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“What’s going on?” Santangelo’s dad asks him quietly.
Jude shakes his head, confused. “Let’s go,” he says, holding out his hand to me.
The guy from the rural fire brigade looks irritated. “You’re trying to tell me that you believe there’s a tu
“I should know,” Jude says as I try hard to keep up. “I helped build it.”
We tear into Murrumbidgee House and Jude leads us straight through the dorms into the laundry. The kids in the dorm are shaken and still in a state of shock and I notice Richard with them, as if he hasn’t left their side all night. We throw everything out of the way and there, under five tiles in the corner of the laundry, is a hole in the ground.
“Jesus Christ,” Santangelo’s dad says, shaking his head.
There’s a shit fight about who goes under. The guy from the rural fire brigade volunteers but Santangelo’s dad tells him that he’s built like a brick shit house and can hardly get through the laundry door, let alone a hole in the floor, so he’s eliminated instantly. Even Mr. Palmer offers but he’s a heart attack waiting to happen, although no one says it to him in those words.
“I’m going,” Jude says firmly.
“Sir, you’ve been driving for almost thirteen hours straight,” Griggs says. “I’ll go.”
“I’m the fittest,” Santangelo argues.
“I’m in the Cadets, you dick. Do you know how many times I’ve had to crawl on my stomach?”
“You’re not going down there,” Santangelo’s dad says forcefully. “Neither of you are.”
“Are you?” Santangelo asks. “You’ve got high blood pressure and mum will kill me if I let you go down.”
“I’m going,” Jude says. “I built it.”
Griggs is already poking his head down the hole. He looks at Jude. “I’m presuming it’s head first because there doesn’t seem to be any room to move your body around.”
“Jonah…”
“Let me do this,” Griggs says. He looks at me. “I need to do this.”
Jude knows he has no choice and reluctantly agrees. “You’ll be on your stomach for most of the time.”
“Hold on a minute,” the rural brigade guy says, having watched the whole exchange. “Chances are they might…”
…be dead. Jessa and Chloe P. could be dead. Worse still is the fact that Griggs might come across the bodies. That’s what the fire chief doesn’t want to say.
I want to say one thousand things to Griggs but Jude has already taken hold of his boots, ready to hold him upside down.
“We can’t waste any more time. If you find the girls, you won’t be able to turn around. There’s absolutely no room. You’ll have to travel backwards. We’ll try to get as much light as possible in there but for the time being you’ll have our torches. It’s darker than anyplace you’ve been in on drills, Jonah.”
Griggs nods and he goes down before anyone says another word.
Looking at Santangelo’s dad’s face makes me realise that he doesn’t believe that anything good is going to come of this. That’s the worst thing about cops. They see so many bad things and they rarely get a happy ending. Santangelo is the same. He spends the whole time with his head in the hole, shining the torch into the tu
“When I fainted,” I begin telling Jude, “I saw my father and I saw the Hermit but it was really Fitz. I always remember him looking old but it’s only perspective. Like that time I saw him when he had the gun and he kept saying, ‘Forgive me, Forgive me,’ but he was never speaking to me. It was Webb he was speaking to. All this time, I thought that Webb was bringing him along into my dream but now I realise that I was bringing him along to Webb’s. All he wanted was forgiveness and Webb said, ‘Tell him, nothing to forgive.’”
Santangelo’s dad stares at me and then at Jude. I know they think I’m crazy but I know I’m not.
“It was such a good dream,” I tell Jude, wanting him to believe me, “and I wanted to stay but he threw me off the tree and then I woke up.”
“You weren’t asleep, Taylor,” Mr. Palmer says flatly, “and you didn’t faint.”
Someone comes in with floodlights and they put them down the hole. Richard crouches next to me and we wait.
“You think Jessa and Chloe P. are down there?” he asks.
“I know they are.”
He moves as close to the hole as possible and then crawls back to where I am. “Who built it?” he asks.
“Ha
“That explains your psychotic personality,” he mutters before leaving.
I watch the rural brigade guy because he looks like he’s going to be our number one prophet of doom.
“Jude? Can I have a word?” he asks. There’s this look between them that I don’t trust.
“You’re going to ask him how long they can stay down there, aren’t you?” I say, looking to Jude for the answer. “How long they have left.”
There is silence for a moment and even Santangelo pulls his head out of the hole just to hear the answer.
“Fastest anyone did it was twenty minutes: Narnie. It was because she was small so Jessa and the other little girl have got that on their side.”
“Her name’s Chloe,” Mr. Palmer informs him.
“Slowest?” I ask.
“Forty minutes. One of us fainted down there and by the time we got him out he was having trouble breathing. You’ve got to understand that you’re not actually crawling through a tu
“Webb?” I ask.
He nods. “Webb was stocky.”
“Why did you let Jonah go, then?” I ask, angrily. “He’s massive and he’ll get stuck.”
“Because he’s still smaller or fitter than any of us. Besides he won’t freak out and he’s got endurance and believe me, Taylor, down there…”
“…you see the devil because it’s so dark.”
He nods. “I did the whole return trip only once and vowed I would never do it again. It was different when we were building, because we started digging from both ends, so we’d only have to crawl for half the way.”
“So how long have they been down there?” Santangelo asks.
“I’m guessing they would have stayed in the room until the smoke became too much for them. I’d say it’s already been thirty minutes.”
“Wouldn’t they have got to this end by now?”
No one says anything. Santangelo’s head disappears in the hole again and I look at Jude, wanting to read something, anything, on his face.
We sit next to each other in silence while the emergency crew comes in and out and the ambulance officers begin to arrive. Sometimes I see Murrumbidgee faces at the door but Santangelo’s dad instructs Richard to take them upstairs to the senior rooms. Because he thinks they’re going to be wheeling out bodies through the dorm and he doesn’t want the kids to see them. For the billionth time I feel sick.
“She didn’t write about being in the tu
“She didn’t write about a lot of things.”
“Why? Was being in the tu
I don’t think he likes that I know the intimate details of their lives.
“When Webb didn’t return from the tu
“Do you think he told her something?” I asked. “Maybe he told her that he was leaving you all. Maybe he’d had enough of Narnie’s depression or Tate wanting to consume him. Maybe it wasn’t Fitz after all….”
“No, I think he did something in the tu