The Lost Cavern

by H. F. Heard

  On the two came, and now I could hear the actual panting of Parson as he breasted the last stiff rise and, perfect tracker, not a breath from his pursuer. I must say that at that point I became more interested in my rival than in our common prey. It shot into my mind that it was a little odd that a common country blackguard should be such a consummate mover. With it came a substitute answer, just a little unassuring. Perhaps he wasn’t just a tough from the village; perhaps he was a lunatic—that would be a tougher proposition; perhaps he wouldn’t run but fight. And this notion, at first fancy, grew to fact while the two I watched made perhaps not more than a dozen steps. What was that shadowing figure up to! They were close enough now for me to see every movement. When Parson finally stopped for a moment to pant, so did shadow. Not to pant, it is true, but to do something which for a moment I thought was going to spoil all my plans. Shadow put out an arm and then another. I saw at once he was deformed. He must have been six to eight feet behind Parson, but he stretched out those arms from his queer bent body until—of course moonlight is deceptive—but I’d have sworn they nearly, but not quite, touched the figure ahead, which all the while was still quite unaware. And not a rustle of movement could I hear either. But I am sure I saw clearly enough and those two arms did the most unexpected thing. I was sure now we were in for a grapple, but hesitation seemed the nature of the beast. For it waved these arms about as though it were trying to haul Parson back before it had got hold of him. “Madness,” I said, and liked the word even less at second thought, for those arms were unpleasantly long. I’d heard of creatures with misshapen bodies covering misshapen minds who are kept in private asylums, family monsters, horrors that should have been killed at birth but, let live, live on for ages, without proper brains and with all too improper passions and muscles.

  I own I felt quite a horrid chill at that. And nothing that then followed let me get back to normal. For as this thing waved its tentacular arms toward Parson, though he never turned round, though he seemed quite unaware that he was followed, he seemed to strain as though something had made a contact and was pulling at him. Twice I could see he tried to get under way again and leaned forward as a worn-out horse with too heavy a load on a hill stumbles and strains at the collar. And each time the follower waved and yearned out with his arms, and each time more distinctly Parson struggled and evidently tried to get free of something. I wondered then could the creature be sufficiently clever to have made a fine noose to strangle its prey and now have thrown it. But then “Why the devil,” I said, half in fear, half in exasperation, “doesn’t the little fool of a priest turn round, see he’s snarled, and make a fight for it? Is he so frightened that he dare not look round?” ’Pon my word I’d just reached the point where I couldn’t let the insane thing go on, for it seemed I had to deal not with one lunatic but with two, when Parson made a sort of breakaway. I heard him gasp—that seemed to support the lasso hypothesis—and on he came, hurrying and stumbling and wheezing like a done runner. And yet the thing that bobbed along behind didn’t close even now.

  “Well,” I said, grimly enough, “I’m in for it. They’ll close here, for a certainty, and even if they don’t, by hell and high water, I’ll make them.”

  Two may make the strangest balance of company but three will bring things to a head. I just couldn’t have stood the strain, let alone the fact that my booty was here on the point of passing right through my hands if I didn’t act. The moon shone right down the little defile which they had now entered. It would be a sheltered enough place for the robbery, whoever made it, but it was as well lit for the actual actors as the open field outside. And over it I hung like a hawk watching two silly squabbling birds—or that’s how I tried to think of myself. Beat, beat, beat, came on old Parson’s shoes, and not a food-padding sounded from the footpad now within four or five feet of its prey and not four or five yards from me. Looking through the brush of twigs which made a breastwork on the ledge of the ruined trunk in which I stood, I could see Parson’s face now with the moonlight on it. And one glance knocked out of me any greed. Believe me, I forgot about the cup, my scheme, my luck. I just caught his mood as one catches a cold—I could do nothing about it. That moonlit face was one of the ghastliest things I’ve ever seen, and I’d seen some none too pretty sights in my “sharpshooting” days—indeed, I’ve only twice seen anything more terrible in my life; and I was, as it happens, to see both of those that very night. It was a face, not crinkled up by fear but just stamped flat—that’s the only way I can put it—by terror. It wasn’t human any longer: it was dead, the face of a man who’d died of horror. There was only one thing still lying across that desolation of fear, and that was what I can only call purpose. The human man was crushed but the will still held under all sense and reason and individual intention. And I saw that that was why he could still keep going, moving—at a snail’s pace, yes, but moving. Whatever was trying to pin him down and flatten resistance had flattened him right enough. But it couldn’t prevent his creeping, oozing away out of its crushing grip. He had ceased to be human, and some basic force or undertow was making him pass through the net and filter which would have held any creature less disintegrated. That made me look over his shoulder. And it was there I saw my second ghastly thing, the thing worse than the face that was coming closer and closer, the thing beside which I’ve only seen one more horrible thing in my life.

  I saw the Tracker—but that’s wrong, really. I saw right to where the tracking thing was. I saw those winnowing tentacles come out again, and the front figure pause, and then—it’s the only word that actually describes it—ooze on again on its via dolorosa. And at that the hind figure seemed to summon all its strength. It seemed to open out a fringe of arms or tentacles, a sort of corona of black rays spread out. It gaped with a full expansion, and even I could feel that there was a perfectly horrible attraction, or vacuum drag, being exerted. That was horrible enough, with the face of the super-suffering man now almost under me resonating my own terror. But the worst thing was that, as the tentacles unwrapped and winnowed out toward their prey, I saw they weren’t really tentacles at all. They were spreading cracks, veins, fissures, rents of darkness expanding from a void, a gap of pure blackness. There’s only one way to say it—one was seeing right through the solid world into a gap, an ultimate maelstrom. And from it was spreading out a—I can only call it so—a negative sunrise of black radiation that would deluge and obliterate everything. Of course it was still only a fissure, a vent, but one realized—This is a hole, a widening hole, that has been pierced in the dike that defends the common-sense, sensuous world. Through this vortex-hole that is rapidly opening, over this lip and brink, everything could slip, fall in, find no purchase, be swallowed up.

  It was like watching a crumbling cliff with survivors clinging to it being undercut and toppling into a black tide that had swallowed up its base. This negative force could drag the solidest things from their base, melt them, engulf the whole hard, visible world. And we were right on that brink. What was after us, for I knew now I was in its field, was not a thing of any passions or desires. Those are limited things, satiable things—in a way, balanced things, and so familiar, safe even, almost friendly in comparison with this. You know the grim saying, “You can give a sop to Cerberus, but not to his Master.” No, this was—that’s the technical term, I found, coined by those who have been up against this and come back alive—this was absolute Deprivation, really insatiable need, need that nothing can satisfy, absolute refusal to give, to yield. It is the second strongest thing in the universe, and, indeed, outside that. It could swallow the whole universe, and the universe would go for nothing, because in that gap the whole universe could fill not a bit of it. It would remain as empty, as gaping, as insatiable as ever, for it is the bottomless pit made by unstanchable Lack.

  When it did that last thing, when it rose above the man and me, a rearing, black tidal wave that had shot up to the zenith, the man, who till then could just move, came to a standstill
. He did not turn round. He did not collapse. The two forces were locked. Absolute demand, emptiness so negative that it could defy everything that exists to fill it, was now determined to drag down this twig on its brink. It had taken in everything right up to where he stood. But somehow, though the twig could not get from the brink, neither could the gulf get it over and down. Then I forgot him and it. My own pain and horror reached a point where I could feel for no one else. For I was going over. But the intensity of the fear, as it mounted to frenzy point, seemed to burn something out of me. I suppose it killed all greed in me, for remember I had the kind of rough, skilled, shameless courage of the beast that you have, that we all have to have to “make good” in our trade. That’s the reason, I think, I was able to see the parson’s face again. By now it was framed—yes, a good word. The hedge of tentacles, or black rays, or whatever, had risen around till the man was enclosed, canopied in them. “Hell had opened its jaws upon him,” as an old writer says aptly. I saw that face going to its doom, and I saw in it again that everything human had gone but the will. No terror or horror would make him relent, recant. I realized at that moment that he could get away, be left unmolested, be safe, if only he would stop doing something that really didn’t concern him personally. And he wouldn’t. That was his ultimatum.

  I heard my voice in that gulf of silence. It was saying slowly, monotonously two words, “Good God!” And, as they were said, the man almost under me, the blank, inhuman face the moon was lighting as though down a long, rapidly deepening shaft, began to move—neither forward nor back. He slowly turned right round. The tentacles were still in a diabolic aureole round him, but he moved. He began to walk or shuffle backward, as men with bad hearts will take a very steep piece of hill. He was not getting himself free, but he was dragging the whole horror after him, as in a tug of war. So he passed under my coign, and now he was on my right hand, and that—that hole-into-nothing, that suction vortex made by insatiable privation, was on my left. I clung to the hard, rough bark, so that afterward I found I had pushed the skin away from half my nails and left the quick bare; and I was able, for my sanity, to keep my face to the right, on the terrible face of the suffering man, and not on the horible lack, the utter lack even of suffering. And, as I watched him, his hands moved under his cloak. His face, now turned from the moon, was in shadow and hardly more than a blank mask, but I could see his hands emerge. They held that, that cup. They raised it till it was as high as his chin. I have said the face was now in dusk, turned from the moon and gray as a piece of desert under a waning moon. But as he raised that cup there was a sunrise. I saw that the great amethyst was filling up with a light of living warmth, warm and living as the light that a hand shows when held before a flame. And that light mounted and filled the chalice until it brimmed it and, spreading up, flooded his whole face. “Go. Go. In the Name of the Life Everlasting and of Him who lives forever, go; and be closed; sealed down.” As the sentence ended, the voice rose in power until at the close the whole hollow place rang with it. It was full of authority; yes, of triumph. It was a shout of victory. I dared turn and look. I could see down the narrow little tunnel of lane down which, a moment before, I would not have looked for my life or sanity, and all I saw was the quiet field slope, the treetops, and the sleeping village lying on the opposite slope.

  The greatest pleasure animal man can know is the sudden and complete relief from agony. I have known it once supremely. That was the moment. I felt my whole skin move as though I could cast it like a snake—it’s called horripilation. It’s the last word of that thing the poor excitement addicts of today are always seeking. Thrill, ecstasy, relief, surprise, satisfaction, the Too Good To Be True mixed and fired with This Is Reality and This Is Home. I dropped out of the tree. I didn’t feel my torn fingernails for hours after.

  Parson didn’t seem the least surprised to find the young American artist tumbled on the path in front of him and telling him that he was a dangerous criminal found on this spot because he had just been planning here and now to assault him, batter him, and rob him. All he said, not making a single reference either to me or to what we had gone through, was, “We have just time. Come along.” It was the first time I realized how no one is really on the spot, no one has real presence of mind and lives actually in the moment, except the saint. I bundled off after him. You’d think after what he’d been through a man wouldn’t like even a nice, human crook too close to his heels. He didn’t care. Didn’t pass a look back or a word to me. His pace now, too, left nothing to be desired. He seemed to skim along and kept me wanting all my breath for its proper purpose, breathing. I realized where we were going. I was to be taken to Farmer Martin, perhaps to be given in charge while Parson saw the mad wife—what did I care? I had to do something and was quite incapable of doing anything myself; besides, as far as I was able to think, which was still very little, I had one strong feeling, and that was not to be left alone and not to be sent back over that route by myself. Better the village constable and all the population throwing garbage at me.

  When we arrived at the farm we had plenty of notice that we were expected. Martin was by the door and stumbled out toward us, waving his arms helplessly. Mrs. Martin, who evidently couldn’t come downstairs, was, however, quite clearly aware of our presence and made herself well known by her shouts. She was making such a din that even when we got up to the distracted man we couldn’t—at least, I couldn’t—hear what he was saying. It didn’t matter, for Parson put him aside: the very way he did it showed that the mild little fellow of the parish was gone. Here was, there could be no doubt, the master of the situation.

  We three went into the kitchen. There the farmer made one more effort to speak; he was trying evidently to restrain the priest: “You must let me send for Doctor. It’s madness to go up. She’ll kill you. She’s, been saying she will, and as she heard your steps coming she became twice as wild. About a quarter of an hour ago she had a quiet spell, quieter than she’s had for twenty-four hours; she seemed to be waiting and watching and I thought she was listening. I thought might be she did hear your steps coming. It was dead still, so I listened too, but you must have been the other side of the hill then. I took the opportunity to slip a rope round her while she was attending in that way to something outside. Then she came to and broke into a rage the worst I’ve ever seen, frothing and screaming.” He became suddenly more urgent. “You can’t go up, sir. ’Pon my soul, it isn’t safe. She’s too blind, bestial raging to know she’s tied. She doesn’t try to get at the knots. If she did—and she might at any moment—she could get them undone, and then she’d have you dead in a trice.”

  The little priest put him aside as you do a child. “Of course I’m going to her.” Then, with a further increase of authority, “That’s what I’ve come for. Now it will yield. I know it. The reinforcements it was looking for have been completely defeated. There is no help now, for that. Of course I’m going to take the surrender in my Master’s name.” He turned to the stair, and certainly the noise that came down it would have made the toughest guy reconsider going on. But it was clear he was as sure as a surgeon just going to cut. Still, I own my nerve gave a nasty squirm in me when he turned with his foot on the first stair and said, “Mr. Martin, you can stay down here, but,” nodding to me, “you’d better come along,” and then, with something almost like humor, though it was anything but reassuring to me in my state, “This is part of your treatment, too.”

  He went first, I’m glad, if rather ashamed, to say, carrying his bundle in one arm. He pushed the door open, and I could see past him. I was puzzled at first. A small lamp had evidently been moved to a far corner of the room where we couldn’t yet see it or the maniac get near it. She was on the big bed in the other corner. But for a moment I could hardly see it was a bed. The air was full of something, and every object more or less covered with it. Then in the dim and dusty light I could recognize what all this flaking was. The whole place was full of feathers. The bed had evidently been made of o
ne of those queer old mattresses stuffed with feathers, and this and the pillows had evidently been torn to pieces by the lunatic. And she was still tearing. Through this stage snowstorm I could see a writhing figure on the bed. She became aware of us the moment we entered and made a kind of clumsy spring. The rope cut it short, and she floundered down, half on the bed, half on the floor. My leader walked slowly toward where she lay and stopped short only a pace or two from her. At that she reared up again, and at last one got a pretty clear look at her. It was anything but reassuring. I have never seen such a sight in my life. The great blowzy body was evidently naked, and cutting across the big swaying udders, the rope scored its way like a wire cutting soap. She did not tear at it—seemed hardly to understand how she was held—but clawed and winnowed in her effort to get at the man who stood in front of her. What added the last horrid absurdity to her appearance was that, though it was clear she hadn’t a stitch on and certainly had not the sort of figure that showed to advantage under such exposure, she was covered in a way. For the down and small feathers of the bedding she had torn and scattered were stuck all over her. Her body was covered with sweat and filth, her hair was caked to her head, face, and shoulders, and her oozy, smeared flesh was plastered and plumed with these small quills and wisps. She must have been given some sort of syrup, for a sticky, dark liquid had spilled from around her mouth and spread over her chest and arms. The feathers, of course, had stuck thickly in this. The whole effect would have struck anyone at first sight as a half-finished attempt at tarring and feathering.