He nudged the phone forward and suddenly the light shot up, extending beyond the ceiling of the hole. At first he thought it had just widened but he craned his head up as far as he could to see and started to hear the wind. Suddenly, as he levered himself forward into the opening, a gust hit his face. It wasn’t an opening; it was the tunnel.

An inch more forward and his arms were free. The ground was wet and slippery but he could reach out his hands and grasp a ridge of rock in the ground. He pulled himself out of the hole awkwardly, trying to make sure not to touch the sides with his feet. But soon enough, they were free, and in the tunnel.

He pushed himself up onto his knees and reached out and grabbed his phone. He shone it around the open space. The tunnel was big, with a high curved ceiling that was mostly smooth. There were a few weathered patches where bricks had come loose and exposed uneven rock. It didn’t look unstable, but wasn’t in the best condition. He could see how a body could cause some kind of collapse.

He shone the flashlight along the floor to see wooden planks slotted into the old train tracks, creating a path of sorts and making the floor more level—undoubtedly to help when the tunnel was used as a road to take a van through, following the boats inside Standedge. The rest of the floor was shingled, but the loose gravel rocks were sparse, having been shifted around for what must have been decades.

Robin pointed the torch each way. Left was where they had walked outside and he could see a small pinprick of dull light in the center of the tunnel that had to be the Diggle entrance. Right—there was nothing but darkness.

Robin wrenched himself to his feet, feeling more exhausted than he’d felt in years. His arms and legs throbbed with pain. His shins stung, and pointing the phone down, he saw that his trousers had ripped at the knee and his skin was red and raw. For some reason, he touched a knee—obviously a mistake. A shot of pain ran through his body into his brain.

He clenched his teeth, trying to get through the pain by focusing on what he could hear. A steady dripping sound echoed up and down the tunnel, probably only from one source but sounding like the drips that surrounded him. There was the wind, of course, providing a steady blunt whistling backdrop, and strange sounds he didn’t think he could even describe. They sounded like throwing a bowling ball at a padded wall—sort of hollow thuds with no real weight behind them. Those sounds seemed to be inconsistent but constant—almost like the tunnel was living and breathing around him.

He shivered.