The Courtesy of Death (12 page)

‘You bloody bastard!’ I yelled.

There was panic. Nobody but Jedder knew anything at all of my existence. The beams searched all over the sweating walls which disguised sound. Two or three correctly pinpointed my position. I
slid back unseen into the cleft behind me.

Jedder ordered them all back to the entrance at once, but Miss Filk stood her ground. She shouted in her most masculine manner:

‘Who the devil is that?’

And then she let the two Dobermans off the leash and sicked them on to me. I heard them patter over the rocks and into my bolt-hole. There was no handy ledge up which to jump—and I should
only have been treed there—but by a stroke of luck Miss Filk’s flashlight as she charged after her savage brutes showed a loose rock.

I lifted it in both hands, like former inhabitants of the cave, and crashed it down on the head of the first dog as he sank his teeth into my shielding coat. The other ran away, howling. It was
an uncanny place in which to ask a dog to attack, especially when the eyes of the hunted had acquired mysterious night sight if any light at all was reflected from the glazed wall of the cave.

Miss Filk caught the contagion of terror from her remaining dog and tied herself up among the rocks. She was quite correct in thinking I was close behind her. I badly needed her torch. I doubt
if she even knew how she lost it. Her screams brought up some dim figures to collect her who were furiously attacked by the Doberman. Her efforts to control it restored her normally firm
character.

I saw their lights disappear on the way to the entrance. I could, I suppose, have chased and haunted the lot of them until they were incapable with fear. But I was on my last legs and in no
condition to meet a determined Jedder who knew only too well what my physical weakness must be even if I had survived Aviston-Tresco’s attentions.

So I went back to the recess for the body of the dog and put it across my shoulders, hanging on to the four legs. That collapsed me in a few strides. My civilised intention was to cook the meat,
but nature was insistent. Lying there with my head on the warm body and a better blade in my pocket than the flints of the cave painters I lapped back my life as they would have lapped.

I lay there in the empty silence. How long I do not know. It must have been hours, for I became very thirsty and the dog was stiffening. I remember whimpering with self-pity as I started for the
entrance by the light of Miss Filk’s torch, dragging the carcass behind me. It puzzled me that I had succeeded in lifting it to my shoulders. I must have been compelled by some obsession in
my exhausted mind that lifting was the right way. An influence of the hunters, perhaps.

The torch began to fade and glow pink. I stumbled about in a frantic search for paraffin by the light of matches which I had noticed with the lanterns in the changing-room. At last I found a
full five-gallon can under the steps, filled a lantern and lit it. That was about the only moment of relief, almost of content, which I had known since I was unloaded into the barn upstairs.

There were some pit-props in the tool store, so I built a fire on the spot and half-grilled Doberman chops over a couple of iron crowbars. They tasted delicious. Two days later, when my hunger
was appeased, they tasted utterly foul and I had to force myself to eat them.

Days, I say; but of course there weren’t any. My watch kept ticking, and I cut a notch on the changing-room table for every period of twelve hours. From then on I had an accurate record of
the passing of time.

One thing was certain: that nobody would return to the cave until positive that I was dead. They might or might not think of the saving carcass. I reckoned that it would never occur to them.
However that might be, I had to face my loneliness for at least a week and probably more. I think now that I should have spotted the solution, although it would have been no earthly use to me since
I had not the strength. The long, cool, workmanlike job would have become a mere hysterical tearing at brickwork followed by collapse.

But endurance I had. I put it down to being an engineer with experience of deep mines, for I have no exceptional force of character, only an obstinate desire to live. I refused to spend my time
just sitting. I had to find myself things to do. After taking care that there was nothing in the changing-room or gallery which could reveal my presence at a glance, I chose for my headquarters an
alcove some way along the passage, but near enough for me to hear any sound from the entrance. Well inside the cave, the air felt fresher than at the dead end. I was afraid that my fire, always
glowing but seldom built up unless shivering became intolerable, might use up too much oxygen. It was my source of light as well as comfort. I never lit a lantern unless at work.

I was in two minds whether to mend the lighting system or not, dreading the disappointment when the storage batteries ran down. Of course I could not in the end resist the temptation. I found
the break and repaired it and replaced the fuse. Nothing happened. The batteries were dead. Before leaving the changing-room Jedder had short-circuited the lot. It was another sign of his
determination to finish with me.

Though I dared not move far from the track of the wired passage for fear of losing myself, I found an occupation in exploring details of geology. I was able to reconstruct a lot more of the
story than Fosworthy had told me. Jedder had brilliantly used compass and measuring rods—his naval training—and established that an upward-sloping pot-hole must be nearly under his
barn. When he and his friends, after the discovery of the paintings, went to work on it, they drove a rock drill up to the surface and found that Jedder’s dead reckoning was wrong by only
about thirty yards. It was then easy to dig the shored gallery through broken rock and earth, and burrow straight up into the barn.

Often I returned to the painted cave, finding more and more in it. A lantern—better still, two lanterns—gave to the beasts more beauty and mystery than Jedder’s too naval
lighting.

I had lively company there, for I plotted and analysed the movements of the conventionally drawn little men. It was like contemplating some spirited wallpaper when half awake; one sees designs
of which the artist was hardly conscious. I came to know that group of families which had hunted its way up from the Mediterranean following the game to the colder rivers and the young forests. The
paintings must have been made during a short interglacial. The ice-cap over Britain stopped short of the Mendips, but would have made the climate too harsh for palaeolithic hunters. Hot sun must be
assumed and the conditions, say, of a high Swiss valley in summer.

The ritual of the Apology was plain as could be. And the mammoth deserved it. I could sense their respect for so rare and magnificent a source of meat with a spirit inside it. Could it have been
a first arrival as the trees withered and the tundra began, or a last survivor as the interglacial brought up the warmth and the southern hunters?

I think I came nearer to emotional understanding of the effect which the paintings had on Fosworthy. In utter loneliness one begins to remember not only facts but one’s former memories of
the facts. My train of thought started with a hungry night in the forests of Honduras. The two Indians with me caught a fat iguana. By the light of our fire I watched it killed, cut up and grilled.
Nothing surprising in that. Any country boy has done the same to a rabbit.

But when, back in a modern city, I thought of this slow, pathetic and very welcome lizard I was astonished that the scene in memory seemed to me to have a deeper and purer significance than the
mere filling of a belly. In that is a faint reflection of Fosworthy’s synthesis. To him the frigid inhumanity of the butcher’s shop and the slaughterhouse was revolting. So was the
taking of life for sport. Like the vast majority of mankind in industrial civilisation, he had never killed in order to live. Even his imagination could not conceive the possibility. It took the
paintings to reveal to him that the hunter experienced not only the sympathy with the animal which we all know, but an enrichment of the spirit which we have utterly lost.

Religion was very present in so after-death a place with its single, concentrated glory of art. Though I am not much of a Christian, I have carried for years my King James Bible and know much of
it by heart as our grandfathers did. If it is not inspired, then what does inspiration mean? I do not, of course, refer to its historical accuracy or literal truth, but just to its superb language.
It was great consolation to me to remember
Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord
though I have no more conception of what I was crying to than the mammoth in the moment of death.
Fosworthy would have said that it did not matter, and I doubt if it does.

These journeys of mine around my tomb, pointless except for keeping up morale, were safe enough while it was day outside. Fosworthy had told me that his people only made their occasional visits
in the late evening when all the fields were empty, to avoid attracting attention. The difference between day and night I knew from my twelve-hour notches on the table. So, towards what would be
sunset, I came home to my alcove or the changing-room and remained there.

Trying to foresee the actual circumstances of my escape, I had to recognise that I should have more than Jedder and his twelve-bore to deal with and that I could expect no mercy. I think few of
the sect would ever have agreed to remove me merely because of my knowledge of the cave; but now I was a witness to the death of Fosworthy and the attempted murder of myself by starvation, to which
they were all accessories. Frightened men, able at a pinch to find justification for conscience, would come prepared to finish me off discreetly in case, against all expectations, I were alive.

To escape was going to be desperately difficult if their routine was always to leave a man at the top of the shaft; and it was prudent to reckon on at least one more on guard in or about the
changing-room while the rest hunted far and wide for me or my body.

Against all this opposition I had to go up the ship’s companion, along the narrow, earth-cut gallery, up the aluminium ladder and through the hatch. One armed man could stop me anywhere.
If he failed, his colleague in the barn had only to pull up the ladder, and there I was.

In the darkness I made vivid pictures of the action to come and forced my imagination to take them slowly and sanely. I saw that I had to create such confusion that everyone would be occupied
sorting it out, and the man on top would rush down to lend a hand.

I sawed one of the steps of the companion ladder nearly through on the under side. Whoever stepped on it would crash down with his full weight on the hinder edge of the step below. On this edge
I did some inlay work with detonators from the tool-store—ten of them set an inch apart. I tried one out in a small cavity. A flat stone weighing about a pound, dropped from a height of two
feet, set it off.

The heavy tools available were designed for shoring, not marquetry, so my booby-trap was a clumsy job. Still, it could not possibly be detected by a man coming down the steps. Some sort of
spectacular accident was bound to happen. I hoped it would happen soon, for the end of the paraffin was in sight and I was down to making soup of Doberman bones. A sinewy bitch she was, with little
meat on her. I would have done better out of the fine, glossy beast which visited my flat.

On the twelfth evening after Fosworthy’s death I heard some dull sound which was not the last echo of a distant fall of rock. I went up the companion ladder—with considerable
care—and into the dug gallery. Feet were trampling at the top of the vertical shaft as the hay bales were removed from the hatch.

That the crisis had at last arrived bewildered me. I had become to accustomed to blindness, silence and withdrawal. Shaking all over, certain that I was going to die, I went into the tool-store
and chose a crowbar. I was quite incapable of making any more plans. I simply stood in the passage outside the changing-room, still trembling, and put out my lantern. All positions seemed equally
objectless. A sound instinct. What was going to matter were their movements, not mine.

I heard the aluminium ladder go through the hatch and down. A whole platoon of feet, as it seemed to me, scuffled over the rubble of the gallery, and the leader began to descend the companion.
There was an almighty crash as the sawn step gave way, but no explosion. The new arrival had somehow managed to miss the step below and the hand-rail as well. He yelled:

‘God! This thing’s rotted, Alan! I might have broken my leg.’

He must have picked up the fallen plank and placed it on the step below, on top of the detonators. A tidy fellow! Or perhaps he was so shaken and annoyed that he wanted to show up Jedder then
and there as a lousy carpenter. He was very lucky not to have set off the detonators. Standing below the companion, his face and eyes were on a level with the mined step.

The next man, who turned out to be Jedder, came running down and took one flying stride over the gap. There was a flash which hurt my eyes, a report which sounded almost shrill, then a rumbling
of echoes mixed up with the slither and thud of the falling body. I was afraid that the whole companion ladder had gone, though I knew well that the effect of the detonators must be local.

Someone else following behind screamed:

‘His foot! Come!’

I let them come. What I had planned in the darkness had happened; and this reality, this hope of the sun, changed me from hunted into hunter. On hands and knees I felt my way round the cold
corner of rock at the entrance to the changing-room and looked in. I need not have taken such precautions. There was a dim group of three around Jedder. A fifth person was up in the gallery asking
if he could help. They told him to go back to the barn.

They were very careless. After all, they could hardly be expected to think of anything but the unconscious Jedder who had been stunned by the shock and his fall. The sawn step laid on top of the
detonators had saved his foot from being blown to bits, but it was hedge-hogged with splinters of teak and scraps of copper, and bleeding profusely. Every flashlight was directed at him.