Chapter One
One
Miles Krzelewski, Hapless Scholar, Wounded Skier, White Liar, Courageous Taker of Old Country Roads, sat in the back row of the former banquet hall of the now defunct Mountain Catch restaurant, and listened to the dwindling applause as the room lights came on.
It was ten o’clock. Down at the college, the postfilm discussion of Metropolis would be winding down, but such considerations were beside the point, even if Miles’s car had had four working tires.
What he had listened to for the past three hours was, in a word, extraordinary.
Thus they had arrived, and thus had the snow hidden evidence of their arrival.
Miles, entering at 7:45, had not missed much.
The evening had begun with a potluck. Andrei brought chili, Kayleigh brought venison casserole, Clem brought along his famous shish kebab, the “Exterminator’s Special.
” Most had heard this joke before, and only the uninitiated were disgusted, it was just that delicious.
Then Hugh had called them to their seats, the lights came down, and the PowerPoint started.
He was on his second slide when Miles knocked on the door.
The Southern Vermont Chapter of the Jeremiah Wylkes Society, by charter, was granted its own authority in determining the structure and content of its meetings, but in truth hewed closely to that suggested by the National Jeremiah Wylkes Society: Potluck, Reports from Subcommittees, Original Research, and Discussion.
Hugh, as chapter president, was tasked with guiding the proceedings, which were to end strictly at ten so that members—schoolteachers, exterminators, and orchardists among them—could get to bed on time.
He also gave the Updates (this was the PowerPoint), which consisted mostly of news from other Jeremiah Wylkes chapters, some of it procedural (the Upper Pioneer Valley Chapter splitting from the Lower Pioneer Valley Chapter, etc.), but most of which concerned progress in the search for tunnels.
Thus, snow melting from his shoes, was Miles greeted by a cascade of maps and images, aerial photos, cave and waterway schematics, newly discovered mining shafts, and reports from urban Wylkes chapters on the progress, ever complicated, of wrestling permission to explore the parks and sewers of Springfield, Hartford, Albany, Burlington.
For what was city today had not been city in 1804.
This was the first fact that Miles learned that evening: that the rumored Greensbury portal was but one of seven portals Wylkes had found across New England, roughly distributed along a ring that circled clockwise from Vermont, through Deerfield, Massachusetts, and into northern Connecticut, before turning north again.
Greensbury, however, was special: the site of Wylkes’s revelation, and his first descent.
The Updates had lasted close to an hour.
To Miles’s surprise, Hugh, whom he had once considered an ignorant blowhard, was a meticulous and cautious student of Wylkesiana, a staunch empiricist, even a skeptic well aware of the dangers in following false prophets, mobilizing what appeared to be a vast amount of knowledge to dismiss many of the recent claims as specious, citing from not only geology and topography, but over one hundred years of scholarship and the Colloquies themselves.
When it had all started, Miles was less interested in this cave or that outcropping than he was in the spectacle.
Hugh transformed! Land trust director turns from skepticism to belief!
Biochemist embraces conspiracy theory refuting known facts about geology!
Dismantler of flimflam falls for flimflam!
But as Hugh concluded, and “Research” began, Miles began to feel that what he was witnessing was more complex than he had first made out.
—
There were three Research Presentations that night: “Whither Polk?,” “Underground Water in Catamount Hollow—What Does Dowsing Tell Us?,” and “Picturing Gabalor.”
The first to speak was an older man whom Miles had never seen before, who introduced himself as Earl Blossfeldt.
As most of them knew, said Earl, he had long been researching the question of Ambrose Polk, and was there to present an update on his researches.
He could never figure out the PowerPoint, and apologized that he did not have a slide presentation, but, nonetheless, he hoped they would enjoy his talk.
To this the group responded with warm approbation, and one or two calls of encouragement, such as “Go, Earl!” and “We love you, Earl!”
Kayleigh Swan gave a whoop.
Earl went on. Given, he said, that there were several newer members, who perhaps did not know much or anything about Ambrose Polk and his relationship to the Colloquies, it seemed a good moment to review the history.
He looked to Hugh, who nodded his approval.
Earl went on. The 461 pages of the Colloquies, he said, had not simply appeared out of thin air, but had been left, if one is to believe the so-called Standard Version, on the steps of the Southern Vermont Historical Museum, in the good year 1897, by an unknown person.
Attached was a letter, explaining that the writer, “X,” had made the acquaintance of Jeremiah Wylkes in the summer of 1874, while working as a forester in the Southern Greens.
This X explained that he had long heard rumors of a recluse living in the hills above Green Pond, but had encountered neither man nor cabin until that June, when, caught in a summer downpour, he’d sought shelter beneath an overhang.
Hesitant to linger by a cave in bear country, X was getting ready to leave when his eye was drawn to movement in the bush, and there appeared a “startling apparition,” a “pint-sized” fellow with long, straggly hair and wild beard, who walked up to the entrance to the cave, passed X as if he were not there, and disappeared inside.
Utterly perplexed, by both the apparition and its seeming indifference to his presence, X waited for some time before summoning the courage to follow.
He had no torch, but found his way along a narrow passage, which twisted this way and that before opening into a chamber, lit by beams of light that filtered down through openings above.
There crouched the strange man before a fire, tending a kettle, which he proceeded to decant into a pair of tin cups, as if X had been expected.
This, said Earl, was Jeremiah Wylkes, by then 104 years old and blind as a bat, and this was the fateful meeting that had started everything.
Over the course of the next one hundred days, Wylkes dictated the full content of the Colloquies to the forester, from his discovery of the entrance, in 1804, until that very meeting.
Then he rose, bowed, and disappeared forever down a path into his beloved underworld.
He asked only that X wait one year before following, so that they would never meet.
X obeyed. Followed. And, for the next twenty-three years, devoted himself to continuing Wylkes’s exploration of the Inner World, the entrance to which—one of the entrances to which—sat at the back of the very cave in which he had recorded the Colloquies.
He was, therefore, able to confirm nearly all of Wylkes’s observations—he had seen the Crystal Palace, the herds of mammoths, the pterodactyls, the catamount and caribou and giant elk.
And if he had not met the beautiful Princess Gabalor, who was away on a diplomatic voyage on the Inner Sea, he had nevertheless met many of the personages described by his mentor, observed the struggles between the virtuous Klebs and the evil Troncons, even joined a battle or two, and so on.
Long had he resisted sharing these discoveries, fearing, as Wylkes did, the possibility of plunder.
Age, however, had made him reconsider, and he decided, as his own mortal passage neared its end, and he prepared to make his final trip down into the hollow, to entrust the Colloquies to the one man of science he believed would not treat his discovery with ridicule: the director of the Southern Vermont Historical Museum, the good Professor Ambrose Polk.
Only the location of the entrances he left secret.
It would not do to have the world rush in, but he was certain that, with diligence and faith, those of “good heart” would find their way.
Earl paused to take a sip of water, and Miles looked around the room. He had assumed that this extended bit of background was for his benefit, and feared the others might be bored, but, to his surprise, everyone seemed delighted to rehearse the story.
Earl went on. Anyway, this was all familiar history; he was there to report on his ongoing work on Polk himself.
For Polk’s account was the only account they had, X’s copy of the Colloquies having vanished in the 1927 floods.
Polk, he said, as everybody knew, was quite a character—the subject, in fact, of two conventional biographies, one published in the 1930s by a historian at the college, and one, far more recent, by an Englishwoman interested in the late-nineteenth-century occult.
In it, she had focused almost entirely on Polk’s relationship to other fin-de-siècle “men of science” who sought to study, “scientifically,” speculative phenomena, spiritualism, magic, miracles, and so forth.
Only briefly did she touch on his publication, in 1899, of Wylkes’s Colloquies, a text she called “bizarre” even for Polk’s already low threshold, reviving the old charge that not only were the Colloquies a hoax, but one perpetuated by Polk himself.
“Booooo!” shouted Kayleigh Swan.