Stay in the light, p.7
Stay in the Light, page 7
‘We’re closed,’ Tom said, straightening his shoulders as a show of standing.
His words were ignored as the man stepped out of the rain. The face didn’t count amongst Mina’s sketches, and she kept that catalogue within her mind’s reach at all times. Her artist’s eye had sharpened – not for creativity’s sake but for the nobler cause of survival – and she now drew it over the man with a microscopic lens, scanning for the tell-tale tokens that marked the monsters out from the men.
The most striking aspect in the dim light of the doorway was his pallor, and how it blanched bone-white atop his chin and cheekbones. Long sable hair was slicked back behind the man’s ears and his face was one shorn of softness. With such scant flesh to fill in between the bones, his thinness bordered on the skeletal. And yet despite this lucid air of sickliness, he stood as one of strength with no stoop to his broad shoulders.
To the undiscerning eye, the sum of his features was masculine at a glance. But Mina had learned to isolate the elements. The man’s bright blue eyes bore heavy, coarse lids that weighed them down into the narrowest slits. They appeared much older than the otherwise pristine paleness that stretched so smoothly around his skull. The nose was distinctly incongruous; short and narrow, and almost feminine in its form. Whilst his lips were dark and thin, and shared the same perfect symmetry that ran throughout. He was astoundingly ugly, yes, but it wouldn’t be like a watcher to seek out a pint, no matter its thirst. The man’s coat was sewn from dirty brown leather and reached down to a pair of boots socked in mud, as though he’d walked the length of the country to drink from Tom’s bottle.
He looked to each of them directly, tarrying his attention on Mina a second or so longer than the others. But then, given her society and surroundings, she was quite obviously the odd one out.
‘I said we’re closed,’ Tom repeated calmly, though his rigid stance betrayed his irritation. ‘I’m not pouring any drinks here until five o’clock.’
He considered the stranger as though the living, breathing embodiment of a complication now stood in his doorway. Peadar swivelled around on his stool to face him in a show of solidarity.
Their uninvited guest let his unblinking gaze linger on the barman. ‘Yes, I heard you.’
He spoke in an accent Mina couldn’t place, contrived and born of no particular county. She instinctively searched the room for some other way out, as any prey – having realised their tier in the grander scheme of things – has wont to do. There was no back door and no window large enough to climb through should it come to that. Stomping out the fire and scuttling up the narrow chimney wasn’t an option. All she had standing between her and this unknown entity were two old men who’d already polished off half a bottle between them.
‘I am terribly sorry to intrude on you all,’ the man said in a manner that was far from apologetic. ‘When I heard voices inside, I presumed you were open. This is a public house after all, is it not?’
With walls that thick and a door just as hefty, it was unlikely that he could have picked up on their presence in passing. The smoky air was becoming too hot to breathe. A nervous twitch attacked the corner of Mina’s eye, like an insect trapped beneath the skin, frantically trying to flap its way out, to escape the dead gaze of the one now guarding the only exit.
‘It’s no problem,’ Tom replied, cocking a fuzzy eyebrow, ‘but we are closed. What you heard was some private chatter amongst friends. I’m afraid it wasn’t an invitation to join us.’
The stranger responded with a smile, or rather an attempt at one. With his lips pursed into nonexistence, their corners limply lifted, though the strain was such that they were seen to quiver. The eyes remained, all the while, glazed and void of the slightest spark. This pained expression was held until Peadar’s patience could suffer it no longer.
‘Best you be on your way now,’ he said firmly, as an order. ‘Tom here will be opening at five o’clock. If you’re still around come then. Though perhaps you’d be as well to take yourself elsewhere.’
The man slowly nodded his understanding as his smile dissolved, like a quenched flame in a lightless room, leaving only darkness. A gloved hand was drawn to his cheek as if awaiting to catch a tear. There it lingered, pressed to the skin. Again, he looked to Mina, tilting his head ever so slightly, as though he could hear the hastening beat of her heart. The hand was lowered. There was something funereal about the silence and the slow, deliberate movements that filled it. All the while, the rain tapped the window like a thousand thoughtful fingers and the fire crackled on.
‘I’m just passing through,’ he said eventually. ‘You must forgive me for seeking out some companionship. Because, you see, I have travelled far to be here.’
His every motion and phrasing was endued with that same serpentine styling that could make the calmest ocean unsteady.
‘Such a quaint place,’ he added, almost as an afterthought, sharpening each consonant with that whetstone that was his voice. ‘Do many live here?’
‘Not many,’ Peadar replied sternly. ‘And there certainly isn’t much to stay around for, quaint as it is.’
Here the stranger cast his eyes around the darkness that draped thick as black velvet from every corner. ‘But there is something beautiful in its isolation. Believe it or not, it’s just what I’ve been looking for.’
There was a decadence to the man’s good humour that Mina knew better than to trust. He turned and stepped back outside, leaving a trail of muck where’d he stood, now mingled with the rainwater into a brown pool.
‘I’ll be seeing you later,’ he said before closing the door behind him, flashing one final glance towards Mina, flaring his thin nostrils as he did so.
Peadar didn’t hesitate in striding from his chair to turn the key.
‘Have you seen that lad around here before?’ he asked Tom.
The barman shook his head. ‘Never in my life. But sure, Peadar, we still get the odd tourist in these parts.’
‘He didn’t strike me as being much of a tourist,’ he said, visibly angry for the first time since Mina had met him.
‘I don’t know,’ Tom mumbled. ‘I saw two or three unfamiliar faces floating around yesterday. Maybe they were lost.’
‘How’d he even get here?’ Peadar asked him. ‘Sure there hasn’t been a bus yet today, has there?’
‘Looks like he walked,’ Tom replied, ‘judging by the state of his boots. Bastard, dragging that mess inside after I’d only just swept the floor.’
Peadar repositioned himself on his stool, angsty now, beard balled up into a pout. He was about to raise his whiskey to his mouth when he noticed Mina’s hands; even when gripped around her glass, they wouldn’t steady themselves.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, at which Tom also examined her more closely.
There were too many eyes on her. Lost for an answer, she downed her drink in one swift gulp and lowered her head to hide whatever gnarled expression it’d coaxed out of her. Keeping the whiskey from exploding back up her throat held her full attention for a moment, until it returned by fearful instinct to the door, projecting that same stranger standing on the other side of it, his eyes mystically locked with her own.
‘Can we go home, please, Peadar?’ she whispered, glancing embarrassedly to Tom.
The old man’s stool scraped back as means of an answer. ‘It was about my time to get back to June anyway,’ he replied, offering the barman a short nod before taking those first steps towards the door. ‘And Tom,’ he added, ‘let me know if that lad comes back this evening. We might want to have a word with him if he’s here to stir up any trouble.’
The barman looked to Mina, suspecting perhaps that she was the reason for the stranger’s intrusion; that their histories were in some shameful way connected – an old flame whose embers time hadn’t stamped out or a debt collector looking to fill a long-suffering empty space in his wallet.
‘Let’s get you home,’ Peadar said, holding the door open.
Mina quit at the threshold, taking a cautious moment to peer around the street. The man was nowhere to be seen, and the rain’s steady static on the pavement had washed away any trace that he was ever there.
Then why did she suffer that recurring shiver as the gooseflesh rose across her neck – that instinctive alarm triggered by another’s gaze, as the hare’s ears perk in the stillness of a glen, sensing something elusive and sinister, and not of its own kind.
7
SEAN
The silence came as a ceasefire.
Painkillers were no better than chalky sweets when the very ground beneath their feet quaked through to the marrow. Every soul on site without exception had proved susceptible to the same headaches, and there were few beings on this earth more fragile than Ash’s nannied little undergraduates. Sean had even caught a few of them glowering at the source of their anguish, fighting the urge to sabotage the entire operation for the sake of some peace and quiet. Truth be told, he’d been half-tempted himself more than once. When eventually the last of the limestone split and fell and the explosive echo of its impact tremored up into the open air, Ian went about disassembling the drill immediately, eviscerating the enemy in full show of the bleary-eyed victors. Their war with the rock was over, and the entrance – as elaborately sealed as it was – had finally been opened.
The crew had convened around the monitor, whispering and giggling amongst themselves, their excitement fizzling in the tent like an electrical storm that’d been rising since Ian brought the drone out for its first test flight. Camaraderie was renewed, and both their voices and tempers had softened in the absence of the other – the tool that none dared speak of lest it be called upon again to remake their lives a misery. And yet – as was evident from those whose fingers remained pressed to their temples like amateur mentalists – the migraines lingered on through the early hours of armistice. Luckily there was ample distraction to soothe their tender thoughts until they passed.
‘Are you all ready for this?’ Ian’s voice rustled over the walkie-talkie, loud enough to startle Ash into adjusting its volume, ever respectful of the newfound peace.
She looked to Sean, spellbound by the screen, gnawing at his thumbnail as though he were watching a breaking news report on the apocalypse.
‘Yeah, Ian, in your own time,’ she replied. ‘Take her down. We’ll be watching.’
The drone’s camera was being live-streamed through to the tent, baiting everyone into stealing the best view they could, barging through any shoulder too tall to peer over. Full colour as it may have been, the Burren’s sober palette could trick the eye into thinking otherwise – stony hues and grey skies without a wildflower in sight to brighten it all up. In accordance with Ash’s playbook, they’d no choice but to send the drone down first. Broken machines could be mended or bought anew. Broken bodies, not so much, even though they seemed to have a surplus of useless ones who mooched around the site chain-smoking cigarettes and picking flowers that they shouldn’t. The passage had weathered the centuries without collapsing in on itself, but there was no gauging how those few short days of drilling had compromised its integrity. Ambitious as Ash was, she still wanted to make the news for the right reasons.
‘Have you ever used a drone before?’ Sean asked her. ‘Like this, I mean, going underground?’
She smirked at him. ‘Never. But then, I’ve also never had to explore a hidden cave buried under the Burren, have I? Trust me, this is as much a novelty for me as it is for you, Sean, and I still think it’d make a great documentary, no matter what we find.’
Ian’s drone hovered directly above the entrance to the shaft, steady as a dragonfly. He didn’t trust anyone else to pilot it. The descent from the surface above to the floor of the cavern below had been estimated around the forty-metre mark – too great a distance to fly without due experience. But once the drone was lined up it should have been a simple drop down – a straight line in still air. No complications. No cause for Sean’s palms to sweat the way they were. Even the wind had respectfully calmed itself for the occasion.
‘Okay,’ Ian said, drawing Sean’s gaze to the walkie-talkie in Ash’s hand, ‘going in now. No more radios, please and thank you. We have one drone and only one shot at this.’
Together they watched through the drone’s unblinking eye as it submerged beneath the surface. Daylight switched to white-lit walls of stone and a measured beep broke the silence in the seconds that followed, slower and steadier than the beat of Sean’s own heart.
‘What’s that noise?’ he whispered in Ash’s ear. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘It’s the sensor,’ she replied in kind. ‘It’s keeping track of how close it is to the walls. We should be fine though. Ian knows what he’s doing.’
The drone’s course was constant, and its distance from the walls remained unchanged if the beep were to be believed. A few in the tent couldn’t stand still. Without a breath of wind to press its walls, Sean could hear the rustle of nylon jackets and the occasional sniffle from the back of the room. The loudest sound – and the only one that mattered – was the beep as those ancient cracks and creases in the granite charted the drone’s descent. Sean imagined his techie, mouth-breathing over sweaty thumbs, wary as though he were making that journey downward himself. One mistake and the darkness would swallow him up like a pill.
‘It’s so deep,’ Ash whispered, to which a few behind them hummed in agreement.
Forty metres hadn’t seemed so far on paper. There was never any doubt that getting the requisite gear and bodies into the cavern was going to be tricky – treacherous even, given the narrowness of the shaft and the inexperience they’d farmed for free from the university. But the frame fixed into the surface had proven its stability, holding the drill with the steadiest hand, never once cramping up. Ian had sourced out an industrial winch, compact enough to haul up to the site without breaking too many spines. Ash prioritised safety over value for money and so it’d cost Sean a small fortune. But it was worth it. They were, after all, going to be lowering down more than just lights and tools. When the time came, the core crew of Ash’s team all wanted a piece of the action.
‘How do you think they got in and out of there?’ Sean asked her without averting his gaze from the screen. ‘I mean, even with our equipment we’re going to have to be careful.’
‘You’re assuming that they’re not still down there,’ she replied, nudging into him.
‘What do you mean?’
Just when he thought his nerves couldn’t wind any tighter around that moment.
‘It could be a massive tomb for all we know, Sean. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Nothing makes the front page quite like a few old bones. Whatever it is, we’ll know soon enough.’
The beep never altered, nor did the tension in that tent falter for a second. And then, almost unexpectedly, there was silence. The metrical melody that scored their descent had ceased, and on the monitor that kept all their eyes from blinking there was only the drone’s light fading into the unknown.
‘We’re in,’ Ian’s voice boomed over the radio. ‘Feel free to take a breath.’
Sean flinched as those around him cheered and pressed against his back. But he didn’t take his eyes off the screen – the answers were there, somewhere, patiently waiting in the dark to be discovered. Only when he felt the warmth of Ash’s hand did he snap out of this lonely state and realise the wonder that had just occurred.
‘You okay?’ she asked, squeezing his fingers.
‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘I’m good.’
She’d reached for him.
‘Right then,’ Ian said, the walkie-talkie’s volume still loud enough to draw back everyone’s attention, ‘would one of you kindly tell me what I’m looking at. I didn’t fly all the way down here just to float around in the dark.’
Sean could feel his father’s presence, as he often did when some fresh idea would ripen in the wilds of their research. They’d sowed so many together, toiling side by side, each as patient and driven as the other. It never was quite the same without him. Even the most celebrated of victories carry their own sadness without another like-mind to share them with. The good times, he’d learned, can accentuate a man’s loneliness just as much as the bad.
What do you think he would say if he were here to see you now?
Sean had yet to satisfy himself with an answer.
The drone was performing a scan of the surrounding walls, drifting back and forth in an attempt to gauge the cavern’s scale and any surprises that could lie therein. The quality of the camera feed had taken a drastic downturn since abandoning the daylight, but Sean could make out a few skinny stalactites dripping from the ceiling like fangs and the murky shoulders of a few half-lit stones protruding seemingly from nowhere.
‘There,’ Ash said, radio suspended by her mouth. ‘Ian, can you move closer to that section?’
Surely as the excavation’s sponsor and figurehead, Sean should have been the one issuing instructions as to what they should be examining. This was his discovery after all, as Ash had reminded him a thousand times over.
‘What is it?’ he asked, keeping his frustration wrapped.
‘That wall,’ she replied, stepping closer to the screen. ‘It looks like the same granite that was laid inside the shaft. The colour, I mean. I don’t know, it just looks different.’
Sean trusted Ash’s educated eye above his own, though he remained quietly baffled as to the significance. They hadn’t drilled through all that stone just to seek out more of the stuff.
