Stray

Terror only comes in brief jags now, but when it does it splits my head. Panic flashes like a strobe light. It isn’t the knowledge of death, but the manner of it. When it comes, I would like to feel human. But I’m a trapped animal – less – a bacterium shifting through the bowels of the earth.

My headtorch packed in some time ago. My world was vivid. Then it was a single, silent cone of light. Now it is permanent darkness. I don’t know whether it’s light or dark outside. I don’t know what day it is. Only my footsteps on the rock. My breath. The occasional drip of water.

I wish I was ignorant of my surroundings, but I’d been with Rob and his party long enough to see the labyrinth he led us into. Miles of caverns surround me. Above my head are black orifices, folds of stone, slick mucoidal pillars and growths. Sinus-like cavities flowering off each other. I remember Rob saying some tunnels were wide enough to drive a bus through. But others could barely accommodate a person. Some flooded with no warning, freezing black water rising fast.

Groping through the dark, feeling the skull-smooth limestone underhand, I am always half-expecting the sudden rush of death.

I walk carefully, testing every obstacle. I pat the floor and check for fissures. I breathe evenly and deeply, tasting the ashy air. I remind myself of the surface world. The village with its baskets of flowers and chocolate-box shopfronts. My grandparents’ house, tucked away at the village’s edge. That place where peace emanated from the sun-warmed patio tiles, the lazy-growing ivy, the slow tick of the mantel clock.

Rob lived in the village too. He knew my grandparents, Walter and Janice. He did odd jobs for them after Walter fractured his hip. The three of them became friends. They would drink tea and talk about the weather, the neighbours, the changing times.

My hands find an opening in the cave wall. I push my arms in as deep as they’ll go. It’s wide enough; rock not too jagged. I can’t feel the end.

I crawl in headfirst. The blackness is stunningly solid, thick with the weight of the earth. There’s space either side of me to fan my hands, nothing more. I am reminded that we once lived in places like this. This stone was the first witness to our vulnerability. Our first confidant, protector – our first canvas, too, accepting the signature of our handprints with the kindly indulgence of a parent.

How fitting we should retreat here, now, at the end of things. I think every member of Rob’s party felt that irony. Everyone entering the cave looked sombre, chastised. As if our time on the surface had been some kind of broken parole.

I took a last look back at the village. It lay abandoned in the laced fingers of the valley. Unlit, it looked flimsily stamped out of shadow, as if built in haste.

“We can stay underground for weeks before the food runs out,” Rob had said. His big gardener’s hands gripped the map he’d drawn. Before us, the opening to the earth gaped like a letterbox in the hillside. There were sixteen of us. Rob had pulled us together, reaching out to anyone he knew who was still able to make it to the village. We stood there like cattle. All of us were stunned by the violence that had riddled the last few weeks. No one had been prepared for the scale of the fighting. No one had known there were weapons like that. We could still hear that piercing tone, still feel the dawning awareness of gas.

“There are miles of tunnels down here,” Rob said. “Miles I’ve mapped out, and miles beyond that. Even if someone follows us in, they’ll never find us.”

I slither through the passage, feeling like a stowaway in the hold of time. Soon, the limestone is bookending my skull, scraping skin. Fear starts to kick. My fingers and toes move like worms. I inch forwards, painfully, madly. A bizarre sense of vertigo upends me. It’s like the earth has tipped back its head to swallow me. My own panting fills the tunnel. I try to breathe slowly, and think of Walter and Janice’s house. The white flowers on the garden trellis. The sun loungers and bird feeders, the to-and-fro of bumblebees mining purple seams of lavender.

Then my hands are scrabbling at nothing, my body folds at the waist, falling, and my legs kick the air as I slide, birthed from the stone, into another lightless chamber.

I can hear a low thundering sound. A sense of enormous space lurking before me.

I start to crawl. Every dip in the rock stops my heart. I bang my knee and cry out. The sound echoes far above my head, multiplying, diving through the air like a sudden flurry of birds.

Walter and Janice’s house had a brown front door. It had the knots and swirls of real wood. Beyond it was the kitchen. On hot days, they cooked with the door open. Janice sat on the patio with a glass of wine. Walter hummed to himself as he prepared the food. I could smell whatever was cooking as I came up the drive. My parents, walking behind me, would roll their eyes. They thought Walter’s humming was embarrassing, as was Janice’s display of relaxation.

I was too young to understand why my parents saw Walter and Janice’s happiness as immoral. I had no grasp of the gulf in welfare between generations, or the ethics of enjoying oneself in a time of crisis. My visits to my grandparents were both a relief and an adventure. The house was a beautiful bungalow, stashed away in the countryside, each room filled with treasures collected by Walter and Janice on their travels, on their life-long browse through the galleries of a happy life.

The roaring sound gets louder. The air takes on a different quality. I realise I am approaching an underground river. It’s somewhere beneath me, thundering through the dark. Nervous excitement shoves at my stomach.

I cast my mind back to think how far I’ve traveled, but can’t connect my movements to any sense of location. I’m barely sure which parts of my journey were blind, and which I actually saw.

One thing, however. I do not blame the man who attacked me. I can’t begrudge anyone anything anymore. His expression as he waited for me in the tunnel – a kind of animal panic – was familiar. I knew its hungry look, even as I convinced myself there was no danger. We were both stragglers at the back of Rob’s group. We needed to look out for one another. So, I hurried over to him and met his out-swung fist, felt his torch crack the back of my head, felt my pack lifted from my shoulders as I lay on the floor. There was no word of explanation or apology; no insult or cry of rage either. It was necessity.

Those left when the fighting stops – if they follow the threads back in an attempt to understand, might conclude that loneliness was why we were able to do these things to each other. Loneliness and estrangement.

I know I always felt like an only child – though I wasn’t – and my parents were like aliens, tight-lipped, spectating on my childhood as I spectated on my grandparents’ contented retreat. There was the distance of observation in all our relationships. Everyone knew where they sat on the timeline of global collapse. That guilt, jealousy, and shame made us retreat from one another. It prepared our fall into factions, terrorists, scavengers.

Even my exploration of my grandparents’ home had been private. They knew I was soaking in all they had, letting it spring inside myself as a kind of oasis. But they never showed me anything. They let me discover it for myself. Their collection of moths and insects from Indonesia, Australia, and Ecuador. Their Russian doll that diminished, beautifully, into a figure no bigger than my thumb. And at the heart of it all was the cupboard in Walter’s office, large enough to crawl into, high shelves extending back into darkness, packed with trinkets.

The gradient becomes steeper. I turn around, terrified of going headlong into the black. I brace my feet on the limestone. Once or twice, I slip, and experience the sensation of sliding through utter dark. It is like falling through outer space.

I fully explored that cupboard only once. I was staying with my grandparents. Walter and Janice went for a morning walk, and I woke to find myself alone in their house. I went straight to the office and crawled inside the cupboard. I climbed the shelves. I found a herd of animals sculpted from bone. Sea shells, fishing hooks, glass jars full of dried flowers. A tin whistle, some old maps, and then, on the top shelf, a wooden box. When I opened it, I saw it was full of literal treasure: coins from around the world, bracelets, necklaces, rings.

The roar of the river now is deafening. I picture a white-frothed fountain, pouring through the dark like champagne. I shuffle down the rock face, drawn to the river’s noise and the sensation of its power. I begin to think that when I reach the river, I will stop.

I ran my fingers through the hoard. My parents had told me Walter and Janice hid things away because they were ashamed of the lifestyle they enjoyed. But I didn’t see anything to be ashamed of in that casket of beautiful things. I scraped up a jingling handful and saw, dangling from my fingers, a necklace ending in a heart. I turned the heart over. A seam ran up the side. I realised, with a thrill, that it could be opened.

I reach level ground. I stand and feel above my head – no ceiling. No walls around me either. I can hear the river bellowing like a motorway.

I take a couple of steps and feel my foot somehow pushing through the rock, merging with it, a resistance just stopping me from tumbling through. Then I realise – I’m walking on sand. I have stepped onto a subterranean shore.

I knew the heart would contain something special. It belonged to Walter and Janice, who were, to me, a different species. They had been places you could no longer visit. They had lived life to the full in a time of innocence. I wanted to discover a relic of that innocence. It would be like a time capsule – whatever lay inside would teach me their joy in being alive. I pulled at the heart, letting it butterfly open.

There was nothing inside. Nothing. Just dull metal reflecting an outraged face.

Stone slabs hump out of the sand. They’re ridged with the smooth shapes of fossils – crinoids and corals. The nameless river roars.

I find a bank and reach out my hand. Freezing force pummels my skin. I brace, then lower my head into the torrent. It shocks me awake. I drink long gulps. Water sloshes round my empty stomach.

I think of the fossils round me: life petrified by drifting millennia. I think of the sun-drenched museum of my grandparents’ house. I think of Rob and the group tunneling somewhere around, above or below me. They might be looking for me. They might’ve killed the man who robbed me.

I remember we once thought underground rivers flowed through hell. One of them was supposed to obliterate the memory of those who drank its waters.

I lean out of the cascade. It is an invisible din, roaring through the black. I plunge my head back in and drink more. I will drink until I am sick. Then, I will fall back onto the sand and rest.