“No good. Can’t reach. We’re stuck.”
“We can’t afford to be. An hour in here will kill us. This water must be snow-melt from the fell. It’s close to freezing.”
“I don’t give a damn where it came from—and I’m well aware of its temperature. What now, Erasmus? The feeling is going out of my legs.”
“If we can’t go up, we must go along. Let’s follow the pool to the left here.”
“We’ll be moving away from the lantern light up there.”
“We can live without light, but not without heat. Come on, Jacob.”
They set off, water up to their necks. After a few yards it was clear that the depth was increasing. They reversed their steps and moved in the other direction along the silent pool. The water level began to drop gradually as they went, to their chests, then to their waists. By the time it was down to their knees they had left the light of the lantern far behind and were wading on through total darkness. At last, Jacob Pole bent forward and touched his fingers to the ground.
“Erasmus, we’re out of the water completely. It’s quite dry underfoot. Can you see anything?”
“Not a glimmer. Stay close. We don’t want to get separated here.”
Pole shivered violently. “I thought that was the end. What a way to die—stand until our strength was gone, then drown, like trapped rats in a sewer pipe.”
“Aye. I didn’t care for the thought. ‘O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown, what dreadful noise of waters in my ears, what sights of ugly death within my eyes.’ At least poor Clarence smothered in a livelier liquid than black fell water. Jacob, do you have your brandy flask? Your hand is ice.”
“Left it in my greatcoat, along with the tinder and flint. Erasmus, I can’t go much farther. That water drained all my strength away.”
“Pity there’s not more flesh on your bones.” Darwin halted and placed his hand on Pole’s shoulder, feeling the shuddering tremors that were shaking the other’s skinny frame. “Jacob, we have to keep moving. To halt now is to die, until our clothes become dry. Come, I will support you.”
The two men stumbled blindly on, feeling their way along the walls. All sense of direction was quickly lost in the labyrinth of narrow, branching tunnels. As they walked, Darwin felt warmth and new life slowly begin to diffuse through his chilled body. But Pole’s shivering continued, and soon he would have fallen without Darwin’s arm to offer support.
After half an hour more of wandering through the interminable tunnels, Darwin stopped again and put his hand to Pole’s forehead. It burned beneath his touch.
“I know, ’Rasmus, you don’t need to tell me.” Pole’s voice was faint. “I’ve felt this fever before—but then I was safe in bed. I’m done for. No Peruvian-bark for me here on Cross Fell.”
“Jacob, we must keep going. Bear up. I’ve got cinchona in my medical chest, back at the house. We’ll find a way out of here before too long. Just hang on, and let’s keep moving.”
“Can’t do it.” Pole laughed. “Wish I could. I’m all ready for a full military funeral, by the sound of it. I can hear the fife and drum now, ready to play me out. They’re whispering away there, inside my head. Let me lie down, and have some peace. I never warranted a military band for my exit, even if it’s only a ghostly one.”
“Hush, Jacob. Save your strength. Here, rest all your weight on me.” Darwin bent to take Pole’s arm across his shoulder, supported him about the waist, and began to move forward again. His mood was somber. Pole needed medical attention—promptly—or death would soon succeed delirium.
Twenty seconds later, Darwin stopped dead, mouth gaping and eyes staring into the darkness. He was beginning to hear it, too—a faint, fluting tone, thin and ethereal, punctuated by the harsh deeper tone of drums. He turned his head, seeking some direction for the sound, but it was too echoing and diffuse.
“Jacob—can you tell me where it seems to be coming from?”
The reply was muttered and unintelligible. Pole, his body fevered and shaken with ague, was not fully conscious. Darwin had no choice but to go forward again, feeling his way along the damp, slick walls with their occasional timber support beams. Little by little, the sound was growing. It was a primitive, energetic music, shrill panpipes backed by a taut, rhythmic drumbeat. At last Darwin also became aware of a faint reddish light, flickering far along the tunnel. He laid Pole’s semiconscious body gently on the rocky floor. Then, light-footed for a man of his bulk, he walked silently toward the source of the light.
The man-made tunnel he was in emerged suddenly into a natural chimney in the rock, twenty yards across and of indefinite height. It narrowed as it went up and up, as far as the eye could follow. Twenty feet above, on the opposite side from Darwin, a broad, flat ledge projected from the chimney wall.
Darwin stepped clear of the tunnel and looked up. Two fires, fuelled with wood and peat, burned on the ledge and lit the chimney with an orange-red glow. Spreading columns of smoke, rising in a slight updraft, showed that the cleft in the rock served as a chimney in the other sense. Behind the fires, a group of dark figures moved on the ledge to the wild music that echoed from the sheer walls of rock.
Darwin watched in fascination the misshapen forms that provided a grotesque backdrop to the smoky, flickering fires. There was a curious sense of regularity, of hypnotic ritual, in their ordered movements. A man less firmly rooted in rational convictions would have seen the fiends of Hell, capering with diabolic intent, but Darwin looked on with an analytical eye. He longed for a closer view of an anatomy so oddly distorted from the familiar human form.
The dancers, squat and shaggy, averaged no more than four feet in height. They were long-bodied and long-armed, and naked except for skirts and headdresses. But their movements, seen through the curtain of smoke and firelight, were graceful and well coordinated. The musicians, set back beyond the range of the firelight, played on and the silent dance continued.
Darwin watched, until the urgency of the situation again bore in on him. Jacob had to have warmth and proper care. The dancers might be ferocious aggressors, even cannibals; but whatever they were, they had fire. Almost certainly, they would also have warm food and drink, and a place to rest. There was no choice—and, deep inside, there was also the old, overwhelming curiosity.
Darwin walked forward until he was about twenty feet from the base of the ledge. He planted his feet solidly, legs apart, tilted his head back and shouted up to the dancers.
“It’s no good, Anna. Not a sign of them.” Richard Thaxton slumped on the stone bench in the front yard, haggard and weary. “They must have gone up, into the Helm. There’s not a thing we can do for them until it lifts.”
Anna Thaxton looked at her husband with a worried frown. His face was pale and there were dark circles under his eyes. “Love, you did all you could. If they got lost on the fell, they’d be sensible enough to stay in one place until the Helm moves off the highlands. Where did you find the lantern—in the same place as I saw it last night?”
“The same place exactly. There.” Thaxton pointed a long arm at the slope of Cross Fell. “The trouble is, that’s right where the Helm begins. We couldn’t see much of anything. I think it’s thicker now than it was last night.”
He stood up wearily and began to walk toward the house. His steps were heavy and dragging on the cobbled yard. “I’m all in. Let me get a hot bath and a few hours sleep, and if the fell clears by evening we’ll go up again. Damn this weather.” He rubbed his hand over his shoulder. “It leaches a man’s bones to chalk.”
Anna watched her husband go inside, then she stooped and began collecting the packages of food and medicine that Richard in his weariness had dropped carelessly to the floor. As she rose, arms full, she found a small figure by her side.