Chapter Four #2
The Hoosac Tunnel had been a death trap, and Isaiah, hiring from the valley, was keen to keep his workers safe.
For an extraordinary fourteen months, they proceeded without incident; it was said that it was safer inside than out.
The primary risk was a collapsing tunnel, and to understand what happened next, said Earl, one had to understand the geology of the solutional caves of the Southern Greens, a topic of some complexity, about which he had collected many books and journal articles, and not a few presentations by Jeremiah Wylkes Society members, and he referred Miles to “Metamorphosed Carbonate of the Upper Cambrian and Lower Ordovician: A Primer in Chemistry,” by Gerald Hurd, the former tenth-grade science teacher; “Rocks and Drills: Why Should We Care?,” by Earl himself; and “The Marble Labyrinth: A Poem,” by Margie, which Candy had illustrated.
Basically, he said, the land beneath them had once been a shallow ocean, where the skeletons of sea creatures fused with compounds in the water to form limestone; the limestone was melted to marble, great deposits of it, miles thick, but twisted by the movement of the earth.
The marble dissolved easily; that was why it was so hard to read the gravestones in the old Greensbury cemetery.
The solutional caves were formed when water found its way into a crack and slowly opened up a path.
The earth was laced with corridors, open in places, but in others filled by sediment, and loose.
It was such illusory earth that collapsed one afternoon beneath the tunnel, casting the men into a massive cavern, and a subterranean lake.
Perhaps, said Earl, Miles could see where this was going.
“I can see a couple of places this is going,” said Miles.
Somehow, the miners had made their way out and back to the entrance.
Any other man would have seen the accident as a setback, and a devastating one.
Isaiah considered changing course, but this meant backtracking, and they were running out of money.
His engineer proposed to build a bridge over the cavern, but a bridge of such dimensions had never been attempted underground, and it was possible the route might be compromised for miles.
For by then, further forays had revealed that the cavern system was far more extensive than they’d first perceived, descending slowly along an underground river into a series of domed rooms, each one bigger than the last, of extraordinary marble colors, ending in an amphitheater so vast that they could not perceive its height.
“No,” said Miles.
“Yes,” said Earl.
“Don’t tell me they found old Jeremiah,” Miles said.
Well, no, said Earl. Alas. But what they found was hardly less astounding: on a far wall, beside another corridor, engraved into the marble…
And Earl beckoned Miles to a cabinet by the worktable, from which he withdrew an old photo album, full of more photos of men and trees, drawings of drills and trains, blueprints, multicolored maps, stopping at last at a piece of paper torn from an 1876 newspaper and rubbed with some kind of charcoal, like a child’s art project, to show
1805
J. WYLKES.
“Earl,” said Hugh, and Miles turned to see that, in this time, the rest of the Society had gathered in their seats.
—
The meeting ended late that night. The Subcommittee of Geology (Andrei, Earl, and Morwenna Halverstal, the dog walker) made a report on a cluster of strange orange concretions that had been found at a spring just north of the Claymore complex, similar to compounds found in the Mohorovi?i? discontinuity, the boundary between the crust and mantle.
The Subcommittee of Speleology (Hugh and Andrei and Tom Foss of Foss’s Tree Service) reported their progress with their winter survey.
Kayleigh reported on photos she had turned up on Google Earth that showed indisputable signs of drilling activity in the Arctic at the Kola Superdeep Borehole.
And Candy brought another pair of paintings, one of Gabalor in nothing but the sheerest shawl, and another au naturel, riding a pterodactyl, which Hugh reminded them had never happened, but which was of such high quality that many of the members took photos.
Miles should have been in heaven. However nonsensical, illogical, indeed structurally impossible a hollow Earth was, he could not escape the sense that he was particularly suited for the Mystery that now presented itself.
If anyone was good at going down—well, he really hated to use this metaphor again, but it was just so perfectly descriptive—a rabbit hole, this man was him.
And here were a dozen other people going down the same hole, physically and metaphorically, which actually were many branching holes, and, as he looked up at the shelves of Earl’s library, the most pressing choice was whether to choose logging history or the geology of Vermont caverns.
But as the night went on, he’d felt a gnawing guilt, very terrestrial, that he’d now lied twice to Kate.
He was not one to hide; if anything, oversharing was a problem.
So he resolved there, listening to Morwenna and Kayleigh debate the photographs of Kola, supposedly abandoned after the fall of the Soviet Union but now bearing fresh scars in the permafrost, that he would tell Kate that night about the Wylkesians.
It was silly to hide it any longer. She did not need to believe the promises of waiting maidens to find some thrill in Earl’s stories of his great-grandfather, on the river, inside the earth.
But it was more than this, thought Miles.
For to tell her what he had been doing meant, by implication, also telling her what he had not been doing.
Now six months into their country idyll, he was no closer to finishing his dissertation than the day they got there.
She suspected, surely, and yet she didn’t know the full extent.
Not a page, not a single usable page, had been written on the Russian folktale.
Perhaps, he thought, it was time for them to have a larger conversation.
He wasn’t ready to give up, not yet, but he could feel this decision growing closer.
Kate would understand. They would just need to drag it out into the open.
Okay, he could hear her saying. But what will you replace it with? Scything? Skiing? Jeremiah Wylkes?
And behind these words, the question she had never asked, or perhaps was always asking: What if I fall sick again? If the drug’s magic doesn’t last forever?
The answer he couldn’t imagine.
If. When. What will you do, what will we do, then?
—
He had agreed to make it home by nine for the children’s bedtime, Kate’s departmental reception for some famous visiting poet taking precedence over his supposed “beer” with Andrei.
And so, after the cookie break, he said goodbye to his friends and drove home, down Main Street, and—just by chance, because it was the natural route—Nausica?’s apartment.
And if he slowed a little, looking for her in the window, before continuing onward?
So what if Jeremiah Wylkes was not the only person he was hiding from his wife?
Technically, Kate had never asked him again about his co-director, and lately he’d seen so little of his wife that there never really seemed to be a good moment to bring up Nausica?, or their collegial drink.
And what was he to say? That Nausica? had told him she’d taken the job in Greensbury after a bad breakup with her long-term boyfriend?
Or that her mother told her that she fell for people a little too quickly, just like her grandpa Morris?
Or that she wondered how the people in Greensbury survived the winter bundled so, without the warmth of human touch?
And if Nausica? seemed to have a little crush on him?
Well, he was mature enough to recognize the difference in age, in life experiences.
And if he’d had a beer, it was only because it seemed puritanical not to, since Nausica? had two.
Their meeting spot was hardly secretive—it didn’t get more public than the Greensbury Arms. Certainly, it was safer than the quiet, private drama room, with its walls festooned with costume fantasy, its sunken couch.
All this he’d tell his wife. He, scytheman, storyteller, parent coach emeritus, object of a younger woman’s fancy. And thus, with Kate’s disappointment softened, a little, they’d put their heads together about his life.
When he got home, Wesley was still awake, working on an article about the JV wrestling team.
Olive was reading. The evening, they said, had been completely uneventful.
If the dishes were still on the table, and the kitchen door left open, and the half-eaten microwavable burritos within striking distance of an animal who loved to cruise the counter, there was no damage, no destruction, and the dog was curled in utter bliss in Olive’s lap.