The antechamber door to the mill had been left ajar, and from within the large room Selina could hear Hannah and Morag chattering worriedly.
‘Oh, Selina,’ Hannah said, her face white, as always, with flour.
‘Selina, thank heavens you’ve come, there’s been a bit of a drama!’
Asking what was wrong, the building answered with a juddering tremor, dust glittering from the rafters, and Morag explained anxiously that something was stuck in the waterwheel below the mill, most probably a length of driftwood, or some other kind of debris. It had clogged the gears of the millstone, and had shaken the very building, sending dust and empty bird nests from the rafters before the stone shuddered to a halt.
Selina asked why they had called for her, and Hannah, wide-eyed said, ‘You’re a stick! Look at you! We didn’t want to bother the men, they’ll think we can’t keep safe our station... Though we had to tell Semi otherwise he'd have tried to make our lives a misery.’
‘Being as thin as you are,’ Morag continued, ‘we thought it best if you tried first, you know... to crawl into the shafts below, and remove whatever it is.’
‘You’re joking of course. I’ve seen down in those shafts. They’re dirtier than Betty’s arseh...’ She stopped herself. She’d been in their company too long, she thought.
They lead her to a rusty sheet of iron that, when removed, opened into a dark passageway, the sound of rushing water was distant in the blackness below.
She considered chimney sweeps of old who became stuck in flues and suffocated alone in the dark. She mentioned her thoughts sarcastically, but they told her they had never heard of such nonsense, thrusting a solar lantern into her palm.
Hands on her back, they ushered her toward the opening, saying they had lost an hour of the day already, and that she must hurry. Whatever was down there was playing merry havoc with the structure. Selina squeezed into the tight space and descended into the gloom, aware that Priya might consider herself lucky to only have to contend with children’s vomit.
Once in the confines of the passage, she was overcome by a macabre sensation that the women would return the iron sheet and leave her there as a joke. She feared she would panic and imagine drowned bodies in the darkness ready to pull her down into the depths. Her heart fluttered at the thought, in the quivering light of the narrow tunnel such thoughts seemed all too real, that dwelling on them for a time might make such things tangible. She called for them to stay by the opening, and to talk to her constantly so that she might stay calm. Hannah replied that they would, a little perplexed by her anxiety, and the two of them began a conversation about nothing in particular.
She came to a junction, one conduit veered horizontally into blackness, and the other continued downward toward the sound of violent water. The bricks became damp the further she edged downward, and a dark sludge soon made them slippery.
‘So much for keeping it clean down here!’ She shouted as she gripped the stonework, aware that a wrong footing would send her sliding down into the darkness. In reply she heard a laugh and knew the two would be elbowing each other in delight.
Selina descended cautiously, finding it increasingly difficult to keep her footing on the century-worn brickwork. Her breath came hard, and she recalled her first coming to Mortehoe, ascending the rocks to see the battered crewman and the beach of dead. Once again her thoughts dwelled on drowned bodies in the darkness and she had to stop to convince herself that there was nothing down there waiting to grab her.
The din of running water had grown, and reverberated loudly in the confines of the passage. She stopped, and manoeuvred the lantern so that she could see how far she had left to descend. The dark rushing waters were closer than she thought, and it looked as though the water consisted of nothing but yellow bubbles and foam. She found some iron pins in the walls and used them as a footing and a lantern hook. Then, with a flexibility she was unaware she possessed, she twisted in the confined space until she was facing downwards.
Blood rushed to her head, she felt dizzy and nauseous, and a repetitive thought remonstrated her for not securing her waist with a rope.
With echoing grunts and curses, she lowered her body towards the water, her knees and back pressing against the wet brickwork, the bubbles splashing against her forehead. She was sweating, though the cold that radiated from the frothing waters made her shiver at the thought of plunging her hand into it.
Despite this, she tested the iron nail for its strength and then reached forward with her free hand and thrust it into the water.
She gave a start, her heart skipping a beat, before she grew quickly accustomed to the temperature. She felt along the slimy bricks until she came to the wheel, its boards choked and clogged with something quite solid. She lowered herself a little further, cringing at the searing cold, so as to rummage deeper in the water to examine the obstruction.
It didn’t take her long, though she didn’t expect to find what she found. It was hard, bulbous, and weeds had enveloped it. Selina tightened her grip on the object, and instead of being hard she found it instead to be spongy. Frowning, she gave a tug. Then another.
It was stuck fast.
Her face was pressed against the rushing, violent waters as she edged forward and closed her fingers around the object.
She twisted it gently and then wrenched decisively. She felt something pop, the object dislodged, and Selina knocked the brick wall with her elbow, exclaiming, ‘Christ!’
She looked at the wound in the yellow darkness, and saw it was bleeding.
She held the object in one hand, and then pulled herself upright with the other. Pressing her back against the slimy wall, she held up the object that had ground the mill to a tremulous halt.
The bloated eyes of Breaker stared back at her, shining in the lantern-light; his muzzle torn off and left behind in the waterwheel. Selina gasped, and a sharp, rotting stench filled the passage. She tried to cover her mouth with her wrist, though that only brought the rotten, matted carcass closer, filling her lungs with the putrid, burning stench.
She only breathed when necessary, holding it as she climbed back up the slippery bricks toward the light of the mill, the sound of the water decreased, Hannah and Morag’s nonchalant conversation overcoming it. ‘… Still burns those herbs of hers, and the baby coughs out the evil…’
As she turned at the junction, they heard her grunting, and coughing, and scraping along the walls, and laughed to see her.
‘Here she comes, what was it, Selina? A stick? A rock?’ One of them shouted, though she didn’t know which.
They saw Breaker’s upper torso in her hand, and they stopped laughing. Hannah turned pale, and Morag gasped - putting her hands to her mouth.
‘Goodness, what is that? A rat? The damn thing’s enormous!’ Hannah said, leaning a little closer to see. ‘Lord, is that Ted’s Breaker?’
‘Oh, poor Breaker!’ Morag lamented, reeling.
Selina reached the top of the passageway, and shook the snout-less dog from her sticky hand, it slid wetly on the floorboards, leaving a trail of dark fluid in its wake.
‘How did he get down there?’ Selina shuddered, wiping tears of disgust from her eyes.
‘Poor Ted,’ Morag said, shaking her head. ‘He loved Breaker so dearly.’
The three of them stared at the carcass in silence, not sure what to do with it. Surely Ted wouldn’t want the body back in such a destroyed state.
‘Must have got into the air duct,’ Hannah said to herself. Morag looked up to her and agreed.
‘Then it was always going to be the waterwheel or the furnace. Nowhere else to go, is there?’
Selina looked up to the small glass panels of the furnace room and thought of Breaker ending up in there, thrashing against the window of the cast iron feed door as his flesh melted, the smell of burning hair engulfing the mill. For the first time she considered drowning as being a more preferable death.
George slipped through the door from the antechamber and saw the thr
ee of them standing motionless. He had a broad smile on his face, so eager was he to take Selina aside and tell her what he had discovered about Hannah and Morag at the hotel.
‘What’s happened?’ He said hesitantly. By the look of them someone had died. He followed Selina’s gaze across the floor and saw a large wet lump.
‘What the hell is that?’ He sneered, stepping toward it. ‘Oh my god is that an animal? How did that get in here?’
‘It’s Breaker,’ Morag said quietly, ‘he got trapped in the wheel.’
‘That’s disgusting.’ George lamented, lowering himself on to his knees and inspecting the carcass. ‘Does Ted know?’
‘Not yet.’ Selina offered. ‘We only just found him.’
‘He’ll be devastated.’ George said to himself, thinking it probably wasn’t the right time to tell Selina his newfound information.
‘Take the poor thing outside before he stinks out the place, George.’
‘What?’
‘All those rocks and irons you lift with Baron and you’re not brave enough to pick him up?’
‘The rocks and irons we lift aren’t all covered in guts, I...’
‘George, for fucks sake,’ Selina burst, tears pricking her eyes, ‘I've just climbed down to the wheel and pulled him out of the water. He’s fallen to bits in my hands. The least you can do is take him outside.’
George looked at the three of them for a moment and then stood, shoving the dog inches at a time with his foot. ‘Egh! Sick! There’s stuff coming out of him!’ He said, pained.
Hannah and Morag gave him exasperated looks and went about their business, while Selina looked at him savagely and shook her head. ‘If you can't do that properly maybe you can go and tell Ted. Can you manage that?’
George nodded meekly, wondering how he could have fallen so sharply in her estimation.
Chapter Twenty-Five.
Stone Hill.