The Underground Man (18 page)

I could not say I had so far taken much pleasure from our little underground hike, but any hope of such a thing was trounced entirely when I found myself taken over by a quite irrational but profoundly-rooted fear. Without warning, I became utterly convinced that I was about to be cut off from my precious circle of light. In an instant my breath quickened to the pant of an exhausted dog, my heart pounding frantically at the walls of my chest. Some imminent rockfall was about to cut us off. Some faceless adversary was plotting to shut us in. The same awful fear possessed me which I had felt as I entered the Oakleys' front room, but I had not now the sisters' kind words to soothe me, their quiet confidence to calm me down. I was filled up with trepidation; it animated every fibre of me painfully. My own infant's voice pleaded with me to abandon the journey, to dash back down the passage. ‘Danger!' the voice insisted. ‘Run for the light, before it disappears!'

Well, I did everything in my power to silence that voice. I blocked my ears and clenched my jaw. I did my damnedest to bring my breathing under control, telling myself again and again, ‘You are all right, man. You are all right.' It was a desperate and pathetic struggle but I was determined that Reason should win the day. When, at last, I managed to recover myself a little, managed to reach some momentary plateau of near-calm, I found I had lagged several yards behind Mellor and his oil lamp. My mouth and throat were completely parched. I swallowed hard and pushed on into the dark.

I continued to walk with my hands out in front of me (more like the antennae of an insect than appendages of a man). Every half-dozen or so steps I would halt and spread my fingers on the tunnel walls to sense how much space I had around me in which to breathe. It seemed that this futile gesture – of my palms pressing against the rock – was all that kept it from closing in on me and crushing me to death.

Twice the Reverend stumbled. Both times he called out, ‘Careful here.' The words skittered down the tunnel, returning first as a single echo, then a second and third and fourth, until they all ganged-up together in a deafening, lunatic roar. When I heard him slip a third time and call out, ‘Careful here,' again, I very nearly lost my head. There was little enough room in the tunnel, without his demented voices flying everywhere.

The tunnel roof had now sunk to such a miserable height it was right down on our backs and the two of us all but crawling on our blessed hands and knees. Time and again I told myself, ‘I shall turn and get out of here in a second,' while becoming less and less certain there was space enough to execute such a manoeuvre. The pressure in my head was close to bursting and both my shoulders were grazing against the rock when I thought I felt the hint of a cool breeze sweep across my face.

The next minute Mellor and I were clambering free of the tunnel, were standing upright and stretching and stamping our feet. We had come out into some sort of cavern, perhaps thirty foot at its highest point, and when the Reverend lifted the lamp above his head its amber light filled the entire dome. The cave walls hung over us like great ocean waves, frozen at that last moment before crashing down.

I must have stood there, entranced, for several minutes, trying to make some sense of the place. It had about it an ochre glow which seemed to emanate from the very rock. Tiny rivulets had eaten away at the chamber walls and made rocky fingers out of them so that one felt almost as if one was caught in a giant's cupped hands.

The Reverend found himself a boulder on the cave floor and daintily lowered himself onto it. He placed the oil lamp on the ground beside him and folded his arms in a proprietorial way while I proceeded to silently circle him and take in every aspect of this weird subterranean place.

The lamp's flame momentarily flickered and I saw my own shadow shudder on the wall and this had on me a powerful, almost hypnotic effect, as if the shadow was not mine but some distant ancestor's who was feinting this way and that. I thought to myself, ‘He is trying to mesmerize me with some ancient dance.'

The light in that cavern was at such a premium and the darkness so eager to return that the shadow which stretched and shrank before me seemed a good deal more at home there and had a presence at least as convincing as my own.

The Reverend clasped his hands round his knees, leaned back on his rock and stared up at the ceiling. ‘What do you make of it, Your Grace?' I heard him whisper, before the words were taken up by the cave walls and tossed about the place. My reply lodged itself deep in my throat, fearful of what the cave's acoustics might do with it. A word here too
harshly spoken might let loose a whole Bedlam of broken voices. But I was also silent because the peculiar beauty of the cavern had all but robbed me of my speech.

High up, where the Reverend had fixed his gaze, were minerals, embedded in the rock. They crackled silently in the light. The cold air now began to find its way through to me, investigating every cranny of my boots and coats, and I began to feel a little unwelcome among all the smooth formlessness of the cave.

At last I said, ‘It is somehow similar to how I imagine the surface of the moon to be.'

The Reverend smiled and nodded back at me from his stone seat. ‘I have often thought the same thing myself,' he said.

I asked if all the other caves were as grand and the Reverend told me that this was by far the largest and queerest but that, at one time, all would have offered shelter to some creature or other.

‘And was it only animals that used them?' I asked.

‘O, no,' said the Reverend. ‘Primitive Man once lived here. There's no doubting that.'

I tried to picture Primitive Man, dressed in nothing but a few rags of hide, as he went about his Primitive Life … creeping out into the valleys of ancient Nottinghamshire to hunt wild bison and reindeer (and the woolly rhino) and spending his nights in the cold, damp dark. For a second I even fancied I saw the carcasses of those beasts laid out on the cave floor and the crude implements which my primitive ancestor might have used to rip their flesh apart.

Well, I could not have chosen a worse time for such a reverie. These gruesome pictures of brute gore were still most vivid in my mind when the Reverend drew me to him with his finger and gave up half his boulder for me. I perched myself down beside him and was still wondering what his
enigmatic expression meant when he reached over to his oil lamp and whispered, ‘Watch carefully, Your Grace.'

And the flame on the lamp's wick began to hesitate; gave out as it was slowly choked of air. All around us the light slowly drained from the cave and seeped back into the ground. The lamp's tiny flame shrank and spluttered to a single ounce of light and the cave quietly reasserted its awful power over us. Every second of its thousands of years of darkness returned to it. The brief moments of light we had brought in with us were erased. Horrified, I watched the flame dwindle, and with a final flicker, die.

I was alone, deep in the rock. There was no light. No memory of it. Only the darkness pressing down.

‘What is this?' I hissed at Mellor and a thousand snaking voices sprang to life.

He said nothing. He was no longer next to me. I could not move for the rock.

‘That is enough, Mellor,' I insisted, but my tongue was thick with fear. ‘For God's sake, man, strike a match.'

My own voice jabbered back at me in chorus before slowly consuming itself. Then there was nothing but the darkness and the silence. Nothing but the deep, dead rock.

At last, I heard the Reverend say, ‘Hold tight. Just one more minute … Ah now, look up, Your Grace.'

Well, I did as I was told. At first, nothing. Blindness. No sound, except my own mouth, gasping for air. Then somewhere up above, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the glitter of the very first star. Then it was gone again but as I tried to retrieve it I found another, further over. Then another. All the stars were coming out. They twinkled mercifully up in the heavens, each one its own small message of hope. And, slowly, the faint moon revealed itself, calmly filled itself with ghostly light and took its place among the stars.

‘Can you see it now?' Mellor asked me.

‘Yes. Yes, I see it,' I said. ‘It is beautiful … Very beautiful indeed.'

From our shared stone seat we continued to look up at the stars until at last I said, ‘I'm afraid I don't understand.'

‘It is a hole,' he said. ‘A natural chimney. Which is why this cave is called the Pin Hole Cave. Only a small hole but big enough to let in the light which picks out the crystal in the rock.'

So was there mercy or was there not? I was still trying to make sense of it and staring up at the moon and the stars when the Reverend struck a match. The brightness was too much forme and I had to cover my eyes against its terrible glare. And when the lamp was relit I found myself back in the cave's strange ochre glow. The heavens above had been turned to stone. The stars had been washed away.

‘Time to go?' said the Reverend, nodding. ‘Hup. Hup.' And he helped me to my feet.

It was as if the hands on my mind's clock had been frozen, then released by the match's flame. Time suddenly flooded back in and exhausted me.

The Reverend lifted his lamp, smiled and made towards the tunnel and I had no choice but to stagger after him and prepare for the long trek back. But as Mellor squeezed himself into the tunnel and stole the light away I had one last glance at the place.

I felt as if I had come within an inch of Primitive Man. Spent a fraction of a second in his skull.

The journey back down the passage was, thankfully, without incident and as we made our way along it I managed more or less to allay my fears that the Reverend might somehow contrive to get himself wedged between the tunnel walls. In time, the tunnel began to open itself up to us and
the light from the entrance formed a gentle halo around the Reverend. And in what seemed like half the time it took us to get in there we were walking out into the day.

The view from the cave entrance, though frosty and wintry, was a marvel to behold – full of colour and distance and depth. I looked up and down the valley and drew in its rich air, wondering how it might look with a huge glacier to fill it up. I imagined that massive slab of ice as a vast silvery ship, sitting on a slipway, calmly awaiting its launch. Slowly, century by century, it inched towards the sea.

I looked at my watch – barely midmorning, though I seemed to have crammed in enough experience to last me the whole of the year. Mellor was busy packing his lamp away and I thought perhaps I should be getting back or Clement might start sending out search parties again.

So the two of us shook hands and I thanked him for his hospitality and for showing me the caves.

‘You must drop by again, Your Grace,' he said.

‘I will,' I assured him and set off across the fields.

I seem to find the less I eat the livelier I become. Each rejected savoury gives me an extra charge of vim. All these years I have thought it was food which kept me going – the fuel for my body's fire. Now I am not so sure. Recently I went for a whole day without eating a single thing and when I woke the following morning felt just as bright as a button. Mealtimes have begun to slip by without even a hint of appetite stirring in me. Some days the thought of a sandwich is enough to make me sick.

But it is not as if I am starving myself. Yesterday I ate a pear and two dry scones. Today I have already had an onion pastry and shall not be in the least surprised if I have something else before I retire. Have vowed to forgo meat of all kinds and must say I am feeling better for it. Mental faculties are a deal sharper. Each day now there are moments when I become so altogether pure I begin to float away.

Have been forced to discontinue my custom of standing-on-my-head, which is a bitter disappointment as I am certain that gravity is the natural way to encourage extra blood to the brain. I recently immersed myself so successfully in meditation that I dozed off for a moment or two. When I came round I was out by ninety degrees – had gone from vertical to horizontal, bringing a curtain and an Elgin vase down with me. Mrs Pledger was quite insistent I give the whole thing up there and then.

So, as an alternative means of invigoration, I have taken up what my father used to call ‘the hot and cold treatment', which, in plain English, is simply the practice of jumping straight out of a hot bath and into a cold. It does wonders for the complexion, giving a body the ruddiest glow. Clement is not keen on the idea – I suppose it rather rubs up against his own philosophies – but I am proud to say that in my old age I am learning to dig my heels in and so every day now he fills one bath for me with scalding water and another with ice-cold. Unfortunately, there is only the one tub in my own bathroom so we have to draw the cold one in a bathroom down the hall.

Now, I cannot pretend that leaping into a cold bath is an altogether relaxing experience, especially when one has been stewing-in-a-pot only seconds before, but there is no denying that it wakes the body up with an almighty jolt. My heart
sometimes takes twenty minutes to return to its pedestrian plod.

From one bathroom to the other is a good fifty-or sixty-yard trot and it has become necessary to seal off the whole landing by hanging up blankets at both ends. This follows an unfortunate incident when a housemaid happened to come round the corner with a pile of towels as I was going down the corridor at full-pelt. The poor girl almost leapt down the stairs in fright and had to be carted to my study by Clement and given a brandy to bring her round. We had to send her home. But the sight of a naked old man must be very alarming to one of such tender years. Especially when he is haring towards you for all he is worth.

So, as I say, we now take the precaution of hanging up blankets. And, in order to clear the area, Clement strikes a small gong just before I go.