by Tim Lebbon
2
Several deaths are reported in a caving accident in northern Moldova. The Discovery Channel was broadcasting a live transmission from the site when the accident happened. There is no indication that Discovery Channel employees are among the dead. The nature of the accident is unclear, and claims that “creatures” were seen emerging from the cave have yet to be independently verified. Dr Kyrylo Orlyk (Moldova State University, Chişinău) who saw the footage from the scene says, “It’s quite evident that a scientific expedition, or perhaps the coverage of that expedition, has been hijacked by publicity hounds seeking coverage for some as-yet unnamed media event.”
Reuters, Friday, 18 November 2016
I surfaced from one of those nightmares that follows the sleeper into reality. As sleep faded and my whole life rushed in—reminding me of the person I was, my mind once again rescuing itself from the endless void that dreams can become—the monsters were still there. Normally I could not identify them, nor could I really say what they looked like. They were just a presence, a background threat, a weight behind every waking moment, and with them came the usual soundtrack to my nightmares: the screeching of brakes.
The screech went on and on, as it sometimes did when I was having a nightmare. It didn’t matter what the bad dreams were about; they were always about the accident.
This time it was different. Trying to open my eyes, squinting against the dawn sunlight that pierced through a crack in the curtains, I saw one of those ambiguous flying shapes circling the fragmenting landscape of my dream. Its mouth was open. It emitted an endless, limitless screech of desperate car brakes, and I hauled myself up at last to escape the inevitable crash.
I sat up quickly in bed, and silence smothered the dregs of my nightmare. It was so unfair that the only times I could hear were in the grip of my worst dreams.
I looked around my bedroom. I loved that room. Beside my bed was the iPad that linked me to the world. My small desk was awash with sketches, notes, open schoolbooks, other bits and pieces. There were several posters on the walls, ranging from a stunning Canadian landscape to a cartoon version of that summer’s Olympic Games in Rio. My guitar stood on its stand in the corner; clothes were strewn at the foot of the wardrobe; and in one corner lay the mixed chaos of my constantly changing sporting preferences—a hockey stick, running shoes, basketball. I sighed, breathing away the bad dreams. Just a nightmare, I thought. That’s all.
Touching the tablet screen, several messages popped up from friends. One of them glowed red—I’d given one name that distinctive tint—and I felt my own cheeks flushing the same colour. Rob had messaged during the night. He might not have been my best friend, but he was my best boy friend. Dad took the mickey out of me about that. But that’s all he was, a mate, and something of a special one. Apart from my best friend Lucy, he was the only other kid in school who could sign.
I opened Rob’s message.
Don’t ever ask me to go caving with you.
I frowned, and everything rushed back in. Not a dream at all, I thought, and I remembered all the fears and doubts of the night before. Watching the strange, confused news item had been bad enough. There was little detail, and the snippet of film they showed again and again was nowhere near as distressing as what I’d been watching live on the Discovery Channel. The people in charge of the news reports must have decided that most of the footage was too traumatic to show.
But as well as that, there had been the troubling atmosphere between Mum and Lynne. They had been sitting close together, and the tension that I’d felt between them when I’d entered the room had not dissipated. I had become very sensitive to atmosphere and emotion. Sometimes Mum said it was because of my deafness, but I didn’t think that was the case at all. Maybe I did compensate in some ways, but empathy and an ability to sense the emotional load of a situation had always been with me.
Later that evening I’d asked my mother what was wrong, but she’d simply shaken her head and kissed me goodnight.
I swiped the screen and accessed the BBC News home page. The fact that the headline stretched right across the page alerted me to its seriousness, even before I started reading.
The details did little to make me feel better.
Something was happening in a region of Moldova. No one seemed to know what. There was talk of a chemical spill, a terrorist attack, even a plague of hornets. A couple of clips of mobile-phone footage showed two scenes that disturbed me more than their content alone should have: a car stuck on a bridge with a huddle of clothes beside the open driver’s door; and fleeting things like large, agitated moths fluttering through the shadows beneath trees, the camera turning to reveal two frightened, silent faces. Death tolls were mentioned. Russia had closed its borders. The UN was watching. It was a news report that relayed no real news, only the fact that something had happened.
I scanned the report again, and it was only on second reading that I spotted a mention of the caving operation, and only as a passing mention at that. It was almost as if the two had barely been connected.
Surely anyone who’d seen the Discovery Channel footage would link the two?
A meeting of Cobra is being chaired by the Prime Minister…
No comment from the Russian President at this time…
The United Nations says…
I picked up the tablet and went to wake up Mum. The house was still, and as I opened my parents’ bedroom door I looked at the time. It was earlier than I’d thought, barely 6 a.m.
“Mum?” I said. Mum opened her eye, face screwed up, hair awry, and she instantly came alert.
“What’s wrong?”
She never stopped worrying, I knew. Ever since the accident she’d become someone on edge, a light sleeper; sometimes she admitted to me that she always feared the worst. Even when I told her that I’d been lucky—the crash that killed my paternal grandparents could well have killed me too—Mum found it hard finding any luck in what had happened. No good luck, at least. The accident had changed my whole family, and I constantly did my best to edge that change for the better.
“There’s something—” I began, but then I saw the pulsing blue tone of the phone on the bedside table.
I grabbed the phone and looked at the name on the screen: Huw. I handed the phone to my mother.
* * *
“Hey, babe,” Huw said. He suddenly felt foolish, calling Kelly about something happening so far away. TV news had a way of upping the ante on things, and sometimes the constant barrage of repeated information made events seem more serious and significant than they really were. Am I being stupid here? he wondered. Maybe he was more homesick than he’d first thought. He had one more day and night away before heading home, but he’d woken up feeling maudlin.
But he was also unsettled.
“Hi,” Kelly said, groggily. “You okay?”
“I’m fine, fine, just… have you seen the news?”
“Hang on,” Kelly said, and Huw heard the rustle of sheets. “Ally’s just come in to show me something.”
Ally! But Huw should have guessed. His daughter had always been an early riser, and she was developing a keen interest in world events. Whereas lots of kids her age would log on to Facebook the minute their eyes opened, her first call was usually one of the news sites. She was a bright kid, but sometimes he mourned her childhood.
“So what am I looking at?” she asked.
“The thing in Moldova,” Huw said.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got that. But what is it?”
“No one seems to know.” He was sitting on the edge of his bed, TV flickering before him. He’d muted the sound to call home, thinking, That’s how Ally sees the world. “I saw something on TV last night. It’s just scary.”
“Yeah. Well, at least it’s a long way away.”
Huw thought of the map of Europe, but he couldn’t accurately place the country. Just how far away was it? Moldova was one of those places only talked about when something bad happened there.
A pause. He heard Kelly sniffing. Then she said, “But it’s in Moldova.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“Hang on,” Kelly said. The line fell silent for a moment, then he heard Ally speaking.
“It’s what I saw on the TV last night.”
“Tell her I did too,” Huw said. There was silence while Kelly signed to their daughter.
“It was horrible,” Ally said.
“It was,” Huw said. “Babe… I might come home now instead of tomorrow.”
“Because of this?” Kelly asked. “Have you finished up there for the week?”
“No, plenty to do here: we’ve hit problems with the site drainage, might need to install a pump and Max is arguing over who’s responsible.”
“So shouldn’t you leave things in good shape there?”
“Yeah,” he said, because he knew his wife was right. “Yeah, maybe I should come home later this evening.” But he watched the muted news reports, already back at the beginning of the loop because they had nothing new to show or talk about. “Several deaths reported,” they’d said, and even that had a vague, remote feel, because there was no talk of how the deaths had happened, who had died, or where. I saw at least one of them on the end of the rope, he thought, and he wondered yet again why those images he’d watched live the night before did not form part of the news report this morning.
“Missing you,” Kelly said.
“You too. All of you. Ally okay?”
“Yeah, she is. You know her, she fixates on things sometimes. And I know she was a bit upset last night at the stuff they were showing.”
“It wasn’t nice.” He turned the TV off. He couldn’t talk to his wife while watching that—the pile of rags beside a car that could be a body; the things in the trees.
“Let me know what time you’ll be home,” she said. “I’ll cook us a nice meal. Steak.”
“Sounds good to me.” They exchanged goodbyes and hung up, and his room suddenly seemed quieter than ever. At his loneliest, those moments just after he’d spoken to his family on the phone were always the worst. The old analogue clock beside the bed ticked away the seconds, and from somewhere else in the small hotel he heard the muted rumble of another TV.
It was an hour until breakfast. Huw hit the shower.
* * *
“Morning,” the hotel owner said. Her buttons were done up today. “Just choose your own table and help yourself to cereal. I’ll come and take your breakfast order in a couple of minutes.”
“Thanks,” Huw said. She offered a business-like smile and turned away. He walked through into the dining room, glad to see other people already seated. There was an Indian couple with their daughter, a middle-aged woman working on a laptop, and a couple of young men wearing sports kit and consulting a map. The men chatted and laughed loudly, and the little girl made faces at them. One of them reciprocated, and the kid giggled.
Soft music played in the background, not too loud to be cloying, but loud enough to give some privacy to conversation. It was a nice atmosphere. No one seemed unsettled or disturbed. Maybe none of them saw the news, Huw thought. He exchanged nods with the men and smiled at the family, then took a table close to a window. It was more likely that they’d all seen the news but it had made no impact on their day. The men were probably planning an adventure—a bike ride across the moors, or perhaps a coastal trail run. The family might be here on holiday or visiting relatives in the area. And the woman was obviously on a business trip, already working at seven-thirty in the morning.
They weren’t like him. They weren’t doomsdayers.
Kelly was always gentle when she called him that, and with good cause. His parents had both been killed in the car crash that had seriously injured his daughter; she’d broken several ribs, a collarbone, and fractured her skull. Most of the physical damage had been repairable. But her cochleae had suffered severe deceleration injuries, and combined with a bleed on the brain from her skull fracture, this had resulted in profound deafness, changing her life and theirs irrevocably. It was the worst day of his life. From what they’d been able to gather from police and witness reports, the crash had been caused by a fox running into the road. His father had swerved, clipped the kerb, and rolled the car into a stone wall. Ally could remember little about the crash or the several hours before. She found that loss of memory almost as traumatising as the hearing loss itself, because she was desperate to remember what she and her grandparents had been doing. She told her parents that she felt like she’d lost the last good times she and her grandparents had spent together, and Huw sometimes lay awake at night wondering what they had done and where they had been. Maybe they’d taken Ally to the cinema. Perhaps one day, when she was watching a film for what she thought was the first time, she would suddenly remember the end.
Huw was doing his best to move on, but during his worst, most pessimistic moments he had no trouble justifying his doomsdaying. He’d project the path of events to the worst conclusion imaginable. Say Jude asked for a skateboard for his birthday, they relented, and he went out on his first jaunt. Most parents would worry that he might fall and break his arm. In Huw’s version, the fall would result in a broken arm, which would lead to Jude staggering home crying, and then he’d faint in the road and be crushed beneath the wheels of a passing car.
His mental gymnastics were often horrific, but he could not help himself.
The previous evening, and then while experiencing an unsettled sleep, he’d been doing the same with that disturbing news report.
“What can I get you?” The hotel owner had appeared beside him while he was daydreaming, and he jumped in his seat. “Oh, didn’t mean to startle you, darling!” She touched his shoulder and squeezed, and Huw had a sudden, shameful thought—I wonder how many guests she’s fucked in their rooms. It was offensive and probably very unfair, but it arrived as surprisingly as the woman.
“No problem,” he said, smiling up at her. “I’ll have the full English, please. And coffee.”
“Coming right up. Help yourself to cereal.” She left without waiting for a reply. He looked around the room at the other guests, all caught in their own world, their own day. The two men on the next table were poring over a map, and one of them glanced up.
“Mountain biking?” Huw asked.
“A bit,” the man said. He was maybe mid-twenties, fit-looking, with a casual rugged appearance that only comes of loving the outdoors. “Bit of running, bit of hiking too.”
“Coast to coast,” his mate said. He was older, his hair thinner, but he looked just as fit. “Starting at Polperro this lunchtime, hitting Tintagel in two days. Hopefully our wives will still be waiting there for us!”
“So you’re going across Bodmin,” Huw said.
“Yeah, my favourite place on the planet,” the first guy said. “Do one thing every day that scares you, right?”
Huw found himself feeling outlandishly jealous of the men. They seemed worry-free, ready to spend time purely fulfilling their own desires. He’d once spent an enjoyable year training for his first marathon, soon after Ally was born. He’d completed the challenge, run his marathon in a little over four hours, and had made plans for what to do next. But work had got in the way. Then Jude came along, and the spare hours in his life seemed to dwindle down to spare minutes. He hadn’t run in over a year, though he frequently considered digging out his trainers. He took them with him every time he stayed away from home, tied in their little blue bag. They’d probably gone mouldy by now.
In truth, he knew it was motivation rather than time. Many of the days he spent travelling could have been bookended with a run. It was just that he’d rather have a pint in a hotel bar or sit in his ro
om, watching a film and ordering room service.
Middle-age spread had crept up on him, and sometimes he thought that if he’d jumped ahead to where he was now from ten years ago he’d be shocked.
He wished he was going with these guys. Wished he had a mountain bike that wasn’t rusted solid in the garage back at home.
He sighed, and then the hotel owner was placing a coffee pot on his table.
“Lovely morning out,” she said. “You staying for the music festival tomorrow?”
“Actually I was thinking of checking out this evening, after work,” Huw said. “I’ll still pay for the night. I’ll need to come back later to shower, then I’ll head off.”
“Fine by me,” the woman said, and he wasn’t sure whether he imagined the shimmer of regret in her eyes. Probably. Maybe he was just kidding himself.
The sound of cutlery clinking, subdued conversation from the family, and the men planning their outing filled the room, and Huw sighed and poured his coffee.
It was going to be a long, hard day. Max was a decent enough sort, but like any successful businessman, he didn’t like waste, nor did he entertain avoidable mistakes. The drainage problem they’d encountered on the site of his new mansion was both. Huw’s difficult position was that the drainage engineer they were using had been recommended by Max himself. Max’s position was that Huw had given a guaranteed price for the work, based on the designs and ground investigations carried out at the time. It was the engineer’s fault, but his company was not keen on taking the hit. Softly-softly was probably the way to go with this, but Huw feared that Max would explode when cost was mentioned. Thirty grand was a conservative estimate of the additional work required in rerouting a main drain, and incorporating a pumping station to lift the site waste up into the neighbouring system.
He drank his coffee, wishing he was back at home. He ran a good, profitable business, and it had given them a decent standard of living over the years. But it had aged him.
He looked at the two men again. “Got room for one more?” he asked. They glanced up from their plates, the younger one automatically looking him up and down and seeming unimpressed with what he saw.