Annerton Pit by Peter Dickinson

Author:Peter Dickinson
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Open Road Media Teen & Tween
Published: 2014-12-29T16:31:14+00:00

Chapter Seven

The only times Jake had ever “seen” anything had come when he had hurt his head—once when he was about five in a playground when a wooden swing had knocked him unconscious and once, a couple of years ago, when an electricians’ van had lost its steering and knocked down him and Becky Skipwith while they were walking home from school. Becky had broken both legs, but Jake had been luckier and was only concussed. Both times Jake had been aware, as he came to, that something had happened inside his brain which wasn’t seeing, but was like it. There’d been brightnesses, sharp-edged but shapeless, with colours in them. They were part of the pain. Fully conscious he found it difficult to make his memory recreate what he had “seen”, but they’d been there, unlike the occasional tiresome dream he had in which he could really see—only of course he couldn’t, even in the dreams, because his dreaming brain hadn’t got any real experience of seeing to work on. The dreams were just his suppressed and unconscious longing to see, coming out in this frustrating way.

Now, though, as he was half aware of angry voices grumbling into agreement, like a dying storm, he “saw” the flashes and the colours. He was dangling head and feet down, over a man’s shoulder. The man was walking, and at every step the blood seemed to bounce in the hurt cells of Jake’s brain. The wrong side of his head hurt—not the one which had been hit, but the other side. For several paces the colours came and went, and footsteps creaked on pebbles, and the arguing voices dwindled—was one of them Martin’s, further, further away, drowning in the sea and the wind? Then there was numbness and silence.

He came to in a quite different place. It began as a dankness and deadness in his nostrils, and the clicks of falling water-drops in his ears. He was lying on chilly, slippery earth. His head hurt, still on the wrong side. He realised that he must have fallen badly after the man had hit him and caught it on something. He felt sick, too. There were a lot of faint echoes. Each time a drip fell it was answered and answered again, so that after lying there a minute or two Jake knew that he was in a widish tunnel, but close to the end of it. The end, in fact, was a nearly flat surface, made of something less echoing than the walls and roof. The other end was out of earshot. Straining, he thought he could hear the mutter of waves, but not the wind. The smell was very peculiar, not strong or unpleasant, but unlike anything else, heavy and wet and lifeless. The air felt as though it hadn’t stirred for a hundred years.

There was another noise, even fainter than the sea. Jake couldn’t decide whether it was real, or was only an effect of the fall—a low, continuous, throbbing hoot.

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