The tunnel entrance

Source: an original fiction extract.

“The walking path ended at the mouth of an old railway tunnel. A notice said the route through it was closed, but the alternative climbed a steep hill before joining the river path again. Alex's boots were already wet, and the map showed the tunnel as a short straight line. His friend Mo studied the notice, then the path uphill. Alex said they could at least look inside. The entrance was wide enough to make the darkness seem less serious from where they stood.

Cold air moved out of the tunnel with the steady breath of something sleeping. Water ticked from the bricks, each drop striking a different note on the stones below. A pale circle of daylight showed at the far end, small and perfectly round, like a coin held beyond reach. Between the two openings, the walls disappeared into a depth that Alex's phone light could not measure.

They stepped just far enough in to see the first curve of the ceiling. Alex said the other end was clearly visible. Mo pointed to a patch where bricks had fallen onto the old track bed. He said that visibility was not the same as safety. Alex disliked the calmness of the sentence. He took a photograph of the distant opening, making it larger on the screen with two fingers. In the enlarged image, the loose bricks were outside the frame.

A train sounded somewhere beyond the hill. Its low vibration moved through the ground, and a small piece of mortar fell beside Alex's boot. He stepped back so quickly that he struck Mo's shoulder. They stood outside without speaking. The train had not passed through the closed tunnel; another line ran farther down the valley. Still, Alex could feel the vibration after it had ended. He put the phone in his pocket.

The climb was longer than either of them expected. Halfway up, Alex stopped to empty a stone from his boot. Mo waited without saying anything about the tunnel. At the top, the river opened below them in a broad silver curve. Alex took another photograph, this time including the path they had climbed. He did not delete the first one, but he did not send it to anyone.”

Refer only to the second paragraph. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the tunnel’s deceptive mixture of invitation and danger. Support your ideas with quotations from that paragraph. You could consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.