“Not exclusively. Anyway, I’m not working. I might not even switch my camera on.”
There were signs saying NO ENTRY and DANGER. Another which read CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC UNTIL JANUARY. Don felt a pang of claustrophobia when he saw the size of the entrance. He would have to bend over slightly, and then the gap narrowed and the ceiling came down further and it was as if he were being swallowed by some gigantic, scabrous throat.
When the cave was first discovered, back in the 1500s (Kerner explained), long before explosives were used to blast a more comfortable passage, you had to crawl through on your belly.
Don felt water drip on to his neck. He could feel the damp in the air. There were footlights guiding you into the cavern along a concretised strip, but then the cave floor took over and it was uneven, treacherous. There was a giddy moment when he wasn’t sure if he was even the right way up.
Kerner seemed to have no such problem. The bigger man bustled through the gap as if he were pushing himself to the front of the queue on sale day.
“Shouldn’t we have a guide?” Don asked.
“No guides for us,” Kerner said. “I know this place like the back of my gland. I slipped Mac back there a tenner. He’s happy to warm his hands on another cup of tea. We’re doing his patrol for him. We’re doing a public duty.”
Don didn’t like that. He had never strayed too far away from the rules. Even when teaching, he stuck to the tried and tested. A gradual accumulation of knowledge. A natural progression. Chords. Barre chords. Finger-picking. Scales. Power chords and riffs were not on his syllabus. It was lazy. It was a fast-track to sloppy playing. You had to have the foundation. Deep roots. Core. He was an oak, Don decided now, enjoying the analogy. It was distracting him from the pressing in of the cave walls. He was an oak to Kerner’s weak bough, flapping in the wind.
“You’ve been in here before then?” Don asked, to stop himself from laughing.
“Many times. I could serve as a guide myself, I reckon.”
“Do you have a torch?” The entrance lights only illuminated so far. Up ahead, the blackness was deeper than anything Don had ever known. He had never thought of the dark possessing a physicality, but that’s what it seemed like. There was substance in it. You’d be forgiven for thinking you had to pierce some part of it in order to get through at all.
“We don’t need a torch,” Kerner said.
“What are you, part owl?”
Kerner chuckled. And then light exploded around them. Don felt suddenly foolish. The space within the cavern was voluminous. The ceiling of it was sixty, seventy feet from where they were standing. Its geology seemed a living thing. It was sinuous in some places, jagged in others. He sensed Kerner watching him, his finger on a light switch hidden behind a curtain of rock.
“Timer switch,” Kerner said. “Switches off automatically, after a while. This place closed down in the 1950s. Lack of interest. Nobody to fund it. It was taken over in the 1970s. Given a real spring clean. They put in the electricity then. No more of those dodgy gas lamps the Victorians used.”
“The rock,” Don said. He wasn’t sure what he meant to follow that with. It seemed anything he might say would not do justice to his surroundings.
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“That it is.”
“Limestone, in the main,” Kerner said, clearly relishing his role. “You’re looking at rock that was formed around three hundred and fifty million years ago, when modest little Derbyshire was part of a continental landmass close to the equator. Volcanic activity pushed the limestone up and into the fractures that were created, hot minerals poured. So you’ve got your galena, your flourspar, your barytes, your calcite. Veins and seams. Ore. This glittering wonderland. This cave was formed by water. Rain becomes acidic when it passes through organic matter, like soil, as I’m sure you know. It dissolved the limestone. Streams eroded it further. You can hear the water crashing through. We’ll see it up ahead. All this water coming through here, it’s been going on for two million years.”
My God, thought Don. He thought of Julie. She would have loved this. She had been dead for one year. The water coming through here, it was difficult to imagine it would ever stop. It would still be sluicing through two million years hence. The cave wider, deeper, but essentially the same. People coming and going so quickly, like glyphs on the pages of a flicker book.
The colours were amazing. Blues and greys and greens. Orange heating up to red. Stalagmites reached up to stalactites, fangs in a closing jaw.
“How big is the cave?”
“Who knows,” Kerner said. “It extends further than anybody thought. Come on, I’ll show you.”
They advanced through the cave, and it expanded around them. Handrails and steps had been put in. The electric lights, subtly positioned, showed off the ripples and thrusts of rock while ensuring there was no chance of becoming lost. Behind them, the lights shut off, like portions of a stage during a play. It was all very dramatic.
Don gradually relaxed. Kerner was a knowledgeable and amiable guide and Don grew to become grateful for his company. They walked through various sections, separated by natural kinks in the path they were following; all were given grandiose names: Hall of the Kings, The Chamber of Hanging Knives, Grey Lion’s Lair. The names were attributed to the shapes in the rock. Some looked like crowns, or daggers, or a flowing mane. It was like hunting for faces in the fire, or the clouds.
The path ran out at a boulder choke surrounded with safety rails and more threatening red signs. Don had been so engaged by the alien surroundings, the assault of the cold and the clean, mineral flavour in his nostrils and throat, that he’d completely forgotten about the lump on his cheek. But now, as its pain re-announced itself to him, he stopped and pressed his hand to his skin.
“Okay?” Kerner asked.
“Yeah, just. I don’t know. Spot or something.”
“Oh, I noticed that too, but I didn’t say anything.”
Don tried to laugh it off but the sound came out all wrong. Beautiful place, unkind acoustics. “I’m turning into a teenager again,” he said.
“You should maybe see a doctor. It might be an infection. You don’t want it to become an abscess or anything like that. They’ll have to cut a big chunk out of you. Bad scars. I have photographs of people, post-op. People who had tumours. One guy who was bitten by a flea or a tick or something. Half his face turned rotten, virtually slid off him. Imagine that.”
Don tried to ignore him. He removed the sticking plaster from his skin and pushed ahead, leaving Kerner to his study of a small, visible stretch of churning water. His fingers fretted at the sore. The surrounding skin was puffed up and tender. There was a hard core beneath. It wobbled under the dome of taut skin, making him queasy. Maybe it was the air pressure that was nagging at it. Or the cold. Something was being drawn out. Maybe it was just time. The body healed itself of most things, given enough time.
“Look, see,” Kerner said. He was pointing at a small hole in a cluster of rocks at the foot of the choke. “They dropped cameras through that last year and found a huge. I don’t know how you’d describe it. amphitheatre of white rock. They dubbed it ‘the blizzard bowl’. Crystal city. Like landing in one of those daft ornaments, you know. What are they called?”
“Snow globes,” Don whispered.
“Snow globes, yeah. That’s the chappy. Anyway, the idea is they’re going to send a man down there. Apparently there’s a guy known as Rat lives in the village. Spelunker
There was a moment, just as the lights were turned off, and they began the walk back to the cavern entrance, when Don thought he heard the scrabble of movement, but he chose not to mention it, because he didn’t want to appear nervous, or stupid to Kerner. The slide of insecure pebbles. A rat, or a bat. It was nothing.
