Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

We walked on and the cave grew larger still for we had lost sight of the wall to our left. We adjusted our direction of travel in the hope of regaining the centre of the cave but found ourselves, after several minutes, in a place where we could see neither wall. Around our feet lay two overlapping horseshoes of dancing yellow light from our lit brands. Beyond them was a darkness so complete it felt like a physical substance. We tried to retrace our steps to regain a view of the wall but cannot have done so accurately. Without thinking we spun round, scouring the dark for any clues, and within a few moments we had lost all sense of direction.

Even if we now succeeded in finding a wall the slope of the floor was so shallow that we would not know which wall it was and be therefore ignorant of whether we should follow it to the right or the left to regain the entrance. A hand reached into my chest and fastened itself around my heart. I believe that Bill felt something similar for he confessed that we were in “a bit of a bloody pickle.”

We began walking in what we hoped was a widening spiral in search of one of the walls when my brand guttered and went out. We took a spare brand from my pack and tried to light it from Bill’s but with no success. The air was too damp and too cold. Some minutes later his own brand went out. We watched the final embers die in the dark. My strength began rapidly to ebb. I told Bill that I needed to sit down for a few moments and did so. He told me that he would carry on searching for a wall. He would bang his machete on the rock every so often and I should do the same, and in this way we would not lose touch with one another.

I heard his individual footsteps distinctly for a while and then they merged into the single, indivisible noise of the cave. However close I held my hands to my eyes I could see nothing. I tried to imagine that it was a moonless night and that, while staying with my brother-in-law, I was out walking on Salisbury Plain but my mental powers were insufficient. Bill banged the rock briskly three times and I returned the call.

After a time I began to see swirls of red and green particles moving upon my retina, the same colours and shapes one sees if one closes one’s eyes and presses hard upon the lids. But I could neither dispel them by opening my eyes and looking at real objects nor close my eyes and cover them with darkness. They became heavy and liquid, a great tide of light, not just red and green now but all the colours of the rainbow, gathering and twisting like murmurations of starlings.

I do not know how to describe my state of mind from this point onwards without seeming affected or sensational. I expected my fear to increase but this did not happen. On the contrary I became very calm. My fear of earlier melted away and I felt completely safe. I possessed no body and existed at no point in space, and if one is both nothing and nowhere how can one be attacked? How can one suffer, how can one die? Gradually the coloured phantasmagoria began to resolve itself into images. I was standing on the balcony of a higher sphere, looking down upon my life — my childhood in Chittagong and Patna, the snake that fell onto the breakfast table, the punkawallah with the deformed leg, my ill-matched father and mother, my terrifying Northumbrian grandfathers (“Gog” and “Magog” as my brother styled them), the house in Canterbury, my mother weeping at the rheumatic weather to which she would now be subjected…all of it charming and tender and utterly unimportant, a world of toys which would be swept away and leave no trace. The thought filled me with a sense of peace such as I have never felt before. It was perhaps that state of mind sought by certain Hindu fakirs and Buddhist monks.

Then I saw a group of boys from the village bathing naked in the pool where the river slowed and pooled downstream of the mill. My clothes fell away and I was tumbling in a puzzle of white limbs and cold water and silver bubbles. I recognised Solomon, the blacksmith’s boy, who kept a knife in his boot. I recognised the ginger boy whom my grandfather had caught trapping rabbits and had beaten with a switch. I recognised my cousin Patrick who died in a house fire at the age of nineteen. I was struggling to keep my head above the surface and frightened suddenly that I might drown. Then Edgar appeared in front of me. I reached out and he put his arms around my chest and I was raised up into the light and the air.

Then he was no longer Edgar. He was Christopher dying, Christopher in those last hours, his sun-browned skin now red and taut and peeling, reeking of sweat and excrement, his eyes wide, as if he could see something dreadful in the distance, nonsense tumbling from his mouth—“Sit down, sit down, sit down…The key, for God’s sake…Horses this morning…” I tried to disentangle myself but he was holding on to me too tightly and I knew that he was going to die and take me with him.

Then he was no longer Christopher. He was the creature in Semperson’s drawing, part man, part bear, part lizard, rotted meat between the yellow teeth, eyes like orange marbles, lice swimming in its fur.

Then I was alone and back in the utter dark of the cave, frightened and cold, and I longed to return to my nightmare.

There was a period of time. It was not like time spent sleeping, after which one is aware of the world having carried on in one’s absence, but an absolute vacancy, as if a chapter from the book of myself had been torn out and thrown away. I was naked and wrapped in a canvas sheet. It was night. I could see my clothes hanging in the light of a fire. I was simultaneously hot and cold. Two poles held up another canvas sheet over my head as a rudimentary shelter. I was not well. My life came back to me, as if I were examining a large diagram, homing in on the tiny figure that bore my name. I remembered that we had gone into the cave to look for Edgar and Arthur.

Bill said, “We did not find them,” so I must have spoken the question out loud. He was squatting beside me. “Drink this.”

I took hold of the warm enamel mug and sipped. He had melted the remains of the mint cake into hot water. “How did we get out?”

“I waited for the bats. Then I knew the way.”

I said, “I owe you my life.”

He said, “I’m going to lance the bite on your leg.”

The lump was the size of a chicken’s egg and nearly black.

“I fear it contains something more than putrefaction.” He straddled my leg so as to hold it down and keep the cut both small and accurate. He heated the tip of his clasp knife in the flames of the fire. “This will hurt.”

On the contrary I felt only a faint nick and warm liquid splash over my leg. Bill cut the sleeve from a spare shirt, washed it and used it to bind the wound. “You should sleep now.”

I woke to sunshine which was some compensation though it did not drive the cold from my bones. There was no blood seeping through the bandages but my foot was numb and I could not stand. Bill served a breakfast of peanuts and a bitter yellow citrus fruit which I had not seen before and which I found hard to keep down. My mind was cloudy. I asked if Edgar and Arthur were dead.

“We were in the cave for five hours,” said Bill. “It is now twenty hours since they entered.”

I felt neither sadness at their loss nor any satisfaction at having risked our lives trying to save them, only a dull wretchedness.

Bill left to investigate the graves further. I attempted to read more of the Ovid but my mental powers were not up to the task. Instead I took up this notebook and glanced through some of my entries — a sketch of a terrapin, a description of St. Elmo’s Fire, a rudimentary calculation of the volume of water passing over a nameless cataract — recalling the stories evoked by these details. After several hours Bill returned in possession of a new skull and a signet ring bearing the initials “JDC” engraved as three interlocking curlicues. “There are six graves in all,” he said. “This was in the last.”