Dark Spell Read Online Free PDF

like one of these pesky tourists. They get everywhere you know, Josh, cluttering the place up. It would be much quieter without them. Still, I suppose they keep me out of mischief.” She exchanged a glance with Callie that could only be described as conspiratorial, then looked round to check there were no inconvenient tourists bearing down on them. “Coast’s clear. In you go.”
    “Thanks, Bessie. See you later.”
    The castle was four sides of a ruin round a centralsquare of daisy-spotted grass, all perched right on the cliff edge.
    Josh wandered round, reading the information boards to work out what the various crumbling walls had been.
    “How old is it?” he asked Callie.
    “I can’t remember when it was built, but it was destroyed in the sixteenth century.”
    “By the English?”
    “No, the French. Some tourists in Pitmillie asked George about it once and when he told them about the French destroying it, they asked him what sort of aircraft they’d used.”
    Josh burst out laughing. “Seriously? In the sixteenth century?”
    Callie nodded, grinning. “Some people just don’t get history properly.”
    They looked over the cliff edge, trying to imagine what it must have been like to watch a fleet of ships come to destroy you.
    “Come on,” said Callie, pulling him away, “I want to show you something.”
    She led Josh to one corner of the ruin, where a flight of steps disappeared down through the grass and underground, for all the world like a giant rabbit hole.
    “A dungeon?” he guessed.
    Callie shook her head and stood aside to let him go first.
    At the foot of the stairs was a tunnel bored into the solid rock, with a handrail on one side and lights cutting through the gloom at intervals. The roof was so low that Josh had to bend almost double.
    “What
is
this place?” he asked as he shuffled along uncomfortably.
    “Wait till you get to the ladder, then I’ll explain,” Callie said mystifyingly, creeping along behind him.
    “I hope it’s not far,” Josh groaned as he bashed his head on the roof yet again a couple of minutes later, but just as he spoke, the top of a metal ladder came into view.
    Josh climbed down the slippery treads and found, to his relief, that he could stand up properly at the bottom. He listened to water dripping from the roof as he waited for Callie to join him.
    “Okay. What is this place?”
    “The castle was under siege and the people outside got fed up, so they started to tunnel in under the castle wall. This is their tunnel.” Callie gestured round them. “But the people
inside
found out, so
they
dug a tunnel to intercept the one coming in. The first bit – where it’s really low – is that tunnel. Come on, let’s go to the end.”
    They had to go carefully: this part of the tunnel was much wetter, trails of moisture on the walls shining in the weak light, and the floor was very slippery.
    Josh reached up to the roof. The surface was velvety-soft – not at all what he had expected. When he looked at his fingers they were black, and he realised that the roof was caked with soot.
    As he stretched to touch it again, a vivid picture suddenly formed in his mind, of what it must have been like down here for the men who had dug it out.
    No light but guttering candles and lamps. The stink of tallow and cheap lamp oil. The noise, endlessly repeated
,
of picks and hammers on rock. The constant drip of water. The fear of rock falls
…
    “Come to the end,” Callie said, breaking in on his thoughts.
    The tunnel ended in a flight of stone steps that must once have led to the surface but had long since been blocked off. Above Josh’s head, thin shafts of sunlight speared down into the dim tunnel in a circular pattern that looked strangely familiar.
    “Recognise it?”
    What was it?
    He went up the steps so he could look more closely.
    “The manhole cover!” he realised suddenly. “We’re under the pavement across the road.”
    They turned to go back. The lights