The Memory of Trees (22 page)

He knew enough about history to know that the former meant a true account, often written under oath, at a time when scribes believed not only in God but in the prospect of eternal damnation if they sinned. A lie of that magnitude would be a mortal sin. He would have to ask Carrington about the significance of that, should he remember to return the professor’s call.

Gregory had approached this place from the sea. He had sailed there and beached his craft unwitnessed. He hadn’t possessed a Maglite or a Glock pistol like the one holstered on Francesca’s waist or the short-barrelled pump-action shotgun Pete had slung from its strap across his back. He’d probably carried a makeshift torch topped with burning pitch and a battleaxe thrust into his belt. Worst of all for him, though, was the fact that he’d come here entirely alone.

It would have been a hell of an ordeal. They believed in monsters then. They believed in demons and witches. Men of his class were bred for the quest, steeled psychologically for the tests they endured almost as a routine aspect of life. Heroism was an expectation that came with their noble station in life. But Curtis thought that even if you found no enemy to confront, exploring this place alone would be a fearful experience.

There was something tomb-like about the cave. It was just a corridor hewn from rock. It gave the impression of narrowing the further you travelled into it, but that was just the knowledge that every step towards its end took you deeper under the ground and further away from the light. It wasn’t a tunnel, because it dead-ended eventually. He thought a catacomb must be like this.

The smell was rank and growing stronger, so strong that the urge to retch was becoming difficult to resist. Abercrombie’s respiration now was a shallow rasp and Curtis realized that their boss hadn’t spoken since entering the cave only because he didn’t possess the necessary breath.

‘We should rest for a minute,’ he said.

‘We should just keep going,’ Pete said. ‘The sooner we get to the end of this thing, the sooner we can get back out again.’

‘Seems reasonable,’ Dora said.

Francesca said, ‘No, we should take five. Tired people make stupid mistakes.’

And Curtis thought that she had noticed how distressed the exploration had made her father and was being as tactful as was possible. There was his ego to consider. However frail, he was in overall charge.

After another moment, Abercrombie said, ‘This is me done, people.’

Curtis said, ‘That’s a wise decision.’

‘I’d love to go on, brother,’ Saul said, ‘but the decision’s been made on my behalf. A throat like mine constricts the breathing. The further we go, the staler the air. Not a problem for you guys. For me, maybe a killer.’

‘I’ll stay with you, Dad. Come back with you, I mean.’

‘The bogeyman doesn’t scare me, honey. You go on.’

‘Continue if you want to,’ Curtis said to her. ‘I’m happy to go back now with Saul. There’s nothing down here but darkness and geology.’

‘And whatever secreted that slime,’ Pete said. ‘And whatever’s generating that stink, unless it’s the same thing.’

‘Which logically it would be,’ Dora said.

‘It must terminate fairly soon,’ Curtis said, ‘given how far we’ve already come.’ He looked at Francesca.

She said, ‘Everyone? Turn off your torches.’

They did. The darkness was abrupt and absolute. There was no hint of light. The only sound was their collective breathing. She said, ‘Nothing lives down here. The air is rank and nothing could tolerate this total absence of light. Maybe something hides here from time to time, makes of it a refuge when it feels threatened. But this place is uninhabited. There isn’t even a ghost.’

Pete switched his torch back on. Curtis would have bet money he’d be the first to do so. Women were more practical than men, weren’t they? He felt pretty spooked and more uncomfortably claustrophobic than he ever had in his life. He didn’t feel merely confined, but trapped. Dora and Francesca, of the five of them, were coping best.

He switched his torch back on. They all did. He said, ‘You wait here with Francesca and Saul, Pete. I’ll continue with Dora for another hundred metres or so. If it doesn’t play out, we’ll abandon. If it does, we’ll take a quick look around and come back. Give us the ten minutes Saul needs to recover his breath. Then we’re all out of here.’

Everyone but Saul nodded agreement. He rested on his haunches against the cave wall with his head on his knees. It occurred to Curtis that the route back was one long, steady incline. He thought that had probably occurred to all of them.

His hunch proved correct. About a hundred-and-twenty metres on, their torches revealed a gallery. It was where the cave ended. It seemed a natural feature, its walls and roof smooth, the dead stink that had accompanied them there possessed of a miasmic power here at the cave’s conclusion.

They played their torch beams around. Dora’s lit on an aperture about eight feet up in the wall to the left of where they stood. It wasn’t much bigger than a crack, a chink of blackness at a blind angle it wasn’t possible, from where they stood, to illuminate.

‘Can you get me up there, Tom? I can reach it if I stand on your shoulders.’

‘It’s narrow. It probably leads to nowhere. You could get stuck. I don’t think it’s worth the risk.’

She shrugged and smiled at him. ‘We’ve come this far,’ she said.

He held on to the cave wall with both arms outstretched. She climbed up him, smooth and agile, and disappeared into the narrow opening with a kick of acceleration that ground the heel of her boot into his collarbone.

He waited nervously for a falling thump or shriek of pain signalling she’d trapped herself. A minute passed. Two minutes became three. Her feet and legs appeared and she squirmed out and down. He caught her and delivered her to the floor. She felt lithe and shapely in his arms and he inhaled the perfume physical effort had just revived on her hot skin. She smelled of fresh sweat and Shalimar.

‘Led to nowhere, like you said it would,’ she said. ‘Could have been a storage space a thousand years ago but I’m with Francesca. No one ever lived here. It’s too dark, even for monsters.’

‘Let’s get out,’ Curtis said.

The excavators would take the rest of the day and most of the night to be unloaded from their giant trailers and properly set up for their work. A team of engineers had accompanied them in transit. Once set up, they would only ever pause to re-fuel until their task was complete.

They were parked just inside the northern gate. There, a section of fence had needed to be taken down to admit their bulk before being straight away put back up again. Curtis led the two-vehicle convoy to go and see them as soon as their party emerged from the cave mouth into light because he thought the sight of them would do Saul Abercrombie good.

Saul was in the rear Land Rover with his daughter at his side and Dora at the wheel. Curtis sat in the passenger seat of the front vehicle making and taking the calls he needed to catch up on. Pete drove. He said, ‘That was a shit adventure, not very Enid Blyton at all, frankly.’

‘We’ll have lashings of ginger beer later,’ Curtis said.

‘We’ll hold the ginger, eh? Just concentrate on the beer.’

‘Enid’s version would have given us something cute and trapped to rescue. The monster usually turns out to be a puppy. We got nothing.’

‘Something left that residue on the floor. Something organic left that stink behind. I’m willing to bet it wasn’t plant-life. You believe I heard something in there yesterday, Tom?’

‘I came across that same odour in the fog at Puller’s Reach before you and Dora arrived here. I didn’t see anything. But there was something substantial at the edge of the water. I heard it. It wasn’t a puppy.’

‘Or even a Rottweiler,’ Pete said.

It was about eight in the evening before Curtis became aware how tired and listless he felt. He knew the reason. He had spent a lot of adrenaline earlier in the day in the fire fight with the thorn bush. That was how he’d thought of it, he realized, as an opponent rather than just as an innocent obstacle. In the cave he’d been running on empty. Now he felt too depleted to do anything further concerning the demands of the job.

He’d delegated some stuff to Pete and Dora, who were busy dealing with those various tasks in the comms room. Francesca was with her father, having a drink on the terrace. Saul Abercrombie was under a rug in a wicker chair with wheels looking every day of his seventy-odd years. They’d had an early dinner, the five of them, during which the conversation could not honestly have been said to sparkle.

Curtis decided he would go to his computer and look up the Victorian family that Café John’s professor said had been located at Loxley’s Cross. Carrington had said the family were called the Crawleys and that it was all in the public domain.

It was something mildly diverting that would take his mind off how tired he was and maybe enable him to relax sufficiently to get the sound night’s sleep he knew he needed. He kept thinking about how animated the scream made by the burning thorns had sounded. He kept thinking about the sticky residue left by whatever had secreted it in the cave. At least he wasn’t thinking about Charlotte. At least he wasn’t thinking about her all the time, anyway.

He soon found out that Alfred Crawley was one of those polymath Victorians with a strong interest in English folklore. He’d been left a generous legacy by his father and hadn’t really needed to earn a living of his own. So he’d made a study of Morris Men and travelled to Cornwall looking for archaeological evidence of Camelot. He’d written a paper about the myth of the Green Man and why it had endured so persistently down the centuries.

He’d travelled about when single in a Romany caravan pulled by a horse. He’d painted this prototype mobile home in a style that reminded Curtis a bit of William Morris wallpaper. He concluded from the appearance of the caravan that Crawley hadn’t been a man who cared very much what other Victorians thought of him.

He’d first travelled to Wales as a young man intrigued by the legend of the sea monster said to inhabit the coastal waters off the port town of Barmouth. He’d tried to locate and catch it in a hired fishing boat, obviously with no success. From the illustrations of the monster, Curtis concluded that it had probably been an unusually large conger eel. They were territorial and could live for a very long time. It was longevity that engendered the sightings and stories inflated by fishermen over the years.

Crawley had become fascinated by the story of Gregory of Avalon and the legend of the vast wood from which the sorceress he’d vanquished had derived her power. He believed in ghosts and curses, ley lines and other magical properties to do with location; the resonant mystical power of particular places to endure through centuries.

He built a wooden house at Loxley’s Cross. In the pictures Curtis sourced on the Internet, this looked like something between a traditional Swiss or Austrian ski chalet and one of those old-fashioned railway signal boxes from which gates at crossings were opened and closed manually. He fancied himself as an architect, on top of everything else. But Curtis concluded with a wry smile that architecture was something Alfred Crawley hadn’t been very good at.

He’d married by this point and fathered two daughters. When the girls reached the age of six, he decided to build them a maze as a place of recreation. There were some photographs of the maze. They were aerial shots, taken from a hot air balloon.

The first pictures had been taken in the spring of 1862. They showed the maze to be an intricate geometric puzzle covering an area about the size of a cricket square on an English village green. The second pictures had been taken in the summer of the following year and when he saw them, Curtis almost gasped audibly.

In the second set of pictures, the maze covered an area about the size of two football pitches laid side-by-side. Most of its internal space was cast into deep shadow by the angle of the sun. The balloon must have taken flight at some point on a late and clear afternoon. Curtis calculated that the height of the hedgerows from which the maze was composed would be around thirty feet. It wouldn’t be fun to play in confinement like that, he didn’t think. It would be terrifying and, for a child, a nightmare.

The story of the Loxley’s Cross maze had a tragic conclusion. Dismayed by the dimensions to which it had grown, Crawley planned to have it razed and then uprooted and the land it grew on ploughed under and left to lie fallow. The work was scheduled to be carried out in the January of 1864. But before it could be done, his girls wandered into the labyrinth he’d planted and became lost.

By this point they were in the charge of a maid called Amelia, a young local woman Crawley had taken on as a sort of housekeeper-cum-nanny. Their parents were at a dinner in Cardiff where they were booked into a hotel overnight. When they returned they could see no sign of their daughters. Eventually the girls were found, both frozen to death, in one of the false paths of dense and towering privet to which their father’s leafy puzzle had led them.

Crawley had the maze destroyed as planned and demolished the house. He and his wife had left England and re-settled in Canada. They thrived in British Columbia, Rachel Crawley giving birth to a son and another daughter who both, happily, outlived their parents. They seemed to have recovered entirely from the earlier tragedy in Wales. But people had been more resilient then and child mortality far more common. Children died all the time of typhus and diphtheria. Adulthood was not the near certainty in Victorian times that it was in twenty-first-century Britain.

He searched for and eventually found a family group shot from the Loxley’s Cross period that showed a slight, smiling young woman he assumed to be Amelia. She seemed familiar to him, like an actress he might have seen in a film he’d only half watched. She was certainly good-looking enough for films. But she’d been born rather too early for stardom of the celluloid sort.

Curtis took out his wallet and found Carrington’s card. He called the mobile number. Carrington picked up after a few rings. ‘This is Tom Curtis.’