by J L Bryan
“Speaking of that...” I checked the camera in front of the Medical Maladies exhibit. It had been recording all night, and the battery was still charged because of being plugged into a nearby outlet all night. I needed to download the data from all the gear in the museum to the server out in the van, among many other chores. “I should probably set up more stuff down here before we go upstairs. Any chance you want to show me those caves?”
His face went a little pale at the suggestion.
“If you're scared of them—”
“No, not scared,” he said, in a rushed, unconvincing sort of way. “Sure, they make me uneasy. But I'll head down there with you for a minute.”
“I just like to know what I'm dealing with,” I said. “I don't want anything sneaking up on me here. Literally or figuratively. If the caves make you uneasy, that could be a sign there's a real problem.”
“Really?”
“Or that you have an overactive imagination.”
“Lately, my imagination's been crammed full of Spongebob and whatever weird Disney teen stuff the girls are into. I try to ignore it when possible. I'll be right back after I make sure the girls are awake to watch Ronan.”
While he went back up, I looked around the museum. There was a box office by the front door that made me think of old-time movie theaters.
The biggest attraction appeared to be the Hall of Monsters.
I pointed my flashlight down that gloomy hallway, not wanting to waste electricity by turning on the array of overhead lights.
At first, the “monsters” were large post-taxidermy animals, most of them posed in some state of attack. They were loosely grouped by classification—mammals on the right, reptiles on the left, birds farther ahead. The largest displays were a black bear, risen on its hind legs with claws extended, a snarling coyote, and an alligator with its jaw spread wide as if chomping, or maybe laughing.
Others beasties stood in hostile poses: a weasel, a skunk, a bobcat. A group of dead rats in caps and checkered shirts played poker at a table, in a fairly morbid tableau. Copperheads, rattlers, and lizards bared their teeth on my left.
I moved deeper into the hall, past stuffed owls and falcons. The displays turned to exhibits of bones, of increasingly dubious quality. One claimed to be a “saber-toothed dog” which I'm pretty sure was not a thing. Ditto for the six-legged “centipossum.”
Next was a collection of sizable bones, which could have belonged to anything from a gorilla to a cow for all I could tell. The bodies of the dead usually don't show up until the end of my cases, when I've figured out where they were buried.
The sign next to the large bones identified them as BIGFOOT (OREGON). A plaster cast of a huge foot, plus blurry photographs of a hairy man-shaped creature were there to add authenticity, I suppose. They could have been anything from a guy in a mask to a bearded, hairy hippie running naked in the woods—the pictures were from Oregon, after all.
Another display showed what could have been a slab of freeze-dried fish, along with very blurry pictures of the supposed BEAR LAKE MONSTER, UTAH.
A third showed what looked like an actual human hand, curled up into a fist, wrapped in thick, dried old bandaging like a mummy. Small gaps in the bandaging showed dried, scaly skin underneath. FOXBORO SNAKE MAN, the sign next to it claimed.
“See anything you like?” the voice startled me; I could have jumped into the air, I'm not really sure.
I turned to see Ryan, smiling a little like he knew he'd startled me.
“How did you sneak up like that?” I asked. “And why?”
“It wasn't planned.”
“I don't think these Bigfoot bones are completely real,” I said. “And...the Foxboro Snake Man?”
“It's some kind of local legend,” Ryan said. “I think he might have told me when I was a kid, but I don't remember now.”
“According to this placard, the 'Snake Man' used to be seen prowling the woods at night, by people who lived in the area. I read aloud: 'half man, half beast, the Snake Man once terrified the people of Foxboro, who locked their homes at night in fear.'”
“So how did his hand end up here?” Ryan asked.
“I guess there wasn't room on the placard for that.” I studied the bandaged, scaly hand in the case. “Maybe it was a person with some kind of skin disease. If so, he clearly wasn't welcomed by the locals. And keeping a piece of his body on display for people to gawk at would only contribute toward a haunting situation here. Isn't that what you and your son are seeing? A scaly green man?”
“Ronan sees it as an animal on his walls sometimes,” Ryan said. “But that's what I saw in the hall, yeah. A tall guy, really tall, with green scaly skin.”
“Did it interact with you at all?”
“No, it just walked down the hall and disappeared. It was gone so fast, I thought it was a dream or something at first. I'd been dozing off in my room, you know, and just jumped up when I heard Ronan yelling for me. Then it turned out he'd seen the same thing...and I thought about the weird experiences I'd been having down here...and that's how I eventually ended up getting in touch with you.”
“We'll see if we can catch him on video tonight,” I said. “But I'm guessing one part of our solution is going to involve disposing of this body part. Respectfully. With some prayers and such to help put the soul to rest.”
“Should we do that now? I can unlock the case—” He reached toward the back of it,
“No!” I said, reaching out to grab his hand.
“You act like it's a bomb.”
“We don't know what it is,” I said. “For all we know, disturbing it right now will make things worse. The entity could grow agitated and start doing a lot more than climbing the walls. We need a clear plan of attack, and I don't have enough information to devise one yet. I don't want to do anything rash, especially without any other investigators to back me up.”
“So what's the worst that could happen?”
“I don't know yet.” I snapped some pictures of the shriveled, scaly hand. “If we can find some actual information about the Snake Man—his name, for one thing, and who his family was—that will help us find a direction. Let's go look at these spooky caves of yours.”
On the way from the Medical Maladies exhibit to the Tomb of History, we passed a relatively small nook of a room, the entrance mostly blocked off by a sawhorse. The first item that caught my eye was a miniature carousel displayed on a table, the ornate wooden horses no bigger than my little finger. The carousel was chipped and scratched, its festive tent-like red roof trimmed in flaking gold, but it was an impressive little piece.
Beyond that was a clock that looked like a dollhouse-sized church, little towers poking up all around the central steeple with its clock face. Tiny stained-glass windows and doors were built all over it; a couple of these had broken and I could see tiny angels and monks inside, waiting for the clockwork to bring them out.
“This stuff's mostly broken,” Ryan said. “It's all old coin-operated gadgets. You know, put in a coin, they do a trick. There's even an old Mutoscope over there, where you look into a box and it plays a movie for a nickel. It doesn't work anymore, either. I did find some old nickels and pennies inside those machines, so it's not a total loss. And this one still works.” He fished in his pocket until he found a penny, then inserted it into a machine that featured a miniature metal greyhound mounted on about two feet of racetrack. Ryan pulled a lever on the side.
The dog bobbed up and down, chasing an even tinier mechanical rabbit that ran on a simple metal track above it. The dog and rabbit both made it almost to the end before the machine let out a rusty squeal and froze.
“Well, it mostly works,” Ryan said. “Probably nobody knows how to fix these anymore, but I was thinking I might put them on eBay. Some weirdo out there probably collects this type of stuff.”
I let out a small, involuntary laugh. I'd naturally been thinking of Michael and how he might be able to repair some of the items in the exhibit; r
eferring to Michael, or really the collectors to whom he sold repaired antiques, as a “weirdo” caught me off-guard.
“Maybe,” I said, completely noncommittal. I didn't want to mention Michael right away, even if the situation seemed like a perfect fit. It was quite imperfect, in fact. For one thing, I wanted to keep Michael away from my cases. We couldn't have a repeat of the possession and the corn maze.
So I bit my lip on that, and we kept moving.
“After you,” he said, gesturing for me to step through the crypt door and into the Tomb of History.
“I'd normally consider that polite, but when it's a tomb entrance, I'm not so sure...” I stepped inside, holding out my flashlight even as the soft lights of the display cases came up.
Most of the artifacts here were fairly conventional—native arrowheads and bits of pottery and art, a few rusty tools and a butter churn from the early-settler period, the Civil War section featuring bayonets and smushed bullets and cannonballs. I saw no sign of actual dead body parts on display here, animal or human, which was more than I could say for some areas of the creepy old museum.
The history section grew as iffy as the biology one, though. A golden ring with some kind of green gems was described as a “CURSED treasure from ANCIENT PHOENICIA.” I guessed it had come from a costume store. A goblet had supposedly been used by Julius Caesar; a pile of broken bricks was said to have come from the Great Pyramid.
The real kicker for me was the “Magic Mirror of Atlantis!!” supposedly recovered by treasure hunters in the Atlantic. It was just a hand mirror with seashell designs around the edges.
“Wow,” I said. “Nobody knows where to find Atlantis, and most historians doubt it ever existed, but here's a hand mirror from the lost civilization. Amazing!”
“My uncle was a resourceful man.”
“Clearly.” I shivered. “It's colder in here.”
“That's the draft from the caves.” He swung out a heavy wooden slab of a door at the end of the hall, revealing an archway with a barred door. Chilly air rolled out from the darkness beyond.
“You send tourists down there?” I asked, squinting into the inky black.
“Not me, personally, no,” he said. “My uncle did when this place was open. To be honest, I haven't been down there since I was a kid.”
He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and pulled a lever on a metal electrical box on the wall.
Staggered lights buzzed to life along a cable mounted on the cave's rock wall. The floor sloped down and around, out of sight, inviting us down below, into the lower realms traditionally inhabited by ghosts, demons, and gods of death.
Chapter Seventeen
Signs on the wall shouted in fire-alarm red and screamed in emergency yellow:
CAUTION.
WATCH YOUR STEP.
CAVES MAY BE SLIPPERY.
MANAGEMENT NOT RESPONSIBILE FOR LOST ITEMS, BROKEN BONES, OR MISSING CHILDREN.
GHOSTS AND MONSTERS AHEAD.
NO PHOTOGRAPHS.
“So what can I expect down here?” I asked, as we followed the slope into the cold underworld. “Bat skeletons? Fake treasure? If there's anything like that baby in a jar, you'd better tell me ahead of time.”
“You don't like to be scared?”
“I get enough of the real thing. Pranks are a distraction.”
“Okay. I'd better run ahead and disarm the dunk tank.”
“Like the thing at the fair where you throw a baseball and try to make a clown fall into water?”
“Sure. Or your least favorite teacher on field day.”
“Sounds like your school experience was different from mine.”
A long wolf howl sounded, and a nook ahead lit up, glowing red. A wolfman stood there, shaggy with fur, holding up two hairy palms in a show of apparent aggression.
“You forgot to warn me about the wolfman mannequin,” I said.
“I didn't think the wolfman mannequin was scary enough to warrant a warning.”
I poked its moth-eaten fur. “Your wolfman mannequin is showing its age. And I don't just mean the Lon Chaney makeup concept.”
“Maybe it's time for a new wolfman mannequin. Can we just call it a wolfmannequin?”
“I'd rather not. What's up ahead?”
“It's a small wax museum of old movie monsters. Only not really wax, because that would take some time, expense, and skill to make. So they're just mannequins in costumes.”
I nodded as we passed another mannequin, this one in a black cape and tie. “The Dracula's not bad.”
“Not until you see the Frankenstein.”
He was right. The face of Frankenstein's monster was completely identical to Dracula's, like they'd come out of the same mold in the same factory. The only difference between them was the clothes and makeup—Frankenstein wore a ratty coat and heavy boots, and its face was painted green, but they were obviously the same basic mannequin.
“Yikes,” I said. “That's pretty bad. I never knew Dracula and Frankenstein's monster were identical twins.”
“Think of the scandal it would cause in Transylvania. And I'm pretty sure if you pull off the wolfman's beard, or unwrap the mummy...”
“Same face?”
“I mean, that's what I found when I lifted the ghost's sheet.”
“You know that's considered very rude among ghosts,” I said. “Peeking under their sheets.”
“Is that a ghost joke?”
“More like a ghost of a joke,” I said, feeling my cheeks go hot. He was making me feel awkward, and I reminded myself to stay cool, stay professional. I turned toward the “Hook Killer”—another mannequin, this one with a burlap mask over its face, and one hand replaced with a big plastic hook, like the hook that ends up dangling off the car window of two teenage lovers in a common urban legend. “Okay, so this is the monster room. What's next?” I looked at the signs on the wall. “Why does it say 'Leviathan Cave'?”
“I'll show you.” He led me down the indicated passage. Other cave passages branched off from the “wax museum.” Some of them were blocked off with wooden barriers and DO NOT ENTER signs.
“See, it's like a dragon's jaws,” Ryan said, indicating the huge stalagmites and stalactites that lined the path on either side. “All these giant sharp teeth. And it leads into his belly. Which is the Bottomless Abyss.”
“Really? Bottomless?” I thought of the deep old well under Michael's apartment building, which we'd sealed with help from James Lachlan, an ex-Jesuit demonologist that Calvin knew. We'd further sealed it with lead and steel.
“That's what the sign says,” Ryan said. “And a sign wouldn't lie, would it?”
“You make an unshakeable point.” I followed him through the spiky corridor into a wider cavern, lit by just a couple of lights on the walls. A metal railing had been built across our end of the cavern.
It was a good thing, too, because just beyond the railing lay an immense drop like a giant rocky throat, leading down into darkness below. No lights had been installed down inside the “abyss.”
“This sign encourages people to throw pebbles, pennies, or whatever they have down, and try to hear it hit bottom,” Ryan said.
“Sounds like a good way to get people to waste their money.”
“I don't know if my uncle ever collected pennies from down there. It's pretty far. If there's a safe way down, I haven't seen it.”
“Let's try it.” I found a small stone on the floor and tossed it over the railing.
We stayed silent; I even held my breath while waiting for the clink.
We waited. And waited.
“Okay, I'm sure it would have hit by now.”
“Yeah...if the cave wasn't so bottomless,” Ryan said, drawing the word out like he was really trying to sell it.
“Right.” I clicked on my flashlight and pointed it down into the darkness below. Even its abnormally powerful beam couldn't find the bottom of the pit. It was freezing cold down there, though. Bumps rose all over my skin.
I heard something above me—a chattering, clicking sort of sound, like a number of whispering voices—so I turned my beam up that way instead.
Bats hung up there, easily a thousand of them clinging to the vaulted ceiling. Most were sleeping, but some were stretching their wings and shifting around. Maybe our presence had woken them up.
“You didn't mention those guys, either,” I said.
“They're harmless. Like puppies with wings.”
“Well, that solves the mystery of the Bottomless Abyss. The cave floor's probably covered in guano.”
“Bat poop?”
“That's the scientific term, yes,” I said. “It's too soft to echo when people throw a stone down there.”
“Or a penny. Which I'm guessing Uncle Leydan really wasn't collecting, unless he was desperate enough to dig coins out of flying-rat feces.”
“They were flying puppies a second ago.”
“That was before I thought of their poop filling up this cave. Ugh. This place just gets worse and worse. Maybe my great-uncle hated me, and that's why he left it to me.”
“I thought you hadn't seen him since you were a kid.”
“Maybe I was a terrible kid.”
He showed me more of the caves—one labeled “The World of Weeping Water Walls” where a thin layer of moisture trickled continuously down most of the rocky walls, draining slowly through cracks in the floor. Not surprisingly, the room had a dank smell.
There were other attractions. The “Rainbow Room” had striped rock in several different hues. “Old Man Craggy” was a large lump of protruding rock resembling a man with a big beard, big nose, and downcast eyes like he was sad about something.
Near the end of the tour was “The Throne Room” which lived up to its name. The rock formations along one wall looked just like an enormous seat, positioned about twenty feet above us. Daylight leaked down on that “throne” from a tiny chimney in the ceiling that must have extended all the way up to the surface. After adjusting to the dark depths of the caverns, it was odd to think that it was morning outside. And a brighter day than the one before, by the looks of it.