Matt followed him as he dodged through the low archway leading into the neighbouring tunnel. The torchlight beam showed sewer worms gathering there too. They were motionless, their heads raised, their eyes alert.
‘Ay, you can sit there,’ Angus muttered. ‘Time’s on your side, isn’t it? Or is it you’re not ready yet?’
‘Why d’you say that?’ Matt demanded. His words echoed through the tunnels, betraying his fear; once again he felt the walls moving in on him.
Angus didn’t bother to answer. They went to a third tunnel, doubled back, then into a fourth. Fewer worms watched them now, but still enough to observe their movements. And report back?
Even in the bubbling effluent at the foot of the steps they found a patrol waiting for them. As if posted there.
But it wasn’t until they were safely in the Crown with two large scotches in front of them that Angus began to explain what he really thought.
‘I sensed ’em coming,’ he said soberly. ‘A change in the sound o’ the tunnels. If you’ve been down there as long as me, practically living down there some weeks, your ears get tuned in to every little noise. But it was you killin’ ’em brought ’em out. Why you had to do it, I don’t understand; everything was fine till then. It was you they came for, Matt.’
‘The food attracted them,’ Matt tried to bluff.
‘Put it that way if you like. Once they’d had a taste o’ you…’
It wasn’t what Matt had meant, but he didn’t argue.
‘If you ask me, it was like watchin’ an army, the way they turned out. Battalion strength.’
6
Matt said nothing to Helen about his trip down into the sewers, still less his encounter with the worms. Something about her manner warned him to keep quiet. Since he’d come out of hospital he’d had the feeling she was being ultra-cautious about how she behaved towards him, as though they’d stuck labels all over him — Fragile: Handle With Care!
As though the hospital psychiatrist had been talking to her.
At times he wanted to shake her awake. ‘Helen, this is me, remember? Matt! Your old Matt! Matt and Helen — you know! The old firm!’ But it wouldn’t work, and the realization hurt him like a long-standing deep wound.
‘It’ll be better when we get down to the cottage,’ she had repeated several times during the past few days. ‘You’ll see. It’ll get your mind off them. I do understand, Matt. Honestly.’
He’d secured the ice-box with wire before tucking it into the boot of his ten-year-old Morris. Helen had watched him, puzzled, but he’d offered no explanation. The last thing he wanted was for either Helen or Jenny to open the box accidentally and find the dead worms inside. If they were all dead.
As they drove down he was aware Helen was glancing curiously at him from time to time, and it irritated him. He’d have to talk to her about the worms soon, he knew: describe his feelings while they were attacking him; why he’d returned to the sewers; the whole threat he was convinced in his guts was facing everyone, yet couldn’t prove.
Ideally he could have talked while he was driving, keeping his eyes on the road to avoid looking at her; but with Jenny playing happily on the back seat it was impossible. He’d have to wait till they got to the cottage. She’d be in a better mood then, anyway. She always was, at the cottage.
They’d stumbled across it whilst on holiday at Westport three years earlier and she’d fallen in love with it right away. From a distance it was picturesque, snuggling cosily into the hillside. A closer view had revealed several slates missing, half the windows broken and the walls in need of re-pointing. Brambles tore at their legs in the large, overgrown garden. In the kitchen the single tap shuddered and swayed precariously at the end of a loose section of lead piping.
‘It’ll need a bit of work,’ she’d commented seriously.
The money had been hers, left to her by her mother, but she’d insisted on the deeds being drawn up in their joint names. That’s how things had been between them at the time — so close they voiced each other’s thoughts; every absence a wound which only healed when they were together again.
Maybe it was the cottage itself which killed it. Every holiday, almost every available week-end, they worked down there repairing the roof, replacing the guttering, painting the woodwork… She even coaxed a loan out of the bank manager to pay for the installation of a bathroom. A fisherman’s cottage it had been — born, lived and died there. That fired Helen’s imagination. ‘We’ll come and live here ourselves one day,’ she’d announced when they were dead beat after re-doing the kitchen. ‘We need roots.’
Matt carried the first couple of suitcases into the cottage before taking the wired-up ice-box down to the larger of the two garden sheds where he’d fixed himself up a workbench and darkroom.
‘What’s in it?’ Jenny asked inquisitively.
‘Oh … specimens.’ He was deliberately vague, and not too sure himself what he intended to do with the worms. ‘Things I want to photograph. Maybe I’ll show you later on.’
Through the open shed door he could see Helen was listening, but she said nothing. Why not?
‘Come on,’ he added, ‘let’s go and help Mummy to unpack. Then we’ll walk down to the harbour and look at the boats, just you and me.’
It was one of their established rituals, that walk down to the old harbour on their first evening at Westport, yet this time Matt felt uneasy about leaving Helen alone. If she untwisted the wires to look in the box? As he’d put it down on the workbench he’d heard a scratching sound from somewhere. It needed only one of the worms to be still alive for…
No, he told himself, that was ridiculous.
Jenny ran slightly ahead of him through the uneven lane between the houses, making straight for the steep, cobbled street which led down to the sea. The handful of shops had mostly closed already — grocers, butchers, fishing-gear specialists — and there were very few holiday-makers about. Probably at this hour the Westport landladies were serving up their evening meals and the campers were tending their Calor-gas stoves.
But the craft shop was still open, with its clusters of open sandals hanging like strings of Spanish onions outside. Usually Matt didn’t give it a glance, but this evening he stopped to look curiously at the handmade leather bags and snakeskin belts. An idea was forming slowly in his mind.
‘That bag’s crocodile skin!’ Jenny told him excitedly, cutting across his thoughts. ‘We learned about crocodiles at school. Some countries have special farms where they breed them for the skins.’
‘Aren’t they dangerous?’
Inside the shop a girl was tidying up ready to close for the day. She was tall, with straight dark-brown hair drawn back and tied with a ribbon; typically she wore a peasant smock of dull yellow ochre with a brown sash. She looked up and smiled at him through the display of coloured scarves and raffia hats. Or was it at Jenny?
‘Not if you keep out of their way,’ Jenny was saying, as practical as her mother. ‘Let’s see the boats.’
He let her pull him away from the shop window in the direction of the harbour. She chattered about all she intended to do that holiday, but he only half listened. Westport seemed so peaceful, it was almost unreal. The smell of the seaweed, swooping seagulls, fishing nets draped over the walls, the winking of the lighthouse on the horizon as the sky darkened, the murmur of the waves against the rocks… Slowly he felt the tensions inside him easing.
Of course the sea had always held dangers — the lifeboat on the slipway was a reminder — but they were familiar because they’d always been there. They were older than man himself. The worms were a new threat.