John Bowman's Cave Read online

  He lay somewhere and looked in front. There were stars in the glass. Slowly other noises crept in as the universe creaked and settled. Time passed and a voice came, saying something severe about the hissing. He tried to roll towards the voice and screamed.

  He was no longer numb; every atom quivered with sensational pain. He sucked air in and stilled, pulling concentration into centre. I'm alive, he thought. And if feeling better was sometimes no more than feeling less bad - as in the mercy of alcohol - then perhaps the antidote to deadness could be this primal agony. He took his cue from the revelation and screamed again.

  He was still screaming when they dragged him free of the fire. He looked up into the face of his saviour and passed into a dream. The dream knit itself into an endless seam of dreams as dreams do, handing him the convoluted images all through the night of clinical unconsciousness until he woke in hospital.

  ***

  It was as if he first saw the building from outside, and then floated into the bed he lay in. Dyall's Ford Royal Memorial Hospital. An old war-time relic that had been patched and promised into the present day. It pattered along the bubbled linoleum passage of its historic charter. In between bouts of delirium the nurse in a crisp gown came and took whatever from his arm. His drugged head lolled about, taking in discordant images. That fly on the window pane, is it outside or in? A chair by the bed with paint flaking. Above the stopped clock her dusty Majesty looked down.

  The nurse was there now. She looked ridiculous in that old-time uniform, and he told her so. He told her a lot of other things too. She in turn, told him to get up.

  “There's really nothing wrong with you. Don’t know what all the carry on’s about. It's time to go home.”

  John made derogatory remarks about the standard of healthcare but allowed himself to be bossed into a sitting position. Once there the nurse whipped his pillows away. “Come on, up now, I want these too!” she said, tugging the sheets he sat on. He slipped from the bed and stood.

  Unbelievable! he thought. I’m okay. That’s incredible! Sure, there were a few scratches on the knuckles of one hand, or was that where he’d taken skin off, punching the wall at home yesterday evening?

  The nurse pointed to a chair on her way out. “There’s your clothes.”

  John followed her finger to the clump his jeans, t-shirt and runners made. He walked over and picked them up. A bit ratty maybe, but he couldn’t remember their state before the accident. Probably not squeaky clean then either, he decided. He shrugged and dressed.

  He stepped outside into sun so bright it momentarily blinded him. There was no one around. He turned to go back inside and call a taxi, and the same chill that swept him when the windscreen shattered after the accident, returned. The hospital was gone. In its place stood a eucalypt forest, its canopy swaying in the dry summer wind.

  He looked down to see if he still inhabited his body, and wasn’t calmed at all by the fact he did. He trembled now, and nausea gripped him. I’m dead, fuck! I’m dead! He rubbed his arms to see if they were just part of the hallucination, or if they were really there. They were; he felt the covering of hair brush back and forth under his sweaty hands. Thank God; probably just out of my head with the drugs. Need to keep moving, lose this damn fogginess.

  The trees were still there, too, when he looked up again. He walked towards them, shaking with cold in the summer heat. As the forest swallowed him the noise of wind in the treetops faded. The clicking sound of the disintegrating windscreen replaced it. John clasped his arms tight to his chest and stopped dead. He waited for the surface of the forest to crack in a crazed pattern, but it didn’t. Instead, the noise metamorphosed into the roar a lifetime in this bush had taught him meant something infinitely worse than simple death was heading his way. Animals crashed out of the bush ahead and thundered past on either side. When he saw the first bright orange licks through the trees he turned and ran.

  He ran further than he knew he’d come, and still the forest held him. The faster he ran the more the noise behind him grew. Finally the trees thinned and he burst from the tinsel-dry eucalypts to pull up in a strange clearing. With the pursuit momentarily paused, thought processes kicked back in. Words started working for him again. This one whispered untouched into the screeching space between his ears. No one had set foot in this place in years. Behind him the wall of forest fire roiled.

  He looked back at the hundred-foot flames. Inexorably they herded him and the myriad creatures that furred past the edge of his choked vision. Patches of tussock grass were smudging black. Tree-ferns in a gully to one side quivered as the wave bore down.

  Time to straighten up. Muster nerves that were racing about like horses in a blazing barn. Take deep draughts of the stinging air.

  Got to think, he thought, aware of the irony even in his panic. Not dead yet. He spun and faced the flames, wanting to scream defiance into the acrid smoke, not wanting to choke in the pointless act.

  Which way? Which way? Got to be some goddam spot where I can lie low, some hole to crawl into until it’s gone past.

  But his heart thrashed in its bloody box, and a hundred yards behind the eucalypts were screaming now, the forest floor with its thirty-year build-up of shed bark - those steel-grey curlicues that weirdly reminded him of his father's workshop, with its carpet of wood and metal shavings - danced and shrivelled as the radiation shimmered through.

  He squeezed his eyes into one long, last scan of the clearing, looking for the one thing, the opening that was also enclosure, sanctuary for the hunted, fox ground, the place where he would not die.

  And then he saw it. A bit off to the right, near the far end of the clearing, under the age-thick bole of a forest patriarch, a patch of low grass watered by underground springs, a soak that fed the little creek in the gully. Grass sweet, short and comparatively green in this killing summer.

  Again survival clicked in, he sprinted across the hair-fine tussocks.

  He hop-scotched smouldering patches where fluttering incandescents, born along before the front, ignited spot fires. Spreading out like a patchwork of stains, the circles began to touch and grow into each other. Soon the storm would explode over them, obliterating their quiet handiwork in one long, furnace-heat swathe.

  As his feet touched the first cushions of the soak, his mind split into organized responses. One was frantically looking for a crawl space, or, lacking that, moss, leaf mould, a log to crawl under, anything - anything to absorb the radiation, anything but skin, got to cover face and hands.

  And he thought again of his father, curled under a barb wire fence as the dive bombers strafed…

  But another, more urgent voice was noting something about his hair, his ears, something not quite clear, some internal conversation getting garbled in the growing cacophony around him, and as he cowered in the furnace that now seared him, what he saw surpassed his death terror.

  His legs were melting.

  The dead weight of his body pushed down on them, and he began to topple as they sank and flowed into ground that was curiously wet for this season, even given its springs.

  His last act was to lift back his head, stretch his mouth and shout hatred at a red-black god, and his last thought was that somewhere at the core of him, some important sliver of being had always known this, this toppling - headfirst, backwards, blind and screaming into black.

  ***

  He fell, burning, buffeted by things that could not break his fall. Rock and whipping vegetation, thudding ledges, the crumbling edges of rank earth that he bounced from, saw him down. He grappled with them the way an atheist in extremity struggles with first prayer; with hands that grasp and clench and come up holding only hope.

  The battering filled nostrils with blood, his mouth pricked with the salt-tang mischief of death. It panicked him, uselessly; he continued falling until the bottom hit and whiteness took him.

  Waking to pain, smoke and his own flesh burning, he thought he'd landed in Hell. He opened his eyes and saw the truth
of it: fire had followed him like a dream that won't let up, that won't be woken from.

  He scrabbled bits of the sludge he lay in to extinguish cinders that bit through clothes. He rolled in it to feel the chill relief, an ease of release that hissed in time and tune to the wetting embers.

  He sat up. Up into a cloud of smoke that grew from somewhere at the level of his legs. He rolled onto his side again to seek the source, seeing for the first time the limits of the thing he'd landed in.

  Must be an old mine shaft. No vegetation down this far, no light to reach it.

  Rough dirt-rock wall encircled him, up to the black-cloud underbelly of the smoke bank. And below the smoke, he could see the floor scattered with smouldering grass tufts, glowing bits of branch and leaf. They fed the poisonous cloud that pressed down inch by inch, pushing out his air.

  He crawled around, gathering and snuffing them inside a growing ball of slimy clay he scooped up with them. When it was done he pushed the ball into the centre of the cave, just below his feet, and lay there eyeing it.

  In fear, exhausted, in resurgent pain, he wept - great body sobs that shamed the taught man in him - and he cursed the life that forever pushed him forward, pushed him here. He slept.

  ***

  Chapter 2

  The Ring Of Return

  He came to, prone, looking up. Half the air had cleared and half hadn't; half his mind still swam with smoke. He snapped up thinking maybe the mound of clay had started smouldering again. Looking between his feet where he’d left it gave him by far the greatest shock he'd had that day: snowy television reception, and on the screen a face that morphed between the countenance of every individual he'd ever known in life.

  But it was the face of a man, an older man, that he could be sure of.

  He squeezed sight to a narrower focus but it just picked up the pixel dots of snow. He flared eyes wide and the picture flurried. He blinked, he shut them for a long moment and half-opened them, squinting through the resultant letterbox slot, hoping.

  Better. Beyond his feet, someone sat on their haunches. A lined face. Silver hair that went wild over shoulders. Eyes so black he wondered if they were entirely pupil, or if he was looking through those sockets into the back of an unlit skull.

  He tried tuning lower down, to get a better view of clothes it wore, but the picture wouldn't hold. He only knew they were loose fitting. A hermit, perhaps, or monk. More like, hallucination.

  “Who... who are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean what do I mean? I mean who are you? Don't you know who you are?”

  The figure's outline wavered like a flame. “I am what you make of me.” Then it changed again, softened, and came closer. “Call me Argilan, for now.”

  John’s head fell back. He felt with his chill hand his clammy brow, and closed his eyes, welcoming the sheet of whiteness as it swept in.

  ***

  Solid now, and somewhat kinder, Argilan leant forward and dabbed John’s burnt arm with a pungent rag. A warm numbness filtered down the arm into fingers.

  Argilan smiled. “Welcome back. Who are you?”

  John opened his mouth to answer, then froze. He swallowed, something dry, that stuck halfway down, and tore at him as he coughed it out. “God, I don't know! All I can remember is my first name, ‘John’!”

  “That’s all?”

  John surveyed the landscape of his memory and shuddered. He expected holes everywhere, white spaces where known things had once formed up. Instead, he could recall almost everything: the person he was, where and how he’d lived, the search for his wife, all the events leading up to and including his sudden descent into this cave. Everything except his last name. He snapped the view shut. He turned back to Argilan with fear in his eyes.

  “I’m not sure. It seems like the only thing I don't know is my last name. But if I can’t remember that, how do I know what else I've forgotten, or how much? I don't even remember if it was worth knowing!”

  Argilan stood slowly. He frowned at John, then sighed. “Come,” he said and turned away.

  ***

  The walls were dank and slimy where the passage narrowed and they were forced to stoop. Wherever the dark grew, so did the rank smell; small flutterings suggested bats above them. When the way widened, light cascaded from every direction and the ceiling flew high up; colour and light flashed from crystals of ice and rock. In a few of the very high places John could see ledges, and on the ledges, undulation of ferns in breeze, or moving people, hard to tell from where he stood.

  Dream sequence, he thought and turned to Argilan. “Is this real?”

  “As real as anything else in your senses.”

  John reached out and scraped fingers along the rock as they walked. Sensation travelled back with absolute assurance. Wet. Slime. Cold. Hard. Sharp. This bit soft, powdery. All okay though, one hundred percent authentic, don't-buy-without-this-label real. He rubbed the dirt off absent-mindedly on his jeans leg. Real, his fingers reported.

  Following the old man, he climbed a staircase formed of stepping stones and risers cut straight into the rock floor. They entered a small chamber, similarly hand-hewn, hollowed out of the mountain that had swallowed him. To either side of the entrance, small tables were scattered with jars, books, dishes of half-eaten food, small implements. Above the tables, and beside them, were shelves and bookcases and unlabelled jars of dried plant material.

  John looked around. Three chairs and a pocked, stained old table. At the furthest end of the room, an open fireplace. A chimney cut straight into the wall above it, going through the chamber roof but letting in no light from the world of presumed sunshine above.

  How can I see in here? John wondered, looking about for light or lamp or candle.

  The old man bent to the hearth, kindling a small fire, and gestured towards the table. “Go on, sit. I'll be with you in a minute.”

  John slumped in the chair and put his head down in his hands. Weariness grew, promising a soft, slow lapse into sleep that would wake into the normalcy of his familiar world. He reasoned that if this was a dream, it was less and less a nightmare, and he could only let it carry him where it would.

  ***

  He woke in the room now warmed and golden-lit by fire, feeling solid wood beneath his arms, brushed his lank hair away from his eyes. Argilan came and sat in the opposite chair.

  “Sorry, must've drifted off,” John said.

  “Don't be, you needed rest.”

  John tried for answers again. “Look, you said you're Argilan. That tells me nothing, I can't make anything of that. I guess what I really need to know is where the hell I am.”

  “In Animarl.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I've been waiting for you. I am the Gatekeeper.”

  John snorted. “Really!” He sighed and looked away, waiting for the magical first breath of the other side of sleep to happen. It didn't. Meaning, a little voice insisted, that this was perhaps no dream. The old man started up again.

  “Listen to me. The burns on your face are not burns, the cuts to your hands are not really cuts.”

  “Yeah, right! Listen, Argilan, burns not burns, cuts not cuts, what crap! I fell down a hole, running from a fire! These cuts bled real blood, I smelt and felt it! Here, is this real?” He grabbed a glass of water the old man had pushed across the table and threw it in the giver's face.

  Argilan recoiled, smarting, then returned his own glass in like manner. “I think so, what about you?”

  So they sat there, faces dripping, mirroring the other's fierceness, till John’s vision cleared of film. He looked down at the pool building in his cupped hand, started shaking, and looked up laughing at the mirror laughing back.

  “Sorry, I don't know what the hell's happening. Where am I, really?”

  “As I said, in Animarl. And in a sense, you are nowhere; nothing has really happened to you since you died.”

  “Dead! I doubt it! Dreaming, ma
ybe; in an old mine tunnel with a madman, perhaps. Don't think I've lost all my wits, Argilan, I live by them, and by what my senses tell me.”

  “Then hear what they're trying to tell you now. You are dead. There is no going back on that. For you, there is only forward.”

  Forward. John thought a moment on that. It accorded with the way he felt life herded him. And to be conscious, hearing someone tell him he was dead, was somehow comforting, as though, through its unreality, it re-affirmed the fact he was dreaming. He decided this was one dream to be waited out and played along with.

  “So, if I'm dead, what does that leave undone? I don't believe in any of that afterlife crap, and you're plainly no angel.”

  “It leaves undone, your going on. You died in shock; that’s why you are here. All unready souls use Animarl as a resting place on their journey to the White Lands.”

  “All? There’ve been others?”

  “Oh yes, you aren't the first!”

  “You've seen them?”

  “Of course! That is what I do, assist.”

  “A woman: did a woman come through recently?” Even to find her in a dream would be something.

  “I have seen a woman, yes, though what you mean by recent is meaningless here, from the point of view of your world.”

  “Never mind that. This woman, what did she call herself?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing? She must have had a name!”

  “None that I recall. I know this sounds strange, but there wasn’t time for pleasantries. I wanted something from this woman, something she wouldn’t part with.”

  “What?”

  “Her life in Animarl.”

  Finding a flaw in the old man’s reasoning, John attacked.

  “But surely, if this place is what you say it is, she was already dead. What harm could come to her after that?”

  “Yes, dead, and fortunate to have arrived in Animarl whole. Most who come here are quite maimed, I’m afraid. Not by the manner of their death; the passage does it to them. Whereas you, and the woman, are virtually unscathed by your ordeal, and therefore perfect candidates for the Key I’m seeking.”