Gunther's Cavern

by Edward Etzkorn

  “Everybody—go on!” Gunther cried. “Hood, Giles, Rocky—stay back with me!”

  Like angry fans at a sold-out rock concert, the Tardies massed at the entrance to the passageway. Only the narrow dimensions of the passageway prevented them from sweeping the children out of the way. Gunther, Hood, and Giles slashed and chopped, little by little backing deeper into the passage. At last a high-pitched cry from the auditorium—Ee-eee-wah-ee-way!—stopped the surge of Tardies and the children found themselves suddenly free.

  The light—the light from above had set them free. They could see. The cave creatures could not.

  The higher they climbed, the lighter the passage grew. “Five minutes before eight PM, New Calar Surface Time,” Giles announced to a chorus of laughter. Gunther’s olfactory senses welcomed the acrid smell of bat guano, which along with the light told them they were nearing the cave entrance. Several of the children limped, or hugged the wall for support, but except for Kara, they all managed to climb without assistance. Sass and Giles led Kara forward until finally she begged off their help and pushed forward on her own.

  When they reached a room that opened up enough for them to gather as a group, Gunther ordered a halt. The waning day up above provided more light than they’d seen in days or weeks. Cloaked in sweat, slug goo, or bat guano, hair tousled, limbs flung in odd directions, they looked around at each other and laughed in relief. Hood’s head count verified that they were all there.

  For the first time Gunther saw the blood caked on Rad’s face. A long gash across her forehead and down her left cheek was bubbling blood like a miniature mud volcano. Dried blood crusted her cheek and shirt.

  She shrugged. “So much for my dreams of being Miss America.”

  “Looks like you’ll need stitches.” He ran his eyes over the rest of his wounded band, noting blood on Giles’s hand and in Van’s hair. “Anybody else cut up or hurt bad?” As he spoke, he became more aware of the pulsing pain in his left arm and back, signaling the return of sensation to the regions where the millipedes had bitten him.

  “Me,” Rocky announced. “I cut my hands and shins on rocks.”

  Gunther looked at the body parts that Rocky displayed, but saw no major injury. What he noticed most was Rocky’s face—it appeared ashen, embarrassed. He remembered. Rocky had run at the last minute when Gunther had asked him to help Hood and Giles defend the kids’ escape into the final passage. “I see many more touchdowns coming,” he said.

  When no one else spoke up, Gunther addressed Kara. “How about you, Kara? You okay?”

  “Okay. Like my stepfather beat me up, only a little worse.”

  Gunther had no reply to that. “Van?” he said quickly.

  “Nothing that a good shampoo and a root-beer float from Ron’s Dairy Bar won’t cure.”

  “Or a Super Slop Special at Fagan’s!” said Tiff.

  The group laughed—far longer and louder than the remarks deserved.

  “Sisters Pizza and root beer!” said Rocky, raising his right arm in what might have been a toast.

  “Sisters Pizza and root beer!” the group repeated, as if one person. All the right arms raised as one—except Simon’s. His left hand rose as high as the rest. Seeing the mangled right arm hanging at his side, Gunther did not need to ask why.

  INTERLUDE 10

  The exuberant crowd pushed—nearly carried Jimmy B to Luisa’s house.

  “No excuse, Jimmy!” Dicey said. “You owe her!”

  “You owe us, too!” said Lucky. “We need our soap operas to have happy endings!”

  “It’s a wonder the poor girl hasn’t totally flipped from hearing that buzzing sound day and night!” added Arthur.

  “Poor girl—ha-ha,” Dicey heard in a low voice from somewhere in the crowd.

  Jimmy’s protests were lost in the noise of shuffling feet. “I’m gonna do it—I guarantee it. I just need time, is all.”

  “Yeah, right,” Hallie said. “The same way Cal’s gonna fix my bathroom. It’ll happen, but Global Warming may have flooded out the Catskills by then.”

  The crowd laughed as they propelled Jimmy B into Luisa’s house. Dicey thought she’d never seen a house so immaculately clean. A flood of guilt washed over her as she realized the muddy mess the shoe prints were making of Luisa’s floor.

  “Top of the stairs, first door to the right,” Luisa said, seemingly unaware of the mess the crowd was making.

  “I need my tool box,” Jimmy moaned.

  “You’ll be okay,” someone said.

  The crowd deposited Jimmy at the door Luisa indicated, but grouped around in a semicircle to prevent him from escaping. Dicey peered into the room—a utility room. No furniture but a double-bed and dresser, both of which could have belonged to Martha Washington. A dead fly or two lay dead on the window sill. No sound of buzzing, no vision of flies disturbed the room’s cleanliness.

  “Where are the flies?” she asked.

  A glance at Luisa told her the answer before Luisa spoke.

  “I couldn’t wait for Jimmy forever. What could I do? I had no choice but to do it myself.”

  “So why … ?”

  Dicey glanced around at the other faces. Some of them had realized the answer before others, and had begun to retreat toward the stairwell. Someone—perhaps Hallie—pushed Jimmy B into the room behind Luisa and shut the door. The confusion on the remaining faces dissolved one by one as they looked around at one another.

  “Sisters Pizza, anyone?” someone said.

  The response was unanimous. “Sisters Pizza!”

  CHAPTER 22

  New Calar High School appeared different when Gunther returned in September. Instead of sneaking onto campus like outsiders who didn’t belong, he and June found themselves hailed by other students from over a block away. Rocky was first to welcome them, throwing an arm around Gunther’s shoulders as if they were returning football champions who together had won the deciding game.

  June stepped aside as Sass and Van grabbed Gunther around the waist, one on each side. He felt his face redden as if struck by instant sunburn when each of them fastened their lips to his cheeks and held on like sucker-fish. Only when a third pair of lips met his and a third pair of arms encircled his neck did they release him. Kara, her face perhaps redder than his, pulled back, leaving a taste of cherry ChapStick on his lips. As she bounced in front of him, he thought she looked more exuberant than he’d ever seen her, despite the healing bruises on her face and neck. Nearly bowling the two of them over, Sass and Van, now along with June and Rocky forming a circle around them, began the trek to the campus entrance. Gunther nearly tripped over his own feet as they passed through the gate.

  “Cheerio, Mate,” a voice greeted them just inside. “Room for one more, what?”

  Within seconds, Giles added himself to the group hug.

  To his right, Gunther spied a slender figure standing by himself, his right arm in a cast, looking as if he wished to join them. Reaching over Sass’s shoulder, Gunther tugged on his left sleeve.

  “Simon!”

  Like a growing oil spill, the group flowed in Simon’s direction, and within seconds he, too, was enveloped.

  “What’s with the arm?” Van asked.

  Simon’s voice emerged shy but sturdy. “Doctors say I should get back about eighty to ninety percent movement in the hand. There’s some nerve damage near the elbow.”

  “Still good enough to hold a girl,” Sass cackled.

  Simon nearly choked on his happiness.

  “Hot stuff, ain’t you?” came another voice.

  At the same time, another set of lips planted themselves on Gunther’s, and another arm insinuated itself into his. Looking into Tiff’s, then Hood’s smiling faces, he had no doubt that he was about to be dragged the rest of the way to the school’s front door.

  Not until he reached the door did the final face appear in front of him. The brown eyes burned into his, the crooked smile sp
oke volumes. The gash across the cheek and forehead looked to be healing, but he had no doubt it would leave a permanent scar.

  “Rad …”

  “Meet me after school,” she said. “Don’t be tardy.”

  Hood nearly fell over with mock laughter. “Ho-ho-ho!” he exclaimed. “Ah-so, ah so funny, so clever these Vietnamese Asian …”

  Tiff clipped him with her purse on the back of his neck before yanking Rad into the center of the group. “Moron!” she addressed her brother.

  CHAPTER 23

  The auditorium fell silent as Principal Greenfield mounted the stage and took his place behind the podium. Not since the last day in the cave had Gunther experienced this degree of silence.

  “Although today is the first day of classes, it is more than that.”

  He removed his eyeglasses and wiped them with an old-fashioned handkerchief he’d brought with him clearly for this happenstance. He wiped his eyes quickly, as if hoping the students would not see, then let the handkerchief linger about his forehead—a man was permitted to sweat, but not cry. “This is a day of rejoicing for those of us who have been saved, and a day of mourning for those who have been lost. It is a day to celebrate heroism, and a day to commiserate with those whose losses are too deep to measure. A day to remember those who were our friends, and will always remain our friends, those who were special to this community and no doubt would have had much to offer it in the future.”

  Around him Gunther heard the sounds of weeping, and he himself tried to refrain from blinking, afraid his own tears would flow. A teenage New York male was not permitted to cry, any more than a Londoner or a Norwegian—or a high-school principal.

  A sob from behind him made him look around—to his regret. Without restraint, tears were flowing down Rocky’s face, causing Gunther’s own chest to heave. The hands on both sides of him grasped his, and all at once a release of emotion was not only permitted, but encouraged.

  “You the man, Gunth,” Hood’s voice followed, with a squeeze on the back of the neck.

  “We’re all the men,” Gunther managed to say. “And women.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Even by the start of the new school year, residents of New Calar and its satellite communities disagreed over what had really happened in the cave below their feet, and about how extensive the cave system really was. A few residents proposed exploiting it, opening it up to spelunkers with an eye toward making it a tourist attraction. Most people, however, wanted only to seal it off, to put an end to this miserable chapter in the area’s history and prevent any further accidents or injuries.

  Despite many hours of questioning by the police and the Town Board, discussions among parents and other community residents, and reports in local newspapers, no consensus existed over what had really happened. The kids persisted in their accounts of giant insects and overgrown tardigrades, but as time passed the stories grew more and more divergent. Ultimately, the only item on which all the kids’ versions agreed was that Gunther stood out as the group’s hero. The adults who had visited the cave could contribute little either to corroborate or disprove the kids’ stories, their most consistent theme being a vague noise that they swore was blowing through the cave and heading toward them. After the kids escaped, no one had dared to enter the cave again from either direction.

  An article printed in the Albany Times Union toward the end of September summed up findings to date, and brought further speculation about the cave and the young adventurers trapped inside it to a virtual halt. Its author compiled interviews with all the kids except one—Simon declined to be interviewed—and several of the adults who had been part of the rescue group. The author questioned whether the cave was indeed a subterranean cavern in the style of Howe Caverns, or whether it was in fact an old mine shaft. Whichever it was, she concluded that the kids had wandered into it unknowingly, and once inside simply lost their way. They survived by eating whatever food presented itself—cave fish, insects, insect larvae, and an occasional small animal like a salamander. She attributed their injuries—and the two deaths—to falls and other accidents within the cave. Relying on evidence from psychological journals that people shut off in darkness for prolonged periods of time experience a variety of hallucinations, she expressed her certainty that the stories about overgrown tardigrades and giant insects were caused by hallucinations, made more vivid by near-starvation and repetitive discussion. She proposed that bats flying near Gunther’s entrance to the cave had provided the rushing sound that the adult rescuers reported. Gunther’s primary contribution, she concluded, had been his flashlight and an ability to find a way out of the cave.

  Although none of the kids or adults involved found the article in any way satisfying, it allowed discussion of what had or had not happened in the cave to come to an end. The kids, their parents, and the community as a whole had had enough of the story and needed to lay it to rest.

  Following the examples of communities that had sealed off old mine entrances within their borders or closed trails leading to waterfalls where people had slipped and died, the New Calar-Ventnor-Turtle Ridge Town Board voted four votes to one to seal both entrances to the cavern with concrete. The dissenting vote was Cathy Sheffield’s, who still hoped to find her son’s body in the cave.

  A specialist was called upon to assess methods for closing the entrances, and bids were solicited from contractors. After much wrangling over the amount of funds to be allocated, a contractor from Saugerties was at last selected, and the concrete poured toward the middle of November, several days before the predicted first snow of the season.

  Gunther refused to attend the burial of his cave entrance beneath several tons of concrete. He’d had mixed feelings about the procedure from the start, on the one hand aware that an open cave entrance might invite curious but careless people, on the other grieving over the loss of the most beautiful cave he’d ever seen. Except for June, the other kids did not share his reservations, and the sealing of the entrances was pushed by a contingent of parents, who month after month harangued the Town Board about its failure to act.

  As the ensuing months rolled by, snow buried the upstate New York farmland, and Gunther turned his attention to school and a social life that was far more active than any he’d previously imagined. As far as he knew, just as he and his friends returned to the life they’d known before, so did the Tardies revert to their former lives underground.

  Winter turned to spring, and children shed winter boots and sweaters. Coats lurked on hooks in lockers, not to be touched again until the final snowstorm of the season swept out of the North Country or parents asked where the coats had disappeared.

  Kelila had been trying to get Gunther’s attention all day at school, but something in her manner compelled him to avoid her. Whatever she was selling, he did not want to buy it.

  When he found her waiting at his doorstep on his arrival home that evening, he realized he could no longer avoid her. He shivered—not just from the chill of the evening.

  “Gunther, you’ve got to listen to me. I don’t know who else to turn to.” She wrung her hands, then plowed them through her hair, already wild as a horse’s mane.

  Not me, Gunther thought. Why me? “What is it, Kelila?”

  “I hear something, Gunther. Every night, when it’s quiet.”

  Gunther allowed himself a sigh of relief. The boards of his old house creaked, the oil furnace in the cellar popped and boomed. His parents talked long into the night, his mom said weird things that he was glad he did not have to hear in greater detail. “So do I,” he said. “There are always sounds.”

  She smiled. “Oh, I’m so glad. I thought I was the only one who heard them. Have you told anyone?”

  Once again, Gunther felt on guard. “About what?”

  “About the sounds—you know, under the ground.”

  Gunther sucked in his gut to be sure he would not pee in his pants. “Under the ground?”

  She looked
puzzled. “I thought you said you heard them, too.”

  “I hear sounds. There’re always sounds. That’s normal.”

  “You think so?”

  This conversation was exhibiting the signs of spiraling down into the morass of confusion and misunderstanding that ended so many conversations with Kelila. “Kelila, why don’t we start over again? I think I missed something.”

  She looked exasperated as she ran her fingers through her hair again. “Gunther! We’re talking about the sounds. The sounds you hear at night.”

  “Right. The old boards cracking, the furnace, the water in the pipes …”

  “No, no, no. Who cares about them? We grew up with them. I’m talking about the sounds under the ground—you know, the Tardies.”

  Months had passed since Gunther had heard that word spoken aloud. He slumped back against the clapboards. “Kelila, no. Don’t start that again.”

  Once again she wrung her hands. “Gunth, I don’t want them any more than you do. But like my mom says, we’ve got to face things the way they are, not pretend that things are the way we want them to be.”

  “They can’t get out. They’re cemented inside.”

  “We can’t get in. They can get out.”

  Gunther paused, hardly able to breathe. “How do you know?”

  “Face it, Gunth. They’re coming. You know it as well as I do. This time we’re not going to be in their world. They are going to be in ours.”

  GLOSSARY

  ADAPTATIONS: Changes in a living creature’s body that have evolved over many thousands of years to enable it to live better in its environment.