A Whisper of Southern Lights by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online

rocky ground. There was an open doorway set in the concrete wall, but beyond, when it was illuminated by a heavy lantern Gabriel found in the plant room, I saw only bare rock. It was an unfinished room, entry to a ghost wing of the prison that had never been built.
    “So, we dig through rock,” I said. “A tunnel. Genius.” I’d expected much more from this man. I’d been waiting for him to lead us to a hidden doorway to the outside. A route back to Britain, perhaps, bypassing all that painful, cruel distance in between.
    “A ready-made tunnel,” he said. “Look.” He shone the lantern to the left, and the light slid from the curve of a manmade form.
    I went closer to inspect it and found the large, wide head of a pipe curved up from the ground. “Drain?” I asked.
    Gabriel nodded. “Our way out. Now let’s break it open.”
    “What sort of drain?” He did not answer, and as we went to work with rusty tools I began to wonder just what we would discover upon breaking the pipe.

    Days earlier, when we had first arrived, there had been running water. Pipes hammered with fluctuating pressure, toilets flushed, we drank and washed. But soon after, the water supply failed. Toilets rapidly became unusable, and men found other places to defecate.
    The drain was tall enough to walk in, and knee-deep in shit.
    I fell back when the shell of the pipe broke, forced away by the stink that gushed from the rupture. Gabriel glanced at me and hit the drain again, shattering a large portion of it with one careful blow. He leaned and shone the lantern both ways.
    I heard things running, splashing and squealing in there. I gagged, calmed myself, then retched a thin, painful fluid. There was little food for me to bring up, and my puke was a sickly green.
    “We have no choice,” Gabriel said.
    “I do. I’m not crawling through that only to be—”
    He shone the lantern at the ceiling so that it illuminated both of our faces equally, then came closer and stood before me. “We have no choice,” he said again. He carried no gun or knife, but I heard the threat in his voice.
    “So is this kidnapping now?” I asked.
    “Rescue.”
    “Even if I don’t want to be rescued?”
    “You want to stay? Do you? You know what they’re like. You know what’s going to happen to most of those men up there; they’ll be used as slave labour up-country, then executed when they become unfit.”
    “That’s just a rumour.”
    “It’s a fact. The Japanese have no respect for surrender.”
    “So if I do decide to stay . . .”
    Gabriel leaned in closer, and I could smell something on his breath that I did not like: age. He was an old, old man, even though he appeared only a few years older than me.
    “You can’t stay,” he said. “We have to find the grave your friend dug and read the note he left. It’s important.”
    “For you.”
    “Perhaps not only for me. I don’t know. I’m still no closer to understanding.”
    I approached the fractured drain, trying to breathe lightly. But nothing could hide that stink.
    “How long is this?” I asked.
    “I have no idea.”
    “But you knew it was here?”
    “I surmised.”
    I nodded. “You go first.”

    The stuff in the drain had a crust across the top of it. I hoped it would hold our weight, but it crumpled and cracked and our feet went through, and that disgusting mess came up to just above my knees, warm and vile, and there were things running across the hardened surface, rats and beetles and fat spiders whose weight could be easily supported. I caught only brief glimpses of them as Gabriel swung the lantern by his side, and I puked again at the smells that rose around us. There was no air movement at all down there, nothing to purge my lungs, and every minute I grew more amazed that I was still alive. We moved on, crunching and slopping, and the mess seemed to be getting deeper the farther away from the prison we went.
    “Will he follow?” I asked.
    Gabriel turned around, and I