When the Dead Come Calling
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My hiding place is not a cave. It is a shrine. I can see that, now I’ve stopped running. I see it in the twigs bound together with twine, in the scratched crosses on the walls. Prayers barely legible chipped into stone: Please Help My Mammy; PD & RT 4EVER; RIP, everywhere RIP. I edge back to the entrance. Don’t want to be here. Can’t be. We used to whisper about this place – the cave that doesn’t exist – but here it is, cold and dark and stale, filled with the marks of people who have found it before me. Their words scrape the back of my neck but at least there is air at the front. My toes touch the pebbles of the beach, my heels the cave’s floor. My feet cross the threshold.
The cliff face is steep either side of my head. Jagged. Rusting like tetanus. I don’t know where the red comes from in these rocks, only that the walls get closer as they rise, make a pointed cavern the width of my arm span and the height of a block of flats – emptied for demolition but left standing, to rot, repainted on the inside with bird shit. Shouldn’t have left those windows open. My breath is a staggered echo, distant, so close it makes my skin shrink. I don’t want to look behind me, don’t want to see inside. RIP. Gouged, carved. Please help. Alone. Desperate.
On the horizon: a military carrier. Fat and full. Smoke belching from the back of it, the waves useless against its hull. It’s a darker grey than the grey above and below it, charcoal deep, while the clouds are bruised and the sea below frothy and spitting. The waves and I are separated by dunes of rock and shingle, barnacled, sharp when you least expect it – I should know, I ran the miles over them to get here. Keep low to the stone, graze your knees, let broken shells puncture your soles, just keep moving. The rain will wash the blood from these rocks.
Legs planted apart, stretching my arms out, one to the left, one to the right. This shaking has to stop. I keep my palms pointing outwards and close my eyes, control my breath. Roll my head back as far as it will go. Something clicks; joint, bone, cartilage. I open my eyes again. Straight ahead I can see through the gash of the cave’s entrance all the way to the sea.
But they will not be coming from the sea. They will be coming from the cliffs. ■