Claddu yn fyw

I wrote this for Mother Combs' campfire challenge - but in a style typical of me, I cottoned on after the moment had passed, and only realised when I went to check the boundaries of the challenge. So I let myself have a few more words, and finished it anyway.

*

The minibus bumped its way down the track and came to a halt on the close cropped grass, where 11 teenagers in various states of queasiness disgorged themselves to stand on legs fatigued by the underuse of a long drive. Mr Jones and Mr Pedley, slower to unfurl their stiffened spines from the cab, joined them, and the group stared past the ranging sheep to the squat grey stone barn stood amidst the grass and bracken. The thick walls looked like they had been dragged up from the rocky ground around them, and moss cloaked the slate roof, thriving in the damp air, so far from the pollution of well-travelled roads. Next to it, a drop toilet had been dug and housed in a tin-roofed shack, the breezy gaps in its slatted walls the only “occupied” sign necessary. A slate sign propped against a jagged stone near the barn door read “Beddrod Bunkhouse”.

“Welcome to your home for the weekend!” My Pedley rubbed his hands together, his forced joviality setting a tone the boys picked up, at least outwardly. They joked and jostled as they grabbed luggage from the bus, then filed inside, dropping bags of pasta and climbing harnesses, sleeping bags and bread, to scramble for the best berths on the eight bunks which lined the unfinished stone walls inside. Jonah got a bottom bunk, as always, but after a raucous dinner at the big wooden table and a review of the maps and gear needed for the morning, he was only too glad to climb into it when the teachers called time on the evening. Mr Jones turned the lantern out, and the darkness closed around them like a shroud. Stifled by exhaustion and the pang of homesickness, the banter died away quickly, whispers giving way to the steady breathing of sleep, and the snores of the two adults, who had a whole bunk each near to the door with the hope of discouraging midnight wanderings.

When Jonah woke with a full bladder, the dark was absolute. The drop toilet may let a little moonlight through its walls, but the barn was as impermeable as a cave, and he would need a torch to get there. Drowsily, he reached out his hand, groping for the bed’s edge, but felt only the cold, uneven stones of the wall. More orientated now, he turned and reached to the other side, where his torch and drinking bottle lay tucked just under the bed, but his hand was stopped hard again by smooth, cold stone. Alarmed into full wakefulness, he sat up, folding himself forward to find the end of the bed. Again, he met only stone. In the darkness, he groped his way back up one solid stone side and to the head of the bed. Again, he met stone. No matter how high, or how low his frantic fingers reached, there seemed to be no way out, no exit, no chink of light at all.

His heart was racing now, and he cried out, quietly, embarrassed that his friends might hear him, then louder, when they didn’t. He must have woken someone, though no one came. But crouching in the pitch darkness, his breath coming fast as the sweat chilled his skin, he heard the muffled calls of another boy, and after a moment, a second. Above him, the springs of the bunk creaked as he felt his bunk mate run through exactly what he had just done, feeling first one side, then the other, the bottom, then the top, before the crying out began, his muffled voice thick with panic. As around him the cries multiplied, Jonah began to scream into the dark, his own terror bouncing back at him off the stone walls of his tomb. The old barn, unmoved by the boys' cries, folded itself around them, another layer in its thick, unyielding walls.