The Cave
by CHARLES TIMM
As he walked through the woods, he looked for safe places to put his feet, and he listened to each of his footsteps crunching the dreary snow. But he raised his eyes in time to see what had brought him. Beyond the last of the parting trees, the cabin.
He was renting it for the first time and yet, he thought the cabin sighed in disappointment as if it could see him as he himself did—once again going somewhere alone. Well, this was the last time. From where he now stood, letting gray winter hammer at him with a few mallets of wind, he scanned about for a suitable place. He might not even need the cabin after all.
He had left the city perspiring in the earliest days of a warm, rainy winter, where the leaves lay stuck about like shavings of copper pennies. But up here, winter already lay its mute white dust across the low hills in all directions. Off to the right of the cabin and outhouse, a pond—just deep enough—lay like an accusing frozen eye. Still a procrastinating distance from the weary log house, he circled about in a few more crunching steps that he watched himself making.
Then he heard a woman scream.
It came from a middle distance, beyond the woods to his left. Not to him, or to anyone else, really, but from the despairing woman to herself. He sighed and dug his heel into the snow. Somebody else was likely closer to the woman. He'd better have a look inside the cabin. He walked so fast toward it that the cold wind bit his cheeks.
***
On the porch, he turned the knob, but the door barely budged, like hands on the inside pressed out against a stranger.
“Hello?” he said, his voice too loud and sudden in the winter woods. Then he shoved a shoulder into the door’s hinged planks, scraping it all open, wood on wood.
Inside the dusky light, a sofa and two bunk-beds faced each other with barely leg room in between. In the near corner to the left, a black-and-rusty cookstove tilted. A crawlspace of wider, misfit planks lay spread out overhead, a yawning crevasse holding what, he feared to wonder.
He pushed his pack onto the upper plastic mattress and sat down heavily on the sofa’s dark brown leather, letting the cold of it squirm its way in through his clothes and skin until he shivered. He closed his eyes and listened to what was his life at the end. And he shivered again.
But then the shivering got him up—to open his pack and spread out his sleeping bag. Crossing the porch, he’d passed a red iron hand pump and a white plastic pail, and he stepped out there now and started pumping. If the water came out clear, he'd brought some tea, a kettle, and packets of camping food that only needed hot water and a stir. Not much food but then, he wouldn't need long to make up his mind.
The water sluiced out invigorated and bright, but he didn't want to hear that scream again, so he kept his eyes on the water and pumped harder and faster. He picked up the pail by its metal rod of a handle (the wider, smooth, plastic covering was gone) and staggered its sloshing weight inside, pausing outside the door only to underarm two of the pieces of firewood from the box.
He was glad to have withdrawn so far. Living in the city, avoiding family and without a friend, he thought he had creativity licked. But, lately, he'd been dreaming of the single women in his building coming to him for help. Or of trapped infants banging away to be rescued from under bed frames.
Through the cabin’s one window, he could see the snow falling now, blowing everything to gone. Simply freezing was the best way to end.
When he’d eaten, warmer for sitting on his sleeping bag on the sofa and for the salt and whatever else they put into camping food that made it last—the labels read—for twenty-five years, he let his eyes float softly to each of the corners of the last room he would ever see.
Why was this so different from the magazine glossies of homesteader cabins, their knotty pine bright with varnish, their feather-tender pillows on blankets of country cotton quilted up into smiles? Maybe because this county only bought utility. But, then, he didn’t need love-nest luxury. He wasn’t staying.
Still, he might as well check on whatever that was, propped up in the back corner.
Snowshoes. Someone had left them. Nice ones, too. Heavy and new. Wine-red metal; stiff, black leather; and silvery steel.
He could resist them. He could resist anything. Hadn't he stayed inside and counted his birthday money while his cousins and the neighborhood played outside? Hadn’t he quickly pedaled past each spring’s town baseball try-out, skipped the senior prom and every company Christmas party he ever might attend? What was this to all of that—someone’s shoes?
But he kept looking at them. And three deliberate steps and one arm reaching out later, he couldn't help himself. He put them on. Strapped them on without anyone talking him out of it—his favorite part of being alone. He wanted a walk anyway. A climb to the top of the hill. Surely, by now, that woman had found the help she needed.
***
Well, the woods weren't lovely. Or dark. Or deep. They were salt-white and soggy-dung brown. And he hadn't hiked fifty yards into them when he heard the scream once more.
He would not walk that way just now. Not toward that awful pricking sound. That moaned scold. This other way was better. He would walk and look this other way, and that awful sound would go. In fact, the snowshoes were delaying him; so he kicked them off beside a tree and hurried downhill.
Suddenly, a small bush with very long thorns came before his notice. And though he saw it, he lost his balance and stumbled into it. He regained his balance, walked around the thornbush, and sped up to gain back the time he’d lost, but he walked into two more such bushes and, beyond those, three more.
At first, he laughed at what reminded him of schoolmates teasing his shyness. But then thorns poked him through his pants and socks. One dug angrily into his hand.
He walked this way and that, but a sea of thorns held against him. Whichever way he moved, thicker grew the thicket, and taller, too, as one step that he took dropped him down a foot or more.
His muscles began to shake as anger climbed the back of his mind. Soon, he stood there, twisting quickly, knowing only rage and those mean brown thorns closing in all around. Chilly, damp, naked, brown thorns that rattled in the wind and the gray.
And here, he heard something like a grunt.
The sound of it instinctively stopped him; his fear, a chilly sheet against his back. His hips shivered and his neck raced his eyes into every shadow of that thorny space. Oh, to look up alone at that sky, as white as a mouse’s belly. But from somewhere that could be anywhere behind the thorns, a bear, or something, had found him. Something that could be anywhere but for the way out, which, it seemed, was in the direction of the scream. Just over there, a brighter patch of thorns signaled a thinner thicket letting in more daylight. As he shored himself up with a deep breath, another of the woman’s cries pierced the woods.
The curdling sound of it paused him, but, he thought, paused the bear, too. So, he covered his eyes with his palms and tore through. And when he’d reached that brighter patch, ground, luckily, beneath his feet, he stopped to look for wounds.
The thorns, he saw, had given him none, and were not following him now. He had left behind that curious garden.
Looking around, he seemed to be in a whole other part of the forest. He knew this to be impossible. Where he'd come from was . . . right over there. But its thorns and rough terrain made moving on easier than going back. Maybe he would try for the hilltop. Either that or there would be a trail somewhere, back down to the cabin.
***
For a while, he walked along a rocky path, more grateful the more his body settled, though he had to keep looking over his shoulder—for bears and branches and all things real and imagined that bound around bends after men in forests. As the path grew vague and widened to a clearing in the trees, he found it held a puddle, a beautiful rainwater puddle sprinkled over with candy-corn leaves and odd woodland muck and flecks of branches to walk around in, boot-sole deep.
Down he went.
Plunking like in a dunk tank, he sank with a disbelieving splash. His blood jumped and his clothes shrank and his feet hung suspended above whatever reached up for them from the grave darkness beneath. Gasping, he bobbed back up again, carnival quick, grabbed the branch that had brushed his cheek as it tried to catch his fall, and, as though from the top of an escalator, he stepped back onto land, feeling wet straight through—rainwater-wet—but finally able to tell himself that he'd fallen into a hole of water.
The shivering startle in his body subsided. The puddle poured from his eyes and hair. The woods returned, warmer around the soppy, shivering hang of his clothes.
He found the rocky path once more and walked on, a breeze blowing his clothing stiff but sheltering again, until he came to a bridge. Iron railings and wooden planks curved up over a rapids and back down to a snowy meadow, beyond which a climb of mountain reached up to a stone tower pointing its peak into a frosty swirl of clouds.
But the first of the planks before his boots reminded him of a childhood of doorway thresholds that he’d never crossed. Club meetings and school newspapers. Better was the river, downstream, there to the left. A beautiful, touchable yearning that gurgled out nature’s first melody. He would pace beside it awhile.
Nearer to it, however, the gravel turned to mud, thick and pasty and gray. And only when he stood too close to the stream and too far from the grassy bank, did the mud give way in two holes beneath his feet, and he sank to his crotch. Then its mass began slipping, moving him sideways toward the drowning stream.
With his hip at the edge of it, he found the water deep, smooth, and fatally quiet. One lonely fish, made mammoth by the refracting liquid frothy with ice, showed a heartless curiosity by swimming near, turned, flicked its tail, and was gone. Drowning offered itself again.
Still, it did not have to be this way. And, so, he pivoted and frantically sought after choices. He could not reach the bank. From beneath his feet, water had filled up the holes to join the mud in gripping his legs. He scooped around, but all was useless. Until he bent back to one side and stretched a begging arm toward the bridge.
The unplanned shift of his weight loosened one leg, which he strained even to pull slowly from the sucking mire. The other pulled free with much greater struggle, the slop greedier for at least one limb.
Laid out as flat and gentle as he could be, he walked on palms and heels backwards toward the side of the bridge, glopping and slopping, gentle and quick, to grip the splintery, rough ends of the nearest planks and climb, hand over hand, up the thin balusters and over the railing, to drop, more grateful than ever, onto the planks and into the glorious freedom felt with even the slightest of movements.
With mud cold on his pants, he stood there a moment before crossing the bridge, his eyes on that snowy meadow beyond the farther shore. And when he reached the other side, he heard the woman's voice again, louder for being closer. And along with her scream, he heard the answering wail of a child, a fearful sound that froze in him all but his power to listen and grieve.
He looked back at the arching planks, and farther back at his leg holes beside the stream, at where he’d been. Going back looked better.
Before him, a single, narrow, hard-pounded path darted between the long, snowy, strangling grasses of the meadow. He thought how he might veer off, either way, from that path, but a sharp pain came up through his boot and into his left foot. A thorn, he saw, was growing beneath him. Thorns crept in all around him now. A creeping parade of them had followed him across the bridge, and like a pitiless hand at his back, pressed him on.
***
On he went, careful to never stumble, to never stray from that strict route. He knew the violence that the thorns held at the ready should he try to escape again.
And, so, he hiked his way to the sheer slope.
High above stood the erect stone wall of the tower. Below it, craggy rock. And at the base, the great black mouth of a cave as hungry as death.
He took two steps left, then took two right. He folded his arms. He looked at the cave’s mouth and forced himself to take a deep breath. He noticed that his eyes were blinking many times. He would have to go in. Somehow, he wanted to. And, so, it wouldn't be the pond or the hole, the mud or the river, but this cave. At least, the end was near.
He walked to the dark opening, from which came a night-like wing of air, a hand of chill wrapping around him and ushering him in. At first, he walked in utter blackness, testing for dirt with each step. Helpless to see, he felt, he listened, with only echoes of water and chilly-air fingers by which to steer. But soon a light of silver-blue rose from the floor. And by this light, he saw that he stood in a private cone of cave, soaring to a point high overhead. The walls were oceanic shades of blue, wavy in spots, jagged, pitted. And in places, deep depressions, black in hue, seemed a skeletal face almost watching him.
When the light had finished undimming and his eyes had fully widened, he looked across the width of the cave and saw a shimmering, unreal woman sitting at one end of a stone bench. She wore a limp gown that he guessed was once purity white but that now matched her skin—as earth-brown as roots pulled from the soil.
As he approached her watchful, glacial face, he noticed the wall behind her and, in it, an iron ring from which descended a rusty chain of size and weight worthy of a great ship. The chain’s other end held a shackle clamped around the woman's right wrist.
His eyes found the wall held a second ring, whose chain he followed to a shackled, unreal boy, hunching and whimpering off to the right. Like the woman, the boy watched him—until it rose, whimpering still, to go and stand beside her.
He could not know them, could not ever have known the faces and skin and bones of this pair. And, yet, he did know them—just as surely as he knew this place. From a childhood where he’d put his thoughts of them here, deep underground, beyond scolding eyes and the reach of their own imprisoned screams. Wishes he’d somehow learned to fear and had slighted until forgotten.
Leaning over to the vacant half of the bench, the woman picked up an empty shackle and part of the weighty chain attached to it, and offered it to him. Not in a way that meant revenge. He was a stranger whom they were including or, even, the one on whom they’d been waiting.
The world outside the cave now tugged at him. He could leave the woman and the boy, as he had before. But he no longer wanted to. How much he had buried in this dark, avoidable place that strangest nature had to quake about him before he could see it?
He stepped in close to them, kindly took the empty shackle that the woman offered, and lay it down. He gently took those shackles, hanging loosely from their wrists, and slid them off. And he took them tenderly by their filthy, rough hands, their frigid flesh weighty with being, and stood them up.
***
With one on either side of him, he walked out through the mouth of the cave and from chill damp to the fragrance of springtime grass.
How long had he been inside that stingy winter had thawed and all was bloom and birdsong? He held their warming hands all the way to the bridge. Then he let them go.
Was it not the verdant beauty? Was not more and more of it beckoning to his vitality from the distance beyond? His eager feet reached the planks as though he could not bring that richness fast enough. But, as he crossed alone, the thorns, appearing again beyond the bridge, scraped in his way, and the planks arched higher at him, as if over an approaching wave he could not climb, till he tumbled back down to the woman and boy, who knelt around him and lay their anxious hands, frigid once more, upon him.
Out of habit at such a show of caring about him, he almost pushed them both away. But he saw what he needed behind the filth on their faces, and stood up. He took their hands again, and together, they crossed the bridge.
And a peaceful crossing it was. They arrived on the other side greeted by a warm, healing breeze that he closed his eyes to better feel. But again, he let go of their hands. The dark, wounded spirit within him that had hidden them away and brought him to these woods to silence their voices for good, rose once more.
Now, he had done it, he knew—let them go forever. And he tightened—tightened his closed eyes and listened for the scraping thorns and the heaving bridge and the shackling away forever of these wishes that were coming true.
But a child’s hand met his left palm, and a woman's hand met his right. And opening his eyes, he beheld the woman and the boy there.
The breezy wind gathered in swirls about them. Real and spring-fair she turned. Likewise, the boy. And the man, himself, was cleaned of that peculiar piece of guiding ground—and freed of the desire to end it all.
Holding hands together, they walked on, reassuring to one another through the green and blue and bloom.