Thirty feet above Len’s head, the round cast-iron manhole cover groaned against its seating ring, scraped across the wet stone collar. Then he tipped back with a hollow, metal clatter that echoed through the upright shaft.
A cone of diffuse, emerald-tinted light cut through the rising cloud of lime dust, lighting up the weeping brickwork of the upright access chimney pipe. The lantern beam danced wildly across the void. It caught the churn of white spray fifty feet below before sweeping across the south wall. Then it locked onto Len’s chalk-whitened dark shape. The shaft was five feet in width, lined with curved red brick that had turned black with forty years of coal fumes, its mortar joints eroded by sulfur water drops until they looked like open, weeping mouths.
“Len!” Bram’s voice bellowed down the brick chimney, raw and hoarse from running. “Are you in the water?”
“On the footing!” Len shouted back, his voice scraping against his raw throat as he coughed out another mouthful of dry mortar dust. “Don’t drop down! The center arch gave way! The double took forty tons of ballast into the lower retention sump!”
A heavy, tarred hemp rope, an inch and a half thick with knotted loops spliced every two feet along its length, snaked down through the shaft. The frayed bitter end splashed into the dark current three feet from Len’s boots, trailing a film of greasy creosote across the foam. The smell of cold pine tar and Stockholm oil cut…
