'We don't have much time,' she said.
The dunes grew as we trudged south. Couch grass and marram bound them together to a point where the sand was disguised altogether. Rocks reared up ahead, pleated like a grey cloak.
'That where we're going?' I asked.
Amy nodded. Her breath was coming in stiff little stitches now. The terrain was affecting us both. The stones were loosely packed and kept falling away from each footstep. There was no feeling of firmness beneath, as if the shingle were suspended over an eternity of space; the camber of the beach was working against us. By the time we got to the rocks, the sky was a deep blue-green, as if it were trying to take on the colour of the sea. The cave resembled an open wound in this light. A large, dark stain on the sand in front of it could only have been sea water, but it resembled oil, or blood. The place was like an accident site. There ought to be ambulances. Police cordons. Helicopters. I didn't like it at all, and I said so.
'I have to show you,' she said. 'You have to see.'
She'd pulled a large Mag-Lite torch from her coat pocket. She switched it on and focused the beam, trained it on the mouth of the cave. Crabs skittered across the rocks. The gaping cave entrance was untouched by the light. It was absorbing it, sucking it out of existence, bending it like a black hole, unwilling to allow us to see what lay inside.
'They came here in 1772,' Amy said.
'Who did?'
'The parents. And again, a hundred years later. And they were meant to come here in 1972 as well. But something happened. There was no sacrifice that year.'
'Sacrifice?' It was difficult to pay attention to what she was saying and pick a route through the folds of rock at the same time. If I lost my footing here, it might set my recovery back months.
'There's strong death... I don't know what to call them... echoes? Stains? Something, anyway. There's something giving me the mother of all headaches whenever I go near this place. So the other day I went inside.'
The rocks increased in size. I was spending so much time navigating a route around them that I hardly looked up at the great, wet O of the cave entrance. The rock was like old flesh, damp and grey, hanging in wrinkles and creases as if it had melted and then hardened. I felt loath to touch it in case it had the same moist, springy feel of perspiring skin.
'Who was being sacrificed?' I asked, as much to distract myself from that horrible yawning entrance. 'Why?'
'Children, of course,' she said. 'Why do you think there are so few around here?'
'They're all being killed?' I stopped, shocked. I thought of Kieran Love and Harry Parker. How many more? I didn't want to go in there with her. I imagined the bodies of children - bulldozer loads - packed up against the walls, stalagmites rising from their cold, blue skin.
'No,' she said, and she stopped too, to catch her breath. I didn't know what was worse: keeping an eye on the cave myself, or seeing her standing before it, like some crumb that the mouth had temporarily missed. I saw the shadows of sharp rocks beyond the entrance, rows of them, like the inward curving teeth of a shark. 'But if they were here? Who knows? I think the families have left here, and stayed away. This is no place to bring up a child.'
We entered the cave. The temperature plummeted. Amy's torchlight, so bright when shone in the face, was incapable of picking out much detail in here.
'What's this place called?' I asked.
'Bryning's Pit,' she said.
'Sounds charming. There are better words, I'd have thought. Aperture. Opening. Cave, for God's sake. Why can't people just call things what they are?'
'There are worse words,' she said.
'Who's Bryning?'
'No idea,' she said. 'Person who found it? Dug it out? Died here? Some guy. Some girl.'
We concentrated on one foot in front of the other, until our eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and our feet felt a little more confident. 'How do you know about 1972?' I asked. 'You said they were
meant
to come here?'
She was staring at the rock, feeling it with her fingers, really digging into its crevices, as if she might find something tucked in there, like the prayers to God posted at the Wailing Wall. She seemed to suddenly remember my question. 'It's like those circles in a tree that's been chopped down. Age rings? I feel the same... space between events. Big shock in 1672. Another hit a hundred years later. Ditto 1872. And then... not a blip. Not here, anyway. Kieran Love? Harry Parker? Yes. Hard impacts to the gut. But...
different
here. There was desperation behind it. Not the same. There was a calmness too. It was as if...'
She tailed off, and I thought she might have closed down, like a robot whose power cell has drained, or whether her pain had come back, thick and hard, cutting off her train of thought. Her eyes streamed. Could be cold. Could be pain. Could be memories.
'Amy?'
'It was as if these deaths here in the cave...' She took a deep breath. 'It was as if the people - the children - who died...
wanted
to die.'
We moved deeper into the cave. Whenever I looked back towards the entrance - the exit - I felt a brief pang of panic; the sky seemed to be getting darker out there. I was worried that it might degrade to the point where cave mouth and sky were indistinguishable. If we got lost in here and the tide came crashing in, we were finished. I thought maybe it was some kind of optical illusion. Perhaps a consequence of the eye coming to terms with the gloom inside the cave was that the outside appeared darker than it actually was. I hoped so, anyway, as Amy drew us deeper beneath the Suffolk earth.
She actually said, at that moment, or rather, muttered: 'Suffolk earth. Suffolk hate.' The acoustics were so good that I could hear every scrape of her feet. I thought I could hear her breathing. I thought I could hear the triphammer of her heart. Or it might have been mine. The beam of light picked out insane shapes in the rock. Moments of shocking pareidol that the mind rejected almost as soon as it had assimilated them. Creations made of rock and shadow that ought to have remained in the dark. But it was just rock, after all. I had to keep telling myself that.
'Hang on a minute,' I said. I reached out a hand for the torch. 'What's that up there?'
I'd seen something gleam, a reflection from the torchlight as Amy ranged it around the jagged rock. My teeth were gritted together, hard. I hoped it wasn't eyeshine, light reflected from the retina of some near blind beast that, even now, was tasting us in the air with its salivary glands. Some kind of bat. Something worse. It was that kind of cave. It was a cave to rattle the child in you.
'It looks like some kind of bracket,' I said, once I'd played the beam on its length. It was a rod of some sort, bolted crudely into the rock. There was a cup at the top.
'Gaslight,' Amy said. 'Victorian. Don't worry, we're on the right path. I'd find this place in pitch dark.'
There were more brackets, some with, some without the rods that had held the gaslamps. Soot from long-extinguished flames speckled the rock above them. There were other shreds of evidence of human presence here, although not nearly so old. Takeaway coffee cartons, a page from an atlas, a single glove lying in the wet like something boneless and dead. I found a walking stick propped up at a fork in the cave. Perhaps it had been used as a marker. We used it too.
Now the acoustics were changing, or something was changing them: interference up ahead. It wasn't long before I had to raise my voice to be heard above it. It sounded like trapped thunder. We turned a corner and the beam from the torch disappeared.
'My God,' I heard myself say. It was like stepping out over a precipice. I felt suddenly sick with the impact of it, and could no longer trust the feeling of firm ground beneath my feet. I felt as if we were falling and had to reach out. I found Amy's hand and gripped it.
There was weak ambient light in this open space, this cathedral of stone. I couldn't work out where it was coming from. Perhaps it was being generated by the rock itself, or by the torrent of white water tipping from the ceiling, hundreds of feet above. It was enough, at least, to see that we had emerged into a huge chamber. There was a lake being fed by the waterfall. Off to our right there was either an echo of that storm of water, or there was a second fall, taking the lake's overflow even deeper into the ground.
'There,' Amy called out. She was pointing at a rock that stood by the edge of the lake. There was something odd about it, something different. Unlike the other formations, this one seemed smoother in places, and darker too.
'This is where it happened. Every century.'
'What?' I asked. But I didn't want to know. 'I think we should go. My feet... I'm sure it's wetter on the floor than it was. I'm worried about the tide.'
'Sacrifice,' Amy said. Her voice seemed awe-filled, as if she could grasp the logic of such an act. 'Look.' She trained the torchlight on the underside of the rock. Iron manacles had been driven into it. They had corroded badly, but not to the point where you couldn't tell what they were. Above the stump of rock, visible on the cave ceiling, was a broad, treacly patch.
'More soot,' Amy said. 'Lots of it. This is where they did it, Paul. This is where those children died, where they were burned.'
'To what end?'
A shape reared up to the left. I shouted and stepped back, felt the cave wall like fingers digging into me, testing me for tenderness. It was as if one of the faces I'd seen in these ancient crevices had come to life. I was getting ready to run, certain we were going to be attacked, when it breathed, it spoke, and I recognised him.
'To pacify. To appease. The Craw. It sleeps. But then. Every century. It wakes. It needs. We must. If not. The village. Will sink. Like Dunwich. Everyone drowns.'
Jake came closer.
I started speaking, as much to try to stop his approach. I didn't like his being here. I didn't really like him. 'What do you mean, everyone drowns?'
'The Craw. It takes. But also. It protects. Without it. We die.'
'But there was nobody sacrificed in 1972,' Amy said.
'You know?' Jake asked. Even in the dark I could tell he was taken aback by her statement. A change in his voice, a halting sound to his step.
'She knows,' I said. 'Trust me. So explain that. Explain why we aren't up to our throats in fish and seawater.'
'Interim measures,' he said. 'Trickledown oblation. Subtle rituals.'
'Do you speak a language other than cock?' Amy asked.
'Ask him,' Jake said. '
He
knows.'
And I did. Of course, I did. It was in the boxes I'd been burning. All those unidentifiable organic nuggets and spurs, the photographs and letters. Everything drenched in hope and belief and good old human DNA. I was the stop-gap, or rather, the agent delivering these piss-poor substitutes. The Craw was all things to all men. Yes, it was the grievous booty in the boxes left for me to destroy, and a psychological golem created from the fear-clay of all these villagers' phobias. But the Craw was as much mine as theirs. The Craw was the shattered bird and the claw marks on the beach. The Craw was the disease, or the lack in me, the thing that was missing, that allowed me to see the awful repercussions from the near miss had it been an actual collision. The Craw was Flight Z.
'Bad place,' I said.
Jake nodded. 'Bad place.'
'But it's not working,' I said.
'It doesn't. Seem so.'
'What about Kieran Love?' I asked. 'What about Harry Parker? Don't they count?'
'Desperate measures,' Jake said. 'Didn't work. Not native.'
'Then what?' Amy asked.
'You have to wait another hundred years,' I said, pleaded, even. 'Twenty-one twelve.'
Jake's head shook. 'Look around. The weather. The water. Storm coming. Bad things. Moves are. Afoot here.'
I had him in my fists before I realised what I was doing. Amy tried to pull me back but all that happened was that we lost our footing and went down against the jagged edges and the growing puddles of water.
'What do you know?' I hissed at him. This close, he smelled of dry paper and brass polish. Under it I detected notes from the endless drab lunches that he filched from his carrier bags. The sardine paste, the processed cheese squares, the pickle, the egg. I remembered what he'd said to me:
Helped us. Burned shit.
I wondered what it was I'd burned of his. Evidence, maybe. Something that would connect him to the deaths of Kieran and Harry. Something that could lead me to Tamara. 'You know Tamara? You know where she is? Because if you do and you're keeping it quiet... if you've got her... I'll... I'll fucking kill you.'
'The Craw. Needs offerings. Desires flesh.'
'Where is she?'
'I don't. Don't know.'
'Then what are you talking about?'
'The Craw. Demands flesh.'
'Then give him yours!' I pushed him away and hobbled back to the mouth of the cave, my fingers itching with the need to damage something. Amy caught up with me and we walked without talking, volleying terse, laboured breaths. I kept my eyes on the ground and my hands in my pockets. I didn't care if Jake was following us or stayed put in the cave. He could lose himself in there and die for all I cared.