Caverns of the Mind

Josh’s foot slipped and sent loose pebbles skittering down into the vast darkness on his left. He pressed his back against the cold stone wall above the narrow ledge and waited for his heartbeat to slow. They’d been in the cave for twenty minutes. From further up along the rock shelf, he heard Paul’s reassuring voice and it calmed him. “It’s only a little further. The ledge widens out up here and there’s an opening.”

Josh knew he would be all right as long as his friend was with him. At thirteen, a year older than Josh himself, Paul had the self-confidence of an adult—maybe even more than most adults. In the year or so since Paul came along, Josh had never seen him at a loss for how to handle any given situation.

His flashlight caught Paul’s lanky body perched casually on the edge of a rock overhang. From Josh’s lower angle, the beam transformed Paul’s face into a mask of light and shadow. He was grinning—a toothy grin that made Josh think of a Jack-O- Lantern.

“C’mon,” Paul urged. “This is really cool, isn’t it?”

They’d been shooting birds with Josh’s BB gun when they found the cave back in the woods behind Bronson’s General Store. The entrance was almost completely hidden by a thicket of blackberry bushes heavy with summer fruit. Bagging Blue Jays had paled beside this discovery. At Josh’s house, they’d filled a worn rucksack with flashlights, bottled water and snack foods, then high-tailed it back to the woods.

Josh’s heart rate finally returned to normal. “Yeah,” he answered, his voice little more than a whisper. “It’s really cool.”

“You don’t have to whisper,” Paul said. “We’re in a cave. You can shout.” He leaned back toward an irregular dark opening in the wall behind him and yelled, “Hello!” The echo reverberated through the chamber, eventually tapering off to nothingness.

“You try it,” Paul said.

Josh did try it. He almost always did as Paul suggested. This time the echo faded more quickly.

Or did it?

“Listen!” Paul said.

They heard it again, faintly, from somewhere deeper into the cave. “Hello!” the voice cried. “Help me! Please help me!”

Paul reached down. “Quick, give me your hand. Let’s go see.”

The two boys scrambled through the opening and along a wide, flat area that gradually narrowed and finally angled off into two separate passageways.

Josh called out again. “Where are you?”

“Here!” the voice shouted, closer now. It sounded female. “I’m down here.”

Josh followed Paul into the tunnel on the left. It was slow going at first because the passageway was low-ceilinged and the boys had to crawl on hands and knees. After a few moments, the tunnel ended and they came to another ledge opening out into a much larger room of the cave.

Josh shined his flashlight over the edge. Jagged walls of rock sloped down twenty or more feet from the ledge to form a roughly oval-shaped floor. The shaft of light stopped on a small form huddled among the stalagmites.

“Oh God, oh thank you,” the woman said. “Thank you so much!”

“C’mon,” Josh said, and the boys picked their way down through the rocks to the floor of the cave.

She was in her late twenties, Josh thought, and in spite of the grime covering her face, she was very pretty. He stared at her, wanting to reach out and touch her, but of course he didn’t. Instead, he handed her one of the bottles of water and she drank from it greedily. “What happened to you?” he asked.

“I was hiking—backpacking.” She gestured to a yellow nylon pack leaning against one of the mineral formations. “There’s a trail not far from here. The map showed a store nearby and I was on my way there when I saw some blackberry bushes.” She paused, squeezed her eyes shut, and twin tears rolled slowly down her cheeks. “I stopped to pick a few.”

“And you saw the cave entrance,” Josh offered.

She nodded.

“And decided to explore.”

Another nod.

“And you got this far and…?”

“I fell,” she said in a tiny voice. “I fell from the ledge up there and hurt my leg.”

Josh lowered his flashlight to the young woman’s legs. They were bruised and scraped and one was badly swollen. Probably broken, he thought.

“I tried to climb back up, but then I fell again.”

“How long have you been here?” Josh asked.

“I don’t know. My flashlight broke and I couldn’t see my watch. I ran out of food and water and I thought—” She began to cry harder and buried her face in her hands.

“Shhh,” Josh said, touching his forefinger to his lips. “You’ll be all right now, but we’ll need help getting you out of here.” He dumped the contents of the rucksack out on the ground. “In the meantime, eat this stuff and—” he handed her one of the flashlights—“hang onto to this.”

He and Paul climbed carefully back up through the rocks to the ledge. Josh paused just before they entered the passageway.

“What’s your name?”

“Marissa,” she called back. “Marissa Collins. And … please hurry!”

Josh nodded in the pale glow from her flashlight then knelt and followed Paul into the tunnel.

They emerged from the mouth of the cave nearly half an hour later. Josh blinked in the warm summer sunlight and stretched to work the kinks from his muscles. “We can go to Bronson’s, I guess. That’d be the closest place.”

Paul stood looking back into the cave entrance. “I guess.”

Josh grinned, thinking of how cool this was going to be. They might even get their pictures in the Inwood Messenger. “C’mon, let’s go be heroes.”

Paul turned slowly and his gray-green eyes locked with Josh’s. “We could do that—be heroes for a while. Or…”

“Or what?”

Paul stepped closer and his voice was soft, like a breeze streaming through tall pines. “Or … we could have something special, something that could last a lifetime. Can you imagine?” He slipped his arm around Josh’s shoulders and they walked off through the woods.

By the time they passed Bronson’s store, the thought of heroics had given way to the greatest secret ever.

The boys went back to the cave once more, on a Saturday in late October. The reason for their return—whether morbid curiosity, or something of a more transcendental nature—was never discussed.

Marissa lay in her sleeping bag, still and quiet. Snack food wrappers littered the ground around her. The flashlight, long since dead, lay clasped in one hand like an icon of hope.

“Go ahead,” Paul said. “Touch her. I know you wanted to.”

Josh reached out and ran trembling fingers tenderly along the side of the young woman’s neck. Her skin felt cool and smooth, leathery, like his mother’s handbag.

He looked over at Paul and smiled.

“Josh! Did you hear me? Open this door right now!”

His sister’s strident cry pierced Josh’s brain like a needle. He looked over at Paul, who sat cross-legged on the bed, reading a dog-eared issue of Mad Magazine.

“What now?” Josh said. “Another Complaint of the Week?”

“Don’t look at me,” Paul said. “She’s your sister.”

Josh sighed, pushing away from his desk. “You’ve got that right.” He opened the door and Lisa stood framed in the entranceway, hands on her skinny hips. Her face showed a mixture of anger and contempt. She was only two years older than him, but had recently assumed the role of household enforcer.

“You know the rules, Josh. No locked doors. Mom and Dad said so.”

“I only lock the door to keep you out—not Mom and Dad.”

Lisa stepped inside the bedroom and looked around slowly.

“Who were you talking to, anyway?”

Josh glanced at Paul, who simply shrugged and kept on reading. Lisa didn’t see Paul. She never did.

Lisa smirked. “I think maybe you’re going bonkers, you little troll. I may just have to have a talk with Mom about you. Maybe recommend you go see a shrink.” She looked him up and down with disgust. “God knows what you do when you’re in here by yourself.” She slammed the door on her way out.

Paul looked up from his magazine. “That could be bad for us, you know—if you had to see a shrink?”

Josh nodded.

Paul studied the ceiling, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “I think we should talk Lisa into taking a hike in the woods soon, talk things over, work out our problems.”

Josh nodded again, grinning now. Paul was the best.

Paul matched Josh’s grin with one of his own, his eyes dancing with amusement. “Maybe do a little caving?”