Bats of the Republic

by Zachary Thomas Dodson

  That which maketh the seven stars and Ouroboros, and turneth the shade of death into dawn, and maketh the day dark with night, that calleth forth waters, and poureth them out upon the face…

  Leeya entered the ring with deliberate steps. She carried a goat. Its feet were bound with bolo-ties. Murmurs coalesced into a lilting chant. Zeke and Raisin stood to see what was happening. The goat’s frail bleating could just be heard over the prayer. Zeke had never seen an animal outside of its cage before. It felt dangerous, wrong. ∧∧ ∧∧ The Auspices all turned away with arcing steps. The eldest woman produced a dagger from her sleeve. Leeya stepped forward with the goat. She lifted the struggling animal over the fountain. There were tears in her eyes. The room was charged. The eldest woman raised the dagger. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she brought it down quickly to slit the goat’s throat. Its lifeblood poured into the gurgling waters. ∧∧ Three of the girls in white knelt at the edge of the fountain. They cupped the mixture into their mouths, staining their robes. They drank it as though it were fount-water. Leeya hesitated. Another girl grabbed her hand and led her to the fountain as well. She drank. ∧∧ Raisin was transfixed with horror. The chants began again as the whole room went into hysteria. Some of the initiates wept as they drank straight from the fount. Zeke strained to catch a glimpse of the girls’ faces underneath their hoods, searching for Eliza. The Auspices began to make their way down the aisles. ∧∧ “We need to get out of here,” Raisin said. He grabbed Zeke. They slid out of the aisle and hurried toward the back. ∧

  25/9/43

  My dearest Elswyth,

  The angle of the sun on the mountains this morning was cold. I awoke stiff, my makeshift tent no barrier against the cool air that comes with the desert night. Any movement of my body still causes my skin to burn. It is so disagreeable that I lay still for a few hours more, and my idle mind first landed on thoughts of you and the cruel hand the fates have dealt us. I feel as but an echo of my former self. I sorely wish for the pack full of things I long ago decided to bring on this journey, chief among those things the bottle of roborant, which would certainly be a comfort now.

  The realization then dawned that Aunt Anne had instructed me to follow the flying creatures, and they had led to the cave. Might this be a path home, my own darkened Nightway? I began to imagine myself once again in its depths and must have drifted back into the embrace of Morpheus, trading one darkness for another.

  I was again wakened by a rumbling, the sound of men or beasts, on the far side of the hills. I got up quickly and gathered my things to climb the tree from which I had observed the bats taking flight.

  Securing myself in the branches, I heard the creaking of wagons, which filled me with dread and suspicion, so I hung as still as I possibly could. The tree provided cover and vantage point both. It was a party, a few scouts in advance of twenty wagons and perhaps sixty other men. The dust was blinding. At first I hoped for a troop led by Irion, but it was clearly a trading expedition going north from El Paso. There were women among them, and a large number of men—I would guess on account of the freebooters, who will attack any party too small.

  I saw them pause at a dip in the hills, and two men disappeared between them with buckets. I thought of calling out to them and seeking a return ride to Chicago. But have I found a shortcut? Presented with the choice I found I lay still until they had finished and moved on again. Texas seems to be fated to me.

  This cave is the thing that matters now. I waited until the men became specks in the forked dust. I then traced their steps, some two miles from the cave. There I discovered a beautiful, bold spring in the midst of a small, thorny grove at the gap between the two ridges. It held perfectly clear limestone water. I stripped off my soiled clothes and took a long cool dip in the waters. It was as though the stream were of roborant or some other restorative elixir, so wonderful did it feel. My skin and gullet were thankful of the soaking.

  It was midafternoon by the time I returned to the cave. I removed a few articles from my sack, including the torch and a coil of rope. It was an auspicious time, as the cave mouth faces west. Shafts of sunlight reached down into its opening and lit it sufficiently for me to see through to the floor, a heartening sight. It was also possible to see, from the same vantage, a tunnel off the floor. Leading away to the left, it piqued my curiosity.

  It was difficult to get my rope uncoiled, as I had tied the head to the tail to keep it secured in my pack. Once I undid my own knot, I tied the rope around a sharp jutting boulder and pulled with all my weight to secure it. Then, slowly and treacherously, I lowered myself down the side of the cliff wall, passing the ledge I had been perched on the night before.

  The rope ran out ten feet from the floor, and I hung for a while, weighing my options. I felt I could drop to the floor safely. It looked smooth and level enough, but reaching the rope again once I had let it go might prove a challenge. Looking around, I could see the entrance of the chasm that I had spotted from above. Its darkness began to throb and beckon me. The dark looked like a liquid night that had been poured slowly into the depths of the cave.

  I held still. Time stretched. The dark seemed eternal. I remained motionless as my fate spooled out before me. I could not see the length of it, as my thoughts began to expand and stretch wider and wider. I heard a voice speak from beyond the cave, beyond the state of Texas, indeed, from beyond time. I began to think on how circumstance had led me to this utterly hidden place and, now that it had, what I might make of it. Whether the fates are truly guiding us or our actions are of our own making, I do not know how any man could say. Even the Greeks, whom I read in grammar school, could not seem to agree on whether our doom is written for us or through some valiant effort, with the grace of the gods, we might escape. We might have an entirely different sort of existence, one that was not drawn for us beforehand. One that we made for ourselves.

  Until I lost my chance to be with you, it never seemed to matter much to me, this question of the fates. I suppose I must abide by them, for if they do exist, there is no use thinking about them or struggling against them. And if they do not, then any thought about them at all is a waste of time. They arrived without providence, and I have only my actions and the events of my life.

  How shall I thread them together? That is the thought that began to puzzle me down in the black of the cave. What should I make of myself, crouching underground, staring into the unknown? What did it mean that I now found myself here?

  Did the fates plan it? Did they have a purpose? Or did I, out of fear that you would never love me, or desperate to somehow prove my worth, design this fate for myself?

  Or perhaps it was just a moment, divorced from the purposes of my journey, completely without meaning. Perhaps it was just the cave and I. Nothing had existed before, nothing would exist after. In fact, I felt myself barely there at all—the self I know as Zadock Thomas. I was a new self, which seemed undifferentiated from the cave and the darkness that held me there.

  Then a slippage of mud, caused by my own boot, broke the hypnotism of the dark, and I blinked awake. I laughed at myself. Now was a time for action. I could contemplate the fates later. I had to explore the cave while the torch lasted yet. Was there a way out?

  There were many boulders fallen in from the mouth. I guessed I could pile enough up to reach the rope should I need to exit the way I had entered. My curiosity had gotten the better of me, and I wanted very badly to see the bats’ nest and where the cave led.

  Once on the floor, I steadied my torch and made for the tunnel. The blackness around me was dense, and the light did little to cut it. I felt like a tiny bird in the middle of a great night sky. I pressed onward, advancing slowly into the dark with the light held out in front of me as guard. I could see the walls of the tunnel grow around me, and felt as though I were entering the very center of the Earth.

  Eventually I reached an immense space that extended several hundred yards. The torch seemed to throw farther here, and I walked quic
kly. There was a steep drop to the left that I narrowly avoided, taking instead another tunnel that led off to the right, the size of which was unfathomable. I would look for a piece of sky in the roof.

  I followed on until I was surrounded by a crop of sharp stalactites. Great pillars of rock jutted up from the floor, sometimes nearly touching the multitude that hung from the ceiling, as though the insides of the Earth were nothing more than a vast churning mouth of animal teeth, frozen in time. Colors rose along the rocks, and the shapes and kinds were arrayed in endless variation, the decorating work of something inhuman. There were colossal white totem poles, and I imagined I’d found the pillared halls of some underground race. The ceilings hung with chandeliers of onyx, the stone wet and dripping in places. There were hanging draperies that looked so delicate that they could be shattered by my breath but were solid rock to the touch. You would have marveled at the beauty—it was the palatial home I’d imagined for us, carved in stone. The motion of shadows, thick black rivers of ink, kept drawing my eye to the wall. Had this been created by digging hands? Was some unknown culture concealing itself just behind those rocks? There were pools of ghostly water, so clear that they may as well have not existed. Even though I was loath to break the perfect mirror of the water’s taut surface, my thirst had returned. This water was finer than any sullied by the air and soil of the terrestrial sphere, much different than the spring I had found this very morning, and I drank my fill. The water tasted so sweet and pure that I began to doubt even that it was water I was drinking. I splashed it on my ruined skin, which was instantly healed. I filled my flasks with it and must declare that I immediately found my health improved. It was truly the roborant I had been seeking.

  The smooth floor gave way to spiky rocks that looked like a plain of stiff grass blades, all straight as though no wind had ever visited them. In the gloom and strangeness of the place, I began to forget completely the desert day above. The air was cool and my lungs felt wet and fresh. The mystery of the world that I had found began to envelop my mind completely, and time seemed a distant concern.

  I was shaken from my rapture by a moment that scared me more than any on this journey so far. My torch began to dim, and I realized that I was short on fuel. I hadn’t found an exit. The blackness felt as though it were tightening around me. I had not left small markers or some such device by which to guide me back out and up into the day.

  As the blackness descended, I hurried back the way that I had just come. My torch did not have much time left. All manner of noises arose, if they hadn’t been there all along. The dripping of water, yes, and perhaps the fluttering of bats, but also other noises I couldn’t decipher—the rushing of water, the chiming of musical strings, and the very distinct sound of murmuring voices.

  I felt out in front of me, afeared that soon touch would be the only sense on which I could rely. Disturbed, I thought I saw doorways and cracks of light that would disappear just as I reached out for them.

  Flickers of light played in my peripheral vision, as though some lightning moths had accompanied me down into the cave, flashing distress signals. They were like the strange stars that appear on the insides of my eyelids every time I close my eyes to the sun.

  The sourceless voices grew louder. I imagined I heard guttural chants, incanting my doom in the lowest of registers, forecasting my eternal imprisonment in these depths.

  Against it all I began to shout in strangled cries meant to calm the noises, but my voice only came back at me, multiplied from every direction, twisted so that it no longer seemed like my own. The echoes and reverberations gave me a fright and I shakily began to run, the floor crumbling beneath me. I was driven mad with a sudden desire to see another light, a natural one that wouldn’t disappear in my hand. I slipped over rocks and knocked into stalactites in the panicked dash of an antelope spooked by an unseen predator.

  I found my old tunnel and hurried through it, wary of falling in the dark. I imagined I felt a breeze, but it could have been the cold air against the sweat gathering at the nape of my neck. Slipping, I nearly fell into a chasm and sat down hard, barely catching myself on the rocks while still holding above me the dying torch.

  This fall knocked some sense into me, and I realized that to hurry too much would mean my death. I tried to slow my labored breathing. I kicked some small rocks into the chasm and heard no echo return. I then dislodged a larger boulder with my foot, again down into the black. It was several heartbeats before it struck something, but even afterward I could hear it rolling down. The chasm extended to a depth many times greater than that which I had climbed down already. I could feel the immensity of it in the pit of my stomach. Presently the sound faded and the cave was quiet again.

  Ever aware of my lamp’s failing light, I snaked my way back deliberately, but with a good bit more caution. One foot at a time. A stray bat, by casting a quick shadow across the ceiling, put me on course. It is to that and the fates that I owe the vision of a blade of sunlight piercing the roof, heralding my return to the surface.