The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

  “What happened to Carlysle?”

  Semperson said no more. His eyes became vacant and I saw that he was weeping.

  “If you gentlemen are finished,” said the director, stepping between the two men, “then I will give Mr. Semperson his laudanum.”

  “I think we have what we need,” said Edgar. “Thank you, Dr. Fairweather. Thank you, Mr. Semperson.”

  The director handed his patient a small willow-patterned cup of suspension. While Semperson drank it I leaned close to Edgar. “I doubt the Carlysles will pay a thousand pounds on the evidence of a map drawn by the man who also believes that this higgledy-piggledy manticore stalks the Gloucestershire countryside.”

  Edgar folded the paper neatly, took the paper-knife from the desk and ran it along the fold, excising the monster. “I have no memory of the animal to which you are referring.” He laid the creature on the hot coals and it became briefly incandescent before it was swallowed by the flames. “Gentlemen, you have been generous with your time. We must bid you good day.”

  We found the cave towards the end of the afternoon. The trees thinned, the earth gave way to rock and we walked up a shallow slope to find ourselves on a low, stony plateau some five or six acres in size. At the far end the granite rose vertically, and cut into this cliff was a hole shaped almost exactly like the lopsided parabola in Semperson’s drawing. We had taken the picture literally, however, and misread the scale by a factor of eight or more. Hazlemere House would have sat comfortably within its maw.

  We could see the sides of the moss-covered vault receding into the dark but they did not narrow noticeably and beyond a hundred and fifty yards all light was swallowed up. The air emerging from the interior was fetid and chill and seemed unwilling to mix with the warm vapour rising from the jungle and as we moved around we passed in and out of rank, wintery currents.

  I walked to the edge of the plateau and looked out across the jungle, the uninterrupted green canopy blurring in the vaporous distance. The space should have offered me some relief but I felt nothing of the dizzying elation which had overtaken me on the bridge over the gorge. I could hear no animal cries of any kind, nor any birdsong, not even the buzzing of insects.

  Arthur and Bill returned from a brief reconnaissance having found the dark star of a long-dead fire burnt into the rock. Edgar appeared only vaguely interested. It was the cave itself which had now captured his imagination, to which end he suggested that he and I make a short foray inside to gauge its size and ascertain whether it was the lair of any creatures against which we should protect ourselves overnight.

  I armed myself with a machete, Edgar clipped his handgun to his belt and we stepped into the dark. The temperature dropped rapidly as we made our way down a gradual slope in the dying light and I was soon shivering in my sweat-soaked shirt. If we paused we could hear only the occasional splash of water dripping from the roof onto the wet floor. Here and there a sour, chemical smell became particularly intense and I found it difficult to shake the suspicion that some beast was only inches away, shrouded completely by the near-absolute dark. Our weapons, I realised, would be of little use against such invisible adversaries.

  We were clearly in a chamber of extraordinary size. The echoes coming from the walls on either side of us were like those one might hear in an empty cathedral, but we could hear no similar echoes returning from walls ahead. I pictured the trees above and thought that one might correctly refer to this as the underworld.

  After a quarter of an hour or so Edgar suggested that we save our resources for the morning and when we turned we saw, suspended in a great, starless dark, a droplet of bright green light within which tiny figures moved and I had the uncanny sensation that this was the world in its entirety and that I was looking upon it from the moon.

  We re-entered the day to find Bill holding a broken shovel with a bent and rusted head. He and Arthur had also found a rudimentary cross, but a good deal of dense undergrowth would need to be cleared before we knew where to begin digging in search of a grave, if indeed there was one.

  Edgar announced that Bill and I would do this in the morning while he and Arthur undertook a proper exploration of the cave. In the meantime we would pitch camp on the rock. A brief silence fell and I realised that I was not alone in the unease I felt about the place. Bill suggested that we spend the night instead in a clearing through which we had passed some twenty minutes before arriving at the cave, but Edgar replied that if we were to be attacked in the night he would rather see our assailants coming across a hundred yards of open ground than dropping from an overhanging branch. He untied his pack, extracted his canvas, poles and mosquito net and the subject was closed. We headed off to the tree line to find rocks and logs with which to hold our guy ropes down.

  After we had erected our own shelters Bill and I built a fire and plucked and roasted the large flightless bird we had trapped the previous night. The sparse flesh was surprisingly good despite a strong aftertaste of aniseed. We followed it with several chunks of Quiggin’s mint cake, watery coffee and two shots each of the ten-year-old Glenturret which Arthur had brought, wrapped in a blanket at the base of his pack, to celebrate the midpoint of our journey.

  I felt unwell on account, I assumed, of so much rich food after weeks of meagre fare, and was therefore in no mood for conversation. I offered my apologies and slipped away to the edge of the rock with my battered Ovid whose fine pages were now speckled with mould. I found it difficult to read, however. So I put the book down and watched the sky. Night fell fast at this latitude, and while I would be denied the spectacle of the sunset by the position of the hill into which the cave was cut, I would, in compensation, be able to see the Milky Way in all its glory for there was no trace of cloud and, apart from our fire, no other light for three or four hundred miles.

  I was beginning to discern the faintest points of light against the darkening indigo of the eastern horizon when I became aware that Edgar, Arthur and Bill had fallen silent. Something was about to happen but I was ignorant of how I knew this. There was a brief pause, then a faint susurration from the mouth of the cave, like the long receding of a wave on a gravel beach. An object of great size was moving swiftly towards us out of the subterranean dark. I briefly considered running but no one else had moved and I was unwilling to be judged unmanly. The susurration became a roar and I could feel a cold, ammoniac wind being driven from the cave’s mouth by the mass of whatever was speeding behind it. The fire, I recall, began to burn with a fierce green light. The noise continued to rise in volume until it was almost unbearable, at which point the very darkness inside the cave erupted into the surrounding air and the sky went black. I pressed myself to the ground, covered my head with my hands and felt something like hail pummel my exposed back.

  I have no clear memory of how long I lay in this position, only that after a period the noise and the smell abated somewhat. I opened my eyes, got to my knees and saw Arthur standing in the light of a fire that was glowing once more with a reassuring orange flame, exclaiming, excitedly, “Bats. Dear God in Heaven. Bats.”

  We walked over and saw, strung between his hands, a furry body the size of a field mouse at the junction of two segmented, translucent wings. “Some near-cousin of Tadarida brasiliensis,” he said, “plucked from the air by my own hands.” The struggling animal possessed the face of one of the demons in the illustrated Bible which had given my younger brother nightmares when we were children. “There was, after all, some point to those tedious afternoons at deep square leg.”

  “Arthura brasiliensis,” said Bill. “You’ll go down in history.”

  “Tadarida arthuriensis,” replied Arthur. He broke the neck of the creature with a sharp twist and dropped it into his pocket. “Brasiliensis is the adjective. And you may call me greedy but I’d prefer a more substantial memorial.”

  “A bat would suit me just fine,” said Bill. “A flower, a tree…”

  I returned to my bed, lay down and watched the Via Galactica reveal its
elf, the sky so clear and dark that I was able to discern the colours of individual stars, each one burning with the light of a different spectrum according to the peculiar combination of elements which fuelled its monstrous furnace. I fell finally into a doze and was woken, as was everyone else, by the return of the bats just before dawn.

  While we were eating breakfast I rolled up my trousers and discovered a raised purple lump on my left calf. The cotton duck of my trousers had not been punctured so it must have been the bite of some creature, perhaps one of the brown spiders through whose webs we had been walking repeatedly over the last couple of days. I showed the lesion to Arthur, the only one of us with any medical knowledge now that Nicholas was gone. He advised me to wait and see if the swelling and discoloration went down before risking any further intervention.

  He and Edgar then prepared themselves for their journey underground, donning all their clothes against the cold and equipping themselves with the remaining rope, two belay devices, the two handguns, a machete, water, food and both our oil lamps.

  “We shall press ahead for two hours at most,” said Edgar. “Then we will return. If after four hours we have not reappeared you must decide whether to search for us or attempt the journey home alone.” There was relish in his voice as if he might enjoy playing any of the roles in such a scenario.

  We wished the two men luck, bid them goodbye, gathered the spade and the machetes and made our way to the cross which Bill and Arthur had discovered the previous day so that we might dig for bodies and find some clues as to the fate of our predecessors. I was very grateful indeed not to be entering the cave. I was convinced that something would go wrong and the fact that my sense of impending doom was without foundation made it no easier to bear. If Bill and I were lucky enough to uncover Carlysle’s body, however, and identify it by means of his signet ring, for example, we might soon be heading home.

  I was unnaturally tired and after half an hour of labour Bill suggested that I sit to one side and resume the work when I felt stronger. By this time we had uncovered two graves. Bill put down his machete, picked up the antique spade and began to excavate the second of these. Within a very short time he struck a human femur. Digging more carefully now he rapidly produced a skull complete with a jawbone and a nearly complete set of teeth. Sinews and muscle were stretched around the whole like ageing strings of India rubber. He brushed the earth away and handed it to me. It seemed fake, a theatrical prop or a desktop memento mori.

  I remained incapable of significant manual labour. Bill said that there was no hurry and that my exhausting myself would be to no one’s advantage. Within half an hour I was handed a second skull, this one incomplete, the dome shattered and absent on the left-hand side of the head. These dead men were the reason we had made this laborious and fatal journey yet I could summon little interest. Bill returned after a few minutes carrying a handful of broken fragments. He laid them out like a jigsaw and fitted them together, the final shape mirroring the hole in the skull I still held in my hand. “He was killed by a heavy blow to the head.”

  I asked Bill how he could be certain of this.

  “If a man were to fall from a cliff he would crack his skull at most. To do this you would need to hold him down and stave his head in with a rock.”

  “Then he was killed by one of his own party.”

  “Or someone was already here and did not want company.”

  “And it was they, perhaps, who buried the bodies and spirited away the expedition’s equipment.”

  Something had caught Bill’s eye. He picked up one of the machetes and began cutting back a mass of vines and creepers which had climbed the side of the rock before petering out for lack of damp soil. He pulled back the foliage and I could see letters scratched into the rock. I got slowly to my feet and walked over so that I could read the inscription.

  “I assume you can tell me what it means,” said Bill.

  I confessed that my Greek was poor but that the word repeated in the first line almost certainly meant “flee,” from the same root as “fugue” and “fugitive.” As for the meaning of the second and third lines I had little or no idea.

  Bill looked at the sun. “Four hours have passed.”

  I had become so preoccupied by the graves, the skulls and the inscription that I had forgotten about Edgar and Arthur. We made our way back up onto the top of the rock, Bill striding comfortably ahead, the muscles in my legs protesting at the incline. Our little camp was empty and the two men were nowhere to be seen. My premonition had been correct.

  “So,” said Bill. “We have a decision to make.”

  It had not occurred to me that Bill might take Edgar’s instructions literally. For a moment I was tempted. Then my senses returned. “There is no decision to make.”

  We dressed as warmly as possible. There were no more lamps so I lit a fire while Bill hammered and split the ends of two staves of firewood to make brands. We took up a machete each, oiled and lit the brands then entered the cave.

  The walls, illuminated now, were rippled and bulbous as if formed from a substance which had hardened suddenly in its melting. I had expected irregularities—overhangs, narrows, drops, forks, subsidiary chambers—but there were none. There were patches of moss but otherwise surprisingly little vegetation for so fecund an atmosphere. The temperature dropped swiftly to that of a cold January day in England. We passed the point beyond which we were able to see the entrance to the cave and shortly thereafter we could no longer see the roof above our heads. I guessed that the cave must have been at least five hundred feet high at this point.

  The previous year I had listened to a speech at the Royal Geographical Society given by Alois Ulrich who had been exploring the Hölloch in the Swiss municipality of Muotathal which appeared to be at least ten miles in extent. I wondered if we had stumbled upon something commensurate. There were no longer any echoes as such, only a sibilant background to every noise, like a stiff brush dragged across a drum skin. Every so often we stopped and called out, standing in silence afterwards, letting the reverberations die slowly to silence and listening for any answering cries, but none came.

  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 powe
rs 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.