Beneath the hot summer sun, the low, rolling hills seemed to go on forever, and the gulls and a pair of redtailed hawks screamed at him like harpies warning him away, screeching threats or alarum from the endless cornflower sky. But he found it, finally, the “hole in the world”, right where the Miwok guide had said that he would, maybe fifty yards from the cliffs.
From what he’d taught himself of geology, Machen guessed it to be the collapsed roof of a cavern, an opening no more than five or six feet across, granting access to an almost vertical chimney eroded through tilted beds of limestone and shale and probably connecting to the sea somewhere in the darkness below. He dropped a large pebble into the hole and listened and counted as it fell, ticking off the seconds until it splashed faintly, confirming his belief that the cavern must be connected to the sea. A musty, briny smell wafted up from the hole, uninviting, sickly, and though there was climbing equipment in his pack, and he was competent with ropes and knots and had, more than once, descended treacherous, crumbling shafts into ancient tombs and wells, Machen Dandridge only stood there at the entrance, dropping stones and listening to the eventual splashes. He stared into the hole and, after a while, could discern a faint but unmistakable light, not the fading sunlight getting in from some cleft in the cliff face, but light like a glass of absinthe, the sort of light he’d imagined abyssal creatures that never saw the sun might make to shine their way through the murk.
It wasn’t what he’d expected, from what was written in the black book, no towering gate of horn and ivory, no arch of gold and silver guarded by angels or demons or beings men had never fashioned names for, just this unassuming hole in the ground. He sat in the grass, watching the sunset burning day to night, wondering if the Miwok had deserted him. Wondering if the quest had been a fool’s errand from the very start and he’d wasted so many years of his life and so much of his inheritance chasing connections and truths that only existed because he wished to see them. By dark, the light shone up through the hole like some unearthly torch, taunting or reassuring but beckoning him forward. Promising there was more to come.
“What is it you think you will find?” the old priest had asked after he’d handed over the book. “More to the point, what is it you think will find you?”
Not a question he could answer then and not one he could answer sitting there with the roar of the surf in his ears and the stars speckling the sky overhead. The question that Ellen had asked him again and again and always he’d found some way to deflect her asking. But he knew the answer, sewn up somewhere deep within his soul, even if he’d never been able to find the words. Proof that the world did not end at his fingertips, or with the unreliable data of his eyes and ears, or the lies and half-truths men had written down in science and history books, that everything he’d ever seen was merely a tattered curtain waiting to be drawn back so that some more indisputable light might, at last, shine through.
“Is that what you were seeking, Mr Dandridge?” and Machen had turned quickly, his heart pounding as he reached for the pistol at his hip, only to find the old Indian watching him from the tall, rustling grass a few feet away. “Is that the end of your journey?” and the guide pointed at the hole.
“I thought you were afraid to come here?” Machen asked, annoyed at the interruption, sitting back down beside the hole, looking again into the unsteady yellow-green light spilling out of the earth.
“I was,” the Miwok replied. “But the ghost of my grandfather came to me and told me he was ashamed of me, that I was a coward for allowing you to come to this evil place alone. He has promised to protect me from the demons.”
“The ghost of your grandfather?” Machen laughed and shook his head, then dropped another pebble into the hole.
“Yes. He is watching us both now, but he also wishes we would leave soon. I can show you the way back to the trail.”
The key I have accepted full in the knowledge of its weight.
“You’re a brave man,” Machen said. “Or another lunatic.”
“All brave men are lunatics,” the Indian said and glanced nervously at the hole, the starry indigo sky, the cliff and the invisible ocean, each in its turn. “Sane men do not go looking for their deaths.”
“Is that all I’ve found here? My death?”
A long moment of anxious silence from the guide, broken only by the ceaseless interwoven roar of the waves and the wind, and then he took a step back away from the hole, deeper into the sheltering pampas grass.
“I cannot not say what you have found in this place, Mr Dandridge. My grandfather says I should not speak its name.”
“Is that so? Well, then,” and he stood, rubbing his aching eyes, and brushed the dust from his pants. “You show me the way back and forget you ever brought me out here. Tell your grandfather’s poor ghost that I will not hold you responsible for whatever it is I’m meant to find at the bottom of that pit.”
“My grandfather hears you,” the Miwok said. “He says you are a brave man and a lunatic, and that I should kill you now, before you do the things you will do in the days to come. Before you set the world against itself.”
Machen drew his Colt, cocked the hammer with his thumb and stood staring into the gloom at the Indian.
“I will not kill you,” the Miwok said. “That is my choice and I have chosen not to take your life. But I will pray it is not a decision I will regret later. We should go now.”
“After you,” Machen said, smiling through the quaver in his voice that he hoped the guide couldn’t hear, his heart racing and cold sweat starting to drip from his face despite the night air. And, without another word, the Indian turned and disappeared into the arms of the whispering grass and the August night.
VII
July 1914
When she was very sure that her father had shut the double doors to his study and that her mother was asleep, when the only sounds were the sea and the wind, the inconstant, shifting noises that all houses make after dark, the mice in the walls, Meredith slipped out of bed and into her flannel dressing gown. The floor was cool against her bare feet, cool but not cold. She lit a candle and then eased the heavy bedroom door shut behind her and went as quickly and quietly as she could to the cramped stairwell leading from the second story to the attic door. At the top, she sat down on the landing and held her breath, listening, praying that no one had heard her, that neither her father nor mother, nor the both of them together, were already trying to find her.
There were no sounds at all from the other side of the narrow attic door. She set the candlestick down and leaned close to it, pressing her lips against the wood, feeling the rough grain through the varnish against her flesh.
“Avery?” she whispered. “Avery, can you hear me?”
And at first there was no reply from the attic and she took a deep breath and waited a while, waiting for her parents’ angry or worried footsteps, waiting for one of them to begin shouting her name from the house below.
But there were no footsteps, and no one called her name.