Tiny stalactites on the ceiling stabbed Gunther’s head when he tried to sit up straight to open his pack, and he had to bend far forward to retrieve his knife and one of the three remaining nutrition bars. He cut the bar in half, and considered giving half the bar to June and keeping half for himself. Then with another thought, he returned one of the halves to its wrapper and proceeded with cutting the remaining half.
Lying on her side, her head supported by her arm, June objected. “Gunther, we can eat a full bar tonight. Haven’t you noticed how bright it’s getting? We’re almost to the end of the cave.”
“June, we don’t know that for sure. We can’t take the chance.”
“What do you mean we don’t know that for sure!? You know our eyes can never see in total darkness. But now we’re getting to where we can see shadows. So we must be near the other end of the cave. We’ll come out somewhere near New Calar.” She jerked to a sitting position, hitting her head on a nub of stalactite. “Ouch!!!” She sounded close to tears as she rubbed the spot. “Gunther, I’m so hungry.”
He mumbled first one sound, then another. What finally came out was not what he’d intended. “June, I don’t know where the light is coming from, but it’s not from the other end of the cave.”
She was not stupid, this sister of his. In the meager light of his headlamp, he saw her face change as comprehension set in. Her eyes took on an aspect of fear.
He half wished he’d supported her fantasy instead of telling her the truth. He handed her her assigned quarter bar. “Maybe we are almost there, June. But there’s something in between. Have you wondered how Simon and whoever else made those tracks survived this long? I don’t think any of the New Calar kids brought food with them the day they disappeared.”
June bit off a fragment of her quarter-bar, then lay down and wriggled until she found a position that was apparently comfortable—or, at least, bearable. “Gunth, you’re scaring me.”
His mind wrestled with a series of conflicting thoughts. “Let’s not think about it now. We’re both too tired. He, too, lay down with his “dinner” between his fingers. “Let’s eat, and face tomorrow—tomorrow.”
“You sound like Dad.”
“Maybe. Maybe he’s got it all together after all. I’m happy to say, you don’t sound like Mom.”
INTERLUDE 2
Panting with anxiety more than exertion, Dicey shot a nervous glance about the room as she opened the door to Sisters Pizza. As she entered, the teenage waitress, sitting at a table with a group of boys her age, leaped to her feet and pulled the top of her Dominican habit up over her head to complete her uniform—just in case, Dicey assumed, Dicey was a spy for Management. So far as Dicey knew, no other pizza establishment in the United States required their waitresses to dress as Dominican nuns. No wonder the local Catholic Church had objected—and no wonder Sisters Pizza had won a spot on the venue of all tour groups that hit the area.
“Good evening, Ma’am,” the girl began. “Table for one?”
In a far corner, Dicey spied a woman sitting behind a pizza almost as big as the tabletop. As she looked, the woman stood and waved her arms wildly, as if she were beckoning someone in the midst of Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
Dicey wiggled her fingers toward the girl, whose face was red with sweat below her veil. What an insane uniform to wear in summer in a pizza place without air conditioning. “Uh … Thank you. I’m joining … yeah … that lady.” She headed off toward the corner table.
Cathy Sheffield looked far different than Dicey had expected. The voice on the phone had led her to expect a young middle-aged woman who could have joined her on the running track. But the woman who waved to her could have been her mother, and was so big that walking as far as the restroom would likely have constituted a chore. The woman nearly upended the table as she reached for Dicey’s hand.
“Dicey,” the woman said—yes, the same voice Dicey had heard over the phone.
“Cathy.” Dicey could not help running her eyes over the pizza, two slices of which were already missing. Must have been the Carnivore Special that she’d heard her children joking about, a greasy glob of a thing smothered with cheese that ran over it like silt in the Mississippi delta. And the foamy yellow stuff in the pitcher beside it was not apple juice. Neither constituted the preferred fare of a near-vegetarian who rarely touched alcohol.
As Dicey sat opposite her, the words burst from Cathy’s mouth like lava from a volcano. “I knew it would happen. I told them, but they wouldn’t believe me. Yeah, like hey man, why should anybody pay attention to a fat ugly drunk?”
Despite her longstanding compunctions, Dicey poured beer into her glass until foam ran over the top, and helped herself to a slice of pizza. She recalled the Girl Scout oath she’d made to herself on her second overnight outing with June: Yes, I will do my darndest best for June and all these other girls, and whatever they serve, I’ll eat. If you were picky in Scouts, you went hungry.
“What did you know would happen?”
Cathy chewed, swallowed, drank as if her insides were a bottomless pit. Poured herself a new glass, and drank some more.
Burped.
Gasped.
“I told them this was not the end. I knew there would be more kids, and then more still. I told them it was going to keep on happening. But of course, they won’t listen. God forbid, they might have to work. Or think. Or worse still—do something.”
Mentally castigating herself for her avidity, Dicey took a huge bite of pizza and washed it down with nearly half the glass of beer. Well, she hadn’t eaten or drunk since her 11 AM lunch—sprouts, hummus, and water from the tap. She measured her words slowly and forcefully. “Cathy—what did you know would happen?”
Cathy’s sea-blue eyes focused on Dicey for the first time. “Our kids are being kidnapped.”
Dicey’s mouth fell open. “Kidnapped?”
“Yes, kidnapped.”
Dicey waited for more, but Cathy merely settled back further into her seat and reached for another slice of pizza. She’d presented her case. The cheese formed a rope that extended from the main pizza to the slice in Cathy’s hand.
Blue bells, cockle shells,
Easy ivy over …
“Cathy, like who would kidnap our children? And why?”
Cathy leaned forward again. Her eyes smoldered as if struck with a match. “Aliens. Who else? I don’t know who and I don’t know where, but it’s happening. Look at your own children—were they acting a little funny the past few days?”
Dicey did not have to think hard to know the answer. “Yes, but it’s summertime. They always act funny in summertime.”
“So they didn’t do or say anything out of the ordinary, anything they didn’t do or say last summer, or the summer before.”
“Well, they’re a year older, so …” Dicey took another swallow of beer. The image of Gunther shaping his potatoes into Devils Tower shot into her mind. June’s complaint about the potatoes being too lumpy. Their date with a pupa.
“You see?” Cathy’s eyes burned into hers as if she could read Dicey’s Diary of a Bad Mother. Dicey had to look away.
“Just acting like stupid teens doesn’t mean they were kidnapped.”
Cathy clucked her tongue and sighed, as if she were talking to a person with an IQ of 50. “Have you gone through their stuff?”
“You mean their personal belongings? In their rooms?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, no, I don’t do that. Their rooms are their own personal …”
“Okay,” Cathy nodded knowingly. “Suture my mouth shut, put a shunt in my liver, and stick hot pokers into my brain.”
“Oh, but I don’t think I could …”
“Of course you could! It’s not every day your kids are kidnapped by aliens. If you want to see your kids alive again, you’d better get all the information you can.”
Cathy chewed briefly, swallowed, bit, drank. D
icey realized that if she wanted a second slice of pizza, she’d better grab it soon. The beer and the meaty taste of the pizza were bringing back gustatory memories of a childhood drowned in a vat of junk food. Against her better judgment, she grabbed the biggest remaining slice of pizza, even though more than half a slice still sat on her plate.
“Good, huh?” Cathy said, with her first smile of the night.
“Yes, uh … Yes! It tastes like sin!”
“Sisters know what they’re doing, all right. You know, they say the couple that owns the place used to be a priest and a nun. They didn’t wear a cassock and veil all their lives.” Cathy rolled around in her seat, causing the whole chair-table module to creak. “So what are your children like?”
A thousand images flooded Dicey’s brain. How could you describe your children in a few words to a stranger? Yet within seconds she was talking—talking as fast as an auctioneer at a cattle auction. “Well, Gunther’s shy and doesn’t talk much. We always have to pry to get him to open up. June’s more open—she’s a joy. She stands up for him when the kids at school make fun of him, but she looks up to him like he was the greatest thing that’s happened to the world since J.C.”
“‘J.C.?’ As in Jesus Christ?”
“You know it. She even goes along with all his nonsense about caving …”
The table shook. A shiny silver nut popped from a bolt under the table and shot to the floor before rolling off in the direction of the waitress, who instinctively pulled her lips away from the boy beside her and drew her habit up over her head. Bits of pizza soaked in beer shot across the table. Cathy stood as if about to make a speech.
“That’s it!” she shouted, causing Sisters’ only other patrons, a group of sedate middle-aged tourists, to turn in their direction. “That’s the connection!” She sat down again, and the table twisted back into position—loose now, minus one of the nuts that had fastened it to the floor. “Radcliffe let go about a cave the day before the whole group disappeared. The rest of the group tried to shush her up. I knew at the time there was something going on, but I couldn’t put a finger on it.”
Dicey was shaking her head, wiping her face with her napkin. “No, Cathy, the cave business is nothing. Gunther’s been hoping to find a cave since he was a little tyke. He’s always had this fantasy about waking up one morning …”
“I heard Rad with my own two ears,” Cathy persisted, grabbing her ears as if to prove their existence. “She’s the most reliable of the bunch—despite all the bad stuff to do with her family lately—and when she mentioned the cave the rest of them immediately tried to shut her up. That’s where the aliens are—they’re in a cave.” She celebrated this pronouncement by stuffing a full half slice of pizza into her mouth.
A flood of thoughts invaded Dicey’s mind—sloshed around by nearly a full glass of beer. Her children in the hands of aliens under the ground—preposterous!
“I think my son mentioned Gunther a couple of times,” Cathy said. Her face had grown sedate, her eyes philosophic. “Some girl slapped him on the cheek after a debating competition.”
Dicey felt her face redden. “That was two years ago. The girl is a retard …”
“The girl is Tiffany. The girl is going to be Senior of the Year next year. If she gets away from the Aliens, that is. An Rad’ll be Senior of the Year the year after that—assuming she, too, gets away from the Aliens and gets her act together. Two gorls in a row.” Cathy’s eyes grew tired. “Teach those lazy boys where it’s at.”
Drinking straight from the pitcher, Cathy drained it. “Serge told me he defended Gunther against the kids that were railing on him. Serge is a good boy. Do you know Serge, or any of the other kids?”
Dicey felt unfairly on the defensive. “No, I …”
“Do you come to school meetings?”
“No, I work, and …”
“You should come. You’re intelligent, and you care, and I can tell you’re a good mom.”
It’s the beer, Dicey told herself. How else could she explain the sudden wash of good feeling that percolated through her brain? How could a few nice words by someone she’d never met erase a decade of feeling like an inadequate mother?
“You need to be more involved,” Cathy said. “Let me tell you about the other kids.”
By the close of the next half hour, Dicey knew the names of all the kids who had disappeared and a few tidbits about each, as well as the names of their parents and a dossier of gossip about them.
Cathy’s closing words took her by surprise. “You going to eat that pizza?”
“Huh?” Dicey followed Cathy’s glance to the paper plate in front of her and the giant slice of pizza she had taken but not touched. “No.”
In less than an instant, the slice of pizza oozed grease between Cathy’s fingers.
Dicey found it difficult to keep her car from drifting over the double line that divided State Highway 480. She was grateful that hers was the only car on the road.
Her breath drove Spike a step backward as she opened the porch door. But he said nothing as she weaved her way upstairs and shoved open the door to Gunther’s room. As she pushed the fourth time, she could not hold back a comment. “Why can’t the useless men in this useless house fix these useless sticking doors and useless wobbly doorknobs?”
She received no reply from downstairs.
Gunther’s room appeared as neat as usual, but her eyes at once found the gap between the books and CDs on the bookshelf. His caving pack had disappeared, and the caving implements that usually sat on the floor below them had vanished as well.
A visit to her daughter’s room—where she merely hissed when the door would not close because the latch bolt did not meet the strike plate—confirmed her fears. Cathy was right. Her children were gone. They’d been kidnapped by aliens who lived in a cave.
CHAPTER 9
A sensation of being smothered woke Gunther in what felt like the wee hours of the morning. Gasping for air, he thrashed about until he realized that June’s arms, locked around him as if she were holding on for dear life, had pulled the space blanket around his neck.
Carefully removing her arms so he would not wake her, he stuck his head out into the netherworld of the cave. Although he no longer noticed its musty smell, he could not ignore the cold. His skin felt coarse and gritty. A fine coating of mud covered him. June’s body felt the same—cool, moist and yucky. They were turning into amphibians.
He looked up to see several limestone icicles above his head. From the floor a few meters away, a row of stalagmites grinned at him. He should not have been able to see these things. In this world, total darkness should have reigned.
June awoke and stretched when he reached for his backpack.
“Gunth, what are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.”
“How do you know?”
She laughed. “Got me.”
Reaching into his pack, he felt for his knife and the remaining half of last night’s nutrition bar. He flicked the knife open and prepared to cut the bar in half.
The space blanket rustled as June pulled herself to a sitting position. She sighed. Then, like their mother, she began to sing, as if the tune were running in her head and just had to get out.
“Now we take a bite—small bite.
Chew, chew, chew—slow chew.
Let the stomach know …”
A scuffling sound from the direction of the little stream drew their attention away from breakfast. A voice cut across the confines of their sleeping nook. Soft and deep, the voice sounded like Frosty the Snowman in the old cartoon. Yet it bore a robotic quality that no television Frosty could mimic.
“Warm greetings, Surface Dweller. Welcome to our dark and moist abode. I am confident you will be happy here.”
Gunther’s hand jerked so violently he jabbed his left wrist with the knifepoint. The nutrition bar flew into the air, the knife fell to the ground. June screamed and scrambled about
for her headlamp. In an instant, the beam of her light shot up, down, right and left until it found the source of the voice.
Looking up, Gunther saw an odd, oval-shaped creature, perhaps four feet high and half as wide. It stood on the bottom pair of four symmetrical pairs of appendages, each pair emerging from one of the body’s four segments. Each appendage was short, and ended in a claw-like structure similar to an animal’s paw. Although the creature had no real head, its uppermost segment rose high enough above the highest set of arms to distinguish it from the other segments and make it look like the seat of the creature’s intelligence. Eyes on each side of the “head” looked as much to the sides as straight ahead. It spoke from a mouth that formed a near-perfect circle at the very top of the head. Only if it bent forward—as it now did—could Gunther see the mouth. Hairlike projections emerging from around the mouth and from the joints between segments waved toward him in a friendly way. The headlamp’s light shone clear through the creature, revealing dark and light shadows within that looked like plumbing—its cardiovascular and digestive systems, Gunther guessed.
Beside the creature, in a pose that appeared submissive—a prisoner of war trying to make himself a favored victim—stood a figure Gunther recognized at once.
“Simon?” he said.
The boy nodded. Tall and gangly, he looked nervous as he nodded from Gunther to June, and then back at the creature. “Hi guys.”
“Simon, what … ? How … ?” Gunther looked to June for help, but found her staring at the creature as if she were witnessing an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Her mouth was agape, her tongue flapping against her teeth. He could expect no help from her.
Simon gulped. “This is Teddy. He’s a Water Bear—a tardigrade. He’s our friend. He’s trying to help us find a way out of the cave. You can trust him.”
The upper quarter of the creature’s body nodded vigorously up and down, as if to confirm the truth of Simon’s words. Its mouth billowed fleshy projections as it spoke, and the flagella around the mouth waved back and forth in a friendly way. “Indeedy, indeedy,” it said.
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