“You are letting your imagination wander inside the wrong story,” she answered. “La grotta della Sibilla is in another part of Umbria. We have our own legend here in Fontanalba.”
“So is this where the Revenant came to see the sun shining at midnight?”
“You have to go deeper still for that,” Adam said. He handed me the candle he was holding, turned towards the skiff, hauled on the painter to pull it closer to the strand, and with a curt nod of the head indicated that I should sit in the stern. I hesitated, looking from his impassive face, beyond the buttress of rock, to the black hollow into which this underground river was flowing. Having come this far, could I just laugh it off, call a halt, say this was too much and walk away?
Adam, Gabriella and Larry were all studying me. Not one of them said a word. A flippant remark about Charon and obols, sops and Cerberus stuck in my throat. Thinking What the hell! and wondering why I was doing it, I boarded the boat. Adam climbed in after me, and fitted the oars into the brass rowlocks. Calling out something I didn’t understand, Larry pushed us off towards the middle of the pool.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He said Tharsei,” Adam answered. “It’s ancient Greek. It means Take heart.”
A moment later we were floating under the arch of rock into the gloom beyond.
When we rounded a bend in the rock, the faint light from the candles vanished behind us. Moments later the prow bumped against stone as the skiff took another turn. I heard the creak of the rowlocks and the dip of oar blades into slowly moving water. Otherwise we were afloat on silence.
“Why haven’t the others come?” I asked.
“You’d better not let that candle blow out. It’s our only light.”
“You don’t have matches with you?”
“It’s best if you keep quiet.”
After a pause I said, “You might at least say where we’re going.”
“I already have.”
“And you’re seriously suggesting that my father’s there?”
“Not only him.”
“Who else?”
“One can never say.”
“You mean you’re taking me to some sort of seance?”
“I mean what I said. We’re entering the House of the Dead. Now be silent please.”
Apart from the small flame cupped in my hand, we were in complete darkness. Already nervous, it was impossible suddenly not to feel very scared.
Over countless millennia this underground river must have incised its way ever more deeply, gouging its passage through almost solid rock. A couple of feet above our heads, the roof had been worn smooth. Again it was like travelling through the entrails of a living organism, though when I closed my eyes it also felt as if I was being drawn on strong currents through the channels of my mind.
We rounded a number of bends before Adam shipped the oars. I saw how the passage had narrowed to a constricted throat of rock. Pulled by the current, the skiff was moving more swiftly. Nor was there room to turn the boat about and go back.
Minutes later the skiff grounded on another strand. Immediately Adam stepped ashore and held the prow steady as I climbed out, anxiously protecting the candle flame. Then he hauled the skiff farther up the slope to where the current couldn’t pull it away, and pulled out two jumpsuits from under the prow. “We’ll need these,” he said. He slipped out of his tunic, put one of the jumpsuits on, and then took the candle from me while I did the same. The cloth, I noticed, was thickly padded at the elbows and knees. When we were both suited up, Adam led me across the uneven floor of rock beyond the strand. After ten yards or so he pointed to a dark pit in the floor ahead. Holding the candle close to the mouth of the shaft, he said, “Can you see the ladder? We’re going down. You go first.”
I stared down where the ladder vanished into darkness. “How deep is it?”
“There are twenty-two rungs. Count them as you go. The ladder’s secured into the rock. Just hold on till you reach the ground.”
“Is this really necessary?
“Yes. Now go.”
I had made my way down a dozen rungs of the iron ladder when, without warning, total darkness shut down round me.
“What’s happened?” My shocked voice echoed in the shaft.
“The candle went out.” In the darkness I heard Adam swing on to the ladder. “Keep going,” he ordered. I’m coming down.”
“I can’t see a bloody thing.”
“Don’t worry. You must be almost down.”
“How the hell are we going to find our way back?”
“We don’t have to. Are you at the bottom yet?”
The sole of my right foot landed on cold stone. It smelt ancient down there. The air tasted of damp, and the darkness was so thick I might have been surrounded by a crowd of people and unable to see a single one of them. I could hear Adam coming down the rungs, but he too was invisible. Shocked by the tense noise of my own breath, holding out my hands as if to push the darkness aside, I stepped away from the foot of the ladder.
If that place had ever known light, it had found no use for it. The darkness was intrinsic and eternal. It offered no way out or through. In that sightless place it felt as though my boundaries were leaking out into the blackness until there were no boundaries. I might have been drowning inside it.
I had known terror before – the terror of the battlefield, the dread of ambush or of stepping onto a mine, but such terror always had its rationale in the knowledge of a clear and present danger. This was different: it was the terror of absence, of being stripped of everything, even my shadow, and then confined inside a deep oubliette. I had no idea whether the space around me remained a narrow shaft with no exit or formed the atrium to some vast basilica of rock. No idea whether I stood within inches of a rebutting black wall that would never move, or on the brink of a drop.
All sense of limit and measure had vanished with the organizing power of sight. I no longer knew where the muffled lantern of my consciousness ended and the darkness began.
Startlingly close, Adam’s voice said, “Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
“Hold out your hand.” I felt the fumble of his fingers searching for mine before my hand was gripped. Hollow in that dark recess, deliberately calm, his voice came at me again. “Okay. We’re going to take five steps forward.”
“Did you blow out the candle on purpose?”
“Does it matter now?”
In the black silence he tightened his grip on my hand. “Are you with me?”
“Five paces, right?”
“Let’s go.”
At the fifth pace he released my hand and told me to stretch it out in front of me. Immediately my fingers bumped against solid rock.
“Crouch on bended knees,” he said, “and reach out again.”
This time my hand met no resistance.
“That’s the entrance to a narrow gallery. In some places it’s not much more than three feet high. Better keep your head down.”
I turned to stare at him in disbelief and saw nothing at all.
“You expect me to crawl in there?”
“The passage is about sixty yards long up a slight incline. And it twists. You’re going to have to feel your way.”
“If you think I’m going in there you’re out of your mind.”
“Stay here if you prefer.”
A silence as dense as the darkness settled round me.
I said, “Are you still there?”
“If you go first,” he answered, “you won’t have my feet bumping into your face.”
“What if I get stuck?”
“You won’t. Just keep going.”
“Where to? Where the hell am I going?”
“You’ll know when you’re there. Get down on your hands and knees. Keep your head low.”
I lowered myself to my knees and explored the rough ground in front of me with both hands. Then I crawled through the fissure in the rock into further inhospitable
darkness. Inching cautiously forward, I held out one hand like a probe to check the width and the height of the corridor through which I was crawling. In places it found nothing. For all I could tell, I might have been keeping my head low in a passage as high and wide as a tunnel of the London Underground.
Then my hand collided with a wall of stone directly ahead. I paused, stretching out both hands. Behind me came the sound of Adam’s breath. Groping at black space, I found only one unobstructed direction. I turned that way. A few yards later I hit another turn. When I lifted my head it grazed against the roof. A sweep of my hand found a gap no more than a yard wide between two protruding rocks. The gradient of the floor was steeper there. My knees had begun to smart. I started at the unexpected touch of Adam’s hand on my foot.
“This is getting bloody tight,” I gasped.
His silence offered no reassurance.
I said, “Does anything live down here?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel empty. It feels as if…”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Push on,” he said. “It gets steeper now.”
I turned my head back in the darkness and groped my way through the gap between the rocks. Now there was so little headroom I had to squirm upwards along a narrow passage on knees and elbows like an infantryman under fire. Why the hell was Adam doing this to me? Why had I been singled out for this ordeal? Why had I agreed to go along with it? I wanted the whole thing to be over now. I wanted to be out of there, to be back in the pleasurable world of light and life.
As if to compensate for being deprived of all sensory input, my mind began to traverse a gallery of memories – brief, luminous flashbacks, many of them startlingly clear. I seemed to glimpse in quick splashes of colour the fairy lights and balloons of childhood parties, and the glow of the chapel windows illuminating the Great Court on the night of the May Ball. I recalled the garish, spot-lit glamour of award ceremonies I’d attended and the cocaine glare of parties in war-torn cities of the world. Conflagrations of shell fire and napalm began to combust in my imagination as mutinous reminders of the lost world of light. And, weirdly in this all-concealing gloom, I seemed to detect, at the periphery of my vision, bright rectangles of light. Yet the darkness remained absolute.
Then I reached out my fingers and met a dead stop.
Groping with both hands, I found solid stone ahead of me. Again at either side, mere inches away, there were only walls of stone. No way through. This space was too tight to turn round and go back. It couldn’t be the right way. I must have taken a wrong turn. I was stuck here.
Trying to keep calm, I said, “We’ve hit some sort of impasse. I’m feeling for a way through.”
No answer came.
“Adam?”
Darkness swallowed the sound.
“Adam,” I called again. “where the hell are you?”
Still there was no response. To the terror of this black trap was added the fear of being abandoned alone inside it. But Adam couldn’t just have vanished. He must still be behind me, concealed in this passage, keeping quiet, waiting to see what I would do, how I would cope. No other explanation made sense unless – the thought stopped my breath – unless there had been a forking of the ways that I’d missed in the darkness and I’d crawled on into this dead end. Fighting against the panic threatening to engulf me, I moved my hands upwards in the only direction I hadn’t explored. Beyond the top edge of the rock stretched a flat plane. Not a blockage – a step. If I pulled myself up I might be able to slide along at its higher level.
By now strength was draining from my limbs. The effort of shinning inch by inch up a sloping chute began to tell. I was running on empty when I raised my head and banged the crown against a rock. A spasm of lightning zigzagged through my brain. Tears came to my eyes. That’s what I was reduced to now – tears and the taste of terror in my mouth. Everything else was gone. Everything I’d been, everything I’d done, all the devices and desires of my unrequited heart, every last pathetic shred of what I’d thought of as my identity was sucked out by a final vortex of despair.
“Adam,” I murmured, “for God’s sake…”
Even though I knew he’d gone, that somehow he’d slipped away, leaving me alone there, I strained to listen for the sound of his breath in the dark. All I could hear was a noise like tinnitus in my ears. Distant water? Or just the hiss of darkness swirling in to fill this untenanted space?
I slumped back, lacking the energy to curse Adam, and not even thinking about him now, because I was thinking about my father as I had last seen him, all signs of life extinguished, lying on his deathbed in Calderbridge. I could see him very clearly there. It was all I could see, like the lit corner of a studio, in the dark. Then I remembered: Adam had called this the House of the Dead. Hadn’t I been told that I would confront my dead father here? Here he was now, and with a frightened, mirthless chuckle I realized just what kind of trap this was. This was the real deadfall that had been lying in wait for me, and here I was under the stone. This was the House of the Dead, and my father was dead inside it, and the only way I could have met him here was by becoming one among the dead myself.
So was that what Adam wanted? Was it possible that he still hated me so much after all these years that he was willing to let me crawl into this impassable place and leave me here to die? Could that have been his intention all along? And what about Marina? Surely she could not have consented to this?
Whatever the case, it seemed that it was about to happen, because I was drifting away, outside my body now, back inside the landscape of the dream. Again I was walking the quarry path on the hill above the town, dragging my father’s emaciated body with me, naked and limp and utterly devoid of life. And I knew that now it would always be like this. It could never change. The two of us, father and son, were forever stuck together in a mortal embrace. I could feel the silent presence of his corpse there in the darkness with me, another portion of the dark. He was there because I’d dragged him with me every gruelling inch of the way. Adam might have gone, but my father and I were together again, as close to one another and as remote from one another as we had been on those Sunday mornings fifty years earlier, when I was a boy and he used to insist that I keep him company at the mill.
All boundaries were blurring now. I no longer knew where I was. There was a slippage in time, a slippage of consciousness, and I was back in the days of my boyhood, days when my father used to go to work so early in the morning and worked such long hours of overtime that I hardly saw him at all during the week. The arrangement suited me very well, because it left me unaccountable to him for the things that mattered in my life. I preferred him gone, because my life was easier that way. But then he made up his mind to strengthen the bond between us by insisting that on Sunday mornings I was to go with him to the mill, where it was his job to light and tend the fires in the boiler house, so that there would be a sufficient head of steam to drive the machines at the start of work next day.
On those still summer mornings, the plume of smoke he sent billowing from the high chimney stack would drift slowly over the hills and moors, and out towards the cold North Sea. Meanwhile, across the whole town, nowhere was emptier than the mill. To me it felt like a penitentiary. I didn’t want to be there in the hot grime of the boiler house with this stranger in baggy blue overalls who was heaving shovelfuls of coal from the bunker to the furnace mouth as he tried to make me talk. I knew he was doing his fatherly best with his gruff jokes and questions, and must have been baffled by the glum way I shied from each approach. I knew that he was reaching out for me, and I didn’t want to be reached, because I didn’t want his kind of life, and had only incoherent yearnings for any other. So as soon as I felt able to do so, I would slope away to explore the rest of the mill.
And I was back there now, walking up the yard from the boiler house, past the panelled room where the black-and-scarlet engine rested, its wheel and pis
tons sleeked in oil, the leather drive belts hanging slack and still. Up the stone stairs beyond that room lay floor after floor of dusty halls, where the air tasted of cotton, and skips filled with varnished bobbins waited beside the machines. To enter there felt like breaking into a museum, as though the cast-iron jennies and carders were arranged not for use but for study and inspection, like the artefacts of an ingenious culture that might otherwise get lost and pass away. On those Sunday mornings there was not a soul about but my father and me. I could hear the scrape of his shovel down in the boiler house, and knew that soon I would have to go back.
But they were too long, those melancholy hours I was forced to spend with him, and wearing on the nerves with their tedious fatigue of evasion and pretence. After a time, when my distaste for them became too plain for him to bear, he stopped insisting that I accompany him, and things turned cold and rancorous between us.
And now, having resurrected and brought him back this way, it was impossible not to relive once more the long night of his dying, his breath rough as the sound of an old saw biting through unseasoned wood as he dreamt his morphine dreams on the lonely bed upstairs. Down below, my mother and I sat silently together listening, both of us dreading and praying that the sound would stop. And when at last it did, I went upstairs to make sure that he was gone, and laid him out before the undertakers came, folding his arms across his chest, staring in guilty awe at the lax penis slumped at his thighs, waiting till his eyelids stayed shut at last beneath my shaking fingertips.
But he was back with me now, laid out here in the darkness at my side. He had never really gone away, and this black passage through the rock might as well have been the gloom of the boiler house, with me tongue-tied there, hating the demands he made on me, wishing to be anywhere else on earth but there.
“Why won’t you just talk to him,” my mother had often asked me, caught between us, loving us both, watching us hurt each other as, again and again, we both hurt her. But my father and I had never really talked, not even when we went out drinking together as adults. We preferred to conceal our mutual vulnerability behind bluff exchanges that passed for conversation, or the barbs of sarcasm with which each strove for ascendancy over the other. And he had never understood that my failure to respond to his gruff chatter about cricket and football and horse-racing was no deficiency of spirit on my part, but an act of passive resistance. What had he ever known about my sense of wonder at the landscape round me? About my attempts at poetry? About the idealism that fired my political opinions and my work? When could he and I ever talk about such things? Even towards the end, when both of us had known he was dying, we still found means to avoid the desperate truth of things between us. And when he was gone, hadn’t some part of me exulted with relief? Yet it seemed that I’d dragged his dead body with me into this last desolate place, where there was no foreseeable future for either of us, no present except the featureless present of this impenetrable darkness – only the past, the unassimilated past, from which more figures crowded round me now, invisibly observing me, keeping me from sleep. Who were they?
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