The Darkness Below #2
I don’t remember the details of what happened next: the rush to find who had spoken, the frantic panic to uncover what had happened, whether he was traumatized, or injured, or worse.
Those moments are gone, lost in a blur of adrenaline and fear.
I assume they lasted little more than a minute, the four of us—Angie, Kirstie, myself and the steward—pushing through the crowd.
“Here! I just saw him sitting there… Is this him?”
Finally, I saw Luke. He was sitting against the wall of the cave, clutching his headphones. He looked up and smiled at us, blowing his fringe away from his face in a way that I hadn’t seen him do before.
“Hey Mum. Dad. What’s all the fuss?”
I took a breath before I said anything. Anyone who has ever lost a child—even for a few moments, in a supermarket, or among the lights and bells of a fairground—will tell you that your heart races faster than you can keep up with, your breath catches in your throat.
For that period of time, whether it’s hours or seconds, your entire world shrinks to a single dark tunnel, leading you toward whatever fate awaits you at the other end.
Most of the time it will be your child, puffy-faced and streaked with tears, but otherwise healthy and alive. Other times it won’t.
Sucking breath back into my lungs, I held out a hand.
Luke clasped it and I pulled him to his feet.
I expected his usual sullenness—was preparing myself to give a lecture on manners, and responsibility, and not giving your father a premature heart attack—but was surprised when his face bloomed into a grin.
His hand felt hot, and I dropped it as he spoke.
“I guess I gave you all a fright. Sorry about that. These stupid things broke—” he waved the headphones in front of us, “—and I was trying to get them working again. Short connection, I think. A loose wire. You should ask for a refund.”
We all turned to the steward, who gave us a bashful look before leading us back to the cave entrance.
There were forms to fill out and sign, a health and safety requirement whenever anyone got lost in the cave network, plus they offered us return tickets for any date in the next two months.
I couldn’t imagine we’d want to, but I took them anyway.
Maybe Kirstie would be so offended we’d cut her excursion short that we’d have to do it all again.
While Angie and I ticked, scribbled and signed, Kirstie and Luke sat on two chairs in the corner. I half expected we’d have to separate them, but they stayed quietly engaged in something on their phones, occasionally exchanging a word or two. It was only when I heard laughter that I paid attention.
“Everything okay over there?”
Luke just nodded, and his sister wafted her hand at me, shooing me away. “Kid stuff,” she said, “nothing for you to worry about, Dad .”
The last word was drawn out so it sounded like a sheep bleating, and it set them laughing again.
I’ll admit I was a little affronted at being the butt of their joke, but I’d take that over squabbling and simmering teenage aggression every time.
If they were laughing at me at least it meant they were happy.
The health and safety forms asked a question about injuries sustained during the “incident,” so at the risk of provoking more laughter, I turned to ask Luke again whether he was okay. As I did, he looked up at me and I caught sight of his eyes for the first time since we’d lost him.
I don’t know if you have kids—I doubt you’d tell me either way—but if you do then you’ll back me up when I say that every parent knows their child’s eyes.
I’m not just talking about the color—although that’s part of it, no matter how muddied the brown or hazy the gray—but also the spark within them, that unfathomable glimmer of life that distinguishes us from a mannequin.
It’s more unique than even a fingerprint, that porthole onto another world that exists only inside their head; what some may still call the soul.
In Luke, it was gone.
My first thought was that it was a trick of the light, my own eyes struggling with the fluorescent strips after the murk of the caves.
But the more I stared, the more I was aware that it wasn’t me—it was him.
His eyes looked dead and cold, more like marbles or glass beads than living tissue.
If there was anything behind them, it was so far from the Luke I knew that it barely seemed human at all.
I must have stared for a while, as Luke suddenly said, “What is it, Dad? Have I got something on me? You’re staring like you’ve never seen me before.”
I could have said something then. But how do you tell your son that the light has gone out in his eyes, that you barely recognize him anymore? Instead I said, “You didn’t bang your head, did you? In the cave, I mean?”
It sounds ridiculous now, telling it to you.
Maybe I should have told them all what I saw, or what I didn’t see: the departure of my son’s soul and its replacement with…
what? He was still walking and talking, still interacting with us and his sister, in some ways better than he had done in years. They’d have thought I was mad.
Luke shook his head. “No, nothing like that. The headphones broke so I sat down to fix them, like I said.”
I turned back to the form and ticked the relevant box.
I didn’t tell anyone about the hollow that had opened in my stomach.
There was something wrong with my son—but I was so incapable of expressing what it was that the thought went unspoken, swallowed down and festering inside me like rotting meat.
* * *
The sunshine hit us like a spotlight as we headed back to the car.
I walked behind the others, watching. I can’t tell you what I was looking for.
I simply knew that something was different, something was off .
I can honestly say that I only wanted the best for my wife and my children. You must believe that.
I saw something in Luke, as we passed the gift shops and cafes.
The way his feet rolled slightly when they hit the ground, the reflexive scratching at his chin, the almost imperceptible squaring of his shoulders when he saw a pretty girl heading his way…
they were all there, in plain sight but small enough to escape attention.
Had they been there before? I couldn’t say.
I don’t believe I’d looked at him so closely since he was a toddler.
But from time to time, as we walked beneath the towering cliffs of the gorge, I’d see something different in him, something alien.
A lopsided smile that lifted one corner of his mouth, an edge of malice in it.
A hand clenching into a fist, unprovoked, only to relax again.
These I didn’t recognize as being typical of our son.
These were something else, although I didn’t know what.
I was so engrossed in watching him that I didn’t hear when Angie called my name. I think she said it twice, but it may have been three times or more before I broke out of my trance. I’d barely recognized the name as referring to me.
“I’m sorry?” I said, tearing my eyes from Luke. “Thoughts elsewhere—what did you say?”
“Kirstie wants to buy something from the gift shop we passed earlier. A dragon or something?” She turned to Kirstie as she said this, who nodded. “I said we’d take a look, if that’s alright with you. She still has some money left.”
The shop was poky and crammed with every conceivable knick-knack and bauble, most of them only spuriously connected with the caves and the gorge, if at all.
Kirstie had seen a diorama of sparkly miniature dragons in the window display, and while she chose one Luke spun a stand of keyrings, setting them clattering over and over again. Eventually I’d had enough.
“Can you stop that?” I said, reaching out to steady the stand. “It’s annoying the other customers.”
“There are no other customers, Dad.” He didn’t bother to look around to confirm this. “It’s only us.”
“Well it’s annoying me, then. If you’re bored, find something to look at. Don’t they have any books?”
Luke looked at me like I’d just suggested he should join the priesthood, then he held out his hand. “Give me the car keys and I’ll see you back there. At least then I can listen to some music while I wait. Plus this place stinks of incense, doesn’t it?”
Angie looked at me and shrugged. We’d been trying to encourage him to take more responsibility lately, quashing our natural tendency to micromanage the kids, and I couldn’t think of any good reason why we shouldn’t let him wait in the car.
I still felt the urge to watch him, but I knew how paranoid it would sound.
“Fine.” I dropped the keys into his hand. “You sit in the back, though. And only the radio, nothing else.”
Luke pocketed the keys, swiveling to leave. “Yes boss. Roger-roger.”
Kirstie took almost ten minutes to decide, eventually settling on a glittery pink thing curled around a crystal ball. By the time we made it back outside I was worried about Luke again.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?” I muttered to Angie as we hustled back through the crowds to the parking lot. “He can’t have got into too much trouble in ten minutes, can he?”
“Of course not,” she laughed, “you just need to trust him. He’s a good kid.”
We were both wrong. We heard the laughter and shouting before we turned the corner of the Chinese restaurant.
The bikers were still gathered around their Harleys, a sweaty huddle of leather and buckles.
In the middle of them stood Luke, a can of lager in his hand, tilted to pour its contents down his throat.
His eyes found me as I shouted and ran over, but he didn’t stop.
By the time I swiped it out of his hand the can felt about a quarter full.