Substrate
Tim and Donovan find a cave
[Back to Mad Art Project. This story takes up right after Spring Thaw. Donovan and Tim are oh-so-close to yanking Jethra out of the clutches of that rascal, Donnie Ross, or so they think. Tim is grappling with the realization that he’s been in love with Jethra for a quarter of a century. (I know, you know, we all knew it but him.) No one knows what the Moon Calves are up to. But we’ll meet them again soon. Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
Donovan’s big black Suburban idled loudly at the railroad crossing. A sign told us what we already knew: South Pittsburgh was north of us, more or less, while Jasper was to the south. Straight ahead a long, low ridge with maybe a breath of green on its lowest slopes blocked the horizon.
“Roll that window up,” I said to Donovan, “my nose is running.”
He glanced at me, looked away, then couldn’t help himself: “Then why don’t you catch it?”
He lay back against the seat, shaking with laughter. I suppose he found the sour look I gave him amusing. He even rocked himself back and forth a couple of times, giving the seat a couple of good hard thwacks with his back as he used to do when he was a toddler. Not a great idea when you’re idling in neutral at a railroad crossing with a train roaring by six feet from the nose of your truck. And this was the child whose stepdaddy I could have been.
If you want to imagine the future, picture fingernails raking a chalkboard —
But I digress.
I fished out my handkerchief and blew my nose. I didn’t look at Donovan, both of whose brain cells seemed catatonic with glee. Then I did look, and he burst out laughing again.
Imbecile. Jethra should have listened to me and drowned him like a superfluous kitten. Or buried him with the other abortions —
Oh.
“Underground,” I said.
Donovan stopped laughing. “What?”
“He’s keeping her underground.” The eighty-ninth car passed us. It was the last one. The train roared away south, leaving the rails squealing and hissing in its wake. Donovan threw the truck into gear. We bucked and started to stall, then rocketed over the railroad tracks. I bit my tongue and tasted blood.
“It’s where she buried them. It’s where — I mean, you can’t separate fairies from their source, their place, it’s like cutting a flower and expecting it to live.” Donovan glanced at me, blue eyes keen and curious now. I went on. “Poetically, it’s the only place that works. That Donnie Ross is a conjure man, something more than a conjure man, he’ll know that.”
“All right, but where?”
I shrugged. “Cave, basement, cellar? I’m afraid that’s not much help, there’s plenty of those.”
Donovan was driving like hell towards Orme Mountain, away on the far side of the ridge in front of us. “Why not his cellar?”
“Donnie Ross’s? How do you know he has a cellar?”
“All those houses backing up on Church Street — that’s the alley behind his place — have storm cellars,” Donovan said. “The kind with exterior doors you lift up, wood or more often corrugated iron, and a flight of steps down.” He scowled. “He’s got my momma in his cellar!”
“In the middle of a very small town?” I argued. “Someone would have found out by now.”
“No, but those cellars some of them have blowing holes.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Donovan slammed his fists on the steering wheel. “Caves, man. Caves! We’re going caving.” He threw back his head and laughed — a very different laugh. A wolf’s howl before the night’s hunt. I didn’t know what he had in mind, but I nodded.
“Let me do some research,” he said, “and I bet I can find another way in. You go to your powwow with him like you agreed, and I’ll be ready to meet you from the other end, like.”
“Research? Back to your place?”
“Mm-mm.” He shook his head, then jerked his thumb at the back of the Suburban. “Got everything I need back there.”
I turned my head and saw a pile of gear — sleeping bag and boots and rope and a helmet and tarps and a shovel and a tumbled pile of maps and manuals.
“Cave surveys,” he explained. “I think I know what I need to know, but I always triple check. Not the brightest up here.” He tapped his head. I shook mine. Donovan might have the mentality of a goblin toddler, but I had the idea his professional knowledge was impeccable.
“You see any black rope back there?” he asked. “I want my black rope.”
“Why black?”
That childish, joyful guffaw rang out again.
“Going down a closed cave at night,” he said.
Next he’d be asking if I saw his left-handed wind shifter. I let him laugh.
I never expect to be happy.
Sounds morose? Not at all. As I’ve told you, it’s my superpower.
Now, for instance, as Donovan’s battered black Suburban bucked uphill over the boulders of a near-dry creek bed, the shape of my sadness crystallizing in my mind, I felt the most radiant coolness spread throughout my limbs. It was as if clear spring water was gurgling through my veins, sluicing the dark, heavy blood out of the way. At the same time I felt like I’d found the center. Despite the events whirling around me — and despite Donovan’s why-live-to-see-30 style of driving — my foot rested on solid ground. Instead of breaking my heart, my realization that I had fallen in love with Jethra a quarter of a century too late was like discovering bedrock and groundwater all at once.
I loved someone — I, who had never loved a soul in my life. I loved someone worthy of love.
Of course I still thought Jethra was stupid, stubborn, infuriating, asinine … but compared with how low I hold the rest of the human race, those are hardly disqualifiers.
The only thing remaining was to devote the rest of my life to her well-being. That she could hardly still love me in return was immaterial. Like I say, I never expect to be happy.
No, my biggest dilemma was how I’d promised Donnie Ross I’d help him ensorcel Jethra and steal her magic. Of course I had no intention of following through. I’d lied in hopes he’d let on where he had her stashed. But I wasn’t quite as sanguine about my ability to resist his allure as I’d like to be.
Love is one thing. Fall-on-the-floor-and-whimper amounts of lust is quite another.
Donovan and I had better find out where Jethra was quick, I thought. I had agreed to meet Donnie Ross again that night. Likely he would bring me to where Jethra was. But we wanted to know that location beforehand, because Donovan planned to converge with us on the spot and wreak havoc as only a 6-foot-4, former-juvenile-delinquent Millennial with long blond braids and a full set of fangs tattooed on his throat can wreak it.
“Where are we going?” I asked. While I pondered — best I could while being slammed from seat to ceiling — Donovan had taken the near-empty streambed as far up the draw as he could. In fact, it was only as the engine rumbled to a halt and the sounds of small birds and plashing water surged softly into the ensuing stillness that I realized we were in a draw at all — a long, narrow valley rising to the low point between two spurs of the mountain.
“Where’ve we got to?” I asked, ashamed I had to ask. This had been my home territory, once. And was again, I realized. Better learn fast. I knew we were on Orme Mountain, some distance from Bethlehem away in the high valley on the other side of the mountain, but I didn’t I didn’t know the name of every cove and point anymore.
“Cold Furnace Cove,” Donovan said. He was already outside the Suburban, standing with one foot on a boulder like a real mountain man. He pointed northwest. “Up there, if we’re lucky, we can get into Way-Crazy Cave, and from there, under this little ridge to Bethlehem.”
We trekked another quarter of a mile uphill on foot, getting our boots wet. Donovan was remarkably adept at avoiding both muddy places where he might leave a footprint and tender vegetation he could crush. I tried to remember the names, but had to ask him.
“Birdseye speedwell, anemones, trillium.” Some favored the sun, some the shade. He pointed. “Deadnettle. Spring beauty.”
Up we tromped. The exercise warmed me up and made the chilly air more bearable, except for my ears. After a while the water became clearer, a fine, bright trickle between dark rocks. We came to what looked like an overhang with a bit of wet rock wall and a dry-leaf-filled cove underneath.
Donovan pointed again. “There.”
I didn’t see anything. But a cool, gentle hand touched my cheek. Air. As soon as I noticed, it flowed past me in an unmistakeable, steady flood. A cave was breathing nearby. I sniffed. I smelled earth and what I imagined was vegetation slowly decaying in cold stagnant water.
“Where — ?”
Donovan didn’t answer, just nodded his head at the shallow-looking cove. Leafless trees bent over it and roots half-barricaded the entrance. Donovan started to lead the way and I started to follow. Then I grabbed his arm.
One of his big boots hovered mid-step. He put it back where it had come from. For a tall, fat, powerful man, he sure had a cat’s reflexes. He glanced back at me in inquiry. I pointed at what I’d seen in a patch of smooth mud just beside the silver thread of the channel.
There, half-hidden by the new leaves of this spring’s jewelweed, were little dragging tracks. Beside them something had left one perfect, star-shaped handprint no bigger than the ball of my thumb. The dragging tracks were kneemarks, I realized.
We had found where the denizens of Jethra’s fairy-ring burial-plot had gotten off to. They were crawling right into this cave.