‘A city in the mountains,’ I muttered.
For a moment, a feeling of calm came over me, a kind of peace to be in so ancient a place. Their refuge, she’d called it. A refuge that became a tomb.
A long sigh of relief escaped from between my lips. There was nothing to see. Until that moment, I did not realise how much I’d started to fear what I might find.
Fabrissa could not be here. It had taken me long enough to break down the obstruction and it seemed unlikely there would be another way in.
‘But then where are you?’ I whispered into the silence, at last facing what common sense had told me all along. I shook my head. I’d felt so sure I would find her. And, in truth, I somehow felt her presence at my side. Somewhere close by.
I shone the torch around the cave, sending the beam darting into every crevice. Suddenly, I stopped. Something had struck a discordant note. Taking a step forward, I directed the light towards a protrusion of grey rock emerging at forty-five degrees from the wall. There was something on the ground beside it. I moved forward, keeping the torch steady, until I saw it was a sheet of paper, lying as if impossibly blown there by a sudden gust of wind.
I picked it up. It was rough to the touch, a coarse weave. Parchment rather than vellum or the page of a book, much like the cheap papyrus tourists brought back with them from Cook’s tours of Ancient Egyptian sites. I opened it out. It was covered in scratchy, old-fashioned handwriting, more like music on a stave than printed letters. I could not read it, even when I held the parchment right up to the light.
I folded it and put it in my pocket. There would be time enough to decipher it later.
Looking up, I noticed a fissure in the rock face directly ahead. Shining the torch in front of me, I went to investigate. There was a narrow corridor, a black seam between two massive ribs of the mountain. It was exceedingly narrow and there was no way of telling how long it was, nor where it went. I felt claustrophobic merely looking at it.
But I forced myself to go in. Holding the torch above my head, I inched my way through, sideways on.
‘Take it steady,’ I said, hating the rock pressing on my shoulders. ‘Steady now.’
In the event, the conduit wasn’t so long, and after only a few paces it opened out into a small, self-contained chamber. Unlike the barren outer cave, there was evidence this cavern had been occupied. In the gloom, I could make out a few belongings, the remains of a camp, what might once have been blankets, a snatch of blue and maybe grey, hard to tell the difference in the yellow light of the torch.
‘Fabrissa?’
Why did I call her name once more? I’d already decided she could not be there. But I called out to her all the same, as though a part of me even now hoped she might be there waiting for me.
I walked closer. The torch picked out fragments of red cloth, green and grey and brown. An earthenware bowl and the stump of a tallow candle burnt down to the wick.
My pulse sped up. My subconscious mind knew what I was seeing, but I could not yet let myself face it head on. I could not accept it. Did not want to accept it.
There was something else now, an acrid smell. Like in church, when the congregation has departed but the scent of stale incense from the thurible has not yet faded. I dug in my pocket for my handkerchief and slapped it over my nose and mouth. It reeked of dried blood and oil, but even that did not completely mask the smell of the cave.
Then I heard it. The whispering. But this time, a multitude, not a single voice, the words layered one upon the other like plainsong at vespers, the harmony holding in the echo.
I stared around. There was nothing to see. Nothing moving in the shadows. Nothing. But the whispering was all around me now, behind, in front, above, a sibilance of voices weeping and calling, desperate to be heard.
‘We are the last, the last.’
‘Where are you?’ I cried. ‘Show yourselves.’
I stumbled forward, nausea rising in my throat. I was being drawn to the furthest corner of the cavern. I did not want to go, but I could not turn back.
Now another voice. Clearer. Distinct. Intended for my ears only.
‘Bones and shadows and dust.’
‘Fabrissa?’ I called out into the darkness.
I staggered on, closer to the epicentre of the sound, until my feet came to a halt of their own accord.
I needed to go no further. I didn’t want to, but I made myself look. Made myself focus on what I knew I did not wish to see. I was standing in a city of bones, men and women and children, all lying side by side, as if they had lain down to sleep and forgotten to wake.
I bowed my head, my eyes smarting, undone by the sight of the humble objects, treasures. Candles, cooking utensils, a pitcher lying on its side. Grave goods for those who had no more need of them.
At last, my head acknowledged what my heart had told me all along. Now I understood the story Fabrissa had told me, though I had not wanted to hear it before.
Had not been able to hear before.
Here were fragments of the long green robe of Guillaume Marty, scraps of something still attached to the leather belt around his waist. Here, the royal-blue robes with red stitching, rags now, worn by the Maury sisters. Here, a remnant or two of Na Azéma’s grey veil pulled up over her face. No longer people, but skeletons. Skulls half-concealed by a hood or a fold of material or by shadow, the bones glowing green-white in the pale beam of my torch.
Swallowing down the bile rising in my throat, I walked on. Now I could see the bones were clustered in groups, where families had died together. How many bodies lay here entombed? Fifty people. A hundred? More? Had anyone escaped this living death? Fabrissa said no one came back. A refuge that became a tomb. A mass tomb for the people of Nulle.
But the worst was to come. The whispering was getting louder, the pleading, crying for someone to help them. Begging for release. And joined now by another sound, superimposed on the whispering. A scratching on the stone. The rattle of bone on the rough and uneven ground. I wanted to turn back, but I could not. I could not look away for to do so would be to abandon them once more. I could not stop my ears against the horror of the voices.
I had not yet found Fabrissa, and though I prayed against all the odds that I would not, I knew it was only a matter of time. Her voice singing in the mountains, in the Ostal, the syllables and vowels smudged and indistinct, everything led to the same conclusion.
The noise intensified. Screaming now, a desperate clawing at rock and stone that could not be shifted. Not the Cers wind but, as old Breillac had said, the spirits of the dead. For countless years, the village of Nulle had lived in the shadow of the memories held in this ancient forest.
I could see shapes in the darkness, shifting and sighing, surrounding me. They would not let me be. The cave was full of movement. White shadows, sketches in the air, the silhouette of souls of the dead departed. I covered my face with my hands, knowing it would make no difference. The black parade would walk before me all the same. As I had heard them die, so too was I condemned to watch them die.
Faces loomed in and out of my vision, a terrible beauty in their eyes, coming closer, then withdrawing. Those whom I had met in the Ostal, greeting me once more. Familiar strangers. The man who had sat beside me scowling, his skull now pushing through the skin. In place of his drunken eyes, hollow sockets the size of a man’s thumb. In place of his greasy mouth, emaciated lips and blackened teeth. The gentle face of Na Azéma, almost puzzled as her features slipped away from her, leaving nothing but white bone and the memory of whom she had been.
I knew why I had been brought here. I had been brought to bear witness, both to the manner of their dying and to the nature of the prison I’d fashioned for myself.
Without understanding, there can be no redemption. And at that moment it made perfect sense to me how I, a man who for so many years had walked the line between the quick and the dead, might be able to hear their voices in the silence when others could not. For ten years, I’d hear
d and sensed things that lay beyond the boundaries of the everyday. I’d been haunted by images of George taken back into the earth. Now, in this place, I was witnessing skin slipping from bone, the putrefaction of flesh, the cavalcade of life and death and decay accelerated. Each feature twisting in upon itself, rotting, collapsing. Lives lived, lives lost. Cradle to grave.
It was too much to bear. I was aware of a different sound, one all too human. The sound of a grown man weeping. At last, I was crying. For George, for myself. For all those who lay forgotten in the cold earth.
Then I felt it. A sudden shift, a thickening of the air. A prickling at the base of my spine and a lightening of the pressure on my chest. They were still with me, the winter ghosts, but they were retreating into the wings.
‘Fabrissa?’
I raised my head and looked straight ahead. The briefest sensation, no more than the tremor of a butterfly’s wing. A moment, not of enlightenment, but of grace in a twist of tumbling black hair and a pale face. I scrambled to my feet and took a hesitant step forward. The vision slipped instantly away, perishing, falling, no sooner seen than gone.
‘No.’ My cry rang out around the cave. ‘Stay.’
I clenched my left hand into a fist, feeling my broken fingernails digging into my scratched palm. I tried to remember the feel of her, so light, the touch of her, her bright grey eyes and the laughter lines at the corners of her mouth.
I took another step closer to where she had been. The weakening beam of light picked out a fragment of blue lying on the ground. A deep blue, the colour of my brother’s eyes, of flax blossom in the Sussex fields in June. The exact colour of the dress Fabrissa had worn. I could see clearly, too clearly, threads of yellow where the cross had been.
I knelt down beside her, more than anything wanting to feel the frail white skin beneath my fingers. But there was only the hardness of bone beneath my hand. I tried to speak her name, to bring her back to life, but I could not.
My ribs seemed to tighten, to crack. Then, at last, I heard her, dazzling in the darkness, speaking to me and me alone.
‘Freddie . . .’
‘I’m here,’ I said, half weeping, half laughing. I knew she could hear me. ‘I kept my word. I came to find you.’
Did I hold her to me then? I cannot have done, for I knew she was shadow and dust. And yet, I have the memory that, for an instant, I felt her warm in my arms and that I sighed. I had come for her and so she had returned to me. Come to take me home.
I could feel myself slipping further into the darkness, but now I welcomed it. And she started to talk, finishing the story she had begun. I laid my head in her lap, I am sure of it, as I listened, entranced once more, by the beautiful rise and fall of her voice telling the end of her tale of the mountains and the ghosts that dwelt within them.
My eyes slowly closed, lulled by the rhythm of her words, until finally all was silence. And in that silence she slipped away. I felt her go. I cried out, but her ghost, spirit, emanation, whatever it was - whatever she was - was gone. And this time, I knew she would not return.
I was slipping further into unconsciousness. I did not wish to wake. As the light dimmed and dimmed again, I thought of the lights going down in the auditorium and the hush of that Christmas Eve in the Lyric Theatre. I thought of Neverland and Pan. Of George and me eating jellies and giggling. Of how we were both wiser now and knew dying never was an awfully big adventure. And then I was smiling to think that I might see George again, and Fabrissa, and that that would be all right.
Then, suddenly, I was struggling. I couldn’t join them, not yet. The thought was as sharp as a splinter under my skin. Although I had found her, I had not brought her home. Just as I had never brought George home.
‘Fabrissa . . .’
But the word died on my lips. I was floating down through the darkness, lower into the ice floes of the Antarctic, into the impenetrable silence. The silence of the end of days.
The Hospital in Foix
White faces, white walls, white sheets on the bed.
When I came round, I was in the hospital in Foix. I wasn’t sure what day it was, nor how long I had been in the hospital, nor how I came to be there. I had been unconscious for two days, they told me. The fever I’d so foolishly thought to have shrugged off had returned with a vengeance, brought on by the exertions of the climb and hypothermia. For a while, my life hung in the balance.
For forty-eight hours, I drifted in and out of consciousness. Time had little meaning. How could it, after what had happened in Nulle? Now, then, in the past, in the present, all just words. The passing of days, as measured by the accretion of seconds and minutes and hours, was too rigid.
Madame Galy made the journey down the valley of the Vicdessos to sit with me. Though unconscious, I was aware of her gentle presence, her soothing hand on my brow. And in the seclusion and privacy of the night, when she did not think I could hear, she whispered of her son who had gone to war, like George, and never come back. Of his name, Augustin Pierre Galy, carved with those of his friends on the memorial in the corner of the place de l’Église. When the fever had worn itself out and finally I woke up, she was no longer there.
At first, I couldn’t remember what had happened or how I had come to be there. I looked down and saw my hands were bandaged and felt pressure on my temples. I realised I had a dressing on my head, too tight for comfort, and my throat was sore. As if I had been shouting. Or possibly even crying.
Little by little, my memories started to surface. I tried to piece together the sequence of events, all of it, from the point at which the car went off the road. There had been a storm and I had crashed, that wasn’t in doubt. Nor that I had found my way to Nulle and Fabrissa. But everything from that point became blurred, indistinct.
I did remember climbing up into the cave and dismantling the prison wall with my bare hands. I remembered chancing upon the letter, then making my way through the narrow gap that led to the inner cave. Then finding the skeletons of those with whom I had spent an evening. The winter ghosts, as Breillac called them, long dead. I remembered Fabrissa. And my eyes filled with tears.
Later, when I was a little stronger, I learned the doctors had been mystified by how ill I was. The fever had been aggressive and my body temperature in the cave had dropped to perilously low levels, but at the same time there was no severe injury that accounted for my disorientation. The abrasions on my hands and face were minor, and though I appeared to have knocked my head, it was nothing serious. Only one nurse understood, a pretty dark girl from Nulle originally, with round kitten eyes. She knew I had ventured too close to the grave and had been tainted by it. Death had slipped into my bones.
Medical men came and went. Doctors, psychiatrists, the ward sister and her flock of starched nurses in squeaking, rubber-soled shoes. On the surface, it seemed that history was repeating itself. A sanatorium in Sussex, a hospital in Foix, a patient unable to cope. But I was not the same man. For though they poked and prodded at me, I felt clear in my mind. I was no longer doped up, just tired.
And the knowledge that I had done what had been asked of me sustained me. I had found Fabrissa.
With each passing hour, more memories returned. Fragments of the days leading up to this point, filling in the gaps like missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. My room in the boarding house, the crunch of sparkling ice underfoot in the place de l’Église when I set out for the Ostal. Watching the pale sun light the valley at dawn.
Fabrissa at my side.
On 22 December, my friends came from Ax-les-Thermes. Having received my letter, they had waited for me to get in touch. When after four days there was still no word, they made enquiries with Madame Galy and found out I was laid up in hospital.
They stayed for a couple of hours. From them, I learned my discovery in the cave was something of a coup. La Dépêche, the local newspaper, had devoted a whole page to the story. Of course it was early days and on account of the season, there was difficulty getting hold of th
e top men from Toulouse - archaeologists, pathologists, battalions of experts - but the consensus was that the skeletons were some six hundred years old. The cache of grave goods, pots and domestic artefacts, all confirmed that.
I understood a little more. Not a tragedy in living memory, but a story far older.
According to the experts quoted in the newspaper, the bodies were most likely to be traced back to the wars of religion in the early fourteenth century. Local historians had recorded similar incidents when members of the last remaining Cathar communities in the region had been trapped inside the caves in which they had taken shelter. In Lombrives, for example. No one had known there might be another similar site so close.
‘Breillac knew,’ I murmured to myself.
The whole village knew. My pretty nurse, Madame and Monsieur Galy, all of them had grown up in the shadow of the deep sadness that enveloped the village. Not only from the last war, but all the wars going back through the centuries. The inhabitants of Nulle, present and past, knew how such profound grief erodes the spirit.
But as I listened to my friends talk, and heard the excitement in their voice at being caught up, at one remove, in such an historic mystery, relief seeped through me. For although it was not I who physically carried her body home, my exploration of the cave had set in motion the reclaiming of those lost so many years ago. Now the real work of identification and burial could begin.
My thoughts drifted back to Fabrissa. She had led me there, hadn’t she? A flash of blue against the white of the mountains? And I had, for a perfect, impossible moment, surely held her in my arms.
I had no other visitors until Christmas Eve.
As the evening shadows were falling across the neat rows of beds and the nurses were lighting the lamps in the ward, a figure appeared in the doorway. Broad shoulders, awkward in the sterile atmosphere.