Darkbank Tunnel - Part 2

It was Monday, June 27th, 1921, and the investigators gathered for an early breakfast at their inn in Shrubford, hosted by the innkeeper Trumpshaw. Over toast and tea, they drew up an ambitious shopping list for their upcoming expedition into the Dark Bank Tunnel — torches, rope, crowbars, waterproof coats, rations, salt for spirits, iron for fairies, and a great deal more besides. John Anderton produced a revolver for one of his companions, and the group debated the merits of everything from a ten-foot pole to a sword cane before settling on a plan: split up, gather supplies, and meet Superintendent Longthorpe at the tunnel entrance by eleven o'clock. Reverend William Grainger set off on foot toward the library while John Anderton and the young Alfie Quinn rode with their driver Mike to the general dealer. The shopkeeper proved both well-stocked and talkative, equipping the pair with hemp rope, electric torches, candles, matches in a special box, a three-foot steel crowbar, a hatchet, a mattock, waterproof fisherman's coats, canteens, rations, and three sturdy backpacks. As they were finishing up, the shopkeeper called cheerfully after them: "Tell me if you find the crying baby!" — and then, seeing their blank expressions, launched into the grim legend of Eli Hardcastle, a hard and hateful boatman who had discovered his wife's child was fathered by his rival Josiah Allen. According to the story, Hardcastle had roasted and eaten the infant in the Dark Bank Tunnel, whereupon his wife Ellen cut her throat and threw herself into the canal. The shopkeeper chuckled to himself as the investigators left, visibly unsettled. Meanwhile, Reverend Grainger arrived at the library only to find a note on the door reading "Called away — back in an hour." He returned to the general dealer, collected his companions, and then tried again. This time the librarian was present — a helpful woman of about fifty — and she guided him to several relevant volumes, including D.R. Lewis's updated mining survey from 1893 and a collection of local ghost stories titled Ghosts and Frights of the Shrubford District. The Reverend took careful notes, sketching a rough map of the mine's layout, which included three levels connected by a lift descending approximately one hundred feet, and a subterranean lake discovered during earlier excavations. The ghost stories proved numerous and unsettling. The book described the vengeful spirit of Josiah Allen, said to haunt the bottom of the canal and drag the living to their doom. There were tales of drowned folk, rotting death's heads, and tunnel bogies lurking in the water, as well as a drunken legger — a man who had pushed boats through the tunnel by walking his feet along the ceiling — who had fallen in and drowned but was too drunk to know he was dead, and still paced the tunnel roof to this day. The librarian also mentioned, almost in passing, that the late Teddy Lockhart had been a frequent visitor to the library, and that he had always been drawn to books on geology — a detail the Reverend filed away carefully before leaving the books on the counter for potential future reference. The party reunited and drove up to the canal entrance, where Superintendent Longthorpe was waiting with a boatman named Walter Braithwaite and a thirty-five-foot narrowboat. Walter gave the investigators a brisk tutorial on the vessel's petrol engine and steering before being called away urgently to deal with a railway landslip. Longthorpe, for his part, made it clear he had other matters to attend to and would not be accompanying them into the tunnel. The investigators loaded their considerable haul of equipment onto the boat — which they christened the Rat — and instructed Mike to raise the alarm if they had not returned by lunchtime on Tuesday. By the time they were ready to depart, it was nearly a quarter to twelve. John Anderton took the helm and steered the Rat slowly into the mouth of the Dark Bank Tunnel, while Alfie stood at the bow with a long pole to fend off the walls. The tunnel was fifteen feet wide and brick-lined, and the darkness swallowed them almost immediately. Strange whistling sounds echoed through the passage — rising and falling in a way that made it easy to understand why people spoke of crying — and the water below the hull gleamed with an oily sheen. Reverend Grainger unhooked a lantern and held it low over the surface, peering into the dark water with a mixture of curiosity and unease. After roughly four hundred meters, the Rat's engine was cut and the investigators drifted in silence, listening. The whistling continued, bouncing off the curved brick walls, and the only other sounds were the soft lapping of water and the occasional drip from above. They speculated that the sounds were caused by air being forced through gaps in the cave-in ahead, compressed into eerie, wailing tones. Satisfied with this theory for the moment, they started the engine again and pressed on toward the collapse. The cave-in, when they reached it, was a dramatic sight. A barge — the Eleanor — was wedged diagonally across the canal, its bow and stern protruding from either side of a great pile of rubble where the tunnel ceiling had given way. Bricks and dirt and rock had cascaded down onto the vessel, and the air smelled of damp stone and something else, something harder to name. The investigators tied the Rat to the Eleanor and began to assess the damage, quickly concluding that clearing the collapse would require many barge-loads of rubble and a great deal of manpower — far beyond what three people could accomplish alone. Alfie scrambled across to the Eleanor to take a closer look, and what he found there was troubling. The barge's cargo of explosives had been disturbed — not crushed by falling rock, but broken open deliberately, the wooden crates pulled apart from the outside, with sticks of dynamite strewn across the rubble. Someone, or something, had been at the boxes. Alfie quietly pocketed one stick of dynamite before reporting back to the others, and the group exchanged uneasy glances in the flickering torchlight. Climbing the rubble pile, Alfie discovered something even more unexpected: above the collapsed ceiling, where the brickwork had given way, there was a void — a rough-hewn tunnel carved directly from the rock, running above and across the canal passage. It was not a mine tunnel in any conventional sense; it had no supporting timbers, no square corners, no brickwork. It was as though something had simply scooped a passage through the stone. Patches of a strange, viscous green slime clung to the walls and floor, more concentrated on the side facing the mine, as though something large and damp had been moving through the passage regularly. While the others climbed up to join him, Alfie spotted a second, smaller hole in the side wall of the canal tunnel on the far side of the Eleanor — roughly two feet wide and twisting away into darkness. He scrambled across the rubble to investigate, and as he descended toward the opening, he caught a glimpse of something that made his blood run cold: a pair of eyes, approximately four feet off the ground, staring back at him from the darkness. They vanished almost instantly. "They looked like bigger eyes than a rat, sir," he reported shakily when he rejoined the others. "It didn't look like a rat at all." On his way back up, his torch slipped from his grip and tumbled into the canal below, disappearing beneath the dark water without a trace. With two torches now reduced to one, the investigators worked carefully to stabilize the edges of the breach in the ceiling before hauling themselves up into the upper tunnel. John Anderton slipped more than once on the treacherous rubble, bruising himself in the process, before finally making it to the top with the help of the rope. Once inside the upper passage, the party moved slowly, with Alfie in the lead brandishing the mattock, while Reverend Grainger marked the walls with chalk every ten feet to ensure they could find their way back. The tunnel was damp, echoing, and deeply unsettling, its rough walls glistening with the same mucozoid slime they had noticed at the breach. After about fifty feet, they found a narrow shaft sloping downward to the right. Reverend Grainger edged his way down, chimneying between the walls, and confirmed that it connected to the hole in the canal wall that Alfie had spotted earlier. From the bottom of the shaft, a larger tunnel was visible running deeper into the earth, roughly parallel to the passage above — another layer of the underground network, leading toward the mine. A crack and a distant splash echoed up from somewhere behind them, consistent with another loose brick finally giving way and falling into the water below. The investigators pressed on through the upper tunnel for another half mile, moving slowly through the dark and the damp, the slime gradually thinning as they moved further from the collapse. After approximately thirty minutes of careful progress, the passage opened out and they found themselves at the entrance to the old coal mine. There were no crying babies, no vengeful spirits, no drowned folk reaching up from the water — only silence, stone, and the faint smell of coal dust. The investigators stood at the threshold of the mine and took stock of what they had found: a mysterious hewn tunnel of unknown origin, a ransacked cargo of explosives, a pair of eyes in the dark, and a great deal of unanswered questions waiting somewhere deeper in the earth.