Freefall

  Closing his left eye, he looked through the device, waiting for the image to settle down through a helter-skelter of static. “I think it’s OK … yeah, it’s OK … it’s working,” he told Chester as he got to his feet. The headset revealed the full extent of the fungal shelf to him as if it was bathed in a citrus glow.

  “Chester, you look really weird,” he chuckled as he surveyed his orange-hued friend through the lens. “A bit like a badly bruised grapefruit … with an Afro!”

  “Don’t worry ’bout me …,” Chester said impatiently. “Just tell me what you can see.”

  “Well, this place is flat, and it’s pretty big,” Will observed. “It looks sort of like … well …,” he hesitated, searching for a comparison, “… as if we’re on a beach right after the tide’s gone out. Sort of smooth, but with a few dunes.”

  They were on a gently rolling plateau that was perhaps the size of two football fields, although it was difficult to tell precisely how far it extended.

  Will spotted a large section of rock a little distance away and, with several massive strides, leaped onto it. With the reduced gravitational pull, it had hardly taken any effort.

  “Yes, I think I can see the edge over there…. It’s a hundred feet or so away.” From his elevated position he could just make out where the fungal growth ended. But the lens gave him the ability to see much farther than this, into the titanic void of the Pore itself. He could even make out its far wall, which appeared craggy, and shone as if water was running down it. “Chester, we fell down one almighty hole!” he whispered as the sight brought home to him the scale of the Pore. He was struck with the thought that it must be rather like glimpsing the sheer face of Mount Everest through the window of a passing airplane.

  Then Will turned his attention to what was above them. “And I reckon we’ve got another ledge right over us.” Chester squinted up at where his friend was looking, but nothing was visible to him through the heavy, all-enveloping blanket of darkness. “It’s not as big as the one we’re on,” Will informed him. “And it’s got holes in it.” As he examined these, he wondered if they were the result of rocks and boulders slamming into it and tearing large rents.

  “Anything else?” Chester asked.

  “Hang on,” Will said as he moved his head to get a better view.

  “Yes?” Chester pressed. “What can you —?”

  “Just be quiet for a second, will you?” Will said distractedly as a series of objects caught his eye. They were regular and patently not formed by nature, not even by the strange forces of subterranean nature that never ceased to surprise him. They just didn’t fit in. “There’s something very odd up there,” he said quickly as he pointed.

  “Where?” Chester asked.

  “There, right on the edge of the shelf.”

  Several seconds passed as the view through Will’s lens fizzled with static, then cleared down again. “Yes, there are loads of them. They look like …” He trailed off, sounding unsure of himself.

  “Well?” Chester prompted.

  “From what I can see they could be nets, in some sort of frames,” Will said. “Which means we might not be alone down here,” he added, “however far we’ve fallen.”

  Chester absorbed this piece of information, then blurted, “Do you think it’s the Styx?” He was suddenly terrified that they might be in danger again.

  “I don’t know, but there’s …,” Will began, then his voice dried up.

  “What?” Chester asked.

  When Will finally spoke again, it was difficult for Chester to hear him. “I think there’s a body in one of them,” he murmured.

  Guessing what might be coming next, Chester didn’t speak, just watched as Will began to tremble.

  “Oh God. I think Cal’s up there,” Will said, staring in horror at the body spread-eagled on the net that Chester had no way of seeing.

  “Uh, Will,” Chester said tentatively.

  “Yes?”

  “It might not be Cal — it might be Elliott.”

  “Could be, but it looks like Cal,” Will said haltingly.

  “Whoever it is, we still need to search for the other one. If it isn’t Elliott, she might still be —” Chester swallowed the last word, but Will was only too aware what it was intended to be.

  “Alive,” he said. He wheeled around to face Chester, breathing fast with emotion. “Listen to us! We’re talking about living and dying as if we’re discussing pass-or-fail exams or something. All this is messing with our heads.”

  Chester tried to interrupt, but Will wasn’t to be stopped.

  “My brother’s probably up there, and he’s dead. And my dad, Uncle Tam, Granny Macaulay…. they’re all dead, too. Everyone around us dies. And we just carry on as if it’s quite normal. What have we become?”

  Chester had weathered such outbursts before. He yelled at Will.

  “There’s nothing we can do about any of that now! If those twins had got their stinking hands on us, we’d be dead, too, and we wouldn’t be having this half-arsed conversation!” His raised voice resounded around the place as Will watched him, startled by his friend’s precipitant anger. “Now get down from there and help me to find the one person who might just get us home!”

  Will considered Chester in silence, then jumped down. “Yes, you’re right,” he said, adding, “as usual.”

  As they made their way across the fungus, the prospect of actually finding Elliott filled them both with unremitting dread.

  “This is where I hit the deck,” Chester said, pointing at the place where he had landed. Dropping down into a squat, Chester began to tug at the rope, which, unless it had snapped, would lead them to Elliott. As he yanked at it, it broke a line in the surface of the fungus, and both of them followed it reluctantly.

  Before they knew it they came upon her. She had landed on her side just as Will had done, and her slight form had penetrated deep into the fungus.

  “Oh, no. I think her face is buried in the stuff!” Chester flung himself down and tried to pull her head around so her nose and mouth weren’t obstructed by the fungus. “Quick! She might not be able to breathe!”

  “Is she …?” Will asked from the other side of her body.

  “Can’t tell,” Chester replied. “Help me get her out!”

  Chester began to heave her up, and Will took hold of one of her legs. With a loud slurp she came loose.

  “No!” Chester shouted as he saw the state of her arm. It was clear she had refused to let go of her rifle, with dire consequences when she’d slammed into the fungus. The rifle strap was wrapped around her forearm, which was horribly twisted. “Her arm’s totally wrecked.”

  “Definitely broken,” Will agreed hollowly as he cleared the fungal gunk away from her face, picking the remaining fibers from her lips and nostrils. “But she’s alive. She’s still breathing,” he told Chester, who didn’t seem to be able to take his eyes off the mangled limb. Nudging him aside, Will gently unwound the rifle strap from around Elliott’s arm.

  “Do be careful,” Chester urged in a croak.

  Will handed him the rifle, then undid the rope around Elliott’s waist and slid her rucksack off her back, pulling her undamaged arm from the straps first. “Let’s get her under cover,” he said as he lifted the girl and carried her over to the cave.

  They laid her down on some spare clothes from the backpack. She was breathing regularly, but out cold.

  “What do we do now?” Chester asked, still eyeing her twisted arm.

  “I don’t know. Wait for her to wake up, I suppose,” Will replied with a shrug, then sighed. “I’m going to see to Cal,” he said abruptly.

  “Will, why don’t you just leave him?” Chester suggested. “It won’t make any difference now.”

  “I can’t do that — he’s my brother,” Will said, and left the cave.

  Will walked around for a while, surveying the ledge directly above until he had located one of the larger holes. Then he readied himself and jumped
at it. On any other occasion, the fact that he was shooting through the air like a human can-nonball would have filled him with awe. But now he didn’t give it more than a passing thought — what he was about to do blotted everything else from his mind.

  As he soared through the hole in the shelf, he realized that he’d overdone it, and his momentum was carrying him too far. He was on a trajectory that was taking him high above the shelf.

  “Whoaaaaaa!” he shouted in alarm, and began to windmill his arms in an effort to bring himself down again.

  But gradually his trajectory dropped off, and he began to descend. He spotted he was heading straight for a patch of some mastlike structures that stood proud of the fungus’s surface. They were thick stalks some nine to twelve feet in height, with what resembled basketballs on the ends. A voice from some remote part of his brain helpfully informed him they were “fruiting bodies”— he seemed to recall they were organs to do with fungal reproduction. But it wasn’t the time to dwell on half-remembered facts from his biology lessons. As he flew straight into the midst of them, he desperately grabbed at the rubbery stalks. Although they either broke off at their bases or the basketballs on their tips detached and whizzed away in all directions, at least they helped to slow his progress.

  As the last stalk came away in his hands and he cleared the patch, he finally touched down. But it was no better — he was skiing on his knees across the greasy surface on a course that was taking him toward the edge. There were no more fruiting bodies in the way to help him, so he threw himself on his chest, digging his fingers and the toe caps of his boots into the skin of the fungus. He howled, imagining he was about to shoot straight off the gently curved edge of the shelf and back into the Pore, but managed to bring himself to a halt just in the nick of time.

  “Blimey, that was close,” he puffed as he held absolutely still. It had been close — his head was far enough over the rim of the fungus that he could clearly see the one he’d just left below him.

  He pulled himself back from the edge and, for a while, just lay there. “Come on,” he said eventually, and got to his feet. He took very careful, controlled paces over to the frames. He certainly wasn’t going to make any sudden movements after that last jaunt.

  The frames were simple rectangular structures, roughly the size of goalmouths, made from what appeared to be the trunks of young trees about four inches in diameter, bound together at each corner. If they were made from wood — he couldn’t tell for certain — it was blackened and charred as if it had been burned in a fire. A mesh of thick strands loosely woven together formed the netting strung between the frames. They felt rough and fibrous to the touch, and he suspected they were the skin of some plant, possibly even of the giant fungus itself. As he walked along the line of nets, he could see that many of them were torn, but the one Cal was hung up in seemed to be in reasonable shape.

  Stopping before his brother’s body, he forced himself to look at it, then quickly averted his eyes. He bit his lip agitatedly, wondering if he should just go back to Chester. After all, he was right: Nothing Will did now would change anything. He could just leave the body where it was.

  He heard Tam’s booming voice as clearly as if the big man was standing right beside him. “Brothers, hah, brothers, my nephews.” Tam had uttered these words when Will and Cal, after so many years apart, and one unaware of the other’s existence, had been reunited in the Jerome family home back in the Colony.

  And just before Tam had sacrificed his life so Will and Cal could escape, Will had made him a promise to look out for his newfound sibling.

  “I’m so sorry, Tam,” Will said aloud. “I couldn’t keep it. I … I let you down.”

  You did your best, m’boy. You couldn’t have done anything more, came Uncle Tam’s gravelly tones. Although Will knew that the voice was only his imagination working overtime, it gave him a measure of comfort.

  Still he made no move toward Cal’s body, debating whether to just leave it be.

  No, I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be right, Will told himself. With a sigh, he took a step toward the net and began to test whether the frame would take his weight. It creaked a little as he pushed on it with his foot, but it seemed to be firmly secured to the fungus. He got down on all fours and moved carefully over the netting. Cal was in one of the far corners. As the fiber strips shifted under Will’s weight, he took it even more slowly. It was daunting because the frame projected so far out into the void. He tried to reassure himself that even if it did give way, then he’d simply drop down to the shelf below. If he was lucky.

  He edged closer to his brother’s body. Cal was on his front — Will was so grateful that he was spared the sight of his face. The rope was still tied around the boy’s waist, and Will took hold of it and reeled in the loose end. A quick inspection revealed that it had snapped clean through. To divert himself from the enormity of his brother’s corpse being only inches away, Will began to piece together what must have happened. Cal’s body had evidently been caught in the net, and the rest of them — he, Chester, and Elliott — had swung like a daisy chain onto the ledge below. Cal had acted like an anchor, and he might very well have saved their lives by preventing them from falling farther.

  Will held the tattered end of the rope, at a total loss what to do next. With his head and one leg at awkward angles, his brother looked so small and broken. Will reached out and gingerly touched the skin of the boy’s forearm with the tip of a single finger, then quickly withdrew his hand again. It felt cold and hard, and nothing like Cal.

  Will’s head was filled with vivid flashes of so many moments, as if various scenes from a film had been randomly spliced together. He remembered Cal’s laughter as they watched the Black Wind from his bedroom window. This was followed by a flood of other memories from the months they’d spent together in the Colony, including the moment right at the beginning when Cal and his father had collected Will from the Hold to take him home and meet the family he never knew existed.

  “I’ve let them all down,” Will said, in a tense, muted growl through his clenched teeth. “Uncle Tam, Granny Macaulay, even my real mother,” he added, remembering how they’d had to leave Sarah, mortally wounded, in the windswept tunnel. “And now you, Cal,” he said to the body, which swayed ever so slightly as a breeze came in small bursts. Beside himself with grief, tears gushed from Will’s eyes in a torrent.

  “I’m sorry, Cal,” he sobbed over and over again. He heard a low howl and, blinking away his tears, he peered down at the ledge below. Bartleby’s eyes shone like two polished copper plates — they were fixed on Will. He was not alone in mourning the boy’s death.

  What do I do now? Will thought to himself, then asked the question out loud.

  “Tell me what I should do, Tam?” This time there was no response from his imagination, but Will knew instinctively what his uncle would have done in the same situation. And Will had to be practical, just like Tam, even if it was the last thing he felt like doing. “Check if there’s anything we need,” Will mumbled, and without disturbing Cal’s body he began to search it. He found the boy’s penknife, a bag of peanuts, and some spare luminescent orbs. In one of the pockets, he discovered an unopened but misshapen bar of Caramac. It was clear from the way it had melted that the boy had been carrying it around with him for some time.

  “My favorite! Cal, you were holding out on me!” Will said, grinning through his grief.

  He tucked the bar away in his jacket pocket and, not wanting to turn the body over, he cut the strap to the water bladder that was over Cal’s shoulder and reknotted it so he would be able to carry it. Then he unbuckled the shoulder straps of Cal’s backpack and removed it. As he lifted it to one side, he noticed there were holes in it. Many small holes were punched into the canvas and, as he touched one of these, he realized with a start that his hands were covered in a sticky darkness. It was Cal’s blood. Will quickly rubbed his palms on his pants. That did it — there was no way he was going to search the rest
of the body.

  He remained with Cal for some time, simply staring at him. Every so often pieces of rock would come whistling down the middle of the Pore in a hail, or a sudden flurry of water in shape-shifting showers would flash past, sparkling like earth-bound stars. Except for these occasional interruptions, all was so quiet and still there on the edge of the fungus.

  Then came a sodden thump from somewhere behind him on the shelf. The whole ledge seemed to flex and judder, and the net shook beneath him. “What the heck was that? A rock?” Will exclaimed, looking nervously around. He quickly concluded that an object with some mass must have slammed into the surface of the fungus, the shock of the impact rippling through the whole shelf. It was enough to get him moving again — this was no place to hang around for long. There and then, he made up his mind what he should do next. He braced himself by grabbing hold of the netting with his hands, and he used his feet to maneuver Cal over to the very edge of the frame.

  Peering down into the Pore, Will shivered as he imagined himself falling into it. Then he glanced at Cal’s corpse. “You never did like heights, did you?” he whispered.

  He took a deep breath and shouted, “Good-bye, Cal!” With a hard shove from both feet, he propelled his brother’s body over the edge of the frame. He watched as it shot across into the Pore, hardly losing any height as it went. Like a burial in deep space, it was slowly rolling over and over in the low gravity, the rope trailing around it. It only began to tip downward when it was some distance away. Then its trajectory dipped, and it was falling and falling, and Will watched as it became a tiny dot that was finally swallowed by the murky darkness below.

  “Good-bye, Cal,” Will shouted once more, his voice also lost in the immensity of the Pore, with barely an echo from the other side. Bartleby wailed a high and pitiful wail, as if he knew that his master was on his way to his final resting place.

  Filled with the bleakest feelings of despair and loss, Will turned and began to clamber over the net to return to the fungal ledge, tugging the backpack behind him. All of a sudden he froze absolutely still.