The Painted Mouth

I first knew Edgar as a quiet, lanky young man with ink-stained fingers when I was thirteen. He taught folklore at the University of Dunedin, and he was one of my father’s chess partners at the staff club, a dim, wood-paneled room that smelled of stale beer and pipe smoke. He was the only adult who ever asked me about my dreams, who listened to my rants about school and my secret dreads, who treated my anxieties like they mattered. By the time I was seventeen, I’d begun to think of him as an uncle, a strange, brilliant uncle who lived in a world of myth and old bones.

That summer, Edgar had retreated to a rented cottage on the wild, windswept coast of the Catlins, far from the city, to finish his book on the forgotten ritual sites of the South Island. His letters were long, typed with a manual typewriter, and full of the kind of passion that made me feel I was missing something important. He wrote about the landscape, the crashing sea, the forests that seemed to swallow the light. And then, in one letter, he mentioned the cave.

He’d heard about it from a local sheep farmer, an old Maori woman named Materoa, who had told him the cave was ‘hungry’. A place of old stories, of a chief who had been buried alive there with his wives and slaves, a tapu place, too dangerous for ordinary folk. Edgar was delighted, of course—a taboo cave was exactly what his book needed. But when he tried to find the cave, the local kids, even the ones he’d befriended at the general store, went silent. They shook their heads, turned away, wouldn’t even point. They said it was ‘not for him’. They said the cave had a mouth, and it would eat him.

Edgar laughed it off in his letters, but I could feel the thrill in his words. He begged me to come up, to help him find it. He said I was ‘unburdened’ by the local superstitions, and that my fresh eyes might see what the locals were hiding. I was seventeen, bored, and flattered. I told my parents I was visiting a friend, and I caught the bus to Owaka, then hitched a ride with a sheep farmer to the tiny settlement where Edgar’s cottage hunched against the wind.

Edgar was thrilled to see me. He looked thinner, gaunt, with dark circles under his eyes, but his gaze was bright with obsession. He had a map, hand-drawn, with X’s and notes in the margins. ‘The locals won’t help,’ he said, ‘but that just means we have to find it ourselves.’ We spent two days bushwhacking through dense manuka and scrub, past abandoned shearing sheds and crumbling fences, following a dry creek bed that twisted into the hills. On the third day, we found it.

The cave mouth was barely visible, a black gash in a cliff face overgrown with lichen and scrubby ferns. But the wind that moaned out of it carried a smell of damp earth and something else, something sickly sweet, like old meat. Edgar was ecstatic. He pulled out his flashlight and notebook, and we stepped inside.

The first chamber was wide and dry, with a sandy floor. Ancient Maori carvings covered the walls, spirals and figures, but they were strange, distorted, as if drawn by a hand that didn’t quite remember human forms. The figures had wide-open mouths, too wide, with too many teeth. Edgar traced them with his fingers, muttering about ‘liminal guardians’ and ‘transitional motifs’. But I felt a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. The flashlight beam seemed to strain against the dark, as if the dark itself were thick, almost liquid.

We pushed deeper. The tunnel narrowed until we had to crawl, and the walls pressed in. Edgar went first, his voice echoing oddly, distorted, as if the rock were swallowing his words. Then the passage opened into a huge chamber, and I saw the paintings.

They were not carvings. They were paintings, ochre and charcoal, and they covered every inch of the ceiling and the upper walls. They depicted a great mouth, a maw with teeth that dripped onto rows of figures below. The figures were humanoid, but their heads were thrown back, their mouths open in silent screams. And at the center of the chamber, on a flat altar stone, lay a small, carved wooden figure, no taller than my hand. It was a humanoid shape, but its mouth was also open, a perfect dark oval, and inside the mouth, something glistened.

Edgar crouched beside it, his flashlight illuminating the tiny figure. ‘It’s a tiki,’ he whispered, ‘but unlike any I’ve seen. This one has a mouth full of teeth.’ I saw them then—tiny carved teeth, pointed, set in rows. The figure’s face was scrunched into a mask of fury or agony. ‘It’s beautiful,’ Edgar said. ‘It’s mine.’ He reached out, and his fingers closed around it.

The moment he lifted it, the air changed. The temperature plummeted, and I heard a sound, a low hum that seemed to come from the rock itself. Then the shadows around the edges of the chamber began to move. They weren’t just shadows; they seemed to detach from the walls, to slide along the ground like oily water. Edgar was oblivious, cradling the figure, muttering about ‘authenticity’ and ‘provenance’.

‘Edgar,’ I said, my voice barely a croak. ‘We should go.’

He looked up, and his eyes were wrong. They were dilated, and the whites had a faint yellow tinge. ‘Nonsense,’ he said, his voice strangely pitched, almost a sing-song. ‘The cave is finished with us. It’s given us its gift.’ He slipped the tiki into his jacket pocket, and I saw his hand tremble.

We crawled back through the tunnel, and the hum followed us, growing louder, then fading as we reached the entrance. The light outside seemed too bright, too flat. The wind had died, and the world felt hushed, expectant. We walked back to the cottage in silence. Edgar seemed to have aged ten years; his steps were heavy, his breath ragged.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I heard him pacing in his room, mumbling. I told myself I was being silly, that the cave had just spooked me. But the next morning, Edgar was different. He was jittery, excited, writing furiously in his notebook, but his handwriting was all over the place, and he kept looking over his shoulder. He showed me the tiki, which he’d put on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s a masterpiece,’ he said. ‘Can you hear it? It’s humming.’ I couldn’t. But I saw his lips move, as if he were talking to someone.

Over the next days, Edgar grew pale and thin. He stopped eating. He spent hours staring at the tiki, his lips moving in silent conversation. He began to repeat phrases from his notes at odd moments, like ‘the mouth must be fed’ and ‘no one leaves’. He spoke of the cave as if it were a person, saying ‘she’ was hungry. He tried to write, but the words turned to gibberish, loops and spirals that looked like the carvings.

One night, he woke me from a dream where I was falling into a vast, toothy mouth. He was standing in my doorway, gaunt in the moonlight. ‘You see it too, don’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s speaking to me. It wants me to bring it back. It says we only took a piece, but the rest is waiting.’

‘Edgar,’ I said, forcing calm, ‘you’re not well. We need to get you help.’

He laughed, a horrible wet sound. ‘Help? The only help is in the cave. It’s waiting for me.’ He turned and walked back to his room, and I heard the door lock.

The next morning, Edgar was gone. The tiki was gone. His jacket was gone. I searched the cottage, then ran to the farmer’s house. The old Maori woman, Materoa, was there, and she looked at me with ancient, knowing eyes. She shook her head. ‘The cave has taken him,’ she said. ‘He went to feed it.’

I didn’t wait for the police. I ran back to the cave, following the now-familiar path. The mouth of the cave was different. The overgrown ferns were pulled back, and the opening seemed larger, almost welcoming, like a gaping jaw. I stepped inside, and the cold hit me. There was no light but the pale gray of the tunnel behind me. I felt my way forward, my heart hammering.

In the central chamber, the paintings seemed more vivid, the mouths more real. The altar stone was bare, but there was a fresh red smear on it, and the smell of copper was thick. And there, at the edge of the flashlight’s beam, something glistened on the floor. I knelt down. It was the tiki, lying on its side. Its mouth was open, and it was filled with fresh, red, human teeth. There was a single tooth, still bloody, lying next to it.

I didn’t run. I couldn’t. A sound filled the chamber, a low, wet, hungry hum that seemed to come from all directions, from the walls, from the paintings, from inside my own head. And then I saw him. In the far corner, hunched over, was Edgar. His back was to me, and his shoulders were shaking. He was whispering, a rhythmic chant, and I could hear the words now: ‘Feed the mouth, feed the mouth, feed the mouth…’

I backed away, and the ground beneath me seemed to move, to pulse. The paintings’ mouths seemed to widen, to become three-dimensional, gaping pits. I stumbled, and the flashlight shattered. In the pitch dark, I felt something brush my ankle, cold and dry, like old skin. I screamed and scrambled backward, felt the tunnel, and crawled, weeping, toward the distant light.

When I broke out into the sun, I didn’t stop. I ran all the way to the farmer’s house, and I told them. I told them I had to leave. Materoa gave me a strange, sharp look and handed me a small bundle wrapped in flax. ‘He’s lost,’ she said. ‘But you can still get out. Don’t look back. Don’t ever speak of it.’

I took the bus out of the Catlins that afternoon. I never returned east. I never told anyone the full story. But sometimes, in my dream, I still see the tiki’s grinning mouth, and I feel it in my own. And I know that somewhere, in a dark chamber, Edgar is still feeding it, tooth by tooth, and that one day, the mouth will be full, and it will open.

Materoa’s bundle contained a piece of greenstone, shaped like a very small, very sharp tooth.