by William Hawk
He looked up as I came over. “I got us some squirrel to eat.”
“Yummy. Hey, you’re not going to believe what I found.”
Cy turned the animal over to its other side. “You have to be very careful not to overcook squirrels. You go a minute or two over, and it could burst into flames. It nearly took the eyebrows off my face.”
“Enough about the squirrel,” I said. Handing the notebook to him, I open to the scribbled pictures and symbols. He forgot about the roasting animal and stepped away from the fire, seemingly captivated by what I had just shown him.
Finally, he cleared his throat. “Where did you find this?”
“This is what’s in that cave. There are huge drawings all over the walls.”
We talked for several more minutes about the different symbols and pictures I had seen. I could tell that he was legitimately impressed.
“What is that place?” I said.
“Our ancestors called it the Hall of Knowledge,” he said softly. “Many others have searched far and wide for that room. It’s said to contain many mysteries of the universe. But I wouldn’t know for sure unless I could get in myself.”
I seized him by the arm. “Oh, you could. We could buy a few small sticks of dynamite and…”
“No, no, we can’t damage anything. It’s a sacred place.”
I was struck by the way he said that. Sacred.
Suddenly there was a loud explosion from the fire. I jerked down instinctively and covered my face. When I uncovered my eyes, Cy had raced over and was frantically beating the squirrel with a towel. It had burst into flames.
“You distracted me,” he said. “Anyway, we’ll come back tomorrow.”
The next morning Cy was up before the sun. From my mattress, I cracked open an eye and watched him gather tools, water bottles, drawing pads, and other things. He wasn’t being very quiet about it either.
“I guess it’s time to get up,” I said.
He kept puttering around. “I made us a couple sandwiches. You’re going to be busy today.”
“Doing what?”
“Drawing.”
As he continued, I understood what he wanted me to do. I was to copy the rest of the symbols on the walls as closely as possible, so that he could see them all.
As we walked with the equipment, there was no doubt that Cy was excited to get back to the cave. It was as though he had waited his whole life for this event—which, in fact, he had. On the way, he couldn’t stop talking about ancient mysteries, symbols that predicted the future, and prophecies being fulfilled. I wasn’t skeptical, just confused—the symbols hadn’t made any sense to me.
Luckily, it was a cool morning, and the sun was just starting to heat up our shoulders when we arrived at the cave around mid-morning. He began unloading the packs and laid out all the supplies on the floor. I noticed there was a roasting pan among them. It was looped to a long rope with two pulleys at each end.
“Cy, what are you going to do with that?”
He put his hands on his hips. “That’s going to be our trolley. We’ll put the materials into the pan and pass them back and forth. Sound good?”
“I guess so.”
Cy tied one end of the long rope to my belt and handed me a pulley. “Now, crawl down that tunnel. When you arrive, I’ll start passing you the equipment through the tunnel. Then you make the drawings.”
I obliged and got down on my hands and knees and crawled down the tunnel for the second time, feeling the cool, damp air on my face. Once I’d arrived in the cave, I shouted back to him.
“Ready,” his voice said.
I cranked the pulley. The sound of a heavy pan clattering down the tunnel reached my ears. I kept turning the crank.
“That’ll wake the dead for sure,” I said.
The pan arrived. It was loaded with tools. After several trips with the jerry-rigged trolley, we had moved everything into the room. We had to get the images in the cave the old-fashioned way, but I wanted to approach it systematically. First, I used string and bits of gum to draw a temporary grid, eight by eight, across the symbols on the walls. Then I drew out a similar grid on the paper that we’d brought. Following that, I squatted and began to draw each symbol with its location and grid number.
It was a painstaking process. The room was full of more information than we could possibly imagine. Every half hour or so, I sent the trolley back to Cy with several sheets of paper. I tried to draw the best representation possible. I heard him grumbling to himself, almost as if he were arguing back and forth with an imaginary person. Sometimes he instructed me to look more closely and report back what I found. As I drew them, I felt that many of the inscriptions on the walls seemed familiar, but I wasn’t sure how I could’ve known them. I noticed the repetition of certain symbols and the order in which they were aligned; these were likely clues to their meaning.
It turned out that one day wasn’t enough to capture everything. The cave was extensive, and I was the only one who could fit inside. For the next week, Cy and I spent every day repeating the same process. In the evenings, we returned to the cabin, trying to evaluate my drawings with a fine-toothed comb—how they all fit together and what the meaning could be. The work felt endless and seemed futile, and it didn’t seem that we were making any progress, but maybe I didn’t have the right perspective. Cy had insights that I didn’t, but he couldn’t get a sense of the cave as a whole, not even from my precise drawings.
On the fifth day, I was deep into my drawing of panel twenty-seven when I heard someone call my name.
William.
I put down my pencil and lifted my head and looked around. There was nobody else in this cave. Just the single light that I’d set up, the duffle bag with the other supplies, the remains of my lunch.
William.
I felt myself getting sleepy. I stretched myself out on my back on the cave floor and shut my eyes.
That’s when she appeared.
A stunning girl is walking toward me across a meadow. She’s tall, with hair past her shoulders, and moves in as though there were no atmosphere around her, no ground beneath her feet.
William, she says.
Yes?
Come rescue me. We have things to do.
What things?
You’ll see me, but I won’t be able to speak.
But where?
I’ll be still. Find me.
Then the image liquefied and faded, and I woke up. I found myself in the cave again.
I sat up. I realized that the dream hadn’t been coincidental, or random, like so many normal dreams. That girl had contacted me, clearly and telepathically—and I suspected that it was because of either my new powers or this location. Or both.
“What is your name?” I asked out loud.
The word came into my head loud and clear. Grace. Then she was gone again.
Her name was Grace.
I picked up the notepad again and continued drawing. Getting through this project and learning as much as I could about my new altered reality was the best way for me to find her.
Grace.
I repeated her name, tasting it on my lips until I finished, and crawled back through the tunnel to Cy.
The next morning, I wondered about this girl. Grace. I knew, of course, that it could have been just a dream, my imagination running unchecked by my subconscious mind. But, no. That had been no dream. I didn’t know what it was, but it was no dream. I knew she had come to me, that she was real, that she needed me. How? I suppose the same way that any of us “know” what “real” is or was. If yesterday you went to the movie with your girlfriend, well, you’d know that this was somehow a different, more “real” experience than when you dreamed last night that you were being chased by a unicorn. You just know.
I was packing the duffel bag for the day when Cy came over to me. “I have a better idea,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“We’re not going to the cave today.”
&nb
sp; I looked up at him. “But I’m not done yet.”
“I know. But I want to see what you see, in proportion. So, I have an idea.”
I’m a big fan of thinking outside the box, but it turned out that Cy’s newest idea involved staying inside of it.
We drove to the little village in the center of the reservation. There was a sad little market on a corner that was sad in that hopelessness seemed heavy in those milling around.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“We’re getting their cardboard,” he said.
I let that one twist around my brain while he pulled up behind the store. There was a deli worker sucking on a cigarette next to the dumpster. Cy rolled down his window and said some words in his native language. The worker just pointed toward a stack of flattened boxes wound up in twine, and then returned to his love affair with his cigarette.
“Would you mind?” Cy asked me.
I stepped out of the vehicle and nodded to the deli worker. He didn’t notice me. I picked up the bale of cardboard and hauled it to Cy’s truck and, with great effort, threw it in the back.
I climbed back into the truck. “Now you have to tell me why.”
“We got to stop one more place,” said Cy.
He drove us around to a little hardware store in the village. We went inside, and it smelled like stale cigarettes. I hung around the front of the store, close to the exit, while he collected a basket of duct tape, nails, wire and more rope. I wasn’t sure what the old guy had in mind. However, it seemed as though he knew exactly what he was doing.
He paid for the items, and we returned to the truck.
“Cy,” I said, “the suspense is killing me.”
“I want to see what you see inside that room, and those are my materials.”
It dawned on me what he was planning to do. “You’re going to build a replica of the cave.”
“Yes. I’m going to put your drawings on the walls. And then I can sit inside of it.”
That was fairly ingenious, but I wondered again, “Shouldn’t we just dynamite your way in?”
He gave me a look, and I raised my hands in surrender.
At the cabin, we wordlessly began to clear out all the furniture from inside.
“This is like what we used to do when we were kids,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “I used to build a fort in the fields behind my house.”
It turned out that the project took us almost two days, and the cabin was only big enough to give us a three-foot perimeter around the cardboard walls, but it worked. We assembled all the cardboard with the duct tape, rope and wire. We built a couple of duct-tape hinged doors that gave us access to the center of the room. Then we attached all my drawings to the walls.
Finally, we stood back and admired our handiwork. Cy dragged a chair into the middle of the room, parked himself in it, and stared at the completed walls.
“Do you want my help?” I asked.
Cy waved the question off. I could see him starting to enter a trance. I quietly stole out of the room and went for a walk in the woods and sat down on a granite outcropping. I watched a squirrel carry an acorn into the hollow of a tree. He was building something too. There didn’t seem to be anything for me to do. Cy could access his people’s ancient knowledge, and I could not.
So, I waited.
CHAPTER SIX
Deputy Hanson kept an eye on Sheriff Winters, who stood in front of the map. He jabbed a thick finger at the map. “Here, or here, or here, or here. He could be any of these places.”
“We looked, Sheriff,” said Hanson.
“We couldn’t find him,” said Deputy Small, who mostly stared at the half a sandwich on his desk.
“What about the bus driver?”
“He already told us everything,” Hanson told the sheriff, which annoyed him, as he had already told the sheriff that. “He got out on Old Nicholson Road and said he didn’t know where he was going. That was the last anybody saw of him.”
“So he’s either dead or he hitched a ride.”
“Or both. Not in that order, probably.”
“What does state have?”
Hanson shrugged. “States have nothing. Not one lead. Hey, Chief, I know this is your daughter’s boyfriend and all, but why are we even bothering? It was a harmless fight between two kids.”
Sheriff Winters punched a hand into his fist. “Boys, normally I am not so, shall we say, demonstrative. But this kid was my daughter’s new boyfriend. He assaulted my nephew, and it could’ve just as easily been her.” He emphasized every word of the next sentence slowly. “I…want…William…Hawk…locked up.”
“Yes, sir,” replied both deputies at the same time.
Hanson thought the boss was losing it. The sheriff had always been an odd duck, no doubt there, but he seemed to be getting even odder.
“Now go find him,” the sheriff ordered. He reached for a piece of hard candy, unwrapped it with a crinkle, popped it in his mouth and grinned, then pointed toward the door. On his left hand was the faded remnant of a cross, something he never seemed to want to discuss when Hanson asked about it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The old man’s trance lasted three days. I didn’t see him eat anything, I didn’t see him sleep, I didn’t see him do anything. He didn’t even answer when I crouched down next to him and tried to speak to him. He just looked at the walls, occasionally murmuring to himself.
On the third morning, he got up and began writing on the drawings in red pencil. I stood over him and looked down. He was adding extra symbols in the white spaces.
Then he put down the pencil and looked at me. “It’s time to go back.”
“Where?”
An odd light was burning in his eyes. “To the Hall of Knowledge. You’re going to tell me if this is right.” He handed me the drawings, and I put them in the bag.
When we arrived at the cave, there was a mystical feeling in the air, a presence that I had not been aware of before. Setting up our equipment and our little trolley as we had in the past went much quicker this time. I crawled quickly down the tunnel—it was getting easier. Once inside the cave, the first thing I did was unroll the three pages that we brought from the cabin. Cy had added, in red pencil, the extra symbols that he thought belonged in the blank space.
I looked at the sheets and matched up the grid work I had laid out earlier. Sure enough, on the walls were the symbols that Cy had sketched. They were faint, blending in quite well with the natural texture of the cave walls
I leaned down to the mouth of the tunnel and said, “You were right.”
A whoop sounded from the far end of the tunnel. “I knew it. Come back out here so we can talk.”
I made my way back out of the tunnel. The journey on hands and knees had grown much easier.
When I returned, Cy pulled me outside into the bright sunlight. There, with the valley spread out around us, he placed his hands on my shoulders. “My ancestors have passed down stories since the beginning of time. They told of a place where the great knowledge keeper stored a record of every Ignition. Many generations of seekers have been searching for this room, but no one has been able to find its location.”
“Well, you did.”
He nodded. “The Great Spirit has chosen us to reveal it. You and me.”
I stood there, looking at him, trying to take this in. “I want to know more.”
We sat down on a nearby rock. He began to speak: “The Great Spirit shared a story with my forefathers. It told of a family consisting of ten brothers that left their family to embark on a journey of enlightenment. They were to discover and understand the principles needed to achieve a flourishing humanity. Legend has it that one named Apollyon, an Under Lord, rose up against the great Spirit, El-Elyon. He did not want to follow in the ways of old, but instead wanted to elevate self above all things. He would do anything to deceive and twist the ways of El-Elyon. The challenge to the ten brothers was to resist the darkness and become one
with the light, but the path that each of these brothers chose has been as varied as the clouds in the sky. As each civilization reached its final ignition point, Apollyon and his legions of deceivers were forced to leave, but they continue to transport themselves to the next civilization.”
I interrupted, “But what does it mean?”
“It means that we are leading up to the greatest battle. At the end, all of Apollyon’s forces will be gathered in one place. I fear that our earth has become the battlefield.”
He paused, pointed to the symbol on my hand. “That’s a symbol of the role you’re going to play in the battle. It’s on the wall.”
I shot to my feet.
“Hang on,” he said.
“I need to look at it again.”
Then I felt myself get down on hands and knees and scamper back quickly into the inner sanctum.
Inside, I stood up and looked around with new eyes. I experienced a flash of insight, almost as if a set of blinders had come off. The room began to make sense. The wall on the left consisted of ten columns, and at the top of each was a symbol. I looked more closely. Those symbols suddenly seemed familiar, and then I remembered why.
I’d seen them on my birthday—that moment when everything had changed.
I studied the ten columns more closely. Each column represented information pertaining to that symbol, and the same symbol crowned the top of each of the first seven columns. Underneath each of those seven columns was etched a date.
Cy had used that phrase final ignition point to mean the date at which a civilization fought against Apollyon, and rose up.
It seemed that three of the ten civilizations hadn’t done that yet. I turned my attention to those three.
My eyes fell upon the tenth and final column. I noticed that the symbol at the top looked familiar. It was a cross. I looked down at my left hand.
I sat down suddenly. My head was swimming. This cave may have been called the Hall of Knowledge by Cy’s ancestors, but I was feeling less knowledgeable than ever. There was apparently an entire world separate from our world—and I had been given access to it. Cy had been right. This room was trying to tell me something. Our civilization hadn’t reached its final ignition point, not yet. And I was going to have something to do with it when it happened.