The Best of Kage Baker

by Kage Baker

  “No, I can show you!” She was already at the door, pulling on her hooded sweater. “Come on, Dad!”

  Muttering, he lit a cigarette and followed her out to the edge of the dune. He scowled as he looked where she pointed, and then his face cleared.

  “Son of a bitch!” he said, grinning. “What is that?”

  “A brontosaurus, sir,” she informed him.

  “Hey, Willis?” He turned and called to the motel’s owner, an elderly man who was presently cleaning fish at the little open shed in the courtyard. “You know anything about the dinosaur up there?” He jerked a thumb at it over his shoulder.

  “Caverns of Mystery,” said Mr. Willis, without looking up. “Place up on the highway. Fellow has some caves on his property. Sells tickets to see ’em.”

  “Huh.” Her father rubbed his chin. “Would the kids like it?”

  Mr. Willis shrugged. “If they like caves,” he said.

  ***

  The headless dinosaur stood in an open field, knee deep in the grass of late summer. At its feet was a leaning plank sign, painted in straggling letters: CAVERNS OF MYSTERY.

  Her mother parked the station wagon at the edge of the field. The children ran at once down the unpaved track to the dinosaur. She followed more slowly, savoring the approach. Her parents followed more slowly still, for the baby had decided to walk between them, holding their hands.

  They circled the dinosaur three or four times, peering up at it, before her father said: “And the mystery is, what’s the mystery?” The children looked at him.

  “But it’s a dinosaur,” said one of her brothers.

  “I expect there are fossils in the caverns,” said her mother. They followed the path to the little brick house at the edge. It had a dutch door with the top half open, and a sign that said OPEN and another that said Admission 25 cents.

  “Jesus, this had better be some mystery,” said her father.

  There was a boy on the edge of the cliff, a little older than she was, wearing only swimming trunks and sandals. He was throwing stones far out into the sea, with a smooth grace of movement that made her stare. He looked at them and turned away deliberately, with something defiant in the set of his shoulders. There was a scar on his neck, a raised pink line.

  Inside were shelves and a dusty counter, displaying a case of arrowheads and baskets of rock specimens for sale, with faded typewritten labels describing what they were. A man sat behind the counter, faded and dusty as his wares. He looked up at them with no particular interest.

  “Where’s the caverns, pal?” said her father, with a slight edge in his voice. The man stood and, without a word, opened a door to his left.

  There, instead of the room with faded wallpaper and dusty windows she had expected, were wooden steps going down into blackness loud with the boom and hiss of waves. The man flipped a bakelite switch and a lightbulb went on, somewhere far below.

  “Here you are,” he said, flatly. “That’ll be two dollars.” Her father grimaced but paid it, and the man counted out eight pink tickets and handed them around, unsmiling. He edged past them and leaned out the door. “Ricky! You get off your lazy butt and come mind the counter. Step this way, folks.”

  He preceded them through the doorway. She was the last to go down and heard a scatter of thrown shell-gravel strike the windows, but the boy remained outside.

  They descended three flights of splintery stairs into the cavern, with a steep drop from the last step into a bank of shingle. Her brothers leaped and ran crunching to where the sea washed in under a lip of rock with a rank iodine smell.

  “Boys!” cried her mother. “Stay back!”

  “Yes, Ma’am, they should,” said the man. “Every now and then you’ll get a big wave through there. You can get soaked.”

  As the children staggered about and picked up agate and jade pebbles, he told them about the Spanish who had thought these cliffs were haunted, because strange moans came from the area during high tides; he told them about the rancher who had discovered the caverns in 1902, when his cow had fallen in through a sinkhole. He told them about the Indian bones that had been found there, and the cannon from a shipwreck, and the fossils.

  “But no dinosaurs?” her father asked.

  “There might be,” said the man, with a shrug.

  At the far end of the cavern another one, smaller, opened out into darkness. It was blocked off by sawhorses. She made her way there, climbing from rock to rock, and peered over them. She saw fathomless blackness and a glimpse of light, a pure cokebottle blue so lovely she caught her breath.

  “What’s in here?” she called, looking back over her shoulder.

  “That part’s closed. Some of it fell in and it’s not safe now,” said the man, with an edge of flint coming into his voice.

  “You come away from there right now,” said her mother, handing the baby to her father and starting after her.

  “Okay, okay. Sheesh.” She turned and jumped down.

  Back in the station wagon, her father said: “Well, that was some crock.”

  “I thought it was neat,” she said.

  ***

  Every Saturday night, Mr. and Mrs. Willis held a barbecue and clambake in the motel’s courtyard. After the children were put to bed the adults came out again and sat around the fire, drinking beer and chatting under the stars.

  She couldn’t sleep, so she tiptoed into the front room and climbed into the windowseat, sitting with her feet drawn away from the little sailor phantom. She opened the window a crack and breathed in the night air, shivering in her pajamas. The adults were black silhouettes against the night, though now and again the fire would flare up and eyes would gleam out briefly, or beer bottles wink in the red light. She heard her father’s voice:

  “Say, Willis, what’s the deal with the dinosaur up on the cliffs? That guy’s a goddam fraud.”

  The old man chuckled. “Well, you didn’t expect a real Gertie the Dinosaurus, did you?”

  “No, but a couple of bones or a skull or something, for the price he charged!”

  “I reckon he figured folks would see it from the highway and pull over to find out what it was all about,” said Mrs. Willis. “He used to be pretty sharp, Sam Price.”

  “Why doesn’t the dinosaur have a head?” asked her mother.

  There was a pause. “He never finished it,” said Mrs. Willis at last.

  “How come? He can’t have run out of money,” said her father.

  There was a longer silence. Mr. Willis opened another beer, had a drink and said at last: “Guess he lost interest. His wife died around then.”

  “Oh, dear,” said her mother.

  “They bought that land, with what Sam’s brother paid him for his share in old Price’s ranch,” said Mr. Willis. “Real nice young couple. Sam built the house and the stairs down into the caves. He reckoned he could get rich showing ’em. Then he went and fooled around with another woman.”

  “Alex,” said Mrs. Willis, reproachfully.

  “Well, he did.” Mr. Willis looked sidelong at Mrs. Willis. “Anyhow. He broke it off and made up with the wife and they had that boy. But she didn’t get over it and she drowned herself.” He gulped down his beer.

  “That ain’t how I heard it,” said Mrs. Willis. “Don’t you listen to him! That poor girl drowned by accident. The baby crawled down the stairs into the caves, somehow, and she went down there to get him out, only it was high tide, and she fell and the waves dragged her under.” She rose, shaking out her skirts. “That pie ought to be cooled now. I’ll go cut us some.”

  “Bring me out another beer?” said Mr. Willis.

  “You had enough,” she said, and went into the house. When the door had closed after her, Mr. Willis cleared his throat and leaned forward, and he spoke in a low voice that nonetheless carried:

  “He did have another woman,” he said. “Foreign girl, I heard. And she went crazy when he broke it off and went back to Winnie. And what I actually heard was, she came snea
king back one day when Sam wasn’t there and got Winnie down in the caves and tried to kill her, and they both drowned.”

  “Oh, that’s awful,” said her mother.

  “And there was worse. She’d tried to kill the baby, too. Cut his throat.”

  “Jesus!” said her father.

  “At least he didn’t die. Grew up into a holy terror, though. Already been in trouble with the police.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said her mother. “Poor child.”

  ***

  She couldn’t get the lovely blue out of her mind. It had seemed like a window into another world. Was it a pool, that went down under the rock and had an outlet on the beach, where the light came in?

  On the strength of that idea she got up early and went out by herself, all the way down the beach as far as the caves, looking up at the dinosaur until she was too close underneath to see it. The tide was out, with little purple crabs wandering to and fro, and deep wells of glass-clear water around boulders projecting from the sand. There were anemones and starfish there, and a cormorant sprawled out flat at the tideline. Its dead eye had a bloom on it, looked like a black pearl.

  There were more caves around the far edge of the cliff, though she had to wade far out to get round to them, through surging water like ice and the unsettling caress of weed on her ankles. She became so preoccupied with exploring the caves that she nearly forgot about the pool; the caves arched up high, like cathedral vaults of limestone, and were carved all over with names and dates. There was a cartoon profile of a sailor dated April 2, 1886; there were even older inscriptions. The oldest was dated 1805 and followed by words in Spanish: Las Lloronas.

  An old phantom sat on one of the boulders, a peaceful-looking man with white side whiskers, smoking a pipe. There was a second one a few paces away, but neither of them seemed in any way conscious of each other. The other phantom was a young man, wearing only trousers, and he was soaking wet and staring out to sea. Tears streamed down his face, he gulped back silent sobs, but never took his gaze from the bright water. He looked vaguely familiar.

  She paid little attention to either of them. Backing into the water, she squinted up at the cliffs above, to see whether she could glimpse the brick house. “Oh!” she said, and shaded her eyes with her hands to see better.

  Switchbacking up the face of the cliff was the remnant of a flight of stairs. It ended abruptly some dozen feet above the beach, its lower section swept away by a long-ago winter storm. Nor did it extend all the way to the clifftop; the earth had slid and buried its first dozen or so steps. What planks remained were silvered ancient wood, and a few mortared stones that anchored its landings.

  “That must have been how people got down here in the olden times,” she said aloud. She saw a way to get up to them, by a series of finger-and-toeholds on the cliff face. The thought of what her mother would have said, were she standing there, decided her; she set her shoulders and ran forward, and scrambled upward.

  It was harder than she thought it would be; she nearly slipped twice, and had at the last to grab for a bush thinly anchored in soil to pull herself over the edge. She was gleeful, though, as she tottered upright on the stair landing, and turned to look out at the sea. I bet I’m the first person that’s stood here in a hundred years, she thought.

  She sat down and luxuriated in the isolation a while, until something went whizzing over her head. She looked up, following its trajectory: a rock? It plunked into the ocean. She remembered the boy, then.

  Cautious, she climbed the stairs in a crouch, and went up the rest of the slope on hands and knees. Rising to the edge of the cliff, she looked up into the face of the boy. He dropped the stone he had been about to throw, and took a hasty step back; then started forward, scowling. He had a dark bruise over his cheekbone.

  “Where’d you come from?” he demanded.

  “The stork brought me, ha ha,” she said, and he didn’t laugh, so she added hastily: “Up the old steps. Did you know there’s a lost staircase down here?”

  “Sure I know,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  They considered each other. He was shirtless, and barefoot; his upper body made a neat triangle, like an arrowhead pointed down. He had green eyes. This close, she could see the terrible scar on his throat; someone must have tried to cut it from ear to ear. She tried not to stare at it, never liking it herself when people stared at her eye.

  He bent now and picked up the stone again, and hurled it into the sea.

  “I liked the Caverns of Mystery,” she said.

  “It’s just a big cave,” he said. He sat and pushed himself over the edge, and she backed down to the staircase. They stood there together a moment, looking out to sea.

  “Stairs to nowhere,” he said. “Pretty neat.”

  “Like you could walk down the stairs and end up back in time,” she said. “Like in the days of the pirates or something.”

  “Except you couldn’t do that, because you can’t live in the past,” said the boy. “That’s what my dad says. It isn’t there anymore.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “It’s all around. People just don’t see what isn’t happening right now. But everything that ever happened is still going on.”

  “Aw, that’s nuts,” he said. “Like, cowboys and Indians fighting right there in town, while the cars go by? And dinosaurs on the freeway. And pirate ships out there!” He pointed at the sea.

  “Yes,” she said. “You just can’t see them.”

  “That’d be really something. I wish I could,” said the boy.

  No, you don’t, she thought. The boy sat down on the staircase, and she sat beside him. He turned and looked at her. “What happened to your eye?”

  She winced, turned her face away. “I have this problem with seeing,” she said.

  “Is it blind? Because if it was blind, you could wear an eyepatch,” he said. “Except I don’t think girls wear eyepatches.”

  “Yes, they do,” she said. “Just not black ones. I had a green one for a while. It didn’t help. And the kids at school made fun of me.”

  “I hate school,” he said. “My dad made me wear a tie. Like it was Sunday School. Everyone laughed. I hate my dad. Do you hate yours?”

  “No-o,” she said. “I think my brothers do, though. But I hate my mom sometimes.”

  “How come?”

  “She never stops talking about my eye,” she said. “She never thinks I can do anything by myself. Like I was retarded or something. And she’s watching me all the time.”

  “My dad watches me, too,” he said. “What’s he think I’m going to do, anyway? Sometimes I think, well, I’ll show him. I’ll do something. But my mom’s dead.”

  She stopped herself from saying I know and merely said, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I don’t remember her. You can’t live in the past.”

  “But the past lives,” she said. “So you could say your mom is alive. She’s just in the past.”

  “I guess.” He grew restless, jumped to his feet. “Let’s see where these stairs go.” She followed him, and stood aghast when he came to the last step and launched himself out into the air and sunlight. He landed in the ankle-deep surf and rolled, laughing. She stepped to the edge and froze, terrified; then she thought, Well, he didn’t get hurt, and so she jumped too, not wanting to seem a coward.

  For a second she almost went somewhere wonderful, a realm of possibilities where there were pirate ships and kindly satyrs; but gravity stepped in and she hit the wet sand as the tide receded, and folded up. Her chin hit her knees, her glasses went flying, and she fell over and lay there trying to get her breath back. He hadn’t noticed. He was staring out to sea. She was grateful.

  Climbing to her feet, she retrieved her glasses and limped over to him.

  “That was cool,” he said. “Want to explore the caves?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. She heard her name called and turned, and was horrified to see her mother and sisters far down the beac
h. “Crumbs. I have to go.”

  “You could stay if you wanted,” he said, hopefully, not taking his eyes from the horizon.

  “No, I couldn’t. She’ll yell, and she’ll come get me.”

  “Fine, then.” He waded out into the surf, and dove like a cormorant into a wave and vanished.

  “Wasn’t that the boy from the dinosaur caves?” said her mother sharply, when she joined her.

  “Yes.” She looked out at her sisters, who were shrieking with excitement as they jumped through the lines of surf.

  “I don’t want you playing with strange children,” said her mother.

  “We weren’t playing,” she said irritably. “We were just talking.”

  “And look at you, you’re soaking wet and you’ve got those circles under your eyes again. Were you reading under the covers last night?”

  “No.”

  “Go on back to the house and put some dry clothes on. And I think you ought to take a nap.”

  Muttering to herself, she trudged back to the cottage.

  ***

  Her father was leaning against the fish shed, smoking and talking with an old man who was opening clams there.

  “Sir, what does “Las Loronas” mean?” she asked, as she approached.

  “What? Sounds like something Mexican,” said her father.

  “What was that?” The older man turned. She repeated it. “Las Yoronas,” he corrected her.

  “This is one of my kids, Luis,” said her father. “What’s it mean?”

  “La Llorona? She’s a ghost. Means, “the crying woman”,” said Luis. “Old Spanish story. Her, ah, her baby drowned, and she walks all night by the water weeping and moaning, trying to find it. Bad luck to hear her, I always heard.”

  “But it’s only a story,” said her father, glancing at her.

  “Sure,” said Luis. “Nothing but a ghost story. ‘Las Lloronas’, I don’t know, that means more than one of them.”

  “It was carved on a rock down by the caves,” she said.

  “Oh! That place,” said Luis, and turned away.

  “I’ll bet some Mexicans carved it there,” said her father. “You remember what the guy at the Mystery Caverns said, about the wind moaning in the caves, and people used to think they were haunted? That’s all it is.”