They came in a trailing group through the cave, following the lit passage. Aviston-Tresco was not with them. His exertions in the early morning must have been too much for his lacerated forearm. The appearance of the three men who led the way made it likely that they were sporting farmers, but they had not the tough, humorous faces of the breed. Though it may have been the hard light on high cheekbones, they seemed to me to have a common quality of cold, puritan self-discipline. I’d have trusted any of them where money was concerned, but run a mile from any contact with his private emotions. Then came the Bank Manager accompanied by a mild friend of the Fosworthy type with a thin, fair beard.
Miss Filk followed, a square and decisive Diana, leading two of her Dobermans. It said something for their training that they could negotiate the ladder. She made the casual group look like a procession, and I felt that her hounds would not be out of place in the painted cave. That seemed to be the lot, and I had high hopes of running for the entrance as soon as they had passed out of the cavern. Whatever Fosworthy said, the chap left in charge of the hatch and the switches was going to experience violence if I could get at him.
And then, behind the rest, came Jedder with Undine. She was well wrapped in a fur coat of her own. Her slender neck vanished into its illusory protection like a pencil of cascading waiter into rock. Impossible not to speculate on where it went. Difficult to accept the answer: nowhere. I must admit that in the underworld she was exquisite.
I could see that she had not been let into the secret before. The wonder and excitement in her face were genuine. Jedder and Aviston-Tresco had taken a chance that she would keep silent out of loyalty to Miss Filk or else they meant to give her a formal Apology later—in which case they might well have received one in return from her formidable protector.
It was hopeless. Fosworthy rushed away from me, grotesque as some emaciated ape from the depths of the limestone, hobbling on one foot with his filthy sheepskin flying behind him. His Dulcinea received him with her usual immaculate sweetness. She had clearly been warned that this was; likely to happen. She knew from her own experience that he was wildly eccentric in spite of his strange charm, and she may have thought it a kindly act to trap him for his friends.
‘You never told me you had joined us,’ he said. ‘I never knew.’
‘But you will come back with me?’
‘It’s quite all right, Barnabas,’ Jedder assured him.
He was in a daze of weakness, and in the presence of his Undine only capable of worship. I think that’s the right word. I doubt if he formulated to himself precisely the tracing of those veins with hands and lips as that Midlands psychiatrist did. He was just certain that present and future were worthless without unspecified union with her. And now the outer world beckoned and Jedder approved and she was willing to be escorted by him back to the light.
But even so he did not forget me. His chivalry, his self-imposed duty to protect me, came up against his infatuation and won.
‘I would like, if I may, to accompany you all,’ he said.
I knew him well enough to see what he was up to. Whenever Fosworthy stopped to reflect, one could hear the wheels go round. He had calculated that if all the party went on peacefully towards the painted cave the way was clear for me to reach the hatch.
Jedder, too, hesitated. I don’t know what instructions he had received from Aviston-Tresco or what he had in store for Fosworthy. The position was very tricky. All those people in the cave knew that Fosworthy had disappeared and why. But how had he returned? Possibly it had been explained to them that he had been found and was being held downstairs until other arrangements could be made. That was a good enough story for the milder souls who were appalled at the thought that he might impetuously publicise their secret but were quite incapable of murdering him.
Jedder had to make up his mind quickly. I am sure that the unexpected and convenient spot where Fosworthy had appeared made it up for him. He sent the others on, and allowed Fosworthy to follow with his enchantress. As soon as they had entered the passage which led out of the cavern, he ran after them. I was just about to get clear of my hiding-place when I saw him reach up and cut the loop of wire which turned the corner. At once and very silently he rushed up the familiar passage before anyone could recover from surprise and start feeling for matches or flashlights. Neither Fosworthy nor his girl had one. I heard the yell—of protest rather than terror—as Fosworthy went over the edge of the abyss, and Jedder shouting:
‘Oh my God, he’s slipped!’
There was nothing I could do. I was in absolute blackness. The whole party returned to the cavern. Some of them now had electric torches in hand, and I watched the beams and points of light flashing nervously all over the place, occasionally lighting a face, usually the lower part of a body. It was a world of shadows and unrecognisable half-humans. I shut my eyes against it and prayed that Fosworthy had been right and that he had in fact dissolved into an existence sunlit and forgiving, not into a hell without certainties such as he had left behind.
Undine was sobbing with shock.
‘He was walking just outside me,’ she kept on saying. ‘Outside me to protect me from the drop.’
‘I tried to catch him as he slipped,’ Jedder insisted.
They yammered uncontrollably, and Miss Filk’s dogs, catching the mood, began to bark. A voice remarked:
‘We have to leave him there. It’s better so.’
‘It will avoid questions,’ Jedder agreed. ‘And I promise you that only three of us know he was ever found.’
I could bear it no longer. I was light-headed with fatigue and hunger and sorrow. If I had not relieved myself by some expression I should have charged out and run amok.
‘You bloody bastard!’ I yelled.
There was panic. Nobody but Jedder knew anything at all of my existence. The beams searched all over the sweating walls which disguised sound. Two or three correctly pinpointed my position. I slid back unseen into the cleft behind me.
Jedder ordered them all back to the entrance at once, but Miss Filk stood her ground. She shouted in her most masculine manner:
‘Who the devil is that?’
And then she let the two Dobermans off the leash and sicked them on to me. I heard them patter over the rocks and into my bolt-hole. There was no handy ledge up which to jump—and I should only have been treed there—but by a stroke of luck Miss Filk’s flashlight as she charged after her savage brutes showed a loose rock.
I lifted it in both hands, like former inhabitants of the cave, and crashed it down on the head of the first dog as he sank his teeth into my shielding coat. The other ran away, howling. It was an uncanny place in which to ask a dog to attack, especially when the eyes of the hunted had acquired mysterious night sight if any light at all was reflected from the glazed wall of the cave.
Miss Filk caught the contagion of terror from her remaining dog and tied herself up among the rocks. She was quite correct in thinking I was close behind her. I badly needed her torch. I doubt if she even knew how she lost it. Her screams brought up some dim figures to collect her who were furiously attacked by the Doberman. Her efforts to control it restored her normally firm character.
I saw their lights disappear on the way to the entrance. I could, I suppose, have chased and haunted the lot of them until they were incapable with fear. But I was on my last legs and in no condition to meet a determined Jedder who knew only too well what my physical weakness must be even if I had survived Aviston-Tresco’s attentions.
So I went back to the recess for the body of the dog and put it across my shoulders, hanging on to the four legs. That collapsed me in a few strides. My civilised intention was to cook the meat, but nature was insistent. Lying there with my head on the warm body and a better blade in my pocket than the flints of the cave painters I lapped back my life as they would have lapped.
I lay there in the empty silence. How long I do not know. It must have been hours, for I became very thirsty and th
e dog was stiffening. I remember whimpering with self-pity as I started for the entrance by the light of Miss Filk’s torch, dragging the carcass behind me. It puzzled me that I had succeeded in lifting it to my shoulders. I must have been compelled by some obsession in my exhausted mind that lifting was the right way. An influence of the hunters, perhaps.
The torch began to fade and glow pink. I stumbled about in a frantic search for paraffin by the light of matches which I had noticed with the lanterns in the changing-room. At last I found a full five-gallon can under the steps, filled a lantern and lit it. That was about the only moment of relief, almost of content, which I had known since I was unloaded into the barn upstairs.
There were some pit-props in the tool store, so I built a fire on the spot and half-grilled Doberman chops over a couple of iron crowbars. They tasted delicious. Two days later, when my hunger was appeased, they tasted utterly foul and I had to force myself to eat them.
Days, I say; but of course there weren’t any. My watch kept ticking, and I cut a notch on the changing-room table for every period of twelve hours. From then on I had an accurate record of the passing of time.
One thing was certain: that nobody would return to the cave until positive that I was dead. They might or might not think of the saving carcass. I reckoned that it would never occur to them. However that might be, I had to face my loneliness for at least a week and probably more. I think now that I should have spotted the solution, although it would have been no earthly use to me since I had not the strength. The long, cool, workmanlike job would have become a mere hysterical tearing at brickwork followed by collapse.
But endurance I had. I put it down to being an engineer with experience of deep mines, for I have no exceptional force of character, only an obstinate desire to live. I refused to spend my time just sitting. I had to find myself things to do. After taking care that there was nothing in the changing-room or gallery which could reveal my presence at a glance, I chose for my headquarters an alcove some way along the passage, but near enough for me to hear any sound from the entrance. Well inside the cave, the air felt fresher than at the dead end. I was afraid that my fire, always glowing but seldom built up unless shivering became intolerable, might use up too much oxygen. It was my source of light as well as comfort. I never lit a lantern unless at work.
I was in two minds whether to mend the lighting system or not, dreading the disappointment when the storage batteries ran down. Of course I could not in the end resist the temptation. I found the break and repaired it and replaced the fuse. Nothing happened. The batteries were dead. Before leaving the changing-room Jedder had short-circuited the lot. It was another sign of his determination to finish with me.
Though I dared not move far from the track of the wired passage for fear of losing myself, I found an occupation in exploring details of geology. I was able to reconstruct a lot more of the story than Fosworthy had told me. Jedder had brilliantly used compass and measuring rods—his naval training—and established that an upward-sloping pot-hole must be nearly under his barn. When he and his friends, after the discovery of the paintings, went to work on it, they drove a rock drill up to the surface and found that Jedder’s dead reckoning was wrong by only about thirty yards. It was then easy to dig the shored gallery through broken rock and earth, and burrow straight up into the barn.
Often I returned to the painted cave, finding more and more in it. A lantern—better still, two lanterns—gave to the beasts more beauty and mystery than Jedder’s too naval lighting.
I had lively company there, for I plotted and analysed the movements of the conventionally drawn little men. It was like contemplating some spirited wallpaper when half awake; one sees designs of which the artist was hardly conscious. I came to know that group of families which had hunted its way up from the Mediterranean following the game to the colder rivers and the young forests. The paintings must have been made during a short interglacial. The ice-cap over Britain stopped short of the Mendips, but would have made the climate too harsh for palaeolithic hunters. Hot sun must be assumed and the conditions, say, of a high Swiss valley in summer.
The ritual of the Apology was plain as could be. And the mammoth deserved it. I could sense their respect for so rare and magnificent a source of meat with a spirit inside it. Could it have been a first arrival as the trees withered and the tundra began, or a last survivor as the interglacial brought up the warmth and the southern hunters?
I think I came nearer to emotional understanding of the effect which the paintings had on Fosworthy. In utter loneliness one begins to remember not only facts but one’s former memories of the facts. My train of thought started with a hungry night in the forests of Honduras. The two Indians with me caught a fat iguana. By the light of our fire I watched it killed, cut up and grilled. Nothing surprising in that. Any country boy has done the same to a rabbit.
But when, back in a modern city, I thought of this slow, pathetic and very welcome lizard I was astonished that the scene in memory seemed to me to have a deeper and purer significance than the mere filling of a belly. In that is a faint reflection of Fosworthy’s synthesis. To him the frigid inhumanity of the butcher’s shop and the slaughterhouse was revolting. So was the taking of life for sport. Like the vast majority of mankind in industrial civilisation, he had never killed in order to live. Even his imagination could not conceive the possibility. It took the paintings to reveal to him that the hunter experienced not only the sympathy with the animal which we all know, but an enrichment of the spirit which we have utterly lost.
Religion was very present in so after-death a place with its single, concentrated glory of art. Though I am not much of a Christian, I have carried for years my King James Bible and know much of it by heart as our grandfathers did. If it is not inspired, then what does inspiration mean? I do not, of course, refer to its historical accuracy or literal truth, but just to its superb language. It was great consolation to me to remember Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord though I have no more conception of what I was crying to than the mammoth in the moment of death. Fosworthy would have said that it did not matter, and I doubt if it does.
These journeys of mine around my tomb, pointless except for keeping up morale, were safe enough while it was day outside. Fosworthy had told me that his people only made their occasional visits in the late evening when all the fields were empty, to avoid attracting attention. The difference between day and night I knew from my twelve-hour notches on the table. So, towards what would be sunset, I came home to my alcove or the changing-room and remained there.
Trying to foresee the actual circumstances of my escape, I had to recognise that I should have more than Jedder and his twelve-bore to deal with and that I could expect no mercy. I think few of the sect would ever have agreed to remove me merely because of my knowledge of the cave; but now I was a witness to the death of Fosworthy and the attempted murder of myself by starvation, to which they were all accessories. Frightened men, able at a pinch to find justification for conscience, would come prepared to finish me off discreetly in case, against all expectations, I were alive.
To escape was going to be desperately difficult if their routine was always to leave a man at the top of the shaft; and it was prudent to reckon on at least one more on guard in or about the changing-room while the rest hunted far and wide for me or my body.
Against all this opposition I had to go up the ship’s companion, along the narrow, earth-cut gallery, up the aluminium ladder and through the hatch. One armed man could stop me anywhere. If he failed, his colleague in the barn had only to pull up the ladder, and there I was.
In the darkness I made vivid pictures of the action to come and forced my imagination to take them slowly and sanely. I saw that I had to create such confusion that everyone would be occupied sorting it out, and the man on top would rush down to lend a hand.
I sawed one of the steps of the companion ladder nearly through on the under side. Whoever stepped on it would crash dow
n with his full weight on the hinder edge of the step below. On this edge I did some inlay work with detonators from the tool-store—ten of them set an inch apart. I tried one out in a small cavity. A flat stone weighing about a pound, dropped from a height of two feet, set it off.
The heavy tools available were designed for shoring, not marquetry, so my booby-trap was a clumsy job. Still, it could not possibly be detected by a man coming down the steps. Some sort of spectacular accident was bound to happen. I hoped it would happen soon, for the end of the paraffin was in sight and I was down to making soup of Doberman bones. A sinewy bitch she was, with little meat on her. I would have done better out of the fine, glossy beast which visited my flat.
On the twelfth evening after Fosworthy’s death I heard some dull sound which was not the last echo of a distant fall of rock. I went up the companion ladder—with considerable care—and into the dug gallery. Feet were trampling at the top of the vertical shaft as the hay bales were removed from the hatch.
That the crisis had at last arrived bewildered me. I had become to accustomed to blindness, silence and withdrawal. Shaking all over, certain that I was going to die, I went into the tool-store and chose a crowbar. I was quite incapable of making any more plans. I simply stood in the passage outside the changing-room, still trembling, and put out my lantern. All positions seemed equally objectless. A sound instinct. What was going to matter were their movements, not mine.
I heard the aluminium ladder go through the hatch and down. A whole platoon of feet, as it seemed to me, scuffled over the rubble of the gallery, and the leader began to descend the companion. There was an almighty crash as the sawn step gave way, but no explosion. The new arrival had somehow managed to miss the step below and the hand-rail as well. He yelled:
‘God! This thing’s rotted, Alan! I might have broken my leg.’
The Courtesy of Death Page 9