by Gregory Hill
The sprite light moved eerily thru the raindrops, still approaching, but now twisting left and right, as if it were confused. Then the light disappeared and I couldn’t see a goddamned thing.
I squatted next to Vero and took shaky breaths in the darkened silence. I didn’t know if it was possible to outrun a sprite, but I knew that I had to move myself away from my current location, even if just a few feet. Otherwise the thing would know exactly where to find me, and it would squeeze itself into my head via one of my nostrils and it would devour my brain.
I did my damnedest to relax, had very little success, and confessed to Vero, “Perhaps we should not have come here.”
I tugged on her shoulders in the same manner I’d tugged on her shoulders a dozen times before. This time, however, she didn’t budge, because this time something was holding onto her.
In bold defiance of my body’s demand for fight or flight, I chose fright, which is to say, I froze. I maintained my grip on Vero’s shoulders. My heartbeats pounded like underwater earthquakes, squeezing my brain tighter with every ka-thoom.
Here it comes, the inevitable, unimaginable, blood-spattered conclusion to my life as the Flash. I’ve served my purpose. I’ve done my duty, the bank is safe, and, no longer necessary, I shall be consumed by a ghastly, ghoulish, glowing sprite.
I will not let go of you, Vero.
An impossible thing happened. On the opposite end of Vero, beyond her feet, at around waist-height, a match flared. It happened so quickly it felt like an explosion, and yet I recall every moment. First, my world was black and empty of anything but fear and paranoia. Then, a tiny yellow glow appeared and it blossomed into a cloud of gas, disorganized, heedless of gravity. The blossom drew into itself, found its core, and erupted into a single wavering, vertical flame, balanced upon a wooden match gripped by the fingers of a human hand.
The hand moved the match toward another hand, which was holding a helmet. In the faint matchlight, I sussed that it was the kind of helmet an old-time coal miner would wear. Tarnished metal with a miniature lamp mounted on the bill. The match approached a steel nipple in the center of the lamp’s parabolic reflector and ignited a glow, soft around the edges, delicious. Perfectly sprite-like.
75
The hands raise the helmet and place it upon a human head. My dilating pupils can’t make out any features because the glowing lamp obscures everything behind it.
The helmet tips forward and alights upon Vero’s face. Her eyes remain closed, her mouth remains in her grim smile.
The helmet tips upward, watching me watch it.
The hand releases the match and lets it float and then pinches it out.
I remain in place behind Vero, quite aware that I’m being scanned by a human. I hold my face still, blinking only when necessary.
The match hand raises itself in front of the headlamp, palms facing me, all five fingers splayed out, ready to stop traffic. Then the tips of index finger and thumb draw together and they make the sign of okay.
Both hands reach up now and grip the sides of the helmet. They remove it from the head of the human and the human takes steps to the right of Vero and approaches me. I remain still, my hands resting on Vero’s shoulders. The human bows toward me. I see outlines of a face, of a body, shadows cast by the chest. This is a woman. The woman’s hands offer the helmet to me and I accept.
I place the helmet upon my head and regard my guest in the unwavering light. She is a small, bent-backed woman, very old, with pale eyes that hop back and forth between me and Vero. She’s wearing a pair of overalls with an unwashed long-sleeved shirt underneath. Her wrists are small. Her whole person is small, except her knuckles, which are too big for her fingers. Her skin has a swarthy tone, the texture of leather.
Under sagging lids, her eyes latch onto my face, or the darkness of where my face would be if the light weren’t blinding her. The woman draws closer, squinting one eye. It’s an expression of curiosity. Not a drop of fear in this one. She is considerably less surprised to see me than I am to see her.
She moves her mouth into a smile, as if she hasn’t done this sort of thing very often, as if her mouth is a pair of toddler’s legs and they’re taking their first steps toward an expression of contentment.
I trust this woman; she’s moving at my velocity, she gave me her hat, and she hasn’t yet attempted to eviscerate me. I smile back at her, and my face, too, feels like toddler’s legs taking their first steps toward contentment. It’s been a while, apparently.
Her shrunken apple of a head motions forward in an expression that could be either a nod or a Parkinsonian tremor. I nod back and then I take my hands away from Vero’s shoulders and, cautiously—so cautious it’s comical—I remove my backpack from my shoulders. With the woman watching, I unzip the backpack and extract my headlamp and offer it to her.
She shakes her head, No thanks, and makes the okay sign again. I offer her the helmet back and she waves her hands, No. She points to me, You keep it.
I make the okay sign now. Thanks for the cool hat, mysterious human. I put the electric headlamp in my pocket, where it glows thru the fabric of my sweats.
She makes two thumbs up in that way that, when an old lady does it, you can tell this was a newly popular gesture when she was a kid. I mimic the sign.
This is the best conversation I’ve had in a long, long while. I hope it doesn’t end with the lady peeling off her face to reveal that she is actually a reptile.
The woman points at Vero and makes the okay sign.
I nod, uncertain. The woman points at me and then at herself and then at the hole I’ve just climbed out of.
I point at myself and at herself and then at the hole, to indicate that I’m paying attention.
She points at Vero and then me and makes a sort of yanking motion, as if to indicate that I’m supposed to pull her, Vero, somewhere.
I mimic this as well, not entirely certain where this is going, but moderately secure that it won’t conclude in in my death. So what if it does? This is a person and she can see me.
The woman, satisfied that we’re on the same page, walks past me and hops into the hole and disappears. A moment later, her head pops up and she nods, definitely not a tremor this time, and beckons me to follow and Oh, and please bring that floating fiancée of yours with you.
There isn’t room for the three of us in the little hole. The lady doesn’t care. She beckons with her knobby fingers, her face annoyed at me for being stupid.
I shrug. Fine, I’ll follow. And then she’s gone again. I draw Vero to the hole and peer in. It’s not just a hole, turns out. One side opens into a tunnel and there’s an old lady’s skinny butt crawling down it.
Hey Vero, let’s get some subterranean homesick blues.
76
Wearing a carbide lamp on my head, I ease into the hole and squat and peer into the tunnel down which the old lady has crawled. I gaze upward at the back of my fiancée’s beehive. I wonder how a tunnel got planted into the wall of this particular hole in this particular valley. I pull my fiancée into the hole and, tugging her by the wrists, awkwardly crawl ass-first into the tunnel. I think, in the voice of my fiancée, “The only thing we have to fear is a gruesome death at the hands of a shape-shifting sprite.”
Taking care to not to bump my fiancée’s hair against the smooth walls of the tunnel, I crawl backward for several feet until I encounter a series of steps that have been carved into the subterranean stone. The tunnel opens up here, allowing me, even one so tall as I am, to stand upright.
Tugging my fiancée’s smallish wrists with my largish right hand, I steady myself against the wall with my left hand. I descend the stairs, seven of them, and then reach the floor of a cave. I am seriously creeped out to be in a silent, dark underground cavern into which I have been led by a senior citizen in overalls. I turn around and cast my carbide lamp light about the cavern. I judge it to be large and empty. I see no sign of the old lady.
77
Yo
u’d think I’d grow accustomed to crazy-ass crazy shit, but every time I think I’ve raised my tolerance to the max, the shit expands into a new realm of crazy-ass.
I’m in an underground cavern and the woman who led me here is as gone as gone can be. Neither hide nor hair. Either she disintegrated or she’s lurking at the other end of this room where the darkness steadfastly refuses to reflect any light from the miner’s lamp.
I should, of course, make like a bat and get the hell out of here. But, no. The Irrepressible Narwhal Zebra shrinks from no challenge. I saved the Keaton bank. I do not turn back. I saved the kitty. I do not turn back. I’m here, here’s queer, get used to it.
My head has begun to ache. The first flush of opiate withdrawal. Let it be. I will not turn back.
The cave is deep. All I can see is the illuminated area in which I’m standing, which is roughly the size of a dual occupancy recovery room in a hospital. The walls are a fresh, glossy white. I reach up and brush my fingers against the ceiling above my head and the stone is not as cool as I’d expect. There is nothing else to see except, to my right, on the hardpacked floor, there’s a blanket, grey wool, roughly woven.
Vero remains tilted from our climb down the stairs, her head lower than her feet. I pull her fully into the room and render her horizontal and hover her over the blanket. I tidy up her beehive. She continues to look content.
Where in the dickens has the old lady gone?
I point the helmet lamp at the far end of the cavern. The lamp’s photons go into the shadows and they don’t come out. This is a big room, kids. I extract my electric headlamp from my pocket and allow it to join forces with the carbide lamp and together they reveal not a goddamned thing.
The LED flickers on and off and goes out. I press the on button and nothing happens, of course, because I can’t turn lights on, because. Because I don’t know why.
I release the dead light to float and I walk forward. As I proceed into the depth of the cavern, I turn back frequently to make sure Vero is still there.
The protective bubble of light cast by the carbide lamp stretches along with where I’m going and peels away from where I’ve been. Vero becomes faint as the cavern gets deeper. White stone walls, hard floor, nothing to see. With my next step, Vero will be gone to shadow. I take the step and Vero blends away. I’m alone inside my bubble of light. I do something nutty. I remove the helmet and mess with the lamp until I find a knob, which I turn. The lamp dims and then sputters out. I blink my eyes until the afterglow of the lamplight fades and all I can see are the sifting flakes of my retinal snow.
It’s dark, I’m in a cave, I have no means of re-igniting the lamp, and my battery-powered light has quit working. Vero is back there somewhere.
With hands outstretched, I take steps. Here, what’s this? Straight ahead, a teeny flickering light. I take more steps and the light grows and it’s a candle, floating at shoulder height. The flame is flickering. The candle is hovering near a sort of shaft where the room pinches off into a tunnel. The tunnel is roughly the diameter a Galapagos turtle shell. I squat and look into the darkness of this new tunnel. As my eyes refocus, I spy another light, a candle, which I follow on hands and knees. The glow of this second candle leads me thru the tunnel and into another room, much smaller than the last. It’s maybe the size of an adult elephant. The ceiling pinches off like the inside of that church in the Red Square with the ice-cream cone towers.
There’s another tunnel at the opposite end of the room. I squat and peer into the tunnel. Here there’s an actual glow, with shadows. I crawl thru the hole and follow the glow until the tunnel opens up wide into a very fucking large underground cavern.
It’s lit by candles shaped into foot-high cones. There are maybe a dozen of them, spaced evenly on the floor along the outside rim of the cavern. There’s a bacon smell in here and I conclude that the candle cones are made of lard or something. The flames are aflicker, but the air in the room still doesn’t conduct sound. The tulip-shaped flames leave black smudges on the curved walls above. The light reflects faintly off the ceiling, which must be at least—holy shit—twenty-seven feet above me. As with elsewhere, every surface is whitewashed.
Can you see this? Little old six-foot-eight, former basketball official Narwhal Slotterfield standing in a ginormous underground cavern, looking about in wonder. Like a kid who snuck into a gymnasium after the arena has been closed for the evening.
Little old Narwhal elects to keep on walking.
I come to the center of the room, where the ring of conical candles reflects neatly off the bright walls. Here’s something. A cluster of small bones is resting on the floor. Poked into the ground in the midst of the bones is a knife with a shiny wooden handle and a polished blade. I lean over this strange exhibit. The bones include a skull with a beak. The bones belong to a bird. I’m no ornithologist, but suspect this was once a chicken. Murder most fowl.
There you have it. Somebody stabbed a chicken to death in an underground cavern. I begin to suspect that this whole adventure has been put together courtesy of a group of smart-ass Satanists.
Stomach cramping. My brain’s growing blurry. I hope this place has a medicine cabinet.
I tiptoe to the far end of the room, which is, seriously, big enough to house Batman’s entire underground operation, and by gum, I reach the entrance to yet another of these tunnel passages. Directly in front of the passageway is another cone candle. Floating inches away from the wick is a carbonated match. This candle has been lit recently and I think we all know who lit it. My apparition, who, now that I think about it
Not possible. Nope. My apparition is leading me to a glorious fate. Evil beings do not employ the okay sign.
I peer into the new passage. It’s dark as shit and narrow as fuck and Christ knows how far it goes.
Onward and downward.
PART
FOUR
What we want is to calm time down, to get time in a good mood, to make time feel wanted.
— Tony Hoagland,
What Narcissism Means to Me
78
Dark, dark, dark.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
Shimmy, shimmy, shimmy.
Scoot, scoot, scoot.
Twist, turn, slide.
Keep yer wits about yer.
Rest a moment, just a moment.
Don’t be fallin’ asleep, Narwhal.
Squirm it like you mean it.
Breathe until your ribs press against the walls of the shaft.
Use yer fingers and toes.
Wiggle like a dolphin.
It’s easy. It’ll happen.
Ignore your tummy.
Ignore the shadows of agitation.
There’s an end to this thing.
Lookee, a light.
79
I wriggle my beanpole body out the end of the tunnel and plop into a cramped, spherical room, maybe eight feet in diameter. The whitewashed walls gleam in the meandering light of a skinny wax candle which is being held by the little old lady, who has somehow managed a costume change, out of her overalls and into a white muslin gown.
She sits on the opposite side of the room with her knees tight to her chest. She’s staring at the body of a naked man, which rests on a pedestal in the center of the room. The pedestal looks like a stone tongue molded from the stone floor of the room. The naked man is on his side, curled into a ball. He is not a big man. The skin on his back is pale, his arms and neck are sleeved in a deep tan.
I’m hunched with my spine pressed against the curved wall. The little old lady doesn’t acknowledge me, she just stares at the man with pitiful fondness in her eyes, as one would stare at a tombstone after one had laid flowers upon it.
Keeping her eyes on the body, the woman nods, as if to say, You may gaze upon him. I settle to the floor and, in imitation of the lady, I bring my knees up to my chest and I gaze. The man on the pedestal is completely still, and has apparently been here a while, as he is covered with a layer of dust.
We sit and gaze, me and the little old lady, for quite some time, long enough for the candle to burn down to a nubbin. I can see the man’s back and neck and one of his ears. His tanned arms are wrapped tightly around his pale knees.
Even though it’s cave-cool, I’ve begun to sweat. My stomach is cramping. I’ve an urge to vomit. Oh, dear God, why did I eat all the Codeine? Hold it in. Be present.
The woman blinks, as if she’s just concluded a dream, and stands with her back curved against the wall. This room is small.
The woman beckons me to sit next to her. I slide my beanpole body around the pedestal and do so. From here, I can see the man’s face. His chin is tight against his knees; his eyes are closed; his mouth is a close-lipped smile that sags to his left, toward the earth. His eyelids are pale. I can’t tell his age, but he’s definitely not old. His hair is brown, flattened against his head as if he’d recently been wearing a hat. His nose is odd. Depending on how I focus, it’s long and flat and broad, or pointy and small and round. A Roman nose, via Pinocchio. I’m familiar with this type of nose, having spent many hours looking at one just like it in the mirror.
I know who this man is. And who he is, is John Riles, older brother of the legendary basketball prodigy, Kitch Riles. I’ve seen his picture in the paper.
With no warning, a cramp begins in my right ass muscle and climbs up my back along my neck and over the top of my head. I hug my knees tightly as the cramp creeps over my forehead, tugs every muscle in my face and then shoots all down my torso and arms and legs. I’m a wound-up ball. My muscles are so tight I fear they will shatter my bones. My chest won’t breathe. Bitterness rises in my throat, claws for opiates.
