Epilogue #2
But no one answered. For a long time, they had been waiting. For two hundred years, they had been waiting. They were not interested in waiting anymore.
—
The corridor narrowed. Then it turned left, then right, descended some steps that had clearly been cut into the stone, sloped slightly downward, then went to the right, then up, then wound its way around a boulder before it reached a drop-off, over which passed, one by one, the members of the Jeremiah Wylkes Society, the spouse of one member, and that member’s son and daughter.
The ceiling sloped down until they had to crawl, but they crawled; then it opened, and they stood.
They went to the right, and to the left, and down, and up, then left again, and right, and then they stopped, in a gray low-ceilinged chamber that didn’t seem to have an opening.
For a few minutes, the crew wandered around, kicking stones and prodding the soil, until at last they found a passage, blocked by gravel washed into the chamber.
But they hadn’t brought a shovel, and after futilely scraping at it with their hands, they decided reluctantly to go back, and return with proper digging implements.
Then Miles had an inspiration. Taking a piece of kibble from his pocket, he pushed it deep inside the gravel with Hugh’s alpenstock.
Giuseppe looked at him.
“Yes, it’s okay,” said Miles, who had said “No!” so many times before. “Now, dig.”
—
Reader, how I want to tell you that Cave A-76 turned out to be the long-fabled entrance to the underworld, that this ragtag group of true believers and partial believers and on-the-balance doubters had finally discovered the fabled staircase that led down into the forgotten world beneath.
How wonderful, in all senses of the word, it would have been to describe that descent as Jeremiah Wylkes described it, down golden channels to the golden door that opened upon the enchanted cities of a hollow Earth!
How I wish that I could show the meeting of these men and women with their long-lost brethren, who likely would have grown up hearing legends of the Outer World!
What satisfactions awaited all the Klebian maidens, with men like Hugh and Clem!
What new age of peace and prosperity might be ushered in by the meetings of these civilizations, and, if not peace and prosperity, tourism.
But no. No cities. No maidens. Not yet.
There was another chamber, however, and when Giuseppe had cleared enough silt for the human party to follow him, they passed into a vaulted space lit faintly by an opening at the far end, where a pulsing light played dimly against the ceiling—silver, sapphire, and ruby red.
—
Which brings us to the brother of Puck 4, sitting next to his father in the auditorium.
Wesley had been finishing up his story on the Spring Chicken Social at the Greensbury Center for Adult Living, muttering to himself about the indignities of junior-high-school journalism, when he heard Olive and Harper arguing, then a door slam, then footsteps heading down the stairs.
Because of this, he would feel partially to blame for Olive’s disappearance.
Had he stopped writing for just a minute, he might have slowed her down enough to get her to reconsider her stormy flight into the woods.
Not to say he was as guilty as his father, who had left them alone, or his mother, who wasn’t there at all.
But he took his responsibilities seriously.
He had, therefore, thrown himself into the search with both penance and love.
When his father had gone off into the woods, and his mother headed up the road to call on neighbors, he’d been told to stick close. They could only have one child missing.
So he’d walked up and down the road. If the growing fear he felt was not as sharp as his parents’ fear, it was perhaps because most of his examples of missing children involved wormholes or portals, and even if a child was kidnapped by intergalactic traders, they usually escaped.
He was more frightened by the sight of his parents, who seemed so utterly beside themselves, so uncertain, as he had never seen before.
As the night progressed, new adults began to come into his life: the policemen with their beacons catching on the falling snow; the Search and Rescue volunteers; the odd members of some club he hadn’t known his father was a part of, with the giant man with the crazy truck who thought he was the legendary Snowflake Bentley; and Olive’s teacher; and the band director; and his classmate Jackson’s mom, Candace, around whom swirled great tides of adolescent fascination.
For three hours, he’d been silent witness to adult futility, to bombast and hubris, to a frantic desperation that transformed his mother from the paragon of poise into someone unrecognizable, inconsolable, and his father into someone much smaller than he had ever been before.
He watched the ebb and flow of hope, and ebb and ebb, and saw how grim the grown-ups, coming and going, grew as the night progressed.
He saw this in the drawn faces of the searchers when they came to warm up in the kitchen, and in the faces of his parents, from whom he asked no reassurance, and who gave none.
Wesley was also at the house when the man who thought he was Snowflake Bentley noticed that Giuseppe was covered with clay, and so he joined the group that set off behind the dog.
And he was with his parents when they found her, saw his mother collapse when Olive answered them, crumpling as she began to sob into his father.
He was with them, and then he wasn’t, because, being the smallest member of the party, he was the first inside.
When he stepped into the chamber, and called to Olive, he had two thoughts.
The first was how very happy he was to see her.
The second was that this was a far better story than the Spring Chicken Social.
Even his exposé of the dark forces behind the Pineridge Farm could wait (though he was coming for them).
This was his break. And as the group convened behind him, and his parents ran to Olive, and Olive to his parents, and the flashlight beams rose up the walls and to the sloping corridor, he felt the sentences furl out before him.
Then they were off, and by the time the little party reached the mound of gravel that blocked their passage, he could fill an entire issue of The Greensbury Yodeler.
It was also he who first recognized that their long and sinuous path, down and down and left and right and up and left and down and right and up and left, etc.
etc., had in fact led them back to the room where they had started, and that the flickering lights at the distant opening were not the beacon of a long-lost city, but the police cars that had come to rescue his sister.
But he waited to tell the grown-ups this, to let them, at least for one more minute, bask in the possibilities.
—
So, once again, a supernatural phenomenon had a naturalistic explanation.
And though a few of those present (Kate) said that there was a nice moral to the story of a path that led back to where it had started, and that perhaps our world and our families are magical enough, for once this lauded genius was a touch dishonest. For, as they traveled onward through the caves, there were moments when she couldn’t help but dream of lakes with liquid fire, hills torn and transported by subterranean winds, and legions of entranced angelic forms thick as autumnal leaves.
Moments when she thought: What if the book she’d dedicated her life to was not an invention but a dispatch, from a staircase spiraling down beneath old Milton’s house?
Her disappointment, however, was nothing compared with that of the stalwart members of the Jeremiah Wylkes Society, who had come so close.
So close! And if some tried to find consolation in the fact that their reason for being there that evening was to find the lost daughter of their new and much-loved member, and that in this they had been magnificently successful, the truth was that even those who doubted the extravagances of the legend still closed their eyes so that the splendors of the glorious city might linger just a little longer.
Hugh was actually crying, and Miles worried that Andrei was going to have some kind of mental breakdown and blame Miles, because Miles’s daughter’s disappearance was forcing Andrei to go through an emotional roller-coaster of hope and disappointment so familiar from his years in the laboratory.
But if he did, it was a very fleeting mental breakdown; indeed, one by one, the members came to the same realization, articulated then and there by Hugh as he wiped his tears away: that an unenchanted discovery does not in any way preclude another, enchanted one.
If anything, the presence of such a cave emphasized the likelihood of similar passages everywhere.
Yes, said Hugh: When one stopped to think about it, it was as if they’d discovered the cities of the Inner World.
In fact, as they were walking, he’d seen hatch marks that were likely, maybe even definitely, by human hands, and that, taken together, the cave, the footprints, the wall markings, suggested they were very close.
“I’m sorry, there were footprints?” asked Wesley.
Anyway, said Hugh, what it meant was that they should focus their search on the to-be-known-from-this-day-forward Rumphius sub-sector, whose geology and hydrology now seemed so promising.
And so, grumbled Snowflake Bentley, Rumor and Unreason found themselves immune yet once again to Evidence, and he went back to his catalogues, and filed away another card.
—