Last Train to Gloryhole (27 page)

‘I’m sorry, but I am no good with - with those things,’ the old man replied, resuming his seat. ‘And I left my readers at home too. All I can tell you is what I can actually see, you know. In my head, I mean.’

The telephone began crackling, then Dave Drinkwater’s voice on the other end suddenly became clearer. ‘Our man at the scene has just gone through reception,’ he told them.

‘Thanks, Dave. And what
do
you see, Tom?’ D.I.Dawson asked the aged Welshman who sat quietly in the corner of the room. ‘What is it you
can
see right now?’

Tom blinked once and turned his head to the side. He suddenly saw his daughter standing just outside the door, with her face pressed up against the glass. He nevertheless dipped his head once again, closed his eyes, then spoke. ‘Well, I walk in there from the road,’ he began.

‘Just tell the officer on the scene, Tom,’ Dawson advised him. ‘Speak into the phone, would you, Tom? It’s just a mobile. The police officer is there right now, you see. At this
Brierfield
. Just tell him yourself, old boy, where to go, and what he should do.’

‘Well, O.K., then,’ said Tom, tentatively, closing his eyes tightly once more. ‘Well, before you is a lovely garden, yes? A square garden, with - with roses in full bloom. No, that was then. Sorry. Anyhow, there are four arches on each side that all focus on this square garden, and, through each arch, there are two separate, and opposing, numbered doors. I hope that makes sense to you. Well, I walk - I mean, you should walk - right around the square, and then you enter the arch right opposite from where you started, you see, then turn and enter the door that stands to your right. Its number - its number is -’

‘Five!’ said a young male voice down the phone.

‘That’s right, young man - five,’ Tom told him. ‘My favourite number as it goes. Good show, well done. Well, by now you should have entered the tiny building where the old man lives, yes? O.K.? Well, he does, anyway. And can you see that there is a door inside the first one, and to your right?’

‘The bedroom?’ the young voice echoed shrilly through the ether.

‘Yes. No. No, the one just before that,’ Tom told him. ‘The door for the tiny room where - where the fuel is stacked. It is a locked door that is very rarely opened.’

Suddenly the loud, oblique thud, of a wooden door being kicked-in, echoed eerily round the crowded room. Then silence. Dawson and Foley exchanged worried glances.

‘There is no light inside, I know,’ Tom announced calmly. ‘But she is - she is under the coal.’

Within the interview-room they shared, everyone bent forward to hear the unmistakable sound of loose cobbles of coal being rolled about across a solid, stone floor.

‘Under the coal is she? Good God alive!’ cursed the Welsh sergeant, now gripping his grey, balding head in his hands.

‘Yes, she is. But you won’t be able to recognise her any longer, I’m afraid,’ said Tom slowly. ‘You see, there are so many - so many rats that live there, being so close to the river and all. And many of them have - have found their way inside, you know. And now they live there. It’s their home, you see.’

‘Aaargh!’ shrieked the young police-officer on the other end of the phone. ‘The mess! I’m sorry but I’m about to retch!’

‘Don’t worry, young man,’ said Tom. ‘Try not to be too scared. We are all with you, you see. And remember that the woman you seek isn’t there any longer.’ The policemen in the room suddenly exchanged sharp glances, clearly shocked at this. ‘No, she’s long gone, on the train.’

‘On the train!’ said Foley. ‘What bloody train?’

‘Do you mean - are you trying to say she’s in heaven?’ the distant young voice enquired.

‘If you like,’ said Tom. ‘Trust me on this one, would you? You see, it’s only - it’s only her
shell
that you will discover there. Left behind, I mean.’

‘Aaargh!’ the young officer shrieked once more. They could all now clearly hear the unmistakable sound of the young policemen being sick, followed by his awful weeping. Each of the officers present in the room felt that they understood something of the young man’s pain, and that he had by this time most likely sunk to his knees, or become slumped against a wall, paralysed with terror at the dreadful, torch-lit sight he had just exposed before his youthful eyes.

The door of the interview-room suddenly opened and Carla stumbled inside. Realising that she, too, must have been listening to the long-distance interchange, the sturdily built constable and his blond-haired companion in the corner rose to their feet and dashed across to help her.

Tom, his eyes still tightly closed, and seemingly unconcerned by his daughter’s presence, simply carried on speaking to the young policeman who was alone in the hellish coal-shed almost two hundred miles away. ‘Young man - what is your name?’ the old man asked tenderly.

‘Darim, Sir,’ the youth replied. ‘Can I tell you something? I’m scared, Sir. I’m terrified, in fact,’ he continued. ‘You see, it’s the man who most likely lives here, Sir. He’s just walked in on me.’

‘What the hell do you mean, lad!’ D.I.Dawson shrieked. ‘Why, he must be three times your age. Remember you’re a police-officer, for Christ’s sake. Just pull yourself together, man.’

‘I would do, Sir,’ replied Darim. ‘But, you see, just now he’s standing right behind me with a gun stuck in the back of my head. And right this minute, Sir, I’m totally unarmed.’ Foley and Dawson exchanged worried glances, then stared at Tom, as if for direction. ‘And I see that he’s not really much older than me at all. In fact I believe I know the man, as I’m sure you do too. Christ Jesus! I was never trained for this, Sir. Is there - is there anything I can do?’

‘Allow me, Mr. Dawson, please,’ Tom suddenly broke in. ‘Listen, young man. I’m afraid there isn’t, Darim. You can’t do a single thing that could possibly stop it. Not now. No, not now.’

‘Nothing at all!’ exclaimed the terrified young constable.

‘Not a thing,’ said Tom. ‘I’m very sorry that it’s come to this, Darim. We all are. But take comfort from the fact that where you will be deployed to next, is the very place that each one of us hopes to reach one day, me included. In fact - in fact it’s the place where your own late mother and her mother and father, your grandparents, presently stand awaiting you.’

‘Christ! Don’t go telling the boy that, you silly old fool!’ exclaimed Sergeant Foley, jumping up, his arms outstretched, his mouth wide open, spittle splashed down his chin and uniform.

‘What!’ yelled Darim. ‘Sir, do you mean -? Are you telling me that
it’s - it’s written?
’

‘Darim, my friend, this is quite easily the most crucial moment of your short, but very brave life,’ said Tom. ‘God bless you, my boy,’ he said softly. The old man then covered his ears with his hands and winced perceptibly, his eyes and nose wrinkled up tightly.

Carla covered her ears too, as a deathly silence fell on the interview-room, and several pairs of male eyes flashed about them their incredulity and their genuine fear. Then two loud shots rang out, and everybody screamed.

The sudden shower was the last of several that had fallen that morning. Chris was wet through, but still determined to get there. His leg was already much stronger these days, and so he decided he would sprint the last hundred yards or so, trying, but failing, to imitate the stride of his hero, rugby player George North. On reaching the tunnel-entrance he quickly opened the swing-door and dashed inside, and then instantly zipped off the sopping jacket that his mother had bought him the previous Christmas, and which, sadly, had proved to be just shower-proof, instead of water-proof, as the label inside it had claimed, and so had allowed the storm’s rain to seep in through the seams and bathe his clothed torso liberally in freezing-cold water all the way from his neck right down to his hips.

Chris switched on his torch, and quickly noticed that there was in fact a stream of sorts already flowing towards him inside the tunnel, presumably fed by dripping water from perhaps half-a-mile or so further down the way towards Pant. It seemed to flow along at little more than a snail’s pace in the direction of the walled entrance by which he had just entered, and then out through an aperture at the side of the base, running from there down into the ditch at the side of the foot-path he had just run along, and thence down the much steeper incline into the Taff River itself, in the wooded valley that lay beyond.

‘I can’t see no cat,’ Chris called out to himself. The echo that his voice created inside the tunnel was a lot deeper in pitch than he could ever have imagined it would be, and that scared him. ‘I can’t see any damn cat anywhere,’ he repeated for better effect. Then a third time. bellowed out, ‘Pussy, where are you? Emily! Emily!!’

The echoing voice Chris heard, seemingly in reply to his own, made him jump. It was deep, masculine, and a tad ghostly, to say the least. Chris switched off his torch to test his courage, then turned it straight back on again, for company as much as anything else, then decided to shine it directly ahead of him, down the long, arched tunnel that he imagined ran directly beneath the limestone hill, and the vast cemetery that lay beyond it, and perhaps even beneath the four-bedroomed house that bordered its southern perimeter, where Rhiannon lived, and most likely still pined for him, but where, oddly, he had never once been welcomed inside.

Chris decided to walk further on into the tunnel, and soon found that the gravel-path he trod, and the lofty, stone walls of the great cathedral-to-steam he passed through, veered by constant degree into a vast, sweeping curve that, as he advanced into the torch-light, seemed to be endlessly revealed anew before him. ‘Nobody could possibly see my light on account of the bend,’.he whispered, largely to reassure himself. He was beginning to feel a little more confident now, and so he switched off his torch completely, and simply listened to the scrunching sound his two marching feet made as they gathered pace and propelled him further and deeper into the vast, horizontal abyss, the great vaulted portal, whose extent he had yet to fully comprehend, and whose terminus might just as easily be in hell as in Pant.

Twenty minutes later, and still with his torch in his pocket, Chris had not yet encountered a soul, and so the sudden shout he heard ahead of him, then the prolonged silence that followed it, disquieted him greatly. Just then he felt he could make out what appeared to be a faint light in the distance, which told him that, either he had reached an exit, or, far more likely, that there was human activity of some kind going on somewhere down the track. Then a minute or so later, as the distant light helped the tunnel acquire greater definition, he decided that it was most likely both. But who could it be down there? he asked himself, and so now began to feel a tad scared.

Just then the whirring noise of what sounded very like a motor-bike started up, and Chris could tell from its ever-increasing volume that it was plainly fast approaching him. His first thought was to run, but he quickly realised the utter futility of it. All he could do was stand stock-still - his back up against the slimy, rounded wall - and hope that the rider simply drove straight past him, although he knew that the chances of that happening were little more than zero.

The motor-cycle was on him in seconds, and soon came to a crunching halt before him, scattering a patch of the limestone chippings which covered almost the entire floor of the tunnel where once train-tracks had been. Chris saw that the helmet-less rider was none other than Steffan Jones, who was a pupil in Rhiannon’s class at Pennant, although the boy from Dowlais was a year younger than both of them. Chris was very glad the rider hadn’t been anyone older.

‘Clicker! What are you doing down here?’ Steffan yelled at him, above the cycle’s roar. ‘The meeting-place was meant to be in Pant, at the back of the junior-school, you know.’

It was only then that Chris remembered that that particular afternoon was meant to be the time for his latest planned sale of drugs to Steffan and his friend Jake, and that he had completely forgotten all about it, and so hadn’t brought the large bag of prepared skunk along with him. With little time to think, he quickly invented a story.

‘I came this way because of the rain. It’s - it’s much drier, and quicker, yeah?’ Chris told him. ‘But I only have a very small bag of bud on me today.’ He reached into a pocket and took it out. ‘I easily can get the rest for you tomorrow, if you like.’

‘Whatever,’ Steffan replied. ‘Listen - give me what you’ve got with you, anyway.’

Chris handed him the small bag, which the younger, but tougher, boy held to his knee and examined. ‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you, Clicker?’ Steffan told him. ‘This thing is not even what ‘the fuzz’ call ‘personal.’ I can’t give you fuck all for this, mate. Jesus!’

‘Look - take it anyway,’ said Chris. ‘Then you can check that it’s the usual quality, can’t you? And I’ll - and I’ll meet you where you said tomorrow with a proper sack full.’

‘No - not near the school,’ said the biker, shaking his head. ‘Different day - different place, remember? ‘It’ll be at
The Blue Pool
this time. Yeah
- The Blue Pool
- eight o’clock. O.K.? And don’t go forgetting again, yeah? Right. See you then.’

‘I’ll be there,’ Chris told him, now a little concerned because the rendez-vous was going to be so much closer to his home this time.

‘But no torches, O.K.?’ Steffan added, lifting up and turning his bike round so that it pointed in the direction from which he had come. Chris nodded. ‘And just one more thing, Clicker. Your step-dad. He’s such a cock, yeah?’

Chris nodded, as he had done several times before when asked the same question at school, then watched as the younger, much sturdier, lad soared off back down the tunnel, no doubt to rejoin Jake and his other compatriots from Pant and Dowlais. He then turned round and trudged back once again in the direction of the bricked-up, northern entrance to this once-vital, but now largely forgotten, railway tunnel, and, slamming the steel-door shut behind him, and pulling up, and tying, the knot on the hood of his sopping coat, set off west, once more to brave the cold, drenching rain of the upper Taff Valley on his route back towards
The Seven Arches
and home.