December's Thorn

by Phillip DePoy

  “You can’t run around down here forever,” Dr. Nelson called out reasonably.

  “Yes I can!” the boy shouted. “I was born in a cave!”

  “No, but this is— you’re being shortsighted.” Dr. Nelson took a few steps in their direction. “Issie?”

  But the cave obviously took a turn to the left and farther downward because the last of the light disappeared in those directions. Except for the red coals in the fire pit and a small stream of clearer light from the hole in the canvas, illumination had vanished.

  “Come on,” Dr. Nelson said, heading toward the back of the cave.

  “Wait,” I said instantly, taking a single step in her direction. “Wait a second. You get twenty feet back there and it’s going to be impossible to see. Impossible.”

  I could barely make out her silhouette. She paused. Then she strode deliberately toward one of the boxes and picked up another flashlight.

  “Unless we use this,” she said, and turned on the light.

  “Well,” I admitted, “yes, that would make a difference.”

  I moved toward her, and she took off at a fair pace. I caught up with her just as the cave began to slope a little downward. Twenty more steps and the pathway took a fairly sharp turn to the left.

  The problem was that with our own torch illuminated, it was impossible to see the bouncing glow from David’s flashlight. And if we turned our light off, it was impossible to see at all.

  We tried, a few times, stopping dead still and turning off our flashlight, but to no avail. Every time we did, there was no sign of the other light; we were only plunged into impossible darkness. And that darkness was remarkably oppressive. It only took a few seconds of total deprivation to make the eyes and the mind play tricks. And any sound in the stone midnight was amplified beyond reality. The slow intake of breath was cannon fire. The slightest shifting of a toe was an avalanche.

  When we came to a place where the cave split into three separate passages, we stopped for good.

  “At this point I have to tell you,” I said to Dr. Nelson, “that if we continue down any one of these halls, the news story will be a sad one. First there will be alarm; a massive hunt. But that will be followed by the great sorrow of never finding our bodies. Eventually, as the years roll on, there will only be the occasional remembrance of friends and acquaintances—maybe at Christmas—to say that we’d ever been on this earth.”

  “Nice,” Dr. Nelson chided. “But I agree, alas. It would be insane to go any farther.”

  “And a plethora of insanity already abounds, abroad in the land,” I intoned.

  “Indeed,” she said, heading back the way we’d come.

  We walked for a moment in silence, neither one of us wanting to admit the fear that we might already be a bit lost in the caves.

  Luckily, seconds later, the cave turned to our right and I could just make out a bit of crimson on the ceiling, painted there from the red coals of the fire pit. It was beautiful.

  Unwilling to acknowledge her own relief at the sight of the entrance, Dr. Nelson chose, instead, to continue with her therapy games.

  “What is it that she wants you to forgive, Fever?” she asked me.

  “Hold on,” I said as we made our way past the cots and the wooden crates. “Just a second. Let’s not skip over the very important, ‘You were right, Dr. Devilin. There is a strange crazed woman in black.’”

  “You want me to say that?” she asked.

  “Yes. And then I want you to say, ‘She’s not a figment of your imagination. She’s real. I was wrong, and you’re not crazy, Dr. Devilin.’ Go on. Say it.”

  She stopped several feet shy of the entrance and cocked her head. “Here’s what I’m willing to say. I saw a woman. I saw a boy. I touched the woman, too, and I was greatly relieved to find her entirely corporeal.”

  “I wondered what that sigh of relief was about when she took your hand,” I said, grinning. “You were afraid that she might be— what, a ghost?”

  “Laugh all you want to,” she told me. “I’ve seen people who looked more real than she does, and they were actually thin as air.”

  “What?”

  “But as to that woman’s being real?” she went on, ignoring my quizzical expostulation. “I haven’t made up my mind about that. Just like I haven’t made up my mind about whether or not you’re crazy.”

  Then she headed for the entrance once more.

  “Now you’re just saying that,” I whined, following her. “You’re just trying to irritate me.”

  “Is it working?” She thrust the canvas outward. Snow fell around her and a rush of colder air stung my face.

  “Beyond all measure,” I responded. “You’re one of the most irritating people I’ve ever met—and I think once you get to know my other friends, you’ll be very insulted by that concept.”

  I could only see the side of her face, but I could tell she was grinning, as the expression goes, ear to ear. She stepped out of the cave; I followed.

  The sky had clouded over a bit, a circumstance not unusual for the mountain. Clear weather could turn ugly in thirty seconds. As we trudged up the hillside toward my house, it looked as if it might snow again.

  “I have to say,” I told Dr. Nelson, “that I’m a bit uncomfortable with the idea that there are strange creatures crawling around in the caves underneath the house where I live. Part of me wants to tie some piece of twine to the mouth of the cave so I can find my way out, and then forge on into the darkness.”

  She slowed a bit, then turned around and looked back down toward the cave entrance. “Tie something to the mouth of the cave,” she repeated. “Like Theseus and Ariadne on Minos?”

  “Exactly!” I said.

  “Really?” she went on. “What clearer metaphor for your subconscious could there be than that? You’re afraid of the things that are hidden in the depths of your psyche—you’re Theseus looking for his Minotaur.”

  That startled me. “You know, this is a little remarkable, but all during my time in and out of the coma, I was thinking about Minotaurs—seriously. I saw them in the clouds.”

  “Really.” She stared at me.

  I sighed. “I am a deeply troubled person.”

  “Amen.” And she resumed her ascent toward my home, and away from the hollow labyrinth.

  16

  Dr. Nelson and I had decided to warm up in front of the fire with a bit of apple brandy. It had been her idea, but I couldn’t have agreed more. My only addition was to include the last of the bread and a bit of Comté cheese. We’d taken off our coats and shoes, stoked the fire, poured the drink, and settled in the living room to ponder and discuss. She had sprawled on the sofa; I had slouched into one of the big chairs facing the sofa. We had decided not to call Skidmore to tell him about our adventure. He’d find out soon enough that his police tape was gone and the visitors had come back to the cave.

  “You know,” Dr. Nelson concluded, after a lengthy discourse on a particularly Jungian interpretation of mythic images, “Jung’s biographer said that Jung never let any of these mythic figures from his dreams leave his thoughts until they had told him why they’d appeared in the first place.”

  I slumped a little. “You mean that I have to get Issie to tell me why she’s here.”

  “I mean,” she said, “that we both have to understand her reasons for appearing to you at all. I believe that you called her; you brought her here.”

  “You think I rang this woman up and asked her to visit me?” I demanded.

  “Not on the telephone,” she snapped. “I mean that your bioelectric magnet drew her here.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered.

  “Just the way you’ve attracted so many— so many other odd people and events in your life.” And with that, she polished off her second apple brandy.

  “You realize that I don’t, for one second, buy into your bizarre magnet theory.”

  “All right,” she said, but she said it in such a way as to let
me know that she knew better. “Tell me about Cornwall, then—your time in Cornwall. Did this woman visit you?”

  “No.”

  “But you were there for your doctoral research.”

  “To investigate the Crick Stone,” I nodded, “a very unusual, prehistoric grouping of rocks, several miles north of Madron.”

  “What, like Stonehenge?”

  “Not entirely,” I told her, setting my empty glass on the coffee table between us. “One of the stones has a huge hole in it, manmade. The formation is also called Mên-an-tol, which means, in Cornish, ‘the hole stone.’ It’s basically three granite rocks, two upright narrow ones stuck one end in the ground on either side of the hole stone, so that, from a certain angle, it looks like the number 101.”

  “And there are various interpretations as to what the use or meaning might have been.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “it might have been the entrance to a tomb at one time, though there’s no evidence of that. Or, like Stonehenge, some scholars think it could have been an ancient calendar.”

  “But that’s not why you were there.” She folded her hands and closed her eyes.

  “No,” I said. “I was interested in other stories.”

  “What other stories?”

  “Variously?” I answered. “That the ring had a fairy guardian who could cure any malady, that any woman who went back and forth through the stone would become pregnant with an otherworldly child, or, conversely, that if your baby had been stolen by fairies and replaced with a changeling, you could pass the changeling through the stone and get your real child back.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “But I found most interesting,” I continued, “stories that insisted these stones were an entrance to another world, another reality.”

  She opened her eyes. “That’s what you were there to investigate?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I spent a month,” I began, “gathering every bit of local information I could find, in addition to the research I’d already done—several years’ worth, on and off. The idea was that if you could properly walk around and through the three stones, just right, you would, on your last pass through the hole, step into another world.”

  “You walked in a hidden pattern around the stones?” She sat forward. “Like an invisible labyrinth.”

  “I—I guess so,” I admitted. “If you insist on being a one-note tune.”

  “So?” she goaded.

  “What?”

  “So did you find the pattern?” She wanted to know. “Did you go into another reality?”

  “No.” I smiled indulgently. “I was doing research for my doctorate, not writing a science fiction screenplay.”

  “You didn’t even try?” she said.

  “Of course not,” I answered, exasperated. “I would have felt— it would have been ridiculous. Why are you asking me that?”

  “Well, if I’d gone all the way to Cornwall to see a portal to another world,” she said, “I would have at least given it a whirl. Damn.”

  “You’re ruining a perfectly good intellectual discussion, you realize,” I told her.

  “And you didn’t see this woman, Issie, at all when you were there,” she said in a deliberate attempt to change the direction of the conversation.

  “I did not. And aren’t you going to say anything more about the fact that she’s real?”

  “The photograph already proved that she was sort of real,” she said. “What else did you want me to say?”

  “I’ve already told you what to say,” I goaded.

  “You were right,” she sighed laboriously, “and I was wrong: the girl is real and you’re not crazy—at least not on that account. Happy?”

  “Delirious.”

  “Wait. The photo.” She sat up. “You sent it to Dr. Andrews. You should check your e-mail or your answering machine or something, in case he got back with you, right?”

  I stood and went immediately over to the answering machine, and surely enough, the red light was blinking. I pressed the button.

  “Fever!” said Andrews’s voice instantly. “Jesus. That’s Issie Raynerd in that photo with you. You don’t remember her? She was a student of yours. And mine. She was in my medieval literature course and your world mythology. How do I remember that? Anyway, that’s who she is. Pretty as a picture, crazy as a loon. She scared everybody. Even I thought twice about dating her. I think it was partly the name. I mean, what cruel mother names her child Issie? I never did date her, in fact, because she only had eyes for you. How in the hell do you not remember her? Anyway, she died about ten years ago. That was the rumor, anyway. Why do you ask? And why on earth do you have that picture after all this time? Anyway, I’m in the middle of grading final exams and turning in final grades and committee work and departmental changes and— look, all is madness. But maybe I could come up and visit after Christmas. By the way, there’s some shrink nosing around, asking questions about you. Dr. Nelson is her name, very pretty. I told her nothing. Your secret is safe with me. Just kidding. That was for Lucinda, in case you’re listening to this with her. Hi, Lucinda! All right.”

  That was the end of the message.

  Dr. Nelson had come into the kitchen and listened to the message with me.

  “I guess that confirms it,” she said softly. “She’s real, she was a student of yours, and she died.”

  “And apparently there’s some shrink nosing around asking questions about me.”

  “Andrews is a relatively bold fancier of women, wouldn’t you say?” she asked, heading back into the living room.

  “He made a pass at you,” I assumed.

  “Several, but that’s not what I’m asking. He remembered this woman. You didn’t. That tells us something about both of you, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it?” I asked.

  “For one thing,” she said, settling back down onto the sofa, “it tells us that after all this time he still remembers that a young woman liked you better than she liked him.”

  “Andrews and I— haven’t I already said that in my early days at the university I was really more interested in having students like me than I was in— well, in anything else. He and I were in a kind of friendly competition. He felt secure in his pursuit of les femmes because it was his supposition that the English accent is the elixir of love for most American students. Whereas I was, if I may encroach onto your territory, compensating for a pathological shyness and a nearly complete lack of any social grace in my attempts to interest women.”

  “He was cocky, you were scared,” she said, as if it were obvious. “Got it.”

  I sat back down in my chair. “I was scared, as a matter of fact. My upbringing was so very bizarre that it did nothing to prepare me for any genuine sort of human intercourse, if I may use that word.”

  “A lesser man would just have said interaction.” She smirked.

  “At any rate, I eventually settled down—not certain why. And Andrews won in the Casanova arena.”

  “Hm,” she said, making it clear that she was unconvinced about something that I’d said.

  “I have to confess,” I told her, a bit more reflectively, “that try as I might, I still don’t actually remember this woman, Issie. And by the way, I agree with Andrews. It’s a terrible name.”

  “It’s probably not her name name,” Dr. Nelson said. “Don’t you think it’s short for something?”

  “Oh,” I admitted. “Probably so. Isadora, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” she responded. “But wouldn’t that be Izzie?”

  “Did anyone ever call Isadora Duncan Izzie?”

  “Not that I know of.” She laughed.

  “Why can’t I remember her?” I asked, surprised to hear the question coming out of my mouth.

  “Yes,” she said slowly, “that is the question. You’re— I mean, excuse my language, but you’re repressing.”

  “I’m not repressing,” I said instantly. “And are you actually required
to use every psychological cliché in the world?”

  “The reason they’re clichés is that they’re most often true,” she said slyly. “If you weren’t repressing, you’d have taken a moment to consider the possibility. But since you shot right back with your ‘I’m not repressing’—know what that means?”

  “I’m repressing?” I answered, eyebrows raised.

  “But why?” She sat up.

  I stared into the fire. “I’m repressing. I probably am. I hate saying that. I actually have a pretty good memory. I mean, I don’t remember every student, but someone like that, especially if she was that crazy even back then, you’d think it would at least ring a bell.”

  “And if Dr. Andrews’s memory of her is that she was—what did he say, pretty as a picture, crazy as a loon?”

  What happened then would be difficult to describe. I had another feeling of being dizzy, the way I’d had when the boy had shot into my house, the same as I’d had when Dr. Nelson’s hypnotizing tones had affected me.

  I saw the living room shift. A kind of vague, golden light seemed to come from behind everything, making the room almost two-dimensional. I had a vague humming in my ears, an almost musical sound.

  It only lasted for a second or two, but Dr. Nelson noticed it.

  “What just happened to you?” she asked.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t tell her what had happened, because I didn’t know.

  “But I was afraid of the stone formation in Cornwall.” I closed my eyes. “I wanted with every fiber of my being to try the various patterns that local people had talked about. I wanted to walk around the stones and step through the portal and find another reality. When I was there, by myself, I wanted it more than anything I’ve ever wanted—before or since.”

  “But you were afraid,” she said softly. “Why?”

  “Because I knew I wouldn’t come back.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Because I knew that I’d already gone through other portals like that one,” I told her, almost silently, “without ever finding my way back.”

  “Yes,” she encouraged, “but there’s more to it. What happened in Cornwall?”