“I say we go, right.”

“I say we don’t, we should go left.”

“Arthur, left is down, we should go right and up.”

Arthur fought the urge to be glib. It was her fault they were in the mess they were in. She was the explorer, the woman who wanted to know every inch of Ring, her soon-to-be ancestral home. He would have said so too if he didn’t sound like a schoolboy. “Well, this is your soon-to-be ancestral home I suppose you know best.”  It was a juvenile and sarcastic remark, but he didn’t care.

“Shut up, Arthur, this is serious, we are lost!  Something is down here, and we need to find a way out!”

“Will you try to stay calm, Julie, your panic is not helping in this situation.”

“Shut. Up.  Can’t you say anything original?”

“Pardon me dear, but I seem at a loss on how to please you.”

“I don’t want to be pleased; I want some serious insight during a serious time!”

Arthur remained silent and stared at her.  He wondered why he found her attractive; especially now.  She had been crying. Her hair looked like she had showered under raw sewage and her clothes smelled.  In her defense, she had just been through a harrowing experience.  Perhaps when this was all done, he would reconsider their engagement.  She could keep the ring.

“You can keep your damned ring, Arthur.”

Arthur started; had she read his mind?

“I know you had to buy the brand-new shiny thing that cost more than I can hawk it for because your family wasn’t about to relinquish a tiny morsel of the family jewels to bedeck a woman like me.”

“Like you, dear?”

“Yes, like me.  The girl who must work, the girl you met in the shop.  The only shining modicum of thankfulness they have about me is that I worked in a leather goods shop and not a pub.  Well, I’ll tell you what Sir Arthur what’s-your-name, I will apply at the first pub I come across if I get out of this mess.  The. First.  And I will live well, and I will save my money for the books I want to read, and I will buy a little cottage and I will join the CATHOLIC church, you bastard!”

She blubbered again and faced the two tunnels; the decision was one or the other.  Arthur felt an unreasonable disgust.  The situation was sobering, but not necessarily hopeless.  Either tunnel would lead back to Ring; one to the cliff side and the other to the cemetery; the family crypt.  But the crypt was the less inviting, and with the recent panic attack that Julie had, he wanted to avoid the moldering old place.   If he had been with Margaret, she wouldn’t have melted into hysterics.  Her rather long straight nose would have lifted as if she could sniff the correct direction and she would have made her recommendation.  If he had been with Margaret, he would have had proper lighting, good sturdy shoes and a methodical map laid out upon the note pad she always had with her.  She was a romantic woman, but a practical one.

“Yes, yes, you pathetic little man. If Margaret were here, no doubt she would have made everything right, but she’s not here.  I suggest you decide.”

“All right, Julie, but only if you stop that infernal sobbing and tell me right now that you will not blame me if the decision is wrong.  I do not want to spend the next hour or two of my life listening to hack and sob all over the old bricks.  There’s enough water down here and dangers of slipping and sliding, I don’t want you adding to; I can’t stomach that.”

Julie stood gaping at him. 

“Well?”

“All right, I promise,” she said, sniffing hard and wiping her eyes as best she could while squaring her shoulders.  Arthur felt no pang of passion but a softening of his heart.  Julie turned from being a besmirched raving woman to a young vulnerable girl despite the muck and the smell. 

“We go left.  You stay behind me and close.  Here, grab onto my belt.  Don’t let go.  If this is wrong, if there is a dead end, we turn about and try the other tunnels.  No more of your running mad.”

Julie’s eyes watered, but she held onto her emotions and nodded. Arthur knew she wanted to defend herself again, to insist that she saw a woman, a woman in white garb just behind him while they wandered the tunnels he knew.  Julie had screamed, turned in terror and fled.  He had no recourse but to follow, and they had lost their way.  His entire family and staff were no doubt out shouting his name; they had been in the tunnels for at least three hours.  The thought of his mother in any distress caused him to grind his teeth in frustration. 

The tunnel was dripping with water, the old stones were soft with mildew, and the squelching noise beneath their feet would probably haunt Arthur’s dreams if he lived to see another night’s rest. 

“I’m… I’m very sorry I panicked.”

“It happens.”

“But I lead you away from that awful woman.”

Arthur turned around, his ire was rising, “Julie, there was no woman.”

Julie gave a violent hiccup, and her eyes were wide with fear. She nodded at Arthur. He stared at her a moment, hesitated, looked at her once more and then continued in silence. After several minutes, he felt the ground beneath him inclined upward.

He knew that below his home was a deep aqua flow.  The flow was the life-giving force of the place and throughout the history of his family, especially during the broad middle ages, the aqua flow gave the inhabitants of the old keep a source of water during sieges of armies and weather.  Tunnels made by hundreds of hands over hundreds of years intersect below the old keep.  What he wanted to avoid more than anything was a dead end, or a collapsed wall. Back tracking in these labyrinths of darkness would only melt Julie into more hysterics.

Yes, the tunnel was taking a definite slant upward.  He had been correct.  This tunnel was one of the oldest, and they used it in the early middle ages to fetch water from a deep well.  His grandfather had made repairs to the old tunnel when he himself was a young man, when Victoria was early on the throne.  He made a silent prayer of thanks for his family’s bizarre bend toward the macabre. His hand then found something hard and sharp-edged.  Jumping despite he hung on to what he found. With trembling fingertip he traced the lines of a cross, then brushing off the years of dust and mud, he traced the lines of a crucifix.  Success, he had been right; it was the old tunnel, and it would soon open to the night air if memory served right.

“We are close, Julie.”  But he was aware, with his words, that she wasn’t behind him.  Not noticing that the grip on his belt had loosened, so consumed with their forward progress, he turned with a jerk and surprise to no one there.  All he saw was blackness.  No, no, this could not be.  He could not allow her the terror of eternal darkness, afraid and alone, but he struggled to turn back and retrace his steps.  Why?  The answer was obvious; it terrified him.

How could he not notice she was no longer behind him?  How could she have tripped or let loose without a sound?  He pulled at the crucifix upon the wall until it inched upon the brick wall and then pulled away.  Without thought Arthur walked back down, tripped, and fell.  Getting up quickly among a tangle of arms and legs, he pushed himself back.  It was Julie and her body was repulsive to him, as if he had stumbled upon the remains of a stranger in the dark.

Taking a deep breath and keeping a firm grip on the old crucifix, he pulled her by her arms with little ceremony back toward the opening of the tunnel.  She was completely dead weight, her head lulled between her arms and her hair caught on the rough floor, causing her face, pale, open-eyed and ghastly, to look up at him in a blank expression.  Finally, out of desperation, he stooped down and wrapped his arms around her waist, allowing her head to rest upon his left shoulder, her forehead wedged upon his jaw.  It was here he sobbed because he could see that her eyes were glassy and that something had savaged her neck. 

“Arthur!”

His sister Estella’s voice.

“Arthur, where are you?”

He said nothing but kept pulling Julie forward, upward toward the door he knew would lead to the outside, to fresh air, to her cottage, her new job at the pub and all the romance novels she cared to read.

“Arthur!  Oh God, Arthur.  Father!  Father, he’s here.  Help us.”

But it was John Seward who first reached them.  He took the young woman from Arthur’s arms, Estella bent over her too. Silence only answered their entreaties.