The Darkness Below #3
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I aimed this at Luke, but then I turned to include the smirking faces of the biker gang. “He’s thirteen. Who gave him this? I should call the police on the lot of you.”
Someone mumbled something about minding my language, which brought another round of snickering. Then a bearded man stepped forward, his face so close to mine that I could smell the beer and tobacco on his breath.
“Before you go accusing anyone, talk to your son. He walked over here, bold as anything, and helped himself to our beer. Now, I don’t know what you teach your children, and I don’t much care, but if you get the cops involved then you’ll find that’s officially what they call ‘stealing’.
We didn’t give him a thing. Your call, but everyone here will back me up.
” He smiled, his teeth yellow and crooked.
“So, why don’t you just get back in your middle-class pussywagon,” this provoked another hoot of laughter, “and get out of our faces?”
I turned to Luke, but he shrugged. “What he said. You don’t want to start something you can’t finish, Dad .”
While we’d been having this exchange, Angie had bundled Kirstie into the car using her keys to open the doors. Beard wasn’t backing up, so after a couple of beats I turned, placing a hand on the back of Luke’s head to guide him to the car door.
“Come on, let’s get you home. We’ll talk about what happened there.”
It was only once we were in the car, Kirstie sobbing in the back seat as Angie tried to talk us all down, that I realized I was still holding the near-empty can of lager, half-crushed in my fist.
* * *
Did you know they’ve found prehistoric remains in Gough’s Cave?
They don’t mention it on the audio tour.
A wide variety of human bones, dating back fourteen thousand years.
The so-called “Cheddar Man” is the most famous, but there have been many others, too many corpses to piece together from all the bones and skull fragments.
You have to dig a little deeper for the juicy parts.
A large number of the bones— human bones, remember—show cut marks, where crude tools were used to strip the meat.
Others show teeth marks, and some of the longer bones have been cracked open and the marrow sucked out.
To date they have unearthed three skulls, hollowed out and shaped to form bowls.
These early men, these Cro-Magnons—they were cannibals.
Best guess, they ate human flesh as part of a ritual, hidden in the darkness beneath the surface of the earth, where even the sun couldn’t see them.
Who knows what they worshipped down there, or what they hoped to bring about. Who knows if they succeeded.
I dug all this up that evening, at the rental cottage.
Kirstie had retreated to her room as Angie and I cornered Luke in the kitchen and quizzed him on what had happened, what he’d done, and what the hell he’d thought he was up to.
Angie gave him the lecture on growing up and taking responsibility, but I was barely listening.
I watched his face. He still looked like our son, didn’t he?
But the change I’d noticed earlier, the deadness behind his eyes, was still there.
He appeared unmoved by his dressing-down, shrugging and half-smiling at times, as if he found it all funny, this incident that had so violently derailed our family outing.
But even when he smiled, the laughter never made it as far as his eyes.
It’s like he’s wearing a mask , I thought to myself, as Angie raged and pleaded beside me. Or something else is wearing a mask. A Luke mask, that looks and sounds like our son .
At that moment a shiver ran through me. It must have been visible in my face, or my hands, because Luke turned to look at me. He didn’t wait for a break in Angie’s sermon before he spoke.
“Is something wrong, Dad ? You don’t look well.”
I shrugged off the question—for Angie’s benefit more than mine or Luke’s—but he was right.
Something was very, very wrong, and the feeling remained with me throughout that evening and into the next day.
Something had happened to our son when he was lost down there in those caves, the site of who knew what kind of savage and violent rituals.
Something had happened and he was no longer who he used to be.
Luke was gone, and someone else was now in his place.
* * *
There was another casualty of the incident in the parking lot.
We didn’t notice until later that evening when the kids were in bed, Angie reading her book in the fading light from the cottage window.
It was only when she reached into her bag for her glasses that she discovered the paper bag with Kirstie’s dragon in it.
Reaching inside, she swore, then held it out for me to see.
Someone must have dropped it or sat on it in the confusion, because the pink resin statue had snapped cleanly in two.
“She’s going to be heartbroken,” Angie said, scrunching the bag up with the broken dragon still inside, then pushing it down into the waste basket. “She spent long enough choosing it. We can give her the money back, but I’m not sure how much that’ll help.”
“Why don’t we drive back there tomorrow?
” I said, almost without thinking. “You guys can take a walk up the gorge, and I’ll run along to the shop and see if they can replace it.
I’m sure they won’t mind making another sale.
If we’re clever about it, we won’t even have to tell her.
” My initial thought was that it would save us an hour of tears, but then another thought followed: I would be able to revisit Gough’s Cave, see if I could make any sense of what had happened to our son.
We almost got away with our subterfuge. Both kids were up late the next morning, sleeping off the adrenaline of the day before, and Kirstie didn’t ask about the dragon statue.
My suggestion that we should drive back to Cheddar Gorge was met with predictable resistance, but no more than any other suggestion I’d made.
“Why are you dragging us back out there?” Luke asked through a mouthful of toast, the marbles of his eyes staring through me at the wall behind. “Didn’t we all have enough fun yesterday?”
“There’s some paperwork we forgot to sign at the caves,” I lied, a line Angie and I had decided on in bed the previous night. “I can run along and deal with it while you three take the path up to the cliff top. I shouldn’t be too far behind.”
He shrugged, then stood and walked back to his room, still chewing, his dirty glass and plate abandoned on the table.
It was as we bundled our coats and bags into the car that he brought it up.
He hadn’t spoken a single word to us since his sudden departure from breakfast, and I’ll confess that I’d spent my time avoiding him too.
Kirstie got into the back of the car first, and as Luke followed her in, he said, quite loudly, as if to be sure that we heard, “What happened to that model you bought yesterday, sis? Your dragon? I’ve not seen that since we got home. ”
Angie slammed the car door a little too hard as she got into the passenger seat, and I winced. I couldn’t bear to look at the confusion and sadness on Kirstie’s face.
“Mum?” she asked. “Have you still got it?”
There was silence for a beat or two, then Luke said, “I’m sure she has, don’t you, Mum? Why don’t you show Kirstie?”
“Don’t pick on your sister,” I said, sliding into the driver’s seat and taking care not to slam my own door. “And don’t be ridiculous—your mum doesn’t have it with her here, and we’re not unlocking the cottage again just to find it. We’ll give it to you when we get back later. Now, buckle up.”
Looking in the rearview mirror, I could see Luke smirking. He knows , I thought. He knows it’s broken and he’s doing this on purpose. Which means he either overheard us last night, or…
It seemed ridiculous to suggest that Luke might have intentionally broken the resin statue, but then I reminded myself—this person in the back seat wasn’t Luke, not anymore. This was someone else, staring out through the eyeholes in Luke’s skin.
* * *
For whatever reason, the gorge was quieter than the previous day, so we didn’t park behind the Chinese restaurant again.
I was unreasonably grateful for that, as if the parking lot itself were to blame for what had happened.
Instead, we were able to snaffle a spot in front of an ice cream parlor, closer to the caves and within only a minute or two of both the gift shop and the path to the cliff top.
I was reluctant to part ways with Angie and Kirstie once we were out of the car, mainly because it would mean leaving them with Luke, but our plan left me with no other option.
Hurrying along the main street, I stopped at the gift shop first, explaining the situation as best I could to the bored-looking woman behind the counter.
They didn’t have a duplicate of the dragon on display, but after describing it to her she went out back to their storeroom, returning with an identical one—and another for the shelf—several minutes later.
She took extra care to wrap it in several layers of tissue paper this time, and I made sure to handle it gently as I jogged along to the caves.
It was soon clear they had no answers for me, though.
The steward who had taken our details yesterday was nowhere to be seen, and both members of the staff looked at me blankly while I explained what had happened.
I stopped short of vocalizing my suspicions about Luke, but I told them I had some questions about the caves, and whether they were safe.
Had any other areas been open yesterday that he might have stumbled into?
Should we be worried that he had drifted away from us for so long?
Their responses were barely more than a single word, and their looks told me they were more concerned by my reaction than his. On the way out, I glimpsed an information board with two blurred images of the bone fragments I’d seen online, one of them bearing scrape marks caused by Cro-Magnon teeth.
It may not have been far to the clifftop walk, but I was already out of breath as I started up the steps in the rock face.
The morning’s wisps of cloud had dissipated and it was a bright and clear day, everything sharp in the sunlight.
The paper bag containing Kirstie’s dragon knocked against my side as I raced up the steps, sometimes taking two at a time, and I realized suddenly that I was supposed to leave it in the car.
How else could I explain the fact that I had it with me, when we’d told her it was back at the cottage?
It was almost enough to make me turn around, but then I thought of Luke left alone with the girls—not our Luke, but whoever this new imposter was, leering out from behind his smile—and I quickened my pace as much as I was able.
I couldn’t believe I had been so reckless.
Rounding a corner, I saw them. They had already reached the top, where a wooden viewing platform overhung the edge.
Angie was hanging back, looking at something on her phone; Luke and Kirstie were leaning over the railing.
He had his hand on her back, and as I mounted the last set of steps he looked up and saw me.
Luke grinned, winked at me, then pushed her.
I barely had time to think as I barreled onto the platform.
Kirstie had somehow managed to keep from toppling over the side—saved by the solid wooden barrier, no doubt—but I knew what I had seen.
Without thinking, I dropped the paper bag and grabbed the boy who used to be Luke with both fists, pushing him against the railing.
His mouth opened wide, but the surprise failed to reach the dark pools of his eyes.
“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled, flecks of my spit anointing his face. “You leave her alone!”
Not-Luke looked genuinely flustered. His hands scrabbled at me, trying to wrench himself free, but his strength was no match for mine. I had already lost one child. Nobody was going to keep me from protecting my daughter.
“Dad—” he said, the words half-choked from him as I pushed him back harder against the wooden railing. “I didn’t?—”
And then with a final heave he was gone, over the edge, tipping backward and tumbling headfirst down the steep cliff-side, his arms hitting rocks and branches as he tried to find something to grasp onto until, finally, with an almighty crack , the back of his skull hit a rocky protrusion and he stopped struggling, falling the rest of the way as limp as a doll.
There was silence for a moment, then Angie and Kirstie started screaming.
I felt unnaturally calm. I had done what needed to be done.
He had posed a threat to my family, and while I mourned the son I had lost, the bundle of muscle and bone that lay at the foot of the cliffs was no longer him.
Something took him from us that day in the caves, I reminded myself, as I sat and waited for the flashing lights to come. Our Luke was already gone.
As the officers led me away, I spotted the paper bag with the dragon statue still in it, lying on the wooden decking of the lookout.
They wouldn’t turn back for it, though, and nobody listened to my entreaties.
It’s probably still there, if the foxes haven’t stolen it.
That’s what hurts most of all—knowing that after all she’s been through, poor Kirstie is still missing her dragon.
I’ve had a lot of time to think, sat here in this cell, and so many other cells and holding rooms that I’ve lost count.
I have no doubt that I was right. Something lurked down there in those caves, an ancient force that only wanted a vessel to allow it back into this world.
Something vast, and black, and unfathomable.
But as I stare into the mirror at night, searching my own face for a spark of life, for that unique flame that makes me who I am, I sometimes wonder if I ever came back from the caves at all.