"I love you so much."
I grinned at Sara, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel as we waited for the light to change. "I love you too. We're going to have such an awesome time, you know it?"
She smiled back and nodded. "Yep. You were right. This trip was just the graduation gift we both needed. I'm glad we gave it to each other." Laughing, she started fiddling with the radio stations, trying to find something that wasn't dire news or country twang. After several minutes she settled onto an oldies station, singing along softly to herself. I looked over at her, seeing that underlying disquiet that was always with her now. It saddened me to see her troubled, and I hoped this trip would help with that.
The past two years had been hard on both of us, but it had worked out for the best in the end. We were together now and in love, and whatever we had given up to get here, I knew that it would be worth it. Rubbing my forehead, I tried to push the background noise from my mind and enjoy the drive. That was the key, right? To not be a prisoner of the past, but to instead focus on the future.
That night, after we had made love and fallen asleep, I began to dream. Or rather, I began to remember. I was back in the clearing, calling out to Mystery. Telling it I needed help. I was ready to set my rock down when it was suddenly right below me, looking up and regarding me silently. I was frozen in terror, images of being drug away into the cave flooding my mind as it looked at the rock in my hand and then back to me, letting out a short wailing sound.
Not the rock. Beyond that now.
I understood, hearing words that were not words, seeing images in my mind that were disorienting and yet signified. In the dream, as I had in real life two years before, I knelt down, leaning my head forward as Mystery opened its razor maw to expose a long whip of a tongue, black and malignant. On the center of the tongue, just an inch above its narrow tip, a small yellow spur of bone jutted out of the flesh around it, a tiny iceberg floating in a sea of darkness. The tissue around it was red and swollen, giving me a moment of pause. Then I thought of Sara and braced myself.
I expected terrible pain or worse, but there was none of that. Instead, all I received was the gentlest of touches as Mystery's tongue pressed to my forehead for a moment before drawing back. The spur of bone was gone, leaving behind a raw, wet socket of flesh that was already filling in. Reaching up to my forehead, my fingertips brushed the last edge of the bone as it disappeared into my head, leaving no mark behind. A few seconds later I began to notice a background buzz in my head, feedback from the link that now existed between the monster and myself. It didn't bother me much then, but it wasn't long before I grew to hate it.
When Mystery spoke this time, I understood her clearly. I say "she" because now when she spoke I could sense her uniquely feminine presence and power as it filled my mind. It both comforted and terrified me, but I kept my gaze steady on hers as she asked her question without making a sound.
What do you offer as tribute for your need?
In life, I was prepared for this question, holding the image of Roberta in my mind until I could feel that Mystery was satisfied. Why I thought that mere selection would be enough of a tribute, and why I picked Roberta, I can't say for sure. I was half-crazy with losing Sara for one thing. But for another, I think I had already come to realize that the bigger the thing you asked for from Mystery, the bigger the thing you had to give up in return. And Roberta...well, it would probably have pained me less to give up my own mother. Two years before though, my guilt and sadness over losing Roberta had been consumed by my anguish over having already lost Sara, and I was filled with relief when Mystery responded.
Very well. Your tribute is accepted.
I woke up weeping and afraid, Sara still sleeping peacefully beside me. The next morning I asked her to marry me.
Some people say that life is a straight line through time. That you’re born, you travel through a series of events, meeting people and learning things as you go, and at the end you die, either ending the line or heading off in a new direction, depending on your theology.
Another common theory is that life is a circle—a cycle that loops without end. History repeats itself and all of that. Or how some people say that you start life and end life with others having to take care of you, or that you are born and die alone.
I remember reading a poem once that talked about coming back to the same place that you started from and finding it new. I always took that to mean that it’s not that the place that’s different, but that you’ve changed yourself, and because of that change you see everything from a new perspective. That’s a nice idea, but I don’t think it’s right.
I think that life is a spiral. You move along, heading up or heading down, and you’re always some place new, even if you never leave the town you were raised in. Always moving forward, unable to touch or change the past except in your memories. Yet at the same time, your life is curving, always curving, coming back to near where you once were, almost close enough to touch. You’ll see places and faces you knew. You’ll glimpse what you once were.
Sara and I were happy for nearly twenty years. For most of that time I ran a website design company out of our house while she built on the real estate business that her mother had started before she passed away. We were successful, and for the most part, we were happy. We had our troubles, just like anyone does, but our love for one another always pulled us back together in the end.
I wondered in those first years if she knew about the tributes I would make periodically to Mystery. I was always so careful, and I would only get the call for another every few months—no more than two or three times a year. Later I could see it in her face when she looked at me. I would glance at her when she didn’t know I was looking, and it was in her eyes. At first I was scared, and then I was angry. In time, when she never mentioned it, never accusing or questioning, I realized that she had accepted it as part of what was necessary to maintain our life, our success, our love. And that made me cherish her even more.
Of course, I wasn’t naming things that we needed any longer. Other than paying tribute when it was asked, I had no ties to Mystery in those days. Well, that and the noise in my head. I would always feel her rustling in the back of my brain, that just-audible hum and crackle that I could never entirely adjust to or block out. Once, only once, I think I shared a dream she had. It was black and terrible, full of faces I knew and things that made no sense. Impossible things. Impossible.
Still, what reason did I have to ask for things? We had everything we needed, and we were happy. Then the trip came.
Sara had met Gladys Merl back when the two of them were working towards their real estate licenses, and ten years later when Gladys moved out-of-state, Sara promised she’d come to visit. It was one of those absent promises that you always intend to keep but never do. Then she did.
She had been gone two weeks, far longer than we had ever been apart since Roberta had died, when she called me crying. She said that it wasn’t working any more, that it hadn’t worked for a long time, but that she guessed she had needed to get away to see that. She said she loved me, but that she couldn’t stay with me. She said that the fucking cunt Gladys was giving her work, and that she was going to stay out there for awhile.
Six months passed, and then a year. One day I found myself putting the house up for sale so that I could move into a sprawling old Victorian on the edge of the northern woods. The feeling in my head was stronger so close to the cave, but I didn’t mind. I had no friends any more. No collegues. My father was gone eight years, my mother four. I had devoted all of my time to building a life for Sara and myself. Now I found myself with nothing.
I kept making the tributes. Most of the time I would use drunks or children. They were the easiest to control, and as long as you went far enough out and never to the same place twice, no one would put it together. Besides, she was always looking out for me.
By the time I snatched April Moreland, I had grown bold. I pulled next to her in a mall parking lot as she walked to her car in the middle of the afternoon, yanking her in before she could scream. I knew that Mystery would keep anyone from noticing what was happening, even if she had screamed a little. It was such an easy thing.
April was sixteen, seventeen maybe, and had the face of a girl that was only pretty due to the glow of her youth. In another ten years it would be a different story, the girl’s fleeting beauty and best years both behind her. In my twenties I would have carried a gun to hold on her and keep her from trying to escape. Now I knew that the fear would be enough.
She cried softly the entire way back to the cave, but she only asked to be let go once, her voice dying when I gave her a hard glance. When I got her out to walk up the trail, she made a half-hearted attempt to run, but a quick swat against the side of the panel van I used for these trips ended her resistance.
The walk to the cave was silent, and when we reached the clearing I moved her quickly to the stone lip. I was about to shove her over when she turned to me, her eyes red and shining.
“Please…Please. Don’t do this. You don’t have to. I’ll never tell, and just pleaaaaase!” The last word stretched out into a wail that would have been comical in another situation. I paused for the moment, the raw emotion in her voice disrupting the routine that I had established over the years. She grabbed the front of my shirt as her knees threatened to buckle under her.
“You’re a good m-man….I can tell. Please don’t do this. Let me go.”
Swallowing, I gently pried her hands away. “I can’t. I don’t have a choice.”
She shook her head, sobs overtaking her again and muddying her words. “Why? Why are you doing this?”
“Because this is what I am.” Smiling sadly, I gave her a solid shove in the chest, sending her tumbling into the darkness. Taking a deep breath, I whispered, “I bring you tribute,” before turning away and heading back to the van.
I have always been in control of what happened. I realize that. The thing she put in my head is just a link to me. It doesn’t allow her to influence me or take me over. I know, because a year and a half after Sara left I sat on the edge of my bed with the barrel of a shotgun I had only used once before pressed against the soft flesh behind the line of my jaw. I thought about using my toe to work the trigger, but dying barefoot always seemed undignified to me for some unknown reason. I ended up using a small plastic pool cue that had come with a gag mini pool table I had gotten as a Christmas gift years before. It was just long enough to slip against the trigger.
Of course, I didn’t go through with it. I don’t guess I was ever going to. But I learned something from it. Mystery couldn’t have stopped me if I had wanted to do it. I don’t think she even knew it was happening. I found that strangely comforting later on.
But that day, after storing the gun away and returning the little pool stick to its tiny patch of green felt, I was far from being comforted by anything. There was nothing special about that day. Just months of loneliness and grief and guilt hounding me as I spiraled and spiraled on, all of it coming to a head on a random day in the middle of spring. That’s what had made me reckless enough to pull out the gun. That’s what made me fearless enough seek out an answer to what I had been doing for nearly thirty years.
It was dark by the time I reached the clearing and the cave. I didn’t hesitate, because hesitation would have required thought, and I had burned through the last of my desire to think weeks before. I didn’t want to live. I didn’t want to die. Mostly, I didn’t want to think or feel. In the end, I settled for understanding.
The cave was large and cool, the temperature dropping as I moved further into its depths. A dozen steps left behind the little moonlight that survived in the darkness, and in a dozen more I noticed I was going down a gentle slope. I kept moving forward, my heart slow and steady, my breath unhurried. No thought. No fear. Just one foot in front of the other, hand trailing along the wall as a guide.
A few minutes passed and then I felt…resistance. It was as if the air had suddenly grown thicker in front of me—an invisible membrane that worked against my passage. I pushed harder and was through, the air dropping suddenly from cold to freezing. It took me a moment to realize that I could see now.
The air was suffused with a faint blue glow, a shining haze that gave just enough light to see what surrounded me. Bodies. Hundreds of them. Maybe more, given that they stretched around corners and out of sight. Impossibly preserved and lined up in a fairly orderly fashion, a path wound between them, a scarred up strip of stone that led off into the shadows. It was out of that darkness that Mystery came crawling out to face me.
Why are you here? The screeching whine was a blade of ice in my brain.
“Because I want to know what this is all for. Why you exist.”
Mystery stared up at me, her blue eyes blazing at me like a nightmare. Seconds passed as we stared at each other, my teeth gritted to stop them from chattering as I held my ground. Then finally,
My why is unknown and unknowable. But if you wish to witness purpose, I will show you.
I nodded. “Yes. I want to know.”
As the last words left my mouth, Mystery stood. She rose like a magic trick, four legs sprouting impossibly from the tattered ruins of her flesh’s end. In a breath she stood a head taller than me, supported on four sickle moons of white bone. She moved forward and I felt my first stab of fear as I watched the tips her ghastly limbs slicing into the stone beneath her as she moved along.
Mystery came to stand over a nearby body, one that I recognized as a homeless woman I had brought her a few weeks before. She crouched down slightly over the corpse, her eyes burning into me as a shadowy form snaked its way from between her legs.
I was brought close to two memories at once. The first was of a scorpion killing a lizard on a nature show I saw once, striking it savagely with its tail. The second was the one time I saw my father naked. He was stepping out of the shower, his penis fully erect.
She stabbed it into the dead woman’s stomach. A few minutes passed as the thing shifted and pulsed, and then it withdrew, the tear it had made in the flesh closing up behind its passage. It was like nothing had happened.
Then I realized that wasn’t true. The stomach was swollen now, the flesh tight and occasionally shifting almost imperceptibly, as if something inside had moved in its sleep.
You’ve seen. Now go.
The full flush of fear had blossomed in my chest as I watched what Mystery had done, and I ran back the way I came without questioning or looking back. Yet in the second before I passed back into the normal cold darkness of the cave, I noticed something. Most of the bodies I passed bore the same swollen, unnatural look, with whatever lay inside their body cavities dreaming restless dreams.
Two weeks later, Sara called me.
“This is the first time I’ve been back, you know?”
My breath had caught in my throat at hearing her voice. She had been nervously rambling for close to a minute, and I still didn’t know what to say.
“I just came back to get some things I had had put in storage. In and out in half a day. I never liked this place, not really. I only stayed all this time because of you.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, so I get here, right? And I’m not here an hour and I start wanting to call you. I can’t stop thinking about you. Instead of leaving yesterday afternoon, I stayed the night at a bed and breakfast that wasn’t here a year and a half ago.”
“Well, you could have…”
“I…I want to see you. I need to see you. I love you. I love you so goddamned much.” She was crying now, and when I said okay, I heard her drop the phone, a door slamming close by a few seconds later.
It was so good having her back. That first night…I never knew I could be that happy again. Every day she would talk about leaving to go back and settle all her affairs, pack and move back so she could stay with me forever. But every day she would grow reluctant to leave me, even for a little while, and she would put it off for another day.
On the fifth day after her return, I stared down into her beautiful blue eyes as we made love. My mind was calm and untroubled, and my heart was so full. So full.
Then it came.
Tribute.
For a second it was a source of irritation, a chore that could wait awhile longer. Then I realized that it meant more than usual. It was a specific request. Mystery wanted Sara.
Tribute.
I rolled away, running to the bathroom to be sick. I told Sara after that I thought it was food poisoning, and she seemed to believe me. Hours passed, and then days. I didn’t sleep from the worry and fear that filled every moment now. Periodically Mystery would repeat the word, the tone (if such a word could be applied to our communication) growing more insistent. I tried to ignore it, tried to block out the growing roar that filled my head. After a week, I thought my head would burst from the pressure.
Then it stopped. I felt relief, holding on to a dim hope that she had grown tired of badgering me and would pick someone else. I debated carrying her someone unprompted, but I was afraid to leave Sara for long.
Then, late one night, as Sara lay softly snoring beside me, her head tucked into the crook of my arm, Mystery spoke to me again.
Her. Or you.
I cried silently until the night slipped into the blue-grays of morning, and then I got up and started packing. I had to get everything right. Everything had to be perfect.
When Sara woke up, we were ready.
That day was beautiful, and despite the knowledge that I bore, it was a wonderful day for both of us. The picnic lunch I had packed was delicious, which was a miracle given how inept I usually am in the kitchen. And Sara….Sara was so happy, so beautiful even after all those years. Just looking at her made me ache.
That night, I carried her inside, the sleeping pills I had slipped into her dessert having taken her into a deep sleep. I lay her gently down on our bed, smoothing her clothes and brushing the hair from her face. Looking at her one last time, giving her one final kiss. Then I went downstairs and unlocked the front door. I moved to the living room and sat in my chair, just out of view of the foyer. I waited.
It was about nine-thirty when I heard the handle turn and the door swing open. The strange sounds of Mystery moving through my house, up my stairs, to my wife. Then, quicker than seemed possible, the door had closed shut again.
Two days later I thought I was dying. My brain was on fire, and I started bleeding from my ears and my nose. If it had lasted three hours, I’m sure I’d have died. It only lasted two, and at the end, I found myself staring at the small bone spur, the seed that Mystery had given me the day Roberta Parks died. Picking it out of the sink basin where I had spit it out in a glob of blood and gore, I absently wiped off my face and hands on a nearby towel as I stumbled to bed. The last thing I remember is sitting the small piece of bone on my nightstand, thinking that I’d decide what it meant when I woke up.
As it was, I slept for nearly a day, and when I awoke, the spur was gone.
Weeks went by uneventfully. I kept to myself more than ever, staring out at a world that seemed more alien and hostile to me with each passing day. Something had changed when I lost Sara. Something had changed in me. Mystery hadn’t asked for a tribute in months, but it would happen eventually. She always wanted more. Even if I couldn’t really hear her anymore, I still knew her. She always had her need.
Time was running out. If I was going to change things, if I was ever going to make things better, now was the time. So I started preparing.
Tommy Johns was a fat kid, but he was smart, and I liked him. He reminded me a lot of Everett and somewhat of myself as well. I first met him three months ago when he came around selling magazines for some school drive. When I had first opened the front door to reveal the red-faced eleven year old, my first reaction was surprise. My house was a little off the beaten path, and I knew a lot of the town’s children thought it was haunted. So I listened to his muttered sales pitch, and I ended up buying a couple of subscriptions, clearly surprising him. As I wrote the check out wheels were turning, and as I handed it to him, I was smiling and inviting him in for something to drink.
He looked nervous, the warnings of teachers and parents no doubt thundering in his ears, but I was smiling at him and nodding, giving him the warm, friendly look that had made me so popular back when people mattered to me. After a moment’s internal debate he stepped inside, and after I ushered him in and got him the promised drink, we spent the next two hours just talking.
And a remarkable thing happened. I had been so alone for so long that I had forgotten what it felt like just to be around people. How good it felt just to talk, even if you were just talking about stupid little boy things. I would have listened to him rhapsodize about video games and who thought they were “the King Shit, uh, sorry, King Crap, I guess” all day long. I thirsted for words, voices, noises that weren’t my own.
He came back a few days later, and a few days after that. As his stories began to peter out, mine began. I told him about growing up in Tulset County. I told him about things I had seen and stories I had heard. I told him jokes that I would look up before he got there just so I’d be entertaining enough.
And, of course, I told him about the cave.
I saved the story for his fifth visit, and by that point I truly liked Tommy. He was a good kid, and a smart kid. He got picked on at school some, but underneath he was strong-willed. His biggest strength though, at least as far as I was concerned, was that he loved a good story.
From the start the legend of the cave fascinated him. At first I kept it vague, only telling him a generalized version of the story that Everett had told us so many years before. Over time I leavened it with more details, eventually admitting that, yes, I had been there before. And yes, the cave really did work.
By that point he was on his eighth visit and was desperate to know more. Where was it? How did it work? I was joking right? Did it really work? He begged and begged for me to take him to the cave.
So today I did.
We walked the trail that I had made from the house years before, the air hot and oppressive as we worked our way towards the clearing. My heart began to hammer as the drop-off came into view. I looked down at Tommy, and he looked both excited and scared. He was thrilled to touch something that had been a legend just a few weeks earlier, but he felt the wrongness of the place too. I felt a surge of fear that he would turn away, that he would not follow through. So I reminded him of what to do.
I told him to get a rock. To write his question and tie the paper tight with the twine that I had given him. And then, when he was ready, to throw his question into the dark of the cave.
He did as I asked, and when he was done, I crouched down before him, my smile genuine. “You did good, Tommy. Real good. And we’ll come back tomorrow for your answer, right?”
Tommy nodded, his eyes nervous but steady.
“Good boy. Just remember. This place…this place is special. It’s your place now. A secret place.” I looked around the clearing, before staring into the black below us. I thought I could just see two blue specks of light in the shadows. I turned back to the boy. “It’s a secret just for you.”
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Credits
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