The Fall Page 2

  He was standing beside something. From a distance, I had imagined it to be his pack, for it was so utterly white. I saw Trevor’s pack some distance to the side of him, and the closer I came, the more I suspected it was a person there in front of him.

  When I was twenty feet away, I was sure. I also saw something I had never believed possible. Trevor crying.

  There was a man on the ground, his hands stretched out in my direction, and a yard or so away was a metal bucket. His eyes were still open, blue and frozen, and over him, the ice was gathering, thickening, until eventually he would become like an insect in amber, caught in that last moment of his life forever.

  “Not much point going to the cottage,” Trevor said, and the loudness of his voice startled me.

  “How long...how long d’you think he’s been here?”

  “God knows.” There was a harshness to his reply because he feared his own emotion. “Maybe a day, maybe not even that. Poor sod. What’s happened, Gavin? What’s happened?”

  I didn’t answer—I knew as little as he did. We couldn’t even bury the man. Picks and shovels would have hacked uselessly at the ground until they broke. So, we left him there—we walked away appalled, his image frozen in our minds, and five minutes later, we stood at the cottage that had been his home.

  The door was open, either left that way or blown in by the wind. Already it was sculpted of ice, and above the lintel, ice grinned in thick piles as if some water pipe had burst in the attic and its contents gathered there. Trevor was there first. He knocked carefully with his gloved hand and asked if anybody was home. All at once, I remembered reading some poem or other in primary school about a man riding into a forest and knocking at the door of a great tower. He asks if anybody is there, but only the echoes answer him, like ghosts.

  In the living room, there was little to be seen. An axe lay on the floor along with the remains of a chair. A beautiful carriage clock had stopped at three minutes past five. There were rowan berries, and sheaves of corn on the windowsill, sparkling wickedly with frost even though no window was open.

  Trevor and I did not speak. It was as though we walked in a museum and kept a reverent silence—we were even careful with our steps in the hall. We went upstairs and stood outside the closed door of a small bedroom. Again, Trevor knocked and tried to open the door. It would not budge. We pushed together against it, and finally, it gave way, the wood of the frame being weak.

  Inside we found a collection of old curtains and blankets and coats that had been blocking the door. The room was dark because the curtains were drawn. Trevor flicked the light switch, but there was no power. Instead, he drew back the curtains carefully to let in the menacing white emptiness of the light.

  A woman lay in bed, still cowering under the weight of blankets and quilts. Her mouth was open and her teeth stuck out. She looked like an animal—an animal in great pain. Her huge green eyes were open, fixed on some invisible spot by the door. She had been dead a long time. The room smelled of her death—the whole house smelled of it. That was why we had walked so carefully, so reverently, as if we had known about her death even before we came upon it.

  “So, she found everything she could to keep warm with, and he promised he would keep the fire going. But he ran out of wood, and there was no water, and he froze to death when he went outside. Tell me I’m wrong, Gavin, but I’d bet every pound I have that this is September. Did we go down into those caves and come out on the wrong planet? Or have we come out in the middle of the last ice age?”

  But there was a calendar on the wall showing the thirty days of September and a cottage in Devon under a warm blue sky. At the bottom, in italics, was printed “Trust in the Lord.” This was September, but everything else was wrong.

  “What if this is everywhere?” Trevor went on. “You and I are thinking all this is just to do with Baleran Moor and that sooner or later, we’ll get out of whatever nightmare we stumbled upon. But what if we don’t? What if there’s nothing and...and everything’s just like here?”

  I had no answer for him. Instead, I went down the stairs and found my way to the phone I had seen on the way up. I just looked at it, for I didn’t rightly know if I wanted to know the truth. Then I heard Trevor coming downstairs after me, and I lifted the receiver. It was dead—the lines must be down. He didn’t need to ask me what I had learned.

  “I’m going to look at the car,” he said. “I doubt there’s a hope in hell we can get it started, but it’s worth a try. Otherwise, we’re ten miles from town, and I doubt we’ll walk that before nightfall, not with the roads like skating rinks.”

  “D’you want to stay here for the night?” I asked. “Maybe we could get the fire going. At least it’s shelter.”

  “I don’t like it,” he said. “Her death’s everywhere. The house is full of it. I suppose if we have to, we have to.”

  We had to.

  Trevor came back from the car three-quarters of an hour later. He had fallen on the ice and hit his hand against a sharp cornice of rock. The blood reminded me of the rowanberries. The color was stark and vivid in a landscape empty of colors. He said it had taken him twenty minutes to open the driver’s door. The whole car was caked with ice. It lay like some glass sculpture at the end of the track, a dormant beast. There was no flicker of life in the engine nor any hope of life.

  Trevor had had to use his bare hands in the end because his gloves were too clumsy. The pain of the cold in them now was almost unbearable. Swearing and moving his mouth about to keep from crying aloud, he sat in a chair in the living room, rocking back and forth. I asked him something, but he didn’t seem to hear.

  While he was away, I had tried to shore up the room. I had brought coats from the porch to block out drafts and laid others on the floor for sleeping on later. After that, I went outside again, and the cold slammed into me like a huge fist. It caught my belly and spread like a dull, terrible ache through every muscle and bone. It made every movement an effort.

  I found the woodstore empty of all but a few splinters of birch. I reckoned the man had lived longest, perhaps until this morning, and had kept the fire going till there was nothing left to burn. I scraped up everything I could from the floor of the place to the last dry twig and fled into the house again. I gathered up the bits of chair the man had obviously been cutting before he went outside with his bucket and fished out the very last of the kindling we had taken down into the caves. It was a pitiful collection of wood. If we were to keep the fire alive for any length of time that night, we had to find a good deal more from somewhere. I thought it odd at first that I had found no coal outside but then considered that the couple most likely had not yet brought in their winter supply when the great cold came.

  Trevor came back from his useless expedition to the car when I had determined to search the rest of the house for wood. I found the odd thing downstairs, but nothing substantial. I faced the staircase, reluctant in the extreme to go into that bedroom again. There was another small room adjacent to it, and I went there first, half-dreading the sight of another death. All I found was an ancient wardrobe and boxes of calendars and books. There was a bed against the far wall that the old woman must have stripped in a vain attempt to keep herself alive.

  I opened the wardrobe. It smelled damp and dusty, a bit like the middle of a wood of alder trees. I fished about and found nothing much: a chess set, two walking sticks, and a grotesque doll that laughed when she was squeezed. Her laughter seemed loud and blasphemous in that dead house.

  Last of all, there was a bag filled with heavy things, and I dragged it out with difficulty. They were wooden toys, roughly made, ducks and dogs and a swan that had lost its neck, and three kittens.

  I took them downstairs and laid the fire as quickly as I could. Trevor still hugged himself, wincing at the merciless pain of his hands.

  “Get a blanket,” I told him. “That’s what they’re there for.”

  “And how long will that go for?” he asked bitterly as I arranged the kindling in the hearth. “Damn it all! Damn and hell!”

  I put the blanket over him myself and then started the fire. Outside it was getting dark, though it seemed unnaturally early for nightfall. I hunted about the little kitchen, searching through cupboards and drawers until, in the end, I found what I was looking for. I lit two candles, and the dark outside seemed to increase at once. The fire threatened to die, and I bent over it, nursing every flame until, at last, an orange curl licked around a bit of wood, and it began to spit and crackle. When I was sure it was safely lit, I disappeared again with the axe and cut up a wooden box I found at the back door. It gave me a whole armful of wood, and I came back to the living room with a feeling of triumph. Even as I opened the door, I felt the change in temperature. We were winning.

  Trevor sat with the blanket over him, but he seemed no longer distressed. As I was going out to the kitchen again, he stopped me with his hand. “Thank you,” he said softly.

  Chapter Two

  I have to go back and think about the time before, the days and weeks and years of my life that led up to that fateful exodus from the caves. I had an ordinary childhood. I went to a good school in the south of England, where I hated rugby and loved science. I wore glasses, and that, coupled with my failure at sports, meant that I was not popular in class. The result was that I spent a lot of time on my own, which was no great hardship for me since I had been an only child, and only children are used to living in their imaginations and keeping their own company.

  Every summer, my parents and I went away to some wild corner of Britain and rented a cottage. I was a collector and a hoarder, and by the end of the four-week stay, I gathered insects and shell
s and flowers and rocks.

  It became rocks that interested me more and more. I kept boxes in the attic at home and got hold of a huge cabinet, where I laid out my best specimens and labelled them with great pride. I told people at school that I wanted to become a geologist, and though teachers constantly informed me that getting any real job with geology was difficult, I stuck to my guns.

  I went to university in Wales when I was eighteen, and though I drank too much in the first year like everybody else, I worked hard thereafter and came out with a reasonable degree. My only sorrow was that in that last year of study, my father died, and my mother was there alone when I graduated.

  She moved into a new, much smaller house a few months later when I had begun applying for a first post as a geologist. She seemed to fade after my father died. All her strength seemed to sap away as if there were no point to all she had enjoyed so keenly before. She moved into sheltered housing and kept a small dog. Every week that I visited her, her world seemed to have grown smaller, her memories weaker. When she died, it seemed such a small death, a fading out like the snuffing of a candle.

  It took me a long time to get over her loss. We were a small family, and though I had one or two relatives scattered across southern England, none was particularly close. After two months of winter and too much solitude, I applied for a job in the southwest of England that involved specialized geological research, and I started rebuilding my life.

  That was how I came to work for Russell Carey and first got to know Trevor. To begin with, there were five of us on the team, but Rosalie left because she could not bear working for someone as disorganized and unreliable as Russell. Mike worked with us in Greece and Sweden and became a real friend, but two years after he joined, he learned he had cancer, and his wife persuaded him to take on a job nearer to home.

  I rented a cottage on an estate near Tavisdale, began hacking out a garden from peaty soil and managed to boost my self-confidence by finding my first girlfriend since my early days at university. It didn’t last long, but I was happier than I’d been for years all the same. After a long dry summer, Russell asked Trevor and me if we would undertake extensive and important research in the Mayall Caves. There was some request from higher up, and we were the ones wanted for the work. Because of the long lack of rain, many of the key caverns deep under the moor were likely to be easily accessible, and as it took such a considerable time to reach the lower passages, it was decided it would be wiser for us to stay down there until we were done.

  We left on a completely ordinary September morning. I remember the people in the office, the copper-hot sky as we drove out of Tavisdale towards the moor. There was a scent of mown hay and apples in the air. At Trevor’s favorite pub, the Clare Arms, in one of the villages south of the caves, we stopped for cider and a late lunch. Two children were trying to catch a butterfly in a garden across from the Arms. I remember one of them falling on the lawn and weeping as though his heart would break. There are paintings in my mind of that day, beautiful canvases, and I remember thinking I wanted that summer to last forever and that I didn’t want to face days of the cave’s darkness. But we had to go all the same in the end, and I remember looking back from the car at the children waving and the blonde girl from the Arms taking in our empty glasses from the table.

  We talked about that as we sat by the fire. It was blazing well now, blissfully warm and bright in the midst of that incomprehensible winter. But it had come too late for the woman upstairs who had frozen to death, and the man outside left forever beneath the ice.

  “I reckon the cold was worse,” Trevor said. “God knows it’s bad enough now, but five, six days ago, perhaps more, it must have been unbelievable. We wouldn’t have survived, Gavin, not a chance. We may not even now. Have we anything to eat? I’m starving!”

  We went out into the kitchen with blankets around our shoulders, closing the door behind us so every molecule of warmth could be held in the living room. The fridge had gone dead, and there was no knowing how long it had been since the power was cut. A plate of cold chicken looked at us temptingly from one shelf, but neither of us had the courage.

  “The freezer section, Gavin. See if it’s still….”

  We hacked out a packet of sausages, the kind that was served at children’s parties, and a couple of chops. I raked around the lower shelves for a pan and some oil and fled with them into the warmth of the living room. I think it must have been the best meal I’ve ever eaten. We had lived mostly on dried stuff in the caves, and during those two weeks, I’d never once felt truly full. Those sausages could have been prepared in paradise. Afterwards, I dug out the last tin of mandarins from the side pocket of my pack, and we ate them in contented silence, watching the fire curl flames into the darkness of the chimney.

  “Cream,” Trevor said with his mouth full, pointing at the last of his mandarins. “Only wish we’d had a bit of cream.”

  “What are we going to do?” I said. “We can’t stay here...not indefinitely.”

  “We have to find out what the hell’s happened. Maybe tomorrow we can start early, get to Tavisdale before nightfall. But one thing we can do is get rid of these samples. I hardly think we’re going to need them now.” He was somehow appalled at what might lie behind his own words and paused, shoving another log roughly onto the fire. “We should stock up with what we might need—firewood, an axe, better clothing, all that. This place is useful—it might just have saved our lives.”

  I suddenly thought of Russell and wondered what had happened to him. It was difficult to believe this might be a disaster that had spread over the whole country and beyond. It still felt as though in the morning, we would come down to Tavisdale and find that everything was all right, just as before.

  “I’m going out to see if I can find some coal,” I said suddenly. “There must be even a little somewhere. We’re going through that wood too fast, and it still isn’t quite dark.”

  I put on about six layers until I could barely bend my arms. Trevor found the sight extremely amusing. “The abominable geologist,” he shrieked, and fell about laughing. “While you’re out, I’m going to scour this house for drink. You’d better hurry. I might demolish it before you get back.”

  I found the back door and went out, closing it behind me. The whole world glittered evilly with frost—not the little chinks of frost you see on a normal winter morning but massive, sharp diamonds. I stood there, held by the straitjacket of the cold and that horrible quiet. We were still high up there, a few hundred feet above sea level, and I went to the edge of a bank to look out over the valleys of Devon and Cornwall. On any normal night, I would have seen glittering necklaces of faraway streetlights and the warm lamps of numberless homes. But there was nothing, just a fire blazing somewhere in the middle distance and huge flames like red wolves leaping up from its heart. What had happened was too horrible to contemplate.

  I shuddered and turned away, forcing myself to think of now, of survival. A few yards away, along the length of the back wall of the house, there was a small door about five feet high. I stood outside it and felt in hope for a key. It was there, but the door was unlocked anyway, and I passed inside to the utter blackness of what I hoped was a shed. I had to do everything by touch, and as there was no window in the room, not a shred of light shone into the place. I diagnosed a rake, nearly cut myself on something unrecognizable, and felt twine, several trowels, and a box full of nails.