Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  She swore, then remembering her desire for battle scars, swore again and called herself names. Stretching her legs back, she found the ledge opposite and pushed herself on to solid rock.

  If she made it out of here alive…

  If she made it out alive? She laughed – a mad sound, peculiar and unfamiliar, which made her shiver. To dispel the fear her own voice had caused, she began to talk to herself, repeat things which were ordinary and unthreatening, things that were from the world she knew.

  ‘Washing machines live longer with Calgon,’ she said, trying to get the intonation exactly right, trying to get the volume right, to match it to the space. She restarted several times, and thought of Lana’s not-quite-stutter. She could imagine, after this, it would be hard to get used to the way her voice sounded in the outside world.

  The Calgon jingle was vaguely unsatisfying and she tried to think of something longer. The Lord’s Prayer, perhaps. She attempted to recall it, but got caught up wondering if it was ‘who art in Heaven’ or ‘which art in Heaven’. This reminded her of a children’s book she’d read to Lana once, where a girl sang hymns to keep her courage up. The only hymns she knew were Christmas carols. She tried a few lines, but they seemed sinister down there in the dark.

  Squeeze

  There was something coffin-like about this section of cave. Her breath caught at the comparison. Had she died already? And was she now suffering her punishment?

  Octopus cave

  Her phone’s torch lit on something, a creature, reaching out for her in the dark. It took up the whole width of the passage, and she recoiled, dropping the mobile. The blackness was so deep that it hurt her eyes, and she felt newly vulnerable without the light.

  For several minutes, she was too frightened to search, blindly, for her phone, but just kept still and tried to tuck herself against the wall, hoped that whatever it was – cave squid, kraken – would pass without guessing she was there. She tried to breathe quietly, to stop the thudding of her heart. She sat for a long time; she couldn’t tell how long. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she stretched out a hand and felt for the phone. Something hard and slimy met her fingers, but it didn’t move and she soon came across the smooth, flat, oblong she needed.

  When she switched the torch app back on she saw that what had spooked her was a pale, shining rock formation, a ghostly octopus with stubby tentacles. Cave, in Latin, she remembered now, meant ‘beware’. Cave canem! Cave octopus!

  The walls around it were black and water spilled off a jutting layer of rock. She put her tongue to it, gratefully, thinking of Grace’s microbe diet. It was a relief, though she had hardly known she was thirsty. Hunger was another problem, but there was no way of solving that, unless…Scrabbling through the pockets of her jacket, she found one chew sweet, wrapped in pink paper, and she put it in her mouth, feeling like Persephone surrendering to the temptation of a pomegranate seed.

  A wider bit of cave was visible up ahead, and she dragged herself along with renewed energy. The trickle of sweat inside her jacket was comforting, the idea of her body working gave her strength. There was a short drop, which she went into hands first, her mobile in her teeth. The air was damp and smelled like old grass cuttings, which made her think the outside world was close, but the only light came from her phone, and that was running out of battery.

  Dried-leaf cavern

  This was narrow, filled with dried birch leaves, souvenirs of the outside world. She stood and shone her circle of light over every inch of the rock, but couldn’t find how the leaves had got in. Perhaps they’d been carried here by water.

  She was so tired, and the never-ending dark was so heavy and it all seemed so hopeless. Perhaps the best thing was oblivion. Sleep would be a respite, a way to blank out the world. It was something she had seen Lana do and, if she made it home, she promised herself she would never drag Lana into the waking world again.

  She lay down among the leaves; they made for a comfortable mattress, and if she kept still for a moment she could convince herself she was somewhere else, somewhere familiar and safe. She trawled her memories for moments which might fit into this dark. A night in the old flat, in their old bedroom with the swirling Artex ceiling and the big, plasticky windows. She pictured it, felt it. She was pregnant with Meg, and the duvet, which she’d pushed down to her thighs, rested too heavily on her. She kicked it off entirely, lying splayed on the damp mattress.

  Hugh was next to her on the bed, the air thick and soft, the air of a hot summer, dense enough to carry the smell of the lime trees in through the window. The woman downstairs was shouting in a companionable, irritating way, and they were trying to decide what her complaint was, repeating any words they made out: finances, handle it, useless, dinner. Laughing into their hands.

  Jen opened her eyes and had a brief moment of panic. In the past, she had been warm and safe and loved. In the present, she was tense, cold, alone, and there was only the bleak, icy sound of water somewhere beneath the rock. She got up and carried on.

  Traverse

  She found she was thinking of Rembrandt, a series of etchings of Christ’s entombment, each one blacker than the last. In the first you could see the detail that you’d never know was there in the final, darkest picture. It made you imagine all the things you could miss in that darkness. The crumpled mourners and discarded skulls you might stumble over.

  There was a hole in the floor; she nearly didn’t spot it. The only means of getting past it was to wedge her feet into the narrow ledges either side, brace her hands against the walls, and hope. Halfway along, though, she wondered if it wouldn’t be best just to let herself drop, rather than carry on struggling like this. It was the trying to survive that was torturous; ending things now might be preferable.

  Low crawl

  Her mind was wandering, she realized, remembering bits of dialogue from old sitcoms and odd moments from meetings at work. She worried a little that this was a sign she was delirious or crazy, but made no effort to halt her thoughts. Occasional dripping and echoing still made her shiver, the idea of someone grabbing her foot, but it was almost cosy here and part of her wanted to wait and not move until someone came to rescue her. Only who would know she was here?

  Guilt flooded her. She was going to leave Meg and Lana motherless, she was going to make Hugh a widower. She would never meet her granddaughter. How could she have been so reckless, so unthinking? To walk in without any preparation, without safety gear, a guide, or even a map. To walk in without letting anyone know where she was. She was going to disappear, just as Lana had disappeared, only it would be for good. The image of Hugh, alone, miserable, was unbearable. Although it was worse (disgracefully) to think of him with someone else, a second wife, a woman with long, dark hair and a wardrobe full of tight-fitting velvet dresses which made her irresistibly strokeable (where did these details come from?).

  The woman would be unsympathetic to Lana, would be one of those people who didn’t believe in depression. She would tell her to ‘pull herself together’ or stop seeking attention. And she would want to go out and show off all the time and would never let Hugh fall asleep with a book in the evenings. And she would be homophobic.

  Picturing the woman made Jen angry. She started to feel as if she’d been tricked. It was that velvet-clad harpy who’d led her down here, lured her away from her family, got her trapped. Well, she wasn’t going to allow it. She was going to get out, get back.

  Stream

  After a narrow fissure, which scraped her body on both sides, came a wide, low space half filled with water. She had to wade through it, on her hands and knees, her boots submerged, her jeans getting heavier and heavier. She hurt her knees on sharp bits of stone hidden under the water and dribbled as she carried the phone in her mouth. She took off her shirt and tried to rip it apart to make bandages, to make kneepads, but the shirt was too well made, the material wouldn’t tear, and so she put it back on again.

  She was in pain and suspected her head
was bleeding, though it was hard to tell because she was so wet all over. Her hands were cut and blistered, but she couldn’t save them as she moved and had to accept the feel of rock biting into her skin. She was sorry for herself and wept at the pain, but amid the self-pity and anguish was a kernel of satisfaction. Her suffering would leave a mark, and this infernal journey wouldn’t exist only in her head.

  The images of Lana’s red-scored wrists came into her mind and she felt for a moment a tiny fraction of what Lana must feel when she sliced at her arms, a desire to show what was happening inside on the outside of her body.

  Crouch

  She couldn’t remember if she had turned left or right, her mind wouldn’t focus on the question; the low roof in this stretch of cave forced her into a permanent stoop so that her back ached with every step. She felt the way she did after a migraine. Unable to find the energy for anything, unable even to find words. She had begun talking to herself again, but the sentences went unfinished. She could hardly remember what she was doing there, what she was hoping for.

  River passage

  Was she still human? It was a question that came to her all of a sudden. Down here, was she some other being? She remembered something about the insides of caves being the closest parallel to the environments of other planets and found she could believe the comparison. The caves certainly looked like part of an alien landscape.

  Grotto

  There were midges. She was so pleased to see them, dancing in the torchlight, that she didn’t slap at them when they bit her. They had to mean an entrance somewhere close. She looked around wildly.

  Lana’s phone was propped up on a high shelf in the rock, a flat, shining object. Completely dead, of course, but definitely Lana’s. Recognizable from the stickers on the case, a collection of brightly coloured cartoon characters and fashion logos. Jen realized she had seen nothing with any colour since she entered the cave, that she had existed in black and white.

  She held the phone in her hands as if it were a tiny Lana, a fragile creature. To find something so associated with her daughter, to see it now, when she might never see her again, was overwhelming. She rocked it and held it to her cheek and kissed it before she put it in her pocket.

  Revival

  It was the sudden gust of air that told her she was near the surface, and the temperature change and, finally, the thin, pale grey shaft of light. She had to turn and turn and turn again to get up, corkscrewing out of the ground. She banged her mouth in her rush to gain height and had to wait a moment for the pain in her lips and teeth to subside. Then, cramming her toes into too-narrow gaps, she kept worming up towards the surface, until at last she could get her arms out and grab on to the roots of some nearby tree and pull herself into the world.

  She gulped down breaths as if she’d been drowning, and lay flat for a moment, her wet clothes stuck in creases around her knees and middle. The sun shone and she looked at it, not caring to save her eyes, so happy to see it, so grateful for its warmth, its presence. As she stood up, the breeze caught her hair, her scalp stinging in response, and she found there was blood on her fingers when she put them to her head. Her neck ached from hunching her head into her shoulders and she stretched as far as she could, grateful not to be cramped, grateful for the ability to move wildly without hitting rock.

  There was no one around, and Jen briefly believed – really, really believed – that everyone had vanished, every human on the planet. Perhaps it was the fresh breeze after the airless tunnels, or the light on her skin after the darkness, or the feeling of rejoining the landscape, but there was a wonderful sense of newness to everything. A Garden of Eden newness.

  The car park was only a few minutes’ walk. She had walked and crawled and squirmed for hours but had come no distance at all. It seemed impossible. She was out of breath and dizzy, soaked through and freezing, and shivering only made her ache more. Her jeans were torn through at the knee and the skin was bruised and bloody. She staggered to the car, her muscles still cramping.

  It was stifling inside, but she was grateful for the heat, and the dusty smell which made her think of family picnics when the girls were little and, before that, with her own parents. She fell on the other three currant buns in the packet.

  There were some tissues in the door bin, and she began dabbing at the cuts on her head and knees and hands. She pictured the chunk of scalp that had been missing when Lana reappeared, obviously lost to the jagged ceiling of a tunnel. The first-aid kit was half empty, but she rubbed some antiseptic cream over her wounds and stuck plasters on her knees, then she took off her jeans and her shirt and her socks and spread them on top of the burning-hot car.

  She sat in the driver’s seat in her underwear, finally comfortable, not hungry not wet, not bleeding. After a minute, she started the car battery, plugged in Lana’s phone and waited for it to come back to life.

  Confession

  I’ve heard that, if you die down here, they just cement your body in. I hadn’t thought about it before, I guess I hadn’t meant to be found. But I don’t want to be left here, even if I am dead. I don’t want to be left in the dark for ever.

  My battery is really low now. There isn’t much time to write a message, and I can’t work out what I want to say. My head hurts like crazy.

  Two things: I feel stupid and I’m sorry.

  I thought, when I came down, that this was the best way, that I wouldn’t traumatize anyone. I didn’t want to make someone else, like a train driver, cause my death. I didn’t want to be found all gross-looking, or for my dead face to haunt someone for ever. I didn’t think about changing my mind. I didn’t think about the pills not working. I didn’t think I’d be stuck here, alone, for so long. I didn’t expect to wake up.

  When I did I couldn’t stop puking. I must have thrown up everything I ate this whole week. The leftover pills were floating in the water, dissolved to mush in their packets, useless. I hope the chemicals don’t hurt any wildlife. There doesn’t seem to be any wildlife down here. A couple of times I thought I saw a mouse. I’d give anything to see another animal. But it was just a trick of the light of my torch and a drip from the ceiling.

  Ironic that I came down here to kill myself and now I don’t want to die. Or not ironic – embarrassing. I’m really, really embarrassed. As soon as I realized I wasn’t dead I felt like an idiot. I just want to get out and never tell anyone what happened. Ever. But I’ve tried to find my way back to the entrance and I only got more lost. It all looks the same, every tunnel. I’m wet through, and my knees are torn from crawling. I’ve hit my head and it’s bleeding. My hands are numb. I’m not sure I could get back up the shaft I came down, anyway.

  A few hours ago, I thought I heard someone above me, and I shouted and shouted till my throat hurt, but if there was anyone there I don’t think they heard. So maybe no one will ever find me, maybe no one will ever find this phone, this message. If they do, then please tell my parents and my sister that I’m sorry. Please tell them I love them. Tell my mum that she was right, that life is worth living. If I was given the chance to live now, I’d never do anything so stupid again. I’d never take seeing the sky for granted, I’d never not appreciate having dry feet, I’d never eat another KitKat (maybe). I’ve got one in my pocket, and I’ve been saving it but

  Hearing things

  The note ended there; her battery must have died at that moment. Jen’s throat was tight, and her heart was hammering by the time she put down the phone. Her hands were shaking too badly to drive. Instead, she got out of the car and peeled her shirt and jeans from the car roof. They were stiff and ripped but warm from the sun. Taking her lead from Lana, Jen looked up at the sky. That calmed her a little. Not wanting to leave sight of it for a while, she put on her dry shoes, locked the car and walked towards the moor.

  After a moment, she realized her phone was ringing.

  ‘Where are you?’ Hugh asked. ‘Have you had your phone off?’

  ‘No, there’s no signal here. I�
��m in Derbyshire.’

  There was silence for a few seconds.

  ‘Dare I ask why?’

  ‘I’ll explain when I get back. Sorry. I didn’t mean to come here. It just sort of happened.’

  ‘Well, something else has happened. Meg’s gone into labour.’

  ‘Oh God. But she’s not due yet. Is she okay? Is the baby okay?’

  ‘Don’t panic. The baby’s several weeks early, so they’ll probably have to stay in the hospital for a while, but yes, it all seems to be going okay in general. Meg would like you to be here, though.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll come back straight away. I mean, it’ll take me a few hours.’

  ‘All right, love. I’ll tell her.’

  She said goodbye to Hugh and gripped the phone as she walked on. In a few hours, she would have a granddaughter, and she should be rushing back, but she was still shaking from the tiredness, the shock of the day and currant-bun-induced sugar rush. So she carried on across the moor, hoping the air, the sunlight, the scenery would steady her.

  When they’d visited in May, all the monster rhododendron bushes had been in purplish flower. Now, it was the heather that added colour to the moor. The bilberries were ripe, too, so the whole landscape seemed rather decadent, a swathe of softness filled with fruit. She was tempted to lie out over the soft tufts of heather and fill her mouth with whatever berries she could reach.