The dark between the tre.., p.19
The Dark Between the Trees, page 19
She said, “Was this down there?”
“Yes. I just found it at the bottom.”
“Sue wouldn’t have let this out of her sight. Even if she dropped it in she’d go down and get it back. Or Kim would.”
Alice screwed the lid back onto the bottle of water that she was holding. “Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
Nuria tried to laugh, but it came out as a kind of shriek. “Are you joking? Are you winding me up?”
“I just think—”
“You stand right there, and you tell me not to jump to conclusions? No. No, I’m sorry, I can’t do this any more.”
“I’m just saying, they might not be dead. There’s no evidence—”
Nuria’s voice was rising. If Sue and Kim were still alive, they could probably hear her a mile away. “There’s no evidence for anything here! Not one thing! And yet here we are, and here I am, because I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt, and I didn’t want to believe Professor Bell when he said you’d never cared about anyone other than yourself in your entire life.”
“Alastair has had it in for me since day one,” said Alice, hotly.
“And you know what? He was right! He was right about you, all along, and if I’d listened to him I’d be in a warm library right now, finishing my thesis—which you’ve also never given a shit about in three and a half years—and three good, brave women would still be alive!”
She was breathing hard, and there were spots in front of her eyes. Alice looked like she’d been slapped, and for a second Nuria felt a twinge of panic—had she gone too far? Despite everything, Alice still loomed large in her head, a figure of authority with blazing eyes and a razor-sharp bite. After all this, a figure to be appeased.
Then Alice said, “You think that’s my fault. You’re just like the rest of them.”
“Do you feel no sense of responsibility at all?”
“You’re calling me a murderer!”
Nuria shook her head. “This is exactly what I’m talking about. You go after your obsessions, and they’re all you can think about, and as soon as anything doesn’t go your way it’s every man for himself. You just completely abandon us, and it’s more fool me for coming all the way out here with you, and being loyal, because when it comes down to it you don’t care about me and you never have!”
Alice had scrambled back up onto the other bank. She said, “I thought you of all people would understand,” and her voice was quiet and level. “None of the rest of them have any idea what it’s like to spend your whole life chasing after something you know in your heart is true. To have them tell you time after time that you’re taking it too seriously, you’re pushing for it too hard—of course I’m pushing hard for it! In the end, knowing the truth is the only thing that matters. It’s what everything else is for. Alastair has never sacrificed anything important for knowledge in his life—look at him. He wouldn’t know what it meant to make sacrifices for your work. And the rest of the department are the same, all of them. I thought you got it, Nuria—you had the drive, the tenacity. You asked the right questions. I thought you were different. But you’re just like the rest of them.”
It would have broken Nuria once. She was here because she had wanted to support Alice, to impress her, to show her that Nuria was serious about her study. The knowledge that she would have been so easily bruised, that a week ago Alice Christopher telling her “I thought you were different” would have haunted her, made Alice’s words feel more calculated than they almost certainly were. And yet now, Nuria found that she didn’t even care. Alice Christopher’s professional respect was the least of her problems. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe they don’t understand you. But you don’t understand them either.”
“Oh, sure!” said Alice. Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest. “They care about knowing things, they’re academics. But would Alastair Bell have ever seen anything like this? No. He wouldn’t have the balls. He’d be running back to some cosy dig in Wiltshire before you can say the boundaries of human knowledge. Because he doesn’t really want to know. Not properly. And you know what?” she added, buoyed along now by her own mounting outrage, “he’d have got away with it, too! He’d have gone prancing back to the Arts Council the next year, and got the same old pat on the back, and they’d give him all the titles and the grants just the same! Because it’s not about the thirst for knowledge, and it never has been.”
“Three women are dead! And you’re grinding your axe about not getting the Winstone Grant?”
“It’s not about the Winstone Grant! It’s about all of them, every single one, going back years and years. And it’s not even the money that matters, it’s the respect. When you put your finger on something that’s true, and not just true but fascinating, and you’re just dismissed, again and again, and they don’t even listen to you. I was younger than you when it started, and I’ve fought it my whole career. It was much worse than it is today. You’d understand if it were you.”
“It is me and I don’t understand,” said Nuria coldly.
“Fine! Fine. That’s how it is, then. Apparently. You just stay here and make your own way back. I had to get myself everywhere on my own, maybe it’ll do you some good to as well. But aren’t you curious? Not even a little bit?”
“I was curious at the beginning. Just not enough to get myself killed because I can’t go back and wait a few more weeks.”
“A few more weeks? Do you know how long it took me to get this expedition? Two and a half years. I was asking for this twenty years ago, when I was still a postdoc. I have done risk assessment after risk assessment, filled in form after form, I have sucked up to endless old men in ways you can’t even imagine, and finally I got the go-ahead for five people. Have you ever done a research expedition with five people before? Eight? Anything less than half a dozen specialists? I am never going to get to do this again. It’s my only chance, and it’s all I have. It’s all I’m ever going to get. So you can come or you can stay, whichever you like. I hoped you’d come, but…” She blinked. “Just don’t tell me to go back, because this is the only chance I’m ever going to get, and I’m not going back now, for you or anyone else.”
Tears were running freely down Nuria’s face. She could feel them frigid on her hot cheeks. Alice was perfectly still.
“Three women are dead. You’re going to die in here. We’re going to die in here.”
“I’m not going back. Not now I’m this close.”
“Then,” said Nuria, “you’ll have to go without me.”
A pause, while it sank in. Then Alice scrambled to her feet. Her face was completely blank, but her hand with the bottle of water in it shook. Nuria flinched, but Alice tossed the bottle across the gap next to her.
“You were a good student,” she said. “I’m sorry I probably won’t get to see your viva.” She didn’t wait for Nuria to say something back, which was probably just as well. Then she slung her bag onto her back, clipped it up, and stomped off. Onwards. Forwards. Alone.
Nuria was left alone at the top of the cut through which the little stream flowed. Water soaked into her trousers where she sat on the sodden ground. She had taken her boots off to replace the blister plasters, and had not yet put them back on. Her socks could not possibly hold any more water now, and her feet were numb with cold.
She curled up in the foetal position, as the woods flickered around her, and closed her eyes. She stayed there for a very long time, while the broken GPS unit lay inert beside her.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Corrigal’s Nest
Captain Davies went ahead, as the way into the cave curved downhill. Leading the charge, as Harper thought of it, although it was only the two of them. Harper was the one who held the candle, so Davies was striding ahead into darkness and his own shadow. As they went downhill, hearing the drip-drip of moisture on the floor and smelling cold stone, and air which had not been breathed for a very long time, the ceiling did not narrow but instead opened up over their heads. The shadows grew longer and taller, and the candle smoked up in Harper’s face and into his eyes.
There was a turn in the tunnel, quite sharply to the right. As they rounded it, a gust of wind came from behind them, and the candle winked itself out. The tip of the wick glowed for a longer time than he expected, and he didn’t pinch it out, but waited for it to disintegrate and dim of its own accord.
The smell of old tallow and smoke followed them down, down, down.
They walked side by side in the darkness after the candle went out, because the tunnel was now wide enough to accommodate it, and it was the easiest way of keeping track of each other. The way continued to slope downhill, but the path was not uneven—not even up the sides. Harper kept his right hand to the wall, brushing against it often to make sure he wasn’t losing sight of it. Presumably Davies was doing the same on his left. And on they went, at a slow, regular pace.
It went on, the passage, for a very long time. There were no forks or breaks in it—at least not to Harper’s side, and if there were any to the left then Davies didn’t mention it. Harper found that this didn’t worry him—even if they ended up very far underground at a dead end, they could always turn around and come back, even if neither of them seriously believed it would come to that. After a while in the darkness, their eyes became accustomed to it, and not long after that, the first wave of intense worry hit Samuel Harper, and his vision responded to it by rebelling, and exploding into acid colours. Oranges, greens, the dark reds on the back of your eyelids that usually mean you’ve closed your eyes in bright sunlight. He wouldn’t have been too disconcerted by it if his eyes had been closed, but they were wide open, and the colours didn’t look like such he would expect from a dream, or even a vision. He knew what something brightly coloured looked like when it was superimposed on his sight—like the ghost of the candle flame when it had been snuffed out in the wind. This wasn’t that. This had depth, like ribbons of air in bright colours stretched out ahead of him and painting themselves up the walls, soft and undulating like smoke, merging into each other in weird and unexpected patterns but otherwise undeniably, somehow, real.
“Do you see this?” he whispered, and that was how he noticed that his mouth was extremely dry. His voice sounded quieter than he had expected, and more echoey. Maybe the ceiling above them was higher than he had realised. It could very well be true; he had no real way of knowing. At any rate, they weren’t going to stop and explore.
“What are they?” came back Davies’s response, which led him to believe that they might both be seeing things, but that they were not necessarily the same things.
But that was alright. In a perverse kind of way, that was comforting, because it meant the colours and the smoke weren’t real after all. He didn’t have to pay them any mind if he didn’t want to.
It wasn’t that he just watched them as they went past, but that was certainly one of the things he was doing while his mind wandered elsewhere. That was the way of walking, however. For Harper, at least. He thought more about life and the nature of Christendom while his feet wore through the soles of his boots than at any other time. Usually there were others around to pull him into conversation. The rhythm of the marching order was predictable and familiar, not always comfortable but to be depended upon whether you wanted to or not. This was not that, but it shared some of the same cadences. He felt it the same way in his legs, across his shoulders. Colours fluttered about him and he walked through them without feeling them touch him, and his boots took him forward.
“Why did you come here with me?” said Captain Davies, breaking the quiet. Some of the coloured smoke receded from Harper’s vision.
It took him a short while to answer. “I wanted to see it. I thought maybe I could find out what it was.” It sounded insubstantial, now he said it out loud—as insubstantial as everything else in here, except the slight crunch of earth underfoot and the rough wall against his fingers. “I suppose… going where you go hasn’t steered me far wrong over the last few years, either.”
He heard Davies snort. “I don’t suppose I shall ever get out of here alive, so the chances of you doing it aren’t much higher.”
“Well then. Why did you come down here?”
Davies said, “Fate, I think. We’ve been circling this place ever since we came into these woods. No matter what way we’ve been thinking we’re going. Longer, maybe.”
“Longer?”
“The company on the hill. Do you remember what any of them looked like?”
Harper shook his head to clear it, and the shadowy lights swirled. “Dark red coats. Their arms were blue and gold.”
“But faces. Any of them?”
“None.”
The captain said, “We were meant to come here. And if I… do what we’re meant to do, then maybe the others can get away. Maybe it’ll follow us instead of them.”
“You think there’s something following us?”
“Can you not hear it behind us? It’s been here since the candle blew out.”
It was true—after they subsided into silence again Harper took to listening hard. There were other noises under the occasional dripping, and the sound of his own footsteps and breathing. Harper had never been much of a hunter—he was not even any good at fishing, and the thrill of the hunt that so often got talked about was alien to him. In the past and as he was growing up he had been more likely to be acquainted with poacher than with hunter anyway, and joining the army had hardly done anything to redress that balance. Still, he was not likely to notice any of the little signs of nearby life until someone else pointed them out, and so it didn’t surprise him in the least that he hadn’t heard the quiet footfalls behind him, that set of hints that told Captain Davies—by far the more experienced at spotting such things—that they were not alone down here.
His immediate urge was to stop and turn around, but he didn’t. Nothing that would set it off. But what was it? What did it look like? Was this how Francis Alwood had felt, at the back of the line the previous morning, waiting for something he could not see to reach out and silently grab him?
“It doesn’t understand English, surely,” he said, in a half-whisper.
“I shouldn’t think so,” said Davies.
“Are we going to fight it?”
“It would get us long before we managed to round on it, in this place,” said Davies. “We’ll keep going, see how far we can get. Give the others as much time as we can.”
Something that had fluttered around his chest now settled. Yes, that was what they were going to do. Maybe the others were even now fleeing, taking this chance to get away which was afforded them by a sacrifice that was still taking place. A sacrifice. Put it like that, it seemed almost noble. At least one of them had intended it that way. Perhaps, if the others did get out, they would tell people that Sam Harper had been brave too.
But now he knew it was there, the anticipation surged through him, and the bright-coloured smoke in front of him got paler, with sharp glints of silver in it. He came to feel like what he saw was in some way a representation of how he felt, which was all well and good except that it wouldn’t do if anyone else—or anything else—could see it, and besides which what could that vibrant green possibly tell him about anything?
His fingertips were completely numb, he noticed suddenly. And not only that, but his cheeks were burning with the cold as if it was the middle of winter as opposed to the beginning of the summer. Presumably that was a result of being so far underground, but the most disconcerting thing was that he hadn’t noticed it at all until now. His left hand had a thin layer of wax on it where he still gripped the stub of candle; it had moulded itself to the shape of his fingers but now felt brittle in the chill air. If he’d been able to see anything at all, he expected that he would have been able to see his own breath rising in a freezing cloud in front of his face.
Thank God that he was not alone. He couldn’t have stood to be alone, not with whatever it was closing in behind him. Now he was very aware that this place was essentially a grave, a place you would walk until you could walk no further and then died where you landed. He would be here forever and never see the sky or his family ever again.
Whatever was behind them gave no clues to its size or its intentions. The steps were light and long and regular, as of something tall and unhurried and loping, with plenty of time to spare. Not the steps of something which had made this place, so much as which had found it and explored it and colonised it for its own purposes. The Corrigal was of this place but not the master of it, a cuckoo in the nest that bore its name.
That was the truth as Harper now came to understand it, and he carried the truth with him under this pitch black and unknowable mountain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Charcoal Burner And Essie
Alice Christopher, walking through a pine forest alone at twilight. She had slowed right down since Nuria had stayed behind by the bank of the little stream. She was not quite sure why, except that it was more difficult to get anything done without some kind of accountability, no matter what you were trying to do. Company made everything easier to stomach. To begin with she had been in shock—she had pushed Nuria to do her best work before now, and Nuria had always stepped up and put the effort in; besides which her mind had always been open and her ideas interesting, which was what had made her such a pleasing student to supervise. Alice had not thought that Nuria would hit her limit in the middle of an expedition, never mind one so novel and so relevant to Nuria’s own thesis. Perhaps, Alice thought, the mistake was doing this so close to Nuria’s thesis deadline. It was maybe not so surprising that she might crack under that particularly hefty combination of pressure.
It was just a shame, that was all.
Further on, her disappointment and shock turned to anger. This place was astonishing and fascinating, and Alice had given every possible indication of what she had expected from it, and it wasn’t just Nuria who had let her down, it was every single other person that had been involved in this project from the word go. They had not listened to her, or they had disbelieved her, called her a crank, tried to discredit her or short change her in terms of manpower because they didn’t think she knew what she was talking about. Her proposal had been rejected no fewer than five times, and in the event, they’d given her a third of the budget she’d asked for. Nobody in the department had thought she had a chance in hell of finding anything, and after all that, Alastair Bell had even tried to dissuade Nuria from going. She ought to have expected it by now. If experience had taught her nothing else she should have learned by now that academia was, for her at least, not collaborative. She could do it alone, she could find out the truth and pour all those hours into doing so entirely on her own, or she could do it not at all. She would have killed a man, in a manner of speaking, to have the kind of trailblazing mentor that she’d been to Nuria. A strong female figure, with grit by the spadeful, clear of vision and more inclined to face down unwarranted criticism than to run from it. Someone whose example she could follow. But Alice Christopher did not get any of that; she had to do it all alone and that was the only way it could ever be.
