Gunther's Cavern

by Edward Etzkorn

  As he sat, Gunther noticed the curtains of Arachnocampa luminosa above their heads that formed rows so close together they could have been vertical blinds around a table closing off windows to the outside. A shallow pit in the middle of the rock writhed with what Gunther thought were flames struggling to keep their sparks going in the darkness. Upon closer inspection, he realized they were not flames, but the bodies of living beings—grubs or larvae that had been removed too soon from their nests or cocoons and thrown together into this central hole.

  To Gunther’s surprise, Hood stuck his hand into the pit and pulled out a wiggling piece of matter. He bit it an inch or two from one end, then thrust the whole mass into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. Rad and Tiff did the same, then, one by one, the other kids.

  “If you use your imagination, they taste a little like cream puffs,” Hood said.

  Rad wrinkled her forehead. “Ignore the phony bravado. When we first got here, he was the last to eat one. As best I can tell, they’re larvae. If we didn’t eat them, they would eventually become giant butterflies. Oversized, like the rest of the bugs around here. They really don’t taste bad, and since they’re just larvae, I figure they don’t feel any pain when we chew them. Or so I tell myself.”

  “And who would care, anyway?” came an ethereal voice from nearby. Gunther and June whirled around to see Teddy standing behind them. As they looked his way, he made a sound resembling laughter, crossing his second pair of armlets over his upper body. The light from the glowworms lit up the central part of his anatomy, revealing orange and brown substances being squeezed, then released, into what Gunther assumed was his digestive tract.

  “Eat up!” Teddy encouraged them. “You must be hungry after all those days in the cave.”

  At the moment, Gunther could find little meaning in the word “hungry.” The sight and sound of insects flapping above his head as they struggled to extricate themselves from the glowworms’ glue did not help his appetite.

  June’s voice surprised him. “Eat, Gunth. So-phong tee strength mon kroi.” Got to keep your strength up.

  Following her lead, he turned again toward the writhing pit, already half-empty, and the sight of their companions chewing with determination, if not gusto. He watched June grab a wiggling form and toss it into her mouth. She swallowed without chewing. Grimacing with displeasure, he did the same. He could not think of it as a cream puff, but with a wild stretch of his imagination, it could perhaps have been Play Doh.

  Gunther awakened many times during the night. He felt as if he lay awake for more hours than he slept. The first time, he awoke curled in June’s embrace. The second time, shivering with cold despite the space blanket, he followed June’s lead in migrating to a vacant spot in the middle of the group. After that, his recollections grew hazy—dream-filled awakenings wrapped in arms, knocked in the head by elbows, running in place under a microscope lens from creatures that flapped their flagella like whips as they tried to catch him.

  He awoke in what felt like morning to the sound of June’s voice.

  He did not know how long she’d been calling him, or why she was not sleeping.

  He awoke with agonizing slowness, warmed by a body on each side, an arm wrapped around the left side of his chest and a head of hair on his right shoulder.

  “Gunther! Gunth!” she was calling in a hoarse whisper. Her voice bore an urgency that in his state of half-sleep he could not comprehend.

  “Gunther!!!”

  He raised his head at last, and was surprised to see her standing outside the circle of children, who all appeared to be asleep. She was rubbing her eyes, but otherwise looked fully awake.

  If she was standing out there—then who …? He jerked to full consciousness. In the minimal light provided by the Arachnocampa luminosa he realized his arm cradled Rad’s head, and the arm across his chest belonged to Tiff. He experienced a moment of panic, then looking around in every direction he saw the rest of the group huddled together in similar poses.

  Feeling more comfortable, he lay his head back down. “June, why are you up when everyone else is still asleep?”

  She shivered. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I got here. I don’t remember getting up.”

  The rest of the group was stirring now, the movement of one stimulating the movement of those on either side.

  “Morning. No …” a voice to Gunther’s right cried, filled with agony. Rocky VII’s, Gunther thought.

  “Four forty-five,” came Giles’s voice. “Too early. Breakfast is not until six. Everybody back to sleep.”

  Rad and Tiff stirred on both sides of Gunther. Neither made any move to distance themselves from him. Tiff’s arm actually seemed to draw tighter. Despite his fears, he felt a weird sense of belonging.

  Rad waved to June and beckoned her to lie down again. After a moment’s indecision, June accepted her invitation and lay down on Rad’s other side, away from Gunther. Gunther felt Rad’s hair slide across his neck, a surprisingly pleasant sensation, even though, like everything else in the cave, her hair was slick with moisture.

  “They took you to the lab,” Rad said.

  “Huh?” June answered.

  “The lab. They study our eyes. We’ve all been through it.”

  Gunther pulled himself up and turned toward Rad and June. Rad’s head slid off his shoulder as he propped his head up on his hand. Despite the rushing water in the background, his voice sounded overly loud. “What?”

  “Ssshhh!” several voices exclaimed.

  “Give me your flashlight,” Rad said.

  Without asking the reason for the request, Gunther reached into his pocket, withdrew his miniature flashlight and handed it to Rad. She shone it into June’s hair—so as not to ruin her night vision, Gunther assumed.

  “Yeah, you look like the rest of us now,” Rad said.

  Gunther focused on June’s face. The white of her eyes had turned red. The skin around her eyes was swollen. “June, are you okay?” he nearly screamed. “What did they do to you?”

  Several voices chimed from his right and left. “Ssshhh!”

  “You’ve got to be careful,” Rad addressed him in a voice barely above a whisper. “They hear everything. Especially if we’re all lying together like this and our bodies touch the ground.”

  “I’m okay,” June said. “I don’t feel any different than usual.”

  Gunther spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Can you see?”

  “Same as ever.”

  Relieved, Gunther lay back down. A dozen thoughts chased each other across his brain and back again.

  He spoke a little louder, but in the same hoarse whisper. “Why do you all stay here? Why don’t you just go back the way you came?”

  A voice came from his left—Rocky’s or Billy’s, he could not tell which. “Jeez, man. If you don’t want to sleep, that’s fine. But at least let the rest of us …”

  Hood spoke up. “Shut up, Billy. Gunther, my man, you got to accept that there are certain rules here. One is, shut your face when we’re lying together as a group. They can hear. If we could go back the way we came, we would. For one, it’s too steep. And for another, there’s the Guardians.”

  “Guardians?”

  Rad. “We’ll tell you later.”

  “So how did you get here?—Did you all fall into the cave?”

  Hood again. “Wish it was that simple. We’re not even sure.”

  Gunther was growing impatient. “How can you not be sure? You don’t even know how you got here?”

  “How did you get here?” The voice belonged to Giles—his accent gave him away.

  Gunther did not feel like going into details, but he knew he had to answer. Before he could speak, June spoke for him.

  “The cave has an entrance at the stream behind our house. We just meant to explore it, not get stuck in it. But our rope slipped, and it was too steep to get back out. We knew from the way the cave blew that there was another way
out, so we went for it.”

  Several voices responded, but it was Rocky VII’s that continued after the others cut short. His voice was filled with hope. “So there’s another way out?”

  “If there were, we wouldn’t be here,” June replied.

  “There’s another way in,” Gunther said.

  “You know, we can’t be talking like this,” Rad said. “You know they’ll hear every word.”

  Giles’s interrupted. “Serge left to find another way out. Maybe you passed him.”

  For an instant the silence intensified, the sound of breaths being held.

  “Serge is dead,” June said.

  Another moment of silence followed.

  Kara’s voice—soft, frightened. “How do you know?”

  Gunther answered quickly. “We found his body. He was standing against the wall, jammed in between a couple of rocks.”

  “Are you sure he … ?”

  “Yes,” Gunther and June chimed together.

  “Was he killed?”

  “Didn’t look like it,” Gunther said. “Looked he died of natural causes. But someone stood him up and locked his body between rock outcroppings.”

  A clacking sound—the same that had heralded the start of dinner the night before—greeted them from seven or eight meters away. A warm voice—Teddy’s—greeted them. “Breakfast in fifteen minutes,” it said.

  Several members of the group jumped at the sound, but most remained lying down or sitting lackadaisically on the floor.

  “Too early,” Giles moaned. “They heard us talking.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Billy said.

  “Ssshhh!” came the response.

  INTERLUDE 3

  By noon, Dicey felt as if she’d been working for two days without a break. Considering that she’d slept only two or three hours the night before—and these interrupted with worries and nightmares—her feelings were close to the truth.

  She’d phoned her boss early—awakening her, from the sound of her voice—to tell her she was too ill to work that day. By noon, she’d spoken with one or both parents of all the New Calar kids who had disappeared—except for Radcliffe Tran’s parents, who she understood lived separately and could not be reached.

  Every single one of the parents believed their children were still alive somewhere, either in a foreign country or in some weird commune in a remote part of the United States. Montana was the state most often selected for the children’s whereabouts. The Givens family had lost two children, a brother and a sister—Houdini, or “Hood,” and Tiffany—and the parents, from what Dicey gleaned, were on the brink of divorce because of it, each blaming the other for their children’s unhappiness and need to run away.

  When Dicey pressed them, four of the parents had overheard their children saying something about a cave. The children had withdrawn the word at once, as if afraid of giving away a secret, and had not mentioned it again. None of the missing children knew the faintest thing about caving, or had ever been to a cave—except to Howe Caverns, a well-known tourist destination that most people in the Northeastern United States had visited at least once. If Dicey added in Cathy’s quote from Radcliffe regarding a cave, five kids out of eleven had spoken about a cave.

  Sitting on the couch, ignoring the local TV news and weather report that smeared the screen in front of her (“Rain in the forecast? Stay tuned for Hailey Blizzard’s latest!”), she reviewed the implications of the information she now possessed. If Gunther and June had disappeared inside a cave, where was it?

  Somewhere on her property? Doubtful. Although Dicey had never roamed beyond the summit of the hill behind their house, the notion of a cave on her property was ludicrous. Caves did not open up behind people’s houses any more than the stream in front could erupt into a tsunami.

  Near New Calar? She doubted that, too. Although many caves existed within a forty-mile radius of her home, they were all well known and had been explored many times. If eleven kids had disappeared inside any of them, they would have been found long ago.

  She assessed the possibilities as well as her lack of sleep would allow. If she ruled out the existence of a cave on her own property, but accepted the possibility that her children had been abducted by aliens who lived in a cave, then someone must have driven them there.

  A list of neighbors filed into her mind, the names clicking like teletype on an ancient printer.

  Jimmy B.

  Arthur and Marge.

  Luisa Steinmetz.

  Vern and Lucky Cohen, the couple who lived up the road and had the weird daughter and refused to put running water into their home.

  Jimmy B.

  Jimmy B.

  JIMMY B.

  An adrenaline surge erupted inside her and made her shoot to her feet.

  “Jimmy!” she exclaimed when he answered her call on the twentieth ring. “Jimmy, I need your help. Gunther and June never came home last night. I think they disappeared inside a cave, and I need to know …”

  A gasp assailed her ears from the other end, followed by Jimmy’s voice, louder and more distraught than she’d expected. “Disappeared!”

  “Yes, disappeared.” When Jimmy did not say anything, she continued. “I talked to the New Calar moms and dads, and their kids were all talking about a cave …”

  She stopped at the sound of Jimmy’s voice moaning at the other end. Moaning, but not saying anything.

  “Jimmy?”

  “In a cave,” he said at last. His voice sounded far away, as if he were speaking to himself more than to her. “Holy saints in heaven, he must’ve found it. They told me they were going for a walk in the hinterlands. I should’ve gone with them. I should’ve read between the lines. If only all this work didn’t distract me—leaky faucets, messed-up roofs, those danged flies …”

  Dicey heard herself gasping for breath. “Jimmy, what are you saying? Jimmy!”

  Her scream brought him around. “Sorry, Dicey. I bet he found the cave.”

  “What cave? Jimmy, what are you talking about?”

  “The cave he’s been dreaming about all these years. I never thought he’d actually find it.”

  “All these years! Jimmy, he’s not even sixteen! It’s ridiculous! Just because you wish a cave would open up behind your house, that doesn’t mean it will! No more than an amusement park … Where is the cave?”

  “I don’t know, Dicey. My guess is it’s somewhere in the back of your property.”

  “My property?”

  “Maybe back near that spring. He told me he used to find blind fish and crayfish back there. Maybe Zeke knows. Or Kelila.”

  “Zeke? Who the blazes is he?”

  “He’s a friend, Dicey. He runs the caving store in Catskill. And you know Kelila. She’s that kind-of weird girl that lives up the road from you. You know, Vern and Lucky’s kid.”

  “I know.” Dicey sank down on her couch. “Jimmy … Oh … How does all this stuff go on right under my nosie?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My nosie! Never mind, Jimmy. How do I get in touch with Zeke?”

  “Hold on. I’ll get you the number.”

  She took down the number Jimmy gave her, making him repeat it twice. She heard herself muttering under her breath, barely understanding her own words. “See what they know … Check the back reaches of my property. Just like they say … Trust your enemies, at least you know what they have in mind … Keep your eye in the sky and you’ll never see the speck in your eye. Worst things happen under our nosies.”

  “Dicey, I can’t hear what you’re saying.”

  Dicey shouted into the phone. “I said, like everybody says, Worst things happen under your nosie!”

  “I never heard that, Dicey.”

  “No, and neither has anybody else! That’s why I still work, and two hundred copies of my CDs and poems sit in the cellar feeding the mold! And I go away every day so my kids can go off and lose themse
lves in a cave!”

  “Dicey, I’m sorry, but …”

  “It’s okay, Jimmy. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll call you back after I talk to the police again. And Spike. We’ve got to rustle up a posse.”

  “A posse? Like in the old Westerns?”

  “Exactly. Luisa and Marge and Arthur. Zeke, Kelila, maybe Cathy and …”

  Immersed in thought, she hung up the phone. A voice sang in her head—her own voice, singing to her from the CD that no one but Spike and Grandma Cowley and Mama Stavropoulis—and an unimpressed agent or two—had ever listened to.

  Nosie, nosie

  Think the world is rosy?

  Get yourself binoculars

  Oculars

  Joculars

  See the fun things from afar

  Worst things happen under your nosie.

  CHAPTER 11

  Breakfast was eaten with few sounds. Gunther could not yet bring himself to bite or chew the wriggling larvae that constituted breakfast as well as dinner, although he knew a quick bite assured a more merciful death than a swim through a human digestive tract. As he tossed and swallowed, he observed the other members of the group. They looked more tired than usual, and their mood was depressed. The news of Serge’s death had hit them hard. Gunther guessed it was not only because of the loss of a buddy—and their leader—but also because of the death of hope that had traveled with him. They’d expected him to find another way out of the cave. Instead, he’d died, and in his place had arrived himself and June.

  Without exception, the kids’ eyes were swollen, some more than others, and bore yellowish or bluish marks around them. The whites of their eyes were red—again, some more than others. June’s looked the worst of all. Most likely, he concluded, it depended on how recently the Tardies had taken them to “the lab,” whatever that was. He had no doubt who tonight’s victim would be. Would he be able to fight back? Would he even know when they came for him, or did they have some kind of anesthetic that would render him stuporous and give him temporary amnesia?