Ruffled, not still. It was rising as he watched. Was it raining again outside? Had it perhaps been raining all the time he had been asleep and before and since? For the first time Stephen realized how steeply after the fork the two branches ascended, the one to Rip’s Cavern, the other to the egress chamber. It would take a long time for the water to get up there, perhaps it never would, perhaps whenever there was heavy rain the mine flooded like this and then afterwards the water gradually seeped away again to be sucked up by the moor.

An awareness that he might be in some danger struck him with a chill. He felt less fear than irritation at this threat to his and Rip’s happiness. Was that why Rip hadn’t come? Because it was raining once more as it had rained on the day of the storm? Stephen thought he would go up and see. He would go up the shaft and see if it was raining.

It was at this point that his torch battery failed. Of course he hadn’t been so imprudent as to come without a spare and he went back to Rip’s Cavern to fetch it from his rucksack. Should he take the rucksack and the blanket up with him? Not yet. It might not be necessary at all. Rip would come. So great was his faith that he would come back and Rip would come that he left the candle burning in the brass candlestick.

Back to the fork he went and along the winze to the egress chamber. Water was running in thin trickling rivulets across the floor out from the mouth of the shaft. But it wasn’t these runnels of water that made Stephen stare and then dash forward across the wet shale.

The rope had gone.

He moved the torch beam aside to give the effect of closing his eyes. Then he shone it again on to the shaft opening. The rope wasn’t there. He went to the shaft and stood in it, looking up. A big drop of water splashed on to his forehead. He imagined it raining hard up there, the water draining off the hillside, over the stones and into the sough. Could the rain have been heavy enough to have washed the rope from its anchorage? If that had happened it wouldn’t have disappeared altogether, it would have dropped down the shaft. Someone had unfastened it.

After his first couple of visits to the mine he had found himself so agile at climbing the shaft that he could have done without the rope. Now was the time to prove that. Should he go back for his rucksack? Of course not. He didn’t mean to stay above ground, he intended to come back into the mine. The torch, however, he would take with him. He hooked it over his arm.

The first steps he took were encouraging. Down here there were prominent ledges of rock for footholds and the streaming water made little difference to the purchase obtained. But after the first five or six feet the walls grew smoother and the shaft became a slippery gullet. When he had calculated that he could do without the rope he hadn’t reckoned with the results of heavy rain. He lay against the wall of the shaft about six feet up, unable to find a secure hold for his hands, and until he could do so, scarcely daring to move his right foot. But he did move it, his hands grasping shale and nearly liquid mud. Both feet slipped and he slid back down all the way he had come, grazing chest and arms and hands on the sticky gravelly surface.

He tried again. He tried twice more and had to give up when he twisted his left ankle. His clothes were covered in mud, his hands were bleeding and he had cracked the glass in the torch. It was stupid to struggle like that and get in a state over it, stupid to risk injuring himself, for there was no chance of his being trapped in the mine. Rip was coming. Rip would bring his own rope with him.

Holding the torch, which still gave a powerful light in spite of its cracked glass, Stephen limped slowly back along the winze. At the highest point he had reached in the shaft before sliding down again he had fancied he could hear rain, a roaring overhead like the sound of the sea. But down here was the same eternal deep silence. He could hear his own footsteps and that was all.

He stopped dead. He froze, he was utterly still, and yet he could still hear footsteps. Very faintly, ahead of him, reaching the fork perhaps from the other direction and pattering along the passage that led to Rip’s Cavern.

Rip had come at last. Stephen couldn’t tell how he had come, by what means he could have entered the mine, but he had come and must now be in the cavern where the candle still burned. Stephen would have run on then in his anxiety to reach him but for his ankle. It was starting to hurt to put it to the ground. He limped as fast as he could up to the fork and turned down the other winze. Before he reached the bend and saw the light from the candle he smelt the sweet aromatic cigarette smoke. He called out, ‘Rip, I’m coming,’ and stumbled up to the entrance to the chamber.

The figure which had its back to him, which was bending over the box that contained the hair, cast on the wall a grotesque and monstrous shadow. It remained bent there as if paralysed and then it turned slowly round to face him. Stephen let the torch fall, it smashed and went out.

The man in Rip’s Cavern was Dadda.

21

There was everything to say and nothing. They said nothing for a long time. Stephen staggered over to the mattress and half sat, half lay on it. He saw it was his own aran Dadda was wearing, an old one he had left in the house in King Street when he got married. He remembered the candlestick too. It came from Whalbys’ stock of antiques.

Dadda had been looking in the box where the hair was. He was holding Harriet Crozier’s hair in his hands and now he looked long and hard at Stephen. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and ground it out on the floor. It had always been his way to smoke only when he was happy.

Stephen forced himself to speak. ‘Did you take away my rope?’

‘Aye. Didn’t know it was yours, did I? Didn’t know it was you.’

Stephen shivered. ‘Then how did you get into the mine?’

‘Same bloody way I always do. Down Apsley Sough.’

‘But that’s Apsley Sough, where my rope was.’

Dadda lifted his great shoulders. ‘Years ago you came home and said you’d found a way into the mine. Apsley Sough, you said. When I — needed a place I looked for a hole and I found a hole, that’s all.’

There were two ways in then — and two ways out. Stephen got to his feet. Pains shot up his left leg from his ankle but he hardly felt them. For the first time he noticed how wet Dadda was, up to the waist he was wet as if he had been immersed in water.

‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘If you’ll tell me the way you came I’ll go. This is your place, I won’t come again.’

He felt, though, that he had come to an end, the end of his life perhaps. If he tried to climb out of it, as he had tried to climb out of the mine, he would only slide back and break himself in pieces. Dadda threw the hair from him. It fell in gleaming coils, bright as the candlestick.

‘We’ll both go,’ Dadda said, and he added in a low wondering voice, ‘Like father, like son …’

He handed Stephen the candle and switched on his own lantern. Stephen left the rucksack and the blanket behind. Dadda didn’t speak again until they were at the fork, Stephen limping along behind him. Then he pointed ahead.

‘It’s up there we go and it’ll be wet, I’m warning you. When I came in I was wading up to my belly in it.’

Stephen objected, ‘The air’s bad up there. You can’t keep a match alight.’

‘Can’t you, lad? I never tried. I breathed it all my comings and goings and I’m still here — worse luck.’

Half a dozen yards farther on and the water was over their ankles. It rose rapidly after that and it was icy cold. Stephen felt it like pain mounting up his legs, past his knees, to his thighs. When the water was up to his waist the candle flame began to sink. He pushed on through the water, Dadda’s back ahead of him like the back of some great ox, and he watched the flame sink and quiver and die.