Chapter 3
Chapter Three
H ammer watched the mayor pick his way down the slope. There was a ring of higher ground enclosing a flat area, which contained a small grassy hill in its centre. It looked landscaped, not entirely natural. After a moment, he followed.
Tobias skirted the edge of the flat area and stepped between two large rocks before approaching the mound. Without thinking about it too hard, Hammer did the same. Something was very wrong in this place, and he was following his instincts. Hammer might not believe half of the weird things that were talked about on Unholy Island, but he had seen enough to know there was substance to the other half. And he knew that just because he didn’t have all the information in a given situation, didn’t mean he couldn’t get hurt by it. He hadn’t stayed alive this long without obeying his gut.
Once on the flat ground, they moved around to the west of the small hill. Tobias seemed to be moving with purpose, but before Hammer could ask what he was looking for, he saw it. A rectangle of black against the green grass.
Esme climbed the stairs to her studio, intending to spend the day painting. By lunchtime she was feeling frustrated with her brushes, her pigments, the canvas and herself. The seascapes that she was always so compelled to paint calmed her. Usually, the act of creating sky and waves from brushstrokes, the layering of colour and unexpected interplay between those layers, drew a deep quiet that was like the meditation sessions with Bee. But even better as she wasn’t supposed to be doing anything other than getting paint onto the canvas. There were no other expectations placed upon her and she was free to think or not think, suspended in time.
Today, however, something strange had happened. She had picked up her brush, expecting to add the final touches of paint to an almost-finished piece. A few highlights, mixed from titanium white and cadmium yellow, added to the places where the light caught the tops of the waves. Instead, without noticing, she had somehow loaded her brush with Brown Madder and Davy’s Grey. Before she was fully aware of what her hand was doing, she had painted a dark shape in the middle of her calm blue sea. She took a step back from the canvas, one hand still clutching the brush and the other over her mouth. The islet loomed from the water where she had not intended to paint it at all. She felt sick looking at the brutal interruption to her carefully layered waves, but couldn’t tear her gaze from it. The picture was ruined.
Tobias had been standing in silence in front of the entrance to the tomb for over half an hour. Hammer kept scanning the bowl-shaped ground, expecting to see movement over the ridge at any moment. The middle of the island felt as dead as the beach where they had landed. The air was so still that he could barely feel it on his skin and there wasn’t a sound other than his breathing. It wasn’t natural. And his eyes were playing tricks. He couldn’t help but see creatures appearing over that stark edge. His mind didn’t conjure people but crouched skittering monsters, straight out of a horror film. Hammer didn’t consider himself a man of imagination, but it appeared to be getting the better of him in this strange place.
Finally, Tobias turned from his position. His face was the same as it always was. A kindly looking old geezer. The sort of man with a tidy garden, adoring grandkids, and a freshly hoovered car.
He shook his head. Just once. And then walked across the ground to join Hammer.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Nothing has changed. I couldn’t see anything.’
Hammer wondered what Tobias had expected to see, standing at the entrance like that, but he didn’t ask. If the old boy hadn’t fancied walking inside that weird old hill, Hammer wasn’t going to be the one to challenge him on it. Apart from anything else, he didn’t want to go inside himself and wanted, pretty fucking keenly, now he allowed himself to think about it, to leave the dead island as soon as possible. Hammer felt a strange disinclination to turn his back on the mound, but he made himself do it. He had been in car crashes and knife fights. He wasn’t going to let a tiny hill with a door in the side freak him out. Besides, it was the quickest way to get the fuck out of this place.
They had taken three steps away from the hill when Tobias stopped.
‘Hell's bells,’ he muttered, and Hammer felt the hairs on his arm stand up.
He didn’t want to turn back, but did it quickly. Like making yourself look at a knife wound to assess the damage.
The hill looked the same. An unnatural-looking shape, covered in unmoving grass.
‘Did you hear that?’ Tobias asked, his hand on Hammer’s arm, as if holding him back.
Hammer shook his head.
Tobias was stock still, his chin lifted and eyes fixed on some faraway point as he listened.
Hammer listened, too. It was all eerie silence. A silence that was so wrong it made him want to throw up the bacon roll he’d eaten earlier.
The seconds ticked by and Hammer fought the urge to grab Tobias’s arm and drag him back to the boat. He wanted to row them both the fuck away from this place and never come back.
Hammer refocused on Tobias. His spine was, impossibly, even straighter than usual. He looked like an octogenarian soldier, but his eyes were sad. ‘I have to go inside.’ Tobias sounded almost apologetic. ‘You can wait here if you want.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Hammer said immediately. He wasn’t being a hero. Nothing on earth could make him stay in this place on his own. He wasn’t going to think about that very hard. It was just the truth.
The entrance to the hill was a neat rectangle, formed by horizontally laid stones. The vegetation on the hill shrouded the stone structure almost entirely, leaving just the edges of the entrance visible. The earth and grass of the hill was like the flesh and skin of a giant creature, the stone structure beneath, the skeleton. Hammer immediately wished he hadn’t thought of it that way. Both men ducked as they walked through the dark doorway. Into the belly of the beast.
It wasn’t a beast, though. It was a stone passage. Surprisingly neat and clean. Hammer didn’t know what he had expected from a structure made five thousand years ago, but it wasn’t this. He always kept a Maglite torch in the inside pocket of his jacket and he switched it on, playing the beam over the slabs that formed the passage and revealing openings spaced up ahead, presumably leading to other passages or chambers.
Tobias was in front of him, moving slowly up the passage and partially blocking Hammer’s view. He raised a hand behind him and waved it. ‘Turn off the torch.’
Hammer did not want to do that. He anticipated the total darkness, knowing he would be able to feel the pressing air in this strange place, but to be blind to it. His hindbrain stirred uncomfortably. He did not want to be blind in this place. But he trusted Tobias. And would be the first to admit that he was out of his depth. He clicked the button on the end of the torch.
Their breathing seemed louder in the dark. Hammer stared into the total black, willing his eyes to adjust. He waited for Tobias to speak. Waited for him to say that they could turn around and get out. But the longer he waited, the more he realised that he couldn’t hear Tobias breathing, only himself.
Tobias had been just in front of him, his brain insisted. An arm’s length away at most. And the passage was narrow. Hammer’s shoulders brushed the stone on either side as he had entered, and he could feel it hadn’t widened much.
As Hammer waited for some vision to return, he felt a deep conviction that Tobias wasn’t there anymore. That he was alone underneath the ground. His breathing was loud, rasping in and out, and his heart was pounding. He couldn’t remember a fear like this. It was as if the ground above and below was squeezing him.
He blinked and tried to regulate his breathing. Called on the old techniques to calm his limbic system. Nobody was fearless, you just learned to control it. Or use it. Hammer was largely self-taught, stuff he had learned through experience. He had learned quickly when he was young. As soon as he grew into the kind of figure that made people turn to him for help or for other men to challenge. Like he was challenging them to a fight just by existing. But there had been one guy. Ex-forces. He had been very smart and talked about the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve and taught breathing exercises. Hammer thumped his chest, now, trying to activate his, remembering too late that he was supposed to press on his chest, not hit himself. But all the trying to remember had distracted him enough so that he was able to take a breath. Panic over. Job done.
He was going to get out, he decided. He would tell Tobias and then he would turn around and get out. Or he wouldn’t bother turning around, he would just walk backwards. Until he was clear of the hill. Either worked.
His eyes had adjusted to the dark and there was something up ahead. A rough rectangle of not-black. It had to be one of the openings in the passage. Perhaps the main passage continued that way and it was lighter because it led to another doorway? An exit. But Hammer knew there was a way out behind him. Much closer. And he didn’t think he could physically take another step into the hill.
Besides. The grey rectangle up ahead told him one thing. Tobias was no longer in the passage.