The Martyr’s Curse. Scott Mariani

rough and stony. He advanced one cautious step at a time, feeling his way. He could have done with a brighter light, and was certain that the intruders had come a little better equipped than he was. Head-torches, maybe, or six-cell Maglites enhanced with LED bulbs that could slice through the murk as well as a car headlamp. His light was beginning to dim as the phone’s battery faded. Now and then it gave a little flicker, and its colour was yellowing. He might have ten more minutes before it gave out entirely, or he might have five. Either way, it wasn’t reassuring. He could smell and hear better than he could see.

      What he could hear was the echo of his footsteps resonating inside the dark space, and something else. A scuttling sound, furtive and intermittent. He raised the light higher and ventured forward a few more steps. His right foot made contact with something soft and mushy. It felt like stepping into a pile of rotten fruit. He shone the light downward, saw the glutinous yuck he’d stepped in and smelled its awful stench through the material of his shirt. It was the decomposing flesh of something furry, half-eaten and extremely dead. Now he understood the cause of the stink in here, and he understood the scuttling noises that echoed all around him.

      The place was full of rats. Hundreds of them, or thousands, everywhere. He saw their dark shapes flitting from shadow to shadow as they scattered and hid, disturbed by his presence. The chamber was strewn with their carcasses and bones. A few yards away lay the body of the biggest rat Ben had ever seen. It had to be two foot long from nose to tail, but what struck him more than its size was that it was deformed, twisted and apparently eyeless. They must have been living down here in the darkness for so many generations that they’d lost their sight.

      Ben had no great love for rats, but they possessed certain qualities it was hard not to admire in a morbid kind of way. When it came to survival skills, rats left humans far behind, simply because of their sheer adaptability. They could thrive in the very worst conditions, drink water that would poison most other creatures, devour things that not even a starving dog would go near. If required, cannibalism was not an issue for them. And that was how Ben realised they must have been living down here, subsisting off the flesh of their own kind. Which perhaps accounted for the deformities. Maybe eventually they would die out, given enough time, but they seemed to have managed to keep going for a few thousand generations at least. There must have been enough moisture in the dirt to keep them hydrated, just enough oxygen filtering in through minute cracks in the mountain to prevent asphyxiation. Millions of them, being born and surviving and dying and giving sustenance to their fellows, while the sorry saga of human history rolled meaninglessly onwards through the ages, above them and below them and all around them.

      Ben lifted his boot from the stinking ooze he’d stepped in and moved deeper into the cavern, straining his eyes to see in the slowly, steadily dimming light.

      Then he stopped and stood still and gazed at the sight that greeted him a little way further from the entrance.

      A wide section of the cavern floor was covered with human bones. Mounds of them, several feet deep in places. Ribcages and fibias and tibias and sticks of spine and skulls, all piled and tangled up. It was impossible to tell how many skeletons were strewn among the rocks and the dust, because so few of them were still intact. They’d fallen apart with age, or been picked apart by rats. Many of the bones were partially eaten away. There was no telling how many must have been gnawed into calcium-rich dust by generations of sharp little rodent teeth. Maybe they were too ancient now to offer any nutritional value to the rats. Ben didn’t know. All he knew was that he was looking at the remains of an awful lot of people.

      He stepped closer and shone his light down at the grisly boneyard. He knew how to tell a female skeleton from a male by the shape and relative width of the pelvic bone, and he could see female remains among the piled mass. Children’s bones were easier to tell apart, and he saw those, too. Then he looked more closely and saw more. Lengths of iron chain, red and pitted with corrosion, lay twisted and coiled among the human remains. Iron shackles were riveted at intervals along their length, still tightly clamped around the skeletal wrists and ankles of men, women and children alike. Iron plates bolted into the rock, with iron rings holding the chains securely to the floor. These people had been bound up like galley slaves.