Figures of Fear: An anthology (12 page)

Martin kicked both legs and swam forward as fast as he could. He reached the end of the sump and broke the surface, taking in huge, grateful breaths of frigid subterranean air.

He had beaten the sump, but there were more hazards ahead of him. The rainwater from the surface was already beginning to penetrate the lower reaches of the cave system. He could hear water rushing through crevices and clattering through galleries. In less than half an hour, every pothole would be flooded, and there would be no way of getting back out again.

Martin pressed on, sliding on his belly through a fissure that was rarely more than thirty centimetres high. He was bruised and exhausted, but he had almost reached Devil’s Corner. From there, it was only a few metres to Legg’s Elbow.

Rainwater trickled from the low limestone ceiling and coursed down the side of the fissure, but Martin didn’t care. He was already soaked and he was crawling at last into Devil’s Corner. He slid across to the narrow vertical crevice called Legg’s Elbow and peered down it, trying to see the trapped boy.

‘Hallo!’ he called. ‘Is anybody there? Hallo, can you hear me? I’ve come to get you out!’

Martin listened but there was no answer. There wasn’t even an
imaginary
answer. He forced his head further down, so that he could see deeper into the crevice, but there was nobody there. Nobody crying; nobody calling out. No pale distressed face looking back up at him.

He had actually reached the bottom of the bed, and was looking over the edge of the mattress, into the tightly tucked dead-end of blankets and sheets.

He had a choice, but there was very little time. Either he could climb down Legg’s Elbow to see if he could find where the boy was trapped, or else he could give up his rescue mission and turn back. In less than twenty minutes, the caves would be completely flooded, and anybody down here would be drowned.

He decided to risk to it. It would take him only seven or eight minutes to climb all the way down Legg’s Elbow, and another five to crawl back as far as the sump. Once he was back through the sump, the caves rose quite steeply towards the surface, so that he would have a fair chance of escaping before they filled up with water.

He pushed his way over the edge of Legg’s Elbow, and began to inch down the crevice. He could slip at any moment, and his arms and legs were shaking with effort. He could feel the limestone walls starting to move – a long slow seismic slide that made him feel as if the whole world were collapsing all around him. If Legg’s Elbow fell in, he would be trapped, unable to climb back out, while more and more rainwater gushed into the underground caverns.

Panting with effort, he tried to cling on to the sides of the crevice. There was one moment when he thought he was going to be able to heave himself back. But then everything slid – sheets, blankets, limestone rocks, and he ended up right at the bottom of Legg’s Elbow, buried alive.

For a moment, he panicked. He could hardly breathe. But then he started to pull at the fallen rockslide, tearing a way out of the crevice stone by stone. There had to be a way out. If there was a deeper, lower cavern, perhaps he could climb down to the foot of the hill and crawl out of a fox’s earth or any other fissure he could locate. After
all, if the rainwater could find an escape route through the limestone, he was sure that
he
could.

He managed to heave all of the rocks aside. Now all he had to do was burrow through the sludge. He took great handfuls of it and dragged it behind him, until at last he felt the flow of fresh air into the crevice – fresh air, and wind. He crawled out of Legg’s Elbow on his hands and knees, and found himself lying on a flat, sandy beach. The day was pearly-grey, but the sun was high in the sky and the ocean peacefully glittered in the distance. He turned around and saw that, behind him, there was nothing but miles and miles of grey tussocky grass. Somehow he had emerged from these tussocks like somebody emerging from underneath a heavy blanket.

He stood up and brushed himself down. He was still wearing his waterproof jacket and his potholing boots. He was glad of them, because the breeze was thin and chilly. Up above him, white gulls circled and circled, not mewing or crying, their eyes as expressionless as sharks’ eyes. In the sand at his feet, tiny iridescent shells were embedded.

For a moment, he was unable to decide what he ought to do next, and where he ought to go. Perhaps he should try to crawl back into the pothole, and retrace his route to the surface. But he was out in the open air here, and there didn’t seem to be any point in it. Besides, the pothole was heavily covered in grass, and it was difficult to see exactly where it was. He thought he ought to walk inland a short way, to see if he could find a road or a house or any indication of where he might be.

But then, very far away, where the sea met the sky, he saw a small fishing boat drawing in to the shore, and a man climbing out of it. The fishing boat had a russet-coloured triangular sail, like a fishing boat in an old-fashioned watercolour painting. He started to walk towards it; and then, when he realized how far it was, he started to run. His waterproof jacket made a chuffing noise and his boots left deep impressions in the sand. The seagulls kept pace with him, circling and circling.

Running and walking, it took him almost twenty minutes to reach the fishing boat. A white-bearded man in olive-coloured oilskins was kneeling down beside it, stringing fat triangular fish on to a line. The fish were brilliant, and they shone with every colour of the rainbow. Some of them were still alive, thrashing their tails and blowing their gills.

Martin stopped a few yards away and watched and said nothing. Eventually the man stopped stringing fish and looked up at him. He was handsome, in an old-fashioned way – chiselled, like Charlton Heston. But his eyes were completely blank: the colour of sky on an overcast day. He reminded Martin of somebody familiar, but he couldn’t think who he was.

Not far away, sitting cross-legged on a coil of rope, was a thin young boy in a hooded coat. He was playing a thin, plaintive tune on a flute. His wrists were so thin and the tune was so sad that Martin almost felt like crying.

‘Well, you came at last,’ said the man with eyes the colour of sky. ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’

‘Waiting for me? Why?’

‘You’re a tunneller, aren’t you? You do your best work underground.’

‘I was looking for a boy. He was supposed to be stuck in Legg’s Elbow, but … I don’t know. The whole cave system was flooded, and it seemed to collapse.’

‘And you thought that you escaped?’

‘I did escape.’

The man stood up, his waterproofs creaking. He smelled strongly of fresh-caught fish, all that slime on their scales. ‘That was only a way of bringing you here. We need you to help us, an experienced tunneller like you. What do you think of these fish?’

‘I never saw fish like that before.’

‘They’re not fish. Not in the strictest sense of the word. They’re more like ideas.’

He picked one up, so that it twisted and shimmered, and Martin could see that it
was
an idea, rather than a fish. It was an idea about being angry with people you loved, and how you could explain that you loved them, and calm them down. Then the man held up another fish, and this was a different fish altogether, a different idea. This was a glittering idea about numbers: how the metre was measured by the speed of light. If light could be compressed, then distance could, too – and the implications of that were quite startling.

Martin couldn’t really understand how the fish managed to be ideas as well as fish, but they were, and some of the ideas were so beautiful and strange that he stood staring at them and feeling as if his whole life was turning under his feet.

The sun began to descend towards the horizon. The small boy put away his flute and helped the fisherman to gather the last of his lines and his nets. The fisherman gave Martin a large woven basket to carry, full of blue glass fishing floats and complicated reels. ‘We’ll have to put our best foot forward, if we want to get home before dark.’

They walked for a while in silence. The breeze blew the sand in sizzling snakes, and behind them the sea softly applauded, like a faraway audience. After
four or five minutes, though, Martin said, ‘Why do you need a tunneller?’

The fisherman gave him a quick, sideways glance. ‘You may not believe it, but there’s another world, apart from this one. A place that exists right next to us, like the world that you can see when you look in a mirror … essentially the same, but different.’

‘What does that have to do with tunnelling?’

‘Everything, because there’s only one way through to this world, and that’s by crawling into your bed and through to the other side.’

Martin stopped in his tracks. ‘What the hell are you talking about,
bed
?
I tunnel into caves and potholes, not beds.’

‘There’s no difference,’ said the fisherman. ‘Caves, beds, they’re just the same … a way through to somewhere else.’

Martin started walking again. ‘You’d better explain yourself.’ The sun had almost reached the horizon now, and their shadows were giants with stilt-like legs and distant, pin-size heads.

‘There isn’t much to explain. There’s another world, beneath the blankets. Some people can find it, some can’t. I suppose it depends on their imagination. My daughter Leonora always had the imagination. She used to hide under the blankets and pretend that she was a cave-dweller in prehistoric times; or a Red Indian woman, in a tent. But about a month ago she said that she had found this other world, right at the very bottom of the bed. She could see it, but she couldn’t wriggle her way into it.’

‘Did she describe it?’

The fisherman nodded. ‘She said that it was dark, very dark, with tangled thorn-bushes and branchy trees. She said that she could see shadows moving around in it – shadows that could have been animals, like wolves; or hunched-up men wearing black fur cloaks.’

‘It doesn’t sound like the kind of world that anybody would
want
to visit.’

‘We never had the chance to find out whether Leonora went because she wanted to. Two days ago my wife went into her bedroom to discover that her bed was empty. We thought at first that she might have run away. But we’d had no family arguments, and she really had no cause to. Then we stripped back her blankets and found that the lower parts of her sheets were torn, as if some kind of animal had been clawing at it.’ He paused, and then he said, with some difficulty, ‘We found blood, too. Not very much. Maybe she scratched herself on one of the thorns. Maybe one of the animals clawed her.’

By now they had reached the grassy dunes and started to climb up them. Not far away there were three small cottages, two painted white and one painted pink, with lights in the windows, and fishing nets hung up all around them for repair.

‘Didn’t you try going after her yourself?’ asked Martin.

‘Yes. But it was no use. I don’t have enough imagination. All I could see was sheets and blankets. I fish for rational ideas – for astronomy and physics and human logic. I couldn’t imagine Underbed so I couldn’t visit it.’

‘Underbed?’

The fisherman gave him a small, grim smile. ‘That’s what Leonora called it.’

They reached the cottage and laid down all of their baskets and tackle. The kitchen door opened and a woman came out, wiping her hands on a flowery apron. Her blonde hair was braided on top of her head and she was quite beautiful in an odd, expressionless way, as if she were a competent oil-painting rather than a real woman.

‘You’re back, then?’ she said. ‘And this is the tunneller?’

The fisherman laid his hand on Martin’s shoulder. ‘That’s right. He came, just like he was supposed to. He can start to look for her tonight.’

Martin was about to protest, but the woman came up and took hold of both of his hands. ‘I know you’ll do everything you can,’ she told him. ‘And God bless you for coming here and trying.’

They had supper that evening around the kitchen table – a rich fish pie with a crispy potato crust, and glasses of cold cider. The fisherman and his wife said very little, but scarcely took their eyes away from Martin once. It was almost as if they were frightened that he was going to vanish into thin air.

On the mantelpiece, a plain wooden clock loudly ticked out the time, and on the wall next to it hung a watercolour of a house that for some reason Martin recognized. There was a woman standing in the garden, with her back to him. He felt that if she were able to turn around he would know at once who she was.

There were other artefacts in the room that he recognized: a big green earthenware jug and a pastille-burner in the shape of a little cottage. There was a china cat, too, which stared at him with a knowing smile. He had never been here before, so he couldn’t imagine why all these things looked so familiar. Perhaps he was tired, and suffering from
déjà vu.

After supper they sat around the range for a while and the fisherman explained how he went out trawling every day for idea-fish. In the deeper waters, around the sound, there were much bigger fish, entire theoretical concepts, swimming in shoals.

‘This is the land of ideas,’ he said, in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Even the swallows and thrushes in the sky are little whimsical thoughts. You can catch a swallow and think of something you once forgot; or have a small, sweet notion that you never would have had before. You – you come from the land of action, where things are
done
, not just discussed.’

‘And Underbed? What kind of a land is that?’

‘I don’t know. The land of fear, I suppose. The land of darkness, where everything always threatens to go wrong.’

‘And that’s where you want me to go looking for your daughter?’

The fisherman’s wife got up from her chair, lifted a photograph from the mantelpiece and passed it across to Martin without a word. It showed a young blonde girl standing on the seashore in a thin summer dress. She was pale-eyed and captivatingly pretty. Her bare toes were buried in the sand. In the distance, a flock of birds was scattering, and Martin thought of ‘small, sweet notions that you never would have had before’.