The Darkness Below
You asked so I’ll tell you, but you won’t believe a word of it.
You’ll read the reports and assessments, the opinions of doctors and social workers, and you’ll take their theories as facts.
And yet my story—the story of someone who lived through this, and lost his world because of it? That, you’ll dismiss as fantasy.
So be it. You don’t have to believe me. Just listen.
That year was Angie’s choice. The previous year had been mine: two weeks in the Lakes, days spent hiking and a spot of night fishing.
More than our fair share of rain. It might be that the rain swayed her, turned her mind to the sunny southwest. Maybe she simply had her eye on a cream tea or two.
If I ask her now, she won’t even tell me.
Somerset. Even the name is evocative, isn’t it?
The end of summer, hay baled in a sunbaked field.
Long days, warm nights. A cold pint of cider in a country pub, condensation pearling on the glass.
Yes, I can see the appeal. Even now, after all that happened, I can feel its tug, a promise of balmy days in the great outdoors.
We forgot that it has its dark places too.
That some things like to hide from the light.
* * *
It was our daughter, Kirstie, who suggested the day trip to Cheddar Gorge.
She liked the name, I think—when you’re nine, every meal comes with a side of cheese.
We saw a leaflet at a Tourist Information stand, an image of the caves, the stalactites glistening wet like something from another world.
She snatched it into her hand and pointed at it.
“Can we go here? This looks so awesome. Can we?”
Angie and I shared a glance, but it only took a second.
Of course we could. Like most kids, both of ours spent the majority of their time glued to a screen, playing cheap mobile games that baffled me with their blocky graphics and homemade music, or watching strangers playing those same games on YouTube.
Luke had taken piano lessons for a while, but that had fallen away once he started high school; Kirstie had followed her older brother’s lead and been devoted to the screen from the moment she’d learned how to press a button.
That she wanted to go to an actual attraction, Cheddar’s infamous Gough’s Cave, was rare enough to raise our eyebrows.
“We can do that,” I said with a nod. “It might be fun. I went there when I was a boy.”
Luke grunted, simmering with thirteen-year-old angst, but I let it pass. One child was on board: I counted that as a win.
I hadn’t considered how much the gorge would have changed.
In my head it was still a schmaltzy parade of gift shops pincered between steep cliffs, the caves little more than a hole in the rockface.
I think even the tickets were tiny paper coupons spat out by a hand-operated machine.
I should have realized how out of date I was.
After we’d sat in traffic for ten minutes, the kids grew restless.
Kirstie kicked the back of Angie’s chair over and over, until she snapped and shouted at her to stop; Luke, meanwhile, huffed through his nose at every poorly parked car, and made unhelpful comments about how we should have gone to Wooky Hole instead. He was probably right.
Finally, having scraped around a few tight corners, we found a parking lot tucked behind a Chinese restaurant.
A group of bikers had kicked down their stands, six-packs of lager at their feet.
Angie wasn’t comfortable, so we hustled the kids out of the car and told them to wait by the dumpsters as we unloaded our bags and hats from the trunk.
Luke was watching them with interest, I could see.
Not for the first time, I wondered if he’d begun experimenting with alcohol.
We allowed him a glass of wine at Christmas, but he hadn’t asked for more, and we had felt it was best not to bring it up. He’d discover it in his own time.
The bikers paid us scant attention as we gathered our things, and Angie herded Luke and Kirstie up the road.
The shops from my childhood had multiplied like mold; now they stretched along both sides of the narrow street, cafes and gift emporiums rubbing shoulders with fudge shops and boutique cheesemongers.
The paths were barely one person wide, and we had to walk single file, the kids sandwiched between us like they were still toddlers.
From my position at the back, I mentally urged them to stay tucked in close to the wall.
More than once I imagined one of them slipping, our world exploding in a collision of steel, blood and bone.
The one time I’d told Angie about these mental flashes she’d looked at me like I was broken.
At the caves I’d expected a guide, but once we’d paid for our tickets we were told there was a self-guided tour, with headsets included in the price.
The kids snapped their headphones on with something approaching glee, and once they were cocooned in their audio bubbles the bickering stopped.
I told myself that half an hour of silence was worth the entry fee.
I don’t know when Luke wandered off. I’ve come back to this moment time and time again, at first as things started to unravel, then later when the police questioned me, trying to place a timeline on my story.
I should have been paying more attention, but I was distracted by the audio commentary, and the rare experience of being buried under a hundred feet of rock in an Aladdin’s cave of sensory wonders.
Have you visited Gough’s Cave? No? Then you should, if you’re to understand what it was like.
Not only the strange shapes formed over millennia as the water dripped through this underground hollow, but the textures, the play of electric lights across random patterns bringing to life hunched figures, gaping mouths filled with needle-thin teeth.
I’ll confess I was as wide-eyed as the kids as we walked into its dimly lit interior.
The cold hit us as soon as we stepped through the entrance, goosebumps creeping up my arms. I shivered as I realized I’d left my sweater back at the rental cottage.
Did you know that the show cave—the portion open to the public—only accounts for a quarter of the network?
I looked that up later that evening, when I was trying to make sense of it all.
The rest is flooded and only accessible to divers, but sometimes, depending on the height of the water table, other caverns open up, often for a matter of hours.
Passages that have slumbered underwater for a thousand years might drain for an afternoon, laying bare rocks that have not been seen by human eyes for centuries—and who knows what else lies down there with them.
The last few summers have been dry, haven’t they? The water table was low. We should all have taken greater care.
I’d reached a stopping point in the audio commentary, and the headset was digging uncomfortably into my scalp.
I pressed pause and slipped it off my head.
I could see Angie ahead of me and Kirstie next to her, the pair of them examining a large stalactite that stabbed down from the ceiling like the tooth of a buried monster, a single droplet sparkling at its tip.
There was no sign of Luke. Looking behind me I saw only a shadowy cluster of strangers, old enough that I took them to be a coach party of retirees.
There was no way our son could have disappeared among their number. He must be ahead.
Skipping one of the commentary points, I hurried forward to catch up with the girls. I still couldn’t see Luke. Tapping Angie on the shoulder, I signaled for her to lift her earphones.
“Have you seen Luke?” I asked, trying to keep a note of panic from my voice. “Is he in front, do you know?”
She shrugged, but I noticed her eyes darting around the dark corners of the cave. “I thought he was back there with you. He hasn’t fallen behind?”
That must be it , I thought. Of course it must—the self-guided walk was a simple straight line up the cave system and back, there was nowhere else for him to go. Still, I signaled that I was going back to look for him and left them to their stalactite and the commentary.
How long did I wander up and down that cave, searching each face for our son?
It felt like hours. The first few minutes passed quickly, then the realization crept slow and cold that he wasn’t anywhere obvious, and this might be more than a simple telling-off for wandering away from his family.
I reached the entrance without any sign of him, then doubled back; by the time I caught up with Angie again my breath was catching in my throat, my heart racing as anxiety kicked into overdrive.
She abandoned the audio tour and we both marched ahead, calling his name.
It didn’t take long for other people to take up the call.
It was the parents most of all, I noticed—the people like us.
They knew what it was like to lose a child, or imagined it at least. The kind of dream that would wake them in the middle of the night, alert and sweating.
What had happened to us might happen to any one of them.
Luke’s name echoed up and down the cave network, and each time I heard it my heart constricted a little tighter.
One of the cave stewards had been directed to us by another family, and he was asking questions, taking down details on a clipboard that shook in his hand.
Then we heard a shout from up ahead, louder than the others.
“Here! Over here! We’ve got him!”