by Seth Fishman
Avery started jumping up and down, his feet splashing the water and his belly jiggling. He was not the type of teacher you could see freak out without at least breaking a smile. “Oh, my God, oh, my God. Look at this! We did it! What is this place? Oh, my God.” He flicked his light on, maybe to get a better view, but it was like he blew a fuse; every flower dissolved immediately into the blackness. Greg felt suddenly disembodied, floating near the loud breaths of his friends. Brenda squealed. Veronica tried to hold Greg’s hand but instead grabbed his shirt. Blake just muttered, “Insane. Freaking insane.”
Avery went as close to the drawings as possible, his lips moving, trying to get some idea of their origins. They were pretty crazy, large and detailed, and the students stood off to the side in awe, anxious for the teacher to finish his inspection so they could get closer themselves.
Abruptly, Avery pulled back and turned to the group of students, aiming the flashlight up at his own face as if telling a ghost story. “Boys and girls, this is the real thing. They will talk about this in every classroom for hundreds of years.” The kids felt their arms go goose bumpy. Greg’s whole body was tingly warm still. “Nice fall, Kish, though you probably shouldn’t be moving.” He stared for a moment at Greg’s leg, shining his light there, and since they were in a cave in the dark, the only place for anyone to look was at the pale and bloody but otherwise unblemished leg. Avery seemed to shake himself awake and went on: “But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that this all has to be done right. And I feel we are wasting precious seconds standing around here, improperly outfitted. Let’s all forget samples—I don’t feel comfortable taking from this potentially fragile ecosystem—and return surface-side. There’s a chance that just us being here is killing the plant life as we speak. We’ll regroup, call it in, and come back tomorrow with better equipment and a few more hands. Sound like a plan?”
The group was sullen, despite understanding Avery’s logic. They had just gotten there. And the idea of him sharing their prize, their discovery, was oddly rankling. Avery seemed to notice this and sighed deeply.
“Okay,” he said, pointing at the wall. “You want to stay? Can anyone tell me what these drawings mean?”
Greg’s eyes felt crazy, and everything began suddenly to swirl with a halo of light. The images on the rock face seemed to fit together, not like the story of a hunt or a dance, but like a sequence. One thing after the other, all leading to something. He followed the images to the end, to the bottom, where somehow, some way, there was a tiny image of the entire wall all over again.
“It’s a map,” said Greg, knowing that he was right.
The others peered, and Avery hmmed, conceding the possibility. Greg traced his finger from the first image—clearly the sun—to the last, forcing Avery’s eyes to follow.
“Maybe it is a map,” Avery said, “but that’s neither here nor there at the moment; this will exist tomorrow. Kids, let’s go.” Still there was an inch of mutiny among the students, but Avery pulled his last card. “Here’s the deal, the real deal. Greg just fell eight stories and survived. That’s a miracle in its own right. Now the wound seems all fine and dandy, but I will go to my deathbed remembering the blood on his leg. I have no idea how he’s standing here making assumptions when he should be a goner. The only reason he’s standing at all is the adrenaline coursing through his puny frame. He could have internal bleeding. We have to get him checked out. Tomorrow we’ll be back, trust me.”
Everyone agreed and made their way to the rope, where they gave a tug and began to climb slowly out of the cavern. A few glances went Greg’s way, as if this was his fault, and he wanted to shout that they wouldn’t even be here if not for him. Veronica hovered, but he hunched his shoulders and turned away, so she volunteered to go up next. He stood off to the side, squatting in the water. Something was missing, he was sure. To him it felt like the tree, the flower, even the map, weren’t the big deal here. He prodded his wound, now healed, and tried to puzzle through it all. He was intimately aware of this fact; his body felt entirely different and buoyant and wonderful, and it couldn’t just be all the adrenaline and shock like Avery said. He felt his blood shooting through his veins, singing. But it was his feet and his fingers, soaking wet, that glowed with heat.
“Your pants look gruesome,” Blake said, coming up to him and taking a swipe at the fabric. “Like you dipped them in blood or something.” He held up his fingers and showed the red to Greg. For a moment, Greg thought Blake would make marks on his own face, like Indian war paint, but instead he just pretended to, his fingers tracing the contours of his sallow cheeks. Blake rinsed his fingers off in the water. “Don’t fall on the way up, Kish.”
Greg didn’t hear him. He was staring at the ripple in the water left by Blake’s fingers. He bent down and splashed some onto his leg, up his shin and over his knee, and it burned, not painfully but in another way, a very intense feeling of heat and pressure and even, he admitted to himself, pleasure. Greg cupped a handful of water, sniffed it, tentatively tipped it onto his tongue. And his mouth immediately felt warm and happy, soothed and relaxed. Even his teeth buzzed. He glanced at the others; they were getting ready to climb. Greg unstoppered his small canteen. He chugged the water already inside—no use wasting—and in a quick motion, dipped the empty container into the pond.
No need to be sneaky; no one noticed him. They rarely ever did.
18
THE STORY, PART II
THEY DID NOT RETURN THE NEXT DAY.
While the group was spelunking toward their extraordinary find, Blake’s mother had made a surprise visit to the campus; she owned a house in Aspen and came out year-round. It wasn’t, in itself, a problem that she didn’t find Blake. Mary Sutton did not especially like to wait, and Fenton had little to offer her in the way of entertainment, but if her son was out on an exclusive field trip, so be it. She found herself in his room, sitting on his unmade bed, convinced that she should fly Elsa in from Connecticut to clean the place once a week.
Five minutes after he was due to arrive back, Mary’s patience ran out. Ten minutes after he was due to arrive back, she sat in the dean’s office, an eyebrow raised, lips impeccably twitched into a frown.
Inquiries were made, and Avery and class were not to be found at Baker Canyon National Park, their original destination. The lips twitched again with, some might be kind enough to say, concern.
The sheriff was called. Deputies went far and wide.
Not two hours later, a lead: a gas station attendant on Interstate 70 had seen a Westbrook van turn off into the foothills. Twenty minutes beyond that, the van was found.
By the time Avery—he had demanded to be last—was pulled forth from the hole by his six students, four deputies and two emergency-service technicians were standing at the cave entrance, shining their lights, playing rock, paper, scissor to see who would go in first. A deputy named Colin Banks lost, and, being terrified of the dark but afraid to show it, he pulled his flashlight and his gun, and crouched through the hole.
Call it surprise or inexperience, but the sight of a man like Avery, with his long white hair and dirty, jowly face coming at him in the dark could scare most humans, even lawmen, especially one scared half to death already. Colin Banks discharged his firearm, thankfully hurting no one at all—just a hole through Blake’s lucky canteen—but this caused his colleagues to draw their own pistols and push their way in, and there was screaming and crying and shouting and much, much flashlight pointing.
No more gunshots that day. But the blame for the entire affair fell square on Avery, who was dismissed before Mary boarded her tiny private airplane to return to Aspen. A gun discharged during his non-approved class outing, which nipped the son of the school’s third largest donor—what other conclusion but termination could there be, star teacher or no? Throughout the entire harried ordeal, through some wordless agreement, no one spoke of the map and the strange forest, even aft
er the paramedics saw Greg’s bloody pants and spent thirty minutes searching for a wound. The kids assumed Avery would talk, but he didn’t either, perhaps worried that someone else would take credit for the discovery. In any case, if it weren’t for Colin Banks, it’s conceivable that Sebastian Avery would still be teaching at Westbrook. But as it was, Greg viewed the dizzying array of events as nothing less than fate.
• • •
A week after the incident, Greg left letters for the other five students. Midnight, near the base of the statue of Socrates, he shivered and whistled to himself, trying to make a coherent noise with his cold lips; sure enough, the group arrived. They didn’t realize that he’d never snuck out of his house like this before. That he didn’t come here to neck regularly with the opposite sex, like Brenda did.
“What’s this all about, Greg?” Chuck asked with a note of real curiosity, his bowl cut wispy in the night air.
“I think we have to go back.”
No one said a thing. No one disagreed. They all had been thinking it. Veronica, in a cashmere hoodie, moved close to Greg and hooked her arm around his.
“I think something important is down there,” Greg continued. “Something that could change the world.”
He reluctantly pulled away from Veronica to demonstrate.
“The map must be important. But . . . guys. The water. Check this out. One of you shine a light on my arm.”
Greg pulled out his canteen, handed it to Veronica, and then drew a knife from his pocket. The group stepped back involuntarily.
“What are you doing, Kish?” Blake said, his thin face etched with concern.
Greg held out his hand and rolled up his checkered-wool sleeve. He took a steadying breath and sliced his arm, relatively deep, sending forth a nice burst of steamy blood. Veronica dropped the canteen, Alex gagged, Chuck put his hand to his mouth, but they all stared when Greg picked up the canteen and poured what remained of the water onto his arm. The blood thinned, and the cut stopped steaming. The cut had been about a half inch wide, and they could see his muscle underneath, but slowly the gap grew smaller, the skin resealing, leaving just a swirl of dried blood.
“I should have died when I fell,” he said, and he knew it was true. He had already cut himself six times before this meeting. “I landed in this water. It saved my life.”
The proof was indisputable. No one made any jokes. No one denied the miracle of his survival. Veronica kept running her hands up and down her own arms to keep herself from shivering. Chuck couldn’t get enough, and he stuck his long nose right onto Greg’s arm, as if sniffing for the solution.
“But how are we supposed to get down there?” Brenda asked. She looked tiny amid the others, bundled in all her winter gear.
“We steal the equipment and go this weekend,” said Blake. He touched Greg’s skin again, just like in the cave, and examined the bloody digit. His eyes sparkled in the starlight, his eagerness so apparent that it gave even Greg pause.
There was no disagreement. It was as if the entire group was looking for this, a purpose, and they were suddenly a unified team ready for anything. There was something powerful happening, and each felt it deep in themselves and the air they breathed. Blake reached for the empty canteen and managed to pour a few drops into his open mouth as they watched in fascination. He swallowed, looked down at his hands, then at the others, and shrugged.
“We can’t tell anyone,” Veronica whispered, her face stern and set in lines.
“Why?” Chuck asked.
“They’ll think we’re crazy. We’re just kids.”
“What about Avery?” Greg said
“What about him?” Brenda replied.
“What if he gets there first?”
Blake took deep breaths of air, and his eyes began to water in the cold. He clapped his hands together to keep warm. “How is that a bad thing?”
No one spoke. There was a current passing between them. A shared vision of wealth, fame, of immortality. Not telling anyone was a big deal, they were realizing. No parents, who expected them to follow a certain path of education and employment. No teachers, who could help procure equipment and material. No friends but themselves. The group stood there for a while, breathing in the cold air, thinking their newfound thoughts, and then dispersed, changed forever.
• • •
Veronica, Blake and Greg strolled back to campus. Veronica was holding Greg’s arm and rubbing the place where he had cut himself. Then she glanced at Blake, the curiosity plain on her face. She almost licked her lips.
“What did it taste like?”
His eyes lit up. “Like water,” he said without hesitation, “but with a kick.”
“Do you feel different?” Greg asked, because he wanted to see if it caused the same effects on Blake. When Greg drank the water, his lungs felt full of fresh air.
Blake stopped walking and began to breathe heavily. Greg got excited. He did feel the same thing! Blake squeezed his fingers into fists and huffed his shoulders up and down, all the while keeping his eyes closed. The steam of his breath shot into the dark.
Greg and Veronica watched him with bemusement at first, and then alarm. Veronica came close, put a shivering hand on his shoulder. “Blake? Are you okay?”
He didn’t respond, but kept breathing harder and harder and then, suddenly, stopped. His head drooped. His arms dangled at his sides.
And then he lunged at Veronica and encircled her waist and screamed while spinning her around and around, her feet in the air and her white sneakers flashing. She freaked out, shouting as loud as anything Greg had ever heard, but then she began to laugh and laugh, her face turning bright red and happy, and she let her arms loose into the sky and Greg watched the two of them go round and round. When Blake let her down, they stared at each other, and Greg had never seen that stare before.
He was not surprised to see them holding hands soon after.
• • •
They didn’t have to steal a thing to help them on their way. Aside from Greg, each of the students had a trust fund to pull from. By the weekend, they were decked out in serious spelunking gear, with laboratory equipment, cameras and plenty of rope. But upon arriving at the cave, after a few nerve-racking hours of setting up everything and imagining police sirens, the Westbrook students found the well dry, the water gone.
The forest was still there, but already it was aged, thirsty, desperate for sustenance. The group was devastated, certain their previous visit had somehow contaminated the environment. Greg wondered if true sunlight would kill these plants that had evolved in darkness, anyway. There were no more insect noises, no more strange creatures. The place was dying. Everyone felt awful but for Greg. He stared at the map for a few hours, his flashlight puzzling over every clue. The white men, the blazing solar eclipse, the upside-down mountains, the vividly bright colors and the endlessly blue water. He smacked his lips together, lost in thought, until it came to him in a flash of gut instinct.
“The water’s coming back.”
The map was near impossible to decipher, but Greg was convinced that the water had to return on a cycle. There were so many calendar events noted on the map: a solar eclipse, a moon, the sun. Surely whoever painted the thing had a time in mind. More important, he reasoned to himself, it was a map. There was a purpose, and that was to explain where something was. In this case, Greg knew it had to be the water, the magical, wonderful, healing water. Blake wasn’t so sure, but Greg kept pointing to the bottom corner of the map, the miniature map within a map, at how it had to mean there was a cycle. He couldn’t tell how long—only that the water would return, he was absolutely, positively, somehow sure of it. He dug around until he found some petrified wood, which he claimed was evidence of an earlier oasis. They just needed patience. Everyone else was pretty disappointed, almost angry. They had witnessed a miracle and had, in that dead forest, all the p
roof of its reality they needed. But they didn’t have the miracle itself. There was no water left. They returned to school, trying to forget anything had ever happened.
But Greg wouldn’t let them.
By the time they graduated, the deal was made: Greg would stay behind—it was his city, after all. He was happy to sacrifice his college plans for an opportunity like this. He’d check the well three times a week, examine the decaying plant life, and would get financed by his classmates’ trust funds. Normally he’d never take a penny from someone else, but Greg had plans for this money, and so he accepted, and the others dispersed to lead their lives. Veronica and Blake moved to New York together, where they both went to Columbia University. They visited Greg the most frequently, on winter breaks or in summer. But even their visits began to slow when, after a few years, not a drop of water had appeared in the well. Soon Greg was alone, a quiet watcher, in the only place he ever knew. The others became doctors, engineers, lawyers, and for a very long time, they really did forget that their classmate once rose from the dead.
• • •
Even Greg almost stopped believing.
Seventeen years passed, and he hadn’t heard from Blake in six months. That call was only to say that Veronica had left him, the divorce messy but—thankfully—childless. All of his pact-mates had stopped sending checks a while back, and Greg no longer visited the cave three times a week.
When it had all started, so long ago, Greg was enthusiastic and determined. He had cleaned up the place, made a lighted path and a long, well-made ladder to the site. At the age of nineteen, he got a job in construction, to better learn how to rig a path and build from wood. He kept studying, both his computers and everything he could about local Native Americans. He had early translations of the conquistador Cortés’s expeditions in his study. But after a time, the Cave became sort of secondary. He became a foreman at his construction company, then manager, then owner—an early adopter of computer technology in the workplace. His firm, Fenton Construction, won the contract to build an ambitious aqueduct straight from the mountain to Fenton, and Greg installed his old friend Terry to run the place. Fifteen years in, Greg had met a woman, a lovely librarian named Amanda, and a year or so later, they were married and she was pregnant.