He continued.
Karl brushed the dirt away from the stones. “You’ve found a path.” I struggled frantically to understand his meaning. This physical path? The Secret Path he sometimes spoke about? Or both?
How could Karl not see the silver gash I’d made in the stone? Was he deliberately overlooking it, setting me up? As far as I knew, nothing escaped his gaze.
He drew a line in the air from the three stones, projecting it towards the foot of the cliff. “Dig it up. Bring it up from the earth, then clean it.” I pictured the path when it was done. Every stone washed, gleaming in the sun, me stepping onto it barefoot, stepping into a perfect future. I’d have arrived on The Path. I was replaying my first time on acid, when I’d stepped barefoot into a perfect spring day. That time I had arrived somewhere.
Not now. As I labored to uncover the stones, I entered an all-too-familiar and mundane state: anxiety. I mustn’t leave the hint of another shovel mark on what I uncovered. And I had to work fast, because that’s how everything was done. Karl had me well trained by now. He didn’t have to stalk up and glare at me. No dawdling! I could see him do it without him even being there.
A week and a half, and I was almost finished. The line of stones ended at a pile of junk at the base of the cliff with a black space behind it. Karl had been absent since I started the job. With his usual impeccable timing, he reappeared.
He pointed into the darkness. “What do you think that is?”
A cave? It couldn’t be that easy. Like all his questions, this was a challenge, a teaching moment. If I could only make some leap of consciousness I’d come up with the right answer. Not just the right words, but I’d learn whatever it was he was trying to impart.
But all I had was a mumbled “I don’t know.”
He said, “Find out. You have until this afternoon.”
Finding out involved cleaning up all the junk. I humped it. I hauled old tires, a rotting mattress, and broken shutters around the north side of the house and neatly stacked them by the trash cans.
When I was done, I saw the entrance of a small cave. I consulted Bodine, who’d somehow found the time to become quite the expert on the local caves. Talking to him was permitted because it involved my task.
He pointed to a dried-up pool surrounded by bad knock-offs of Greek statues. “This is a grotto,” he said. “They were all the rage back in the Victorian times. Just the thing if you owned a mansion or castle with a formal garden and wanted to get over on your neighbors. Often they were artificial, but it helped to have a real cave to work with. Which it looks like this is.”
He pointed to the speleothems wired to the walls, which appeared dusty and lifeless. He said, “Those look real, but Karl isn’t going to like them.”
He was right. When Karl came to see them, his face twisted into a pained expression. He looked at me deadpan. “This is appalling. Fix it.” He stalked away.
I told Bodine. He said, “I don’t know what you can do about it. But I do know some cavers around here.”
I raised my eyebrows. How? We weren’t to have contact with outsiders.
“Never mind.” He wrote a phone number down on a piece of paper. “Call this guy.”
I met the caver at the pizza joint down in Piedmont. He was grizzled, with a lopsided grin. About what you’d expect for a guy who got off on crawling around in the dark and mud.
He asked, “You new to the area?”
“Uh, I’ve been here a few years. I’m helping someone fix up their house.”
“You’re a carpenter? Contractor.”
“No, actually it’s their garden.”
“You’re a gardener.”
“Right. There’s this little cave at the back of the garden.” I explained.
“A grotto.” He curled his lip. “The reason those formations in there look like shit is because they’re dead. They’ve been cut off from their blood supply—water.”
“So if I found new ones and hung them in there, how long would they look alive? Maybe you know where I can get some?”
He groaned with disgust, closing his eyes. Opened them and looked at me as if I was asking him to join a ring of child molesters. He gave me the rap. It didn’t sound like the first time. “Cave formations are irreplaceable. It can take a hundred years for them to grow a single centimeter. Besides, around here most of the good stuff was plundered long ago by assholes like whoever made that grotto.”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea. Any way I can hook the existing stalactites up again? Or fake it?”
The guy shook his head mournfully. But then he got a gleam in his eye. “This house with a grotto—it must be big. Fancy. It wouldn’t be that ugly place up that switchback road where the quarries are?” He pointed up the mountain towards Karl’s.
I scrambled. I’m not a good liar. “No, no, it’s up by Albany.”
He cocked an eyebrow but let that go. “You ever seen the one here?”
“Never heard of it.”
“There’s an old rumor of quite a cave on that property. And the geology’s just right. Some cavers went up there years ago, but the owner didn’t seem too friendly, chased them away. The place was abandoned after that. But I hear there have been cars up there recently.”
He was getting way too close. I said, “Well, I have to go. Have to get up, go to work. But thank you.”
“Any time. And hey—you want to go caving sometime, give me a call. We have a nice beginner’s cave. See how you like it.”
No thanks.
“And if you hear anything about that cave, I’d give my left nut to get in there.”
I drove back to the farmhouse Susan and I were renting. What was I going to do with that cave? I bought some polyurethane and painted the dead formations. It made them gleam as if they were for sale at Wal-Mart. Karl would never buy it. The only solution was to clean everything out, speleothems and lame statues, make it pristine. I could hook up a pump and fill the pool. Find a tasteful statue—a Buddha? Something Hindu? It was too dangerous second-guessing Karl on that, so I left the statue out.
Karl came to inspect. He swept his hands over the walls where the dead speleothems had hung. “You’ve ruined it.”
I felt like I’d done something terrible, but at the same time I was certain—what he’d demanded of me was impossible. He could ask you for a rainbow, and you’d bring him a real one, wrapped with a bow, and he’d say, “Ray, you got the wrong one.”
A sound, and Ray looked up from the screen. It was the hum of an engine. Shit! He fumbled the binoculars up but was too late. He’d been too busy writing. All the time he was doing it, he’d been oblivious to this headache. Now it hammered his forehead. It was around one. He shut down the computer, crawled back in his cave, and watched.
Caves. He remembered another part of the story. It was just a little anecdote, but Lou might like it.
It turned out that caver guy was right about the big cave. Burt was one of Karl’s old roadies, not too bright, but hulking and muscled from years of lugging around giant PA systems. Karl pulled a version of his mirror trick on Burt, letting the big guy see himself in the task Karl assigned.
The basement flooded in spring. Karl told Burt to dig a hundred-foot-long trench, six feet deep. It was a job for a bulldozer. All Burt had was a shovel and his machismo. Without dynamite, it turned out to be just about impossible. The soil lying on the old quarry floor was at most only a few feet thick. As Burt dug down, he kept hitting bedrock. As I hoed in the garden, I’d hear the regular pings of his shovel on stone, followed by anguished growls.
He was persistent. Did Burt ever get what Karl was trying to make him see? In any case, at some point he got smart. He gave up on digging outside and moved inside to the little room at the north end of the basement, opposite the foyer. He’d heard about that cave system in the area, that there’d once been an entrance in t
he bowels of The House.
It was filled with dirt, but in a few hours he dug into open passage. Burt trenched the floor and the next spring the water in the basement drained away into the cave. He made a wall of loose bricks to cover the entrance.
Karl was away the Sunday Bodine took me into the cave. He sidled up to me where I was working, grinned, and placed a finger to his lips. This was definitely not part of our practice with Karl. He handed me a flashlight and led me to the basement.
Bodine pulled the bricks from the entrance and clicked his light on and pointed it in. It looked like a natural sewer pipe, about three feet around.
I asked, “We’re going in there?”
“It’ll be fun.”
“It doesn’t look like fun.”
“Burt told me he reached the end and popped out on the side of the mountain. Said it was a real trip, coming out from that cold, dark place into glorious sunshine, bright green leaves. A literal rite of passage.”
“Burt called it that? That doesn’t sound his style.”
“No, actually he said it was like ‘getting born from Mother Nature’s muddy snatch.’ You’ll like it.”
I was a sucker for mythic experiences.
“The moment you want to turn back, we’ll leave.”
Sure.
Ray shut the computer down again. He hadn’t missed any cars this time, but in the half hour he’d been at it, the sky had filled with dark clouds. Bodine’s predicted rain?
He enjoyed sitting at home on a comfy couch with a drink and looking out his window. This was a whole other gig: surveillance. The boredom was visceral, a sickness in his muscles. It must be lactic acid buildup or some such. What had happened to that volcano of rage? It was dormant, but not likely extinct. Ray had a moment’s clarity. His heart was like the karst landscape of this plateau, subject to subterranean forces he couldn’t understand. And this was no mere intellectual theory. These mysterious influences were what had him up on this cliff, trying to see, and damn the consequences.
One thing was certain. Those forces were sapping the shit out of his life energy. The next moment he was asleep.
A car awoke him, as it had this morning. He was doing a terrible job watching. He trained the binoculars on the gap. Too late.
It was time to pack it in. Go home, to coffee, beer, hot dinner and a warm bed. He could taste it, feel it. He just needed to roll up this sleeping bag, crawl out of here without banging his head.
But he didn’t move.
What about the teenage geek business? And the electricity? That had been no candle last night. What about the front of The House? There were windows there on the second floor. How did he know they hadn’t been lit last night too?
He didn’t have what he’d come for. He needed to see in that window, tonight. He studied the corner where the east and north cliffs met. It was right outside the window and was filled with a steep slope of quarry rubble. The one place you could descend without a rope.
The bottom was overgrown with shrubs. But they wouldn’t provide much cover. And looking up all he’d see was the ceiling of The Bedroom. But if he could make it to the top of the north cliff, he could see down into the room, down on Karl. Atop the cliff were rocks and bushes that he could hide behind while he did it.
On his way there, he needed to stay out of sight of The House. He had to walk in the shape of a staple with a little bend on one end: a short jog east, a long one north, short jog west, then south to his new aerie.
It was midafternoon. He should go there in the light and wait. He could deal with getting back later.
He headed across the saddle and entered the woods. He reached the yard-wide crack and his body shrunk away. Before it became paralyzed, he got a running start and leapt. He overshot it and crashed to his knees.
At least the cracks came at regular intervals. The next two were less wide and filled with debris. He turned to what he hoped was north. With the sky overcast, there were no shadows, no sun to guide him. He needed to move in straight lines so as not to get lost, meanwhile looking down and making sure he didn’t fall in one of those holes. The trees were sparse and the undergrowth thick. He zigged and zagged to avoid the bigger bushes.
He was panting, out of shape, long-idle muscles complaining. But he was too adrenalized to feel the effects of a lousy night’s sleep.
Was he far enough north? He got his answer a minute later. He was huffing it, flailing at the brush, getting sloppy. Some instinct caught a thinning in the undergrowth, or maybe it was just luck that stopped him short. He crept forward to the edge of the sheer cliff over the valley.
He backed up and sat on a rock, trembling. There wasn’t a sound. No wind, no birds. The temperature was in the forties, but the exertion had him soaked.
As he completed the last legs west and south, he slowed way down. His muscles hated these deliberate movements even more than the unaccustomed exercise. His eyes were tired from darting between ground and woods.
The roof appeared, and he jolted to a stop. It was closer than he’d expected. He crept forward on hands and knees. He came around a bush and there was the edge of the north cliff. He lay behind a rock. He restrained the impulse to poke his head up and look. If Karl happened to gaze out the window—possessing that fine intuition—he’d see. Ray, what are you doing on up there? Aren’t you afraid of heights? There’s a perfectly good door.
Portal, whatever.
When night came, it would be bright in there. And, with no moon or stars, pitch dark out here.
Time crawled. Dusk finally came. A cold wind picked up, whistling at the corners of The House, whooshing through the bushes, bare branches clicking like skeleton fingers. His fingers trembled in harmony.
The hum of an engine and his head jerked to his right. The road below wasn’t visible from here, but a minute later, he caught the roof of a blue sedan. Karl? He strained his ears, but as the car passed behind the mass of The House, the wind swallowed its noise. He couldn’t tell if it stopped here or continued up onto the plateau.
Five minutes later came the chirring sound from last night, much louder here. The sky brightened a hair. They had a generator. He peeked over the rock. There were eight windows on the second floor. They were dark except for the leftmost two. The blinds were down, glowing like candle lanterns.
Fuck. He couldn’t see him. Ray stared as if his eyes could burn through the shades. He didn’t hear anything aside from the faint rustling of leaves. But if stuff outside was inaudible when you were in The House, the converse would be true.
He looked around the foundations of The House but didn’t see a generator. It must be in front. The light had come on about the same time last night. What if they were on pilgrimage, and the light was on a timer? Could a generator start by itself?
What if there was no one here? Except the light had appeared a few minutes after that car. About the time it would take to get inside and turn it on.
A momentary blur, and a silhouette appeared behind the shade. A person. It electrified him, driving him half to his feet. He remembered the cliff and stumbled back, shuddering. Karl. Ray crouched, frozen, transfixed, waiting for another shadowy appearance, but there was nothing. Finally, the light winked out. It was around eleven, the same as last night.
He looked to his right, toward the front of The House. As far as he could tell, no lights were on there. Though they could have gone off before Karl’s.
The wind had died away. He was groping his way back from the rock when he felt the first raindrops. He’d never make it to his lair without light. He cupped the Mag-Lite in his hand, clicked it on for a second, saw a few feet forward, then moved with it off. Twenty feet from The House and he turned the light on full-time. He was not falling in one of those cracks, or off the cliff. And Karl was presumably asleep. If not, maybe he’d think he was seeing lightning.
Ray couldn’t
believe how dark it was. Even with the flashlight on, the darkness was like a sentient thing that chewed at the edges of the tiny circle of light he cast on the ground as he looked out for cracks. He didn’t see the branches coming that slapped him in the face. He ran smack into a tree and had to work his way around, then try to compensate so as to not lose direction.
The rain grew to a steady downpour. He was soaked, feet squishing in his shoes. The only advantage to his exhausting movements was that he wasn’t cold.
He stepped onto bare rock. That saddle, or someplace down the plateau? The limestone tower with his cave below it appeared, and he flopped into his lair with enormous relief. It had taken him the better part of an hour to get back here. Rain lashed the limestone outside, punctuated by violent gusts of wind.
He was soaked. And for some reason his sleeping bag was wet too. Now that he was still, it only took a few minutes before he started shivering.
He investigated and found water steadily seeping from a crack in the rock, pooling in the floor of his den. How in the world was he supposed to sleep like this? He could bed down in the back of his car. Hell, he could just leave.
But he wasn’t going out in that rain again, walking by the edge of the quarry in the dark, even with the flashlight. Not shaking like this. He might fall.
He burrowed in the wet sleeping bag, leaving just an inch of space to breath. The rain thundered down on the rock outside, worked itself into a rage and finally quit. He passed out.
He woke, shivering violently. Icy water flowed under his bag, the rivulet turned to a stream. He squeezed into a corner of the cave, out of its path, but he was too cold to get back to sleep.
Rustling. His body launched up and he slammed his head on the rock ceiling. He let out a cry. As the agony subsided, he became acutely aware of his vulnerability, trapped in this rat-hole with only one exit. He pictured Karl, creeping up from the quarry with that gun. Coming to shoot Ray, or just shove him over the cliff. Was Karl here already, waiting for Ray to fall asleep again?
Never Speak: A Mystery Thriller (The Murderous Arts Series) Page 25