Deep Shelter Read Online Free Page B

this where you take all the girls?”
    “I only found it today.”
    “What is it?”
    “It’s a bomb shelter from the Second World War.” He retrieved a first-aid kit from the dorm, emptied it onto the warden’s table and unscrewed the bottles: reds, blues, whites. Pills to make you bigger, pills to make you small. He read the labels again: the drugs apparently belonged to Site 3. Where was Site 3 and its party?
    Jemma took her drink and sat on his lap. She plucked a carnation and threaded it into her hair. She kissed him.
    “We’re celebrating a windfall,” Belsey said. “Plan is we enjoy ourselves, then take the bottles up. I sell them and we split the profit. You could walk off a few hundred quid up.”
    “Just for coming down here?”
    “For helping me carry them up. That’s my estimation.” He poured more champagne. They drank, kissed again and he slid a hand under the frayed hem of her cut-offs. She wriggled off him. Then she blew the candles out.
    “Wow.”
    There was that velvety darkness again. They were sinking through it. Belsey found his lighter and waited. He felt a hand on his crotch. Then it went. Then a few seconds later a torch beam appeared, deep in the dorm. It was Jemma.
    “Happy birthday to us,” she sang.
    Belsey stood up, felt his way to the dorm entrance and watched her explore among the bunk beds and boxes of drink. She clicked the Maglite off then on again.
    “Can you hear something?” she said.
    “What did you hear?”
    “I don’t know. Where does it all lead?”
    “It doesn’t.” He returned to the table, lit a candle, opened the rest of the first-aid boxes and began filling his jacket with their contents. He was uneasy.
    “Jemma?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Be careful.”
    “Why?”
    “Break a leg down here and I’m not sure they’d get the ambulance down the stairs.”
    She giggled. He downed his champagne. Then he heard a man singing. It was very faint. Belsey told himself he was imagining things.
    “Jemma?”
    “Nick? Is that you?”
    The birthday candle flickered. Belsey looked around. Something at the back of the dorm creaked stiffly.
    “Hang on, Jemma. Stay there.”
    Belsey took the candle and walked into the dorm. Bunk cages danced in the wavering light. No sign of her. He waited for his date to jump out. That would be classic. She didn’t.
    “Are you OK?” he called, and his voice sounded like the voice of someone on their own.
    Belsey made a circuit of the dorm and arrived back at the spiral stairs. But he would have heard if she went back that way. He called up them, then returned to the warden’s post, pocketed the box of candles and walked through the dorm again. The candles were pathetic. He used the light from his iPhone instead. He headed past the cases of champagne. Had she been drunk enough to fall? Maybe she was pre-loaded when they met. At the end of the dorm he saw that a bunk had been pulled askew to reveal another door out. This door had been painted over at some point, forced open more recently. The wood around the lock was splintered. Belsey walked through into a narrow brick passageway. It turned sharp left after a couple of metres and you were at the start of a low, rounded tunnel. The tunnel stretched as far as Belsey could see.
    “Jemma!’
    He began along it, running. Thirty seconds later he saw something on the ground and the nightmare became a little more concrete. It was Jemma’s bag, the strap broken at one end, a sequinned purse still inside. No phone—but he’d felt that in the back pocket of her shorts. Belsey checked the break of the strap and listened to a silence that now had a very different tenor. He headed on, still gripping the bag.
    The tunnel presumably led to the other shelter entrance. It was just about tall enough to stand in. Belsey could hear his own blood pulse. He couldn’t hear anyone else. He half walked, half ran as much as the narrow strip between the curved sides allowed. It was marked with tracks where