Other Earths Read online

  “In this dereliction, though, I found a refuge on a little farm, a few dozen acres and a log cabin chinked with mud, a few rooms to let to travelers. And you will understand what I mean when I suggest that the proprietress of this establishment reminded me of our dear aunt in her kindness toward an orphan far from home. Her name was Madame Mylecraine, but I did not think there was a monsieur, despite the presence of a dark-eyed and dark-skinned boy named Logan on the premises. You see I must describe these things as I first perceived them, not as I learned subsequently. She also had come a long way, because her father was a native of the Island of Man, and she spoke in the Manx language with a hired hand about the place. Oh, there is much for me to tell you. One thing at a time. I pray for strength to reach the end.

  “She is small, formed like a woman and a child at the same time, although her hair already holds a silver frost—in this she also reminds me of our dear aunt. She has green eyes, I suppose. On my third night in that house, as I lay sobbing on my bed, she came into my room—these are spaces scarcely large enough to let the door open inward. She stood at the threshold carrying a stick, I thought—the light was behind her and I could not make it out. But I imagined the cudgel in my uncle’s hand, as he stood on the landing of the stairs (Oh, I pray that he is dead, and he torments you no longer!), until she moved. Then the light from the hurricane lantern touched her hair and the stick at the same time, revealing it to be a silver flute. She did not blow into it or touch its keys, but she showed it to me only, as if the fact of its existence could be a source of hope. It was outdoors that she played it, as well as a small flageolet or piccolo, a wild, ferocious sound! It was only later that I heard it, after I had revealed to her some news that agitated her in a way I did not understand. In my clumsy English I explained that I had taken employment. I thought she would be pleased! But I was to be a member of the party that would search out and apprehend a highway-man or bandit who preyed on travelers along the road; he always took refuge in one of the huge caves in that area, the largest one, in fact, which stretched many leagues under the earth from the great pit that was its entrance. A Captain Douglas Sharpe had undertaken to search him out.

  “This was in the month of October. When I explained it to Madame Mylecraine, in the great room by the fire, I thought she would approve of me, if only because I would be able to pay my way—there were rumors, as always in such places, of buried treasure in the cave. Instead she was angry and distraught and asked me what I knew of this fellow, Leon Benbourgisse—an uncouth name! I answered what I had been told, that he was a mongrel or half-breed of prodigious strength who had robbed a number of rich gentlemen on horseback and murdered one of them, so that travelers now avoided the entire locality. I thought she would be grateful to dispose of such a one! Instead she said nothing and turned away from me. This was in the evening, when the lamps were lit. She put her kerchief over her head and went out.

  “I waited for her to return. When she did not, I went in search of her. In time I followed not her foot-steps or the shadow of her passing but a sound at the limit of my hearing, a melody from the Celtic islands, or Brittany, or Acadia, as you and I have heard together from the players in the Place D’Armes. I found her in a seam of sunken rocks below a limestone cliff, a place of evil reputation in that country, if one can judge from the name of Devil’s Twist. It was a place where she went to be alone, and I followed the note of her piccolo, which in that amphitheater swelled among the rocks, even though she played quite softly, as I perceived. She had pulled away her kerchief, undone her long hair. When I kicked some stones to alert her to my presence, she turned suddenly, as if from a guilty secret. The music broke as if snapped off. When she saw who it was, she came to me. She took my hand and begged me to consider the extremities of fate that might drive a good man underground, the injustice that might force him to lash out against his tormenters. ‘I will not go,’ I said. ‘Not if you forbid it.’ But instead she asked me to continue the next morning to the muster at the gulf of Mammoth Cave so that I could be her eyes in that dark place. So small she was! Almost like a child. I reached to wipe away her tears, to comfort her like a child and a woman—you and I both know that is possible!

  “The next morning I rendered myself at the top of the pit, at a distance from the farmhouse of two leagues or else some miles—I will give these measurements in the English fashion, as they were explained to me. We crossed over the stile of fence rails that blocked our way and continued down the ravine at a distance of a hundred feet below the surface of the plain. On each side of the dry streambed we found oak trees and chestnuts, as well as elms and maples and a proliferation of vines and brambles, in all a far greater variety than anything to be found up on the flat. When I remarked on this, my companions first explained to me one of the enduring mysteries of this place, which as we sank down appeared more and more dismal and terrible to me, darker and colder, though it was a bright, hot morning when I left Madame Mylecraine’s farm. There is a wind that issues back and forth out of the cave, as if from a bellows or the lips of a stone giant, a breath that is most healthful and bountiful. Consumptive patients, I was told, after all hope was abandoned, could take up residence in the mouth of the Vestibule and be cured in a matter of days. This was first reported in the days of the last war, because the floors of the first galleries are rich in nitre, which is used in the manufacture of gunpowder. Even now we could see the remnants of the abandoned works, while the guides told us stories of their uncles or fathers who had emerged from the pit with their backs straight and their eyes keen, their ponies glossy and well-tempered. I thought at first they were deceiving me.

  “But now we stood on a grassy terrace above the entrance, a steep descent to the black arch, choked with planks and timbers, while water dripped down from above. And for the first time I could feel the cold, sepulchral blast, while I watched the swallows dart through the thin water, and at the same time I listened to our commander, Captain Douglas Sharpe, as he explained our tasks. There were twenty-five of us, divided into groups of five.

  “Now we also received our iron torches and a bucket of lard among each group. We filled our canteens from the brook and primed our pistols. But we could not light the swinging lanterns in the wind until we had descended beneath the great portal and sixty paces into the cave itself. Here the roof was just a foot above my head. The passage was constricted by a wall built by the miners, leaving only a narrow door. The wind blew like a winter storm, and we must grope forward in the dark. A few feet beyond the wall, the air was calm and still.

  “Here we lit our lamps and pressed forward in single file. We stayed in this low, narrow corridor for perhaps a quarter of a mile until it opened out into the Vestibule, a round chamber perhaps two hundred feet across, and the ceiling sixty feet above our heads. Black buttresses of stone jutted from the shadowy walls. Our party of twenty-five had seemed sufficient in the narrow entrance to the cave. But as we pressed forward into the Grand Gallery we seemed small and few. We picked our way among the leaching vats and wooden pipes. We skirted mounds of excavated earth, while for the first time I gave credence to the stories I had heard outside, that the miners in their excavations had disturbed a cemetery of gigantic corpses, ten feet long. It was easy to imagine giants in this place, and to imagine also the ghostly presence of the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, specters from the more recent past.

  “As it turned out, this was no idle speculation. Because of it, I was able to find our quarry where the rest failed. For by the light of my swinging torch I descried piles of blackened rushes and abandoned canes, which the Cherokees had used to light their way. As we spread out into the side passages—the Haunted Chambers, as they are called, and the Bridges with their gleaming stalactites—I found myself looking always for these traces that, though ephemeral, seemed more trustworthy (I don’t know why!) than the arrows marked in chalk to indicate the correct route or warn me from the brink of some precipice or pit. At the same time it occurred to me w
hat in some fashion I must already have known, that Leon Benbourgisse and his accomplices must have another means of egress from the cave. Else they could not fail to be taken in the Narrows.

  “And so as much as I was full of wonder at the dismal choirs of rock, the ghostly chapels with their dripping columns sixty feet above my head, I found myself studying the ground as well, looking for marks of the outlaw’s passage. I remembered the way Madame Mylecraine had leaped to his defense and wondered at the connection between them. At the same time I first noticed a shard of broken pottery such as is often found where Cherokees have camped—a distinctive piece, ridges of black on a dull surface. I swung my lantern over one of these, allowing my companions to go ahead. I thought I had seen several of these shards, broken into rough trapezoids, and resolved to look for them. I passed by the Devil’s Looking Glass, a sheet of fallen rock. And in a chamber called the Snow Room, where any shout or call brings from the ceiling a shower of crystal flakes, I found what I was looking for—away from the path, where the salt dust was undisturbed, a piece of my broken pot, and beyond a naked footprint.

  “I let the torches diminish as the men passed into the Deserted Chamber. I did not call them back. To do so would have dusted me as if with snow. Instead I remembered my promise to Madame Mylecraine, or Kate, as she would have had me call her. With my lantern held in front, I took a few steps forward, around a buttress of the rock. There was a twisting corridor, another piece of pottery. Fifty yards on, I found a hole, a round passage perhaps four feet tall, and in front of it, another footprint.

  “Like Robinson Crusoe, I crouched over it. My dear sister, I do not know why I continued, except because there are always choices of this nature in the lives of men, to creep forward in the dark or else fall back. I could feel a wind from the round hole, not enough to threaten my flame. I knelt and pushed up an ascending passage until it opened up into a great space. My light could not reach the ceiling. And I found myself at the edge of a cliff. A spar or promontory of rock protruded thirty feet over the black chasm, ending in a rough point. From the cliff I could see no trace of the far wall, or of the bottom, or of the roof. It was a place at the edge of the world, a strip of rock that passed into the darkness at both sides. I crossed it in five paces, shuffling through the half-burned canes that were as thick here as the saline crystals had been back beyond the hole, piles of them.

  “I stretched my lamp over the abyss. Now I could hear at a great distance the rushing of a stream, while some wisps of vapor lifted toward the light. And I could see also the remnants of a painted geometric pattern on the limestone promontory, even on the underside, daubed there by some brave or chief’s son as he hung suspended over the depths. On the top I saw three timbers wrapped in bundles of bleached cloth, carved poles or images sacred to the first inhabitants of that place and hidden there, I guessed, from men like me.

  “Nor could I keep from my mind the rumors I had heard of buried treasure, purses robbed along the road or the lost gold of these ancient tribes. Even though I understood the foolishness of such tales, I could not stop myself from setting my lantern in a crevice in the rock, carved there, as I saw, for the purpose. On my hands and knees, I climbed out on the base of the promontory, placing my feet in the shallow steps. And I had just promised myself to turn back, to abandon this search or else to call out to my friends, as I still supposed them to be. But then I heard a noise behind me, the chink of an iron chain, while at the same time the light trembled. I turned to see a man against the rock wall behind me, though whether he had followed me out of the hole or had crept toward me from somewhere further on along the ledge, I could not then determine. For a moment I was motionless with horror, because I was convinced that this was Benbourgisse himself, a huge man clad only in leather breeches, with naked legs and a black, naked, hairless chest. He had no beard and no hair on his oiled scalp. He pulled at the swinging torch, and when he turned to me and smiled, his features showed his Cherokee or African parentage. But more horrifying still was what he intended at that moment, as I saw him wrench the iron bar from its crevice in the rocks. Ah, God, he could not leave me here, and so I gathered myself on my stone promontory and leaped at him across the intervening space. In the middle of my jump, he swung the lantern toward me, only high beyond my grasp, launching it out over the abyss, where it fell and was extinguished at once.

  “How can I explain to you the terror that I felt, to find myself encased in darkness as I moved? No light, no light at all, darker than night, darker than when you close your eyes, darker, I suppose, than blindness. Every act is an act of faith. I scrambled up toward the wall where I had seen him, guided only by his low chuckle and his soft exhale. But in my desperation I found him and grabbed hold of him, only to feel myself suddenly overpowered, the pistol snatched from my belt, while at the same time I could smell his whiskey-soaked breath and hear his voice muttering as if inside my ear itself, ‘Well, ain’t you a regular tear-cat, sure enough?’

  “Then I could feel his arms tighten around my chest, and it occurred to me that he could crush my bones between his hands or that he could cast me over the lip of the abyss, to follow the light downward forever. He could not be resisted, because he had drunk so deeply from the cave’s air. My eyes stared in the darkness, and as I felt the breath crushed out of me, I cried out, ‘Please, I have a message from Mistress Mylecraine!’

  “Suddenly I was released, flung a little distance onto the stone ground. I saw nothing, smelled nothing, heard nothing, while at the same time I did not dare to move, because I could not guess how far I cowered from the edge of the precipice, or even which direction it lay. I crouched as if at the bottom of my own grave. I raised my face up to the vault above me, imagining at some moment I might hear the strains of a silver flute, an air or melody from the Isle of Man, guiding me upward, always upward into the light of day.”

  In the big house on the Rue de Dryades, Lucien’s lonely and brokenhearted sister might have wiped away a tear.

  And though desperate to leave the house of Monsieur and Madame Mercier, still she might not have married at her first opportunity an American lawyer with whom she did not even share a language. Their daughter, Justine Lockett, would not have died in prison waiting for trial after she’d been arrested carrying letters and supplies through the Union lines at Petersburg. A widow, she would not have left young children, one of whom, my great-grandmother, would not have gone north to Virginia to live with her father’s family. She would not have married William R. McKenney, a congressman and judge. Her granddaughter would not have met my father, who himself would never have existed for different but related reasons. Sixty years later, a diminutive universe of speculation would have been snuffed out.

  DOG-EARED PAPERBACK OF MY LIFE

  Lucius Shepard

  My name, Thomas Cradle, is not the most common of names, yet when I chanced upon a book written by another Thomas Cradle while looking up my work on Amazon (a pastime to which I, like many authors, am frequently given), I thought little of it, and my overriding reaction was one of concern that this new and unknown Cradle might prove the superior of the known. I became even more concerned when I learned that the book, The Tea Forest, was a contemporary fantasy, this being the genre into which my own books were slotted. Published in 2002, it was ranked 1,478,040 in Amazon sales, a fact that eased my fears somewhat. According to the reader reviews (nine of them in sum, all five stars), the book was a cult item, partly due to its quality and partly because the author had disappeared in Cambodia not long after its publication. I found it odd that I hadn’t heard of Cradle and his novel before; out of curiosity, I ordered a used copy and put the incident from mind.

  The book arrived ten days later, while I was proofing my new novel, working on a screenplay based on my third novel, for which I was being paid a small fortune, and negotiating to buy a home in the Florida Keys, a property to which some of the screenplay money would be applied. The package lay on my desk unopened for several weeks, buried u
nder papers. By the time I got around to opening it, I had forgotten what it was I ordered. My copy of the The Tea Forest turned out to be a dog-eared trade paperback, the pages crimped and highlighted in yellow marker throughout, rife with marginalia. On the cover, framed by green borders, was a murky oil painting depicting a misted swamp with an almost indistinguishable male figure slogging though waist-deep water. I looked on the spine. The publisher was Random House, also my publisher. That made it doubly odd that I hadn’t heard of the book. What the hell, I asked myself, were they doing publishing two Thomas Cradles in the same genre? And why hadn’t my editor or agent made me aware of this second Cradle?

  I turned the book over and glanced at the tiny author photo, which showed a bearded, unkempt man glaring with apparent contempt at the camera. I skimmed the blurbs, the usual glowing overstatement, and read the bio:

  “Thomas Cradle was born in Carboro, North Carolina in 1968. He attended the University of Virginia for two years before dropping out and has traveled widely in Asia, working as a teacher of English and martial arts. He currently lives in Phnom Penh. The Tea Forest is his first novel.”

  A crawly sensation moved down my neck and spread to my shoulders. Not only did Cradle and I share a name, we had been born in the same town in the same year and had attended the same university (though I had graduated). I’d also trained in Muay Thai and Shotokan karate during high school—if not for a herniated disc, I might have pursued these interests. I had a closer look at the author photo. Lose the beard, shorten the hair, drop twenty-five pounds and six years, and he might have been my twin. The contemptuous glare alone should have made the likeness apparent.