Kerry Greenwood - Urn Burial

‘They call this London Bridge,’ said Dingo Harry.

They stopped in a body at a wide bridge, which looked like it had been thrown up by some convulsion of the earthmother as she turned in her sleep. It stretched, five feet wide and perhaps thirty feet long, over a chasm. ‘Differential solution,’ commented Dingo Harry. Someone, mindful of the nervous, had made a waist-high handrail out of hemp rope and pitons for the panicky to hang on to. Phryne was not afraid of heights, and hung over the rope, listening to the millwheel churning of water in the depths below, and admiring the way that pink colouration gave way to bands of black and grey as the light receded down the walls of the cliff.

‘Miss, Miss, be careful,’ wailed Dot, who had shuffled across, holding on to the rope with both hands and resisting an unworthy urge to crawl.

The house party’s variation in courage was interesting. Phryne noticed that Miss Mead and Miss Cray walked across without trouble, as did Mrs Reynolds and her husband and Li Pen, Miss Medenham and Mrs Luttrell. Mrs Fletcher baulked, caught her daughter’s stern eyes, and managed the walk with only a subdued whimper. Dot didn’t like it at all, whereas Lin Chung was utterly unafraid of heights, though he was not keen on depths. The poet had to be coaxed and the Doctor almost dragged. He was really afraid. Phryne saw a sheen of sweat on his bony face and his wide eyes caught the torchlight. Miss Fletcher almost led him over by the hand, talking to him gently as one would to a nervous horse. She seemed much more relaxed now that she did not have to strain at being a good girl. Phryne almost warmed to her as she and the Doctor went by.

As they passed through another junction, Phryne began to hear footsteps. They never coincided exactly with the noise the house party was making. Every time they all paused to survey some new marvel, the following feet tapped on a little longer than an echo would, then stopped.

She began to feel eyes on the back of her neck, and rubbed a palm over the prickling hair. Li Pen dropped unobtrusively back through the crowd until he stood beside Lin Chung. The slim valet said something to his master in Chinese and Lin replied quickly.

‘Yes, I can feel it, too,’ said Phryne, grasping at the meaning of the high, slurred dialect. She would never really get the hang of a toned language but she was beginning to pick up the sense of the speech.

Lin, surprised, said, ‘You understood what he said?’

‘Not really, but there’s someone behind us. I can sense them.’

‘You were certainly a warrior in a previous life,’ said Lin. ‘He says there is a wild animal in the cave. As this is Australia and I have assured him that there are no large predators here, he has decided that a human with the heart of a beast must be stalking us.’

‘I almost wish you hadn’t translated that. Li Pen, you remember the night we came here – is it the same hunter?’

Li Pen nodded. Phryne shook herself.

‘We say nothing to the others,’ she decided.

‘But I go last,’ insisted Li Pen. He fell in behind and followed as they walked into the new cave.

The sound of his cat footsteps behind her made Phryne feel much safer.

The new cave had teeth.

Instead of the massive, melted-looking columns of the cathedral, this one was newer and the stalactites and stalagmites were almost sharp. They dipped over Phryne’s head like icicles, thin as blades, striking up through the soft floor and down from the roof like incisors, white as bleached bone. It was a little unnerving and Phryne felt Dot draw closer.

‘In the mouth of the beast,’ said Lin, and Phryne snapped, ‘Less mysticism and more light. If this place was strung with electric lights it wouldn’t be so alarming. It’s the contrast. White teeth and black shadows.’

‘You can’t abolish all mystery with your modern machines, Silver Lady. Some very old part remains; some primitive Lin Chung who hid here when the ice sheet moved down, and feared ghosts and bears and shadows with fangs. He tried to fight his terror with fire, also, and it did not entirely work. If your electricity failed, the dark would return, as it has been since the beginning of the world.’

‘To banish fear with light has always been the aim of humans,’ agreed Tadeusz, breathing fast. ‘Yet we cannot exile the shadows, for they lurk in our own heart, our own mind.’

Phryne lifted her torch high, and the white teeth gleamed with the dust of diamond. The stone on her ring caught the light and blazed.

‘Miss Fisher . . .’ said Tadeusz, abandoning philosophical speculation with a jolt. ‘Wherever did you get that ring?’

‘I found it. Pretty, isn’t it? Do you know it?’

‘I do indeed. Though I haven’t seen it for years – diamonds are so seldom set in silver.’

‘I think it might be Indian. What do you think?’

‘No, it’s South African. Miss Fisher, I don’t think you should be wearing it, not in this gathering, it can only . . .’

Dingo Harry called them through into another cave. The poet lost his thread and said no more about the ring, although Phryne caught him glancing at it. She bit her lip in frustration.

The next cave was spacious and not too high, and the party sat down on convenient but damp stumps of stalagmites to drink tea and discuss what they had seen. Torches had been set in iron rings around the walls, and Phryne noticed that the smoke was blackening the pristine ceiling. Humans and caves did not go together. A few more years of human smirching and they would be sooty, smelly, grey and uninteresting. After which, presumably, humans would leave them alone, and the caves would repair themselves over a hundred years, patiently constructing more delicate alchemical marvels, to be ruined again by the next human who fell through the roof. Phryne was feeling most displeased with a species to which, she reminded herself, she belonged. She took an egg sandwich and a gulp of tea and strove to adjust her philosophy.

‘What a remarkable place,’ observed Miss Mead. ‘A demonstration of the multifold gifts of the Almighty.’ She trailed this unexceptionable tag at Miss Cray, who did not take her cue to launch into her usual speech on the Magnificence of God and the Necessity of Supporting His Work Amongst the Heathen with Immediate Generous Donations. Indeed she seemed altogether subdued, which would have been more interesting if Phryne had not felt as though something with talons was about to spring from the darkness onto her back.

‘Yes, there are names for most of the formations,’ Dingo Harry was saying in reply to a polite question from Miss Mead. ‘This is called Picnic Cave, for obvious reasons. The first cave is called The Cathedral, and the formations are like the trappings of organised religion; The Pulpit, The Nave, The Font. Then there is London Bridge, Gem Cave, and Undersea Cave where the limestone is twisted into forms like fish and coral and weed. Surprisingly, the shapes are like those which would have been here when this was the bottom of the sea. See, here is a fossil, and another. Have a look at this wall.’

Phryne finished her sandwich and joined Tom Reynolds and the Doctor. The torchlight showed regular furrows, dips and indentations like shells and strange bubbles. She saw wavering shapes like weed and a fronded, primitive strand of kelp.

‘Erinoids,’ explained Dingo Harry, his scarred forefinger caressing the surface without actually touching. ‘Don’t touch them, please – the acid in your skin eats into the chalk. See, here is a shell, just like you’d find at the beach, and another one – and there is the important one.’ The wall appeared to be blank. Phryne unfocused her eyes and blinked. An armoured creature five feet long sprang into view. Dingo Harry’s finger traced plates of shoulder and belly; the heavy, ridged, savage skull and the socket where a tin-plate eye must have gleamed. No room in that cranium for brain. Just reflexes, just the mindless hunting of any protein which moved. She saw it in a flash of insight, not frozen in grey stone but alive, slate-blue and monstrous, sliding through grey water like a pike or a shark, the lower jaw loose and shining with spiked teeth, the fins stroking lazily towards . . . what? A floating baby in a leaf? Her own unprotected and terribly vulnerable limbs, unaware of the killer beneath the placid surface? A pounce, a swirl of blood which would bring all the lesser meat-eaters finning to the feast, a tearing gulp, and no more strange little heavy-headed mammal which might eventually have become a human.