He stood up, shook himself, and climbed onto one of the big skips to take stock of his situation.
Although the sun was hardly up, the landscape was bathed in clear, soft, almost creamy light. There were shreds of thin cloud squatting on the fields that clung to the sides of Combs Moss, and frozen billows of morning mist hovered above the surfaces of the small lakes that had formed, over the years, in the quarry bottoms. Something in motion caught his eye, running away from him along a line of wall, but he realised at once, from its russet coat, that it was only a large fox. There were rabbits, too, munching the tall grass around the edges of the tip. The air smelt clean and dry, as he imagined desert air must.
Except for the regular clanking and glugging of a distant pump engine somewhere down in the old diggings, all was stillness and silence.
Nothing moved or made a sound in the line of dark trees.
He clambered over the broken steps leading up to the cabin, and went inside.
The pile of mattresses had fanned out like a pack of cards. The old caretaker was spreadeagled across them on his back. His face looked raw, and was mottled with dark stains like those that had remained on Maurice’s hands after he had crushed the egglike object he had found. The man looked dead, but wasn’t. A heartbeat was just detectable under his overalls, and he was drawing rasping breath through his mouth. Maurice tried to rouse him, but soon gave up. The man seemed in a trance, or coma.
Many of the piles of cases and boxes scattered along the length of the cabin had toppled over and burst open. Maurice was not surprised to see that some of them had been packed with bones, and that two of them contained dozens of the eggs wrapped in scraps of grubby paper and plastic. Bundles of the long, thin bones, tied like firewood with electric cable, were revealed behind a half-fallen rubber sheet.
Maurice left the cabin and wormed his way back into his car. He tried the engine. It started without trouble and he found he was able to back the vehicle away from the cabin. He drove cautiously down into the tip. Something under the chassis was grating against the wheels, but he didn’t give it a thought.
The cinder path took him past a high wire fence marking no apparent boundary. Twice he stopped to look round, hoping to catch sight of some of the scavengers, but there was no one else about at all, he was soon convinced of that.
In one of the deeper sections of the recent workings he nosed the car out over what appeared to be dried mud when the caked surface broke and the vehicle tipped forward alarmingly. The back wheels spun strands of slime, like black mucus, out behind.
He could not reverse out. The car was sinking. Oily stuff oozed in through the bottoms of the doors around his feet.
He awkwardly hauled himself out of the passenger door again, and abandoned the car. He walked back the way he had come, out of knee deep, liquid filth, then climbed up to the top of one of the highest mounds of builder’s rubble. The position gave him a view over most of the tip. He noticed little clouds of smoke or steam were starting to drift up from the surface in various places, as though fires had been started underground. He went to investigate.
The smoke for that was what it was, was coming up through some of the tunnellike holes he had noticed on his first visit. It was slightly scented, not unpleasantly, and had a greenish tinge. He wandered round for a while, peering down into the openings, then sat down next to a large hole that was not emitting smoke. He could hear a sound deep down in the tunnel, a regular heavy pounding, like the bass line of a musical composition. He leaned out over the hole and cupped his ear with his hand. He thought he could hear other sounds down there, like snatches of a whispered conversation.
He was propped up on one arm with his hand outstretched on the encrusted mud. Suddenly, as he adjusted position, the surface gave under his weight and he dropped into the tunnel clumsily. He lay still for a moment, winded. Then instead of drawing back out again, he tentatively reached down even farther. The tunnel was quite wide enough for him to squirm into. It descended at an angel of about thirty-five degrees to the surface; a comfortable angle to slip down.
And, he judged, not so steep that he could not make his way back out again without too much trouble, if he had to.
It was not absolutely dark down there; there seemed to be some source of dim light ahead of him. Feeling his way carefully and methodically, he lowered himself into the ground. When he felt his feet slip over the lip of the tunnel, he had a momentary doubt about the wisdom of what he was doing, which he forced himself to ignore.
Moving with great caution, he descended perhaps forty or fifty feet down the narrow passage without much trouble.
The tunnel got a little less steep after a while, however, and became narrower, and he found he was having to make more effort to make any progress. Also, the air was getting musty and unpleasant to breathe.
He rested, and began to worry about the sides of the tunnel collapsing on him. He would suffocate. No one knew he was there, or would come looking for him.
Total loneliness stabbed up inside him again, with an accompanying, enervating, surge of self-pity.
Although he was strong, he was not at all fit, and what he was doing, in his condition, seemed suddenly crazy.
He was just about to start wriggling back out when he saw and heard a motion in front of him.
Something reached out of the dark ahead, and clasped his hand. It was a thin, dry, loose-skinned hand, and it took a powerful hold on his. His fingers were crushed painfully together. Whoever was in front of him began to retreat, pulling him further down the tunnel. He tried to resist, but discovered he was at the end of his strength. He plummeted lower very fast, hurting himself against stones and other objects that protruded from the sides of the crudely dug hole.
He tried to keep his free arm bent across his face to protest it, but smashed his elbow against something sharp.
He thought whoever was pulling him was whispering something earnestly to him, that he could not catch. After a while he gave up trying to hear and started howling with pain.
Something hit him hard above the right eye. He became unconscious.
There were voices in the air around him. He knew they were conversing together, not trying to communicate with him. The words they used sounded like a distorted jumble of heavily accented English that he was too weak to make the effort to understand. He lay quite still for what could have been a long time, with his eyes shut. He slept, then woke when he felt himself being lifted and moved. He was lowered to the ground with a bump that hurt. He was vaguely aware of forms and figures moving away from him. He slept again.
He woke to absolute silence.
It seemed that he was blind. He passed his fingers over his eyes and felt a sticky crush covering the top half of his face, welding his eyelids shut. He scratched at his eyes with both hands, and was relieved when the substance began to crumble away. He managed to get his eyes open and saw, as he had suspected, that it was dried blood.
He turned over on his side and tried to get to his feet. Sharp pains shot through his body, causing him to yell. From the sound of his voice, he knew he was enclosed in a small space. He collapsed into a sitting position, and looked about him.
The circular, domed compartment had walls of smoothly worked bare rock. A pale illumination, falling from a number of narrow tunnels the led diagonally up and out, from positions about three feet from the ground, showed him he was alone. Except for himself and a number of piles of the egg-like objects that were now familiar to him, resting in nests of rubbish, the room was empty. He crawled about, trying to ignore the pain in his probably broken left arm, and inspected the nests. They were about two feet in diameter, and made of the shredded, entangled remains of the sort of refuse he would have expected to find in a dustbin.