The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

of caves not far from here, where they project art onto the walls. It’s supposed to be amazing.”

“Great idea!” exclaimed Bertie. “Mum mentioned it too—I’d love to go, if anyone else is up for it?”

He leaned back to better look around the table: a full house of nodding heads. Nobody mentioned how stifling the château had seemingly become, but they were packed into their two cars within half an hour.

The landscape flicked past them like a showreel of greenery and bauxite, jutting cliffs and the odd crumbling tower above the canopy. They drove with the windows slightly down to take in the aroma of cypress bark warming in the sunshine. Effie almost purred.

The day was so glorious it was easy to shake off the strangeness that had enveloped them at the house, to leave their unanswered questions behind its stolid wooden doors.

They came to the caves—an old quarry, in fact—at the foot of a steep hill, on top of which a village perched in readiness for lunch. The gray cliff face rose impassively above the entrance to the caves, although it was the void at its base—a gaping maw with a queue snaking out—that seemed more impressive somehow: a proscenium arch of only blackness. Effie felt her insides constrict a little at the fullness of that emptiness.

At the head of the queue, Lizzie negotiated tickets for the group, just as she and Dan would have done had things turned out differently. One by one, they filed through a narrow metal turnstile and stepped into the blackness.

“They highlight a few different artists every month,” Lizzie declaimed, tour guide–style. “This month is”—she checked the leaflet she had been handed with her receipt—“Bosch and Brueghel.”

“Oh, very cheery,” said Effie, a slow, cold sweep of dread washing over her in the dark. She reached for Ben’s hand, but he had shifted beyond her in the queue on a wave of other people.

She could make out little other than the faces of her friends in the dim light of the tiny bulbs dotted along the ragged walls of the cave. They downlit a path from the entrance into the body of the deserted quarry, deep beneath the sunny hillside. Effie felt sweat spring out on her top lip, and she tried to breathe more deeply, to use all her techniques.

Count things, be aware of sensations, list colors—but the only shade here was black, the only touch emptiness. Effie’s hands were wet with nerves, and her fingers trembled.

The group moved almost in tortoise formation along a gritty corridor, straining their eyes at indeterminate shapes—another visitor, a bat—until they emerged into a cavern. The subterranean chamber was as tall as a cathedral’s nave and lit on every side with projections of paintings that spanned and slid across the uneven walls to a choral soundtrack every bit as atmospheric as the scenes they contained.

Skulls, evil eyes, and devils. Writhing masses of bodies piled high by hell’s worker demons and directed by an army of the dead. Mouths pulled downward in pain and cadavers spilling putrefaction. A woman, expensively dressed in fur-trimmed gown and hennin, tried to hold back a phalanx of skeletons intent on picking her clean enough to join their number. Lurid creatures squatted and shat out sinners, whose earthly delights were followed by eternal agony.

Effie missed her footing in the dark and turned on her ankle. The jolt and jarring pain, distracting her from the many calming techniques she had attempted to use to quell the panic, was enough to send her spiraling mentally too: her breath became short, and the paintings surrounding her, already rotating slowly around the space the visitors were standing in, began to spin as though she were trapped on a merry-go-round.

Twisted faces of villagers and hunters, goblins and knights whizzed by, some pained and some angry. Malevolent grins and dripping chins, sucking on devils’ teats or hoisting pitchforks full of hay. Shouting, dancing, laughing, carousing. An imp that looked like Charlie, a lady in ermine that could have been Iso. Anna and Steve arm in arm. Skeletons clashing with swords and shields; peasants toiling with the harvest; villagers skating; and Lizzie shaking. Shaking her head at someone in the dark, and jabbing a finger, her lips round with a shout and her face as pale as any of the subterranean creatures on the walls.

Effie had had panic attacks before, but that detached and logical information never helped in the moment when she felt herself whizzing around and around, smaller and smaller, disappearing down the plughole of her existence to be flushed away on a tide of terror. There had been more of them since James had left, times when she had truly believed herself to have been constricted in the pinhole of the world ending. Times when she had tried to fight it and then finally surrendered to the horror, only to find her breathing slow once again and the world carrying on around her, despite the blood in her veins pumping at full speed around her body, hurtling through her arteries like an emergency vehicle to a crash.

This time, however, there was Bertie. He noticed when she tripped and then crouched, so he lifted her gently to her feet, murmuring and calming her in words she could barely hear, let alone make sense of, as everything swirled around her. Gradually the whooshing stopped and the dark stabilized. Effie stabilized too, and she raised her chin weakly to Bertie in thanks. As she did so, her phone buzzed in her pocket and she pulled it out.

A message on the screen. James: “Don’t worry—it’s nothing. Speak when you get back.”

She thrust it away again before she could feel either disappointment or elation. Not now.

“No wonder they call Bosch the Hangover Artist, eh?” Bertie murmured behind her, and she moved her head to swing her gaze around. The horrific visions displayed on the walls seemed to sum up exactly how Effie had felt for the past few months, give or take a few