The buried canal ended abruptly. Rosemary and Lucy-Anne came to a halt, standing side by side and shining their torches at a blank concrete wall. There was graffiti carved into the concrete, incongruous in such surroundings and more disquieting because of that. ‘We've come heer to hyde.’ The mis-spellings made the pronouncements even more otherworldly.
“Who wrote that?” Jenna asked.
“It looks very old,” Rosemary said. “To be honest, it's the first time I've seen it. I came from the other way, remember?”
“So where is the other way?” Lucy-Anne asked, her question bearing a challenge. Jack thought she was getting nervous.
“Can't you see?” Rosemary said, a hint of humour in her voice that Jack didn't like. She was supposed to be leading them, not testing them. But then, she was from out of London. Perhaps being in a position of power was something she was not used to.
Jack and the others shone their torches around, looking for where their path might continue. The combined lights lit up the whole end of the tunnel, revealing little but wall, ground, concrete ceiling, and the old, crumbling tow paths on either side.
“No,” Sparky said. “I don't see.” He spun around and played his torch behind them, his action instantly making Jack nervous. Trap? he thought.
“Down there,” Emily said. “Look! It looks like a wave of mud, but it's fresh.” She aimed her torch at the base of the graffitied wall, revealing a drift of canal-bed mud resting against the concrete. It looked unremarkable to Jack; just another hump in the old canal's uneven floor.
“Good eyes,” Rosemary said.
“SuperGirl,” Emily said matter-of-factly, and everyone laughed.
Their spirits raised, the others stood back while Sparky and Emily scooped away handfuls of loose dirt, slowly revealing a dark opening at the base of the wall. It was small—barely large enough to crawl through—but Rosemary assured them it was the way to go.
“If I can do it at my age,” she said, “all of us can.”
“So you hid it on your way through?” Jack asked. “Buried it?”
“Yes. Ruined my nails.” The old woman smiled, but in torchlight it looked grotesque.
“Why?”
Rosemary frowned, and Jenna and Lucy-Anne aimed their torches at her face. Jack held back a laugh; it was like an interrogation in some crappy movie.
Cringing against the light, Rosemary turned away. “It's a secret,” she said. “This way, this route, no one knows about it. No one but Philippe and me, and now you.”
The torches lowered, giving light to Sparky and Emily once more.
“Everything's a secret,” Rosemary continued. “We're going towards a place where secrets are currency, and survival means stealth. I never liked London before Doomsday, to tell the truth, but these days, I like it much less. It's as if in moving on, we've also regressed. Trust is a thing of the past.”
“Tell me about it,” Lucy-Anne said, and Rosemary looked at Jack's girlfriend, her eyes sad and heavy with the terrible things they had seen.
“We trust you,” Jack said, surprising himself. Lucy-Anne glanced at him, eyebrows raised. “We do. We trust you. You lead us in, and we'll help however we can.”
Rosemary smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “All of you. But sometimes…” She drifted off and stared at the concrete wall.
“Sometimes what?” Sparky said, panting. He stood, face grimy and hands filthy from the dirt.
Rosemary sighed. “Sometimes, I think we've passed the point of no return.”
Rosemary went first. Sparky offered, but she insisted, waving away objections and borrowing Sparky's torch. Maybe Jack's statement of trust had given her strength, or perhaps it made her want to prove herself more.
Lucy-Anne felt a begrudging admiration for the old woman. But trust? Not yet.
“Only a few feet,” Rosemary said. They watched her crawl into the narrow crack at the base of the wall, pulling with her elbows and pushing with her booted feet, and the light she carried threw back curious shadows, as though there was something down there with her.
“I'm through,” Rosemary called. Her voice was muffled, and came from miles away.