Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  Poor foxes, she thought.

  But it was normal here. In the country, people weren’t so cut off from death, they accepted it as part of life. She rolled her eyes at her own lecture.

  ‘It’s not some otherworldly culture, Jen,’ she said. ‘Country people watch EastEnders and shop at Waitrose just like you.’

  But, thinking about it, she didn’t actually do either of those things.

  She trudged on. The fields were mostly bare earth, and the boundary hedges ragged; it was like an approximation of the countryside rather than the real thing: there weren’t any discernible smells, except a thick waft of manure, or similar, which hit her every few minutes. Not a bird called, not even a crow, she hadn’t even seen one swoop overhead. And no birds sing. The phrase seemed significant, a continuation of another thought, and though she couldn’t remember where it was from, she knew it had something to do with sedge, whatever that was.

  A kind of moss or succulent, she guessed, as she ducked under a trail of ivy and watched out for a person to ask for directions. But no buildings rose up, no cars rattled by and no people appeared, despite the evidence of their existence in empty cartridges and discarded beer cans.

  And a saw.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, fully giving in to the urge to talk to herself, and even pointing at the saw, as if this gesture would draw the attention of another soul. The saw was a blue-handled, slightly rusting wood saw, hanging on a branch at about thigh height. Hanging there, in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘You’re telling me that’s not disturbing?’ Jen said. ‘I might be about to get eaten.’

  Then silently: You’re not in Texas and it’s not a chainsaw.

  ‘It’ll just be for normal farmer-type things,’ she said. ‘Cutting back branches and things.’ She looked around as she spoke, though, and couldn’t help imagining figures in the trees.

  When a movement caught her eye, it took Jen a few moments to realize that her gaze had fixed on something across the next field. For a minute, she thought it was the crouching man from the Instagram photos, but it was a girl.

  She stood far enough away that Jen couldn’t see her face, and she held her head slightly bent, as if she were looking at Jen under her brows, scowling at her, tracking her. The girl’s shoulders were bowed and her arms hung down in front of her, the sleeves swamping her hands. It was a pose not unlike Lana’s in a bad mood, a petulant stance, childish. But also menacing, unreasonable, beyond reach. The girl’s hair moved in the wind, flapping about, masking and unmasking her face, but she did nothing to stop it, to brush it away, she only stood and stared at Jen.

  Dry-mouthed, Jen tried to say something to herself, to come up with a reassuring phrase, but the words wouldn’t form. She felt trapped, unsure whether to flee. The girl hadn’t moved, seemed to be concentrating, and Jen had an idea that Lana had sent someone after her, an eerie double, a rage-filled stand-in. Could her daughter’s hatred have followed her, somehow?

  She felt a brush across her face, as if some ghostly fingers had touched her skin, and jerked away so quickly that she fell against a fence. But the ‘fingers’ were just clumps of feathery seeds which had detached themselves from a spike of rosebay willow-herb. The white fluff bobbed along the ground, carried by the breeze, a disembodied rabbit’s tail, and Jen pushed herself up and followed it, not checking to see if she was still the subject of the girl’s intense stare.

  And as she got over a stile she bumped, quite literally, into Matthew.

  He had been on one knee, as if waiting to propose, and a collection of straps hung around his neck, connected to cameras and camera bags, which bounced against his waist as he got up.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, his clear face so normal, so ordinary. ‘Hello, Lana’s mum.’ That slight catch in the middle of his sentences, the repetition. Could you call it a real stutter?

  ‘It’s Jen,’ Jen said.

  ‘Yes, sorry, I remember. What are you…what are you doing here?’

  Jen didn’t know how to answer him. She hadn’t banked on meeting anyone she knew. ‘I was trying to find the cave with the crucifix in it,’ she said, picking a landmark at random. ‘But I’ve only managed to get lost. What about you?’

  ‘I was hoping to catch sight of a red-backed shrike, but I think the original sighting was a fairy tale. Anyway, all the birds seem to have been spooked by something. You, probably.’ He smiled.

  ‘Sorry,’ Jen said, smiling back. ‘So, you know where we are?’

  ‘Yes. We’re not far from the crucifix cave. You’re not as lost as you think. I can show you, if you like.’

  He led her back the way she’d come, and her breath caught as they passed the girl, still standing in that same unnerving position, but as they got close, Jen saw it wasn’t a girl at all, that what had spooked her was a cleverly life-like scarecrow. Perhaps the crouching figure in the pictures was a scarecrow, too.

  ‘No wonder there are no birds,’ she said.

  Bingo

  ‘Is…Is Lana with you?’ Matthew asked, as they crossed a field of sheep.

  ‘No, it’s just me.’

  ‘You’re not going to visit the centre? You haven’t come to talk to my dad?’

  Jen didn’t answer. Taking her eyes from the landscape and focusing on the boy, she was aware of a panic in Matthew’s voice, aware of a calm that she could fake and he couldn’t muster, aware that her silence was more effective than anything. It occurred to her that Matthew had the answers.

  ‘Please don’t tell my dad,’ he said. ‘I…I know I shouldn’t have taken the vodka. Or any alcohol. It just seemed a good…a good idea, because it was our last night together. Mine and Lana’s.’

  ‘You drank vodka?’

  ‘Well, no, we didn’t actually drink it –’

  ‘Matthew,’ Jen interrupted, ‘did you have sex with my daughter?’

  His blush was immediate and fierce. ‘No, no.’ He unscrewed the chunky lens from his camera and packed it into a bag. ‘We, er, we kissed. But no. I promise we did not do that.’

  ‘Explain about the vodka again.’

  ‘I took some from the bar at the centre, but neither of us wanted it and then Lana said she’d hang on to it, because I was scared my dad would catch me trying to put it back.’

  ‘And you think I’m here to tell your dad that?’

  He looked at her, a long, studying look, the kind that Jen imagined the birds in these hills must be familiar with. ‘No, I suppose it’s a long way to come for that, isn’t it?’

  ‘Quite a long way.’

  ‘Is it Lana, then? Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s all right enough.’

  ‘What about her headaches?’

  Jen felt a bit sad that he’d been so easily put off with such an obvious excuse. ‘I think her headaches are gone now.’

  ‘That’s good. She was having a terrible time when she was here. I had to get her painkillers from town.’

  ‘She asked you to get painkillers?’ Jen wondered how easy it would be to smash all the camera lenses in the padded bags he carried. ‘So, when you left her, Matthew, the night she went missing, she had a bottle of vodka and lots of painkillers?’

  He nodded.

  She might have shouted at him then, asked why he hadn’t told anyone that at the time, but there were other things to think about. The mouth of a cave had made her stop.

  ‘Matthew, I think I’ll have a rest here,’ she said, thinking of the #rapture picture, of Lana’s sleep-talking (‘I’m underneath’), of the oyster fossil.

  ‘Oh.’ He walked a little way and then ran back to her, as if he were attached by a piece of elastic. ‘I can’t really stay with you. I have to help my dad with a kayaking tour.’

  ‘I know. That’s okay. Have a good time.’ She wanted him gone, but he kept turning as he went, that piece of elastic bringing him up short over and over.

  When he was finally out of sight, she turned back to the cave. She had a powerful sense of recognition, thoug
h she didn’t know why. It was a dark opening, partly hidden by a mass of fern, and she walked towards it, waiting for some meaning to materialize. Halfway across the field, it came to her. From this distance, the shape of the cave’s mouth looked like the figure of a man, crouching slightly.

  Crabwalk

  The first bit was too easy, that was the trouble. You just had to walk in. It was dark, but there was a torch on her phone, and the ground was a bit treacherous – covered in loose stones – but the slope was very gradual and the walls were dry to the touch. A dozen yards in, she had to turn sideways to get through, but that seemed an adventure, a safe sort of an adventure. She scraped her knuckles, grazed the side of her head as the tunnel varied in height and she caught her shoulders and elbows on outcrops of rock, but the pain was pleasing and she felt it would be appropriate to emerge from the depths of the earth with a few war wounds.

  Sump

  People had said caves were dangerous, but it wasn’t as if you could die. There was just one way in and one way out, and although it was dark – so dark that she had to keep checking there really was a floor ahead of her – you could feel your way along well enough. The only cause for alarm was a hole at the end of this stretch. A wide hole, full of fast-moving water, which a person might fall into if they were moving too fast. But she hadn’t been moving too fast and her torchlight had found it before her feet did. The shiny, slippery stone at the edge had only been under her boots for a second. She was fine. She began to walk back again.

  Round chamber

  She had ducked to avoid a stalactite and discovered an opening, low down on the right, black in the grey, a crawl space that, when she shone her light through, held something which glinted at her. She squatted and edged forward, inelegant, creaky, glad no one was there to see, and soon came out into a roundish chamber that she could kneel in (if she didn’t mind the stones pressing into her kneecaps). It smelled of incense. But perhaps the smell was just associative, because the place resembled a church crypt; no one could have been burning incense down here, could they?

  No, but it seemed someone had been drinking. The glint she’d caught sight of came from an empty vodka bottle. So this was the place. Lana had come here after leaving Matthew. And had she sat and waited while they’d been frantically searching for her? Had she heard their calls? Had she imagined how desperate things were above ground? Jen felt a sick sort of anger and took a photo of the cave, the vodka bottle, with a vague idea that she was gathering evidence.

  As she crawled off, though, she knelt on a blister pack of paracetamol. Also empty. A few inches to the left was another, crushed flat, and two more were wedged between some stones. Jen curled against the wall and shuffled the foil sheets together. Thirty-two pills at least. More than enough to end your life, if that’s what you wanted to do. The chamber took on a different aspect. It wasn’t a hideout, but a condemned cell. She sat awhile, waiting for the emotion to leach from the rock, for some sense of her daughter’s rage or despair to materialize. Nothing happened. So much for T. C. Lethbridge, so much for human suffering being stored in stone. She put the pill packs into her pocket and squeezed back towards the main tunnel. Except it wasn’t the main tunnel she found herself in. It was another narrow space, slightly lower. She stretched a hand out to stop herself falling and her sleeve got soaked to the elbow.

  River passage

  She would have to be more careful. She didn’t want to get lost. And she wondered if she should tie her shoelaces into a guide rope, or unravel her jumper and plait the wool into a ball of string. A nice idea, if she hadn’t been wearing wellingtons and unwoven synthetic fleece.

  Back in the main tunnel, there was a sort of ringing in her ears, or else a singing in the rock, which could have been water, an underground river whistling along somewhere nearby. She hadn’t noticed the sound before. It seemed colder here, too, and she could see her breath cloud in front of her.

  She walked (stumbled, fumbled, tripped) for a while, a long while. Long enough that she realized she’d made a mistake, that this wasn’t the tunnel she’d been in, the tunnel that led to the entrance. That this was some other passage, and God knew where it went. She turned back. But it was soon apparent that this was hopeless as well. She couldn’t find the entrance to the round chamber in the dark, though she diligently shone her torch into each crack and fissure, and even poked her head through some of the openings.

  The stones carried on with their wet ringing, which she thought for a moment might be rain. Down here in the gloom, it was possible to imagine the Peaks awash with every kind of weather and, despite knowing the reality was blazing sun, she pictured the sheep in the field, huddling under wind-battered trees, sheltering from hail, blending, white on white, into a wintry landscape.

  Echo chamber

  ‘Hello?’ she called, her voice bouncing off the stone and dispersing, half drifting towards the ceiling, half slipping into the dark recesses ahead of her. There wasn’t exactly an echo, but it was a lonely sort of sound, and she regretted it.

  Choke

  She dithered, didn’t trust herself to make a choice, started one way and then changed her mind, stood in one place then moved about frantically. Finally, she took a chance, working her body into a small opening. The air was heavy here; she could smell her own breath (sour from the junk food she’d eaten on the drive up). And the tunnel narrowed too quickly to be right, so quickly that she got stuck, unable to move in either direction. Her breathing was loud, her ribs pressing against the rock; she seemed to be swelling in the stone tube. There was nothing to get hold of, nothing to push against, her feet sticking out, an arm crushed to her body. She wriggled uselessly, her clothes bunching around her hips, then gave up (the despair of that moment, the hopelessness). Her lungs deflated. After a moment, she found she could move again.

  Hollow

  Things she remembered about caves: that they were the only places left that Google Earth hadn’t mapped, the only places left to explore. That the plaques that form in the lungs due to tuberculosis were made of the same material as limestone caves (which meant that, when Keats was writing Endymion, he might already have had the beginnings of his own tiny cave system inside his chest). That the constellation of the stars was meant to be somehow mirrored by a network of tunnels under the ground, as if the straight lines between stars on a star chart were pathways. What Jen always wondered was what the tunnels underground were supposed to link – what was the earthly equivalent of a star? A clod of mud? A rock? Some sort of precious mineral?

  None of this was of any use. She had never been able to get the hang of celestial cartography, and quoting Keats was hardly likely to get her anywhere (however much she felt like a ‘lamb strayed far a-down those inmost glens’). Even Google couldn’t help her.

  Blanket shaft

  There was an opening in the ceiling, and a blanket hanging from it, just out of reach. She stopped and looked up and thought of the wannabe hermits and their discarded camping equipment. Could the crucifix cave be above her? Might someone be up there?

  ‘Help!’ she shouted. ‘Please, help me!’

  She shouted for a long time, but no answer came. Even if they heard, she thought, they’d probably dismiss it as a yew-induced hallucination.

  Low crawl

  It started at crouching height, but soon she was on her belly, the phone pushed along in front of her, or held in her mouth. Either way, she could hardly see. Rock constantly grazed her skin as her jacket rode up again and again, and she got cramp in her neck from holding her head up. Her wrists were hurting, a shooting pain in one of them, and every movement was laborious. She longed to walk upright again. The noise of her breathing was brittle and carrying; it seemed dangerous, alerting anything predatory to her presence. How fast could she really move along on her belly if someone or something came up behind her? Which was nothing to the idea of something appearing in front: there was no room to turn around.

  The fear was so sudden and physical that she h
ad to stop moving, despite her better instincts, and lie still in the tight space. Her limbs were ticklish with exhaustion (she wished she hadn’t done so much cleaning the day before), her heart’s thudding was like a heavy stone dropping over and over. Moving again was an effort – it suddenly seemed almost embarrassing to keep trying – but Lana had made it out, so there must be an opening somewhere. Jen just hoped it wasn’t three days away.

  Cold drop

  She sat at the edge, letting herself down slowly. The opening began with coarse boulders arranged in a descending circle like a natural spiral staircase. Each step was waist height or taller, and Jen slid from shelf to shelf on the seat of her jeans.

  Her first steps at the base of this chamber echoed, and Jen felt again as if she was in a holy place, though the holiness wasn’t reassuring. It made her think of Stephen, of the children he wished so much to send into Hell. He hadn’t been entirely wrong, she realized. For what was this like, if not Hell? There were no fiery pits, no devils, but being stuck here, alone, in the dark, with no way out, was close enough. She wasn’t surprised Lana latched on to the idea, an idea that gave the experience meaning, that located it, related it to something bigger.

  Her throat was cold, her lungs, too; in fact, most of her body was stiff and freezing. She was frightened. Suddenly, she was desperate to get back up to the tunnel she’d just left.

  Half lying on the lowest boulder, she scrambled up, scraping her shoulder as she stood. The second ledge was narrower and she scraped her elbow and both knees, tearing her jeans. The next jut of rock was almost out of reach. She broke a fingernail trying to get a hand-hold, then swung forward, hitting her cheek and finding herself hanging against the rock, with nothing below her.