The Lost Cavern

by H. F. Heard

  As he said that, he sat down in the pew, what I had almost called my pew, and I sank, down beside him.

  He was silent, so at last I said, “Do you understand now why I wanted to see the man who had charge of this place and had specially asked that he might work here?”

  “Do you know,” he replied, “all the while we have been together, ever since we met on the steps of the dead man’s house, from the first glance I had of you, I felt that, if I could give you all the surface and ordinary information, that would be what you would need for your difficulty and—” he paused a little—“my information. You see, I felt there was some kind of mystery about our old friend and, as I left him in that bare little room, I felt he had gone to his grave with it. More, I felt that he had wished to share it with someone and that I ought to have been that one and had failed. So now that I have told you all I know of the man you so evidently wanted to see and of the place where we are and where he made some service to God and man that I didn’t understand, will you tell me why you needed to see him, what you know?”

  It was said with gentleness and simplicity, and I told him my whole story as I have told it now. He did not wait long after I had finished but rose.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Now I feel pretty sure what he meant when he said that his life was sworn to the vocation of intercession. So that was his task! And I thought he was perhaps a man playing at life and the real things going on in the town and the large churches. Can an Archdeacon be saved! But you see how everything fits. That congregation you so dreaded, that awful effort being made, that frontier or margin which kept you from them—you know, of course, that any water diviner would feel a shock in crossing that stream and that all through the Middle Ages they used that test to find and destroy people who were using psychic powers without the Church’s approval.”

  We had gone up toward the east end. At the altar he paused.

  “Do you know what today is?” he asked. I was at a loss and showed it. “It is the Feast of All Saints. You see, then, why yesterday was a climax. Why did the Church put this Feast of All Saints right at the tail of the year, among the wreckage and death of the life-cycle? It is the culminating feast of final triumph. Today the faithful celebrate the victory of saints past, present, and future. And the Church chose this date because as she rose in the ancient world she found that that world, the ancient religions which she superseded, had always kept the day and eve before—October the thirty-first—as the awful day and night of bitter fast and haunted vigil. Men stayed close within their houses, leaving the ways to be trodden by invisible steps. They dared hardly to eat, still less work, for were they not in the presence—the food-withering, work-blasting presence of all the dead, the spirits, ghosts, and wretched souls denied life’s table, hungry but unable to feed, grasping but unable to hold, longing to attract and to influence but unable to find any purchase, hating but powerless to revenge?”

  “Then yesterday was Hallowe’en!” I said.

  “But today is All Saints’,” he answered, and, kneeling down, he began to recite the great Thanksgiving and Gloria for the blessed departed. After a moment’s shamefaced hesitation I knelt behind him, repeating the sonorous, reassuring words.

  When we rose he led me out through the priest’s door into the air again. There he turned to me. “I’m sure it’s all right now,” he said. “Don’t have any misgiving, I beg. You saw but you were not really touched. That man had great power, and he roused and opened channels in order to reach so far down that, loosing those forces, taking their still unresolved tensions, he might free some. Now that he is gone, those that remain still tied will relapse into their locked condition. You are surprised that I am talking in this way. But is there any other conclusion to draw? We have the evidence here in the actual objects and history of this place, and when we put these together with what we now know the man was doing, can we draw any other conclusion? After all, the Church I belong to believes in prayer, and every day I am bound to say, ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins, I believe in the communion of saints and the life everlasting.’” Then, turning to me with a great friendliness, he concluded, “Please don’t think I’m being impertinent or unctuous, but it is really very obvious that you have been through a great strain. What’s more, everything you say I believe, and my job just now is to reassure you. The door was opened, and you looked through at the real struggle of life and death. Now it is closed, and you are free to act as you will, on fuller information than most people are granted this side of things.”

  He held out his hand. “Well, I must be going down the hill. That telegram as to what to do about the funeral must be here by now.” He waved his hand as he turned away. “And don’t forget that an Archdeacon may in the end be saved. Ora pro me.”

  I stayed up on the hill till lunchtime. I had no longer any dread of the chapel. As he said it, I realized that it was true, perhaps more clearly than he did. I had seen an unsuspected force generated through what, one may say with absolute exactness, was a terrific power. I had seen it raised to that pitch where it could tear open that callous which life, using the queer analgesic we call Time, spreads over its most horrible wounds. I had seen, with my own senses, that things forgotten may remain, remain because the wrong, the actual twist, tear, and abscess were never healed, never forgiven. They remain as a fistula, eating away under the surface and resulting—who knows?—in all the horrors of war and disease, hatred and suffering that, to us, seem to spring from such absurdly small causes and provocations. I had seen that redemptive energy cut, as a surgeon cuts, through that dead husk of skin and release the pus from underneath. I had seen horror first oozing and then spurting from that root of buried wrong. But I had been simply an onlooker. I had no part in it, really. At least, unless I chose. The strange intercessor had really no business with me—that was not his job; I had been allowed to be present at a major operation done by a master surgeon. I had been placed where I could watch but where I was really screened from all intervention.… Yes, screened from all intervention.

  What happened after that? Oh, well, as far as the chapel was concerned I never went into it again. When the great surgeon is dead his operating theater is merely of archaeological interest. And, remember, I had seen the past come to life—no, that’s wrong—I had seen the eternal life going on in its passion and its purgatory. And so for me the past and the contemporary were one. It is there, I now knew—I know—that all reality goes on. Here are merely the symptoms, the consequences. There, there alone, real decision is taken and real causality can be altered.

  Yes, I stayed on at my job during the war. The doctor used to joke with me: “That air raid, what a neat piece of therapy! I wish I could claim I staged it. It put you absolutely right. Do you know—I can say it to you now—I was really quite alarmed at one moment? I took a bet with myself that do what I could you’d break on us. And we couldn’t have afforded it. I can say it frankly, now the end is in sight and you’re in better form than at the start. Not only were you a key man to this department, as we all know, but I, as doctor, know that you were the key to our psychological situation. The whole of this series of offices looked up to you. If you had gone, then, as happens in suicide epidemics—and who knows, we might have been in for one of those—the thing spreads like a contagion. And just that touch of actuality, so graciously granted by High Air Marshal Goering, put everything again on the level and brought your feet firmly onto the ground.” You know, it’s never any use giving a doctor any explanation save that which he has pitched on as his diagnosis. And what would he have made of the right one? Of course, had I given him that, why, he had given me enough of his confidence about me to know that he would have had me in a mental home with electro-shock treatments every Sunday instead of my walk. I preferred my walk and my silence.

  And after the war, now? Well, I don’t know. It’s late to start life again. But I can tell you that I’m not going back to my outpost in the Empire, nor am I going to take a home job. I beli
eve what I’m doing is looking for some small seminary where I can study. I keep on asking myself, Was that glimpse I had of the real forces given for nothing, just to startle a casual passer-by? And yet what can I do about it? You can’t suddenly turn yourself into a great brain surgeon because you have suddenly become aware of what a frightful thing tumor on the brain can be and how surgery can help when nothing else can. But that’s the timid side of my nature trying to tell me that I needn’t and can’t do anything. When that gets too insistent, then I remind myself. I give the little beast a touch of shock-treatment. For one thing, I know, whether I know what I ought to do about it or no, that Terror and Horror are not the same thing. Horror springs from the defeated and craven disgust that shrinks back crying that life is too terrible, fleeing from reality, swearing that existence has no meaning and had better stop, cursing God, and, without the guts to die, going off to huddle itself in some foul little pocket of self-indulgence and, finally, neurotic or psychotic. Terror springs from the other end of things. Terror is the realization that life has meaning, but one so great—one that has to be so great—that it may, can, and does swallow up all that is hideous in its vast meaning, all death and suffering in its victory. And here’s my last word: I know that we choose Horror, the false deliverance of disgust, because we fear the cost, the terrific cost of meaning. The way to the meaning that grasps everything and holds the whole in that final span where truth and beauty, suffering and ecstasy are one—the way to that, the only goal, is through Terror.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Henry FitzGerald “Gerald” Heard (1889–1971) was an English philosopher, lecturer, and author. The BBC’s first science commentator, he pioneered the study of the evolution of consciousness, which he explored in his definitive philosophical work The Ascent of Humanity (1929). A prolific writer, Heard was also the author of a number of fiction titles, including mysteries and dystopian novels. He is best known for his beloved Mycroft Holmes mystery series.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1947, 1948 by H. F. Heard

  Cover design by Andrea Worthington

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3780-8

  This edition published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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