Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

The stress of the afternoon was in him like hot pins. The way that poor woman had screamed for her son. It was animalistic. He could understand her need. He had wanted to howl like that, for Julie. It built up inside you. You forgot who you were.

He tried to make the room comfortable enough so that Julie might come to him in some way. He needed to be warm and clean and relaxed. He bathed and drank a glass of whisky. He put her favourite music station on the radio. He sat by the window and closed his eyes. He determined what each sound was and relegated it to the back of his mind. There was space here for her.

He felt himself slide towards sleep. But she was not there to greet him. She had not been a part of this intimate darkness since before her death. It was as if, in dying, she had ceased to exist for him during the moments when he ought to be most receptive to her. Gazing at photographs of her was like assessing a stranger. She mugged for the camera. She was never her natural self. He felt panic at the thought that, day by day, this memory of the truth was gradually leaving him. It scared him more than the nightmares that were so ready to enter that vacuum he’d created just for her.

That evening, after another challenging meal in the hotel restaurant, Don sat in the bar nursing a glass of Scotch. He’d decided on an early night and a quick escape back to London in the morning. He’d look into therapy. He’d consider a holiday away from the UK. He needed to map out his career. Find a new hobby, some new friends. Do the unthinkable. Find someone else. Why not just dig her up and spit into what’s left of her face?

“Hello again!”

“You bastard.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry. Grant, isn’t it? I’m very sorry. I was talking to myself. I was thinking about someone.”

Kerner was observing him with a mixture of scepticism and distaste.

“Really,” Don pressed. “I’m sorry. That was aimed at me, actually.”

The doubt in Kerner dissolved. Maybe he could see something in Don’s own features, his posture. Defeat, quite possibly.

“Then I apologise for interrupting you.”

“I’m glad you did. There’s only so much abuse I can put up with.”

Kerner laughed; the tension lessened. He assessed Don as if for the first time. There was a sense of him weighing up what to do next. Don could feel an invitation growing within; he was all too ready to refuse it. But he surprised himself by accepting, when Kerner asked if he would like to accompany him on a visit to Kayte’s Cavern.

They walked. It was not far. There was a place to buy tickets and tat. A café. All of it closed now. A little display, showing the history of the cave and what had been found there. Roman coins and bones and bronze brooches. Over time it had been a burial ground, a shelter, and the hideaway for a robber, the eponymous Nathaniel Kayte, who used the darkness and the depth and the churning noise of the water sluicing through it to his advantage when hiding from his pursuers.

Later it was a tourist trap. People travelled great distances to see the flowstone curtains, the stalactites and stalagmites, the great chambers of pale crystal, glowing in the dark as if lit from within. After that it became a big draw for the Victorians, who were led by candlelight deep into the cavern and then, the flames blown out by their canny guides, asked for more money if they wished to be taken back to safety.

“Isn’t it a bit late for this?” Don asked again. “I thought you meant we’d go in the morning.”

“Caves are dark whether the sun’s shining or the moon’s up, no?” Kerner said. “My mate’s on duty tonight. We can get in without paying. And anyway, the cavern’s closed while they do some exploratory digging. I think they’re going to go deep. Open up some new chamber that has never before been seen by human eyes.” Kerner deepened his voice at this last sentence, turning to Don and peering at him with theatrical menace.

“What’s your interest in this place?” Don asked Kerner as a black-clad figure in a peaked cap swung open the gates and directed them to the cavern’s mouth. “I thought you photographed broken things.”

“Not exclusively. Anyway, I’m not working. I might not even switch my camera on.”

There were signs saying NO ENTRY and DANGER. Another which read CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC UNTIL JANUARY. Don felt a pang of claustrophobia when he saw the size of the entrance. He would have to bend over slightly, and then the gap narrowed and the ceiling came down further and it was as if he were being swallowed by some gigantic, scabrous throat.

When the cave was first discovered, back in the 1500s (Kerner explained), long before explosives were used to blast a more comfortable passage, you had to crawl through on your belly.

Don felt water drip on to his neck. He could feel the damp in the air. There were footlights guiding you into the cavern along a concretised strip, but then the cave floor took over and it was uneven, treacherous. There was a giddy moment when he wasn’t sure if he was even the right way up.

We become so used to flatness, to stability , he almost said to Kerner. The horizon and the vertical. Take the straight lines away and we lose direction.

Kerner seemed to have no such problem. The bigger man bustled through the gap as if he were pushing himself to the front of the queue on sale day.

“Shouldn’t we have a guide?” Don asked.

“No guides for us,” Kerner said. “I know this place like the back of my gland. I slipped Mac back there a tenner. He’s happy to warm his hands on another cup of tea. We’re doing his patrol for him. We’re doing a public duty.”

Don didn’t like that. He had never strayed too far away from the rules. Even when teaching, he stuck to the tried and tested. A gradual accumulation of knowledge. A natural progression. Chords. Barre chords. Finger-picking. Scales. Power chords and riffs were not on his syllabus. It was lazy. It was a fast-track to sloppy playing. You had to have the foundation. Deep roots. Core. He was an oak, Don decided now, enjoying the analogy. It was distracting him from the pressing in of the cave walls. He was an oak to Kerner’s weak bough, flapping in the wind.

“You’ve been in here before then?” Don asked, to stop himself from laughing.

“Many times. I could serve as a guide myself, I reckon.”

“Do you have a torch?” The entrance lights only illuminated so far. Up ahead, the blackness was deeper than anything Don had ever known. He had never thought of the dark possessing a physicality, but that’s what it seemed like. There was substance in it. You’d be forgiven for thinking you had to pierce some part of it in order to get through at all.

“We don’t need a torch,” Kerner said.

“What are you, part owl?”

Kerner chuckled. And then light exploded around them. Don felt suddenly foolish. The space within the cavern was voluminous. The ceiling of it was sixty, seventy feet from where they were standing. Its geology seemed a living thing. It was sinuous in some places, jagged in others. He sensed Kerner watching him, his finger on a light switch hidden behind a curtain of rock.

“Timer switch,” Kerner said. “Switches off automatically, after a while. This place closed down in the 1950s. Lack of interest. Nobody to fund it. It was taken over in the 1970s. Given a real spring clean. They put in the electricity then. No more of those dodgy gas lamps the Victorians used.”

“The rock,” Don said. He wasn’t sure what he meant to follow that with. It seemed anything he might say would not do justice to his surroundings.

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

“That it is.”

“Limestone, in the main,” Kerner said, clearly relishing his role. “You’re looking at rock that was formed around three hundred and fifty million years ago, when modest little Derbyshire was part of a continental landmass close to the equator. Volcanic activity pushed the limestone up and into the fractures that were created, hot minerals poured. So you’ve got your galena, your flourspar, your barytes, your calcite. Veins and seams. Ore. This glittering wonderland. This cave was formed by water. Rain becomes acidic when it passes through organic matter, like soil, as I’m sure you know. It dissolved the limestone. Streams eroded it further. You can hear the water crashing through. We’ll see it up ahead. All this water coming through here, it’s been going on for two million years.”