In the Belly of the Earth Page 8

  Fred went motionless, tried to slow his breathing. A minute later he was able to calm down enough to think clearly. Right then, to his relief, the moaning stopped. All went quiet in the pit. When he garnered enough courage, he inched slowly forward to resume his examination.

  A thin shred of fabric clung to some of the bones, rough and brittle. Almost like burlap. There were no shoes to be found. No jacket. No flashlight. He found a cluster of tightly wound twigs nearby and a satchel of some kind made of rawhide. It crumbled when he tried to open it. There was a sliver of stone inside with a sharpened edge, hewn to a point. Fred held the objects in his hands a moment as he realized what this was, who this was.

  Was it a caveman? No. The bones would not have lasted so long in this condition. It must be a Native American. Centuries old. Had come down into the cave perhaps to explore, gotten lost, and died somehow.

  Fred felt about for signs of injury and discovered a deep fracture on the back of its skull. The man had fallen just as he had fallen; but struck the back of his head on stone hard enough to kill him. He sat there beside the skeleton for some time without moving, imagined the day centuries ago when the man came down into the cave, holding up a torch of gathered twigs. How had he gotten down so deep? Had they come the same way? And how had he fallen? Had his torch gone out just as the flashlight had?

  The boy raised his hand and placed it gently on the fleshless forehead.

  “Why did you come down here?” he asked, expecting no answer.

  For a long and somber while, Fred talked to the skull. He told it the story of his own adventure. And how he had managed to survive for so long. He found that as he talked, his heart became lighter in a way, as if the bones of that long-dead man, trapped like him, were listening sympathetically.

  He spoke for a long time about Craig. What had happened back at camp, and about being pushed. His thoughts had not gone to the bully for days. Hadn’t had time or space to. But now, as he pondered him, somehow, things were different. He no longer felt rage.

  He felt pity.

  What could drive someone to kill? What lies were twisted inside him? Fred didn’t know. Couldn’t know. But he did know what Craig had done up in the tunnel was the result of darkness in his own heart, a shadowed prison wrought from a thousand different wounds.

  In a stab of memory he thought about what he had done. Digging up the underwear and bringing it into camp with no goal other than to humiliate. Fred closed his eyes, shook his head. The shame of such an act settled upon him like a cold ooze over his skin. It was a horrible thing to do. No matter what had happened before or after. And Fred had paid dearly, though the full price was still yet to be seen. If he’d managed to turn the other cheek, he would be home now, sleeping in his own warm, dry bed, talking with his parents, or reading his lovely arsenal of books. How strange that such a singular act can change everything, for good or ill. Granted, Craig’s revenge was infinitely worse, but Fred was guilty as well. There seemed only one choice, one way forward, even if he never saw the light of day again.

  He had no choice but to forgive. No choice but to let go. Even if he died in the cave and joined the bones with his own. He would not let his final days be poisoned with rage. He’d come too far for that.

  A blast of air struck his face, followed by the loudest moan of all. He blinked in the dark as realization hit him. The moaning had not come from a creature at all, but from air currents whistling through the cave! Something about the stone funnel he was in caused the wind to moan as it passed through it. He grinned at his own ignorance, and then breathed in through his nose and smelled pine trees and honeysuckle. The air moving over him was warm!

  “I’m close…” he said, voice rising. “I’m closer than ever.”

  Fred rose to his knees and leaned over the bones of the lost explorer. “I will find a way out...I will. And I will survive for the both of us.”

  He groped for the crumbling satchel, took the stone knife, and stepped over the bones to face whatever lay beyond.

  17

  The air pressed hard against him as he moved. He leaned into the current and took one careful step at a time. Aside from a series of gentle dips and rises, the tunnel remained steady and smooth. He held his good hand out in front of him like a mummy, sweeping it slowly from side to side to keep from running into some errant formation. When the air slowed and went still, he paused to listen for any new sounds. There was nothing of note. No sounds at least. But then, lingering in the stillness, he smelled something strange. Not the fresh outside smell borne on the wind, but something acrid. Like dirt, but more foul.

  He started forward again, had just raised his hands as before, when he took a step into nothing, falling so suddenly there was no time to scream. One second, two seconds, three, rolling end over end in the dark. He squinted his eyes shut and hoped that death would come quickly. Air rushed up to meet him like a cushion and he felt he’d fallen forever when his body met the ground. A giant sledgehammer slammed up into his frame and his mind snapped out like an extinguished light.

  When his eyes fluttered open some time later, he groaned at the fresh, acute pain in his arm. The fall had probably worsened the fracture. But how was he even alive? He’d fallen so far. When he felt beneath him his fingers dug into moistened dirt, or what felt like dirt. He raised his right hand to his nose and sniffed. Pungent, sulfuric, septic. His stomach turned in his belly. He swallowed. Fought back a gag. There was no mistaking what it was.

  Bat guano.

  Droppings, feces, dung.

  And where such a pile existed, hundreds, thousands of bats were sure to exist as well, hanging from the ceiling above. He looked up pointlessly and listened. There was a faint, though constant cacophony of squeaks, a rustling of leathery wings, and a scraping of claws clinging to stone. Every second, something fell from above and landed on the pile where Fred sat wide-eyed with disgust, trapped in a rain shower of bat excrement.

  He bent over in attempt to shield his head. A thousand thoughts of germs and disease and flesh-eating bacteria swirled within his mind. That single bat he had avoided now seemed like a joke, a trifle he would easily trade for what was happening to him now. Now there were countless hanging above him, and he was sinking into their latrine.

  But their latrine had saved his life.

  As soon as he mustered the strength, he pushed with his single functioning arm and slid down the guano pile on his bottom. It was a tall pile, several dozen feet at least from crest to base. When he reached hard, level stone he struggled to his feet and moved forward, much slower than before to keep from falling again. A second lifesaving pile of bat dung was highly unlikely. He would have to be more careful.

  It wasn’t long before his left arm began to swell. He could feel jagged bone cutting into muscle as he moved, though he tried hard to keep it stationary. If the injury was left untreated for much longer, things would not fare well for him, he knew.

  The floor of the chamber angled down steadily, but not too steep for him to descend with ease. A new gust of air swept forward, this time colder and moist. He thought he could hear the distant roar of water rushing over stone. Was it a waterfall? An underground stream? Such a thing would likely lead to the outside world. The further he went the louder the sound became. His outstretched hand struck a wall and he turned to follow it as it angled to the left. The floor grew steeper. He clung to the wall as best he could but did not slow down. When a spray of water met his face, he knew he was very close.

  Then something happened he had not prepared for. The stone beneath his feet had grown increasingly wet and slippery. More so than any he had walked upon since being in the cave. One moment he was walking as surefooted as a deer, and the next, his feet flew out from under him. He crashed on his back, banged the back of his head and began to slide, faster and faster and faster until there was no stopping. With a throat-rending cry, he rolled over and clawed at the moistened stone in attempt to stop himself.

  “Please!” he scream
ed, but seemed only to accelerate. His nails split, his fingertips tore. “Please, God!”

  And then, somehow, his fingers caught hold of a small knob and jolted him to a stop, right as his legs dangled off a ledge. Water roared deafening below, spray swirling up like inverted rain. He tried to pull himself up, but with only one arm it was no use. He tried to swing his legs onto the ledge but they were so weak, and the stone so wet, he could manage little more than few futile attempts.

  His grip began to give way.

  “Come on!” he shouted enraged, clenched his fingers upon the knob as tight as he could, but they continued to slip. Seconds more and he was done.

  “All for this?” he shrieked, hot tears stark against the cold, drenching spray. “All for this?”

  The face of his mother, his father, and the shining sun met his eyes in three sudden flashes.

  And then he fell.

  The plummet was not long, but the shocking cold when he struck the water was like a wall of spikes. He sank deep, spun round and round by eddies and currents impossible to fight. He’d failed to catch a breath before the river took him, and felt his lungs giving way within seconds. His head dimmed. His mouth gaped for air.

  And then he was falling again, falling forever.

  18

  He awoke facedown on a shore of rounded stones, half his body still in the water. All was black, but he could hear the waterfall roaring behind him. He tried to roll over, but was stopped by a new injury. His left leg was limp and numb, like a piece of meat attached to his body. When he tried to move it searing bolts of pain drove him to cry out. Something was torn, or broken. He sunk his hands into the ground and squeezed them shut, sand and clay oozing between his fingers. With a broken arm he could still walk. But with an injured leg he would need a crutch. And searching for such a thing in the cave was futile, at best.

  The tears that fell now were tinged with surrender. The cave had tried to kill him for so long in so many ways. But he had survived. He’d kept moving. Kept delving deeper. But now there was nothing left for him. For all his courage and risk, the darkness had beaten him. Fred’s lip trembled bitterly.

  “I’m sorry Mom…Dad,” he whispered into the earth. “I tried.”

  For a long while he lay supine, trying to ignore the pain that wracked his entire body. His mind drifted to even darker places, imagining his bones joining that Indian’s, to be found in a hundred years by a stranger. He reached down into his pocket and pulled out the stone knife. Just to hold it in his hand. He closed his eyes.

  Through a haze of delirious slumber, the voice of his father drifted into his dreams. A memory he hadn’t thought of in forever. Dad sitting on the edge of his bed one night years ago when Fred had cried in fear of the dark. With one hand, his father touched his head, and with the other he opened his leather-bound Bible and read.

  * * *

  “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like day, for darkness is as light to you.”

  * * *

  He opened his eyes, but knew he was still dreaming, for blue twilight was rising around him. He pressed his face down into the spongy earth. But the air grew brighter still, warmer, thick with summer smells. He lifted his head and saw that the dream had placed him in a forested gully, his body lying halfway in a pool with a waterfall at his back. Twenty feet away, a young doe nibbled on a patch of grass beside the water. It looked up and saw him, tilted its head, then dashed away with its white tail flagging. Soon the sun broke the horizon, blinding shafts slicing through a thousand shadows and bathing the forest in a yellow glow. Light reached the pool, reached his face and broken form, and he began to weep.

  The dream was so real.

  He expected it to vanish at any moment. Just as they all had. He expected to wake up and find himself blind and crippled in the belly of the earth, waiting to die. But the sun just kept rising.

  Was this a dream?

  He turned his head to look behind him and saw water gushing out of a ten-foot hole in the mountainside. It was the mouth of a cave. His cave.

  It took a moment to sink in. But when it did, Fred began to laugh.

  He’d ridden the river to freedom.

  “Yes,” he said, quiet at first, then growing into an all out shout. “Yes!”

  He pulled himself out of the pool, dragging his leg beneath him. He took hold of a small oak tree growing near the water and pulled himself to his feet. Fire burned up and down his leg but he couldn’t care less. He was out. He’d won.

  “You see?” he shouted back at the cave, pounded his chest, reached down for a rock and threw it as hard as he could into the cavern’s gaping mouth. The rock smashed onto stone somewhere inside. “You couldn’t kill me!” he cried. “You lost!”

  Fred stood there silent for quite some time as the waterfall roared before him, his mind going back to all the days he’d been trapped underground. The cold. The hunger. The dread. The danger. He’d beaten them all. He’d faced down a thousand Goliaths and won. He was different. Deep down he knew he wasn’t the same boy he’d been before the cave, too scared to swim, too scared to climb. Too scared of everything.

  “I won,” he whispered once more.

  He took the stone knife and went to work cutting an inch-thick branch from a low-lying limb. He trimmed leaves and twigs away until he had a usable crutch. Shoving it under his good arm, he set out along the edge of the stream, picking his way between fallen logs and limestone boulders, feathered with lichen and moss. The going was not easy. But he felt more alive than he had his entire life.

  After two hundred yards, the stream curved to the right, the gully leveled off and he found a clearly-marked hiking trail. This he took, moving as fast as his body would allow, and at times, even faster than was probably good for him. Five minutes later, the trail bisected a dirt road. He looked both ways, chose the right, and began hobbling, though his strength was finally giving way. He wouldn’t be able to go much farther. And he had no idea how far it was to anything.

  Right when he felt he had to rest, he heard the sound of an engine rumbling in the distance. Then tires crunching on gravel and country music blaring through open windows. The next moment, an old Chevy truck rounded a bend in the road ahead, plumes of red dust billowing up behind it. The driver slowed at the sight of him, then stopped. He was an old man, leathery as a saddle, hair white as cotton with a beard to his chest. He stuck his head out of the open window and frowned.

  “You okay there, son?”

  “I need a ride.”

  Minutes later, Fred sat in the truck as it rumbled up the road toward the highway. He leaned back against the headrest. It was the softest thing he’d felt in a long, long time.

  The old man was talking fast through a thick country twang and a mouthful of tobacco. “I just about can’t believe my eyes, son. Can’t hardly believe you’re sitting here beside me.” He spat brown juice out the window, wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. “They searched for you for weeks. Had all kinds of cops and locals crawling all over the mountain. But it was like you up and vanished into thin air. Been all over the news. There was some kid from the city who they marked as suspect. But he swore up and down, crying like a baby he didn’t know a thing. Said y’all were friends. That the last time he saw you was on a walk by Indian Creek...before you got separated. But they couldn’t interrogate a kid for long without folks causing a stink.” He looked over at Fred, who listened silently with eyes half closed and staring out the window. “So what really happened, kid? Where the heck have you been for the past two months?”

  Fred could only breathe. In and out. Could only breathe and watch th
e light sifting through the trees like flashes of heaven. The old man furrowed his brow, turned his eyes back to the road.

  “Are you thirsty?” the other asked. “I bet you’re real thirsty after such an ordeal. Here…” He reached behind him where a small ice chest sat wedged against the seat. He opened the lid, groped about until he pulled out a small white carton dripping with ice-cold water.

  “Hope you like milk.”

  Fred looked up at the carton, took it and held it in his hands. He swallowed dryly and opened one side, lifted it to his mouth. Before he drank he saw something printed on its side. A picture of a boy gone missing.

  His eyes stared hard at the image.

  He’d always hated that picture.

  He shook his head, chuckled, and drank the carton dry.

  Interview with the author

  So why in the world did you write a story set in a cave?

  Great question! I’ve just always been strangely fascinated with them. My grandfather was a spelunker (that’s just a fancy name for cave explorer) and I grew up searching out and exploring different caves in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas. Ever since I was a kid I’ve wondered what it would be like to be trapped in one for an extended period of time. I guess that makes me rather strange. But what writer isn’t?

  * * *

  How do you relate to Fred?

  Again, great question! Whoever wrote these is pretty astute. Anyways…about Fred. I really relate to him. In a way, you could say he’s me. I used to deal with a lot of fear. To be honest, I still do sometimes. I also love books, though not quite as much as Fred does. His journey “through the dark” echoes a lot of my own journey learning to have courage and not listen to the voice of fear in my life.