he manage understanding such secrets? Jack found the world of the Irregulars both intriguing and disturbing, and whenever he tried to put himself in their place, he became afraid. His life had changed enough since Doomsday. He could only imagine what London's few, amazing survivors must have gone through.
The buried canal ended abruptly. Rosemary and Lucy-Anne came to a halt, standing side by side and shining their torches at a blank concrete wall. There was graffiti carved into the concrete, incongruous in such surroundings and more disquieting because of that. ‘We've come heer to hyde.’ The mis-spellings made the pronouncements even more otherworldly.
“Who wrote that?” Jenna asked.
“It looks very old,” Rosemary said. “To be honest, it's the first time I've seen it. I came from the other way, remember?”
“So where is the other way?” Lucy-Anne asked, her question bearing a challenge. Jack thought she was getting nervous.
“Can't you see?” Rosemary said, a hint of humour in her voice that Jack didn't like. She was supposed to be leading them, not testing them. But then, she was from out of London. Perhaps being in a position of power was something she was not used to.
Jack and the others shone their torches around, looking for where their path might continue. The combined lights lit up the whole end of the tunnel, revealing little but wall, ground, concrete ceiling, and the old, crumbling tow paths on either side.
“No,” Sparky said. “I don't see.” He spun around and played his torch behind them, his action instantly making Jack nervous. Trap? he thought.
“Down there,” Emily said. “Look! It looks like a wave of mud, but it's fresh.” She aimed her torch at the base of the graffitied wall, revealing a drift of canal-bed mud resting against the concrete. It looked unremarkable to Jack; just another hump in the old canal's uneven floor.
“Good eyes,” Rosemary said.
“SuperGirl,” Emily said matter-of-factly, and everyone laughed.
Their spirits raised, the others stood back while Sparky and Emily scooped away handfuls of loose dirt, slowly revealing a dark opening at the base of the wall. It was small-barely large enough to crawl through-but Rosemary assured them it was the way to go.
“If I can do it at my age,” she said, “all of us can.”
“So you hid it on your way through?” Jack asked. “Buried it?”
“Yes. Ruined my nails.” The old woman smiled, but in torchlight it looked grotesque.
“Why?”
Rosemary frowned, and Jenna and Lucy-Anne aimed their torches at her face. Jack held back a laugh; it was like an interrogation in some crappy movie.
Cringing against the light, Rosemary turned away. “It's a secret,” she said. “This way, this route, no one knows about it. No one but Philippe and me, and now you.”
The torches lowered, giving light to Sparky and Emily once more.
“Everything's a secret,” Rosemary continued. “We're going towards a place where secrets are currency, and survival means stealth. I never liked London before Doomsday, to tell the truth, but these days, I like it much less. It's as if in moving on, we've also regressed. Trust is a thing of the past.”
“Tell me about it,” Lucy-Anne said, and Rosemary looked at Jack's girlfriend, her eyes sad and heavy with the terrible things they had seen.
“We trust you,” Jack said, surprising himself. Lucy-Anne glanced at him, eyebrows raised. “We do. We trust you. You lead us in, and we'll help however we can.”
Rosemary smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “All of you. But sometimes…” She drifted off and stared at the concrete wall.
“Sometimes what?” Sparky said, panting. He stood, face grimy and hands filthy from the dirt.
Rosemary sighed. “Sometimes, I think we've passed the point of no return.”
Rosemary went first. Sparky offered, but she insisted, waving away objections and borrowing Sparky's torch. Maybe Jack's statement of trust had given her strength, or perhaps it made her want to prove herself more.
Lucy-Anne felt a begrudging admiration for the old woman. But trust? Not yet.
“Only a few feet,” Rosemary said. They watched her crawl into the narrow crack at the base of the wall, pulling with her elbows and pushing with her booted feet, and the light she carried threw back curious shadows, as though there was something down there with her.
“I'm through,” Rosemary called. Her voice was muffled, and came from miles away.
Sparky went next. In his enthusiasm he banged his head on the concrete, cursing and touching his scalp to check for blood. Lucy-Anne giggled, but only briefly, because no one accompanied her.
Fair enough, she thought. Yeah, we all know how serious this is. Rosemary can stop the bleeding, but we're out of the world we know, now. We're facing danger and challenging it to bite back.
Jenna went after Sparky, then Emily, pushing the camera bag before her.