What if you hadn’t come along? What if you had simply just said… “no”?

 

“No,” the word rumbles around your mouth, tongue thick. “No.” A little louder this time. “NO!” It’s echoing around the cave now, the stone soaking up the scream and throwing it back at you.

 

It’s no use saying it now, though. Not when the old man is lying before you, pale and cold and awash in his own blood.

 

You’re on your knees. There’s pain, so you must have fallen to them, but there’s a blank in your memory. Your scream’s still reverberating into the dark. Blood seeps into your jeans. Not yours. His.

 

The sea thumps against the cliffs, rising higher and higher as the minutes tick by. The rhythmic beat of it reminds you of a heart. You claw across his chest, feeling for the steady heartbeat that you know you won’t find, but hope is a strange beast and won’t be beaten down.

 

Of course his chest is unmoving. Just in the same way that his eyes are unblinking, staring glassy grey at the rough stone above you.

 

You’re shivering. The fleck of rough sea spray is gradually seeping through your thin shirt. You can taste the salt of it.

 

“Idiot.” You push to your feet, not knowing whether you’re saying the words to yourself or to him.

 

Both, more than likely. After all, he’s dead, and you’re going to die.

 

Your fists clench. You’re going to die. Here in this godsforsaken cave, with no one but a corpse and seagull circling on the wind far out at sea. And it’ll be drowning, you think, with the way the tide’s rising. Would that be more preferable to exposure? Possibly. Probably quicker.

 

You look about the cave. It’s sparse, but that’s exactly what brought you – him – here. Right now, you don’t give a damn about that. You just wish there was a rock big enough to weigh you down. It’ll make death quicker, you think.

 

The floor is damp. Glossy with sea weed that slips and slides under your trainers. The downfall of the man at your feet.

 

“Idiot.” This time it’s firmly aimed at the old man.

 

You stare down at him. The wind’s getting up and tugging at his fine white hair that’s mottled with blood, and the shirt that was neat and crisp at 5 o’clock this morning when he turned up your hotel room, waving his leather notebook and shouting about finding “it”.

 

One hour and forty-two minutes. That’s all it took for him to go from such life to…this. Less than two hours and some slippery sea weed.

 

Gods. You lean over him. He’s still holding onto that bloody notebook. Ha. It really is bloody now.

 

That dark bit of humour makes you stop, hand hovering over him. You should be feeling…more. You think. Death is a distant concept. It happens to elderly relatives. It happens tragically to friends of friends of friends. It happens to people who lived long ago, whose skeletons you now dig up and analyse for a living.

 

You’ve never seen someone die. And certainly you’ve never experienced such sudden, unexpected death. You’ve never faced your own death head on like this.

 

So yes…you should be feeling more. Instead you’re just numb. On the outside, as the sea spray gets thicker and more insistent, and on the inside. Numb and making dark jokes about your dead mentor, who until forty-five minutes – no, you check your watch, fifty minutes – ago was full of enthusiastic life.

 

You’re still leaning over him, trying to avoid his staring eyes, but they keep catching your attention like a lamp in the dark.

 

“We shouldn’t have come here,” you tell him sternly.

 

You use – used – the same voice when he left tea bags on the work surface of the small kitchen the department – that is, you and he – shared on campus.

 

He doesn’t reply. He never used to reply with the tea bags either. Too busy scribbling in the damn bloody notebook. Ha. It really is blo – you catch yourself this time. Give yourself a frown. That’s better. Have some decorum. It’s the least he deserves.

 

“Sorry,” you grumble and you detach the notebook from his clammy, clawing hand.

 

You turn away from him. Mainly because you don’t want him to see you read his notes. And also because the wind really is picking up and the waves are lapping the cave entrance. You don’t want to be reminded of your looming death more than you really need to be.

 

You’re trembling as you open the scratched leather cover. The edges of the pages are tinged yellow and already damp. Gods know how old the notebook is. On the first pages, the ink is faded and you have to angle it towards the grey light filtering in from the cave entrance to even attempt reading it.

 

His handwriting hasn’t changed in the years – what, it must be decades really – since these first pages were written. It manages to swirl and loop but remain neat, in that old-fashioned way.

 

After the first page, you throw him a frown. And then retract it. It’s not just his fault. You could have put an end to all this at 5 o’clock this morning. You could have said, “No, I’m going back to sleep, thank you very much. If you want to go down there, we can put an application together and fund it properly.”

 

But you didn’t. You shoved on your jeans, picked up a crumpled shirt in the dawn half-light and followed him out of the hotel like the good mentee you are. Always eager to help!

 

Ah, but he would have gone down here by himself anyway, wouldn’t he? Stubborn old man. And don’t pretend that you came down here blindly. You were intrigued. You’ve always been intrigued by this little notebook. You hoped to be The One: the first to learn his secrets, the first of his many, many mentees to be truly brought into his confidence.

 

But from that first page, the notes make so little sense to you. Symbols and doors. Scribbled longitude and latitude coordinates. Closer to the ravings of a madman, than the tidy notes of an academic.

 

You glance between the body and the pages.

 

Your mouth twists as a tremor runs through you. You and he, you’re the seekers of truth. Not purveyors of fantasy. And yet as you skim page after page, the wind trying to tug the paper from your grasp, you realise that this is exactly what he was.

 

The tremor intensifies and your tears mottle the paper, sending the ink into cloudy plumes. You press your shirt cuff onto the pages, trying to dry them, even as more tears fall.

 

He was a brilliant mind, you thought. The greatest academic of the era. You thought. Your career would skyrocket under his tutelage. You thought. You thought. You thought.

 

You launch the book against the cave wall. The thud barely echoes. Then you rush over and grab it from its resting place on the slimy ground.

 

You don’t hug it tight, but you do wipe the damp from its cover.

 

The tears are gone as abruptly as they started. You thought you had coped well with the reality of the situation, before, but it’s now dawning that you hadn’t coped at all.

 

Your life will end today.

 

No more days spent in trenches, or hiding from the summer rain under gazebos held together by duct tape and determination. No more scrubbing mud from under your fingernails, and beers after a long day in the sun. No more days in the library, trying to summon the courage to ask out the cute librarian who always seems to smile wider at you than at the other academics. No more tea bags left on countertops. No more dusty pages and ancient languages. No more runes and relics.

 

You’re on your knees again. You don’t feel pain or cold anymore. Not whilst inside, your chest feels like it’s tearing. You want to scream, but all that comes out is a sigh that the wind whisks away before you can hear it.

 

The churn of the sea is louder. The tip of every wave creeping ever further into your resting place. The wind is wilder, even the seagull has departed, so now nothing will witness your passing.

 

You’ll be – you and him – one of those strange disappearances that after the shock’s worn off, your colleagues will bring up after a few glasses of wine at Christmas parties, wondering what on earth happened to you that later summer morning. You might even feature on a documentary. Conspiracy theories abound.

 

Your shoulders sag. You imagined if you were ever on a documentary, you’d be the one doing the talking. Surrounded by books. In a leather, high-back chair. Discussing the ins and outs of Viking invasions and their effect on the indigenous population. Dismissing – with a dry, haughty laugh – the notion that they wore those ridiculous horned helmets.

 

Gods, what’s happening to you? There’re more important things to think of than idle career dreams. You slap yourself. A real stinging hand around the cheek. It’s enough to drive away the self-pity.

 

The sea’s sloshing in the cave entrance. For a moment, you consider swimming. But the turbulent waves wash away that idea before it can really take hold. You’d be dashed against the cliffs, or sucked under before you could make any headway. And besides, you were never a strong swimmer.

 

The water’s is grabbing at the old man’s ankles. You can’t have that. You’re in this together. With the book tucked under one arm, you drag him away from the entrance, slipping and sliding on the lethal rocks. He’s a dead weight – ha! – and by the time you reach the back of the cave, your forehead is dripping with sweat. You drop the damned notebook in his lap. Let him keep it.

 

You slump, back against the hard rock, and, together, you wait.

 

The waves inch their way towards you so methodically that, after ten minutes, you can predict where the next will reach. And once you’ve worked that out, there’s not much more to look at. You stare at the ceiling, head rocking back so that the hard knobs of stone massage your scalp and –

 

What’s that?

 

You squint.

 

Without the years of sifting through dirt, meticulously searching for tiniest shard of evidence, you probably wouldn’t have spotted it. You stand, to get a better look, and there’s no doubt.

 

It’s a carving, no bigger than your palm. A simple circle cut into five pieces, like a pie. And…no.

 

You shake your head. But all those years have trained you for this. Your memory for things you’ve glimpsed. Of putting together clues to create a whole picture.

 

You’ve seen that symbol before. In fact, you saw that symbol – you check your watch – twenty-three minutes ago in amongst the ramblings of a mad professor.

 

“What the…”

 

You snatch the notebook out of the old man’s lap.

 

Yes, here it is. It’s unmistakably the same symbol.

 

Your gaze jumps from the carved rock, to the notebook, to the old, dead man.

 

“What the…?” you say again, because what else can you say?

 

Your brain goes into overdrive. The same way it did when you thought you were digging up a burial site, but only found shards of animal bone and chipped stone.

 

What’s happening here?

 

A dead professor, who until eighteen minutes to seven this morning was convinced he was about to make the discovery of his career.

 

A notebook of fantasies, symbols and wild theories.

 

A mysterious carving, matching a symbol inked lovingly into the fantastical notebook.

 

There’s only one explanation. Perhaps the old man wasn’t mad. Perhaps there is something in this cave. Gods, you’re about to die, but your heart is pounding, the thrill of a mystery coaxing a smile – a smile! – onto your face.

 

You take a step, and only then do you realise your feet are wet. The sea has reached you.

 

It’s soaked into your trainers and is just starting to dampen the ankles of your jeans. Your feet are already turning numb. Maybe hypothermia will get you before you drown.

 

But you’ll be damned if it gets you before you solve the old man’s riddle. You ignore the sea, sloshing ever higher up your legs and turn back to the notebook.

 

There are other symbols written there. All circles cut into slices, in varying numbers. You cast your eye around the cave. Bloody hell, it’s dark now. Darker even that it was at dawn. The wind, thankfully, can’t reach you here at the back of the cave, but you can hear it screaming away outside.

 

You know what you’re looking for now, though, and it takes less than a minute to find the next symbol. It’s etched high up on the back of the cave. How did you not spot it beforehand? Ah, yes, the shock of death.

 

Well that shock’s worn off now, and before you know it, you’ve found all seven of the circles outlined in the professor’s notebook.

 

“Well, now what?”

 

Because although the old man had the habit of getting extremely excited about the smallest of discoveries, this morning went beyond even his usual enthusiasm. 5 o’clock in the morning! You don’t wake colleagues up at that time for a few engraved circles. There’s something more to this.

 

He doesn’t answer your question, so you flip through the pages.

 

The sea’s up around your knees by the time your brain fully accepts what his notes are telling you.

 

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

 

He isn’t.

 

“A magic door?”

 

You brandish the book at him.

 

“A. Magic. Bloody. Door.”

 

He shifts and you jump, the salty water splashing up around you.

 

But he’s not alive. It’s just the waves, picking up his empty body, tugging it back out to sea.

 

“Oh no you don’t. You’re not leaving me here alone.”

 

You push him back to where you’d propped him up before, and stand in front of him, so he bobs in the same place.

 

You turn your attention back to the notebook. It’s impossible to keep it dry. Not with all the splashing and the waves creeping ever higher. When you move, you have to wade now. And it’s chill. Icy. How can water be this cold? You’re shivering so much that the neat handwriting judders in your hand, it’s hard to focus any more.

 

You’ve never been one for experiments. You like facts. Order. Doing something on a whim – like heading down at the crack of dawn to a remote cave – makes you nervous. But it’s either try something or die, right now. So, you suck in a deep breath and say the words in front of you.

 

Your voice starts small. The words are unfamiliar. Not a language you’ve ever heard of, let alone learnt, and you can’t help the prickle of self-consciousness that comes with reading out loud.

 

“Eff aba tra-orla lai.” You’re stumbling over them, the strange sounds on your numb, numb lips. “Eff aba der so. Eff aba leen riba-def. Eff aba den no.”

 

Nothing happens. Well of course it didn’t. But the sea’s around your waist, and it’s really fighting to take the old man away from you. And you can’t have that. Not after all this. All those decades of work, all that life and passion, wasted just because you didn’t give it another go.

 

So you say the words again, and again, and again, and as they become more familiar you realise there’s a rhythm to them. You still don’t understand them, but they sing from your lips, and soon you don’t even need to read them. They roll out to a beat of their own, mournful, powerful, peaceful.

 

You’re singing them for him. To the old, dead, professor. You think of the tea bags left on counter tops, and his fluffy white hair. Nimble, ink stained fingers flicking through books and the contagious excitement that was so at odds with his stately manner.

 

To the late nights in the library. The shared passion of discovery. The need to understand, to learn, to reach for more.

 

Tears pour down your cheeks, but the incantation has stolen your voice and it remains steady. The words echo around you, the sea vibrating with their power.

 

Wait.

 

The sea…vibrating?

 

How you don’t stutter, you don’t know. But the song continues even as you look around you. The waves have been quelled, and instead the surface ripples, as if a stone had been thrown in it.

 

There’s a grinding noise in the wall behind the old man.

 

You take a step towards it, looking around at those strange little symbols, because they’re…they’re glowing.

 

Your voice gets stronger. What you’re doing, you don’t know. Can’t be possible. But whatever it is, you’ve stopped the sea and…and what was that about a door?

 

As soon as the thought hits, a rectangle appears on the cave wall, through which light, like that of a brilliant summer morning, beams.

 

In the gloom, that light near as blinds you. The words on your tongue fade away. Their job is done, you suppose.

 

“Are you seeing this?”

 

Of course he’s not.

 

“It’s a bloody door. A magical bloody door.”

 

You wade right up to it, one hand keeping the book dry, the other holding tight onto the old man’s arm.

 

The crash of the waves pulls your attention away. The water’s pouring in now, as if the words had held the sea at bay and the silence has freed them.

 

Past your chest, up to your neck. You’re holding the book high above you, feet scrabbling for the rocky floor below. The door. It’s the only way to get you both out of here.

 

And then the waves take their chance, and tear the old man from your grip.

 

“No!” The word is barely a gasp, because you can’t reach the floor now.

 

You stretch for him, but he’s floating back down the cave, bobbing with the current. You flounder. The door and the unknown, or the professor and certain death.

 

Whether it’s sea or tears on your cheeks, you no longer know. He’s going.

 

No, he’s gone. He left you – you try to look at your watch, but the water’s got into it and it’s just flashing an error message – a while ago.

 

He left. He’s gone.

 

This adventure is up to you now.

 

“Goodbye,” you try to say through a mouthful of salty water that makes the word come out choked.

 

Then you push on the rock.

 

It swings forward, sucking you into the light.

 

THE END