It Knows Where You Live (10 page)

The night opened up before them, creating a space for their peculiar brand of unity. Into that place Cal spoke all the honest words he could muster, giving her everything she wanted.
 

Afterwards, when finally he slept, Cal dreamed not of violet skies and orange trees; instead he realised he was human,
completely
human, and the truth was all that mattered: the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

DOWN

Mr Campbell had vanished over an hour ago, at least as far as Todd could tell without being able to see his watch. The boys heard his voice diminishing, trailing off as if the man were falling into an endless chasm. Just before the voice left them forever, it became a ragged scream.

Now the air was as taut as the skin of a drum, as if waiting for more cries to pierce it. The boys were all quiet, each waiting for someone else to take the plunge and speak. No one could understand the loss of their teacher. It was simply beyond their comprehension.

“I want to go home,” whined Chester, the youngest and neediest of the group. Chester had only just stopped crying and calling for his mummy, but the whining was equally as annoying.

“We all want to go home, mate. That’s what I’m trying to do: get us out of this cave and back home, safe and sound.” Todd was the eldest by a couple of months—those eight weeks meant an awful lot when you were only thirteen—and as such he had assumed command when Mr Campbell had been sucked away into the grasping dark. That was exactly how Todd had come to think of it: one by one they were being drawn into a darkness which seemed somehow alive...and hungry.

First they’d lost Chambers, captain of the football team.

Then there was Bennings, the computer whiz and science geek.

Johnston went just before Mr Campbell, who was, of course, the latest to go.

Of the seven original classmates and single teacher, only four remained. Four small boys wandering in the blackness, looking for a way out, or even a chink of light to guide them. The school trip had turned into a nightmare and Todd understood at some level, in the part of him that always seemed so grown up, it was all Mr Campbell’s fault. Why had they not been accompanied by a guide? Surely school rules dictated that more than one adult should be present on such a potentially hazardous outing. It had seemed like such fun in the beginning, as if they were being treated like adults. Now they had reverted to scared children, fumbling in the shadows.

Water dripped in the darkness; it never stopped dripping, just kept on and on, like a leaking tap. Otherwise the silence was thick and oppressive, and it was easy to imagine strange wild animals creeping around them, waiting to pounce. Strange echoes sounded, far-off yet close enough to provoke uneasiness in the boys that threatened to spill over into full-on panic. A sound like wings—birds? bats?—came from overhead, high up in the unseen stone ceiling.

Mr Campbell had been having problems for some time, everyone knew that. His wife had left him and gone to live with the girls’ P.E. teacher, Miss James. Since then, Mr Campbell stunk of alcohol most mornings, and he always looked in need of a shower. His suits were grubby, his shirts creased, and he no longer combed his hair so it stuck out at odd angles.

If he was going through such a rough time, thought Todd, then why had he been allowed to lead a small group of pupils down into the local cave system? They didn’t even have the proper equipment. Mr Campbell had turned up in jeans and T-shirt and the boys were still wearing their uniforms. He wished he’d spoken up at the time, before it was too late. But things had gone too far now, and everything was different down here in the dark.

“Why has no one come to save us? Shouldn’t there be a search party by now? It’s been hours.” Chester’s voice wavered, but he seemed to have the sobbing under control.

And there was the truth of it—from the mouths of babes, and all that. For his own quite probably insane reasons, Mr Campbell had brought them down here without telling anyone. There had been no permission slips, no letters home to inform their parents; the whole thing was arranged off the cuff, at the last minute: a surprise jaunt with your favourite teacher (except Mr Campbell was no longer anyone’s favourite, if he ever had been at all).
 

Whichever way you looked at things, it all pointed to the same thing: Mr Campbell had lost his mind, and wanted to take the class down with him.

“Just stay calm,” said Todd, feeling anything but. “I’ll get us out of here if it’s the last thing I do. I promise.”

He thought of his mum, always cooking in the warm kitchen, and how she would flush with pride and remark that he was so mature, like a little man rather than a schoolboy. He pictured his dad: long nose buried in a book, the thick lenses of his NHS glasses reflecting the soft lamplight as he studied paperback editions of the classics. Tears threatened to come, but Todd knew if he let them fall he too would be lost in Mr Campbell’s darkness.

“Where are we going, anyway? It’s too dark to see anything in here.”

Mr Campbell had been holding the last working torch; its pathetic light had dwindled as he’d been dragged away, shouting his wife’s name. Only moments earlier he was telling them about cave-dwelling nocturnal creatures. How most of them were blind and had never seen or felt the light of the surface world. Describing in detail how they groped along in the stygian blackness—that’s what he’d called it: stygian, like in the old Greek myths he’d taught them last term—to search out prey. There was something desperate about the way he told them all this, a sort of hunger seeping from him like the cheap aftershave he occasionally remembered to wear to hide the other smells.

“We’re retracing our steps back to the entrance. Going back the way we came.” Todd kept moving forward as he spoke, feeling his way along the wet cave wall. His fingers ran over crevices and folds in the rock, and he was terrified he would suddenly feel something soft and moist and
breathing
...something like an unformed version of Mr Campbell’s face.

Now where had that thought come from?

He braced himself and continued at an even pace, wondering why for the past ten or fifteen minutes the rough surface of the wall had felt as if there were letters or symbols carved into it. He had to be careful here: the last thing any of them needed was for his imagination to get carried away and for him to start believing there was more to the situation than the immediate, and very real, trouble they were in.

“If that’s true,” said Wellington, the new boy, whose dad ran a paper shop, “then why are we still going downhill?”

Todd felt a weight shift from his chest to his stomach, rolling like a large smooth boulder away from a cave mouth.
 

He focused on his feet, on the uneven stony ground, and realised with horror that Wellington was right. The ground
was
sloping down; a gentle incline but nonetheless heading deeper underground. But how could that be? They had turned around and started tracking back—slowly tracing what he thought was their original route—soon after the second boy had disappeared. Had Mr Campbell simply told them this to reassure them, to make them think he was leading them out, when all along he had been leading them deeper, deeper, down into God knew what kind of underground maze?

He turned his head and stared at the figures following him. Immediately behind, holding tightly to his hand, was young Chester, still sniffling but keeping it under control. Behind Chester was Wellington, the know-it-all; next in line was Crawley, who didn’t speak much at all, even in class. Then there was...but, no. That was wrong. There should not be a further member of the group. So who exactly was that, bringing up the rear? They’d lost three of the seven boys along with Mr Campbell. That meant there were only four of them left—himself, Chester, Wellington, and Crawley—so how the hell was there a fifth head bobbing along in the darkness at the end of the line? It seemed wrong somehow, that head, large and ungainly, as if the neck were struggling to support it.
 

Todd’s fingers clenched against the rough cave wall, slipping into grooves resembling etched lines and curves. Running his hand along the cold textured rock, he began to suspect there was some kind of huge mural cut into the tough granite.
 

He thought again of Mr Campbell’s final lesson. Ancient cave-dwellers, pale and blind and groping, stuck in the dark of the earth for centuries, drawing the stories of their tribe on the walls and evolving slowly into something new, something unimaginable—a species that might just have learned, over the course of generations, how to mimic other animals...

The weight in Todd’s belly shifted again, threatening to punch a hole in his side. Shock numbed him; his hands felt cold and heavy and his legs moved only out of habit. All he could hear was the drip-dripping of water and the constant shuffling of his friends’ feet.

He stopped. Chester bumped into his back, letting out a tiny wordless cry.

“
What’s wrong? Why have you stopped
?” Who had spoken? Was it Wellington, or the usually silent Crawley? Todd had not recognised the voice; it sounded strange, too low and far too deep for that of a teenage boy. The words were garbled, the intonation all wrong, as if the speaker was unused to the subtleties of the English language, or was only just learning how to speak.

“Just keep still. I think the ground gets a bit tricky up ahead.” Todd let go of Chester’s hand; the boy’s small fingers were reluctant to break the contact and his fingernails scraped against Todd’s palm.

Drip-drip; the stifled sound of someone coughing into a fist; and was that quiet, muffled laughter?

“Don’t worry, I’ll be right back.”

Todd pushed himself away from the wall and out into the darkness. The vast black sea swallowed him up. He wanted some time on his own, that was all: time to assess the situation. The weight of responsibility pressed against him from all sides, twisting him out of shape, and he experienced a sudden fast-forward sensation of what it would be like to have a family relying on him, a home, bills and a mortgage to pay...

Feet shuffled; rocks were disturbed, skipping across the ground. Todd thought he heard a sharp cry being cut off, like someone trying to call his name before something soft covered their mouth.

He had made a promise. They were all relying on him, these boys, his fellow pupils: he could not let them down, however much he might be tempted to leave them stranded and fend for himself in the dark. Chester, Wellington, even the oddly quiet and withdrawn Crawley, who nobody could really get close to because he was so shy and awkward and introverted.

Todd returned to the spot he had recently vacated. Only a single figure remained standing against the wall: not much more than a thin, dim outline whose extremities seemed unbalanced or disproportionate. He reached out his hand, and what grasped it was colder than ice, colder than the deep dark sea, and seemed to possess far too many boneless fingers.

“Chester?
Is that you, Chester
?” The desperation in his voice was nauseating. He knew the wordless answer before it even came.

Someone giggled; the chill grip on his hand tightened; water drip-dripped all around him like an insane percussive accompaniment to his dumb terror. When the figure finally loomed forward, peeling away from the wall and flopping jerkily towards him, its huge flat face heaving into view, Todd was reminded of cold tripe on a meagre platter; of the stench of an empty room opened up after being sealed for decades; of the eerie non-sound a stone makes when it is dropped into a bottomless shaft.
 

Then the slope beneath his feet grew suddenly steeper, and all he knew was the dizzying sensation of descent.
 

It struck him right then, in an exquisite timeless moment, that all they had really learned on this outing—under the expert tutelage of Mr Campbell—was how to die alone.

(
This one could only ever be for Mr Campbell, who taught us all about the dark
)

SOUNDS WEIRD

Money was tight that summer. I’d just changed jobs after a disastrous period working in a furniture warehouse, where I’d been escorted off the premises for various disciplinary miss-steps including a regrettable late-night incident involving the managing director’s daughter and a crate of cheap white wine.

Because of my reduced earnings, I was forced to move out of the two-bedroom flat I’d been renting for more than a year and find cheaper accommodation. The result of this search was a grubby little studio in a rundown suburb located a mile or so to the west of the city.

My first night in the new digs was tiring. I kept hearing mice scurrying about under the floorboards and the central heating system was old and cantankerous: the sound of the pipes as they expanded and deformed from the passage of hot water was not unlike the low whining of injured dogs.

Unable to sleep, I decided to tidy the flat and put away my meagre belongings in some kind of order. I wiped down the shelves, brushed dust from the windowsill and cleaned out the drawers of the dresser I’d inherited as part of the deal.

It was in the bottom drawer where I found the plastic carrier bag.

I grabbed the bag and took it to the bed. It was one of those thin blue ones, the cheap kind given away in small shops and food markets. Grabbing the bottom corners of the bag, I upended it and let the contents fall out onto my bed. Then, crumpling the bag in my fist and tossing it into the waste basket, I inspected my haul.

On the duvet lay four items: a back issue of a film magazine I hadn’t read in years, a packet of condoms (unopened), a bent foil sheet of paracetamol tablets (opened; five capsules remaining) and a personal MP3 player (still boxed; one of the cardboard flaps torn and the clear plastic window crumpled).