Hidden Depths

He lay in the tent, willing himself to move. In a minute. In another minute. By now, at home, in the warm and the dry, he'd have already been driven from his bed by the radio, if indeed it was as late as he thought it was. Rain pattered intermittently on the canvas, reminding him that, however cold it was in here, it was much worse outside. Grassy footsteps approached his tent, accompanied by the swish-swish of waterproofs. "Rick," called a voice, not too intrusive but with enough power to wake him up, if he wasn't already. "Ri-ick," it repeated with an ironic lilt to it. He heard a third intake of breath and, before his companion could holler again, grated sleepily: "Yes. I'm awake." "Rick, it's 9.30. Time we were up an' at 'em." It didn't feel like 9.30. The grim greyness of the morning was twilight through the tent walls. It felt more like evening: maybe the colour of the way home from early drinking at the Red Lion. That led him on to the thought that the nearest pub was over an hour's walk away, which (despite him having no urge to start drinking) struck him as such a miserable notion that he caught himself rolling over to go back to sleep. Rick mumbled something that sounded sufficiently resigned to his fate; it carried easily over the grass and, from the grunt that returned to him, seemed to satisfy Tony in the next tent along. He tested his muscles against the groundslept aches he felt on every joint that had borne his weight for another minute or two, steeling himself against the damp misery ahead of him. Finally he eased his way out of the sleeping bag, one wriggle at the time. and began the tortuous process of getting dressed, all the time trying not to bump into the sopping flysheet and pour water into his haven from the elements. Clutching a beaker of nasty coffee and some breakfast bar, Rick squinted at the folded and re-folded map, willing his eyes to wake up. The survey was barely half-finished, despite the mass of data they had collected between them. Much of what they had at their fingertips now, neither of them understood. That was fine: to be expected, in fact. Leave that for the ageing computers back in York. It was an article of faith that anything discovered with care and attention would eventually be of some use. The department's systems could churn up the data, strain out the dead mash, and distil something more easily consumed from what was left. For now, they followed the instructions fieldwork had on its wrapper, heading over to the cove yet again, staggering with boxes, assorted probes, and lengths of cable. Millennia of running water had fashioned from the rock a wide parabolic cliff, apparently clad with oversized, weather-worn limestone blocks. Centuries of walkers had made surprisingly little impact on its surface. Yet the slightly more acidic rain of the past few years might be having a much deeper effect. Caves, too deep and too narrow to pothole, might be opening up. A few man-sized lumps of lime had subsided, and one researcher, an archetype with unkempt hair and the electric buzz of the maybe-correct, the untested oracle, had prophesied the collapse of the whole limestone pavement. Unlikely, but possible and so to be tested. The effect it would have on the tourist trade alone won them a sizeable grant. "I'll go up to the top. You should be able to see me when I round the top of the stairs. Call me when I'm getting close to where we sounded for depth yesterday. OK?" Rick nodded at Tony, blowing onto his hands. The wind bit at his skin, and the rain's chafing batter chewed over the remains. He felt thoroughly miserable and, as Tony moved towards the stairs heading up the shallow tail of the cove, he wandered towards the middle of the shadow of the huge no-manmade cliff, stretched above him parabolically. Surveying in October had seemed like a good idea back in August. Firstly, it was best to find out as soon as possible if something was going on; secondly, off-season was much more convenient for this scale of investigation (thirdly, on the day of the planning meeting the sun was blazing through the conference room windows). Two men against a party of tourists would never cope, would either waste time in the field chasing the public out of it, or waste time later throwing out bad data, false echoes from kicked stones or stout walking-sticks. One reason not mentioned out loud was that the less the interest, the better: it was exceedingly bad press for anyone to find out that the ground beneath them might, at any moment, plummet through itself some hundreds of feet. Rick wondered how much of a cover-up he was currently taking part in. Why was he here? What had led him, from a degree in engineering and four years' work for two survey companies, to this godawful Yorkshire... sod, perpetually covered in whirling mists and sheep? He walked desultorily a little further then, looking up, realised he was at roughly the midpoint of the cove, some hundreds of yards distant. A thought formed in his head. The thought was childish, but it wouldn't go away. He grinned at its childishness, and stared at the rough stone surface, bending all around him, its focus pretty much entirely occupied by Rick's body. He scanned the lines of the rock: it looked right, but he walked an arbitrary few steps forward. There. He sucked in air and held it. He felt his ribs stretch apart, his lungs expand under the pressure. Then, he breathed in even further, a tiny, desperate gasp, and held it again. And again, still further. His face began to purple and there were dots before his eyes, and just before he felt too dizzy to stand he bellowed every last wisp of his lungs in a primal roar, hurling everything out through his vocal cords and away from him. He felt the guttural vowel bounce and crash its way out of his throat. In that split second, he envisioned himself borne away by the echo of his own voice, coat and hair billowing, eyes blown shut. Visions too touched a deeper part of his mind, worrying him about tiny caves, many tiny caves, shaking and surprised into motion by his voice. And deeper still was the worry that Tony might wonder what the bloody hell he was doing. But he swept all these aside, and, lost in the moment, heard his own voice return to him from all around. A chorus of faint cries all acknowledged that he, the cliff, its caves, its grassy tops and knuckled roots and all the rest of the landscape still existed. Possessed and summoned by his multiple selves, he imagined his bones rattling in their joints, and grinned into an gale that wasn't there, that his shout was too weak to create. As he relaxed his stance, which had become Christlike with unselfconscious melodrama, he ignored the polite cough from his radio, the signal that Tony had indeed heard and was probably wondering what the hell was going on. Rick, though, unembarrassed, looked round at everything as if he had just returned from another world, and thought: maybe there had been a good reason to come here after all.