by Jeff Long
It was Gregorio’s hand on her arm. Night hung above him. “I have found something,” he said.
With a groan, Ali pried herself from the ground. She felt drugged. Not enough sleep, but somehow too much dreaming. So vivid.
Ever since leaving the lake—taking this tunnel that spiraled down beneath the lake’s floor—she had been dogged by her dreams. Maggie featured hugely. But also her parents appeared, and January, her mentor, and others. All beloved. All dead.
She didn’t mention the dreams to Gregorio. For one thing, she had no patience for dream telling, which ranked in her books with reading tea leaves or the astrology page. She had never believed God spoke all that mysteriously. And that was back when she still believed in God.
Ali refused to believe she might be infected with the lake disease. She was in command of herself. That was paramount.
Gregorio’s black hair swung like liquid in the light. “This way.”
He grabbed her pack and she followed him along the worn trace. Ten minutes later he knelt and pressed his light against the amber floor. “Can you see them?”
Suspended in the flowstone beneath her feet, a dozen dead hadals seemed ready to rise up and break free. Even the females looked ferocious with their primeval dugs and torn hair and albino eyes. All the women were missing at least some of their fingers, which Ali recognized from her captive days. No death went unmarked without a few digits being chopped away.
“There are more,” he said, sweeping his light farther along the smooth surface of stone. “At least fifty of them. And slaves. Human slaves.”
They walked above the stock-still turbulence. These were modern hadals, meaning they were debased and misshapen. Some wore scraps of human clothing—she saw a Nike swoosh—though not the humans. The slaves had been kept naked except for iron collars or shackles.
“The plague,” Ali said. She had never seen the aftermath in person. “It spread so quickly.”
They walked across the flowstone, now and then peering down through the mineral lens at the plague victims. “They were running away,” she said. “From us, the human invasion.”
A warm breeze skimmed across the polished surface. Ali lifted her head. Suddenly a thousand whispers seemed to converge on her. At the edge of her hearing, she could almost distinguish soft syllables and bits of hadal click language. The breeze died. The voices stopped.
She glanced at Gregorio. Head down, he was intent on the bodies underfoot and plainly deaf to the whispers. It frightened her. Only me? She came up with another explanation. Maybe her hearing was simply better than his. The voices might be wind whistling through faraway forests of stalactites and stalagmites.
They left behind the refugees in flowstone. The trail wound lower. Portions were rocky with slides or jacketed in flowstone. One ancient bridge, near collapse, ground its teeth as they edged across.
“Are we on the right path?” said Gregorio.
“It has to be,” said Ali. Three days ago, they had left their boat tethered to a boulder and entered the only hole marked by an aleph, and counter-signed by IC and WM. “The spiral’s center lies this way, I’m positive.”
Without another word, Gregorio surrendered to her judgment, which was no relief. Because at this point their direction rested on nothing more real than the sum of whispers and dreams that she rejected as wind whistling on stone. Ali in Wonderland, she thought.
“One more day,” she said. “Then we turn around.”
“Three more days, Alexandra,” he said, generous with his loyalty. “We have enough food for that.”
Gregorio muscled on his big pack. In the quiet corridors, she could hear the popcorn in his soccer knees. His limp worsened, but he never complained. Step by step, she thought, the old broad is wearing out her stud.
Ali wanted it to end. She wanted to purge Ike, bury Maggie, and lay herself in this man’s hands. It was not too late to start a new life. She had passed forty, but maybe she could still outfox the big M and start a family up in the sun and become someone else.
But first they had to exhaust this quest. Three more days. After that she would turn around and never look back again.
The trail narrowed. The bridges grew miserly and more dangerous. The walls thickened with stony scabs.
They made camp beneath long, ragged curtains of hanging moss. Gregorio guessed they had dropped a mile in elevation from the lake. Quad busting, he called their descent. An hour later, Ali woke with cramps in her thighs.
His light switched on. “Alexandra?”
“My thighs,” she groaned.
“Lactic acid,” Gregorio pronounced. “From all the going down. Lie back. I will massage you.” He kept a straight face. “Or you will die.”
He began kneading her thighs. The spasms faded. “You can stop,” she said.
“A little more.” His hands moved higher. “You’re still tight.”
Tight, perhaps, but feeling no pain. To the contrary. “Gregorio…” He was devastating her.
“It’s no problem. A little exorcism, that’s all. I am banishing the bad spirits.”
Time out. “Stop,” she said.
He stopped. Her leg promptly spasmed. He went back to work.
He had no way of knowing how ready her body was. Then she smelled her own musk. “Wait,” she said.
It was not that she needed wine and roses, or even a hot bath. Indeed, ten years ago the caves had sufficed for her and Ike. She’d gotten pregnant in this tubular night.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
That was the crux of it. What did she want? Love, of course. But also a child, if that was possible, and by this good man. But not one conceived in the abyss.
All she had to do was say nothing. They could travel upon each other’s bodies all the way out of here. They could transcend the darkness.
She sat up. “Soon,” she said to him. Not someday. Soon. “I promise.”
On the fifth morning from the lake, the faint path evaporated in their light. The tunnel branched right and left, and then right and left again. With no marks to guide them, Ali found herself fishing for the faint wind. Gregorio, bless him, chiseled the walls like a jailbird, diligently marking each twist and turn for their exit.
Higher it had been a fitful breeze, almost too faint to feel. Here it issued upward in a steady warm stream that combed back her hair and carried a slight aroma. It carried something else, too, a thousand voices speaking a thousand languages. Whenever Ali came to a fork, she fished for that breeze and went into it.
They dined on teriyaki Slim Jims, protein bars, and Jolly Rancher candies, the last of their food from the World. The supplies and fuel they had so carefully salvaged from empty villages had gone down with their rafts. Except for Gregorio’s experiment with trilobite meat (too rubbery, and it tasted like water), they had managed to keep their diet free of the territory. Sooner than later, though, they were going to have to go native and risk the hallucinations. He kept eyeing the cave pools and their blind, slow-moving fish. But Ali resisted. Before possibly infecting herself, she needed to figure out the whispers.
The lower they went, the more constant the voices became. Oddly, that made them easier for Ali to ignore. There is only so long you can listen to the traffic outside your window before it becomes part of the inside. The welter of languages receded in her mind. It helped that she was so tired and hungry and had blisters on her feet.
The sixth morning she woke from yet another dream of Maggie. They were striding through the grass, making stories from the clouds overhead. There is a castle, there is its tower, there is the princess waiting.
“It’s time, Alexandra.”
Today was to be their final day of descending. Unless they found some relevant sign, their climb up to the surface began tonight.
They followed the tunnel lower. Water beaded on the ceiling and sweated down on them. The walls narrowed. The floor turned into a tangle of fallen rock. Everything about it suggested a dead end, everything but that wind with its
clamoring whispers.
All day long, Gregorio gave her the full benefit of their search. He didn’t pester her for a turnaround point. He didn’t check his wristwatch. He wanted her to have no doubts about leaving behind her old life.
But then a butterfly appeared from the darkness. Its orange-and-black wings flickered in their light like frames of a movie. Gregorio stopped in his tracks. “Impossible,” he said.
“Sea serpents and trilobites,” she said. “Why not butterflies?”
He looked at his altimeter. “Forty-five thousand feet below sea level?”
It lighted on her forearm, wings slowly pulsing. After a few seconds, it took flight again and wagged higher into the tunnels, borne by the breeze. Gregorio’s wide eyes met hers.
It was not that the Interior was barren of life, far from it. Except for a few parasites that required hominidal blood, the sudden erasure of man and manlike beings from the Subterrain had gone spectacularly unnoticed down here. From mosses and aquatic plants to mice and eels, the place was thriving.
And yet this butterfly did not fit.
“A monarch butterfly?” said Gregorio. “Where did it come from? We must find out.”
It had never occurred to Ali that a butterfly could be a mortal temptation.
“Lepidoptera!” he shouted over his shoulder.
The wind in the tunnel was getting stronger.
“Moths, yes, they are nocturnal,” he said. “But a butterfly? They are creatures of the sun. And monarchs travel in flocks. She could be lost, this one. But so lost? Eight miles below sea level? No, there must be more. But how can this be?”
“Gregorio, I don’t know.”
“There must be a hatchery somewhere,” he said.
It was getting harder to think clearly. The voices kept getting stronger. Soon, she would have to confess her illness to him. First, however, she had to confess it to herself. There were still too many ways to dodge the verdict. If the hallucinations robbed you of appetite, for instance, why was she so hungry? And if the delirium was so contagious, how come Gregorio was unaffected? After all, he was the one who had eaten from the lake. Or was he hiding his delirium the way she was hiding hers? Or had he told her and she’d forgotten?
The descent grew steeper. Several times they had to lower their packs to each other and climb down. They came to a hole. They stood at the edge, angling with their lights for a floor or a ledge.
“I don’t see a thing down there,” said Ali. “Gregorio, it’s time to turn around.”
His blood was up, though. The butterfly had him going. “Let me try one thing.” He tied his headlamp to the tip of their only rope. It was an old rope, but in immaculate condition, one of Ike’s that he’d left stowed in a trunk in her closet. Gregorio carefully slid the light down the rock face.
Let there be darkness, thought Ali. Let us put an end to this.
The light came to rest on solid ground. Gregorio was triumphant. “En avant!” he said. “The way lies open to us.”
Ali sighed. In caving, Newton’s law reversed. Whatever goes down must come up. She eyed the drop-off. The one thing she hated more than rappelling down was jumaring back up. But Gregorio had followed her on her search. It was only fair to follow him on his.
She went first, leaving him in darkness without his headlamp. As she roped down into the bulging pit, Ali watched for any sign that Ike or McNabb might have come this way. But there were no old ropes hanging in place, no scratched initials, no traces of an extreme tourist.
Partway down, she heard Gregorio’s voice and stopped. He was talking to himself up there. His conversation was animated and in Basque, not even Spanish. He laughed. “Is everything okay?” she said.
Silence. Finally he called, “Alexandra, was that you?”
Who else? “Were you saying something to me?”
“No, no,” he said, too quickly.
The voices, she realized. He was hearing them, too. They would have to talk about this.
At the bottom she unclipped from the rope and scouted with her light. The tunnel led on. “I’m down,” she called. The rope began to snake up, then his headlamp caught on a spur. “Do you want your light?”
“No need.”
She unknotted the headlamp, and perched it on a broken stump. She turned off her light to conserve it.
Gregorio pulled up the rope. His voice trickled down, then a laugh. He was having a very good time by himself up there.
Ali noticed a drop of blood on her forearm. When she wiped it away, another bead appeared. She remembered the butterfly. It had lighted at that very spot.
The packs came scuffing down on the end of the rope. She untied them. “I’ll be down in a minute,” he said.
“Are you sure you don’t want your light?”
“I can do this in my sleep.”
Ali bent to drag his heavy pack to one side. Words rained down. More laughter. Then she heard, “Oh, shit.”
She started to raise her head.
A dark angel seized the light.
Ali spied the thing from the corner of her eye.
A mass of limbs swooped down with wings like rags. There was a terrible racket of sticks snapping and melon breaking. The juice whipped her eyes. Ali tumbled back.
The light from Gregorio’s headlamp snuffed out.
Ali lay in the darkness, too shocked to move. She did not turn on her light. She knew what had just happened, but did not want to see it. At last there was no more putting it off.
“Gregorio?”
Silence.
She thumbed the switch on and cut a hole in the night.
He lay broken backward on the stump. The wings of his shirttails were soaked with gore. His hair hung upside down, exposing his face.
Blind me. “Gregorio?” Rob my thoughts. Slowly she got to her feet. Take me away.
The rope lay unspooled in muddled strands. Loops draped his body. She kept her distance.
Twice she tried to bridge the awful expanse between her and…it. This was not Gregorio. He would never do such a thing. Break her heart? No, he had dropped this puppet down to frighten her. How could you?
She focused on the rope. It looked intact, no frayed sheath or blown tips. The rope had not failed. Gregorio had. All she could deduce was that he had untied the rope and then leaned back. She remembered him laughing up there.
“Gregorio.” No questioning this time. She stated his name. She identified the dead.
He revived. He seemed to. His basket of ribs moved. Or was that her light jostling the shadows? Was it the wind, or had he just drawn a breath?
God help me. Was he alive?
Ali tried to think. First she would have to make him warm. And get him water, he would need water. And stitch his wounds. And splint the bones. Get him settled for the long wait. Maybe pile some rocks as a windbreak. Then she would race for help. I will return for you. Like in the movies.
She cast her light up the hole, and there was no exit. Maybe Ike could have managed the blank rock, but the way was closed to her.
“Gregorio?” Help me.
She felt pinned in place by his eyes—his beautiful black eyes—turned wrong side up. Blood streamed into them from his nostrils, but he did not blink. His neck had snapped. He was dead after all.
He spoke.
Distinctly, with all the seriousness of a child who has been left alone entirely too long, a voice came from Gregorio’s mouth. But it wasn’t his voice.
“Mommy,” it said.
As if toppling from a great height, Ali dropped to her knees.
Face-to-face with those sightless eyes, she whispered, “Maggie?”
The mouth didn’t move. The voice was just using it. “Mommy,” it said. “Help me.”
ARTIFACTS
A LETTER HOME
Dear Marcia,
I have turned around (along with most of the army) and was going to return home. But then it seemed like such a waste to let all the opportunities down here pass me by. Why not t
urn the sour into the sweet? That’s the American way.
So now I am in Electric City. The locals said stay awhile, “There’s a place here for a sturdy man like you.” It is good to be wanted again after all those months of unemployment. They said that even though I have no mining skills, they can use me. Here’s the deal, and I think you’ll agree it’s a dandy.
There’s no money involved. (They don’t have any.) But I will get a part share in the big project here, which is to drill down to hot rocks to make electricity, and then we’ll hit it rich. I don’t mean just rich. I mean really rich! We’re going to change the world, babe, no more fossil fuels and smog and oil wars. Just the quiet hum of electricity. And it all starts here. Rockefeller and Bill Gates and Mr. Donald Trump, move over.
So I am going to stay on awhile. Please know that this is all for you. These folks are a little strange, but they’re right around the corner from the greatest treasure of all time, the energy of, by, and for our planet. Once we strike the mother lode, you and I are in the money, honey! We’ll pay off all the credit cards and banks. Do you still want that ninety-two-inch LDTV? How about one for every room?
If you could, please put together a month’s supply of Power-Bars and dehydrated food and some treats (you know what I like) and send it to me at Electric City. People here eat bush meat, which comes from some kind of cave animals, and I don’t have a particular taste for it. It’s a hungry place. You should see me, babe. I’ve lost the tire and handles. One of the miners said, “Don’t get skinny on us, John. Keep some meat on you.”
So I love you, Marcia, and can’t wait to see you in a short while with all the money I’m bringing up with me.
Love,
John
28
DIALOGUES WITH THE ANGEL, NUMBER 9
“Long before the first man or woman found their way in to me,” says the angel, “I knew something extraordinary was rising up in the sunshine.”
Inside the tomb, the student listens to the tales, delirious with knowledge lost and regained.
“I can’t say when I first became aware of the souls. I’m not sure when they first became aware of me. These were a new phenomenon for me. Like the rumbling of faraway earthquakes, or the whisper of invisible gases, I could hear these spirits but not see or touch them or comprehend what they were. To tell the truth, for the longest time they frightened me.
