First chapter: Below by David Hill
Winner of the 2023 Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Award for Junior Fiction
David Hill’s first book was published in 1970 and there’s been no stopping the prolific author, writing tutor and reviewer. He has continued to write award-winning books for children and young adults, picking up numerous prizes and awards. Two years ago, he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (fiction). This year, he collected his latest prize at the New Zealand Book awards for Children and Young Adults.
Here is the first chapter from that book, Below.
Chapter One
When you stood deep inside the tunnel, you could hear the mountain groaning overhead. That’s what Liam Geary’s father had told him, anyway. And the couple of times he’d taken Liam inside the Puketapu Tunnel, they’d listened until they both heard it: creaks and crackings as rocks shifted under the billions of tonnes of stone and soil crammed above them; distant rumbles, where mini- avalanches poured into the caverns and chasms that riddled every mountain, no matter how solid it looked.
You didn’t hear those sounds when people were actually working in the tunnel. Giant trucks roared as they carried rocks out from where the TBM, the Tunnel Boring Machine, was working. Drills hammered holes in the walls, to take rock samples, or to bolt steel reinforcing plates in place. Engineers, drivers, machine operators, tunnellers shouted to one another over the other noises. Any sounds of rocks moving somewhere in the mountain were lost in the din — especially since everybody wore ear protection to stop themselves from being deafened.
The first time Liam’s father took him inside — just for half an hour while engineers checked ground level measurements — he told his son that cutting a tunnel sometimes felt as if you were boring into some colossal living thing. Ancient people believed caves and natural tunnels were places where gods and spirits dwelled; Liam had read that in one of his books. So if you started cutting or drilling into a mountain, you were wounding the body of some incredibly old, enormous creature.
It sounded stupid, till you stood inside a big tunnel; felt those billions of tonnes pressing in from above and the sides; heard water dripping from ceilings, or even trickling like something’s blood behind the concrete walls; sensed the blackness that lay beyond the TBM’s blazing lights as it ground its slow way through the stone ahead. Then you knew that a major tunnel like the Puketapu was a place of power, somehow; that darkness and danger lurked all around.
Even just standing in the pale sun beside the entrance, as Liam was doing now, talking to the truck drivers and other workers while their tyres and boots sloshed through the mud of the floor — ‘Time they put you on the payroll, buddy!’ yelled Sonny Ngatai, as his digger swayed past — Liam could believe the black hole in the mountainside was an entrance to a world where humans were tiny and alien, somehow. Sunlight reached only a few metres inside; then the workers depended on banks of electric lights to see. When the other half of the tunnel, gradually carving its way from the far side of the mountain, finally broke through to meet this one, air and light would flow through these rocks for the first time in millions of years. Till then, the depths of the mountain remained an unknown world.
Peggy Chen, one of the geologists, came sloshing out of the entrance in the pink gumboots she always wore, and grinned at Liam. ‘Your dad should be finished in a few minutes. He’s just giving the walls a stroke.’ They stood together, gazing at the tunnel mouth and the green branches hanging over it from the hillside above. ‘Looks good, eh?’ Peggy said.
Liam nodded. ‘Yeah.’ Actually, no. It didn’t look good; it looked amazing. He gazed at the black arch of the entrance, above which a name and date would be carved (but not till the whole project was finished; tunnellers were superstitious about that). Soaring trunks of trees with glossy wet branches clung to the hillside above. Little streams gurgled and bounded down, especially now the sun was shining after days of rain that had drenched the mountain. It was a special place.
All he had to do was try to get Imogen Parkinson to think the same.
