Chapter 48
FORTY-EIGHT
Amos had spent most of the night awake. Shep had been whining and pacing up and down as best as he could in the kitchen and had refused to move away from the pantry door.
Which meant that Amos, who hadn’t really used the pantry for its original purpose since his mother died, was also on edge and pacing up and down.
He sat staring at it, sipping his tea and trying to cajole Shep into sitting down or eating his breakfast. Shep was having none of it and he kept staring at him with his big, brown eyes.
Unable to take it anymore, he stood up and hobbled across to where he’d left his false leg last night.
‘Okay, boy, I’m going to take a look. We should be keeping our nose out of this, you know that, don’t you? You have no business being so demanding, it’s not your concern.’
But Shep wouldn’t look away from him. Amos strapped on the leg, took hold of a torch from the kitchen drawer and opened the door that led to the room which had once been stocked with jars of every pickled vegetable you could imagine.
When his gran was alive it had also been full of home-made jams, damson gin, blackberry wine.
You name a fruit or vegetable, and his gran would either preserve, pickle or turn it into alcohol.
He had no light in there; the bulb had gone out just before his mother had died and he’d never replaced it.
He had no use for the room – he didn’t like pickled anything – and there were still dusty jars on the shelves from over thirty years ago that he just didn’t have the heart to throw away.
He always had been sentimental and too soft for his dad’s liking, which was the reason he’d run away to join the army.
Determined to prove himself, he’d done that by going and getting the bottom half of his leg blown off, but he didn’t feel sorry for himself.
He managed; he had lived when many of the guys he’d known hadn’t been that lucky.
The old rug hadn’t been moved in a long time, and he peeled it back revealing the trap door underneath it. Shep was watching him, his hackles on edge. Amos turned to him and patted his head.
‘You wait here, old boy. I’m going to struggle enough myself getting down there. I don’t want you following me and getting hurt, okay?’
The trap door was a little too easy to lift, which made him wrinkle his forehead. As he lifted it, a blast of arctic air filled the room and the fusty smell of damp assaulted his nostrils. He shone the torch down into the black hole and then turned to Shep.
‘Stay.’ He held up one hand, and Shep finally sat down on the floor. His head resting on his paws, he watched as Amos tried to navigate the old ladder that led down into the tunnel that ran underneath his house and right under the old campsite.
Amos wondered if he should have told the cops about it and let them search it. But he knew he hadn’t put those missing girls down here, so he’d kept quiet about it, but now he couldn’t be sure that somebody else hadn’t.
To his knowledge, the tunnel hadn’t been in use for many years.
It was originally built as a way to get from one property to the next should the weather turn and they got snowed in.
Amos never saw the point. His dad used to talk about filling it in but his mother, who had always had the opposite opinions of whatever his dad did, wouldn’t allow it.
As he reached the bottom of the ladder he breathed a sigh of relief, he was much slower than he used to be because of the prosthetic leg which made normal tasks quite a challenge, the cold air made him shudder.
He didn’t know what was wrong with the dog, but he was letting him know something was wrong down here and it was his duty to check it out, wasn’t it?
It occurred to him that if those missing women were down here, they had somehow found another entrance and got stuck.
That thought made his stomach churn. He didn’t know what he was going to find, but he knew he had to keep going because one way or the other Shep was never going to let him settle unless he’d checked it out.
The tunnel was narrow and Amos’s shoulder scraped against the wall as he dragged himself onwards.
It was hard work as it ran downhill. He was beginning to get out of breath, and he had to swipe a hand across his brow to wipe away the cold perspiration that was forming on his forehead.
Eventually the narrow tunnel began to widen as he reached the room that was smack bang in the middle of it.
Another tunnel ran from the other side even further down the side of the fell.
He’d never explored it as a kid, he hated dark, confined spaces and had been too scared, so he wasn’t sure where it finished, but whoever had built it must have had some purpose in mind.
Stepping into the room he shone his torch around and saw two cages had been built against one of the walls.
Puzzled, he stepped further in to take a look, when he heard a woman screaming in his direction.
He turned to see a figure running straight at him.
Shocked, he held up his hands, but she had her head down and ran straight at him, punching him in the gut with something so sharp he sucked in his breath and dropped the torch, looking down to see a large piece of wood sticking out of his stomach.
He put his hands around it, they were slick with blood, and then the pain took him from his feet and he slid to the floor. The woman was still screaming at him, but the room was starting to spin. He felt lightheaded and knew he was going to pass out.
No idea what she was shouting at him, he tried to say, ‘I came to help.’ But the words came out as a hoarse whisper and then his vision blurred and everything went black.