…an historical occasion, the first time an important scientific discovery like this has been broadcast live. The excitement here above ground is palpable; we can only guess how thrilling it is down at the entry point. The scientists and potholers are all at a safe distance, and the specially designed and constructed robotic systems are now ready to start dismantling the ancient cave-in. What we might find beyond, no one is certain, although a recent series of seismic surveys suggest that the hidden cave system, isolated for perhaps millions of years, is vast. Rumours abound that it might contain caverns larger than the recently discovered Son Doong Cave in Vietnam, and extensive systems as long as the legendary Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. I, for one, have never been so excited. This is a day that everyone connected with this expedition will remember for ever. And I hope you, the viewers, will remember it too.
Hidden Depths—Live!, Discovery Channel, Thursday, 17 November 2016
As I watched three black-clad figures adorned with climbing gear being lowered into a cave, Jude threw an apple core at my head. It just missed, hitting the wall behind me, splitting and showering me with fruit flesh and pips.
“Piss off!” I shouted. His shadow flitted from my bedroom doorway—he was obviously wary of retribution—but his left hand and head reappeared around the jamb.
“I’ll tell Mum you swore,” he signed.
“So tell her!” I said. My words were a vibration formed from little more than memory. I felt the regular plod-plod of my younger brother’s footsteps as he stalked back into his own bedroom, and a moment later a thud against the wall as he jumped on his bed. He’d be back. Little turd was in that sort of mood.
Brushing moist apple from my shoulder, I turned to the television once more. I had only just turned it on. I’d been strumming my guitar for an hour or so, before succumbing to the urge to slouch down on my bed and watch some undemanding crap on TV. But the first image I’d seen had immediately caught my attention.
It wasn’t a jungle, exactly. More like a heavily wooded landscape, hillsides rich in trees and shrubs, more distant peaks bare and stark and swathed in mist. Creepers hung from trees that grew far above, feeling their way into the shadows like dormant tentacles, and a stream zigzagged slowly along the base of a ravine. Several large tents were pitched there, a few smaller ones close by, and a storage compound was piled with plastic crates and khaki bags. There were people moving in the ravine, and it was their expressions that had made me watch so intently.
They were excited. Not just caught in the moment but properly thrilled by what they were doing, and whatever it was they’d found. The “Live” motif in the screen’s corner gave the scene even more immediacy. Men and women clustered around the camp in the background, and the camera was focused on one small group—the three people draped in ropes and harnesses, the propped metal winch, and the dark gulf of the cave entrance set in the hillside. Two women worked the winch, and one by one the explorers were lowered out of the light and out of sight.
I was confused why there was no narration, but then I pressed a button on the remote and subtitles popped up. Jude must have been watching my TV again, messing up the settings. Annoying little shit.
“—just over a mile, so although that doesn’t yet make this anywhere near the longest or the deepest cave system in Europe, that unique feature does set it aside as the most fascinating, and the potential for deeper exploration is huge. As Dr Krasnov said earlier, you’re watching history in the making, live on the Discovery Channel. So as these three cavers are lowered into the vertical cave mouth, further inside the robotic systems are already…”
What unique feature? I wondered. The cave mouth looked unremarkable, a sinkhole perhaps fifteen feet across, its edges shrouded in bushes. Daylight seeped down one side, revealing a plant-covered wall that seemingly led straight down. It was a bit spooky, I supposed, and watching the last caver disappear into the darkness I wondered whether I’d stumbled onto a new drama or movie. But I checked that it really was the Discovery Channel, and then the presenter appeared in shot for the first time. I’d seen her before, reporting from all across the world. What an amazing job, I thought. At fourteen, I was just starting to get a feel of what I wanted to do, and watching this reporter filled me with anticipation. Being deaf wasn’t going to stop me from trying to become who I wanted to be.
“As we said earlier, there’s already a team of fifteen camped out at this system’s furthest extreme,” the presenter continued. “They include experienced cavers, a botanist, a biologist, a geologist, and a palaeontologist, and they’ve been underground for almost six days taking samples and trying to catalogue the new species of plant and insects already discovered down there. But now that the entrance to the next passageway has been found, and the explorers are ready to start moving aside the rockfall that seems to hide a much deeper, vaster system beyond, it could be that this becomes one of the greatest scientific discoveries—”
I picked up my permanently open iPad and accessed the scrapbook app. I’d adapted and personalised it, and now used it whenever a news story grabbed my interest, attaching reports, video clips, and social media content. Sometimes I’d let my parents read my analyses. I knew they were pleased I wanted to be a journalist, but once Dad had said it would be hard work. He meant because of my accident, though he didn’t say it. But it was hardly surprising that communication was important to me. His doubt had surprised me a little, especially as he often listened to me playing music. Jude wanted to form a band with me, him as frontman, me as songwriter, musician, and everything else that didn’t involve stage-diving into the adoring audience. I’d replied to Dad, Say that to Beethoven. He never doubted me after that. Not to my face, at least.
I opened a new file, called it “New Worlds?” and was just about to start the introductory text when a movement caught my eye.
Jude slipped around the doorway again, crawling like a sniper, elastic band tensed between thumb and forefinger and paper pellet folded across it. I saw him and ducked, but he’d reacted faster. The pellet caught me an inch above my left eye.
I howled in pain, then roared in rage.
Jude tried to scamper away, wide-eyed and laughing.
I dropped the iPad on my bed and launched myself across the room, reaching for my annoying little brother. Years of ballet and athletics gave me the advantage, and I was across the room before he could find his feet.
My hands clamped around his ankles. He looked back over his shoulder. I grimaced, trying to put on the most evil expression I could muster. He annoyed the hell out of me, but sometimes I couldn’t bear to wipe that manic, delighted grin from his face.
“And now, with vengeance close—” I began.
“No, Ally, I’m sorry!”
Something wet nudged against my side, nuzzling my hip where my tee shirt had ridden up.
“Otis!” I shouted, jumping. Jude took the opportunity to slither from my grasp and crawl away, crouching in his doorway ready to defend his turf.
The dog sat and nudged me again. “Coming!” I called, because I knew Mum had sent Otis to fetch me. He wasn’t a proper hearing dog—not professionally trained, at least—but I’d spent long hours coaching the Weimaraner to let me know when people were calling for me, when the landline was ringing, and when someone was at the front door. Otis and I had a deep relationship, and it still amazed me how he seemed to differentiate between moods and tasks—serious was being my hearing dog. Play was pretty much everything else.
“Good boy!” I said, ruffling his neck and scratching his chest. Otis gave a short, sharp bark—I actually felt it, heavy in my chest—and pounded back down the stairs.
Jude and I fought down the staircase on our behinds, side by side. We laughed. I’d already forgotten about that faraway ravine, the hole in the ground, and the people disappearing into deep, deep darkness.
* * *
It was just another hotel room, in another bland hotel that Huw would forget the moment he drove away, and this one smelled of piss.
The place was presented nicely enough. The rooms were all different—his was unimaginatively called the Red Suite, with red curtains and bedclothes, and a series of abstract paintings depicting stark fleshy landscapes and bleeding sunsets—and the couple who ran the hotel seemed friendly and efficient. The wife was a little older than Huw, and she’d smiled just a little too much when he’d noticed the undone buttons on her blouse. It was only a peek, a bit of lacy brassiere. He couldn’t help noticing things like that, but notice was all he’d ever done. He had a table booked for dinner later, and the hotel seemed to have a great reputation as an eatery as well. So it was fine. It was quirky. But his room still smelled of piss.
He’d moved slowly around the room, sniffing here and there, ducking into the en suite to see if the stink came from the most obvious place, but he couldn’t pin it down. It was only a slight tang, nothing too heavy and alarming, not enough to persuade him to ask to be moved. Certainly not enough to make him complain. Huw just wasn’t like that. He hated trouble, and avoided confrontation at all costs. If there’d been a huge turd in the middle of the floor, he’d probably have complained then. Probably.
He sighed, sitting back on the bed and sinking into the four pillows he’d stacked against the headboard. A book lay unread beside him. A cup of tea cooled on the bedside table, a good idea at the time but tasting of… well, piss, with the faux milk they provided in those little plastic containers.
That was another thing he’d do if he ran a place like this. A small fridge in the room with a jug of proper milk. He spoke with Kelly about it often, and once or twice they’d had serious conversations about actually buying a small B&B here on the Cornish coast. She could paint, more than the occasional dabbling she sometimes found time for now. He could surf. Jude could explore the rock pools down on the beach, and Ally could indulge whatever her latest interests might be—shell-collecting, kayaking, coasteering. Huw smiled. Ally would probably want to try them all, and more.
He glanced at the book, sighed, flicked on the TV and started surfing the channels, sound muted.
It had been two long days, working on the new house. Or mansion, more like. The client was a racehorse owner, sixty years old, rich, and readying to retire. A nice guy with lots of interesting stories, he inevitably kept Huw behind for an hour longer than each meeting really needed to be. But Huw really didn’t mind. Max would sometimes pull a bottle of wine from his briefcase, and they’d had more than one boozy late afternoon on the building site that would soon become his luxury home.
Max was paying Huw’s company almost a million pounds to build the house, so he guessed Max was entitled to own just a little bit of his soul.
He sighed and reached for the tea. Moving seemed to agitate the air and bring another waft of ammonia. The clock said almost six, his meal was booked for seven, and there was sod all on the box. Maybe he should go for a run. It was a long time since he’d even got as far as slipping on his trainers. There was always a reason not to run, and today that was tiredness. His limbs ached. If motivation was there it was buried deep, and not coming out to play.
Huw thought of the woman who’d registered him, her welcoming smile, and wondered whether that blouse button had been left open on purpose.
Kelly sometimes jibed him a little about his frequent spells away from the family home near the town of Usk, in Monmouthshire. They were rarely more than three nights; still, she prodded and poked, never quite serious but, he thought, never completely joking either. She’d ask whether he had his hooker booked for the night, or whether he had a regular fuck buddy in whichever town he was staying in. Huw would go along with it, never taking things too far, and then he’d hug her and say she was the only one for him. And truth was, he completely meant it. After twenty years of marriage, the two of them still loved each other, differently from before but just as deeply. He knew of other guys working away who’d had flings—a regular shag, casual visits, or just a one-off screw in their hotel room with someone they’d met that night and whose second name they’d never know. But that had never been for him. Huw was a family man, and his family always made him look forward to returning home.
He took a swig of tea and wished he hadn’t.
Maybe he’d run a bath, relax with a book. Mind made up, he reached for the TV remote, but before turning it off he flipped through a few more channels, a casual habit he’d picked up from Kelly.
An image caught his eye.
Several people were gathered around an apparatus of some sort, two of them working hard to turn a handle while a third seemed to be tinkering with a control mechanism. The camera must have been handheld because it was jumpy and uneven. In the background were several tents, lights strung between them, shadowy people dashing back and forth. They were somewhere wild—trees, a starry sky, gnarly terrain.
It was the looks on their faces that grabbed his attention.
They were scared.
“New movie trailer,” Huw muttered. He talked to himself quite a bit, and usually didn’t even notice. But this time he did notice, because he wasn’t quite sure. If this was a trailer, it was incredibly realistic. And graphic.
The people kept turning the handle, and it was only as Huw saw something glistening and red rising out of the ground that he realised the sound was still muted.
He hit the sound button and winced as a soul-shattering scream tore through the room.
“Shit!” Heart pounding, Huw chuckled at how easily he’d been scared. He leaned across the bed and grabbed his mobile phone, glancing quickly at it to check the time. Almost six-fifteen.
No way they should ever be showing anything like this before the watershed.
* * *
I loved spaghetti bolognese. Mum made it from scratch, and it came out differently every time. She enjoyed experimenting. She always said that a recipe was just a guide.
Parmesan cheese, though. That was always in it.
Jude sat across the table, and Mum was on my left. She was a graceful woman, someone who wore her middle age with dignity rather than trying to see it away with expensive make-up, hair dye, or denial. I sometimes told her that the grey at her temples—spreading now, from streaks to splashes—made her look somehow super-heroic. Mum laughed at that, and Jude had called her Superchef.
“Is that all I am to you?” she’d asked him.
“Yep,” he’d replied. “Where’s pudding?” Well, he was only ten.
Otis sat with his head on my leg, looking up with sad feed-me eyes. If Dad were here, he’d send Otis to his bed while we ate. He didn’t like the dog begging, but I didn’t mind. Otis always knew when the man of the house was away.
“Where’s Nan?” I asked. My grandmother was staying for a couple of weeks, and she always ate dinner with us.
“Having a lie down,” Mum said. “Do you have homework?”
She was the only person who I found it easy to lip-read. With Dad I had to really concentrate, and with most of my friends I usually only picked up one word in three. Weird.
“Well, yeah, geography. But that isn’t due in till next week.”
“You should still do some tonight.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
Jude nudged me under the table, his usual sign that he wanted to say something abusive. I glared at him.
“You smell,” he mouthed. I picked that up well enough.
“Jude,” our mum said, a soft warning.
We tucked into the meal. Jude snatched at the loaf of garlic bread in the middle of the table, and I was quick enough to grab some back. It tasted great. My friend Lucy hated when I’d had garlic, and I always made a point to sit closer to her on the bus to school the next day, breathing out of the corner of my mouth. Childish, but it made me laugh. Lots of stuff made me laugh. I was a happy girl, and some people—mostly ignorant, more often than not arseholes—found that difficult to understand.
A boy once took the piss out of me at school, calling me names he thought I couldn’t see—mong, spazz—and pulling faces behind my back that my friends only told me about later. He was known for being a dickhead, but now he was being a dickhead to me. I’d confronted him and gave him an earful, concentrating hard to make sure those harsh words I used so rarely were well formed, sharp-edged, cutting. Then I’d turned away before he had a chance to respond, so he was left shouting at my back, and I flipped him the bird over my shoulder. The smiles around me had mirrored my own.
Sometimes, not hearing had its benefits.
Jude dropped some food, and Otis ducked beneath the table to lick it up. Jude shouted, making a big drama of being knocked off his chair. Mum scowled and said something to him that I didn’t catch. I just carried on eating, looking down at my plate.
When we’d finished, knives and forks together, Mum dished up a small bowl of ice cream for each of us. I glanced across at Jude to find him staring at me expectantly. Grabbing my attention, he started signing in what I always thought of as the Andrews family dialect, a form of sign language expanded and adapted from what we’d all learned after the accident. My parents had been great with signing, but Jude—barely six years old at the time—had picked it up amazingly quickly, and it was the two of us who’d started coming up with our own altered version. Mum and Dad simply had to follow.
“Want to play Twenty Questions?” he asked.
I shrugged, but my brother could tell that I was keen.
“Okay, you two,” Mum said. “I’ll clear the table this time. Keep it clean!”
I laughed, and Otis pointed his nose to the ceiling and howled along with us. I remembered what that sounded like—not too loud, a sort of ululating song that was filled with mischief and joy—and apart from my family’s voices, it was the sound I missed the most. I tickled Otis under the chin as Jude asked the first question.
I won three points to two, but agreed when Jude asked, “Best of seven?” And of course, I let him win. He knew that, and perhaps that was why he celebrated so much more enthusiastically. We ended up rubbing knuckles into each other’s scalps while Otis jumped around, nudging us with his nose and barking. Mum came in to tell us off, but I averted my eyes. I got in one more good ear-tweak before catching Mum’s eye and stern gaze. I blinked, smiled, shrugged.
That might have been the last time Jude and I fought together playfully. Like many great milestones it passed without us noticing. Later, I’d reflect upon that meal as the last good time, ever.
I ran upstairs to my room and the terrible, noisy future.
* * *
I loved horror films. Dad had started showing me some of his favourites—The Thing, Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Shining. I liked them, and liked watching them with Dad even more; he enjoyed sharing the films with me. But when he’d told me there were certain movies I wasn’t quite ready to see, I had of course sought them out. Hostel, Saw, and all manner of tie-them-down-and-cut-them-up torture movies, I’d watched them with a feeling of sick interest, but little more. They didn’t really scare me. Sometimes they disgusted me. I thought they were shock films rather than horror films, and had decided that it was much easier to shock than to unsettle or terrify.
When I walked back into my bedroom, I thought perhaps I’d left one of those movies running on the DVD player. But within seconds I knew that wasn’t the case.
This was real.
However realistic the films I watched were supposed to be, I always knew they were made up. It formed a block in my mind, a horror-sink that I was not really aware of until I saw real pain. Some scenes on the late evening news upset me, and I didn’t watch the more extreme stuff my friends watched online: beheadings, car crashes, real-life deaths and murders—I knew that they’d be too much.
Besides, buried memories of the accident often surfaced at the most unexpected of times.
It took me a few moments to really register what I was seeing. Something red and meaty hung from a rope, swinging gently as if only just touched. Beyond, a couple of spreads of tent material slumped low to the ground, and on one of them a shape thrashed and lashed out, limbs moving rapidly. It looked like a wind-up toy that had been overwound.
I blinked and sat on my bed. That’s the place I was watching earlier. The cave was now out of sight, and the camera was still and steady, as if it had been set on a tripod. The lights slung between tent uprights were swinging, agitated, throwing frantic shadows.
I blinked again, as if to reset. Kept my eyes shut for longer than usual, thinking, What is it that I’m seeing?
When I looked again, somebody dashed from the cover of trees and tried to get into one of the large tents. Something—a shape in the air, a blot on the screen, perhaps even a ghosted image—followed them across the clearing. When it touched them, they went down.
My heart was racing, pounding painfully in my chest. I leaned in closer to the screen, but the person was a long way off, hidden in flickering shadows, and moving close merely made their image appear even more pixelated. They seemed to be fighting. Their face was no longer white.
It was red.
If this had been a horror film, I would have laughed at the effects. I couldn’t see what was happening. Everything was confused. The thrashing shapes were merely squirming now, as if winding down. The meat continued to swing.
Something parted from the object hanging from the rope—the object that was, I now had to acknowledge, the remains of one of the cavers. It clung there for a while, a hazy image almost seeming to sprout from the sickening mass of red. Then it spread what looked like leathery wings and flitted quickly out of the picture.
“Mum,” I said softly. I didn’t like this at all. It was too real.
The subtitles were still switched on, but there was no one left to speak.
* * *
“Fucking hell, fucking hell,” Huw muttered. He was cold. Chills tingled his skin, settling across his damp back, armpits, balls. Whatever this was, it was bloody effective. He hit the remote again and frowned. Discovery Channel. Surely they’d never agree to something like this? It was a science channel. A serious channel. It was November, and Hallowe’en was two weeks ago. “Fucking hell.”
Several shapes shot up from the bottom of the picture, spiralling and veering off into the trees like large, frightened birds. He turned up the volume until the digital readout on the TV read one hundred, a loud hum filling the room. Something rustled, the sound ending quickly. Something else ran, pounding steps in the distance that ended as quickly as they’d begun.
More creatures—birds, he assumed, although there was something off about that description—flickered across the screen, one of them hitting one of the upright tents and seeming to disappear inside.
It was the pauses that convinced him this was real. There were periods of frantic movement, mostly off-screen but audible, and those occasional flickers of life on screen. But it was the quieter times between these events—long moments when there was the gentle swish of leaves in a breeze, the electrical grumble of the TV on full volume, flies and insects buzzing into the camera and making random patterns in that unknown forest clearing—that gave it the true sense of reality.
That, and the thing on the rope. It reminded him of a lure, a bloody red chunk of meat slung on a rope ready to act as bait. But it wore the shredded remains of clothing.
“Gotta be a movie.” He spoke aloud to break the dreadful silence, and as if to comfort himself.
Someone sobbed. The sound was so unexpected that Huw jumped, looking around the piss-stinking hotel room for whoever had sneaked in while he wasn’t looking.
“I think… they came from there,” the voice said. It was low and scared, but definitely a woman’s voice. “I think—”
Several shapes burst into movement on the screen. It was as if they’d been hanging, sitting, or floating utterly motionless, invisible in the picture because they were as still as everything else. But when they moved, and the woman screamed, Huw had a second to truly see them.
Like birds, but pale. Leathery wings. Teeth.
The picture suddenly changed, spinning, blurring, and then more screaming, loud and piercing, filling the room, so loud that Huw wanted to turn the TV off. But he couldn’t not see.
The camera fell onto its side, filling most of the picture with long grass. Then something dropped onto the camera, squirming and shuddering as the screaming grew higher, even louder.
The picture blinked to blackness. The sudden silence was shocking.
Huw, breathing heavily, snapped up the remote control, lowered the volume, and switched immediately to the news channel.
“—seeking a majority Conservative government for the next term, and he reiterated his commitment to make Britain a land of opportunity. The opposition leader launched a tirade against the Prime Minister, suggesting that his policies…”
He muted the volume and watched the news presenter delivering familiar, comfortable news. Nothing horrific, nothing filled with blood and screaming. Politicians baiting each other, business leaders casting warnings, celebrities entering rehab. He giggled. “Fucking hell.” He’d really scared himself there. Stupid.
He thought once more of running a bath, but it had lost its allure.
* * *
“Mum!” I was running downstairs, still full from dinner and vaguely queasy at the thought of what I’d been watching. I’d left the TV on, the scene still playing out, but didn’t want to watch it any more. Not alone. “Mum!”
Otis sauntered from the living room to the bottom of the staircase. I scratched his head as I pushed past him. Mum and Lynne—my grandmother insisted on us using her first name, and it had long-since stopped being weird—were in the living room, both looking at the doorway as I entered. They smiled, but it was strained. I wasn’t sure why. The television in there was off, and it looked like they’d simply been chatting and drinking tea.
“Hi, Lynne,” I said, smiling.
Lynne returned the smile. She was a tall, thin woman, what Dad called prim and proper, and her poise often revealed where Mum’s natural grace had come from. But now she just looked weak and tired.
“What is it?” Mum signed.
“Something on TV. On the Discovery Channel. It was horrible, people were being killed and… I don’t know, there was blood. In a cave.” I shrugged, not really knowing what else to say. I couldn’t stop myself from glancing at the big flatscreen TV on the living-room wall, as if its darkness would be revealed as the image of the cave’s interior. I might be looking at them right now, I thought, immediately troubled at where that idea had come from.
“Watching another horror film?” Lynne asked. I had to frown and ask her to repeat herself, and Lynne tried to sign the words.
“No, no, this was on live, Discovery Channel. They don’t show horror films. It was…” I picked up the TV remote and switched it on, scanning across channels. Nothing. “I did see it.”
“Shouldn’t you have been doing your geography homework?” my mum asked.
Lynne waved her hand to get my attention, then asked, “What’s the capital of Norway?”
“Oslo,” I said. “But geography’s a lot more than just that, Nan.”
Lynne mock-scowled at the use of that term, and I looked at the TV again. The Discovery Channel showed a holding screen of a mountain landscape, with a message along the bottom reading, Sorry for the break in signal, normal service will be resumed soon.
“Normal service,” I said, thinking of the bloody, swinging thing.
“Come on,” Mum signed. “You can help me—”
“Mum!” Jude shouted, rushing into the room. “I was on my iPod… messaged me… thing on now… the news…!”
I only picked up half of what he said, but he fired the last word at me again in sign language. Our Andrews family signing—teeth bared, hands clawed, eyes rolled back.
“Monsters.”