The Fall Read online

  The Fall

  by

  Kenneth Steven

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  World Castle Publishing, LLC

  Pensacola, Florida

  Copyright © Kenneth Steven 2022

  Smashwords Edition

  Paperback ISBN: 9781958336090

  eBook ISBN: 9781958336120

  First Edition World Castle Publishing, LLC, June 13, 2022

  http://www.worldcastlepublishing.com

  Smashwords Licensing Notes

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.

  Cover: Karen Fuller

  Editor: Maxine Bringenberg

  Dedication

  “This novel is dedicated to two great friends in Michigan: Dave Green and Britt Cartrite. Both are teachers, and I’ve learned much from them through the years. What matters is that both of them are learning all the time too, and are never afraid to admit their need to learn. I dedicate this work to them with grateful thanks for good friendship.”

  Chapter One

  It was the last day in the caves. We were on our way up again after two weeks spent living like moles, taking rock samples and chipping at the faces of walls. I had lost all sense of day and night. We had watches with us and knew the time, yet gradually it had come to mean less and less. Trevor was ahead of me now, the light from his headlamp fixed on bits of water and shale at random, dancing about like a firefly twenty feet or more away. We had already climbed at least three hundred feet and had begun to get into that automatic way of walking you do when you know it’s just a slog ahead, a question of putting one foot in front of the other.

  “I could murder a decent shower,” Trevor said. “Everything I brought down here stinks to high heaven. I tell you, I’ll stay under that water for an hour and more. What d’you miss most, Gav?”

  I thought about it and was tempted to say peace and quiet. Two weeks underground with Trevor was quite an endurance test on its own, quite apart from all the difficulties with the geology tests.

  “A bed, I suspect,” I answered at last.

  “And someone to warm it, no doubt!” He laughed considerably at his own humor.

  “Yeah, well. I miss the light too, the end of the summer, the colors. After a while, you get to believe there never were any other colors but black and white.”

  “The color of a cool pint of beer—”

  There was a rush of stones as Trevor’s foot slipped on a bit of scree. He swore, and as I caught him, I helped push him upwards till he’d regained his balance. I looked up at the dome of the great cavern.

  “Not far now,” I remarked. “That’s the sky above there.”

  He looked up towards the roof of our underworld.

  “Yeah, and people and decent food and a good sleep. D’you ever notice, Gav, how quickly we get used to something, whether it’s bad or not? I mean, I remember once I was in a hellish job somewhere, and I literally counted the days to the end of it—I had a sheet of them up on the wall and scored them off one by one. But I remember when I finished and went home, I’d forgotten how bad it was after a couple of days. I bet you it’ll be the same now.”

  “Don’t tell Russell you think that, or he’ll have us down here every month from now on.”

  Russell was our manager, a bald geologist who had spent too long in the field, who lived his work completely. His wife had left him years before, and his house was like a cave itself, strewn with rock crystals and agates, sacks of grey samples from safaris in Africa and the odd unwashed dinner plate. I don’t think the floor had been vacuumed since his wife left.

  “If Russell came down here, he wouldn’t bother going back up again,” Trevor retorted. “He’d run out of food and just go deeper and deeper into the caves and never come back.”

  “Your personal idea of heaven.” I smiled. “Come on, let’s get going—stop griping and climb!”

  But it was harder going than we had expected. We were coming out at a completely different point from where we had entered the system, and it was several years since Trevor had navigated this wall. I was impatient and none too kind about his wrong turnings and dead ends. The heavy pack on my back was hurting, and I would have loved to throw it, crystals and slabs and all, into the deep chasm beneath me. I was dog tired of the dark, and I wanted out. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia normally, but I think just then, I began to experience something of the fear of claustrophobia and no longer liked the oppressive dark of those rock walls.

  I was thinking about a favorite place of mine called Sillin Acre, where there was a waterfall and a meadow and an abandoned mill. It was September now, and I reckoned that if we were to get a real Indian summer, I would go there. I would persuade Russell to give me some days off—I’d pretty much earned it that year anyway—and take off with the tent and forget geology had ever been invented.

  Trevor stopped abruptly in front of me, and I almost collided with him. “D’you notice the cold?” he asked. “It’s bizarre—I’m freezing, and we’ve been climbing for a couple of hours without a break.”

  I hadn’t been conscious of it before, but now I realized Trevor was right. It was really cold. My hands felt raw against my face, and a fierce draft tingled around my ribs. Fortunately, we had brought plenty of warm clothing into the caves, for they were damp and the stone floors cold as graves.

  But outside, it should have been warm. It was still September, and when we’d gone down into the caves, the weather was brassy yet. The leaves hadn’t even begun to turn, and the rivers were silent after a long dry summer. Yet the closer we got to the outside world, the worse the cold got. We were still twenty or thirty feet from the cave’s ceiling when Trevor said, “I’ve got a last sweater in my pack—I’m going to have to get it.”

  I wasn’t so fortunate. I’d dragged on every layer I could to make room for Russell’s stone samples, and I was wearing all the sweaters I’d brought. But I did have gloves, and I scrabbled about with claw-like hands in my own pack till I found them.

  “Look at those rocks,” Trevor said sharply. I followed the line of his pointing finger up another five or ten feet to a dark ledge. “That’s frost,” he said with certainty. “Bloody thick frost at that.”

  “Come on,” I said, staring up in disbelief. “Surely it can’t be. Aren’t they quartz crystals?”

  He didn’t argue but levered himself carefully up till he was on a level with the rocks. He chipped some away with the hammer he kept in his belt and fingered them carefully.

  “Sorry, Gavin, but you’re wrong. This is frost, all right, and—I don’t believe it!”

  “What is it?”

  “Above me. The whole entrance to the system, it’s blocked by ice!”

  I followed him as he started up to the window. As I hurried upwards, I looked at where the sky should have been, where I had imagined the sky to be from below, and I saw that it was opaque, glassy, solid. Trevor hammered at it with his chisel, and a few splinters of ice broke away, but that was all. I dragged myself up to his ledge and stretched my hand up to the ice. It was all in glassy whorls, huge thick chunks that were feet deep. I had seen ice like that in the far north of Sweden, waterfalls that seemed to have frozen in a split second, every wave and bubble etched in time. We were trapped. The whole circular dome of the exit to
the cave system was smothered with ice. I felt myself involuntarily breathing faster. I thought with terror of how our only alternative was to retreat into the system to find another way out. But, what if the next one was the same, and the next….

  Trevor saw my panic and gripped my wrist. “Look, we’ve got the chisels, we’ve got goggles—we’ll get out. It can’t be that bad. It’s bloody strange, but that’s another matter. Maybe one of Russell’s little welcome home tricks!”

  Trevor laughed loudly, but I was still panicking inside. Like when you’re a kid, someone shuts you in a trunk and wants to close the lid completely. I felt suddenly breathless and desperate. It wasn’t the ice itself that terrified me at that moment, but the fact that it had formed such a complete roof over our heads and locked us in.

  We dug out our goggles and chisels and hammered away at different sides of the ice. Tiny diamonds sparked away, stinging our cheeks and ears and necks, but it was hard going. We made small channels with the chisels but little more. I stopped and wiped away a layer of white crystals from my collar. The air was filled with the chips from Trevor’s hammer.

  “Come on!” he said. “We’ll be finished in five minutes.”

  I doubted that but started again and kept up until I thumped my index finger by mistake and swore loudly. I could see the light behind the ice, but I still had a bit to go, and I’d already chiseled away half a foot of frost. What the hell was going on? Now my fears began to change. I knew that sooner or later, we would get out, but what were we going to find on the other side? I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know. A slow dread began to creep through my bones like horrible cold tentacles.

  “I’m through!” Trevor crowed. “Told you it would only be five minutes. I’m going to try to lever....”

  I went over to where he was working and crouched down to gaze up through the shaft of light. The first panic had passed. I knew, at least, there was the possibility of an escape from the warren of the caves. All I could see now was the sky above, and it was as white as frost. Trevor’s attempts to break off a lid of ice like a manhole to free us did not succeed, at least not yet. He had to hammer away at a further blowhole while I finished mine, and even then, we only succeeded in cracking the crown of thick ice that joined the three points. It was weakening, but it weighed a great deal and was not easily broken.

  By now, my face and neck were stinging with bits of unbroken ice, and the cold was digging into me. I glanced at my pack of useless stones and wished there was a last sweater hidden away in one of the pockets. Something awful had happened, something so weird and crazy I couldn’t begin to understand what it was. Somehow, I knew that getting the ice away from above our heads was only the beginning of the thing, not the end.

  I finished my bore hole and began another so that there was a diamond of drilled passages leading up to the light. We banged hard against the panel of ice, and it seemed to budge, just a fraction.

  “Wait a second!” Trevor shouted, and bent down to rummage again in his pack. “I knew that fluorite crystal would come in handy!” He grinned at me and dragged out the largest of the rocks he had chiseled out, a great fist of stone several pounds in weight. He raised it above his head and smashed it into the heart of the ice sheet so that it cracked and burst upwards in a dozen pieces. At the same time, we seemed to breathe into our lungs pure white frost, the air of the outer world, and it was staggering, terrible.

  Trevor lifted his head slowly through the hole he had made. “Oh, my God,” he whispered, and though I asked him from below what it was, he didn’t respond for what seemed like an eternity.

  “What the hell is it?” I kept saying, until, at last, he sank back down and didn’t say anything at all. I took his place and raised my head into the light of the outside world.

  I did so, still expecting and hoping to see the September we had left, not some bizarre, impossible December. Yet this was like no December I could remember since childhood. Our winters had been getting warmer, there was no constancy about them, and the days fluctuated between frost and flood. This was like all the white Christmases I had ever known rolled into one, except this was terrifying in its intensity—it was no child’s dream. This was the kind of cold that reached to the roots of one’s being. Like the times you go out in winter without gloves and kid around for a while in the snow. On the way back, your hands are red and raw, useless, like the claws of a wild animal. When you are home, you put them in front of the fire right away, and they hurt so badly you could cry. This cold was like that, except it did not go away. It just went on and on, hurting.

  I wanted to lower my head again, but somehow I was as entranced as Trevor had been. The pain of that cold was well-nigh unbearable, but I was looking all around this landscape, mesmerized, dumbfounded, unable to believe my eyes. Everything was frozen, wrapped and molded in ice. I was looking out over Balleran Moor, but not as I had ever seen it before. Even the trees near me were caked with ice. Ice covered everything, each stone and root and stem. But this was not the result of one night’s frost. This was something catastrophic, something so bizarre I didn’t want to believe it. This ice that lay on the world was thick, as deep and strong as a clenched fist. Nothing moved in that glassy land. There was neither a breath of wind nor the sound of a hawk screeching overhead nor the noise of traffic slushing west and east on the motorway four miles away. This was more than a freak cold spell—this was something different.

  I climbed down again to Trevor. “Did you hear the quiet? The main road...there was nothing!”

  “Yeah,” he said matter-of-factly. “Bit of a bugger if my car’s conked out and the road’s closed.” He looked at my astonished expression and shrugged his shoulders. “Just one of those things, Gav. An early winter. We may even get off work for a day or two. Now think of that!”

  I didn’t know what to say, and in my heart of hearts, I wanted to believe him. Even then, I tried to rationalize, to think straight. All right, odder things had happened to the weather in September. I could accept that. This had lasted several days and had been enough to shut us into the Mayall Caves and close the motorway. That was also just possible. I believed him with my head but not with my heart.

  “Well, let’s hope it hasn’t been enough to shut the Clare Arms down!” Trevor said. “Come on, help me under this hole so we can get our packs through.”

  We hammered away for a good ten minutes or so until Trevor decided to move to the other side. “It’s less tiring banging down on the ice than up.” That made sense, and I helped to shove him out into the late afternoon of that strange day. He called down and asked me to try to pass up his pack, but it was too big, as he’d guessed it would be. I stood aside while he thumped away from above, and small glass chunks of ice landed around my feet in an ever-increasing pile. It took longer than he had imagined, and he wasted a lot of precious energy on the job, but we managed it in the end. I passed him the two packs laden with geological samples.

  When I joined him there on the ice, he was just kneeling, his head in his hands, still breathing heavily. He tried to grin at me. “I’m knackered—this cold is something else. I’m trying to work out what it must be.” He looked at me, and there was just the tiniest edge of fear in his eyes. “I reckon it’s twenty below, Gavin, maybe even a bit more. How the hell is that possible?”

  I had no answer for him. His fear brought back my own. I looked over once more towards the motorway and heard the silence. It was not the quietness that disturbed me—it was the absence of noise.

  That road had been angry with traffic for decades. Day and night, the cars had thundered north and south on it so that one lived with the noise without even hearing it anymore. I would have been thankful even for the sound of one vehicle now to let me know things were all right, still alive. But as I crouched there at the cave mouth beside Trevor, I looked around and listened and heard no other vehicle. I saw tapeworms of roads winding away to distant villages below the
moor, but I saw not a single car on them.

  “Come on, let’s go,” he said, and helped me to my feet. Fortunately, we had sturdy boots on, having needed them for climbing in the cave systems, and now we descended the hill relatively easily though the ground was a single sheet of clear ice. Our breath steamed away like smoke from our faces—already, my upper lip was sore with the cold, and when I brought my finger away from it, I found it covered with tiny crystals of ice.

  “Trevor!” I shouted, as he started down a new slope a dozen yards ahead of me. “Let’s stop at that cottage we passed near the roadside and ask them if we can make some tea.”

  “Ask them if they can tell us what the hell’s going on! Yeah, why not? It shouldn’t be more than an hour from here.”

  He hadn’t reckoned with the conditions. Our boots were good, but they hadn’t been designed to descend complete fields of ice. Part of the path was steep. There were rocks, and there was no way around. I went too gingerly, and my legs were swept from underneath me, and I landed on my left hip.

  I swore a lot and made more of it than I needed to, but little more than my pride was seriously hurt. All the same, I lost confidence after that and would trust neither my boots nor Trevor.

  He was silent, making no wise cracks as I traversed the ice foot by foot, my back bent lest I fall again. Often enough, he’d made a jibe about my pace when we were down in the caves, for he was fit, far fitter than myself. For me, hills were things that had to be endured and gotten over. Trevor attacked them like a young puppy. But he was not laughing now. The cold was intense, and in all that half-an-hour and more since leaving the caves, we had neither seen nor heard a single living thing. I found it a horrible quiet. It was too huge and empty for the human mind, like a scream that wasn’t there and went on not being there until I wanted to cover my ears and scream myself to fill the void.

  Despite my fear, I did not fall again, not with any severity. Trevor plodded along ahead of me and became nothing more than a black boulder. Impossibly far away on the edge of the skies, there was a fingernail of a moon veiled by thin white clouds. I kept glancing up at it and thinking that the moon, too, was covered with snow and ice, buried by a silent winter. Then Trevor waited for me. We were almost down from the moor now, into the country I remembered as a wild meadow strewn with boulders and crisscrossed by brooks. All of that was buried, but somehow, I recognized it all the same. The going was easier, for I was on the flat now, and I made better progress towards the distant figure of Trevor. I suspected he would be irritated at having to wait so long and at the intensity of the cold, but I noticed something as I drew closer that made me forget all that at once.