HOLLY - The loneliest girl in the world • Jayne Sharratt 'Jayne has created an original and wonderful children's story that is exciting yet wisful. A truly delightful novella for kids of all ages'. Sam North

CHAPTER NINE

There was no question that they wouldn’t go down the secret passage. Everything else was forgotten. None of them especially wanted to go inside a mysterious dark hole, but at the same time it seemed as if they didn’t have a choice.
“I’ll go first,” Max said, taking the flash light from Holly.
Holly smiled, and made to follow him.
“Wait,” Sam said. “I don’t want to be last.”
“Well I’m not going to be,” Nic said.
“You go first,” said Holly, standing back. “I don’t mind.”
The opening was low and narrow. They had to stoop when they climbed down the steps.
“We can’t go far like this,” Nic said.
When they reached the bottom of the steps the passage widened and the roof was higher. They could stand up without hitting their heads on the roof.
“Do you think it’s safe?” Nic asked.
Max and Sam shook their heads. “This is definitely one not to tell your mom about,” Max said. “I guess we’ll be fine. The roof and walls all look pretty solid, and we’ll just go far enough to see where it goes.”
The passage sloped gently downwards as they walked. The flash light didn’t show them far ahead and when Nic glanced over her shoulder she could see nothing. She only knew Holly was there because of the noise of her shoes on the stone floor. They had been walking for a very long time before anyone talked about going back.
“We haven’t found anything, We probably won’t find anything, we’ve been down here ages and I’m hungry,” Nic said.
“The treasure might be just a few steps further on,” Sam said.
“I keep telling you,” Nic snapped at her brother. “There is no treasure.”
“You’ll never know that for sure unless you see where this leads to,” Holly’s voice came from the darkness behind her.
Max agreed. “We’ve come so far, and this must lead somewhere. It could take us as long to get back as it would to go forward and see where we get to.”
Nic shook her head, but accepted that they were going to carry on. Nobody stopped. Max, Sam and Nic knew that finding lost treasures in secret passages was the kind of thing that only happened in stories, but they all couldn’t help wondering, what if? So they carried on, and nobody suggested turning back after that.
“Does anyone have any idea what direction we’re going in?” Max asked. Nobody did, and nobody replied. They were quiet again.
Finally the passage began sloping even more steeply, and ended in a steep flight of steps, covered in seaweed.
“So we’re near the sea,” Nic said. She felt rising excitement despite herself,
wondering if Holly’s tales of Smugglers could actually be real. She forgot to hope Holly would be proven wrong for a moment.
At the bottom of the steps there was a wooden door. Max opened it and they walked through.
They were in a cave carved from the cliff face forming a tunnel into which the sea flowed, like a river running back under ground. They were stood on a plateau of rock which ran along the side of the cave. They could just make out the entrance to the cave, narrow and hidden by an outcrop of rocks, and the rain falling onto the sea. Outside they could see the storm was rising in pitch.
Max felt his foot hitting something solid beneath a clump of seaweed. Kicking at it he saw a rusting iron ring set into the rock. “Look, it’s like a secret, hidden harbour. It must have been used by smugglers in the old days.”
“Let’s have a look further in,” Sam said.
“I’m sure we’re close to finding something,” Holly added.
Max shone the light further back, and around the walls. “OK,” he said.
“The floor’s slippery,” Nic warned, after her feet had nearly gone from under her once.
“I’ll shine the torch on the floor,” Max said. “Then I can warn you where the seaweed is, or the floor’s uneven.”
“We can’t see ahead of us, now.” Sam complained.
“At least we can see where we are, right now,” Nic pointed out. “It’s better than ending up in the sea.”
They looked below them at where the waves washed against the rock ledge they stood on. They couldn’t see much, they heard more, but they thought it seemed anything but calm. Water dripped on them through cracks in the cave roof.
“It doesn’t look the same sea,” Nic said, thinking of the perfect blue by which she had sunbathed for the last week.
They carried on.
“Wait! I’m going to stop,” Max warned from the front. They had been making slow progress when Max halted them all together.
“What is it?” Sam’s voice hissed in the darkness.
Max was crawling on the floor, using the flash light to see, shuffling backwards. There was a puzzled note in his voice. “I...thought I saw something...” he said.
Standing up, he turned to them, the light in one hand shining on something else, something he held between the finger and thumb of his other hand.
“A cigarette stub?” Sam asked.
For a moment the chilling significance of the discovery didn’t sink in.
“It means we’re not the first people here recently,” Nic said.
“We might not be on our own...Those men we saw, it must be...”
“Max...?” Nic pointed over his shoulder. She had seen a large mass looming in the
water, bobbing in the waves.
Max turned and pointed the light on it.
It was a boat. Not an old fashioned smugglers wooden rowing boat, or a pirate ship. This boat was a gleaming white and chrome modern speed-boat.
Before they had time to think about this they were stopped again, this time by a noise behind them. Footsteps and men’s voices, in the darkness.
“Quick,” Nic whispered, hoping her voice was low enough not to echo. “Go on,”
Max edged forward. A moment later his whisper had a hint of panic in it. “The ledge runs out. There’s nowhere to go.”
“Hide,” said Sam.
Max had switched the light off, so no one would know they were there. They felt around them in the dark, hoping, but their hearts were sinking, and their chest’s tightening in fear. They knew there was nowhere to hide. They stood in the shadows, hoping somehow they would not be noticed, waiting for the owners of the voices to appear.
They were seen straight away. The man with dark hair and flashing white teeth picked them out with his powerful flash light.
Sam yelled and made a run for it, attempting to dodge between the two men. In a moment of scuffling and loud shouts he had been overpowered. The way out was blocked and the bigger of the men held Sam in a tight grasp, a hand over his mouth. Sam bit it, the man yelled and held on tighter.
“You’re hurting me,” Sam yelled.
“Let go of my brother!” Nic yelled, realising how stupid she sounded. There was nothing she could do, except feel angry and helpless.
“It might teach you to mind your own business instead of messing in other peoples’ affairs,” said the thinner man.
“We weren’t,” Nic said. “We just found this passage, and wondered where it went. We’ll go now, if you like, we won’t tell anyone, just let us go.”
“I don’t think so.” Neither of the men had very pleasant looks on their faces.
“If you’re stealing my Gran’s treasure, you won’t get away with it,” Max said.
“Treasure?” The men laughed, without seeming very much like they were joking in any way. “Well I suppose you might call it that. See for yourself. Help us load, or the kid gets it.” The man who was still holding the squirming Sam motioned towards the boat with a nod of his head. The other man pushed Nic and Max forward.
On the boat Max tugged Nic’s sleeve. “Where did Holly go?” He whispered.
Nic shook her head. “She must have hidden better than the rest of us. I don’t know. Shhh...”
By the light of the men’s flashlight they saw there were piles of boxes further up the rocky ledge, all stacked and wrapped in cellophane.
“Cigarettes,” Max exclaimed.
“So you are smugglers,” Nic said.
“Just get these on the boat,” the man said.
Reluctantly Max and Nic helped the dark haired man load the cargo into the speed-boat, while the other man stayed with Sam.
“What now?” He asked gruffly, when all the boxes of cigarettes were on the boat.
“We’ll leave them here, and get back to the ship.”
“The kids? And...you know,” the man still holding Sam nodded back down the tunnel.
“Yeah,” he was told, by the man who seemed to be the leader. Nic got a look at his face for the first time, closely in the light of his flash-light and she gasped, then frowned. Something about him stirred a chord in her memory.
Sam was thrown to the ground. He yelled in pain. Trying to get to his feet, he sank down again, and turned white. “My ankle, I think, I...”
“Well, you’re not going anywhere, then, are you? We’ll have time to escape, and you’ll just have to stay here until we feel like letting someone know where you are. By which time I expect you’ll be so weak with hunger, you won’t give us much trouble. That is if we remember to tell where you are. This has been a good hiding place for us, and you kids have ruined it. We may just want to forget you, leave you to the fishes.” With a hard laugh, they jumped into the boat and started the engine. “Smoking kills, kids, remember that, smoking kills.”
In a moment they were gone leaving Max, Nic and Sam in darkness.

Holly was alone, running through the dark. Her feet found hold on the rocky floor, distance disappearing, fear making her fast. Breathing was hard, she thought she could hear her heart, hammering, echoing around the tunnel. There were sobs in her gasping breaths. For the first time she was afraid. She had never thought there could be any real danger in leading her friends down the passage. She had to get them help in time, and she wasn’t sure she would be able to.
Finally she reached the entrance to the secret passage, and crawled through into the chapel. On her feet again, she stumbled instantly and fell to her knees. The ground was gravelly and stung her to tears. ‘I should never have made friends with them,’ she thought. ‘It’s all my fault.’
She found old Mrs Tempest asleep in an armchair in her bedroom. Holly hesitated a moment before shaking her shoulder, trying to be gentle.
“Yes? Oh! Who is it?” Mrs Tempest blinked her pale blue eyes in fear. She looked at Holly. “It’s you. Have you come for me? Is it time? My time?” Her voice wavered.
Holly shook her head. Her whole body shook. She felt faint. She had to explain,
before it was too late. “No, no. I know you don’t understand. But please. Please. You have to help me. Please.”
Mrs Tempest still looked puzzled and afraid, but she listened to Holly as she told her story. And then she reached for the telephone as Holly’s strength faded away before her eyes.

“Are you OK, Sam?” Nic sat next to her brother on the rocky ledge and rested his foot across her legs. “Can you find where your flash light went, Max?”
Max was groping in the darkness. A minute later he found the torch. The light flickered a moment, and Nic had time to see Sam’s ankle, swollen red and blue, before it went out again.
“It must have broken,” Max said, shaking it, and flicking the switch on and off in frustration. “Or the batteries are out.”
“We’ll just have to feel our way back to the door. Do you think you can walk, Sam? If you lean on Max, and I lead the way?”
Sam sniffed. He might have been crying, but nobody could see. “I’ll try,” he said.
He didn’t see that he had much choice.
“Well, Sam go on the inside, we don’t want you over balancing and falling in the water. And Max, take my hand, and I’ll feel the way with my other hand, that way I suppose we might get somewhere,” Nic said all this a little breathlessly, and began to lead the way back along the length of the ledge.
“Where did Holly go?” Sam asked.
Max was concentrating hard, and feeling dangerously close to the edge. He didn’t feel like starting a conversation as well, so he didn’t say anything.
Nic shook her head. “I don’t know. We just thought she must be hiding somewhere.”
She called out. “Holly? Holly?” Her shouts echoed around them.
“Holly?” Sam joined in, his voice considerably weaker. His shouts tended to end in a loud sniff.
They finally got to the part of the tunnel where the ledge widened, where the door to the secret passage they had come through was. There was a very little light from the entrance of the cave, which they could just see in the distance. The rain was like a sheet over it now, and they saw the sky flash with lightening. The drips of water from the roof were becoming larger and more regular, and in some places they were a constant stream of cold rain water.
Nic helped Sam sit down for a moment, and Max drew a sigh of relief.
“So where is Holly?” he asked.
Nic shook her head. “She must have got out, gone back,” she said.
“But how could she?” Sam asked. “We would’ve noticed.”
Nic shook her head. “It was dark, and she’s pretty agile and sly. And you know how she made sure she was always at the back of us.”
“That was only because you were afraid of being last. Holly’s not scared of anything. She wouldn’t have left us.” Sam said loyally.
“She probably saw a chance to go back and get help,” Max said.
“But how could she when the men were behind us?” Sam asked. “She couldn’t have, they’d have seen her. What if she’s back there, hurt or something, on her own?”
“Sam, Holly can look after herself,” Nic said. “She must have sneaked past, that’s all. We’d be much better off getting out of here, than sitting around talking about it.”
Max helped Sam back up from the floor, and they made their way to the door. It was shut. They pulled at the rusted iron handle, but it was no good. It wouldn’t move, and it was too solid to even think about breaking it down.
“I can feel a keyhole,” Max said. “It must be locked.”
They went back to the waters edge.
“Holly can’t have gone back through the secret passage if the men locked the door when they came through it,” Nic said.
“No,” Max said.
They sat down. They didn’t care about the slimy sea weed any more. They were soaked to the skin by the dripping rain water anyway. Nobody said anything for a while.
“Have you got your phone?” Sam asked suddenly. His ankle was so numb he didn’t feel it anymore. His idea gave his voice sudden hope.
Nic fumbled in her mini see-through rock sack, wondering why she hadn’t thought of it before. She found the phone. “Yes,” she exclaimed. She switched it on, her face lit for a moment by the garish green light. It faded. “No. We’re stuck in a big hole in a cliff. There’s no reception.” She flung the phone angrily in the sea.
“That’s going to do us a lot of good,” Sam said sarcastically.
Nic glared, but it was lost in the darkness.
“What shall we do?” She asked after a while. She sounded frightened.
Nobody had any ideas.
“Where did Holly go? I mean maybe she knows another way out, and she’s gone to get help.” Max suggested.
Nic remembered something. “That man. The one who made us unload the cigarettes. I recognised him. At least, I think I did. I’m sure he was the man in the sports car we saw. Holly and I. Her step-mum was with him.”
“I recognised them too,” Max said. “They were the men Holly and I saw that night, you know. They were in a red sports car.”
“So that means it must have been the same man,” Nic said.
“Holly didn’t tell me she recognised him. If she knows them...” Max’s voice trailed off. He didn’t want to think about it.
“Holly led us down here,” Nic said, her voice rising, her hand gripping Max’s. “All the time she’s led us everywhere, controlling everything, telling us what to do, and we’ve just let her. The only way she could have got out of here is if those men let her. She’s led us down here, to die...”
“Don’t be stupid,” Sam said.
“Why, why would she do that?” Max asked.
“I don’t know,” Nic said. “But where is she? There was always something weird about her. I always thought there was something funny about her eyes.”
“You did not,” Sam said. His protest was weak. He was tired and lent his head against Nic’s shoulder. She idly put an arm around him.
“Maybe I should go and have another look along the ledge, check Holly’s not there, fallen, or something,” Max said.
“She won’t be,” Nic said. “We would have seen,”
“Well there aren’t many other logical explanations,” Max said. “Unless you think she walks through doors.”
Nobody said anything. Max stood up. “I have to just check,” he said. “You stay here with Sam.”
Nic nodded. She had no idea of going anywhere.
“Aaargh!” Sam pulled back suddenly from the edge of the rock where he had been sat. “A wave hit me. It’s cold. Uuurgh.” He was struggling to his knees, trying to move away from the edge.
Nic got to her feet as well, and helped him up. She peered down, to where her feet had been. They were in a thin layer of sea water. She hadn’t noticed because they were already so wet.
“The water’s rising, isn’t it?” Sam was sounding panicky. “Isn’t it Nic?”
Nic nodded. She closed her eyes a moment. “It’s high tide. And there’s a thunder and lightening storm,” she muttered, her voice hollow. “We’d better move. Max!” She called out. “Max?”
There was no answer. Only an echo.

© Jayne Sharratt. 2001

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