Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  “Caves are dark whether the sun’s shining or the moon’s up, no?” Kerner said. “My mate’s on duty tonight. We can get in without paying. And anyway, the cavern’s closed while they do some exploratory digging. I think they’re going to go deep. Open up some new chamber that has never before been seen by human eyes.” Kerner deepened his voice at this last sentence, turning to Don and peering at him with theatrical menace.

  “What’s your interest in this place?” Don asked Kerner as a black-clad figure in a peaked cap swung open the gates and directed them to the cavern’s mouth. “I thought you photographed broken things.”

  “Not exclusively. Anyway, I’m not working. I might not even switch my camera on.”

  There were signs saying NO ENTRY and DANGER. Another which read: CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC UNTIL JANUARY. Don felt a pang of claustrophobia when he saw the size of the entrance. He would have to bend over slightly, and then the gap narrowed and the ceiling came down farther and it was as if he were being swallowed by some gigantic, scabrous throat.

  When the cave was first discovered, back in the 1500s (Kerner explained), long before explosives were used to blast a more comfortable passage, you had to crawl through on your belly.

  Don felt water drip on to his neck. He could feel the damp in the air. There were footlights guiding you into the cavern along a concretized strip, but then the cave floor took over and it was uneven, treacherous. There was a giddy moment when he wasn’t sure if he was even the right way up.

  We become so used to flatness, to stability, he almost said to Kerner. The horizon and the vertical. Take the straight lines away and we lose direction.

  Kerner seemed to have no such problem. The bigger man bustled through the gap as if he were pushing himself to the front of the queue on sale day.

  “Shouldn’t we have a guide?” Don asked.

  “No guides for us,” Kerner said. “I know this place like the back of my gland. I slipped Mac back there a tenner. He’s happy to warm his hands on another cup of tea. We’re doing his patrol for him. We’re doing a public duty.”

  Don didn’t like that. He had never strayed too far away from the rules. Even when teaching, he stuck to the tried and tested. A gradual accumulation of knowledge. A natural progression. Chords. Barre chords. Finger-picking. Scales. Power chords and riffs were not on his syllabus. It was lazy. It was a fast track to sloppy playing. You had to have the foundation. Deep roots. Core. He was an oak, Don decided now, enjoying the analogy. It was distracting him from the pressing in of the cave walls. He was an oak to Kerner’s weak bough, flapping in the wind.

  “You’ve been in here before then?” Don asked, to stop himself from laughing.

  “Many times. I could serve as a guide myself, I reckon.”

  “Do you have a torch?” The entrance lights only illuminated so far. Up ahead, the blackness was deeper than anything Don had ever known. He had never thought of the dark possessing a physicality, but that’s what it seemed like. There was substance in it. You’d be forgiven for thinking you had to pierce some part of it in order to get through at all.

  “We don’t need a torch,” Kerner said.

  “What are you, part owl?”

  Kerner chuckled. And then light exploded around them. Don felt suddenly foolish. The space within the cavern was voluminous. The ceiling of it was sixty, seventy feet from where they were standing. Its geology seemed a living thing. It was sinuous in some places, jagged in others. He sensed Kerner watching him, his finger on a light switch hidden behind a curtain of rock.

  “Timer switch,” Kerner said. “Switches off automatically, after a while. This place closed down in the 1950s. Lack of interest. Nobody to fund it. It was taken over in the 1970s. Given a real spring clean. They put in the electricity then. No more of those dodgy gas lamps the Victorians used.”

  “The rock,” Don said. He wasn’t sure what he meant to follow that with. It seemed anything he might say would not do justice to his surroundings.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “That it is.”

  “Limestone, in the main,” Kerner said, clearly relishing his role. “You’re looking at rock that was formed around three hundred and fifty million years ago, when modest little Derbyshire was part of a continental landmass close to the equator. Volcanic activity pushed the limestone up and into the fractures that were created, hot minerals poured. So you’ve got your galena, your fluorspar, your barites, your calcite. Veins and seams. Ore. This glittering wonderland. This cave was formed by water. Rain becomes acidic when it passes through organic matter, like soil, as I’m sure you know. It dissolved the limestone. Streams eroded it further. You can hear the water crashing through. We’ll see it up ahead. All this water coming through here, it’s been going on for two million years.”

  My God, thought Don. He thought of Julie. She would have loved this. She had been dead for one year. The water coming through here, it was difficult to imagine it would ever stop. It would still be sluicing through two million years hence. The cave wider, deeper, but essentially the same. People coming and going so quickly, like glyphs on the pages of a flicker book.

  The colors were amazing. Blues and greys and greens. Orange heating up to red. Stalagmites reached up to stalactites, fangs in a closing jaw.

  “How big is the cave?”

  “Who knows,” Kerner said. “It extends farther than anybody thought. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  They advanced through the cave, and it expanded around them. Handrails and steps had been put in. The electric lights, subtly positioned, showed off the ripples and thrusts of rock while ensuring there was no chance of becoming lost. Behind them, the lights shut off, like portions of a stage during a play. It was all very dramatic.

  Don gradually relaxed. Kerner was a knowledgeable and amiable guide and Don grew to become grateful for his company. They walked through various sections, separated by natural kinks in the path they were following; all were given grandiose names: Hall of the Kings, The Chamber of Hanging Knives, Grey Lion’s Lair. The names were attributed to the shapes in the rock. Some looked like crowns, or daggers, or a flowing mane. It was like hunting for faces in the fire, or the clouds.

  The path ran out at a boulder choke surrounded with safety rails and more threatening red signs. Don had been so engaged by the alien surroundings, the assault of the cold and the clean, mineral flavor in his nostrils and throat, that he’d completely forgotten about the lump on his cheek. But now, as its pain re-announced itself to him, he stopped and pressed his hand to his skin.

  “Okay?” Kerner asked.

  “Yeah, just… I don’t know. Spot or something.”

  “Oh, I noticed that too, but I didn’t say anything.”

  Don tried to laugh it off but the sound came out all wrong. Beautiful place, unkind acoustics. “I’m turning into a teenager again,” he said.

  “You should maybe see a doctor. It might be an infection. You don’t want it to become an abscess or anything like that. They’ll have to cut a big chunk out of you. Bad scars. I have photographs of people, post-op. People who had tumors. One guy who was bitten by a flea or a tic or something. Half his face turned rotten, virtually slid off him. Imagine that.”

  Don tried to ignore him. He removed the sticking plaster from his skin and pushed ahead, leaving Kerner to his study of a small, visible stretch of churning water. His fingers fretted at the sore. The surrounding skin was puffed up and tender. There was a hard core beneath. It wobbled under the dome of taut skin, making him queasy. Maybe it was the air pressure that was nagging at it. Or the cold. Something was being drawn out. Maybe it was just time. The body healed itself of most things, given enough time.

  “Look, see,” Kerner said. He was pointing at a small hole in a cluster of rocks at the foot of the choke. “They dropped cameras through that last year and found a huge … I don’t know how you’d describe it… amphitheater of white rock. They dubbed it ‘the blizzard bowl.’ Crystal city. Like landing in one o
f those daft ornaments, you know. What are they called?”

  “Snow globes,” Don whispered.

  “Snow globes, yeah. That’s the chappy. Anyway, the idea is they’re going to send a man down there. Apparently there’s a guy known as Rat lives in the village. Spelunker extraordinaire. He can squirm his way into holes like that. No fear in him. He’s going to see what’s what and then they’re going to open the whole thing up. I mean, it’s anyone’s guess. How far can you go? There might be worlds upon worlds beyond that blizzard bowl. Who knows what we might find? There are new species being discovered every day in the rainforests.”

  There was a moment, just as the lights were turned off, and they began the walk back to the cavern entrance, when Don thought he heard the scrabble of movement, but he chose not to mention it, because he didn’t want to appear nervous or stupid to Kerner. The slide of insecure pebbles. A rat, or a bat. It was nothing.

  “Let’s have a pic,” Kerner said, when they were outside. He got Mac to take a photograph of them, standing in front of the cavern entrance, and then they were ushered out of the grounds and it was much colder out here and the stars were studs of glass scattered across an oily hard shoulder.

  “Nightcap?” Kerner asked.

  Don shook his head. “I’m wiped,” he said. “Thanks for an interesting evening.”

  “Sad to leave ya, Eurasian beaver.”

  “Good night.”

  *

  Again. Did it become a ritual if it happened more than once?

  A hot bath. The Scotch. The music she loved. Oh, I could drink a case of you. He mustered the memory of the smells that made her who she was. Tea tree oil. Fennel. He thought back to the last time they had made love. The flush of red on her chest. The eyes closing. The quickening of her breath. Don, Don.

  Sleep was over him and around him, closing, like a thin blanket, but it was not yet in him. His breath deepened. His eyes rolled back. He submitted himself. Sleep sank into him like something taking a bite. And just at the moment he felt himself go under, he was aware, in the dark, of a shape at the foot of his bed. It was heart-shaped, a muted grey, and it took awhile to understand that it was the shape of someone’s back: the arms and head lost to shadow. Slowly, it shifted. He heard the shiver of nylon moving against itself. He saw the nubs of vertebrae in a spine curve subtly against the fabric of a cardigan. And it was her cardigan. His heart leaped. Until:

  Why are you doing this?

  He flinched. Her voice was? too close, as if she were whispering in his ear. And there was something wrong with it. She sounded as though she was thirsty. The voice, full of holes.

  I love you but you have to let me go don’t blame yourself

  “Julie? Julie, what can I do? Where are you?” He stared at the figure at the end of the bed as it stretched and writhed. “Don’t leave me. It was so sudden.”

  I have to go I want to go to the white I want to run through the snow you can set me free

  The shush of her nylons… but she never wore tights.

  “Julie?” He jerked upright in bed, blinking himself awake. The shape toppled forward, turning. Her hair fell across her face so he could see only a sliver of gleaming eye through the mouse-blonde bands of it. She raised her thin limbs and showed him where she’d cut through the veins of her arms with the shattered remnants of her snow globe.

  The blood hissing like water from punctured hoses, eternal.

  I’d have killed myself anyway, eventually… don’t blame yourself

  In the second it took him to wrench himself free of the bedclothes, winter sunshine was streaming through the window and his alarm clock was droning and she was gone. He turned back to see his pillow, streaked with red. A pebble of glass sitting there like something the tooth fairy had forgotten to collect.

  *

  “Whoa, pal. Easy. What bit you this morning?”

  Don had dropped his glass of cranberry juice. He watched the spreading red stain around his breakfast plates and tried to stop his hands from shaking. Surely everyone could see that. They’d think he’d been drinking at daybreak. Or that he had something terrible to hide. Kerner watched him while he chewed his interminable muesli. His question hung in the air. Don ignored it.

  He poured coffee and tried to hide in its steam. The plaster on his face felt tight and itchy, but he wasn’t going to sit there with a wet hole flapping in front of all these people while they tucked into their grilled tomatoes.

  After his shower that morning he’d noticed there were other points on his face beginning to flare up. Most worryingly, there was an ache building behind his left eye. Another in his chest. The windscreen had shattered into a million pieces. How many of them had disappeared inside him? How many were now worming their way out, rejected by his flesh after the slow journey of a year? In the horror of it, came the thrill. The glass might have connected him to his wife. What if, as he had read once, it was possible for slivers of glass to pass through your body? Perhaps some of them had become embedded in her. He was in her, then, after a fashion. And now that he was here, in Sheckford, some numinous frequency, made in blood, had been opened between them. It was the kind of thing she believed in. The end was never the end. We were all passengers in transit.

  “There’s something wrong with my camera,” Kerner said. “Just found out this morning.”

  “I think there’s a camera shop in the village. Maybe they’d have a look at it for you.” Don hated the sound of his own voice. It was weak, pathetic, more so since his eventful night.

  “Not this. Specialist job, I reckon. Fault somewhere. And not with my picture-taking abilities, for once. It’s as if I’d forgotten to take the film out and rewound it and taken more exposures over the top.”

  “Have you checked that?”

  Kerner gave him a look. He checked his watch. “Hmm,” he said. “Says here that it’s still the twenty-first century. That must mean I’ve got a digital camera.”

  The sudden, spearing conclusion that he didn’t like Kerner. Don was glad his camera was knackered. He hoped it would cost him a fortune to repair it.

  “Look, see,” Kerner said, pushing his bowl to one side and setting the expensive camera on the table. He pressed a few buttons and the screen on the rear flashed up a picture: the one Mac had taken the previous evening.

  Don came around the table and squinted at the glass oblong. “Christ,” he said.

  The two of them, standing in front of the cavern entrance, the blue guide lights set into the floor illuminating them from below, giving them an unhealthy, cyanotic glow. Shadows falling on the uneven rock behind them: Kerner’s, Don’s, and someone else’s.

  “See that?”

  “Yeah. It can’t be Mac’s shadow, can it?”

  “Hey?” Kerner leaned in closer. “I hadn’t actually noticed that. I was talking about that… glow, in your chest.”

  Now Don saw it. In roughly the position where his heart might be, a fist-sized lump of grainy light, like the diffuse aura cast by a sodium street lamp. He pressed his fingers to his breastbone.

  “What could it be?” he asked. His voice sounded perilously close to choking. Tears ganged up. But Kerner seemed not to notice.

  “Could just be some hot pixels on the sensor, maybe. Maybe a lens problem. But I have some pictures I took before and after, and they seem clean. That shadow you point out though… it’s obvious something’s not right. Bollocks. It’s quality glass that. Spent a fortune on it…”

  “I have to go,” Don said.

  Kerner nodded, smiled. His fingers fidgeted with the buttons on the camera body. “Adieu, caribou.”

  *

  Go home. Leave this place. Let it sink into time, let it become a fossil in your memory.

  But how could it? This was as much Julie’s place as his now. They were inextricably linked by Sheckford, the things that happened to them here.

  He was back in his room, standing in front of the mirror, his shirt off, staring at his chest, willing the glo
w to reappear. It’s you, isn’t it! Julie?

  He switched on the light and his breath caught. Two shadows. But one was merely a copy of the other, bounced back by the silvered glass. He pressed his fingers against his skin and felt something hard. It was like a swelling. All of the other hot spots of pain in his skin sang out. He buttoned his shirt and returned to the bedroom. There was a sense of someone having just departed. The mattress seemed to be rising slightly, where it might have cushioned a body moments before. There was a slight shift in the temperature of the room. A microscopic change in its pressures.

  I want to go to the white I want to run through the snow

  The crystal snow globe had been so important to her. It had been with her for much of her life, and it had helped to end it too. She had often told him how lovely it would be to live in a snow globe, to be protected from all the evils in the outside world by that perfect glass. The silence, the beauty.

  He was out of the hotel and walking hard along the street before he had any concrete notion of where he was heading.

  His mind was filled with white.

  Mac let him through the gate but was unsympathetic when Don told him he might have lost his car keys in the cavern. “It’s not really my job to go hunting for lost property. I’m a security guard.”

  “I’ll go,” Don said.

  “I don’t think so. This isn’t a drive-through restaurant. You don’t just pop back whenever you feel like it.”

  A twenty-pound note changed his mind.

  Don steeled himself at the entrance, but only because the pain in his chest ramped up a notch. It was like heartburn, only a hundred times worse. He thought he might retch, but nothing would come when he leaned over. Something felt sharp just beneath the skin. Something was coming.

  He could hear the water plowing over and under and through the rock as it had done for so many millions of years. It had churned through this cavern at the moment of his birth and at the moment of Julie’s death. He staggered along the pathway, grateful for its enormous sound; it meant he did not have to listen to his own skin tearing open.