The Fall of Man

Part III chapter 13

Chapter 13

Time passes slowly. Eve focuses on the breathing patterns of her two cellmates, and tries to picture their positions. The old man hasn’t moved in all the commotion. He remains slumped directly across from her. From the scrabbling sounds, she deduces that the boy has shifted around to sit in the third empty corner of the tiny room, away from the nothing that was the doorway a moment earlier.

“Rat?  Is that your name?”

Her words seem to hang in the thick blackness. They rebound between the solid stone walls, and hover in the void like fading hummingbirds.

“It’s a pet name, love – ‘scuse the pun. Short for Gareth.”

The voice sounds like gravel, ancient and tired as the night. She turns towards the old man’s position, trying to visualise an outline in the shadows. Sinister inky patterns swirl wildly for her imagination.

“Why doesn’t he speak for himself?”

“He’s mute; they took his tongue before he was knee high. Didn’t like his mam, see.”

“He tried to help me. But - I didn’t understand… I thought he was going to hurt me.”

“He’s a good lad. I’ve known him all his life. Not like some of those others-”

“Who are you?”

“William.         William Davies, at your service.”

“William?”

“Bill, then. Old Bill, they calls me.         You could say I’m a bit of a feature down here – part of the furniture...”

Eve imagines a creased smile accompanying his kindly tone across the small room.

“But what’s- ”

The door swings inwards with a clang, illuminating the cell and its occupants with a stark and unforgiving light. The old man’s cloudy blue eyes sit beneath knotted eyebrows and a long, matted grey mane. His tangled hair has apparently woven itself into one big conjugal mane behind his head, and provides him with a pillow where he slumps against the wall. His beard trails in wispy fronds of grey and black down his front, like the tatty coat of a dishevelled and ancient badger. He is draped in a patchwork mass of layer after layer of soiled blankets and threadbare clothing. In a flurry of activity, two burly silhouettes swagger in and haul Eve up onto her knees. She is too tired to protest. Her hands are quickly and efficiently bound behind her back with a nylon rope that pinches the skin of her wrists, then she is hauled up and onto her feet. Her right ankle twinges in complaint.

“Come on, girlie. Let’s go meet the boss…”

Eve hobbles silently between the two erect figures. Terrified, she has no desire to engage with them. Instead, with her face down, she tries to concentrate on the twists and turns their feet are pacing out against the briskly moving ground. One rough hand is clamped on the back of her neck and another propels her firmly by the binding around her wrists, down the rat-run of dingy corridors.

Suddenly, both hands come to a standstill in front of a door-sized opening, which is screened by a gently swaying mass of tiny beads. In between each of the beads, a pinprick of amber has been caught. With a shove, she is pushed blinking through the tinkling curtain and into the light.

Beyond the curtain she is confronted by a gigantic, sweltering cavern. Eve’s first impression is of being inside a giant pearly crustacean’s shell. There are no sides and no dimensions to the sculpted space; the scalloped chasm is as ephemeral as a vast, tethered cloud. It feels as though it was not built but carved, scooped bite by bite out of translucent chalk. Everywhere she looks, undulating shelves flow up and down the sides of the chamber, like waves lapping at a shoreline. All of these surfaces are lined with a dizzying sea of fossils; bones of every size and shape. They rise and fall to form ivory stalactites and stalagmites in mounds where they have been gathered. The ossuary is illuminated throughout by flickering candles, and pools of wax cement the ghoulish mounds into congealed forms, lending flaxen flesh to the skeletal constructions. Dancing light and shadow emanate in equal amounts from bony sockets and ribcages all about the place, like the shifting camouflage of an army of prowling tigers. Grimacing skulls stare back at her with empty eyes from every direction. Too many to count, they are unmistakeably human. The macabre collection exudes death on the scale of an entire city.