“Jacklighter,” Brad heard someone mumble, but Luke didn’t seem to notice.
“But they just kept coming—bucks in front, does in back. You never see them all herded up that time of year. I slid over so I was mostly blocked by a big oak tree and just watched ‘em run. I shut my light off after they passed by. Didn’t even take a shot. I figured I wanted to hike up the hill, figger out what was drivin’ ’em. I guess they wasn’t the only ones, too, ’cause on the other side of those deer I didn’t hear nuthin’ in those woods. No birds, raccoons, squirrels, possums, nuthin’. Honestly? I didn’t even know what I expected, but I didn’t expect such a … such a void.
“So I kept climbing. I kinda gave up on looking for some monster, chasing all the sounds away, but I wanted to get to the top. All them hills are covered with trees, but on the south side of Brandette, there’s a little cliff where you can see a ways. I had to move real slow because I was coming from the other side and it was dark—just starlight—and I didn’t want to fall over t’other side of the cliff. Took me almost ’til dawn to get all the way up there.
“I don’t know how all the deer knew it was coming,” Luke said, “but when I got up there, I saw what scared them away.”
Luke folded his hands behind his head as he talked. He still looked up at the ceiling while the eyes of everyone else were locked on him and his story. Brad glanced over at Robby; the young man leaned forward, perched on the very edge of his chair.
“Up above me, the sky was full of stars, but in the distance… It looked off in the distance like the sky was disappearing altogether. Looking into it almost hurt my eyes,” Luke said. He shut his eyes, like they still hurt now.
“Was it black?” asked his compatriot, Frank.
Brad rolled his eyes—when Frank prompted for an answer he must already know, this seemed more like a sermon than a story.
Luke might have sensed he was losing his audience. He lashed out at the interruption—“No, Frank, you asshole, I already tole you it weren’t black.”
Luke sat up straighter, put his hands on the table, and glanced around to a few people in the room, locking eyes with them for a brief second to recapture their trust and then he looked down at his hands.
“It weren’t black,” he repeated. “The sky just weren’t there. It’s like a TV in the ol’ days. When you didn’t get signal, you’d get fuzzy snow, ya know? Not black, just no signal. What was worse—it weren’t just the sky. The ‘no signal’ was starting to creep down over the hills across the valley. Down the slopes it spread out in these little fingers. Least I think it did, coulda just been the terrain that made it look that ways. It was almost like watching the sunrise, but in reverse, and slower. We’ve got a tall ridge out to the east, so the sun always lights up the peaks first and then rolls down the hills. Well that morning it looked like the hills were being eaten from the top down. I just stood there watchin’ with my jaw hangin’ open.
“When a couple of big black shapes passed overhead, I got movin’. At first, I crashed down the hill like the deer, but then I remembered what I was standin’ on,” Luke paused while everyone wondered about his statement. He once again controlled their full attention. “Those hills are made of nuthin’ but pure limestone—all shot fulla holes. I turned west, and ran up hill for a little bit until I found the entrance to a cave they call ‘Fat Man.’
“They call it that because you have to be right skinny to fit in the entrance. It’s like about this high,” Luke said, spacing his hands about a foot apart, “for the first five feet and then it turns straight up. It ain’t too hard to find ‘cause it’s right at the base of a big maple what’s split at the base—looks like a female with her legs up in the air.
“I went in rifle first and shimmied all the way in. I didn’t stop until I got to the first room, where you can stand up. When we were kids we called it the ‘Altar Room.’ We’d go in there to drink beer and have herbal picnics. I turned on my light and found it pretty much how we’d left it back when I was in high school. There’s some candles on the ledges on the wall, and in the middle there’s a great big flat rock—the altar—with a bunch of bat bones on it,” Luke said.
At the mention of the bones, the woman he’d called “Tib” let out a tiny sigh of disapproval.
“Yeah, kids catch ‘em and then burn ‘em up on the altar,” Luke said. “You don’t know better. I didn’t keep my light on long though. I had just sat down when I heard a noise comin’ through from the entrance. It kinda sounded like wind, but it was too steady. It was like a high-pitch train whistle or something. Gave me a chill. I didn’t even notice when the noise stopped, but then I was hearin’ different sounds and the first one was gone. The new ones sounded like ‘swish,’ only real fast. There was something menacing ’bout these new sound. Made me flinch back. Like the sound of a circular saw would if you all of a sudden didn’t quite know where your fingers were.”
Frank smiled and nodded. Brad watched his head dip up and down.
Luke continued—“With the lights off in a cave, you get real sensitive to noises, and these ones really bothered me. I fished out my lighter so I could make sure I was still alone. I mean it seemed like the sounds were coming from outside the cave, but with those sounds it was damn hard to tell. I grabbed one of the candles stuck on a ledge in the wall, lit it up, and then started shimmying even deeper into the cave. The cave goes back a ways before it gets serious. I waited around one of the turns to see if the noises would stop.”
“What do you mean ‘serious’?" Ted asked.
“You can just walk through the beginnin’ of it,” Luke said. “Then you get to a point where you have to chimney between two walls to get to the next room.”
Ted and several other people still seemed perplexed by the answer, so Luke continued his explanation—“You put your back against one wall and then put your feet against the other—they’re only about three feet apart. Down below, the crack goes down forever. Can’t see the bottom. You just shuffle sideways and it’s called chimneying. That’s what I mean by serious—serious climbing and risk to life and limb are involved.”
Luke took a second to reorient himself in the story.
“So I waited and waited. I blew out the candle for awhiles, then lit it up again. It’s hard waiting in the dark. You don’t know how long anything takes in a cave, and I didn’t have a clock except on my phone, and it had gone blank,” Luke said.
“When? When the deer stampeded? When you ran to the cave?" Ted asked.
“The clock? I don’t know for sure. I didn’t think to check it until I was in the cave. First time I checked it, it was blank,” Luke said.
As Luke continued, Brad watched Ted. The older man handed something to Robby; more accurately, he pushed it into Robby’s hand as Robby focused on the storyteller. Robby took it and flipped it open without looking down. It was a small notepad.
“So, like I said,” Luke said, “I don’t have an idea of how long I crouched, but it felt longer than hell. The gap between the swish noises got bigger an’ bigger, until it seemed like they were about to stop. I crawled back to the altar room without the light and then waited even more. I wanted to get out. Now that I look back, I almost wanted those noises to still be goin’ when I got outta there. I wanted to see what they were, you know? Curiosity. Nuthin’ more. Had I known, I woulda just sat right there.” Luke shook his head slowly.