Lloyd’s eyes grew wide. “So much for being safe. You really want to go in there?”
“It’s something I have to do.”
Lloyd gave an ushering gesture. “Lead the way.”
Four irregularly-spaced strands of barbed wire stretched across the opening, tacked to leaning cedar posts. Jim ducked between the strands and held them apart for Lloyd. He carried his rifle, not so much out of concern for what might be inside the cave but for the possibility that something might be waiting for them when they came back out.
As is frequently the case with caves, the entrance in no way foretold what lay inside. Jim had seen some impressive-looking caves that dead-ended just beyond the portal. That was not the case here. Just inside the entrance, the floor began to gently slope away from them and the ceiling rose higher. The floor may have been a single, solid slab at one time but over the course of eons massive tables of rock had fallen from the ceiling and lay scattered like blocks. There was a sense of vast space around them that was almost extraterrestrial.
“It’s the size of a football field,” Lloyd mumbled. “Maybe several football fields.”
“That’s what I’d read,” Jim said. A flutter around his head startled him and he caught the flicker of a bat in his headlamp. “Shit!”
“It’s time for them to head out for the evening,” Lloyd said. “The place is probably full of them. A cave this size could have thousands. Hundreds of thousands even.”
It was indeed the case. As they continued deeper into the earth, tiny bats the size of rodents dropped from the ceiling and flitted toward the entrance. Soon the floor began to level out. There were more slabs the size of tables and some naturally-occurring ledges of stone ran along the wall. Then they began to see bones. Jim’s light hit a pile the size of a campfire, the bones yellowed but distinctive. There was no mistaking what they were.
“I’m no doctor, but that’s more than one person,” Lloyd said. “That’s a lot of damn bones.”
Jim agreed. “I read about this too. Looters picked through the graves for skulls and the remnants of old shell necklaces. Anything they didn’t care about got tossed to the side. Back in the 80s or 90s a local tribe got involved in trying to protect the site. With no way to reconstruct what it was supposed to look like, they decided to leave everything the way it was and focus on keeping it from being further disturbed.”
Lloyd played his light around the chamber. “This is some spooky shit. Imagine this place filled with torches while they did some ancient burial ceremony. Can you imagine being a fly on the wall for that?”
“Makes you wonder who they were,” Jim said. “Were they Cherokees or Shawnees? Those guys were active in this area. Was it some isolated, remnant tribe with weird customs whose history has been lost to time? We like to think we understand the past but we really have no fucking clue. We only know bits and pieces.”
They poked around for more than half an hour, finding that the vast chamber seemed to be the extent of the cavern. If smaller tunnels were leading off, they required crawling or scrambling in a manner that Jim wasn’t interested in. The two touched nothing and took nothing, though Jim did remember to snap a few pictures with the iPhone he’d brought along.
“I’m ready to go,” Jim finally said, shoving the phone in his pocket.
“Good. I’m starting to get creeped out. I feel like I’m being watched.”
Like the bats before them, the pair fled the cave. They climbed the slick floor carefully, not anxious to be injured so early into their adventure. When they were out, Jim went to his horse and got a drink of water. “You want to stay here for the night?”
Lloyd looked back at the yawning mouth of the cave, then out into the darkness. “Let’s go a little further. I’m not all that tired.”
“Chickenshit.”
“Call me what you want,” Lloyd said, getting wound up. “I’m not waking up in the middle of the night surrounded by pissed-off Indian ghosts. You know they gotta be riled up over their missing heads and relics. You want to have to answer for that?”
“That’s fine. I guess I got a few more miles in me.” Jim took up the lead of his packhorse and climbed onto his own mount. “I hope you brought a teddy bear or something because this ain’t the last scary sight we’re going to see out here. You’re going to have to hitch up your panties and toughen up.”
Lloyd climbed onto his horse, groaning from the effort. “What is this? You got some kind of morbid tour lined up for us? Ghosts and cemeteries?”
“Not in particular,” Jim said. “But I might have an itinerary.”
“You going to tell me about it or keep it a surprise?”
“Eh, I think I’ll just keep you in suspense. Don’t want you getting scared and running home to Randi.”
“Glorious,” Lloyd groaned. “Just glorious.”
They managed to push on for a couple of more miles before they began to get punchy. They rode in the dark, not wanting their headlamps to broadcast their position on the high pastures of the mountain. There was enough moonlight to keep them headed in the right direction but the gentle rocking motion of the horses lulled them into sedation. While the ride itself hadn’t been particularly exhausting, it came on top of an already long day. Normally Jim would have been in bed hours ago.
They stopped for the night on a shoulder that jutted prominently from the mountain, near the tree-line. It was an exposed position that would have been lousy if they’d intended to have a fire. It was too late to bother with one though. They unpacked their horses and hobbled them for the night so they could graze.
Lloyd wasted no time stretching his sleeping bag out on a ground cloth. “I’m going to bed.”
Jim rolled out his own sleeping gear, then retrieved his binoculars from his pack. “I’m going to take a look around before I go to bed. You can see for hundreds of miles from up here. I want to see if there’s anything interesting out there.”
“Knock yourself out,” said Lloyd. “I don’t want to see anything but the inside of my eyelids.”
Jim walked about forty feet from their camp, closer to where the edge of their shelf began to slope back down the mountain. He sat down, propped his elbows on his knees, and held the binoculars to his eyes.
Beartown Mountain was the seventh highest peak in Virginia and the forty-first highest in the eastern US. Jim had hiked up there several times before but from a different direction. The route they were currently using was on private property, part of the massive Rockdell Farms holding. Jim had only been up there at night once before, when he was a kid in Boy Scouts.
It had been cold and snowy, probably way more of a hike than a bunch of kids in thin boots and Sears’ winter jackets should have been out doing, but they’d made it. They collapsed exhausted on top of that solitary peak as their scoutmaster pointed out the dozens of small towns and highways visible from there. Jim could still remember that feeling, having never seen so far before. It was like seeing constellations of stars laid out on the Earth itself.
Later, as an adult, Jim had hiked the mountain for the challenge of it and it had indeed been a challenge. He’d approached the mountain from the back, coming up through the Clinch Mountain Wildlife Management Area. It was the single roughest day hike he’d ever taken. He’d once read that Beartown was one of the most inaccessible peaks in Virginia and perhaps one of the toughest hikes in the east because the public land around the mountain had no access trails. No one but bear hunters ever went up there. It was an unforgiving morass of thickets, cliffs, and bears.
The route to the top required a map or GPS with advanced land navigation skills. There were steep knife-edge ridges where a climber had to kick steps into the earth and pull themselves along by tugging on scrubby brush. There were odd boulder-strewn canyons that looked out of place on top of the wooded peak. Then there were the mazes of rhododendron so intense and disorienting that a hiker could easily panic in their clutches. It was the kind of miserable experience that only outdoors peop
le understand, the way you can love a trip that totally breaks you down and makes you hurt for weeks.
None of those highways his scoutmaster had pointed out so long ago were easily located now. There were no streams of white headlights and glowing red taillights. There were no glowing domes of light reflecting off the clouds, as the distant towns had once produced at night. In normal times, he’d have been able to spot his town and several small cities from up there. He’d have been able to spot coal mines and factories working twenty-four hours a day.
There was none of that now but there were indeed pockets of light out there. There was life in the world. Most of it was just faint flickers—likely a lone bonfire, a burn barrel at someone’s watch post, or a group of people still up for one reason or another. He could see the city of Bristol on the Tennessee and Virginia border. There was a large pocket of light there and Jim wondered if it was one of the comfort camps, like the one the government had tried to establish in his community.
Jim knew that his efforts would not stop the progress of the world at large. Electricity was coming back and people were so hungry for it that he had no doubts as to the many ways in which they would prostrate themselves for it. Many saw no freedom worth the nights of darkness and the lack of refrigeration. They would kneel before the gods who brought light and give them anything they wanted in return. Their souls, their children’s souls, and everything in between.
Jim shifted his view to his valley. He saw no lights at all but could make out the general area of his home in the tufted grayness of the moonlit terrain. He hoped his family was all safe and sleeping, but he expected Ellen was not. He could feel her out there in the darkness worrying about him. He understood that. Despite his best efforts he seemed to often be the source of worry for those who loved him. That was the hardest part of being married he found, that surrendering of freedom. That awareness that his actions were never without consequence to other people.
Jim didn’t know if he’d be able to look onto his sleeping family in the same way tomorrow. He and Lloyd would likely top the mountain and move deeper into the forest. He said his goodnights to each of them and went off to his sleeping bag.
7
The Camp
Sharon woke with the crow of the first rooster and saw that it was not yet light outside. Had the night not been so insufferably hot she probably could have rolled over and gone back to sleep. Instead, any part of her body not stuck to her damp nightgown was stuck to the damp sheets. It was typical of the Appalachian Mountains this time of year. Nothing ever felt clean. Not the bed, not your clothes, and not your body. Without the convenience of electricity, keeping all those things clean was harder than it used to be. A year ago it was two showers a day and laundry once a week. Now, like a lot of other values, standards of cleanliness had shifted.
She pushed herself up and looked toward the window with its thin curtain stretched on a rusty rod. Outside, the dark of the night was diluted with a hint of the coming day, like a splash of cream in a cup of strong coffee. There was plenty that needed to be done and this was the time of year to do it. That made it even harder to go back to sleep. They had good weather and long days. Despite that, everything took longer than she wanted and she never accomplished everything she set out to do each day. Her list was never done.
It wasn’t so much the impediments to her own mobility that slowed her as the circumstance itself. She felt a duty to teach as she worked. When she handed out assignments, she showed each child how to perform the task, then carefully explained why they were doing it. That took longer but it felt like the right thing to do. She didn’t know how long it would be before order was restored to the world, but even if things did get back to normal, who was to say something similar wouldn’t happen again down the road.
Sharon wanted these children to know how to survive, both for now and for the future. She wanted them to have every bit of knowledge that she had in her own mind. While she was by no means an expert, she knew a few things. She also knew how to look up information and thank God they’d had a decent library there.
Of course, mastering survival and homesteading skills wasn’t why these children were with her. Their parents certainly hadn’t sent them to summer camp with the intention they’d come out as skilled survivalists. They’d come there to learn traditional Appalachian music. These were kids who had an inclination for the banjo, the guitar, the upright bass, or the mandolin. Some even played the autoharp or the dulcimer. Others liked to sing the mountain ballads or dance to the traditional tunes. A year ago they were junior musicians, not homesteaders. Now they were both.
Sharon wasn’t a musician herself but was the program director for the camp. She scheduled events and managed the staff, brought in the instructors, and kept an eye on every aspect of the camp experience. She made menus, scheduled deliveries, and bandaged skinned knees. She picked up kids at the airport and sent them on their way when camp was over. She’d been doing this as a summer job for over twenty years now and it renewed her in a way that nothing in her life ever had before. Being at the camp, among those kids, cleared her head to return to a year of teaching school within the tight confines of the traditional educational system.
She much preferred the experience of being at the camp to sitting in the classroom. There had been many times she wished she could live there forever, but she was insightful enough to understand that the magical feeling of summer was fleeting. It was the transitory nature of the experience that contributed to it feeling so special. Every two weeks the pool of children changed and she got to relive the magic of camp through new eyes. Then, at the end of summer, the last of them went home and the camp sat idle all winter, awaiting their return.
Until last year.
As the world crumbled around them, Sharon did her best to get children where they needed to be. She coordinated rides and worked the phones in the early hours after the terror attacks. She counseled child and parent alike, trying to keep everyone calm. Despite her best efforts, however, not everyone made it home. Within days of the attacks, the phones no longer worked and the fuel no longer flowed. Flights continued to depart, though she could no longer get children there to board them.
She had eight children between the ages of nine and fourteen remaining at the camp. For some, she’d been unable to track down their parents or their emergency contacts before the phones went dead. Through a long fall, a cold winter, and a damp spring she’d waited for the parents of these last children to show up, but they never did. At this point, she had to assume the worst. They weren’t coming.
She was aware the world outside of their pastoral oasis was a harsh and unforgiving place right now. The children understood that too. She’d been honest with them in her assessment of what was taking place in the rest of the world. She’d learned from her own life, from an accident that left her unable to walk, that you didn’t give people false hope. Honesty and practicality were the best approaches. This was what the world had thrown at them and they had no choice except to confront it head-on. They had to roll with it, meet life’s challenges and overcome. If she could teach them anything, it was that.
She kept the children busy and she filled their days with work and structured play. She kept them working on their music lessons, both as individuals and as a group. They taught each other and they studied reference books. Through their own labor and with the assistance of the camp’s owner they survived.
Sharon twisted and swung her legs to the floor. She stretched and yawned, fighting the temptation to lie back down and find another hour of sleep. She knew it would never come and the time spent laying there waiting would be wasted. It would be an hour she’d never get back. An hour she might need later.
An inflatable solar lantern sat on her nightstand and she turned it on, wincing at the harsh intrusion of artificial light into her peaceful world. She reached for her wheelchair and rolled it closer. Yesterday’s clothes were piled in the seat and they weren’t so dirty that she couldn’t get a
nother day out of them. As she pulled them on she caught the smell of dried sweat on her t-shirt. It was the same musty smell that pervaded every corner of her life right now and likely would for another month at least. Sweaty clothes, sweaty sheets, and sweaty bodies. When she was dressed, she pulled a headlamp onto her ratty straw cowboy hat and headed out of the cabin.
Sharon wasn’t the only adult on the property. The camp was located on a thousand-acre farm and the owner, a bluegrass musician named Oliver Poteet, had built the summer camp on fifty acres of it. The farm belonged to his parents, who raised cattle and tobacco but had also instilled a love of traditional music in their son. He’d convinced them to let him build the camp in the 1960s when the hippies were rediscovering hillbilly music.
Over fifty years later, Oliver was an old man in his eighties and his summer camp was an institution in music circles. Each summer they had sessions for adults or children, as well as weekend workshops for those who couldn’t get away for an entire week. They had musicians-in-residence who would come teach in exchange for the opportunity to hang out in the mountain setting at no cost. There were dozens of cabins, toilet and shower facilities, a dining hall, a library, gardens, creeks, and a pond. They hosted square dances and jam sessions that were the stuff of legend.
Although some of the facilities had been upgraded over time, the place was pretty rustic. As a result, much of it was not easily accessible to folks with mobility issues when Sharon first started working there. Initially, Oliver hadn’t understood all of the challenges that people with physical differences faced but Sharon helped him with that. She gently guided him through improvements that made the camp a place everyone could enjoy, whether they walked, rolled, or navigated the property by some other means.
Her cabin had a ramp that was thirty years newer than the rest of the structure. It connected to a boardwalk that allowed Sharon to get to the dining hall without having to push her way over a rutted path of tree roots and exposed rocks. The boards made a hollow echo as her chair rolled over them, like a finger dragged across a xylophone. At the base of the ramp, she hooked a right and was soon beneath the wide covered porch that surrounded the dining hall.
The Borrowed World Series | Book 8 | Blood & Banjos Page 5