THE STORY, PART II
THEY DID NOT RETURN THE NEXT DAY.
While the group was spelunking toward their extraordinary find, Blake’s mother had made a surprise visit to the campus; she owned a house in Aspen and came out year-round. It wasn’t, in itself, a problem that she didn’t find Blake. Mary Sutton did not especially like to wait, and Fenton had little to offer her in the way of entertainment, but if her son was out on an exclusive field trip, so be it. She found herself in his room, sitting on his unmade bed, convinced that she should fly Elsa in from Connecticut to clean the place once a week.
Five minutes after he was due to arrive back, Mary’s patience ran out. Ten minutes after he was due to arrive back, she sat in the dean’s office, an eyebrow raised, lips impeccably twitched into a frown.
Inquiries were made, and Avery and class were not to be found at Baker Canyon National Park, their original destination. The lips twitched again with, some might be kind enough to say, concern.
The sheriff was called. Deputies went far and wide.
Not two hours later, a lead: a gas station attendant on Interstate 70 had seen a Westbrook van turn off into the foothills. Twenty minutes beyond that, the van was found.
By the time Avery—he had demanded to be last—was pulled forth from the hole by his six students, four deputies and two emergency-service technicians were standing at the cave entrance, shining their lights, playing rock, paper, scissor to see who would go in first. A deputy named Colin Banks lost, and, being terrified of the dark but afraid to show it, he pulled his flashlight and his gun, and crouched through the hole.
Call it surprise or inexperience, but the sight of a man like Avery, with his long white hair and dirty, jowly face coming at him in the dark could scare most humans, even lawmen, especially one scared half to death already. Colin Banks discharged his firearm, thankfully hurting no one at all—just a hole through Blake’s lucky canteen—but this caused his colleagues to draw their own pistols and push their way in, and there was screaming and crying and shouting and much, much flashlight pointing.
No more gunshots that day. But the blame for the entire affair fell square on Avery, who was dismissed before Mary boarded her tiny private airplane to return to Aspen. A gun discharged during his non-approved class outing, which nipped the son of the school’s third largest donor—what other conclusion but termination could there be, star teacher or no? Throughout the entire harried ordeal, through some wordless agreement, no one spoke of the map and the strange forest, even after the paramedics saw Greg’s bloody pants and spent thirty minutes searching for a wound. The kids assumed Avery would talk, but he didn’t either, perhaps worried that someone else would take credit for the discovery. In any case, if it weren’t for Colin Banks, it’s conceivable that Sebastian Avery would still be teaching at Westbrook. But as it was, Greg viewed the dizzying array of events as nothing less than fate.
• • •
A week after the incident, Greg left letters for the other five students. Midnight, near the base of the statue of Socrates, he shivered and whistled to himself, trying to make a coherent noise with his cold lips; sure enough, the group arrived. They didn’t realize that he’d never snuck out of his house like this before. That he didn’t come here to neck regularly with the opposite sex, like Brenda did.
“What’s this all about, Greg?” Chuck asked with a note of real curiosity, his bowl cut wispy in the night air.
“I think we have to go back.”
No one said a thing. No one disagreed. They all had been thinking it. Veronica, in a cashmere hoodie, moved close to Greg and hooked her arm around his.
“I think something important is down there,” Greg continued. “Something that could change the world.”
He reluctantly pulled away from Veronica to demonstrate.
“The map must be important. But . . . guys. The water. Check this out. One of you shine a light on my arm.”
Greg pulled out his canteen, handed it to Veronica, and then drew a knife from his pocket. The group stepped back involuntarily.
“What are you doing, Kish?” Blake said, his thin face etched with concern.
Greg held out his hand and rolled up his checkered-wool sleeve. He took a steadying breath and sliced his arm, relatively deep, sending forth a nice burst of steamy blood. Veronica dropped the canteen, Alex gagged, Chuck put his hand to his mouth, but they all stared when Greg picked up the canteen and poured what remained of the water onto his arm. The blood thinned, and the cut stopped steaming. The cut had been about a half inch wide, and they could see his muscle underneath, but slowly the gap grew smaller, the skin resealing, leaving just a swirl of dried blood.
“I should have died when I fell,” he said, and he knew it was true. He had already cut himself six times before this meeting. “I landed in this water. It saved my life.”
The proof was indisputable. No one made any jokes. No one denied the miracle of his survival. Veronica kept running her hands up and down her own arms to keep herself from shivering. Chuck couldn’t get enough, and he stuck his long nose right onto Greg’s arm, as if sniffing for the solution.
“But how are we supposed to get down there?” Brenda asked. She looked tiny amid the others, bundled in all her winter gear.
“We steal the equipment and go this weekend,” said Blake. He touched Greg’s skin again, just like in the cave, and examined the bloody digit. His eyes sparkled in the starlight, his eagerness so apparent that it gave even Greg pause.
There was no disagreement. It was as if the entire group was looking for this, a purpose, and they were suddenly a unified team ready for anything. There was something powerful happening, and each felt it deep in themselves and the air they breathed. Blake reached for the empty canteen and managed to pour a few drops into his open mouth as they watched in fascination. He swallowed, looked down at his hands, then at the others, and shrugged.
“We can’t tell anyone,” Veronica whispered, her face stern and set in lines.
“Why?” Chuck asked.
“They’ll think we’re crazy. We’re just kids.”
“What about Avery?” Greg said
“What about him?” Brenda replied.
“What if he gets there first?”
Blake took deep breaths of air, and his eyes began to water in the cold. He clapped his hands together to keep warm. “How is that a bad thing?”
No one spoke. There was a current passing between them. A shared vision of wealth, fame, of immortality. Not telling anyone was a big deal, they were realizing. No parents, who expected them to follow a certain path of education and employment. No teachers, who could help procure equipment and material. No friends but themselves. The group stood there for a while, breathing in the cold air, thinking their newfound thoughts, and then dispersed, changed forever.
• • •
Veronica, Blake and Greg strolled back to campus. Veronica was holding Greg’s arm and rubbing the place where he had cut himself. Then she glanced at Blake, the curiosity plain on her face. She almost licked her lips.
“What did it taste like?”
His eyes lit up. “Like water,” he said without hesitation, “but with a kick.”
“Do you feel different?” Greg asked, because he wanted to see if it caused the same effects on Blake. When Greg drank the water, his lungs felt full of fresh air.
Blake stopped walking and began to breathe heavily. Greg got excited. He did feel the same thing! Blake squeezed his fingers into fists and huffed his shoulders up and down, all the while keeping his eyes closed. The steam of his breath shot into the dark.
Greg and Veronica watched him with bemusement at first, and then alarm. Veronica came close, put a shivering hand on his shoulder. “Blake? Are you okay?”
He didn’t respond, but kept breathing harder and harder and then, suddenly, stopped. His head drooped. His arms dangled at his sides.
And then he lunged at Veronica and encircled her waist and screamed while spinning her around and around, her feet in the air and her white sneakers flashing. She freaked out, shouting as loud as anything Greg had ever heard, but then she began to laugh and laugh, her face turning bright red and happy, and she let her arms loose into the sky and Greg watched the two of them go round and round. When Blake let her down, they stared at each other, and Greg had never seen that stare before.
He was not surprised to see them holding hands soon after.
• • •
They didn’t have to steal a thing to help them on their way. Aside from Greg, each of the students had a trust fund to pull from. By the weekend, they were decked out in serious spelunking gear, with laboratory equipment, cameras and plenty of rope. But upon arriving at the cave, after a few nerve-racking hours of setting up everything and imagining police sirens, the Westbrook students found the well dry, the water gone.
The forest was still there, but already it was aged, thirsty, desperate for sustenance. The group was devastated, certain their previous visit had somehow contaminated the environment. Greg wondered if true sunlight would kill these plants that had evolved in darkness, anyway. There were no more insect noises, no more strange creatures. The place was dying. Everyone felt awful but for Greg. He stared at the map for a few hours, his flashlight puzzling over every clue. The white men, the blazing solar eclipse, the upside-down mountains, the vividly bright colors and the endlessly blue water. He smacked his lips together, lost in thought, until it came to him in a flash of gut instinct.
“The water’s coming back.”
The map was near impossible to decipher, but Greg was convinced that the water had to return on a cycle. There were so many calendar events noted on the map: a solar eclipse, a moon, the sun. Surely whoever painted the thing had a time in mind. More important, he reasoned to himself, it was a map. There was a purpose, and that was to explain where something was. In this case, Greg knew it had to be the water, the magical, wonderful, healing water. Blake wasn’t so sure, but Greg kept pointing to the bottom corner of the map, the miniature map within a map, at how it had to mean there was a cycle. He couldn’t tell how long—only that the water would return, he was absolutely, positively, somehow sure of it. He dug around until he found some petrified wood, which he claimed was evidence of an earlier oasis. They just needed patience. Everyone else was pretty disappointed, almost angry. They had witnessed a miracle and had, in that dead forest, all the proof of its reality they needed. But they didn’t have the miracle itself. There was no water left. They returned to school, trying to forget anything had ever happened.
But Greg wouldn’t let them.
By the time they graduated, the deal was made: Greg would stay behind—it was his city, after all. He was happy to sacrifice his college plans for an opportunity like this. He’d check the well three times a week, examine the decaying plant life, and would get financed by his classmates’ trust funds. Normally he’d never take a penny from someone else, but Greg had plans for this money, and so he accepted, and the others dispersed to lead their lives. Veronica and Blake moved to New York together, where they both went to Columbia University. They visited Greg the most frequently, on winter breaks or in summer. But even their visits began to slow when, after a few years, not a drop of water had appeared in the well. Soon Greg was alone, a quiet watcher, in the only place he ever knew. The others became doctors, engineers, lawyers, and for a very long time, they really did forget that their classmate once rose from the dead.
• • •
Even Greg almost stopped believing.
Seventeen years passed, and he hadn’t heard from Blake in six months. That call was only to say that Veronica had left him, the divorce messy but—thankfully—childless. All of his pact-mates had stopped sending checks a while back, and Greg no longer visited the cave three times a week.
When it had all started, so long ago, Greg was enthusiastic and determined. He had cleaned up the place, made a lighted path and a long, well-made ladder to the site. At the age of nineteen, he got a job in construction, to better learn how to rig a path and build from wood. He kept studying, both his computers and everything he could about local Native Americans. He had early translations of the conquistador Cortés’s expeditions in his study. But after a time, the Cave became sort of secondary. He became a foreman at his construction company, then manager, then owner—an early adopter of computer technology in the workplace. His firm, Fenton Construction, won the contract to build an ambitious aqueduct straight from the mountain to Fenton, and Greg installed his old friend Terry to run the place. Fifteen years in, Greg had met a woman, a lovely librarian named Amanda, and a year or so later, they were married and she was pregnant.
It was almost on a lark that he went to the cave the day Mia was born. He was driving home to pick up some supplies from the hospital, after having just left his wife and newborn sleeping peacefully in their room. There was the turnoff, and on a whim, he took it. Greg went there to say good-bye. He was going to write letters to the others, tell them he was foolish, let them get on with their lives (which they were long since doing anyway). He remembered whistling as he took the path, tossing his keys in the air and catching them, outfitting himself in his harness and peeking over the ledge to see an incredibly bright light below him. There was no darkness, no petrified trees. Instead, he found a forest, teeming with impossible life.
Amanda didn’t know about any of this, and, according to the rules of their little group, she wouldn’t. The others had spread far and wide. Greg went home and made some phone calls, and by the time he returned to the hospital, they had all booked plane tickets, ready to sample the wonder of the well and their long investment. They came ready to work, though there was a palpable tension between Veronica and Blake, who did their best to stay away from each other. Greg skipped out on his newborn as often as he could, feeling only slight guilt—he’d make it up to her, she’d see. Gallons were taken and stored, some refrigerated, some not. Tests began; instead of cutting his own arm to see if the water healed, Greg started to use mice—the water worked. And the reunion was kindhearted and happy. After a week, even Veronica and Blake seemed to be getting along better. Suddenly everyone was closer than they could have ever been, and the project began in earnest.
Seventeen years. The cycle ran seventeen years. And the water lasted for ten days, at least from the time Greg had discovered it, though he had an unshakeable hunch that it began on the day of his daughter’s birth. He found the coincidence of her birthday timed to the water’s flow to be too much for his proud-father mind to ignore.
But this time, with the water in storage, the others had all the reason in the world to maintain a constant and regular presence. There was a meeting at Brenda’s Aspen mansion that went particularly well. The biggest difference was in Greg, who had changed when the water came forth again. He carried himself with an air of command and confidence. He knew the Cave and its environs intimately. And he was, importantly, not of their social strata; he was a neutral party. They recognized plainly that this man would take them places, would be in charge, would be their guide. There was a vote, and aside from a brief, perfunctory conversation about the potential of a rotating leadership—initiated by Blake Sutton—Greg was chosen unanimously. Before, he was the night watchman. Now he was their leader.
The land around the entrance was purchased from the state of Colorado, an impenetrable door implanted, a road built in, the map dug out and placed in an air-controlled environment. Greg tried to call Avery but discovered that he had been dead for some time now, killed in an accidental fire some sixteen years back. With everyone else together, the Cave became a real and complete entity. The well, quite oddly, was an empty abyss when there was no water. The group considered, perhaps, that this was a tributary of some underground aquifer, perhaps an offshoot of the one that fed the town’s aqueduct, but any time they tried to find a source, to follow the tunnels that continued below the well, they failed to make headway. There wasn’t any evidence of petrified plant life deeper within the earth, nothing similar to the cavern with the well and the map.
Seventeen years until the next cycle . . .
The group hired Greg’s construction company and used the interim to create a vast complex of caves and tunnels and rooms. After these were in place, Greg sold the company to focus entirely on the project and began a front company, Fenton Electronics. He used his skills in computers to install a state-of-the-art lab and security system. He familiarized himself with everything. Named director, he was rewarded for his faith. He oversaw all aspects of the organization, from Chuck’s purchases of medical equipment to meetings with Blake’s private security contacts about on-site protection.
Greg sent Veronica and Brenda off to receive degrees in biology and chemistry. He refused such a path, himself, and remained full-time in Fenton to manage construction and be near his growing daughter and loving (but oblivious) wife. Chuck was already a medical doctor; so was Blake, but Blake went to work for the CDC to learn about pathogens. Two doctors were imperative: one for practical medicine (Chuck) and the other for clinical and theoretical (Blake). Early testing was quite successful, and new strains of healthy and insect-resistant plants were bred through research in the greenhouses below. A couple of the more common strains—tomatoes and spinach—went to market, bringing in additional revenue for the project. Farms were purchased in the neighboring counties by Fenton Organics, a well-disguised subsidiary, and it was there that these hyperseeds sprouted.
It took eight years to fully build the Cave—they expected great things to come of the place, and took advantage of the lengthy dry spell. Day in and day out, the water samples were beaten into submission, endless data charted for everything from sunless crops to cancer remission in mice and monkeys. They worked especially hard to attempt to re-create the water’s effects artificially, reasoning that they would not have enough to sustain its use worldwide over seventeen years when they went public.
They failed, over and again.
Seventeen years was a long time, even for such a find. These denizens of the cultural elite couldn’t just drop off the face of the earth for almost two decades. In order to keep everything fair, the entire group of six agreed to spend at least three months a year within three hours, driving distance from Fenton—and to devote most of that time to working in the Cave. As a side effect (perhaps of boredom), most became major sponsors of Westbrook Academy. Chuck built a mansion in Denver and hosted fund-raisers, and Veronica’s family name crested the new gymnasium.
And there were, of course, some major pauses in construction and research. Alex’s family lost their wealth in the dot.com bust, and he disappeared for a few years. Brenda’s husband was elected a senator of Connecticut and she was often away in DC or campaigning. And Greg’s daughter, Mia, fell down a twenty-two-foot well. The hole was only eighteen inches wide. National media swarmed. The country watched, held vigils and dug up background stories for anyone involved. The group had to use all of its influence to keep the press from the Cave, no easy feat considering the parties involved and the mysterious nature of the shell corporation. For most of six months, Greg barely went to work.
Ten years later, when Amanda lay bleeding beneath a tree trunk, Greg had a choice. He could stay with her as the blizzard raged, scooping snow away from her mouth and nose. Or he could race to the Cave, break his own rule, and steal some water for his wife, even though it was surely too late. He heard Mia call his name, back on the porch. She couldn’t see them. She didn’t know her mother lay dying thirty feet away. Greg stayed, held Amanda’s hand and missed only three days of work after. He barely left the Cave again.
Despite his renewed vigor for their cause, failures continued and until the well sprang to life once more, they’d have nothing but a limited supply of the most valuable item in the world.
Greg was convinced they’d found the Fountain of Youth. He started tasting the water when no one was looking.
They all did.
Greg aged slowly, never had a cold, never broke a bone, never needed glasses. He could hold his breath underwater for fifteen minutes at a time. He could remember things photographically. Everyone at Westbrook was smart, but this group became more so. Their extra studies took no time. They excelled at all things but solving the mystery of the water.
And now there was but one diluted vial left. On the morning of the next cycle.
Mia’s seventeenth birthday.