books

The Distant Dead

The Lost Girls

The boy shouldn’t have been in the cave. He knew this. He was a good boy, the sort of boy who cared about shoulds and shouldn’ts, but the thrill of this particular shouldn’t made him feel like a different sort of boy, the sort of boy he wished he were. It was why he was there. The air outside the cave was wavy with late summer heat, but the air inside was cool, and on his tongue it tasted of dust and daring. He was twelve years old, and he was alone for the first time in his life.

      The cave was some distance from where his people made their camp by the great lake, but they could see it, a black eye in a cliff that surveyed the wide, flat basin. They came to this shore every few seasons, following rabbits and other small game through the wetlands. In their stories the cave was a place that drove men so mad that they returned from it unable to speak, even the seers, men who lived mostly in dreams. There was a seer among them now, a bent old man who had visited the cave the summer the boy was born. The boy kept his distance from him, as all the boys did, but he watched as the old man spent long, wordless hours drawing circles in the dirt. Sometimes the seer looked up from his tracings, and in his bottomless black eyes the boy thought he saw not madness but something like awe.   

      As he stood at the mouth of the cave, the boy marveled at the earth stretched wide below him. The green grasses close to the lake gave way to low brush at the feet of the rocky bluffs that rose above the basin floor like blisters. The lake itself was vast, a blue sheet vanishing into the shimmering sky to the north and east. His people called it Allelu, which in their language meant water of life. Twelve thousand years later a different people, half the world away, would make allelu a song of praise. By then the great lake would be gone, leaving only a flattened desert in its wake. Above the boy’s head an eagle soared, black against the sky, a beautiful, wild thing that would be dead before the season was done.

      The boy was beautiful, too, with a face as delicate as a girl’s, and long-lashed brown eyes. He was his mother’s only child to live past the suckling years. Like her other babies he had been sickly and small, and even now he was slight, but unlike his brothers and sisters he had latched his translucent lips fast to her breast and would not let go. Now he was a singer of songs and a teller of stories, with a voice even the elders hushed to hear around the fire.

      Tonight the elders would anoint the boy a man, together with two other boys his age, but the boy didn’t feel like a man. He saw the arcing muscles of the other boys’ arms and the proud bones hardening in their faces, and believed himself to be a child. He heard them talk about the hunts they would join and knew himself to be afraid of the charging mastodon. He didn’t see how the elders listened when he read the stars, or how the other boys looked at him when they spoke, to see what he thought. He saw only how far short of the other boys’ his stone fell when he threw it in the lake, and how far behind them he ran.

      He had come to the cave because, in the last hours of his boyhood, he wanted to do something brave. So in the lazy part of the afternoon, while his mother slept on the dirt floor of their shelter, he ran through the grass to the foot of the cliff and climbed until the eye in the rocks became a mouth. Now he took one last look at the bright curve of the world and walked inside.

      The air was suddenly cold. The ceiling was low, the walls barely visible in the dark.  A fine dust, bat guano mixed with sand the wind blew in, sifted over the boy’s rough tule sandals. He moved slowly, braced for the visitation that had struck the old seer dumb, but found only silence. After twenty halting steps he had reached the back of the cave. Still nothing disturbed the cool, dead air. He put his hands on the stone and waited for it to speak to him, but it said nothing.

      Then, in the ghost-edge of daylight, the boy saw a narrow opening, the width of his arm and half as high, where the wall met the floor. He looked back to the cave’s mouth and the bright blue disk of sky. He knew he should leave now. His mother would be awake soon and calling for him. But the cave, after the trouble he’d taken to get here, was a disappointment. He turned from the sky and crawled into the crevice.

      It was narrow, but there was enough room for him. He shimmied forward on his elbows, the rock cold and sharp against his skin, his nerves tingling with the thrill of exploration. He’d gone the length of his body when the thrill gave way to panic. The dull weight of the cliff pressed down and the tunnel felt like a noose about to tighten. He was a child of open space and unbroken sky, and his mind screamed at him to go back to the air and the light. He closed his eyes and breathed slowly, in and out. Then he forced himself to push on, a few inches at a time. At last, after he’d crawled three times his length, he felt the tunnel expand around him. He opened his eyes and rose to his feet, his arms outstretched, feeling for purchase and finding none. Then he froze, stunned into stillness.

      The darkness was absolute, and the silence was deeper still. The boy had never experienced such an utter absence of light and sound. He could not see his hand in front of him, and he could not hear his own heart beating.

      Without warning, he lost his body. His mind flooded beyond his skull, his spirit came untethered from his bones, and he was floating among eons he’d never imagined, ages beyond number. The lives of men and women winked past by the billions, bright sparks flaring and gone. The seasons of his own life flew by and vanished, unremembered. He saw the entire chasm of time: the births of planets and suns, the surging of mountains and seas, and the rise and fall of civilizations like heartbeats in a darkness that was the beginning and end of everything, the womb and crypt of the world. His terror was beyond measure.

      He reached out his hands, grasping at the dark, and invisible, sharp-edged crystals scraped his palms. The pain snapped him back into his body. He was a twelve-year-old boy again, breathing ragged breaths in the dry air of a cave. He touched his face, his trembling fingers tracing the bones of his nose, the soft skin of his cheeks. He thought of the old seer, and the circles he drew in the dirt. Had he, too, stood here, in the cave within the cave, while his spirit rose up to meet the universe? The eternity the boy had glimpsed brushed his arm with fingers of cold gossamer, and he shivered.

      He drew in a long, slow breath and called his voice forth. It came in a whimper, but it came, and it brought with it a hot surge of triumph. He, alone of all the seers who had come before him, would return to his people and tell them the secrets of the cave. He imagined himself at the campfire that night, the blood of the eagle still wet on his forehead, describing the vastness of time while the other boys watched in awe and the old seer squatted on his haunches, the memory of it lighting his eyes.

      He shouted, a crow of joy. The sound echoed through a dozen unseen caverns as though hundreds of boys were calling to one another. This made him laugh, and the laughter, too, bounced back to him a hundred-fold. When the reverberations faded he turned toward the tunnel. It was time to return to his mother; to the hearth and the cooked rabbit that awaited him, and the ceremony that would mark him a man.

      He heard a stirring in the dark.

      Restless. Gathering. Alive.

      The boy listened, one hand on the wall above the tunnel. The stirring became a mutter, then a high whine, rising from somewhere deep in the cave. The smell of cold stone yielded to the stench of something else, something ancient and feral. The boy groped for the tunnel, but it was too late. A swarm erupted around him. Thousands of small, dense bodies beat against his upraised arms, pummeling him with hair and teeth and leathery wings as they circled the tunnel. The boy screamed for his mother, but his voice vanished in the shrilling. He stumbled backward, one blind step, then another, until the earth disappeared beneath him.

      The bats took no notice of him. They poured through the tunnel, out of the cave, and into the day, their eyes stabbed by light and their brains aflame with fear. In the harrowing radiance of afternoon they crashed into one another, as unmoored by light as the boy had been by darkness. From the shore of the lake their terror was invisible; they seemed to float upon the sky, as graceful as birds.

      That night, by the lake Allelu, two boys became men. Before the ceremony, the old seer spoke for the first time in twelve summers. The missing boy had been taken by the bird gods, he said. It was a great honor. The people rejoiced, but the boy’s mother wept.

      In the autumn the boy’s people moved on, tracking their prey south. Years passed. The boy’s mother died. The boys who became men died. Within a dozen generations the boy’s people were replaced by another people, born of the same distant land but with different gods and other names for the places the boy had known. More years passed, and another people replaced them, then another, and another. Allelu, allelu. Through it all the cave’s round, blank eye watched from the bluff, its darkness clenched like a fist around the boy who once sang songs and told stories and read the stars and who, one afternoon while his mother slept, climbed a cliff and touched the fabric of time.

      His name meant nothing in the language of his people. But to his mother, it meant beloved.