The silence came as a ceasefire.
Painkillers were no better than chalky sweets when the very ground beneath their feet quaked through to the marrow. Every soul on site without exception had proved susceptible to the same headaches, and there were few beings on this earth more fragile than Ash’s nannied little undergraduates. Sean had even caught a few of them glowering at the source of their anguish, fighting the urge to sabotage the entire operation for the sake of some peace and quiet. Truth be told, he’d been half-tempted himself more than once. When eventually the last of the limestone split and fell and the explosive echo of its impact tremored up into the open air, Ian went about disassembling the drill immediately, eviscerating the enemy in full show of the bleary-eyed victors. Their war with the rock was over, and the entrance – as elaborately sealed as it was – had finally been opened.
The crew had convened around the monitor, whispering and giggling amongst themselves, their excitement fizzling in the tent like an electrical storm that’d been rising since Ian brought the drone out for its first test flight. Camaraderie was renewed, and both their voices and tempers had softened in the absence of the other – the tool that none dared speak of lest it be called upon again to remake their lives a misery. And yet – as was evident from those whose fingers remained pressed to their temples like amateur mentalists – the migraines lingered on through the early hours of armistice. Luckily there was ample distraction to soothe their tender thoughts until they passed.
‘Are you all ready for this?’ Ian’s voice rustled over the walkie-talkie, loud enough to startle Ash into adjusting its volume, ever respectful of the newfound peace.
She looked to Sean, spellbound by the screen, gnawing at his thumbnail as though he were watching a breaking news report on the apocalypse.
‘Yeah, Ian, in your own time,’ she replied. ‘Take her down. We’ll be watching.’
The drone’s camera was being live-streamed through to the tent, baiting everyone into stealing the best view they could, barging through any shoulder too tall to peer over. Full colour as it may have been, the Burren’s sober palette could trick the eye into thinking otherwise – stony hues and grey skies without a wildflower in sight to brighten it all up. In accordance with Ash’s playbook, they’d no choice but to send the drone down first. Broken machines could be mended or bought anew. Broken bodies, not so much, even though they seemed to have a surplus of useless ones who mooched around the site chain-smoking cigarettes and picking flowers that they shouldn’t. The passage had weathered the centuries without collapsing in on itself, but there was no gauging how those few short days of drilling had compromised its integrity. Ambitious as Ash was, she still wanted to make the news for the right reasons.
‘Have you ever used a drone before?’ Sean asked her. ‘Like this, I mean, going underground?’
She smirked at him. ‘Never. But then, I’ve also never had to explore a hidden cave buried under the Burren, have I? Trust me, this is as much a novelty for me as it is for you, Sean, and I still think it’d make a great documentary, no matter what we find.’
Ian’s drone hovered directly above the entrance to the shaft, steady as a dragonfly. He didn’t trust anyone else to pilot it. The descent from the surface above to the floor of the cavern below had been estimated around the forty-metre mark – too great a distance to fly without due experience. But once the drone was lined up it should have been a simple drop down – a straight line in still air. No complications. No cause for Sean’s palms to sweat the way they were. Even the wind had respectfully calmed itself for the occasion.
‘Okay,’ Ian said, drawing Sean’s gaze to the walkie-talkie in Ash’s hand, ‘going in now. No more radios, please and thank you. We have one drone and only one shot at this.’
Together they watched through the drone’s unblinking eye as it submerged beneath the surface. Daylight switched to white-lit walls of stone and a measured beep broke the silence in the seconds that followed, slower and steadier than the beat of Sean’s own heart.
‘What’s that noise?’ he whispered in Ash’s ear. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘It’s the sensor,’ she replied in kind. ‘It’s keeping track of how close it is to the walls. We should be fine though. Ian knows what he’s doing.’
The drone’s course was constant, and its distance from the walls remained unchanged if the beep were to be believed. A few in the tent couldn’t stand still. Without a breath of wind to press its walls, Sean could hear the rustle of nylon jackets and the occasional sniffle from the back of the room. The loudest sound – and the only one that mattered – was the beep as those ancient cracks and creases in the granite charted the drone’s descent. Sean imagined his techie, mouth-breathing over sweaty thumbs, wary as though he were making that journey downward himself. One mistake and the darkness would swallow him up like a pill.
‘It’s so deep,’ Ash whispered, to which a few behind them hummed in agreement.
Forty metres hadn’t seemed so far on paper. There was never any doubt that getting the requisite gear and bodies into the cavern was going to be tricky – treacherous even, given the narrowness of the shaft and the inexperience they’d farmed for free from the university. But the frame fixed into the surface had proven its stability, holding the drill with the steadiest hand, never once cramping up. Ian had sourced out an industrial winch, compact enough to haul up to the site without breaking too many spines. Ash prioritised safety over value for money and so it’d cost Sean a small fortune. But it was worth it. They were, after all, going to be lowering down more than just lights and tools. When the time came, the core crew of Ash’s team all wanted a piece of the action.
‘How do you think they got in and out of there?’ Sean asked her without averting his gaze from the screen. ‘I mean, even with our equipment we’re going to have to be careful.’
‘You’re assuming that they’re not still down there,’ she replied, nudging into him.
‘What do you mean?’
Just when he thought his nerves couldn’t wind any tighter around that moment.
‘It could be a massive tomb for all we know, Sean. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Nothing makes the front page quite like a few old bones. Whatever it is, we’ll know soon enough.’
The beep never altered, nor did the tension in that tent falter for a second. And then, almost unexpectedly, there was silence. The metrical melody that scored their descent had ceased, and on the monitor that kept all their eyes from blinking there was only the drone’s light fading into the unknown.
‘We’re in,’ Ian’s voice boomed over the radio. ‘Feel free to take a breath.’
Sean flinched as those around him cheered and pressed against his back. But he didn’t take his eyes off the screen – the answers were there, somewhere, patiently waiting in the dark to be discovered. Only when he felt the warmth of Ash’s hand did he snap out of this lonely state and realise the wonder that had just occurred.
‘You okay?’ she asked, squeezing his fingers.
‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘I’m good.’
She’d reached for him.
‘Right then,’ Ian said, the walkie-talkie’s volume still loud enough to draw back everyone’s attention, ‘would one of you kindly tell me what I’m looking at. I didn’t fly all the way down here just to float around in the dark.’
Sean could feel his father’s presence, as he often did when some fresh idea would ripen in the wilds of their research. They’d sowed so many together, toiling side by side, each as patient and driven as the other. It never was quite the same without him. Even the most celebrated of victories carry their own sadness without another like-mind to share them with. The good times, he’d learned, can accentuate a man’s loneliness just as much as the bad.
What do you think he would say if he were here to see you now?
Sean had yet to satisfy himself with an answer.
The drone was performing a scan of the surrounding walls, drifting back and forth in an attempt to gauge the cavern’s scale and any surprises that could lie therein. The quality of the camera feed had taken a drastic downturn since abandoning the daylight, but Sean could make out a few skinny stalactites dripping from the ceiling like fangs and the murky shoulders of a few half-lit stones protruding seemingly from nowhere.
‘There,’ Ash said, radio suspended by her mouth. ‘Ian, can you move closer to that section?’
Surely as the excavation’s sponsor and figurehead, Sean should have been the one issuing instructions as to what they should be examining. This was his discovery after all, as Ash had reminded him a thousand times over.
‘What is it?’ he asked, keeping his frustration wrapped.
‘That wall,’ she replied, stepping closer to the screen. ‘It looks like the same granite that was laid inside the shaft. The colour, I mean. I don’t know, it just looks different.’
Sean trusted Ash’s educated eye above his own, though he remained quietly baffled as to the significance. They hadn’t drilled through all that stone just to seek out more of the stuff.
‘See,’ she said, pointing to the monitor, ‘that’s way too flat to be natural.’
‘Is that…?’ he said, cutting himself short as the drone loomed closer.
Ash’s whole body tensed up. ‘Holy shit,’ she whispered.
Deep markings had been etched into the wall. They ran in perfectly vertical lines, possibly from the floor to the ceiling, and from their stems sprouted tiers of horizontal scratches. The precision on display was faultless. And to think that the artist responsible would have had the basest tools, with only the aid of firelight to guide their hand.
‘It looks like some form of Ogham,’ Ash said, staggering back in disbelief.
‘Are you sure?’ Sean asked, placing a steadying hand on her shoulder.
‘No doubt about it,’ she replied, clearly breathless from the field of theories flourishing in her mind. ‘Limestone would have eroded, wouldn’t it? Whoever did this, they must have known that granite would withstand the test of time better than anything else. And what’s the point of going to all the trouble of writing something if no one’s going to be able to read it?’
Sean watched the screen with renewed wonder.
The earliest Ogham inscriptions were thought to have originated as late as the fourth century. Scholars suspected that its cryptic alphabet had been modelled on some earlier form of script. But the fact of it being here – hidden in the darkness, deep beneath the Burren – was a monumental discovery in its own right. The accepted timeline had just suffered its first blow and they hadn’t even left the tent.
Sean’s fingers clinched around Ash’s shoulder. ‘This is huge.’
‘I bet now you wish you hadn’t sent that reporter packing,’ she said. ‘This is going to—’
‘There’s more of it,’ Ian said, interrupting her. ‘Jesus, it’s all over the walls. What is it?’
Sean looked to Ash for an answer.
‘It’s a message,’ she replied, talking into the radio but looking only at Sean. ‘It’s the answer to whatever question we’ve been trying to ask since we found this place.’
Sean had hoped the excavation would bear sufficient fruit to justify their expense, but he’d never dreamt of this. They weren’t fated to fumble underground with mere rocks and relics, relying on educated guesses to unravel the mystery. This could be the true history that he’d pursued his entire life, that which his father had sacrificed everything to attain – written, recorded, and perfectly preserved.
‘Hey, Ash, what do you make of this?’ Ian said, snapping their attention back to the monitor.
The drone was now facing a black space surrounded by a frame of lightly illumed stone. It looked to be an opening in the wall of the cavern, one too deep for the drone’s torch to expose – an emptiness that, given their discoveries thus far, was most likely far from empty.
‘It looks like another room,’ Ash replied into the walkie-talkie, now trembling in her hand.
‘And I reckon there’s more than one,’ Ian said. ‘Check this out. Not to blow smoke up your arses but I reckon you guys might have hit the jackpot here.’
In the floor of the chamber there was a rectangular hole. Its edges were cut so cleanly that Sean guessed it to be a tomb. The final resting place, perhaps, of one of Ireland’s ancient heroes – an actual body; the evidence to finally transform myth into reality. The dimensions certainly seemed to fit the notion. But as the drone hovered closer, inch by careful inch, its light revealed a thin tier of steps leading down into the dark.
‘Stairs,’ Sean whispered excitedly, looping his arm around Ash’s shoulder.
This defied all expectations. Her preliminary scans had revealed nothing more than a rough scale of the cave beneath them. But this wasn’t just a cave. There were adjoining chambers. There was a stairway descending to another level undetected until now. And there was the message.
‘Can we go deeper?’ Ash asked their techie. ‘How good a connection has that drone of yours?’
‘This little one could take us to the centre of the earth and back again,’ Ian replied proudly. ‘I’m guessing you weren’t expecting to find stairs down here.’
She shook her head, mesmerised by the events unfolding on the screen. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘I’ll admit that the stairs do come as some surprise.’
Ian chuckled. ‘Well sure, there’s no harm in us having a peep down there, seeing as we’ve come this far.’
He positioned the drone above the first step, carefully angling its camera to entertain all those in the tent; such was their silence that Sean had forgotten they were there. The passageway’s ceiling was low but it looked wide enough to negotiate given the skill that Ian had already demonstrated. The drone’s hefty price tag was irrelevant now, and Sean would have risked far more than the well-being of some machine to know what was down there. Watching the monitor, he’d felt the impulse to crouch, vicariously suffering a sense of claustrophobia that the steely drone was surely oblivious to. Ruts of stone poked out from the walls, but they didn’t awaken any cautious beeping. Every step caught in the drone’s light rolled out more and more darkness until Sean thought he’d noticed shapes, faint and distant, like long arms reaching out from both sides.
He brought his eyes closer to the screen. ‘Do you see what I’m—’
The camera feed suddenly cut out.
It hadn’t flickered. It hadn’t faded. It had switched to black like an eyelid snapping shut.
‘What happened, Ian?’ Ash spoke into her radio. ‘Did you hit something?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘There was nothing to hit. The sensors hadn’t picked up anything. We just lost power. But that doesn’t make any sense. The drone was fully charged and well within range.’
A collective sigh of disappointment sapped the energy from the tent. There was something down there. Sean’s eyes had only snared the slightest glimpse of it, but it was there.
The next step was an obvious one. He squeezed Ash’s shoulder before turning to face the crew.
‘Looks like we’re going down.’