Deeper into Darkness

by James, Russell

  Jackson wrung his hands. By now, he had always stepped into the life of Chester Ellington, oil baron, and felt the authority of the man flow through him. Tonight, he just felt like an actor dressed as a fool.

  He looked at Kelly. He didn’t feel the magic. That singing in his heart that he heard when he stepped on stage with her hadn’t begun. He gazed at her profile against the cluttered backstage backdrop. She didn’t shine as she had each night before. She didn’t look like the elegant Mrs. Ellington, tycoon’s wife. She looked like Kelly Conner in thick stage makeup.

  Kelly’s eyes darted back and forth across the stage as the supporting cast worked the first scene. A bead of sweat rolled out from under her thick black wig and down past her left ear. Her lower lip trembled.

  She’s lost it too, Jackson thought. His heart ran in his chest like a jackrabbit. She’s nervous. Weeks of perfect shows and she’s nervous. We jinxed it! We talked about the craft, tried to dissect it, and overanalyzed the whole thing. Now we’re both lost, two people about to parrot memorized lines back and forth for two hours before a bored, silent audience.

  Seconds remained to their entrance. And the end of their careers.

  ♦♦♦

  A man and woman leaned against a table of props offstage behind the two leads, in the stagehands’ area clear of the actor’s paths.

  “I felt the urge again,” the man whispered, voice tinged in sadness. “That wanderlust or whatever it is.”

  “The feeling that it’s time to leave the Barclay?” she said. She looked past the waiting actors at the action on the well-lit stage. “Like you’ve had before?”

  “Stronger this time,” he said. “We’ve worked this venue for so long…”

  “…that it feels like a prison,” she finished. “I know. I felt the same way all week.”

  The man peered around the edge of the curtain at the packed house. “This place does pull in the crowds. But I’ve got this longing to move on.”

  The audience roared with laughter at a well-delivered punch line.

  “Where will we go if this is the last night we work the Barclay’s backstage?” the woman said.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. He managed a weak smile. “It’s the way of the theater. You never know what the next gig will be until you land it.”

  “What if in our next gigs aren’t together?”

  The man turned to face her. His mouth fell.

  “We would have to be together. That’s a given.”

  “And if we aren’t?”

  “We’ll come back to the Barclay.”

  “If we can,” she said.

  The man hung his head and stared across the table full of props. Offstage, Jackson gave his tight collar an annoyed tug. Kelly patted away sweat from her brow.

  Relief lit the man’s face like a marquee. “Then we stay. Whatever adventures await elsewhere can wait a little longer. In fact, they can wait forever if we risk experiencing them apart. I’ll fight the wanderlust if you will.”

  Her eyes twinkled as she smiled

  “As prisons go,” she said, “this one’s not bad.”

  ”Here comes our cue,” he said.

  They walked up behind Jackson and Kelly. The man reached out without thinking to caress the woman’s shoulder. His hand passed through her. He laughed at himself for still forgetting after a century.

  “I love you, Emma,” he said.

  “I love you, Billy.”

  “What’s out there that could trump sharing the stage with you?”

  They both stepped forward into Jackson and Kelly and disappeared.

  ♦♦♦

  Jackson’s heart skipped a beat. His skin flushed. He turned to Kelly. Her eyes sparkled like sunlight on diamonds. That familiar shudder surged up his spine. Kelly smiled at him, relaxed and confident.

  “Knock ‘em dead, Kell,” he said.

  “Every night,” she replied.

  An actor on stage gave their cue. They entered stage right and hit their marks. The crowd erupted in applause.

  My wife asked me why I never wrote a story about nice ghosts. Now I have.

  Ω

  Stone Cold

  “This is so exciting!” Trina said.

  Roland couldn’t say he agreed. Crystal Caverns looked like a hole in the ground from where he stood. Worse, it looked like a tourist trap hole in the ground, and not even a first-tier one.

  If nowhere really did have a middle, this place could well have been it. Crystal Caverns lay about twenty well-wooded miles off I-65. Its weedy gravel parking lot sat at the end of a dirt road. Three dilapidated log cabins lined one side. On the other stood a sagging office/ticket booth. From the woods between them rose the black entrance to the cave; a low, narrow passage into a stone hillside, ringed with flowering kudzu.

  “I don’t know how you found this place,” Roland said. “There isn’t a word of advertising anywhere. Not even a Turn Here sign.”

  “Dubbya dubbya dubbya dot roadside treasures dot com,” Trina said. She whipped her long black hair back into a ponytail. “And it’s half way to Gulf Shores!”

  “So are a lot of other places,” Roland said. He eyed the dreary cabins. “Places with hot water.” He tapped his darkened cell phone. “Places with cell towers.”

  Trina faced him and tugged down the corners of his Ohio State t-shirt over his belly. She rubbed her hand over his buzzed brown hair and made a mockingly sad face.

  “Aw, just one day off campus and already lost. Will you survive a whole week of Spring Break?”

  He batted her hand away. “I was willing to drive straight through and avoid re-enacting a scene from Deliverance out here in Nowhere-ville.”

  “You’re a geology major,” Trina said. “This should be fun for you.”

  “I’ve seen caves rigged up for tourists,” he said. “The damage to the formations makes me cry.”

  She wrapped an arm around his waist and looked up with those big brown eyes that he fell in love with last month.

  “Well tomorrow afternoon it will be all beach, bikini and beer,” she said. “Just to make it up to you.”

  He kissed her. “You’d better.”

  “Last tour, y’all!” announced a man by the ticket window.

  “C’mon!” Trina spun around and took Roland in tow. His heart skipped a beat as he caught a glimpse of the tattooed strand of ivy that peeked out from the feathered edge of her short shorts.

  They fell in behind a half-dozen other visitors, all dressed in high-tourist fashion. All eyes were glued to the man in khaki shirt with a Crystal Caverns patch over his right pocket.

  He couldn’t have been past twenty and was hard scrabble-country thin. His shaved head was shaped like a light bulb and when he opened his mouth, the view of his jumbled teeth within made Roland’s jaw hurt.

  “Now y’all step up. My name’s Cal. This here’s our last tour for the day, last chance to see the amazin’ wonders of Crystal Cavern. Just five dollars a head, three for kids.”

  With no children in the group, Roland wondered why he mentioned it.

  “Ooh, my treat!” Trina said as she whipped out a ten. She handed it to Cal. He smiled his cluttered smile and nodded them forward.

  The group followed him down a thinly mulched trail to the cavern opening. Just inside the kudzu curtain, a heavy iron gate blocked their entrance.

  “Gate here’s two-fold,” Cal said as he pulled out a single black skeleton key from his pocket. “Keeps the curious youngsters out and keeps the cave gnomes in.”

  Roland exhaled a resigned sigh as his worst fears about this adventure were realized. But half the group chuckled. Cal brightened like he’d gone over big at The Laugh Factory.

  “Just kidding, just kidding,” he said.

  He stepped inside and threw a big power switch on a wall circuit box. Twin trails of floor-level lights flickered on. They bordered a tight curved path that snaked away between the narrow walls.

  “Crystal Cavern’s been in the
family since near forever,” Cal said. “First tours were done by lantern light before the War Between the States.”

  They followed Cal down the dim passageway. The air turned cooler and damper with every yard. The passage narrowed and a more rotund couple had to physically squeeze between two boulders. Roland was behind them and feared he might have to give the husband a little shove to help him through, but his wife pulled from the other side and he popped out like a champagne cork.

  Cal tossed out some other cavern facts about length and width and depth. His deep accent and the constant echoing combined to make him incomprehensible.

  A few hundred yards in, the claustrophobic passageway opened up to a large cavern. The visitors gasped. Poorly placed colored spotlights could not distract from the formation’s natural beauty. Delicate, thin stalactites hung from the high ceiling, many several feet long with a single bead of water clinging to the tip. Wider, more irregular stalagmites rose from the cavern floor like a standing-room-only concert crowd.

  Roland had to admit some of the more remote, less disturbed formations were in pretty good shape.

  “Now these take decades to create,” Cal said as he led them down a path between the stalagmites.

  “Seriously?” Roland said under his breath. Geology apparently wasn’t part of Alabama high school curriculum. These formations took millennia to create, one drip of water at a time leaving a microscopic deposit of minerals.

  “Some folks claim to see things in the shapes,” Cal continued.

  “Oooh, this one looks like a bird,” the fat woman said to her husband.

  He huffed in return. Roland inspected it as he passed and agreed with the husband.

  “Rollie, look here,” Trina said.

  She stood in front of one larger formation. An inverted crescent covered it about chest high.

  “It looks like a person’s face,” she said. “See the frown, the eyes, the nose.”

  “C’mon, Trina,” Roland said. “They probably carved that in there to make the place more interesting. Cal practically pointed it out to us.”

  They passed several other formations. Roland noticed their relative human height and some vague facial features, clearly all carved fakery. Typical of what people, unchecked by scientific appreciation, did to caves.

  Trina looked increasingly scared as she looked upon each formation. At the end of the cavern, the group paused around Cal. He stood next to two switches atop a peeling wooden pedestal.

  “And here you see a very special formation,” he said.

  He flipped one switch and illuminated a large granite stone shaped like a squat mushroom. One side had a pronounced droop.

  “This here’s the Home of the Gnomes,” Cal said. “The cave gnomes live inside here, only coming out in the dark. But don’t worry none, these here lights will keep them at bay.”

  Roland shook his head.

  “Their sworn duty,” Cal continued, “is to protect the crystal treasure.”

  He threw the second switch. A spotlight lit the wall behind the stone mushroom. White quartz crystals protruded from the wall at odd angles. They sparkled in the floodlight.

  “In olden days, folks would venture into the cave and chip the crystals from the wall. The gnomes would leave the cave at night, and drag the thieves back. They would cast a spell and the thieves became the formations you see here.” He gestured to the stalagmites with a poorly choreographed sweep of his hands.

  “So the gnomes stopped when people stopped stealing the crystals?” the fat woman asked.

  “No ma’am,” Cal said. “The gnomes found they had a taste for it and started to kidnap regular visitors. Anointed ‘em with a drop of cave water and then tracked them down that night. That’s why we had to put up the gate.”

  Trina screeched. Roland whirled to face her.

  “Trina?”

  Water glistened on her forehead. “Water! Dripped right out of nowhere. Right on me!”

  “It just dripped from the ceiling,” Roland assured her. “Don’t get spooked by all this nonsense.”

  “Looks like the gnomes have selected another one,” Cal announced.

  Trina rubbed her forehead like she was putting out a fire.

  Roland turned back to Cal and had to restrain himself from punching him in the face. “You aren’t helping here, buddy.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Cal said, hands raised in submission. “Sorry, ma’am. Just funning with ya.” He turned to the rest of the group. “That’s the tour folks. Back up to the daylight.”

  ♦♦♦

  The two of them lay staring at the cobwebbed ceiling from the bed in Cabin Two. Cheap paneling covered the log walls. The tiny, ancient water heater took up precious space in one corner. Their bags were still in the car. There was no table or dresser to put them on and the filthy floor was out of the question. A nightstand lamp marginally lit the room through a yellowed lampshade. Roland’s unfulfilled dream of Trina’s sexual conquest remained just that.

  “I can’t believe that you let that stupid hick’s story get under your skin,” Roland said.

  “For the hundredth time, the water dripped on me right after he said the gnomes worked that way. Coincidence?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Did you get dripped on? Did anyone else get dripped on during the tour?”

  “No, but there was a lot of dripping. The floor was wet everywhere.”

  “But only on me.”

  He wrapped an arm across her waist. She stiffened.

  “Look, I’m beat,” he said. “I drove all day on no sleep. Let me get a few hours in and we’ll blow out of here before dawn, okay?”

  “Promise?”

  “Absolutely.” He snapped off the light, yawned and closed his eyes. “Bright and early…”

  ♦♦♦

  Roland woke up freezing cold. He shimmied over to be closer to Trina. He reached the other side of the empty bed. He bolted upright.

  “Trina?”

  A cold wind blew in and ruffled the covers on the bed. The cabin door yawned wide open. Absolute darkness covered the parking lot outside.

  Roland leapt out of bed and jumped into a pair of pants. He ran out to the parking lot. Gravel dug into his bare feet.

  “Trina! Trina!”

  Deafening silence answered his calls. He looked into his car’s windows in case she’d opted for back seat sleeping. Empty.

  He rattled the doors of the other two cabins. Locked. He ran to the office and pounded on the door. No answer. She sure wouldn’t walk off into the woods. Where else could she…

  He looked over at the entrance to the cave. One flickering footlight lit the entrance. The gate was open.

  “Oh, hell no.” She’d gotten herself so spooked that she went into there? That didn’t make sense. Neither did the other option, that gnomes had dragged her in.

  He picked his way to the cave entrance. Dry pine needles pricked his toes. A bush rustled in the darkness.

  “Trina!” he called when he reached the open gate. Her name had an ominous, hollow ring as it echoed down the dark passageway. “Trina?”

  He threw the big switch. The footlights flickered on. The scuttle of scurrying feet sounded from the cavern’s far reaches. A muffled voice sounded from far away. His imagination overpowered reason. He dashed into the cave.

  He wriggled through the tighter passages that conspired against him. The rough walls scraped his hands as he rushed to rescue Trina from whatever held her captive in the cavern’s depths.

  He burst into the main room. The lights were on. Trina stood facing the crystal wall.

  “Trina!”

  He ran straight for her through the maze of damp stalagmites. Two steps from her side, his feet jerked to a stop. He looked down.

  Glowing kudzu vines wound around his ankles. The lines ran taut back to the base of two stalagmites, each held tight by a foot-tall, scrawny, sharp-faced gnome. The hairless, naked creatures had long pointed ears and faces more dragon than human.
They yanked on the vines and smiled with yellow pointed teeth.

  Two more luminous vines flew up from the ground and wrapped around his wrists. The vines drained the strength from his body, pulling energy from his core and out through his hands and feet. Two more vines wrapped around his neck. Gnomes appeared all around him.

  “Trina!” he gargled against the constricting vines.

  She turned to face him. A gnome hopped up on a stalagmite and jumped to her shoulder like a pet parrot. It chattered something unintelligible. Trina smiled at Roland. The ivy-like tattoo on her leg sprouted a new leaf.

  “I guess you believe me now,” she said. He voice had a new-found Southern accent.

  Water splattered on Roland’s head. Cal stepped out of the shadows.

  “Nice work, Sis,” he said. He turned to Roland. “See, told you about them gnomes. They can’t really leave the cave, but they do only come out after sundown. Actress Sis jus' had to bait you down in here somehow.”

  Roland’s wet hair stiffened. Water drips ran down off his shoulders and left sandstone trails. Wet splotches of skin on his face turned rock hard.

  “If we give them a sacrifice once per year,” Trina said, “they get to do their thing and we get one more treat for the tourists.” She giggled. “The irony of picking a geology student, well, how could I resist.”

  Roland tried to speak but his cheeks already felt that they were encased in plaster. He mumbled something frantic. Trina kissed her finger and put it to his lips.

  “Think of it as being part of our family. Welcome home.”

  Owing to a lot of underground limestone, northern Alabama has a host of cavern attractions, some public, some private. While on a tour of one, water dripped for the ceiling onto my shoulder, and the idea for this story came alive.

  Ω

  A Long Stay in Number Six

  The steam engine sent a plume of snow from its plow as it barreled down the west side of the Sierra Nevadas. Thick, black smoke billowed from its funneled stack, flecked with glowing bits of red coal dust. The dark mass passed along the roof of the train’s single car, then swirled down into the vacuum at the rear, as if some great phantom hand pushed the train forward.