Abaddon - Chapter 6

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 16, 2010

Ten minutes before closing time, we’re inside the Museum of the Pit again. I have paid good money to goggle at Hellenic Imperial Votive Tablet Number 59,993, once again.

The place is full of backpackers, much more so than normal. Why is it full of them? Because Pete and Vernon have been hanging around outside it for the past hour offering vacillating hippies wads of worthless Vzeng Na currency to pay their way into the exhibition, claiming they no longer need the money as they’re leaving town and can’t change it. The backpackers are lumbering around like moonmen among glass cases filled with delicate exhibits, and the museum commissionaires, unused to such volumes of visitors - particularly visitors who insist on wearing hundred-pound Bergens at all times - scurry around anxiously, trying to discreetly stand behind the bigger and more dangerous-looking individuals.

Meanwhile, we - who have quite small rucksacks, by comparison - have finally entered the Museum ourselves, and are skulking unobtrusively behind the Vzeng Na Mixed Infants’ bacofoil recreation of the pagan idol.

“D’you think they’ve recognized us?” says Pete to me furtively.

“Almost certainly”, I say. “But I think they think they’ve other things to worry about.” Gviong, for one, has already thrown me a flummoxed stare of recognition, even in this woolly hat and outsize Gore-Tex parka I’m inhabiting as a temporary disguise. I find the fact that he recognized me so quickly both sweet and flattering.

“Is it behind us yet?”

Pete throws a nervous glance back over his shoulder. “Just about.”

“And you’re sure it’s unlocked.”

He ums and ahs. “Er, you might need to push it a bit.”

This isn’t encouraging, but in the event it (it is, in fact, a cleaning cupboard) opens with only the merest of shoulder barges, and as I barge, some pimply Oxbridge twot on the other side of the room just happens to loudly inform his travelling companions that “Nietzsche is only Schopenhauer reinvented, yah?”, masking the noise.

Inside, it is dark and there are cleaning materials. Luckily, far too many cleaning materials - huge numbers of cardboard boxes which we promptly hide behind. It smells very unclean for a cleaning cupboard. Our rucksacks are unpacked rapidly to reveal caving and burgling equipment. No air cylinders, though. Vern has been pressured into leaving them behind.

“There is”, asserts Pete, “a dead rat in here somewhere.”

“Dead rats”, I say, “are not what I’m bothered about. I can live in here with a dead rat till closing time.”

“Well”, says Vern ominously, “what do we do to pass the time?”

“If one green bottle”, says Pete, “falls, however accidentally, off one wall, you are for it, Vernon Hollingsworth.”

In the event we pass the time by being bored stiff in a cupboard, though this is alleviated by the thrill of being bored stiff in a cupboard we’re not supposed to be in. For many hours, there is the sound of shuffling feet and voices saying “Doch Nietzche ist nur Schopenhauer in neuen Kleidern, das weißt jeder.”

Then, finally, there is silence. The Museum has finally closed for the day.

“What if the cleaners come round?” whispers Vern.

“This is a former communist country”, I reply. “If the cleaners are in evidence first thing in the morning, which they are, they will not come round again in the evening. By the smell of things, we were lucky they came round in the morning.” And as neither Pete nor Vern seems willing to do so, I sneak out from behind the pile of pine fresh windowcleaner, push open the cupboard door a fraction, and poke my nose out into the bathhouse.

Leaf litter of fallen Wrigleys wrappers. A collage of Nike prints. Rows and rows and rows of silent votive tablets lying in state in cases, saying things like MAKE ME RICH and KILL MY ENEMY.

“Why are you so interested in going down there anyway?” hisses Vern.

“Put it this way - if you saw someone fall a mile to certain death, and then ran into them to talk to only a day later, wouldn’t you be curious?”

This is no answer, of course, but it shuts him up. The room is empty. The door to the elevator cage in the corner is unlocked (actually has no lock).

“The elevator shaft is open once it leaves the Museum”, I tell Pete. “Girderwork. A thin man could climb through it.”

He nods, opens the outer and inner elevator doors, and examines their locking mechanisms.

“I think the door on the elevator itself locks solid once the car is moving”, he says. He turns his attention to the louvre door. “And this has to be locked shut before the car will move.” He pulls a wad of chewing gum out of his cheek and squishes it into the door lock. “Now it thinks it has a bolt inside it.” He reaches through the lift cage and pushes the BOTTOM button, having to snatch his hand back quickly as the lift jolts into motion and begins to motor downward. “Et voilà.”

And even he, a man I supposed ought to be comfortable dangling at dizzy heights, took a good long look into the gulf beneath his feet, and took a good deep breath to steady himself.

Then, he swung himself into space above the drop, clambered down among the cantilevers as if walking downstairs, unlooped a coil of rope from round his shoulder, and began securing it around a handy girder. Vern followed him down like a big Helly Hansen’d spider.

This part of the descent was not so bad - began to think the whole thing might be a cinch, like going down a big climbing frame. After all, people who go to, say, Stanage, go there with intent to deliberately target the most difficult parts of the face. These guys just wanted to get to the bottom.

Erm. Didn’t they?

We were soon standing at the base of the cagework, on the actual face of the saddle at the foot of the actual pinnacle that had the actual Church of the Angel on its summit. Above us I could see the actual single-arch stone footbridge built by yer actual Matthias Corvinus after two unsuccessful tries which both fell into the void during construction. He finally used an unnamed English cathedral mason who constructed a marble arch so close to being flat that a marble placed anywhere on it took over ten seconds to roll off. But roll it did, from any point on the surface, the whole bridge being as precisely cut and planned as any of the onyx statues of saints that flanked it on both sides of the gulf, nailing down the weight. Even the Mongols were impressed by the bridge, and let it stand while churches galore burned around it. Today the bridge is helped to stand by lengths of steel cable pinned through its masonry, which is cheating in my view.

But we were standing a good twenty or thirty metres beneath it . Looking up at it. From underneath.

Nearby, tents full of archaeologists dozed in the dark. From one of the nearer tents, a ratbag voice said: “Those fucking museum faggots are using the fucking elevator after hours.”

“Fuckers”, came a voice back.

We made our way to the edge of the gulf, difficult in the dark, and Pete began casting about for places to put his nuts with a head torch. There were cries of “TURN THAT FUCKIN TORCH OFF” and “FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, MAN, CAN’T YOU PEE STRAIGHT WITHOUT A LIGHT?” Eventually, Pete and Vern belayed the line to the base of the elevator shaft, which bent and whined alarmingly, but held. The rock was not good for climbing, but slimy and covered in patches of crumbling earth - not even one solid piece of cliff in places, but collections of frost-split gravel held together only by grass and soil. And the light was bad (for ‘bad’, read ‘nonexistent’). If I looked up and stared into the dark a little while, I could just about make out a pool of stars far above. Basically, Pete led the climb, Vern removed our protection all good-neighbourly behind us, and I scrabbled down between them making maximum use of the rope. I slipped two or three times; luckily, Pete’s nuts and bolts held. I tried to cover up my lack of experience by swearing at the slime and dark, and on this occasion at least they seemed to buy it. No idea whether they’ll buy it next time.

And so eventually, after what must be hour upon hour of scrambling, we finally arrive at the bottom of something.

It is not the bottom of the pit - that it cannot be. We’ve probably only gone around a hundred metres, an incredible distance for a novice climber like me who’s never been up anything more challenging than thirty feet of V Diff. But compared to the massive wound in the earth beneath us, it's a papercut. It is a shelf we're standing on, though, solid flattish ground, temporary respite whole handspans across. Room to stretch legs, maybe even lie flat to sleep. Pete says that we don’t need to sleep yet, but that we’ll do well to remember spots like this.

It also stinks to high heaven.

“Switch off your torches a minute”, says Pete. “And don’t put your weight on owt you haven’t felt out first. And what’s that FUCKING SMELL?”

As our eyes became accustomed to the gloom - it can take this long for the cones in the human eye to reach maximum sensitivity, as any astronomer lying on his back on a hillside squinting through a cardboard tube will tell you - the outlines of the underworld became more visible. Long black and white streaks of human and avian waste striped the rocks, some fresh enough to raise trails of steam. They streak down, down, down, converging, coalescing, until they sink into what is unmistakeably -

“A lake of shit”, says Vern; and he’s not wrong.

“It’s not marked on any maps”, complains Pete. He stares out into the dark. “Maybe it’s an optical illusion.”

“None of the maps are official anyway”, scoffs Vern.

“It must be yards across...”

“Tens of yards.” Vern seems to be trying to poke around it with what looks like a tentpole, which he must have taken from his rucksack. “It’s huge...”

“It has to be”, I say. “It contains all the accumulated bum waste of the entire city of Na. Must be an outflow somewhere, though.” I search the blackness for said outflow, but can’t see it.

“It can’t be a natural formation”, says Pete.

“It isn’t. It’s had two thousand years to form, like a pothole forms at the base of a waterfall.” I pause for dramatic effect. “A waterfall of poo.”

“I name this lake”, says Pete, “Lake Vladimir Pootin, on the grounds that it contains almost as much shit as he does. And I claim it”, he adds, “for Britain.”

Vern salutes. They perform an impromptu duet of Rule Britannia.

“Is there a way round it?” I say. And as I say it, I’m looking up at the arc of darkness obscuring the stars and thinking, what part of the city is above us right now?

“Think so”, says Vern from somewhere out there. I can see his headtorch bobbing. “Not bivouacking here, that’s for certain.”

Ah. So it was a tent pole.

“Do you often bivouac in caves?” I say.

“Frequently, in some of the really deep ones”, says Pete. “It can take days to get in and out.”

I look up again. “This is directly under the part of the edge that backs on to Victory Square.”

He grins. “Someone should tell the Americans. They’re going to be dipping their balls in the shit.”

I look down. “How deep do you think this pool is?”

He shrugs. “Can’t tell. Might be able to guess in daylight. Waterfall plunge pools are usually a metre or three at least. Why?”

“Do you think it could cushion the fall of someone dropping right from the top up there?”

He stares at the steaming cwm of ordure.

“I don’t know”, he says, shrugging. “Why? Did somebody?”

I name our new body of ‘water’ Lake Avernus. But I don’t tell either of them that. It is indeed, by Abyssal standards, enormous - maybe twenty metres across, perhaps ten or fifteen wide, a substantial bite out of the footprint of the pit. The Abyss wall behind it is set back in what, from here, looks to be a classic waterfall erosion pattern. It’s a wonder no-one has ever recorded that the pool existed.

“Maybe they were embarrassed”, says Vern as we finally rejoin him. “Maybe they didn’t want anyone to know they had a lake of cack down here.”

And at one end of the lake, there is a waterfall, though I’m loath to go up close and feel the spray on my face. It looks more like a sort of anaemic mudslide, and must ooze from the mouths of Lord alone knows how many civic sewage outlets far above. At the inward end of the lake, there is another waterfall, going down into depths which we prudently decide not to abseil down.

“I don’t think it would be a good idea to stay here longer than strictly necessary”, says Pete, and I agree. I’ve no desire to step on a discarded AIDS-infected heroin syringe or jagged fragment of Oracle Smoke bottle.

Suddenly, we hear Vern’s voice call from near the exit waterfall.

“What is it?”

“Footprints!” he yells back. “I’ve found fucking footprints!”

***

There is someone down here who isn’t us.

To detract from the general drama, it seems they also have a penchant for Reebok trainers.

There is more than one set of footprints, and they, or their feet at any rate, are all human. They come down to the lake, then leave it. Sometimes they are dragging heavy objects as they do so.

“Scavengers”, says Pete. “Like the people who live on Smoky Mountain in Manila, or the muck-rakers in old London. People who make a living out of other people’s shit.”

“They must know a way back up to the surface”, says Vern, then seems to think about this a minute and goes very quiet. Somehow the thought of human beings who live down here all the time seems far, far worse than the idea of people who just commute here daily.

Some of the footprints have shoes; some are barefoot. Some appear to be wearing odd shoes, one manufacturer’s logo on the left foot, another on the right. There is at least one odd pairing that appears on two separate pairs of feet so that if the owners of these feet pooled their shoes, they’d have two matching pairs between them.

“Why do they come here?” says Vern.

Pete shrugs. “Everything that gets chucked down the sewers ends up here. It’s a shit-shark’s Aladdin’s Cave.”

Pete and Vern begin following the footprints off into the dark to see where they end up. I am growing uneasy about this.

“I just don’t want to come up against these guys after dark”, I say.

Pete shrugs. But he doesn’t argue, which basically means he feels the same way as I do, but doesn’t want to admit it, because he’s a big strong tough hairy man.

The footprints, we discover, lead away from the lake and along a broad ledge, joining many other prints, leading not up but down. A small car could be driven down the path they walk along, were it not for Vern’s next discovery.

“Steps!” he yells incredulously. “The damn thing’s cut into steps!”

A Devil’s Staircase, spiralling round and round the Abyssal wall into the depths. The steps are there, all right. And what’s more, they’re worn with the pressure of many, many feet.

“The opposite of Jacob’s Ladder”, says Pete.

Vern doesn’t think it’s the Devil’s Staircase.

“Satan’s Escalator”, he says. “Have you ever noticed how the shops on the High Street always have escalators to take you in, but only stairs to take you out?”

Not far along the Devil’s Escalator, there’s a small waterfall which I call Nightingale Falls, where a whole gaggle of tiny night-birds are washing themselves in the water, twittering like fuck. Since the birds seem to think it’s OK, we risk it, and it seems clean enough. It’s amazing how much human ordure can creep onto your clothing in the pitch dark. After ten minutes or so, we’re cold and soaking wet, but clean. I am aghast at the fact that Pete and Dave just peel off every inch of their caving gear and stand there unashamedly probing their every bodily crevice, but after a few moments’ indecision, I join them. We can hardly see each other in the dark anyway. (But if they try probing any of my bodily crevices, they’re for it...)

At this point Vern suddenly supports himself with one hand on the waterfall wall and goes into a coughing fit so bad I expect to see bits of lung coming up. Pete v. concerned. Vern says he thinks it’s just hay fever. Makes a joke that there couldn’t be much pollen down here. Pete says it’s no joke, as there isn’t pollen but there are zillions upon squillions of bats, and the amount of airborne batshit in some caves can be v. high. This is normally fine, but can be v. dangerous if bats are infected e.g. with rabies. Vern goes white as a bleached sheet and stops coughing forthwith, bless him. Have a feeling he is now trying to breathe as little as humanly possible.

Who cut the steps? We have no idea. We’re certainly not about to try and find out till we’ve had a good night’s sleep. So we roll out big comfy waterproof sleeping bags and get on with the snoring and the lying recumbent. I thought this sort of thing only happened when pimply little adolescents played Dungeons and Dragons, but we actually do post watches and I really, really do see the necessity for them.

I can’t sleep during my allotted sleeping time for excitement, so I doze off during my watch. I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night. Out there in the dark, something is screaming. Maybe it’s an owl. I tell myself it’s an owl.

I’ve roped myself to the cliff so I don’t roll over in my sleep and fail to wake up from a falling dream. Penned these notes while I was on watch. Took my helmet off and put it down on a rock nearby so I could write by its light. Remember hearing from a friend who was in the army that a torch held in front of your body is the only point a sniper can see to shoot at in the dark. That may be why the police hold torches high up and reversed in the hand.

Hopefully, we will all wake up in the morning.