The crack went up and down, wavering through the hill. Then Father stopped. He couldn’t turn his head to speak, but he could crouch on his heel. ‘Climb over,’ he said.
Mary pulled herself across his back. A side of wall had split off and jammed in the passage, almost closing it.
‘Can you get through there?’ said Father.
‘Easy,’ said Mary.
‘Get through and then listen,’ said Father.
Mary wriggled past the flake and stood up. The passage went on beyond her light. Father’s candle made a dark hole of where she had come, and she could see his boots and one hand. He pushed the bobbin of bad ends through to her, and six candles. He kept hold of the loose end of silk.
‘What’s up?’ said Mary. ‘What are we doing?’
‘You still want a book for Sundays?’ said Father. ‘Even if you can’t read?’
‘Yes,’ said Mary.
‘Then this is what we’re doing,’ said Father. ‘So you listen. You’re to keep the lucifers dry, and use only one candle. It should be plenty. Let the silk out, but don’t pull on it, else it’ll snap. It’s to fetch you back if you’ve no light, and that’s all it’s for. Now then. You’ll find you go down a bit of steep, and then the rock divides. Follow the malachite. Always follow the malachite. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘After the malachite there’s some old foxbench, then a band of white dimension, and a lot of wet when you come to the Tough Tom. Can you remember it all?’
‘Malachite, foxbench, dimension, Tough Tom,’ said Mary.
‘Always follow the malachite,’ said Father. ‘And if there’s been another rockfall, don’t trust loose stuff. And think on: there isn’t anybody can reach you. You’re alone.’
‘What must I do when I get to the Tough Tom?’ said Mary.
‘You come back and tell me if you want that book,’ said Father. ‘And if you do, you shall have it.’
‘Right,’ said Mary.
The crack in the hill ran straight for a while and was easier than the first part. She held her candle in one hand and the bobbin in the other. She had tucked the other candles and the lucifer matches into her petticoat. She went slowly down the rock, and the silk unwound behind her.
The steep was not enough to make her climb, and water trickled from above, over the rock, and left a green stain of malachite. She stopped when the passage divided, but there was nothing to worry her. She went to the left, with the malachite. The other passage had none.
She took the silk through the hill. The green malachite faded, and she passed by a thin level of foxbench sand, hard and speckled.
Then the walls were white. She was at the dimension. The crack sloped easily downward and was opening. She no longer had to move sideways. Her feet scuffed in the sand, but in front of her she could see brown water.
Mary held her candle low. At the bottom of the wall she saw the beginning of a band of clay, the Tough Tom red marl that never let water through. She went forward slowly into the wet. The floor was stiff and tacky under her boots, and behind her the silk floated in curves. But the crack went no deeper. The ground was level, and her light showed a hump of Tough Tom above the water, glistening.
Mary stopped again. There was nothing else, over, behind, below; only the Tough Tom humping out of the water, and the white dimension stone. And the crack finished at the end of her candlelight.
‘Father!’
There was no reply. She hadn’t counted how much silk had unwound.
‘Father!’
There was plenty of candle left, but it showed her nothing to explain why she was there.
‘Father!’
Not even an echo. There wasn’t the room for one. But she turned. There hadn’t been an echo, but her voice had sounded louder beyond the Tough Tom.
Mary scrambled up the hump, slithering in the wet. Then she looked around her, and saw.
The end of the crack was as broad as two stalls and as high as a barn. The red Tough Tom was a curved island above its own water. The walls were white and pale yellow. There was no sound. The water did not drip. It sank through the stone unheard, and seeped along the marl.
Mary saw Father’s mason mark drawn on the wall. It was faint and black, as if drawn with soot. Next to it was an animal, falling. It had nearly worn itself away, but it looked like a bull, a great shaggy bull. It was bigger than it seemed at first, and Father’s mark was on it, making the mark a spear or an arrow.
The bull was all colours, but some of the stone had shed itself in the damp air. The more Mary looked, the bigger the bull grew. It had turned around every wall, as if it was moving and dying.
Mary had come through the hill to see Father’s mark on a daubed bull. And near the bull and the mark there was a hand, the outline of a hand. Someone had splayed a hand on the wall and painted round it with the Tough Tom. Fingers and thumb.
Mary put the candle close. A white dimension hand. She lifted her own and laid it over the hand on the wall, not touching. Both hands were the same size. She reached nearer. They were the same size. She touched. The rock was cold, but for a moment it had almost felt warm. The hands fitted. Fingers and thumb and palm and a bull and Father’s mark in the darkness under the ground.
Mary stood back, in the middle of the Tough Tom, and listened to the silence. It was the most secret place she had ever seen. A bull drawn for secrets. A mark and a hand alone with the bull in the dark that nobody knew.
She looked down. And when she looked down she shouted. She wasn’t alone. The Tough Tom was crowded. All about her in that small place under the hill that led nowhere were footprints.
They were the footprints of people, bare and shod. There were boots and shoes and clogs, heels, toes, shallow ones and deep ones, clear and sharp as if made altogether, trampling each other, hundreds pressed in the clay where only a dozen could stand. Mary was in a crowd that could never have been, thronging, as real as she was. Her feet made prints no fresher than theirs.
And the bull was still dying under the mark, and the one hand still held.
There was nowhere to run, no one to hear. Mary stood on the Tough Tom and waited. She daren’t jerk the thread to feel Father’s presence; he was so far away that the thread would have broken.
Then it was over. She knew the great bull on the rock enclosing her, and she knew the mark and the hand. The invisible crowd was not there, and the footprints in the Tough Tom churned motionless.
She had seen. Now there was the time to go. Mary lifted the thread and made skeins of it as she went past the white dimension, foxbench and malachite to the candle under the fall.
Father had moved to make room for her.
‘Well?’
‘I’ve seen,’ said Mary. ‘All of it.’
‘You’ve touched the hand?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought you would.’
They went back to the shaft, and up, and out. The sky seemed a different place. All things led to the bull and the mark and the hand in the cave. Trees were trying to find it with their roots. The rain in the clouds must fall to the ground and into the rock to the Tough Tom.
‘That’s put a quietness on you,’ said Father.
‘Ay.’
They came over Glaze Hill.
‘Why