The Lost Cavern

by H. F. Heard

  I had clear proof of all these suspicions in a few minutes. Naturally I kept my eyes on the spot where the noise had come to rest and silence. At first I could see nothing, and then something did appear. Knowing that if you are to see with night-sight you mustn’t glare at the spot you wish to sense (that, too, you learn in the unlit places of the world), I swung my eyes to and fro and then up and down, to straddle the spot, as it were, and try if any kind of impression of shape would be yielded to me. And as I raised my eyes I did get a piece of information, which, though it gave me no news of my actual situation, promised I might later know more. I ought to have remembered—there was a moon that night and its light was beginning very faintly to percolate indirectly. It would, I judged, have some of its rays cast on the deep splays of the high, small windows. And so, into this gloom below, a kind of tertiary twilight would distill. Certainly the light—if light it could be called, and not diluted gloom—increased; and, finally, I had no doubt. Against the north wall, about one-third of the way down, a figure was standing. Further, that figure was facing toward me.

  I don’t know how long we stayed like that. It was, I suppose, after the few moments in which one has the kind of relief that comes from knowing a little where you are and what you are up against, that I felt again the oncoming tide of distress. Some powerful current was being generated, and as it stepped up I felt the growing torsion of its whirlpool rotation. What was it? And, even more, what was that other force against which it pulled so desperately? I was in it but not, thank Heaven, quite of it. I was in the millrace of those cross tides but somehow—how in Heaven’s name can I put it?—somehow like a swimmer in the lee of a small rock or sandbank. Around that shelter the swirl and race of these awful tides swept and rushed and kept almost snatching me out and away from my cover. But something kept me from being torn away and swept into the deep. I know that by then I was physically clinging to the front of the pew with a grip that could have raised my whole body. And I was also peering as anxiously as the lookout man in a typhoon to see if by any chance the storm would check and lull.

  So it was that I noticed one more thing. This was a physical thing, I’m sure, and just because it was physical, though Heaven knows it was uncanny enough, it actually distracted me from my basic panic. That, I think, helps to show how much more terrible was the atmosphere of that place than any material happening could be. I could now see the size of the figure—it looked like that of a fairly tall and very thin man, and I was also pretty sure now that the arms were stretched out toward where I crouched. The first sign that anything of a phenomenal nature was about to take place was, indeed, about those arms. For I began to notice that I could see the hands with increasing clearness. What had been simply the suggestion of an extension, now, I could see quite clearly, were hands. For they were lit more clearly for the moment than any other part of the shadowy person. The trebly diluted moonlight could not account for that. There could be no doubt: they were shimmering with a light that came from them. I said, though, that they were lit for the moment more clearly than any other part of the dim figure, for it was only for the moment. Just like a very faint moonrise, I began to notice another light, or another area suffused by this weird glow. Where I judged the head to be, my judgment received a painful confirmation: for two ember spots of light began to glower. Again my experience in the wilds gave me the answer. There could be no doubt, for anyone who had ever been in the night-jungle, that what I was seeing is what naturalists call the tapetum—that frightening phosphorescent glow given off in the dusk by a wild animal’s eyes when suddenly he turns them on you. It can also be given off by human eyes if they have been out in the nocturnal world and shunning for long the day. I remember a witch doctor I once passed in the dusk gave me a shock in that way.

  I often wonder how long we remained confronted like that. I had no more power to move than a bird has when a snake has it well under its glare. Besides, there was another thing I must try to make clear. I’ve said that this force, though very near the pressure which would penetrate right into me (forgive such terms, they really do describe something), was not quite of that quality. I could feel it beating against some very thin partition which still, thank Heaven, separated me from it. And, also, I would like you to recall, it was not actually aimed at me. At whom, then, was it aimed? Well, that was why I couldn’t get out. Do you see, I was wedged in, caught, trapped by some pressure, some dreadful pack that was somehow gathered by the force ahead of me and was being held by that force. I was, in fact, in between a nightmare tug-of-war and had the feeling that if either broke I would be torn from all my moorings in space and time and dragged helplessly—and here is the center of my problem—either into utter horror, an utter horror that somehow had risen and flooded up round me, or into an utter terror, that lay ahead of me, that poured out from that figure that stood over against me. That figure, I now knew, stood for two things: in the first place, it was the vent through which drove this terrible, utterly inhuman force, and, in the second, it had roused this other force, this force of horror, this flood in which I was involved—but not yet quite swept away or liquidated. It was then that I realized, with a kind of self-contempt, that, ghastly as the horror was, somehow it was nearer me, more kin, I have to confess, and that if I had to choose one or the other, mad and base as it would be of me, nevertheless I would be forced by my physicalness, my animality, to choose the horror, not the terror.

  I don’t know whether that decision really decided anything—I hope and trust now that it didn’t. But I know that, not long after I had recognized this dreadful fact about my own nature, the atmosphere began to be less of a torture, the pressure was being remitted. It ebbed, and I was able to notice that the baleful light on the hands and in the eyes died, or I no longer could catch them. The moon, too, was evidently moving, so that the faint light on the deep window-splays above was no longer present and the place grew darker once more. In the deepening gloom I finally lost sight of the figure altogether.

  It was then I heard movement again. It, too, was a movement of ebb. The sound was once more of something moving with unutterable fatigue, on the very verge of final exhaustion. I know it stirred the first nonselfish emotion in me. I felt I ought to go and offer some assistance to one so spent, so wounded. But, on the life of me, I could not. Granted, there was a creature—I could not say a fellow creature—in this terrible place; granted he or it was in ultimate distress; yet I could not bring myself to go toward it and offer any aid. I had no strength in me anyhow, and the thought of coming nearer to that struggle roused my panic again, to full pitch. I cowered back farther at the very thought. And then I became aware of something I’d forgotten all this while: the other force that ran just in front of me, that had been there, I now realized, all the while, and over whose margin and bed I had been looking at this awful, and still, to me, utterly incomprehensible drama. No, I said to myself, of course I couldn’t go, even if I wished—there’s that frontier. And with that thought, or, as I believe, discovery, a kind of relief came: I knew I was free. I waited till that unutterably sad trailing, dragging sound died away, ending with a click. Then, after a few moments, when no more sound came, I rose slowly and silently, as one moves in a dangerous place, and stole out.

  When I was under the faint stars I looked at my watch; it was past midnight. I was home in some twenty minutes. It was all downhill, and you may be sure I didn’t loiter. They had left some warm drink for me in a thermos and a little food. I drank, but ate nothing. When in bed I lay with sudden attacks of rigor shaking me like a fever. But, after an hour or so, I slept.

  My sleep, was, I think, dreamless, but I woke up knowing I had been through something that had left its mark. Still I was not late for breakfast, and the strain, I soon recognized, was not in that level of me which would interfere with the office routine. But it was somewhere, nonetheless. And it showed its strength in this way. I found that if I tried to drive the thought of the chapel out of my mind, then I became disturbe
d and distressed. The only way to get on with one’s work—and then one could do well enough—was to give it the harborage it demanded. It did not wish, as far as I could judge, to intrude into my day’s duties. But it demanded that it should be granted the station it had taken up: a kind of sentinel on the pass between my office life in the world of the great cause, the war and mankind’s future, and this other world into which I had stepped just hoping to rest a while from things which were too real, this other world which had now shown me that it had its own forces and struggles of such unsuspected intensity that beside them our squabbles might prove to be the shadows. Well, I had no choice. My work, after all, came first. I must do it under those conditions which my mind—for I still thought that was the limit of my involvement—chose, rationally or irrationally, to impose. So one side of my mind didn’t think too much about the chapel but did keep its image hanging there, and the other side, the business side, had to allow that and go on with its work.

  But as the week wore on I realized that this was simply an armistice, and a very unstable one. I realized that I would have to meet some kind of decision when the week ended. Indeed, by Thursday that was so clear that I tried to get out of it by going to the doctor. And of course, as I ought to have foreseen, he threw me right back into the midstream that was carrying me along into the dark—or, if that’s too dramatic, into the utterly unknown. I told him frankly that I felt the long afternoon on Sunday was too much of a good thing and wouldn’t he let me, say, take off an occasional afternoon when I wanted; I even fibbed and said office pressure was greater now, and a little later it would be easier to take off such a long regular spell. He actually laughed at that.

  “Classic excuse mechanism and, I expect, a lie to boot! Don’t bother; of course, we all lie when our real interests, our subconscious drives, are involved. I’ll take you on your own ground, and, mind you, think nonetheless well of you for it. Granted that you want to get away out of this setup (and who doesn’t who’s sane at bottom?), you can’t get away decently or in fact actually. I can’t let you, no one who could, can—unless you can have a nice neat little nervous breakdown—well, that looks nice enough, doesn’t it? We all know about you, quite well-known civil servant, was home on sick leave, war comes, joins up, overworks. ‘Of course,’ says his last remaining aunt, ‘they should never have taken him, straight, as you might say, from his sickbed, and broken him like that! What fools these men are! And, believe me, they are said to have doctors, if I may use such a name, to help them!’ And you’ll settle down at Eastbourne with her, and she’ll spider-web you with shawls and gruels and blankets and Bath chairs and she’ll live to ninety on your illhealth, and you’ll be dead in half a dozen years, and she’ll get all your savings and have, too, a permanent grievance against the government.

  “Yes, she’d do very well out of it. But I don’t see why you should be vampired in that way, and all through your own fault; and I’m not going to let you. This beast of a war will spend itself in time, and I’m going to bring as many of my patients through as I can. Believe me, I know something about it. You’ll go for your Sunday afternoon trail whether you like it or not, or I’ll somehow get you for insubordination. For if you don’t, let me tell you, not only will you get queerer and queerer, but it’ll spread; it always does.

  “And now I’ll tell you something just to show that though I’m speaking to you like a schoolmaster, though you’re older than I, I do want us to be colleagues on this your health as on the rest of this lousy job. Do you know that you’re feeling that the walk is bad just because it’s doing you good and showing how much you need it? When I was doing my psychiatry we were lectured by a doctor who, in his researches, had looked into the way that various systems have found they could stave off nervous strain. One that stuck in my mind had to do with those oddest of all odd people, the Carthusian contemplatives. Well, I don’t think any sane man, outside the Church that has to bless them, would call their way of life normal or fairly safe. But they’re no fools, he told us. Do you know that they all have to turn out of their fuggy little holes and leave their mumbling offices, I think they call them, once a week? Once a week—mark me, my dear patient—the abbot clears out the whole frowsy brood, and they have to air themselves about in the sane countryside. Indeed, he said one abbot remarked that he’d rather excuse them from all sorts of scoring points, such as fasts and not having enough sleep and Heaven knows what other record breakings, than let them off from their weekly trail. So I’m not going to let you off, not I!” And he laughed me out of his office.

  And in a couple of days it would be Sunday. Well, there was nothing to do. I just drifted, and in the back of my mind the chapel loomed clearer and clearer. Of course, all those days I didn’t go the combe walk home. I worked late and actually went back with a colleague the ordinary way through the town. Yes, I think I can say I gave myself every chance. I didn’t run on my fate. It ran me down with the ease with which a greyhound runs down a winded hare.

  Sunday was fine again. I went the same walk. It was the line of least resistance. And certainly neither the doctor nor myself nor anyone else could have questioned the health and value of the first part. I found my place up amid the gorse again. It was even quieter. For though the year was a week older, the quiet weather had held—these gentle remissions that autumn will make to summer, recalling the preceding performer for one more bow before putting on its own more rousing act. The whole air was golden, the distance lost in haze, and everywhere in the foreground the grass, weeds, and hedges laced and gleaming with the trailing filaments of the gossamer spider, fine lines of wavering light giving a delicate gilded beauty to every object, faint lines of iridescence making the harshest outline vague and opalescent.

  I stretched myself again, and though, when I was spread on the earth and to the sky, the chapel did not actually leave the frontier of my mind, it did take on some other kind of significance. There was mystery there, awful mystery, but somehow it was not mystery without meaning. That mood—not of hope, still less of curiosity, but I think I can say of interest, or perhaps I ought to say, if you will excuse the word, of faith—lasted with me on the way back. Indeed, I think it was that which made me submit without a struggle to the realization that I should not be able to pass that small door on my way home. I should go in, come what might when I was again within.

  I was pretty tired when I came abreast of that last rise. I don’t think I paused to recover breath even, but, just as a blind animal stumbles at the end of the day into its stall, I turned into the narrow duct that led from this world, with what it considered its all-engrossing tragedy and conflict, into that other, that other beside which our outer struggle was a nursery mishap. I placed myself. No, I had no fear, no reassurance that I would find a harmless little evensong twittering away its ineffectual platitudes in this spot now. I realized the change in myself when I found passing through my mind a fleeting wish that it might have been so. No, I was here beyond amusement or boredom, out in another world, a world of desperate business—what I learned, after, a great expert, Bernard of Clairvaux, called The Business of Businesses, but which was to me then simply “Negotium perambulans in nocte,” the process that was working out itself in the darkness.

  I settled into what I now felt to be my place. I was even aware of my frontiers, as it were: the margin on which I was drawn up and that other side where that conflict, all the more awful because indefinable, swayed and lunged and swept in waves right to my feet and against my breastwork. I was all the more surprised, then, that on settling down, my breathing being eased, I found, not peace but a kind of vacancy. It was a hush; and then I understood: it was a hush of waiting. We were crouched expecting something to arrive, something which maybe was, could it be, late, hindered, postponed from being here at its appointed zero hour. This kind of thought, if it can be called anything so definite, was only forming in my mind. I had, in fact, just turned round in my mind, as you might say, to ask myself what I meant by such a fancy an
d what in particular did I mean by saying “we” were waiting, who could be waiting but myself? And then speculation was swept out of my consciousness like a heap of dried leaves by a blast of wind. For the arrival had taken place, the presence was here, the conflict was to be joined at once.

  I tried to use my surface senses to the best of my powers. I knew that my power to endure, perhaps my sanity, would depend on keeping up that defense of objectivity, of object and subject, of here and there and now and then. So I looked about me and was able to scrape together a few such supports. I noticed that there was again the faint moonlight, and it was not weaker than last week. I was even able to say to my mind, “Of course, of course; because after seven days what was only a moon of the first quarter declining is now one getting on to the full ascending.” The much greater volume of light was already striking on the deep splays of the windows above and casting down a twilight which allowed objects in their main masses and color contrasts to be made out. I could see that there was some kind of simple altar right at the other end, and I thought I could make out that about one-third of the way down the north wall was some sort of small pulpit or maybe a reading desk. My mind also was able to move a little. By that I mean I was able to think—“Then that must have been the spot and place where I saw the figure at my last visit. It moved from the altar and stood at that lectern.” There was something reassuring in making out that the being or creature had followed a route which complied with the ordinary lines of a familiar liturgy and rite.