by E. R. Mason
Skyla and Jax ignored him. Skyla carefully opened the book to the first page. Only a single name was written there: Henry Lathkill
“Well, now we know who,” said Jax softly.
“Now for the why,” added Skyla.
Skyla flipped ahead. Some pages were ragged, the entries illegible. Finally one caught her eye.
Feb. 20
First 3 samples mineral rich.
Traces of gold dust in sediment.
On site sampling needed.
“Well, there’s the why,” said Skyla.
“This has to be that retired miner Remy was talking about.”
Skyla flipped ahead through numerous pages describing exploration of the cave and the search for gold within it.
Jax became impatient. “Why don’t we go to the last entry, and work our way back?”
Skyla gently flipped ahead to the end. The last three entries were strange gibberish, barely legible. The first legible entry before them was also extremely strange.
July 18
Should never have opened it.
No getting back now.
A dozen more pages of smeared, unreadable entries brought them to:
July 1
Object is definitely not of this Earth.
Skyla paused and looked at Jax. “This is what we’ve been looking for. I’ll bet on it.”
“But what is it?”
“I have no idea. Probably some strange ancient artifact. Who knows from where. This man stumbled across it and somehow caused this whole thing.”
“But we didn’t see any artifact down there.”
“He probably hid it away somewhere. Let’s hope he recorded where.”
“Keep back tracking. Maybe there’s more.”
As Skyla carefully open the fragile pages, the entries became more and more illegible. Only a few words on each page could be made out. As they continued, the writings seemed to make less and less sense.
“What’s the deal he keeps mentioning a table? Is he back upstairs?” asked Jax.
“This page here has the word rifle on it.”
Skyla kept turning pages. “Look at this, he’s clearing part of a rock slide on what he calls the north wall.” She stopped turning pages and looked at Jax. “Why would he be digging in one of the rock slides?”
“The thing was buried. He had to dig it up. Go back a page or two more.”
“This page says something about cigarette smoke. Why on Earth would he mention cigarette smoke?” she wondered out loud.
“This is the best pastrami sandwich I ever ate,” interrupted Remy. Without anyone noticing, he had returned and was standing behind them.
Skyla and Jax turned to glance up at him.
“Is that all you can think about? Food?” asked Skyla indignantly.
“It’s number two on most people’s instinct for survival,” replied Remy. “Second only to water!”
Skyla hesitated and looked at Jax. “It does smell really, really good. When did we eat last? Can I have one of those, please?”
“Sure thing,” answered Remy. “There’s tons more. And not only that, while I’m getting one out for you, I’ll tell you why a miner would care about cigarette smoke, Miss Smarty-pants.”
Skyla stopped and turned to him. “Oh you will, will you?” said Skyla sarcastically as she accepted the wax-paper wrapped sandwich.
“Smoke can show where air is getting in and out of a cave.”
Skyla became stunned. Wide-eyed, she looked at Jax “An opening to another chamber? That’s it? That’s why he was digging in a rock fall.”
Jax straightened up. “Wow, Rem! Good one!” and the two men high-fived each other.
Skyla spoke with a mouth full of pastrami. “We’ve got to get back down there.”
“You’re going to make me dig, aren’t you?”
“Wow! This pastrami really is good!” Skyla replied.
“It’s like a bad dream that just keeps getting’ worse,” said Remy as he handed Jax a sandwich.
“Remy, did you bring in the sleeping bags when you went for the food?” asked Skyla.
“No, Lara Croft. I was hoping if I left them out there that idea might go away.”
Thirty minutes later, Jax touched down again on the floor of the cold damp cavern. He braced and caught Skyla as she dropped in from above. When the lamps were set back up, they stood together and began searching the chamber.
“That wall right there is the north wall, if he was really referencing magnetic north,” said Jax.
“Then that over there is probably the same rock pile he was talking about” replied Skyla pointing to a rock fall on the right.
“Not much choice, really. It’s the only rock slide on that wall.” Jax bent over and found the small, very old pickaxe he had thrown down. Skyla grabbed her short handled shovel. They worked their way to the rock pile and climbed near the top, then began digging and pulling down stone.
After twenty minutes of rolling large boulders out of the way and clearing the upper portion of concealed rock wall, they had uncovered nothing. Jax paused to wipe the beads of sweat on his brow despite the coolness of the cave air. “Are we wasting our time?” he asked.
“There’s no plan B,” replied Skyla. “Try to keep your chin up, Superdude.”
Jax scoffed and resumed digging. “Okay, from now on only you can call me that.”
Skyla climbed to a new position and braced her back against the cave wall and her feet against a particularly large bolder. She pushed with all her might, grunting from the effort, but the boulder refused to move.
Jax laughed at the spectacle of it. He dropped his pickaxe and joined her. Once he was setup against the uncooperative rock he nodded and gave a short countdown. “3, 2, 1, now!”
At first the stone moved an excruciatingly tiny amount, but a second later it dropped away completely, tumbling down the side of the pile. The two cave dwellers were caught off balance and fell hard from their positions. Skyla bounced off the dirt pile and rolled down one side, her headlamp beam rotating all the way down. Jax fell straight down on the opposite side and ended up wedged upside down between two boulders, his feet sticking out above them.
Skyla scrambled through the sliding dirt to find him and met him upside down, eye to eye. “Are you hurt?”
“Nope. Just upside down. Are you hurt?”
“No I’m fine. Grab my shoulders.”
Braced against Skyla’s left shoulder, Jax twisted around to push against one of the rocks holding him. Skyla pulled at his other arm, pulling him up so he could get a better grip.
“I must have smashed my headlamp,” he said. “It’s dead.”
At that instant, both legs suddenly came loose causing the two of them to tumble together the rest of the way down the pile of loose dirt and stone. Skyla’s shrieks echoed off the cavern walls. At the bottom, Jax found himself flat on his back with Skyla atop him, staring down into his eyes.
“Well, that wasn’t all bad,” he said. “Your face is filthy, though.”
“You’re not exactly camera-ready, Superdude.”
“You know, even with the black streaks all over your face, it still looks pretty good to me.”
Without warning, Skyla leaned down and kissed him hard on the lips. It was a long, warm kiss in the chilled cavern air.
As quickly as it had begun, Skyla pushed away and gasped for breath. “That’s your reward, Superdude, but we have to stay focused.”
“Remind me exactly what I did, so that I can do it again!”
She pushed up and stood, brushing some of the loose dirt off. Jax continued to lay there trying to recover from what just happened. Exasperated, he sat up and pulled off his headlamp. A quick fiddle with the on-off switch and it came beaming back on. “Wow! I just hit the switch when I fell. It’s okay. Now, where were we? Oh yeah, we were busy not finding anything.”
Skyla stood staring upward. Then, without looking at him, she replied, “Oh my God!”
“W
hat?” asked Jax as he pushed himself the rest of the way up and stood wiping mud off his clothes.
Skyla did not answer. She continued to stare upward, her headlamp focused on one specific place.
Jax looked. In the wall where the large boulder had been, there was now a triangular-shaped hole. Only the top of it was visible, but it was clearly the opening to a tunnel.
“I don’t believe it,” said Jax, half under his breath.
Skyla scrambled furiously back up and stared into the opening with her headlamp.
“What do you see?” called Jax.
“Another chamber,” she replied. “And there’s equipment or something in there.”
Twenty minutes of furious digging finally made the hole big enough. Skyla incautiously wiggled through and slid down the pile of rock and dirt on the other side, quickly regaining her feet at the bottom. Jax hurried to keep up, slid down feet first, and stood beside her.
The new chamber was a place not easily understood. It was the size of an indoor arena, one half of which was an underground lake. The ceiling appeared to be naturally domed. The dirt beneath their feet was black granules. It would have been a strange, dark, serene cavern except for the out-of-place items scattered around.
Jax slowly brushed more dirt off his clothes and studied the immediate area. “One mystery just leads us to another,” he said and he unhooked the large flashlight from his belt and began using it to see further. The shore to the lake was a good thirty yards away. The cavern was much larger than the other. Even the flashlight was unable to illuminate the far walls very well. They were still too distant.
Other things did not make sense. Off to the left there was a dirty metal table. Small rocks and dirt littered its surface. Against the wall near it, some ancient tools had been leaning for decades. One of the items looked like a rifle. There were other unidentifiable objects half buried in the gravel near the shore of the lake. Jax scanned them and spoke with misgiving. “What do you make of all this?”
Skyla looked at Jax, accidentally blinding him with the beam from her headlamp. “Whatever is going on, began here,” she said.
“There are quite a few more rock slides around this place. It can’t be very safe. That could be how old Howard met his fate,” said Jax.
“Let’s look around. I’ll go right, you go left,” replied Skyla.
Reluctantly Jax began a slow search. Here and there, little mounds of dirt cropped up where things had become buried over time. He kicked the nearest of them and found it to be a rusted hand shovel. He reached the dirt covered metal table and drew the knife from his leg sheath to clear away dirt. There were large sheets of strange drawings, barely legible, impossible to understand. He yelled to Skyla, “There’s papers on this table. Drawings and junk.”
Ten more minutes of searching brought him to the far shore of the lake. He pointed his hand lamp down into the water. The water was crystal clear, the lake bottom just more black sand. As he began to turn away, a glint of light stopped him. He searched the water once again and froze.
Beneath the still water, a new skull face stared up at him. It was mostly buried, but the hollow eyes, nose, and teeth were visible. In the reflected light, it almost appeared to be smiling. Just beneath the chin, was the sparkle of silver, a necklace or medallion of some sort.
Jax subconsciously took a step back and looked around for Skyla. She had ignored his mention of paperwork. She was at the far end, doing something near a rockfall. The rock pile suddenly concerned Jax even more than the skull. “Hey! Don’t push your luck over there. You’ll start another slide.”
Skyla glanced over but ignored the warning.
Jax pointed his light upward and scanned the ceiling. It was jagged, very high in some places, and quite low in others, a ragged, jutting dome of rock. There was no telling which were ready to fall, and which were not. Having regained his composure, he called again to Skyla. “You’re going to want to see this.”
Skyla did not look up. She was digging furiously at something head high, something buried in the rock pile. “Wait. There’s something here,” she yelled.
“Here too,” replied Jax. “But you won’t like it.”
Skyla stood back to catch her breath. She looked over at him and with the back of one dirty hand wiped chilled sweat from her cheek. “What? What is it?”
“Someone else,” replied Jax.
“Someone else what?”
“Come see for yourself.”
Skyla pushed up and marched toward him. She came to the shore’s edge and stared with a quizzical expression. Jax pointed his light down into the water. The skeleton face stared back.
“He was wearing something around his neck. See it?”
Skyla stepped boldly into the water, reached down and gently wrestled the silver medal away from its owner. As she lifted it, the chain caught the skull and tilted it upward. The jaw fell open as though the skull was about to yell at them.
“It’s an ID tag, I think,” said Skyla, looking down at her catch with the light. “There’s a name but I can’t make it out.”
“So old Henry must have had help down here and somehow none of them made it out alive. You still think we should be here?”
“There’s something buried over there. It’s silver and shiny and it’s pretty big. I need your help.”
“I don’t know about you, but the energy level is winding down. It’s pretty late.”
“Yes. We can’t get so drained that we can’t climb up out of here. How about if we go get a few hours of sleep, and then start again?”
“Can you sleep knowing there are skeletons in the basement?”
“I’m so tired I could sleep on a ship in rough sea.”
“Have you stopped to think, people really have disappeared here. The legends are true.”
“Yeah. Let’s try not to add to them.”
Chapter 8
Upon returning from the netherworld, the weary cave explorers found Remy asleep with his head on the dining table amidst a pile of crumpled up candy bar wrappers. Jax gently took the half eaten one from his hand and patted one shoulder to wake his friend. Skyla unrolled Remy’s sleeping bag and spread it out nearby. Remy looked up groggily, kept mumbling about noises in the house, and was steered to his bed on the floor. He was asleep before his head hit the small pillow provided by Skyla.
Jax reached for his own sleeping bag and a rush of uneasiness came over him as he wondered what sleeping arrangements Skyla had in mind. Almost as though she had read his thoughts, she came to him and jerked his bag from his grip. She went a few feet away and set up two bags next to each other, almost touching. Jax’s apprehension turned to yet another flush of tired joy, which he struggled to conceal.
Skyla began pulling off her gear. “Thank goodness the water’s still on in this place. I’m going in the kitchen to clean up. Don’t come in, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You can go after me.”
“Okay.”
When cleanup had been accomplished, they stretched out beside each other, staring up at the cobwebbed ceiling, wondering at the strange set of circumstance that had brought them together in such an unlikely place.
“You still awake?” asked Skyla.
“Oh, yeah. My body’s not though. My brain’s having trouble winding down.”
“Me, too. I guess if we survive this, we still won’t be able to tell anyone because they won’t believe us anyway. Only the three of us will know it ever happened.”
“I don’t know about you, but getting back to our time seems like a long shot.”
Skyla turned onto her side to face him. She rested her head on her hands. “We’re still only about a week behind, and we may be getting close to the answer.”
“I’m afraid to hope that.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m afraid of the disappointment if it doesn’t happen.”
“It’s the silver thing I found down there. I’m sure of it. Solve the mystery and fig
uring out how to fix things. We’re almost there.”
“I love your optimism.”
“Well, no matter what, we’ll have each other.”
Jax rolled onto his side to face her. “Want to know a secret? That scares me more than anything. Getting separated from you, I mean.”
“If that happens, we meet at the library. We’ll find each other.”
“If that happens, just remember. Nothing will ever stop me from getting to the rendezvous point.”
“Me too,” said Skyla. “I promise.” She wiggled over closer to him and flopped one arm across him. She stared lovingly into his eyes and a moment later a kiss said more than any words could. Skyla eased away and glanced over at Remy. He hadn’t moved. She turned back to Jax. “If we make it back, I promise you we’ll finish this business.” Skyla smiled and gently placed a hand on his cheek.
Jax closed his eyes for a moment, and was gone.
The sound of voices and someone rustling about awoke Jax. He sat up in time to see Skyla rise to her feet. There was a light coming from the open door at the other end of the dining room. Still half-asleep, he climbed from his sleeping bag in time to catch up with Skyla. Her gaze was fixed upon the open door as she slowly crossed over to it. Jax managed to keep up, trying to focus his sleepy eyes. As he did, something very strange came into view. A disorganized row of children in old-fashioned school-clothes began passing by the door. At first, the vision seemed like a dream, but as he approached, it became clear this was real.
At the door, one young girl stopped to stare back at Skyla. She gave a big smile and in a heavy English accent she called to someone behind. “Mrs. Roberts, there’s a man and a lady here!” The young girl pointed as she stared off to her left.
A second later, an adult woman stepped into view, almost tripping on more children bunching up at the door. She was dressed very proper, a collared tan silk blouse buttoned all the way up, belted navy blue dress below the knee, black lace-up shoes with big square heels. At the sight of Skyla and Jax she became wide-eyed and smiling. “Oh thank heavens . . . people! I’m Ann Roberts from the Somerset Academy. The children and I were on a nature field trip when the sirens went off. We came in here for shelter. Thank goodness there was a key under the mat. I hope you don’t mind. We waited until the bombing stopped but somehow I misplaced the keys to the bus and we haven’t been able to find them. You haven’t seen any keys lying around have you?”