The Little Man

© Tom J Vowler 2007

It may not necessarily have been the biggest or the most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself. But now we must mention an important property of any copying process: it is not perfect. Mistakes will happen…
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Dad is doing his thing with the dark, telling us to hold our hands in front of our faces, asking if we can see them, which we can’t. We sit still – me, my sister and our classmate – the only sound the drip drip of mineral-rich water falling from stalactites, echoing round the pitch black chamber. We’ve heard this, my sister and I, so many times but it’s for Clare’s benefit.

Our Mum used to come when Sophie was alive, but now she stays at home with the curtains drawn, listening to the same audio novel over and over. We’re allowed to go in her room for an hour after tea. Sometimes she talks, others she just lies there while we tell her about our day. An episode, Dad calls it. My sister and I collect other names from the taunts at school.

When we asked Clare it threw her completely.

‘You scared?’ my sister said.

‘Of what?’

‘Bats and spiders,’ I said.

‘Shut up.’

‘Go on, Clare, go with the freaks,’ her friend said.

Freaks was the most benign of our labels but probably the most accurate. Mum used to say God had made us special for a reason.

We give up trying to see our hands and turn our lights back on. The chamber is vast. Dad once told us you could fit all the people in Devon in here if you packed them tightly enough, but when I did the calculations there was nowhere near enough room, however much you squashed them in.

We look in a crystal pool. Dad shines his light into the water and tells Clare about the blind fish. He tells her how they evolved without eyes, how they use touch to navigate.

‘What do they live off?’ she says.

I tell her that nutrients get washed in from above ground, but she only wants Dad to tell her, Dad who produces freaks but isn’t one himself. Becs and I ignore her and look for another pool we know, even though Dad tells us not to go off at all. Sometimes you can see shrimps. Their skin is see-through, so you can see all their organs, like in an x-ray. There aren’t any shrimps today, so we go back to the others.

We climb between the giant boulders that fell here millions of years ago and squeeze into a small passage. Dad leads and I go at the back, because I’ve done more caving than Becs. Clare goes in front of me and every time she gets a bit stuck and panics, she kicks me in the face.

After a while we get to my favourite place in this cave. You crawl along for ages thinking it’s just cold mud and rock, and then it appears from nowhere. We sit down and Dad tells us to turn our lights out again and begins.

‘Hundreds of years ago, there lived an evil squire called John Cabell, who was said to have sold his soul to the Devil. On the 5th July 1677 he died and the terrorized villagers buried him in a stone tomb. On the night of his internment a phantom pack of hounds came off the moor to howl at his tomb. On each anniversary of his death his ghost was seen leading the shrieking hounds across Dartmoor. To stop his soul escaping, the villagers placed a slab on the tomb and built a wall around it. Still there were reports of a strange red light glowing from behind the iron bars. The squire now had only one escape route, tunneling into the ground. But when he finally got into the cave system below, he got stuck between two rocks, where he’ll remain forever.’