Glenn Cooper - The Tenth Chamber

He directed Hugo where to aim his torch and found a good handhold to start the ascent. The distinct strata of the rock face formed a staircase of sorts and he never really felt in imminent danger, but still he took it slowly, aware that night-climbing and wine were not an ideal combination.

In a few minutes he was at the spot where he thought the bats were disappearing, although he wasn’t positive. There was nothing resembling a cave mouth or shelter in sight. He had a good enough purchase on the cliff that he was able to remove his own torch from his jacket pocket for a closer inspection. Just then, a bat flew out of the cliff and zoomed past his ear. Startled, he paused for a moment to catch his breath and make sure his foot hold hadn’t slipped.

There was a crack in the rock face. No more than a few centimetres wide. After he transferred the torch to his left fist he was able to slide his right hand into the crack until his fingers disappeared to the knuckles. He pulled down and felt a wobble. On closer inspection the wobble was coming from a flat rock wedged in the wall. In an instant it dawned on him. He was staring at a dry wall of flat stones installed in the cliff face, so artfully crafted that it simulated the natural strata.

He wiggled the stone out with some effort and when it came free he carefully placed it on its side on a narrow shelf, calling down to Hugo in warning to step aside in case it fell, for it was deadly enough, the size of a coffee-table book. The next several rocks came out more easily but he ran out of places to balance them so he started pushing them back into the widening opening instead. Before long he was looking at a hole large enough to ram his body through.

‘I’m going in,’ he called down.

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ Hugo pleaded.

‘Nothing’s going to stop me,’ Luc defiantly replied before reaching over and wedging his head and shoulders into the gap.

From the ledge below, Hugo watched as Luc’s shoulders disappeared, then his torso and finally his legs. He called up, ‘Are you all right?’

Luc heard him but didn’t answer.

He was inside the mouth of the cave crawling on all fours until he realised the vault was capacious enough to stand upright. He shone his torch ahead then swung it from side to side.

He felt his knees weaken and he almost lost balance.

Blood was rushing in his ears.

There was the sibilant fluttering of a bat colony.

Then he heard his own cracking voice rasp, ‘Oh my God!’

Luc was aware of motion.

He felt surrounded, in the middle of a pack, a stampede.

It was at once suffocating and disorientating, compounded by the way he was hyperkinetically moving his torch, bouncing angles of light off the tawny walls and stalactites in an effort to take it all in, flitting from image to image, creating a stroboscopic jumble in the black confines of the cave.

To his left was a charging herd of horses, huge beasts boldly rendered in charcoal that overlapped one another, their mouths open in exertion, their manes thick, their pupils piercing black discs afloat in pale ovals of unpigmented rock.

To his right were thundering bison with upraised tails and cloven hooves, all energy and menace, and unlike the horses which were done in stippled black, their massive bodies were fully shaded in bold swathes of black and reddish-brown.

Above his head was a single giant black bull in full motion, running headlong into the cave, two legs off the ground in a full gallop. Its head was lowered, presenting its horns in aggression and its nostrils were flared and its scrotum swelled.

Ahead, to his left and right, were massive stags with racks of antlers half as large as their bodies, their heads turned up, their eyes rolled back and their mouths open in bellowing posture.

And there was more, much more, fantastic creatures he strained to see in the dimming reach of his torch beam – a crush of lions, bears, roe deer, colour, so much colour, and was that the trunk of a mammoth?

Although there was a sense of velocity all around, his feet were firmly rooted to the ground. He must have stood on the same spot for an immeasurable length of time before he became conscious of the pleading shouts coming from below.

He also became aware that he was shaking febrilely and that his eyes were wet. This was more than a moment of discovery. This was Carter at the Valley of Kings, Schliemann at Troy.

In the mouth of the cave alone were dozens of the finest prehistoric paintings he had ever seen, nearly life-size animals done in a confident, masterful, naturalistic style. The great Lascaux Cave had a grand total of some nine hundred beasts. Within his limited sightlines he already saw nearly a quarter as many. And this was the tip of the iceberg. What lay beyond the limits of his torch?

Luc fully realised the weight of the moment – this was potentially even more important than Lascaux or Chauvet. Luc had never shown any interest whatsoever in mapping out his future. He’d always let things just happen in his professional and personal lives. He let himself be carried along by the stream of fate. But in an instant both exhilarating and frightening, he knew he’d be spending the rest of his life here, in this cave on the outskirts of Ruac.

He stepped back towards the fresh air, stuck his head out and had to snap his eyelids shut when Hugo’s beam hit him full-on.

‘Thank God you’re okay!’ Hugo shouted. ‘Why didn’t you answer me?’

All Luc could say was, ‘You need to come up.’

‘Why? What have you found?’

‘This is Barthomieu’s cave!’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, it has to be. Climb the same route I took. Carefully. And think about this: your life, my friend, will never be the same again.’

Time became a curious commodity.

At once it crawled to a dead stop and raced ahead at warp speed. That night was both the longest and the shortest in his life and in the future, when Luc spoke about it, people would wrinkle their brows in non-comprehension, which would prompt him to say, ‘Trust me, that’s what it felt like.’

He had given Hugo stern instructions to stand still and keep his hands in his pockets while he twice made the climb down to the ledge to retrieve their rucksacks. When he finished, he aimed his torch over his head to provide a reflected cone of light and delivered a solemn little speech. ‘This is now an archaeological site, a national treasure. We have a responsibility to science, to France and to the world to do this right. We don’t touch anything. You only step where I step. You don’t light any of your foul cigars. If you don’t know what to do, ask.’

‘Christ, Luc, I’m not an idiot.’

Luc playfully swatted him. ‘I thought we already established you were. Let’s go.’

It didn’t take long to prove incontrovertibly, that this was the cave of the manuscript. They quickly found three distinctive paintings – a horse, a stag and a stippled bull – that were identical in every respect to Barthomieu’s illustrations.

Luc trod delicately towards the interior of the cave, training his beam on the guano-encrusted floor before taking each successive step, making sure he wasn’t crushing something precious under his boot. Above their heads, bats were squealing incessantly in ear-splitting, high-pitched urgency. The atmosphere was noxious, not intolerable but undeniably unpleasant. Hugo took his handkerchief and pressed it over his mouth and nose to shield himself from the caustic ammonia sting of the bat urine.

‘Is this going to kill me?’ Hugo complained, shivering in the cool dampness.

Luc was uninterested in any distraction and only said, ‘The handkerchief’s a good idea.’