Peel Castle, Isle of Man, Autumn 1446 #3
I raise the candle and take a step forward.
The path takes me downhill, steeply down; it must have been carved out of the rock by short people, bent double; I have to crouch as I go.
My back muscles and my leg muscles cramp and grip, and I squat and lean against the damp wall to rest. The roar of the sea seems to be louder, and I wonder if I am so deep that I am already under the flooded causeway and the way out of the barrow is a cave just a few steps ahead.
I go on a few paces, and then the ground levels up, and I am walking more easily, though still stooped over my candle flame.
I am watching my footing, not looking ahead, and so I am surprised when I glance forward and find another door.
This is neither hinged nor latched; it is a stone door made by the Old Ones.
No one knows how long ago they built their strange barrows and left their tall white standing stones to guard the entrance to every barrow.
They are here: white pillars, set in the rock with a huge dark slate held upright between them.
Dolyn and his father were here; I can see the fresh scrape marks of their tools on the edges of the stone, the two of them, working together, had the strength to roll the slate sideways.
They did not close it behind them but left a gap which is just wide enough for me to squeeze through into the ancient barrow.
The candle flickers in the briny air; the sound of the sea is louder; the smell is like a cave, damp and salty and enclosed.
Perhaps I am already at the cave on Horse Hill, perhaps this door is the entrance on the hillside.
I put one hand on the wet slate door behind me to push myself forward, hoping to turn a corner and see daylight.
There is a sudden gale of cold air, so strong that my cloak streams back from my shoulders, as if someone has suddenly opened a door to the wind and it is blowing off the sea into my face.
There is a bang like a thunderclap, so loud that it makes my ears ring, and I feel the shock of it in my head, as if someone has slapped me.
My candle flame streams back in the sudden wind; I put my hand up to shield it when there is a monster’s roar, and suddenly there is a reflection of the light before me.
At first, I think there is a wet wall, a huge cliff wall right in front of me, and then I realise it is a wall of water towering over me, thundering down the tunnel towards me.
The sea is somehow in the barrow; the sea has broken into the tunnel and is filling it, floor to ceiling, roaring towards me, and in the glassy water, white in the dark wall of water, are a tumble of bones, legs, grinning skulls, tumbling over and over and coming towards me, filling the whole of the chamber, torn from their burial by the sea gushing up through their graves, flung at me, flung over my head to the roof of the barrow, so I shall be drowned and tumbling with them.
I dash back towards the slate door, the candle blown out by the gale that rushes before the wall of water.
I cannot get away from the water; it bears down on me, crashing on my head, picking me up and flinging me forward like a rag doll.
Something comes to my frantically scrabbling hands; something falls against me, as the wave turns and starts to suck back, snatching everything out of the barrow that it threw in, whirling me above water, scraping my face against the barrow roof, where I snatch a breath; and then dragging me down again.
Beside me, twisting with me, is a huge, tattered object.
I grab hold of it as my saviour as it catches on the edge of the cave and is wedged by a pillar.
I embrace it like a lover, throwing my head back to gulp a breath out of the water.
I snatch the last of the air as the water drags me and the object back down the barrow.
We are rolling over and over; I cannot even see what I am clutching so tightly.
Again, it gets stuck as the water rushes past, and I cling to it, arms and legs around it in a passionate embrace as the water rushes past us.
I snatch a breath, and I blink my eyes open, and I am face to face with all that is left of a dead man who has been rolled around this cave for weeks.
Dolyn’s father – drowned as he returned to the barrow, greedy for treasure.
The battered bloody face, with smashed nose, and sightless eyes is pressed against my own face as the body is wedged in the barrow below me.
I rear back in horror, but I will not let him go; the water would drag me down to my death.
I cling to a dead man to save me, and when his skin parts and his flesh comes away I grip his clothes and whatever is left of him.
I embrace a corpse like the necromancer they accused me of being.
I grip Death like a lover to save myself from drowning.
The water drags at us and then, horribly, something yields and he is free, rolled on top of me, and in my terror and my horror, my womb contracts, and I scream out in a climax of fear, as there is a terrible tearing and a rush of warm blood, and then an icy coldness as the devil’s baby, that I have carried so secretly for so long, comes away from my body and is trapped between me and a corpse and then washed away.
The corpse is slumped on me like a spent lover as the water gurgles away, but I know this is not safety: it is only the ebb of one wave; the next will surge in as high as the first, even higher. It will be a full moon outside and an onshore gale – the seas will never be higher.
I throw the dead man aside, pushing him off me, and scrabble to find my footing on the floor of the barrow.
I can hear the screech of the shingle as the wave sucks back through the broken roof of the barrow and then, further out at sea, the building roar of the next wave coming.
I have no light and no tinderbox or candle; I have to find my way to higher ground.
I have to get through the gap of the slate door to the tunnel on the other side.
I have to get out of this trap before the next wave smashes in and knocks me from my feet and throws me down again.
I heave myself up, my foot on the shoulder of the dead man.
His sea-soaked flesh yields beneath my scrabbling boots.
The floor of the barrow is littered with unseen things that roll like skulls, crunch like vertebra.
I struggle to run on wet shingle, bones and shells.
I have to go faster, faster, to get up the narrow steps before the next wave bowls me over.