Chapter One #3
Above, the sky had cleared, the moon was out, the snow upon the trees shone brightly.
Well, said Bentley, after some time. The truth was: Some of it.
Not none of it, and not all of it. But this was true of all the members, really.
Most, if he could see inside their hearts and minds, believed a man had gone inside a cave and seen something extraordinary.
Believed that this man had told another man, who’d written it down, who’d left it on the doorstep of another man, who’d published it.
That seemed to him quite reasonable. That did not controvert his previously held understandings of nature, of geology, or his sense that people have private worlds and the need to share these private worlds with others.
It also seemed reasonable to believe that, in addition to the world manifestly before us, there existed something one might call a Mystery, at times yielding its secrets, at times holding them more closely.
When one recognized this, one realized that all one was really questioning was the particulars.
“And the particulars?” asked Miles.
“I believe a man found something in a cavern, am agnostic on the possible existence of more extensive geologic phenomena, doubtful but open to the possibility of the remnants of some ancient civilization, very doubtful as to its architectural achievements, very, very doubtful about the persistence of that civilization and the pterodactyls, and absolutely certain that Princess Gabalor was the invention of an old man who deeply yearned for female contact.”
By then, they’d reached Farm Road, and turned up Miles’s driveway.
This was not to say his was a majority position, said Bentley; there were those who believed every word as if it were Scripture, and those, it seemed, who wanted an excuse to go spelunking.
Hugh, that fascinating smorgasbord of empiricism and credulity, believed everything Wylkes wrote.
Also, he enjoyed the power, which fortified the smorgasbord.
Andrei was going through some kind of Oedipal reaction against the academic-scientific-industrial complex that had betrayed him.
Mike Randolph was banking on some chthonic action with the Princess’s ladies-in-waiting, a gamble made more urgent by the fact that he had ruined his real-life marriage because of his Hollow Earth obsession.
Margie was lonely, and had cycled through a half-dozen other religions before finding solace in the Colloquies.
Red Lidenbrock had a head injury. Earl, in another time and place, would have been a professional historian.
Kayleigh saw the Colloquies as a natural extension of a political worldview that included Southern Vermont secessionism, anticorporate environmentalism, postapocalyptic survivalism, and a long-standing family beef with Massachusetts.
Curt Hopkins had read too many fantasy magazines as a child.
Dolly Prendergast thought there was treasure.
Clem was there either for the buffet or to try to go to bed with Candy.
A couple of the other guys were also trying to go to bed with Candy.
Bentley parked. But Miles had another question. “And the postcard, and the secrecy?”
“Ah,” said Bentley. He was glad Miles had asked.
There was a time when they’d held public events, but then the people at the college started nosing around: anthropologists interested in conspiracy theorists and sociologists studying pseudoscientific organizations, and then a wave of literature professors who treated them like they were a book club, and kept saying the whole thing was a metaphor.
And then a copper-mining company got wind of some of their surveys, and a group of Australians came poking about, and later a guy from an Italian marble conglomerate.
The last thing they wanted was for Greensbury Mountain to end up as countertop.
Miles nodded. He didn’t know whether to feel insulted or complimented that Snowflake didn’t consider him an academic. Then, after a moment, he said, “Not to tattle, but Hugh was talking pretty freely at the Land Conservancy.”
Bentley waved his hand. “Oh, we know. But you’ve got the general vibe on Hugh; the more he talks, the more people think we’re nuts.”
—
The house was dark as Miles bid goodbye to Bentley and hobbled painfully up the walkway, his knee now hurting after so many hours of sitting.
Inside, his family was sleeping. He moved quietly, not wishing to explain the car, the flats, the meeting, not merely because it meant admitting he had lied about Metropolis, but because it risked profaning something—something that, as he tiptoed through the house, seemed a kind of magic.
How had he gone through life, forty-five years, scurrying about, above, and never thought of it?
Not Gabalor and not the Troncon armies—that part was ridiculous.
As it was to think that beneath his feet were silver forests, and towers rising to the clouds, and thousands of warriors gathered by the fluttering pennants of their battalions!
The herds of caribou and elk, the stalking lions?
And pterodactyls circling, and sea beasts in the seas?
Pink sunsets, rivers of sand? Ha! But to have never questioned the simple illusion of solidity!
To have no sense of what lay beneath him: the caves, the pith, the tumble.
He looked down at the floor.
And imagined, far below, within his earthy barracks, another person looking up.
Giuseppe rose from his bed and ambled over.
And you? thought Miles. Was that what you’ve been telling us?
How lovely would it be if that were true! His pooch another Wylkesian, digging toward his long-lost double, itself now digging upward. Was that why he had turned the yard into the Western Front? Maddened by the Inner World, and not the stirrings of the rat?
How mundane was his imagination! To have seen the chest and not the treasure. He of the Humbaba, of Burowak, of Okiroshi. Terrestrial-bound. Mundane, the thought. That was the word: of earth.
—
In the morning, the mundane awaited.
Wednesdays, Kate had Masters Swimming at the college pool, and when Miles awoke, she had long been swept up by Miranda—a good thing, because she didn’t notice that the garage was empty.
Meanwhile, Miles was catapulted into panic.
Wrenched from an erotic dream featuring Candy’s painting of Princess Gabalor (Reader, he was not the only one), he realized suddenly that he had no way to get Olive to school.
They had an hour. It was a seven-mile walk.
But luck was on his side. Not only did the dispatcher at Area Taxi answer, but she said a car could be there in thirty minutes.
Yes, she promised. The driver was her husband, she’d personally guarantee it.
And then the secretary at Green Mountain Towing and Repair said that they could send a car up to the Mountain Catch.
Twenty-nine minutes of parental jujitsu followed: Snack for Wesley, snack for Olive, snow boots discovered beneath the couch and behind the cabinet, stashed by dog or thrown by child.
Milk mustaches wiped clean, bed-heads largely tamed, arguments over whether or not to wear a jacket averted with a reminder of the useful but apocryphal story of the area boy who had died the prior winter from hypothermia.
And Wesley caught the bus, and the cab came for Miles and Olive, and if he didn’t have a chance to walk Giuseppe, the dog just watched him lazily from where he stretched out on the heating vent.
He’d be back by noon, and what kind of damage could Giuseppe really do?
Let’s rephrase that: What kind of damage could Giuseppe do that Giuseppe had not already done?
—
Since arriving in Greensbury, Miles had observed a certain phenomenon of small-town life: once you met a person, you met them everywhere.
Had he, for example, in California, attended the meeting of a secretive Hollow Earth group, he would have been very surprised to find, the following morning, that his cabdriver turned out to be the very man who had presented at the meeting.
But he had lived in Greensbury long enough that such things no longer startled him, and so felt merely a familiar frisson, when the battered sedan with rusted wheel wells pulled up honking in his driveway, to step outside and see Earl in the driver’s seat.
Olive jumped in behind him, clearly thrilled by the novelty of the taxi.
Briefly, Miles worried that Earl would say something about the meeting to Olive, and Olive would tell Kate, but Olive’s mind was already too abuzz with the complex web of allegiances and betrayals that awaited her at school to care what the old man was talking about when he sang the praises of “the lady artist.”
Outside, fresh swaths of white covered the fields and meadows, lines of hoarfrost banded the mountains, and here, and there, clumps of snow sprung free of the bowed branches as the world woke up.
They sped over rivers, and unfathomed caves, the vault beneath, the plunge, the firmament.
They made good time.
At school, Olive leapt from the taxi without looking back, and they were just pulling into Green Mountain Towing and Repair when Miles’s phone buzzed with a message from Kate, reminding him, though she was sure he didn’t need reminding, that this morning was the first day of the school play rehearsal, to which he’d been conscripted as a volunteer.
“Oh, no,” said Miles.
“Forgot something?” asked Earl.
Miles explained the problem.
But it wasn’t a problem at all. Earl could get Miles’s car for him.
“Oh, I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not asking. I’m telling. The school play’s God’s work.”
“But—”
“Son,” said Earl. “You’re family. It’s good as done.”