'Hang on a minute,' I said. I reached out a hand for the torch. 'What's that up there?'
I'd seen something gleam, a reflection from the torchlight as Amy ranged it around the jagged rock. My teeth were gritted together, hard. I hoped it wasn't eyeshine, light reflected from the retina of some near blind beast that, even now, was tasting us in the air with its salivary glands. Some kind of bat. Something worse. It was that kind of cave. It was a cave to rattle the child in you.
'It looks like some kind of bracket,' I said, once I'd played the beam on its length. It was a rod of some sort, bolted crudely into the rock. There was a cup at the top.
'Gaslight,' Amy said. 'Victorian. Don't worry, we're on the right path. I'd find this place in pitch dark.'
There were more brackets, some with, some without the rods that had held the gaslamps. Soot from long-extinguished flames speckled the rock above them. There were other shreds of evidence of human presence here, although not nearly so old. Takeaway coffee cartons, a page from an atlas, a single glove lying in the wet like something boneless and dead. I found a walking stick propped up at a fork in the cave. Perhaps it had been used as a marker. We used it too.
Now the acoustics were changing, or something was changing them: interference up ahead. It wasn't long before I had to raise my voice to be heard above it. It sounded like trapped thunder. We turned a corner and the beam from the torch disappeared.
'My God,' I heard myself say. It was like stepping out over a precipice. I felt suddenly sick with the impact of it, and could no longer trust the feeling of firm ground beneath my feet. I felt as if we were falling and had to reach out. I found Amy's hand and gripped it.
There was weak ambient light in this open space, this cathedral of stone. I couldn't work out where it was coming from. Perhaps it was being generated by the rock itself, or by the torrent of white water tipping from the ceiling, hundreds of feet above. It was enough, at least, to see that we had emerged into a huge chamber. There was a lake being fed by the waterfall. Off to our right there was either an echo of that storm of water, or there was a second fall, taking the lake's overflow even deeper into the ground.
'There,' Amy called out. She was pointing at a rock that stood by the edge of the lake. There was something odd about it, something different. Unlike the other formations, this one seemed smoother in places, and darker too.
'This is where it happened. Every century.'
'What?' I asked. But I didn't want to know. 'I think we should go. My feet... I'm sure it's wetter on the floor than it was. I'm worried about the tide.'
'Sacrifice,' Amy said. Her voice seemed awe-filled, as if she could grasp the logic of such an act. 'Look.' She trained the torchlight on the underside of the rock. Iron manacles had been driven into it. They had corroded badly, but not to the point where you couldn't tell what they were. Above the stump of rock, visible on the cave ceiling, was a broad, treacly patch.
'More soot,' Amy said. 'Lots of it. This is where they did it, Paul. This is where those children died, where they were burned.'
'To what end?'
A shape reared up to the left. I shouted and stepped back, felt the cave wall like fingers digging into me, testing me for tenderness. It was as if one of the faces I'd seen in these ancient crevices had come to life. I was getting ready to run, certain we were going to be attacked, when it breathed, it spoke, and I recognised him.
'To pacify. To appease. The Craw. It sleeps. But then. Every century. It wakes. It needs. We must. If not. The village. Will sink. Like Dunwich. Everyone drowns.'
Jake came closer.
I started speaking, as much to try to stop his approach. I didn't like his being here. I didn't really like him. 'What do you mean, everyone drowns?'
'The Craw. It takes. But also. It protects. Without it. We die.'
'But there was nobody sacrificed in 1972,' Amy said.
'You know?' Jake asked. Even in the dark I could tell he was taken aback by her statement. A change in his voice, a halting sound to his step.
'She knows,' I said. 'Trust me. So explain that. Explain why we aren't up to our throats in fish and seawater.'
'Interim measures,' he said. 'Trickledown oblation. Subtle rituals.'
'Do you speak a language other than cock?' Amy asked.
'Ask him,' Jake said. 'He knows.'
And I did. Of course, I did. It was in the boxes I'd been burning. All those unidentifiable organic nuggets and spurs, the photographs and letters. Everything drenched in hope and belief and good old human DNA. I was the stop-gap, or rather, the agent delivering these piss-poor substitutes. The Craw was all things to all men. Yes, it was the grievous booty in the boxes left for me to destroy, and a psychological golem created from the fear-clay of all these villagers' phobias. But the Craw was as much mine as theirs. The Craw was the shattered bird and the claw marks on the beach. The Craw was the disease, or the lack in me, the thing that was missing, that allowed me to see the awful repercussions from the near miss had it been an actual collision. The Craw was Flight Z.
'Bad place,' I said.
Jake nodded. 'Bad place.'
'But it's not working,' I said.
'It doesn't. Seem so.'
'What about Kieran Love?' I asked. 'What about Harry Parker? Don't they count?'
'Desperate measures,' Jake said. 'Didn't work. Not native.'
'Then what?' Amy asked.
'You have to wait another hundred years,' I said, pleaded, even. 'Twenty-one twelve.'
Jake's head shook. 'Look around. The weather. The water. Storm coming. Bad things. Moves are. Afoot here.'
I had him in my fists before I realised what I was doing. Amy tried to pull me back but all that happened was that we lost our footing and went down against the jagged edges and the growing puddles of water.
'What do you know?' I hissed at him. This close, he smelled of dry paper and brass polish. Under it I detected notes from the endless drab lunches that he filched from his carrier bags. The sardine paste, the processed cheese squares, the pickle, the egg. I remembered what he'd said to me: Helped us. Burned shit. I wondered what it was I'd burned of his. Evidence, maybe. Something that would connect him to the deaths of Kieran and Harry. Something that could lead me to Tamara. 'You know Tamara? You know where she is? Because if you do and you're keeping it quiet... if you've got her... I'll... I'll fucking kill you.'
'The Craw. Needs offerings. Desires flesh.'
'Where is she?'
'I don't. Don't know.'
'Then what are you talking about?'
'The Craw. Demands flesh.'
'Then give him yours!' I pushed him away and hobbled back to the mouth of the cave, my fingers itching with the need to damage something. Amy caught up with me and we walked without talking, volleying terse, laboured breaths. I kept my eyes on the ground and my hands in my pockets. I didn't care if Jake was following us or stayed put in the cave. He could lose himself in there and die for all I cared.
Amy drove us back to her flat. Once we were inside, I made her a cup of tea and we sat down on the sofa.
'Something went on in this village,' she said. 'There've been deaths here. The police don't want to know because it's ancient history.'
'Keble's hands are tied. You heard him. What's he going to do? Arrest somebody's great grandchild?'
'Children were murdered by their own parents. Something to do with Winter Bay, with the battle there. I think the villagers saw the battle as the end of the world. They'd never seen anything like it before. Fire on the water. Bodies washed up on the beach. Their children stolen in the night by invaders. Maybe soldiers who wanted to rid the place of future generations of opposition. Neutralise the threat. The villagers equated, or confused, the terror of the battle with the loss of their families. A dragon, an erlking, a bogeyman came to steal their young. Who would want that to happen again? And so this myth was born. The Craw. Someone suggested an offering. It worked. No more children were taken in 1772. The village was not su
bmerged. So it went on. And another sacrifice would have happened in 1972 - should have happened - but something went wrong.'
'Or went right.'
'How do you mean?'
I shrugged. 'Maybe the Craw had been satisfied a century earlier. Maybe the villagers didn't need to deliver any more children.'
She shook her head. 'I don't think so. It almost went ahead. There was a massing in that cave thirty years ago, a grand congregation. I felt it so strongly it was as if I was being jostled in a crowd. It was meant to happen. But there was a hitch.'
'The child didn't want to die? Or there was a parent who stepped in? Halted the whole thing from going ahead?'
'That's what I was thinking,' she said. 'That works for me.'
Her flat was a mess. Photocopied sheets of paper were scattered across the floor. All of her files had been stacked against the walls. There were books on Southwick's history, its people, its traditions and wars, and more general biographies of Suffolk piled up next to her favourite spot on the sofa. A notebook, half-filled with scribbles, loose leaves, references, Post-it notes. There was an Ordnance Survey map of the area pinned to the wall above her desk. Green pins scattered across the sea and the sand and the towns.
'I can't help you,' I said. 'It's important, I know. To you and the village. The truth is important. But I've got to straighten out a lot of things. I've got to find Tamara. And I've got to come to terms with who I am now. What I am. I've changed, I don't recognise myself any more, and I need to be able to deal with it. I need to find things out for myself.'
She nodded, finished her tea. 'Where will you start?'
'I don't know. Maybe I'll start with where it ended. The accident site. Maybe I'll find some clue that the police missed. I doubt they even did a thorough search. You think, a hit-and-run, someone makes a mistake and then gets scared, pisses off. You don't think hit-and-run because the guy wanted to actually kill you. I have to believe that now. I have to follow the hunch that he tried to kill me, and that he's got Tamara.'
'I dream of falling,' she said after a few moments of calm. 'More and more. I actually look forward to going to sleep. Falling asleep. When I fell, those few seconds... I felt more free, more alive than I've ever done before.'
She turned away from me and began leafing through one of her books. I left the room and went out into the street. It was cold, still, but there was something in the night, some granularity, some paleness. Something that took the edge off the rawness in the wind.
Spring was coming.
Part Three
The Monkey's Fist
Chapter Fifteen
The Nuchial Loop
I'm in my hospital bed. I'm still deep in my coma. But I'm watching myself, as if I'm some disembodied spirit escaped my corporeal self for a while. A bit of a break from the breathing in and the breathing out. The stutter of the heart. The spoiled limbs. Ghosts don't limp. Ghosts don't have to worry about myocardial infarctions any more. I could get used to this.
I'm remembering something that happened, just before the near-miss. A weekend away with Tamara at an Isle of Skye hotel in the shadow of the Quiraing Mountain. We were tired out from a long, long drive, one shift from Camden - hitting the road at the crack of dawn - to the hotel, and it was closing in on midnight. The staff managed to find us some pea and ham soup and a half bottle of wine. We bolted it down and showered, then shared the wine wrapped in bedclothes, looking out at the fantastic darkness and all the stars and the kyloe in the fields, their long horns gleaming in the moonlight. The shower and the food had revived us. Tamara shrugged free from me and, clad only in a pair of dazzling white knickers, performed a hopek - a traditional Ukrainian dance - on the grass in front of our hotel room. I was laughing so hard I thought I might trip over the blankets and go crashing through the French windows. But I was also fired up with lust for her. She was so beautiful. Such a sexy, unselfconscious woman. We didn't even make it over the threshold back into our room. She smelled of ozone. She was so hot and clean I could have cried.
The door cracks open. Ruth stands in the gap staring down at my withered, pathetic body. She's wearing her crisp, freshly-ironed uniform. She hisses and rasps as she moves towards the bed. She puts a hand on my forehead, and up here, shivering against the ceiling, I feel it. Cool, dry, comforting. Thanks, I say, and she tilts her head slightly, as if she heard something. She checks the life support machine. She checks my notes. She turns and locks the door. She drops the blinds. She undresses me. She undresses herself. Her abdomen is tightening with the baby. Three months now. Maybe four. Her breasts are growing. Her nipples are a deep, chocolate brown. Her skin glows.
She wrenches my withdrawn limbs away from my centre. She straddles me, impales herself upon me. She rides me and I watch from the ceiling, feeling every stroke.
I fade. I'm going back to my body. But I can see now that there's no body to go back to. I see a tuft of hair, some pale fingers sucked into the Y at the top of her legs. She finishes and wipes herself clean and dismounts. She pats her distended belly and gets dressed. I stare down at the wet, empty bed and the scream stays inside me because there is no mouth to release it.
I woke up convulsing, gasping for a breath that my lungs seemed incapable of drawing. My eyes were filling with black grains and it was only when I fell from the sofa on to the floor and the breath flew out of me that I realised I'd been doing nothing but inhaling and it was all trapped inside me. I sat there with my head in my hands, trying to calm down. I chased the feeling deep inside me, wondering if it might give me some clue as to why my dreams were so filled with death, with the utter destruction of the body, but I could only recognise hunger behind it. I laughed - a bitter little shock of air - and pulled on my coat, walked the fifty metres or so to the village fishmonger, suddenly, strangely ravenous for seafood.
It was a good shop, scrupulously clean, with attentive staff; I ate stuff from this place maybe three or four times a week. But something about the shop was off today. The fish smelled past its best. There were tiny holes in the swordfish steaks and I thought of worms burrowing into the flesh. The John Dory, like a grey dinner plate in the centre of the display, was drying out, its eyes shrunken and opaque. A fly danced across the carapace of a crab.
I was about to leave - forget dinner, I'd have a slice of toast and Marmite - when the fishmonger asked me what I wanted to get my hooks into.
'What's good?' I asked, feigning enthusiasm, and he gestured at a tray of squid. Unlike everything else, it looked fresh and bright, as if it would start swimming again if only it had some water to be dunked into. I selected one and asked if he could prepare it for me.
'I can't right now,' he said. 'I've cracked my wrist and my apprentice is late. He's on his way in if you want to wait.' He held up his hand to show me the cast that sheathed it.
I shook my head. 'How hard can it be?' I said.
He shook his head too. 'Not very. It's just a bit... strange.'
I took my white paper parcel back to Ruth's house and found a note from her in the kitchen: Yoga! CU later. x
Thunder coming. You can just hear it, miles away, trembling along the horizon.
I pulled back a corner of the wrapping. I hadn't eaten squid for years. It freaked me out. I suppose people living by the sea just think that everyone eats seafood, no matter what it is. There's no squeamishness here. But I was hungry and I didn't want to search on an empty stomach. I wanted to be blinkered. I didn't want to be distracted by the aroma of dinner being cooked in a thousand Southwick kitchens. Though I was put off by its alien looks, at least the squid smelled good: clean and fresh. Thrown in a blistering hot pan with some oil, lemon and chilli, it would do the trick with salad and what was left of a baguette in the breadbin.
I flicked through a couple of cookbooks until I found a recipe that included details of cleaning and preparing the old calamari. I was further put off by the reference to what was edible: tentacles, ink, body and arms. But I pressed on, gritting my teeth as I
held the cold, moist body in my left hand while pulling out the translucent quill, like some piece of weird packaging plastic, from the sac.
No end to that thunder. It drones on and on as if the lightning that birthed it is endless, a static explosion that feeds itself, wrapping around the globe like a fishing net made of wet fire, snagging in the wrecks.
I thrust away thought of wrecks and concentrated on the squid. I peeled away the purplish membrane that clung tenaciously to the soft white flesh. I pulled away the hard 'ears' from either side of the body. The tentacles were curled inside the cavity, as if it were trying to withdraw into itself, or eat itself. I prised them clear with a knife, intending to cut them away, and core the beak from the very centre of the ugly thing, but saw that something was bound up in the knot of tentacles and slime and guts. I teased it clear with the knife, the dead tentacles reluctant to be parted with its booty: a partially digested fish slithered clear of the squid's clutches with a faintly audible suck. For a moment, before I turned away in disgust, I thought about cooking that too. But it was too pale, too unformed, like a hesitant child's drawing of what a fish resembled. I couldn't stop myself from imagining the knife slicing through its guts - too easily, no bones, no cartilage, like jelly - to find something else within. A finger or an eyeball or a pair of sea-shrivelled lips. Like some ghastly set of babushka dolls.
No longer hungry, I threw the whole lot into the bin and went to the bathroom, where I washed and rewashed my hands with soap and scalding water. It bothered me that I couldn't identify the fish. Its eyes had been almost the size of its head and black with mystery, probably reflecting the cold, benthic depths it had come from. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and my face was not contorted with the disgust of this aborted meal. There was something else there, hardening my features, something determined beneath the soft, broken shape, the jagged, brutal scars. I saw the hard metal of a black car dent my face; the glass of a windscreen crash open and peel back the skin of my arm like a sopping jumper sleeve. The figure behind all that shattered wet ruby and crystal, was he there, in my thoughts somewhere?
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