Chapter 1: The Folding of Two Lives
I had climbed Muller Hill maybe forty times, and the false summit fooled me every one of them. The trail bent left through a stand of red pine and ran level for a hundred yards, and your legs believed it. Then it swung right and went up hard, shale sliding loose under the boots, the sun coming down through the gap in the branches.
By the time I topped that second pitch my grey shirt was soaked through. I had knotted the sleeves of my windbreaker around my waist an hour back. I planted the walking stick, put my hands on my hips, and let the sweat run down into my collar.
Fifty-five years old and still hauling myself up these things. My knees had opinions about it now. So did my back. But the hills around here were the only place my head ever went quiet, and thirty years in logistics had taught me the going rate for quiet.
I shifted my trousers where the climb had bunched them and took a long drink from the bottle. Down below, the land opened up the way it always did, drumlins rolling west toward the lake, a checker of hayfield and corn, the far water going silver where the wind moved across it.
A red-tailed hawk came up off the ridge below me and hung there, wings fixed, riding the same warm air I was standing in. I watched it until it slid away north. That was the whole reason for the drive, the climb, the sweat. Some men find it in a church. I found it in a view.
I could have turned around then. Most people do, from that shoulder, and call it a day. But the ridge kept going, and I had the light for another hour, so I followed the crest past the last blue blaze and onto a deer path worn thin through the grass.
The limestone didn't show itself until I was almost on top of it. A grey seam broke out of the hillside where a hemlock had dropped its roots into the rock and died, and the seam widened at the base into a dark mouth about the width of a man.
Cold air came out of it. Cold, and wet, and faintly sharp, like the inside of a well. The sweat on my arms went tight and raised at once, and I stood there in the heat of the afternoon feeling it move against my skin.
I told myself it was just a sinkhole, a solution cave, the kind you get all over this country where the water eats the limestone out from under the hills. I'd seen a dozen of them. This one was bigger, that was all. It had a mouth you could walk into, and a smell like rain on hot stone.
I stepped up onto the lip and let my eyes adjust. The light went three or four feet in and quit. Beyond that there was nothing to see, only a blackness that had weight to it, and the cold coming steady past my face.
I took a step in. Then another. The cool air was exactly what my chest and legs wanted. Demanded.
I took one more step in. Something, a deep longing almost, prompted me to continue.
I stood still.
I listened. For my age, i knew my hearing was excellent. I waited.
Nothing.
I shouldn't have spoken. The word came out anyway.
"Hello?"
"Hello? hello?hello?"
It came back to me off the walls, but wrongly. Not once. Twice, three times, folding over itself like water going down a drain.
Then something answered.
It was a voice so deep I felt it in my sternum before I heard it, a sound like a rope drawn over a stone far under the ground.
The welcome cool of the cave went cold, went through me, all at once, from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet.
The voice, one word.
It said my name.
Frank.