by Tony Nalley
We walked along naturally formed crevasses; some channels leadin’ nowhere, while others dropped off into great depths. We sat and rested. Gainin’ strength, and again we returned to our gait.
Along one path we stopped and drank from the water of an underground spring, but it was not good to the taste; warm and salty as minerals from a mine.
Petrified stone protruded in places throughout the ceilin’ above us, and from within these natural alcoves where they bore their marks deeply, grounded into the caverns basin.
Petrified wood, this was petrified wood! Where was it that I had I seen this before?
“Colby.” I said as I ran my hand over the rock. “I think I know where we are.”
“What do you mean?” He asked.
“I know where we are! We’re under Mr. Roberts’ field!” I said ecstatically! “This is the underground spring that I’ve heard tale about!”
“Look at this rock!” I reached down and picked up a piece of stone from the caverns floor and handed it to him. It looked like wood, preserved in its original shape but over many years the plant materials had been replaced by minerals that had formed the rock!
“This is petrified wood. It’s literally wood turned into stone.” I said. “It takes about a hundred years to do it and there’s a bunch of it just over the hill from my house!”
“I’ll bet that’s where we are!” I said as I picked up another piece and examined it for myself. “We’re under the woods behind my house! I know we are!” I continued.
“Then I wonder if there is another way out of here!” Colby said as he began to get as excited as I was!
We scoured the walls with our flashlights, lookin’ for passageways, runnin’ our hands across the smooth cavern walls. For thirty minutes or more we searched for an opening, findin’ ourselves disoriented in the darkness. There were no man-made doors within this part of the cavern; at least none that we had seen for an hour or more. And as the minutes quickly passed, we found ourselves becomin’ more and more familiar with many of its uncharted dead ends!
“We’ve been walkin’ around in circles Toby.” Colby said agitatedly. “I can’t find a way out! Plus, I think we might be lost!”
It was dark within this hidden cave, that without light we could not see; but from deep within its confines, distant sounds echoed softly by way of the earth and granite walls; faint but hallowed sounds of a small dogs bark!
“Wait a minute, listen!” I whispered. “Do you hear that?”
We rose to our feet!
“It’s a dog!” I said excitedly. “I hear a dog barkin’! I think it’s Candy!”
We hastened our footsteps and ran in search of a way back home! Deep into a murky gloom, through collapsed and abandoned passages, with rocks and wooden beams piled upon the floor; we moved in the direction of the sound of the dogs bark! Crawlin’ over heaps of broken timbers, discoverin’, uncoverin’ and unblockin’ passages that had long since been closed off!
Through dirt and rock and with heated effort we broke through the piles of rubble and stood before an unlocked wooden and metal door! It hung loosely upon its hinges, we opened it with extreme caution but little effort, as spiders, dust and loosened earth fell out into the spillway!
The dog barked loudest here, the other side of this gate!
We pulled open the rustic wood and metal door to find a cobblestone stairway behind it, much neglected with broken rock. It led us upwards as we climbed through a secret passageway that seemed to transcend space and time and then out again into the darkened night! Where the air was sweet and smelled of great freedom!
Candy barked as we stood there now beside her just inside my family’s barn! And I knelt down and petted and hugged her a great deal! She licked my face and I didn’t even mind!
We swore each other to secrecy Colby and me, right there in the darkness of the barn as we cut our fingers and mixed our blood: an oath that could not be broken, lest God smite us and we both be dead! And we covered the entranceway to the tunnel with loose tarp found lyin’ in disarray. And laid old boards across it to ensure it would remain hidden.
It was good to be alive in that moment! As we stepped outside to breathe in the pureness of the night’s air! And it was so good to be home again!
“The cavern had led us here from their citadel …but for what reason was there passage?” I wondered. “Perhaps there was somethin’ to Colby’s ghostly analogy after all; a confederate soldier, ‘werewolves’ and all! And what of the images of children runnin’ back into the mountain? Were they merely shadows of terrors past, or the foreshadowing’s of a future yet to come?”
I hadn’t spoken to Colby of it! Too much to relate and take in all at one time! He would probably laugh at me again anyways. He always did!
The back porch light was on. That was my signal that it was time for me to come in. It was most likely past that time already I reckoned but I didn’t have a watch to tell. We went up to the back porch; my dog Candy followed with a wagging tail. Mama greeted us and shook her head at us too, ushering us all three inside! Mama closed the back door then. And she turned the porch light off.
Twelve
A Thirst for Knowledge
“What are we gonna do Toby?” Colby asked from across the room in the dark.
I couldn’t sleep either, but I didn’t know that he’d been lyin’ there just as wide awake as I was. The clock by my bed showed it to be 3:15 A.M. I knew then that it was gonna be a long day tomorrow, cause it would be time for us to be gettin’ up in just a little while. But thank God it was still summertime! Otherwise it would have been a school day and that would’ve just added to, and compounded a whole other dimension and level of misery in our lives!
“I don’t know.” I yawned and whispered in answer. “But we need to do somethin’. We may need to go to town …to find out some stuff, like up at the Library.”
“What do you mean?” Colby asked. “What kinda stuff do we need to find out?”
“Well …somebody has to know somethin’ right? I mean how did a place like that get there? It didn’t just magically appear! Who owns the land …and that kind of stuff?” I said. “Why did the Quarry stop production? And why did it even start for that matter?” I stated excitedly. And then rememberin’ the late hour I lowered my volume back down to that of a whisper.
“I saw things in there Colby.” I whispered in the darkness. “I saw images of children runnin’ from men with guns! I heard a church bell ringin’ and I saw fires! I saw em’ just like they were as real as you and me!”
I paused for a moment in the darkness, waitin’ for him to say I was a liar or to hear him make a joke and laugh at me. But the laughter never came.
“Somethin’ happened here Colby, in this place and on this land, and maybe it’s up to us to find out what.” I continued.
“What was the name that was written on the ceiling?” Colby asked. “Do you remember?”
“It said Lystre, whatever that means. Maybe it’s in an old form of English? I don’t know. But you know …most of those writings weren’t in English at all!” I stated matter of factly. “Maybe if we can find out some of the history of this town, maybe it can point us in the right direction.”
“Toby.” Colby whispered. “I saw this show one time where this boy lived in a house and it had a second floor bedroom with a window just like this one. And this vampire looked like a little boy and he was floating right outside the window!”
“Colby, don’t go scarin’ me now!” I said.
“And the vampire smiled at him through the window and tapped on the window glass!”
“Colby! You’d better stop it right now!”
“And the vampire said, ‘Toby …open up the window and let me in!” Colby said as he tapped his finger against the window glass.
I threw a pillow at him then and he laughed at me for a minute. But then he got real serious.
“We can’t be the only people who know about em’.” Colby said. “Cause if th
ey let us come into their lair, I guess they’re not too worried about what people know.”
“Well, like you said, maybe they don’t see us as bein’ a threat to em’ cause we’re just kids.” I reminded him. “But regardless of it, we’d probably better get some sleep. It’ll be light soon and we have alot to do tomorrow.”
Colby silently agreed and we lay there in the darkness of my room, thinkin’ and starin’ aimlessly up at the ceilin’.
The next mornin’ came way too early for both of us even though Mama let us sleep in til’ 10 A.M. But we made it up and got to breakfast alright. And then we had to figure on how in the world we could go about gettin’ ourselves up to the Library in town! It was at least five miles away!
“Why don’t you boys look in the encyclopedias first?” Mama suggested.
We hadn’t even thought of that!
“Good thinking Mom! Thanks!” I replied.
We both excused ourselves from the table and hurried to the livin’ room where Mama kept a whole complete set of encyclopedias under two of her coffee tables. They were small with green covers on em’ and I grabbed a bunch of em’ out and started lookin’ through em’ as I sat right there on the floor! Colby grabbed a bunch too! I never would have thought I’d be lookin’ through some old books tryin’ to figure out history stuff on summer vacation!
“What do we look for?” Colby asked.
“Well.” I replied. “I guess we should start by lookin’ for stuff that would pertain to things that happened around here? There’s alot of history surroundin’ Bardstown, like the old tavern up there and St. Joe. So maybe if we start lookin’ through the history that we know of, we can find our way to other things that would lead us to what we need to find.” I continued. “Does that make sense?”
“Yep.” Colby replied. “It also sounds boring. How about we go bike ridin’ first?” Colby suggested.
Well, it was summertime after all. And we were kids, and we’d just finished breakfast for goodness sakes! So we decided to close the books up and straighten em’ up so Mama would let us use em’ again and then go outside and ride bikes!
Colby managed to keep me pretty much occupied throughout the rest of the mornin’ and into the afternoon with things, even right up and until his mom and dad had come by to pick him up.
It wasn’t until then that I realized that he had left me to do all the book learnin’ by myself.
But I guessed I really didn’t mind since it was really up to me anyways, cause I lived there and I guess that I had more skin in the game. And plus, they were my mama’s books.
After Colby left and we had eaten supper, I excused myself to my room and I spread the encyclopedias out all along the whole floor by my bed. I grabbed one of em’ then, and I lay down and I began to read.
I always liked the feel of a book in my hands; it made me feel like I was smarter than I thought I was. Books also had a good smell to em’ too, leather bindin’s, old paper and ink.
I turned the pages and skimmed through a bunch of subjects, but I wasn’t findin’ much of nothin’. At least nothin’ that would have to do with real life, or the life here in Bardstown, so I began to focus more on what I knew about, like I had told Colby; stuff like “My Old Kentucky Home”, “The Talbott Tavern”, “St Joe’s Church”, Stephen Foster and John Fitch.
“Wait a minute!” I thought. “Lystre, I’ll look up Lystre!”
I picked up the volume marked L-M and thumbed through the pages to Lystre! “Lystre: a French translation of Lystra (Ancient Greek) the present name is ‘Klistra’. The city of Lystra was one of beauty and culture; sited along the Persian Royal Road, where a large cross now marks the wall of an early Christian church. Ruins of the ancient city are located over the top of a hill, where according to local legends; the city was hidden as defense from its enemies. The Apostle Paul once preached the Gospel in Lystra after persecution drove him from Iconium, but unlike other cities that Paul had visited, Lystra had no Jewish synagogue. Paul had reached the Gentile race without approaching them through Judaism, perhaps for the first time. Situated in the country of Laconia, (modern day Turkey) it was the land from which the legend of the werewolf began and from where the term lycanthropy is derived. In the middle ages the church condemned lycanthropy as a form of sorcery and often punished the supposed offenders ruthlessly.”
“Wow!” I said out loud.
Lystre was a ‘real life’ city and the spellin’ of its name was in French! The ancient city was located ‘over the top of a hill’, which is exactly the way the old rock quarry is positioned now! Just over the top of a hill! The city was located in an area from where the legend of the ‘werewolf’ began! And the Grand Hall within the cavern closely resembled that of a Christian church!
“Okay!” I thought as I found myself getting overly excited. “If the Grand Hall has been there for…let’s say, a hundred years...” I thought further. “…that would mean it was there at the time of the Civil War and perhaps even further …considerin’ our connections to France by way of Father Flaget!”
I picked up volume E-F and looked up Father Joseph Flaget. “Benedict Joseph Flaget (1763–1850) was a U.S. bishop. He served as the Roman Catholic Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bardstown between 1808 and 1839, then as bishop of the Diocese of Louisville between 1839 and 1850 when the See was transferred to Louisville in 1839. At the age of seventeen Flaget entered The Society of Saint-Sulpice, at Clermont-Ferrand, France. He was ordained a priest June 1, 1788. Flaget taught theology for two years at Nantes, and later was chairman of the seminary at Angers until the institution was closed by the French Revolution in seventeen hundred ninety-three.”
Blah …blah …blah …and I yawned.
“Flaget left Baltimore in 1798 bound for Cuba with other Sulpicians. They were not permitted to celebrate Mass in Havana. He contracted yellow fever and was left behind when the other Sulpicians returned to America. He recovered and acted as a tutor to the son of a wealthy Spaniard. Later he was permitted to celebrate Mass at the church of the Capuchin friars. While in Cuba, Louis Phillippe of France and his two brothers had made their way to Havana as part of their exile journey. The exiles were befriended by their fellow Frenchman, Flaget, in 1799. He returned to Baltimore in November 1801.”
I stretched and yawned for about a minute cause it was gettin’ kind of late. And I grabbed a pencil and a small piece of paper and started writin’ down a list of what I had learned. That way I wouldn’t forget about it once I woke up in the mornin’. Now, let me see ...and I yawned again.
1. Lystre was written on the dome of the Grand Hall, it was a French translation of Lystra.
2. There were ruins from an Ancient Christian Church, over the top of a hill.
3. Lystra was located in Laconia, the land from which the legend of the ‘werewolf’ began.
4. In the middle ages the church condemned lycanthropy as a form of sorcery.
5. Flaget met with the ‘future’ King of France while in Cuba.
How this all tied together I didn’t know. I also didn’t know why the city had been built in Kentucky or by whom. I thumbed through still more pages, and I looked under multiple headings. I found bits and pieces of information regardin’ Bardstown and I found another listing under the headin’ of ‘the City of Lystra’ …a map drawin’ was included, showin’ the city and its dimensions.
“Plan of the City of Lystra Nelson County, Kentucky1795 Tanner, Henry Schenck, 1786-1858 (Engraver) Plan developed for the city of Lystra on South Creek of Rolling Fork in NelsonCounty, Kentucky, is comprised of perpendicular streets and blocks of uniform size. The lots un-disposed off may be purchased at the Agency-Office. Plans to build the city of Lystra were manufactured in London, England. The proposed town was to be located along the Rolling Fork of the Salt River, 37 1/4° north latitude, and 85 1/2° longitude west from London. While the location of the city appeared on many maps up until 1817, the city itself was never built. And its precise location has never been d
etermined.”
“The city was never built. And its precise location has never been determined.” I whispered as I read those words again.
Perhaps it had been built after all …just not according to conventional history.
In my vision within the cave amongst other things, I had heard the words ‘of faith and chime’ and I had heard and seen an image of a large church bell. The only church that I was aware of that could have come close to havin’ a church bell of that size was St. Joseph’s Church! So I searched through Mama’s encyclopedias and I picked up the volume labeled S-T.
I thumbed through its pages to find the listin’ for St. Joseph’s Cathedral. And I yawned again.
“Saint Joseph Proto-Cathedral is a Catholic parish church at 310 West Stephen Foster Avenue in Bardstown, Kentucky. It is the former cathedral mother church of the former Roman Catholic Diocese of Bardstown. During its years as a cathedral, the pastor was Benedict Joseph Flaget, the first Bishop of Bardstown. The cornerstone was laid on July 16, 1816, with construction beginning thereafter. Materials used for its construction were found in the immediate area. The architect and builder was John Rogers of Baltimore. By 1819 it was sufficiently completed for Mass to be held. The interior was fully complete by 1823. Many of the paintings and interior decorations including a large cathedral bell were donated by Pope Leo XII, King Louis-Philippe of France (who desired to acknowledge his sense of obligation for courtesies extended to him by that prelate when he was an exile in the Island of Cuba.) The gifts from the King of France included a cathedral bell; paintings by Rubens, Murillo, Van Dyke and others. Gifts of royal embroidered vestments: the handwork of the queen and her court.”