The Truth is A Cave In the Black Mountains is a novella by Neil Gaiman. It was later adapted into a concert reading.
A small man asks for a guide to a cave filled with treasure. He gets one, Calum MacInnes, a former reaver with a dark past. Yet they are warned that the cave gives treasure, but takes away something intangible for a price. The journey may also reveal uncomfortable truths about the two of them.
Tropes for this story include:
- Bittersweet Ending: The narrator has avenged his daughter's death and survives to return to his wife, but Calum's screams as he's left to die will haunt him until the day he dies, and the cave has taken its price for helping him in his revenge. He mentions he can already feel the shadows growing inside his mind, so there's the possibility that he might, in time, become as sociopathic as Calum — or worse.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: The men each realize that they want the other dead. The reason why Calum holds off on killing the narrator is because he wants a warm body to carry the treasure out of the cave and then gut him, avoiding the price altogether. Yet the narrator waits because he wants the cave's help in avenging his daughter, and making sure Calum suffers along the way.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Calum freely admits he was a reaver, and a raider in his time. He also went Oh, Crap! on realizing that he killed Flora indirectly, and no one had found her body.
- Exact Words:
- Calum MacInnes keeps claiming that he never killed a woman. When pressed for details, he admits that he didn't kill Flora. Instead, he tied her to a tree and took away her knife so she wouldn't be able to free herself and buy himself a window of time to escape with the family cattle. When Calum realized that she had died alone while still tethered to the tree, he went Oh, Crap! and sent a message to the nearby inn.
- Once in the cave and speaking to the being within, the narrator tells it to appear in a form that neither harms nor is offensive to him. The being promptly takes the form of his daughter Flora — as she appeared the last time he saw her, tied to the thorn bush with her skeleton picked clean of meat.
- When Calum and the narrator are stuck half way down a cliff after their fight, Calum is too injured to move but knows that the narrator will be able to climb to the top safely, and makes him swear to come back for him with ropes to retrieve him. The narrator swears he will — and then, once he is out of Calum's reach, he says that he will come back in a year.
- Foreshadowing : The narrator is incredibly fast and strong; more so than any regular sized man, let alone a small person. He later reveals (albeit only to the readers) that he's actually half-fae.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Zig-Zagged; the narrator is horrified when the figure in the cave takes the image of Flora as she was tied to the tree, but it’s implied that the figure thinks it this, since it’s his daughter when he last saw her, the figure seemingly not understanding the context.
- Heel–Face Door-Slam: Calum sent a message to Flora's parents so that they would be able to bury her. This single act motivated her father to hunt him down and seek revenge.
- Karmic Death: Calum unwittingly left Flora, the narrator's daughter, to die of starvation after he tied her to a thornbush by her hair, and her parents only discover the truth about her disappearance a year later. After he grapples with the narrator and they fall off the edge of a cliff to land in a hawthorn bush growing into the side of the cliff, Calum makes the narrator swear to come back for him with ropes to haul him back up to safety. The narrator swears that he will return — in a year. He starts to climb, leaving Calum to scream helplessly.
- Missing Child: Flora went missing for a year. Her parents disowned her, having believed that she ran off and eloped with an enemy. She was tied to a tree thanks to her long hair, and eventually starved. The narrator says he'll never forgive himself for believing she would run away and that he hadn't considered she was in danger.
- My Greatest Failure: The narrator says he will never forgive himself for disowning Flora when she needed his help and a rescue. He hopes the journey will at least give him closure.
- The Reveal: There are three throughout the story. First, Calum is responsible for the death of the narrator's daughter Flora, unwittingly leaving her to starve to death after tying her to a thorn bush. Second, the narrator hunted down Calum because he plans to kill him in revenge, rather than because he wanted riches. And third, the narrator is actually half-fairy, and so is able to see through the glamour of the cave and communicate with whatever lives within it, in order to know when it's safe to attack Calum.
- Tomato Surprise: Near the end of the story, the narrator reveals his greatest secret: his father was a fairy.
- Revenge: The narrator doesn't seek gold or riches for his king. He wants revenge on Calum for indirectly murdering his daughter, and leading her family to believe she ran away.
