Saturday, May 10. 2008
It wasn't dark, darkness is a perspective - nothing more than a simple lack of light with which to see. This was thicker than darkness, it blocked the light, turned it away before even a slice of what lay inside it could be revealed. It was cold too, wind swept right through that old passage, no matter what the weather. Most thought nothing of the way in which regular bursts of air swept through the tunnel, even on the most stale of days, fewer still attached any meaning to the frost that ringed that black entrance...or the ever present stalactites that - due to some trick of the rock obviously - could almost be made of ice.
If you sat in front of it for long enough then you could almost convince yourself that the gusts of wind sounded like the sleeping breath of a giant, or that the piles of leaves swept in there from the autumn sounded more like rasping scales than wind tossed foliage.
Almost anyway...
The old-folk knew better, they stayed away. The children didn't know better, but no child would willingly go near that place.
The rest? They simply didn't know.
Happy-campers, ramblers, potholers, even the military. All of them, at some point or another, had tried to explore that passageway. The campers and ramblers hardly ever made it up the cliff-road, so many were the warnings and outright lies that they recieved. Potholers who had done their research and come seeking a potential thrill would find the entrance...and then very quickly find their way back down, struggling to remember what they were doing...if they remembered anything at all about that mouth in the earth.
The military had come once and only once, after a contracted demolition service enlisted for construction of a new road developed an extreme case of mass hysteria whilst attempting to dynamite the gap shut it was suspected that dangerous substances were being kept inside. A team of 15 experts in various fields of toxicology, psychology, virology and geology were flown in...2 days later the 3 remaining survivers tumbled down the cliff, their bodies so cool to the touch that you could be forgiven for calling them dead, all 3 quite obviously insane. Nothing but insanity could drive human beings to the level of self-inflicted violence that was discovered by old Anne Flagarin, 11 dead bodies, all in various stages of dismemberment were eventually collected from that unnatural place, of the final expert, Shaun Boa, nothing at all was found.
Both the mortician and psychiatrist set to analysing the remnants of the team agreed that a peculiar emphasis of the violence had been upon the eyes and ears, of all the corpses only 1 still had relatively unscathed facial features...he had driven a screwdriver through the top of his head instead. The 3 survivors had 4 eyes and only 2 working ears between them. The reasons behind these terrible acts were never discovered, the project was shut down the following day, bodies were buried as the survivors were packed off to differing asylums.
The tunnel was haunted, a chemical waste dump, a test site for new strains of hallucinogen, an old story blown all out of proportion...all these opinions, and more were to be found the day that Josh decided to see it for himself. He'd grown up in the area and certainly knew the history, but a combination of childhood fear and a genuine belief in the stories that some like Flagarin insisted upon spreading had held him back from ever going up to see it for himself. Now he was 14 though, nearly 15 actually, he'd grown tired of getting second-hand reports and garbled suspicions. He wanted the real deal.
By all accounts the passage wasn't hard to find, a dirt road, heavily overgrown but still visible, led up the cliff and right past the famous hole in the ground. All he had to do was trek a few miles and he'd be there, alongside the tunnel that you couldn't see into and would never even dream of entering, standing at the site of at least 11 known gruesome suicides. All this really meant was that he damn well wasn't planning on staying overnight.
Charcteristically he left the next weekend with a decent coat wrapped around his waist and sandwiches tucked into his pockets. The walk was uneventful, the climb even more so. He stopped for a break before getting there and ate one of the sandwiches before pressing on. Around the next bend and there it was.
He'd expected more.
Because Josh fancied himself a weirdo, and because it appealed to him at that moment, he approached the entrance and sat as close as he dared to the blackness, it was colder here, but not noticeably so, and Josh had never much minded the cold. The wind came as a shock though, it hit all at once - buffering him almost on to his back before just as sharply declining. Josh picked himself up, gathered as many scraps of his precious adolescent dignity as he could and turned back to the mouth.
"Hello," he said. "I'm Josh, what should I call you?"
This was fairly common, Josh didn't like talking to himself so instead he'd talk to inanimate objects, trees, pets, or anything else that caught his fancy. Making up the replies he expected as he went along...at least, that's what he was used to doing.
The next gust of wind was colder than the one before.
"Nekard...that's a pretty strange name, but hey you're a hole in the ground, what the hell do I know?"
The blast of wind ripped up dust from the track, sending it spiralling into the air.
"Oh, this is just what I do. Don't get to speak to many people really so I gotta get my conversations whenever I can."
The stalactites shook and tinkled against one another with a sound unlike anything simple rock would produce.
"There's no need to get upset, it's not like I could do anything about it."
The cave roared, there was no other word for it, the largest icicle snapped off - proceeding to imbed itself in the ground near Joshes leg. His only response was to lift out the remaining sandwich from his pocket and stand up.
"Look, I have to go now. You may as well have this, it's only tuna and sweetcorn but I'm not hungry anymore. If you don't throw another strop then I'll assume you liked it, maybe I'll bring more next time, maybe then you'll tell me your real name."
With that the sandwich was hurled into the inky depths, it's progression slowing almost imperceptibly as it sank into the dark. Josh walked away and didn't look back. No sound came from the mouth of the cave.
That night, there was a storm.
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