Hills loom out of the darkness up ahead. They form the foothills of a high rock face. There are caves: dark, jagged holes cut into the hillside. The girls pause, look back, wave. Then they bend over and enter one of the caves.
Abby increases her pace. She feels a light chill against the side of her face, and it is pleasant, keeping her cool. When she reaches the cave, she looks up at the sky — wishing that she could see some stars — and then follows them inside.
Darkness swallows her up. She feels like turning back, following the black leaves to the safety of the grove of trees, but realises that she has no choice but to carry on into this uncertain darkness. She hears water dripping down the cave walls; the hard ground is cold and wet underfoot. She can see nothing, only blackness. She holds out her hands, feeling her way deeper inside, and even though she expects to come up against granite walls, she feels nothing… she might be walking a path with a sheer drop on each side.
But that’s okay. She doesn’t fear death, not now. She has not been afraid of dying for a long time. In fact, she’s often flirted with death, taking too many drugs and sleeping with strange men in the hope that they might be killers. But nothing bad ever happened. She has led a charmed life since her daughter went missing, as if the forces of the universe have conspired to keep her alive, as a form of punishment for losing the only person she ever loved, the only human being who ever loved her as much as she never deserved.
Vague light up ahead.
She moves towards it, quickening her pace. Soon the backs of the heads of the girls resolve out of the darkness. She is closer than she thought; only a few feet behind them. She has the feeling that they have deliberately slowed their pace.
Tiny electric bulbs — like fairy lights — hang from wires along the cave walls. The light they shed is meagre, barely illuminating the space, but it is so much better than darkness.
Abby begins to glimpse markings on the cave walls: crude paintings of animals, buildings and people. She pauses before a representation of a grove of trees, and then, farther along the tunnel through which she is passing, she sees the ragged outline of what looks like the tower block at the centre of the Concrete Grove, the Needle.
But how can this be? These drawings are primitive, like the ones she’s seen on documentaries on television. Primitive Man, using inks made out of berries, would decorate the walls of his cave with illustrations much like these.
She stands and stares, unable to take it all in. How could shambling cavemen, dressed in the hides of wild beasts, even know about a place that has yet to exist — a housing estate tens of thousands of years in their future? None of this makes sense. She fights against the sight, trying to force it out of her mind.
She looks up ahead, along the tunnel, and sees the girls watching her. Their eyes glow in the weak light, but there is nothing behind them. In unison, they beckon to her. Then she hears the noise — a soft, slow humming sound. She tilts her head and stares over the girls’ shoulders, trying to catch sight of what is busy behind them. The darkness moves as if composed of a million smaller parts, each one spinning and twirling and making a pattern in the air.
“Tessa?”
No… it isn’t Tessa. It is not her daughter.
The girls steps aside, allowing her access to the back of the cave. Beyond them, the tunnel opens up into yet another cave, and then there is only darkness. She steps forward, moving past the girls, and is only dimly aware of the girls blending into the rock walls, becoming part of the cold, damp stone. There are no electric bulbs here, just the cold air, the constant dripping, and a strange, barely perceptible luminescence which emanates from the rock itself.
She walks across the uneven ground, over a small, natural walkway that spans an underground stream. She looks down, into the rushing water, and sees faces staring up at her through the churning white foam. She does not recognise any of the features, but she feels a connection to their pain. They are trapped here, in the endlessly running stream, but they are not unhappy. Their pain has brought them here, just as her own pain has allowed her to access this strange, desolate place. It is a pain that has no place in the real world, the world she’s left behind; but here, underground, and even in the greater world beyond, through which she’s passed, it is welcomed.
Those faces belong to dreamers, and they are dreaming of themselves.
At the end of the walkway is a low stone plinth, a pedestal carved out of the solid rock. As she draws closer, Abby sees that there are two tiny hummingbirds hovering above this plinth, facing each other. When she reaches them, she goes down on her knees. It feels right to show respect to the wonder before her. It isn’t prayer, exactly, but it is a subtle form of worship, a willing act of subjugation.
One of the birds is black, the other is white. No other colours mar their purity. Their wings move in a blur; the beating of those wings equal, the sound they make a single endless note. Not one of the two birds is stronger than the other. It is unclear whether they are mates or enemies. They simply hover there, balancing what at first she thinks is a diamond between the tips of their beaks.
She shuffles forward, not caring that the skin of her knees is torn by the rough stone. Bending forward, she inspects the scene more closely. The black hummingbird is pure black. The effect of looking at it is hallucinatory. She feels as if she is staring at a hummingbird-shaped hole in reality, and glimpsing the utter blackness beneath. The white hummingbird is so bright that it almost blinds her to stare directly at it, so she is forced to look askew. Yet, curiously, it sheds no actual light. These are not colours: they are an absence of colour. And they are locked into a battle that can never have a victor.
The thing she initially thought was a diamond is shaped like a teardrop. It is tiny, but it draws her gaze, growing massive at the centre of her vision, like a black hole sucking towards it all of time and space.
“It is a teardrop. It’s a frozen tear…”
She has no idea who has shed the tear, whose sorrow has given birth to such a magical thing, but there is no doubt in her mind that it is here, underground, in this dark cave, protected by — or perhaps imprisoned between — the twin hummingbirds, one black, the other white. Everything is focused on this scenario; this is the pivot around which everything else turns, and she’s been given a glimpse of the mechanics behind the universe.
Behind her, the three girls giggle softly.
She stares deep into the frozen teardrop and sees it alclass="underline" tectonic plates shift, carving up the planet; icebergs collide; caverns fill with seething magma; above the surface, dinosaurs roam, then die, take flight to live in the trees; monkeys come down out of trees and begin to dream the dreams of humanity; and this place is born, it comes into being on the strength of those first fleeting dreams; the first tear that is shed in this place is encapsulated, frozen into a solid gemstone, and it becomes the centre. Balance is achieved; eternal, everlasting, a fulcrum upon which nothing will ever turn, because the energy will never tip one way or the other.
“Is this place the dream the world has when it’s sleeping, or was the world dreamt into being by that grove of trees out there?” She is talking to herself and doesn’t expect an answer.
The teardrop shimmers; the opposing hummingbirds are unchanging, infinite.
The girls giggle again. The sound is eerie yet strangely comforting. It reminds her of her daughter.
When she turns around to confront the girls, to chastise them for sullying the purity of this subterranean grotto, she is back inside her daughter’s room. Shards of fractured moonlight shine through the window, their brightness making her wince. The sky is overcrowded with silly stars, each one of them a dead world, a place where life will never be possible.