Down, down he crawled, letting himself feet first down a rockslide, first prone then supine because he needed the flashlight. There was no way, he figured, to go wrong going down. He wished for a miner’s head lamp and, thinking of it, seemed to catch a whiff of acetylene. The slide leveled gradually and entered a crawl. Dry rock gave way to wet clay. The crawl was longer than he remembered, a good hundred yards. There were places where the ceiling came so close to the floor that he had to turn his head sideways like a baby getting through a pelvis. Progress could only be made by a slow scissors kick and rowing with his elbows. Once he got stuck. The mountain pressed on his back.
When the crawl opened suddenly into a chamber the size of a small theater, he stood and walked across as quickly as a man going to work, crossed the lobby of his office building, mounted a shelf of rock which fell away into another slide, longer but not as steep as the first. It was possible to go down standing, using the light and choosing his footing carefully. There was pleasure in planning each step, calculating distance and angle of rock and using his weight either to fetch up or to carry him onto the next step. It was not hard work but when he reached the stream at the bottom he was sweating. There was a curving beach of gravel. As he played the light into the clear shallow water, it was easy to imagine that it was a tidal rivulet. There were minnows. Perhaps they were blind. But when he shone the light up, it showed a glittering lopsided vault, one side sloping steeply to join a cliff across the stream. The glitter, he saw, came from needles of stone, each holding a drop of water.
Beyond a promontory crouched the three nuns, humpy becowled stalagmites. When the cave was open to tourists, there was a blue floodlight behind the nuns. Lewis said that what people liked was not nature but likenesses in nature. Rather than see stalagmites, they would rather see stalagmites that looked a little like nuns. There were also formations called the Old Man of the Mountain, and Honest Abe, and Marse Robert.
It took another hour to find the chimney. It began, he remembered, as a sort of flue above a tilted slab of a boulder. But there were many such slabs. Twice he passed the entrance to the lair where Lewis had found the tiger, but did not bother to enter. It was the chimney he was looking for. When he found it, the opening was higher than he remembered. Before he went up, he made sure to leave footprints of heavy wet clay in plain view on the rock. It took both hands to jump straight up into the dark and catch hold and double over onto a shelf of rock. The chimney was directly above, a rough skewed cylinder a yard or so wide. With each step up he had to wedge himself like a chimney sweep to free one hand and use the light to plan the next step. Could this have been another Confederate beaver hole to escape the blue tide? No, because at its top it opened not up and to the outside but to one side and into a small curiously shaped chamber elongated in one dimension but rounded top and bottom like a pod. Tiger bones had been found here too. A knob of rock the size of a hassock rose from the stone floor at the smaller blind end of the pod. It looked a little like the great flattened head of a tiger. One could even imagine the lip of bone on each side where the massive jaw muscle attached. Could the tiger’s skull have fused into rock over the years, dripped on by jeweled drops and turned calcareous and huge? But no, it was a rock shaped vaguely like a tiger’s skull, enough to allow the cave operator to call it the Sleeping Tiger. Lewis said the tiger had died here thirty-two thousand years ago.
Water dripped on one side of the chamber and filled a saucer of stone. Good! It would be uncomfortable and unnecessary to die of thirst. It was quite comfortable sitting against the curving wall. Head high, he found a dry alcove for the flashlight. Next to it he stood the four fresh batteries. Emptying his pockets of Placidyl capsules, he carefully lined them up on the floor and counted them. Ninety-six. The roll of aluminum foil fitted on the shelf. He could piss down the chimney but feces must be deposited on a square of foil, packaged, and put away, else he’d foul his own den. What had the tiger done?
He smiled. Here I am, he thought, folding his arms and nodding and smiling. Now. Now we’ll see.
Who else but a madman could sit in a pod of rock under a thousand feet of mountain and feel better than he had felt in years, feel so good that he smiled again and snapped his fingers as if he had made a discovery? I’ve got you both, he said aloud, God-seekers and suicides, I’ve got you all, God, Jews, Christians, unbelievers, Romans, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Yankees, rebs, blacks, tigers. At last at last at last. It took me a lifetime, but I’ve got you by the short hairs now. One of you has to cough it up. There is no way I cannot find out.
Even if worst comes to worst, he thought with a smile, to suicide, it will turn out well. My suicide will represent progress in the history of suicide. Unlike my father’s, it will be done in good faith, logically, neatly, and unobtrusively, unobtrusive even to the Prudential Insurance Company. Moreover, I shall arrange to be found.
What is more, it will advance knowledge.
His plan was simple: wait. The elegance of it pleased him. As cheerfully as a puttering scientist who hits on a simple, elegant experiment which will, must, yield a clear yes or no, he set about his calculations. The trick was to devise a single wait which would force one of two answers, not more, not less. If a yes, then to be able to leave and act on the yes. If a no, then to act on the no and at the same time euchre the Prudential Insurance Company out of the money he felt coming to him, to leave Sutter one million richer, and so to be found with the Placidyl gone from the floor of the cave but gone also from his blood. Lewis would find him eventually—
— Ah, to make doubly sure, drop a note down the chimney. He did: Help! he wrote. With tiger, fifty feet above. He frowned. That’s confusing. They might not know which tiger. He wrote another note. I’m fifty feet above this place and can’t move. I think I’ve had a small stroke or an arterial spasm.
Vance Battle had told him about arterial spasms. They could mimic a stroke yet an autopsy would show nothing.
The second note he folded and dropped down the shaft.
Ninety-six capsules. Three a day could give him tranquillity for thirty-two days. Then he’d be too weak to move anyhow and yet live long enough to get rid of the drug.
This way everybody wins. God, if he exists, is not affronted. If he doesn’t, Sutter gets the one million.
There will be plenty of time for asking God — that is called prayer! — between knockout drops. I am no hero! to sit here for a month and starve without a drug is too much of a bore to consider.
Speak, God, or be silent. And if you’re silent, I’ll understand that.
O ye mystics who go out in the desert and see visions, o ye old men who dream dreams, who believes you?
O ye suicides who go not so gently into that good nothing, you can’t tell me either. But I’ve beat you both. In either case I’ll know.
Speak, God, and let me know if the Jews are a sign and the Last Days are at hand.
If the Last Days are at hand, one shall know what to do. I shall go to Megiddo with Sutter and wait for the Stranger from the East.
If you do not speak and the Jews are not a sign, then that too is an answer of sorts. It means that what is at hand are not the Last Days but only the last days, my last days, a minor event, to be sure, but an event of importance to me.
2
Unfortunately for the poor man awaiting the Last Days and raving away at God and man in the bowels of Sourwood Mountain directly below thousands of normal folk playing golf and antiquing and barbecuing and simply enjoying the fall colors — for on the following day at the height of his lunacy the cloud blew away and the beautiful days of Indian summer began, the mountains glowed like rubies and amethysts, and leafers were out in force — unfortunately things can go wrong with an experiment most carefully designed by a sane scientist. A clear yes or no answer may not be forthcoming, after all. The answer may be a muddy maybe. In the case of Will Barrett, what went wrong could hardly be traced to God or man, Jews or whomever, but rather to a cause at once humiliating and comicaclass="underline" a toothache. So in the end not only did he not get a clear answer to his peculiar question, not a yes or a no or even a maybe — he could not even ask the question. How does one ask a question, either a profound question or a lunatic question, with such a pain in an upper canine that every heartbeat feels like a hot ice pick shoved straight up into the brain? The toothache was so bad it made him sick. He vomited.