As they walked the gentle grade from the hotel to the cavern entrance, Jacqueline observed Wick as though he were something unreal, a special effect in a movie that might be skipping a frame or two in his animation. He regarded Mica with no surprise -- she did not know what it took to surprise Wick or if this was an emotion of which he was capable -- but less familiarity than he had Jacqueline when first he appeared on her porch. Had he ever regarded Jacqueline as a stranger, as he ought to have, or did he consider her a foregone conclusion?
No, she remembered now. Dropping Houdini in the toilet had surprised him, though this being the exception to his composure almost provoked in her an uncharacteristic giggle. What if the only ways to startle him involved bathroom fixtures and insects?
Mica loped, halfway between a happily gangling teenage boy and a woman who knew that she could crush someone's larynx with her boot, and they would thank her for the attention. She wore a fitted black leather jacket over an unzipped maroon hoodie, the former all but the only splash of color in a quarter-mile of Cobleskill this morning. Mica appeared better built now than in the office, despite possessing a humbler height than Jacqueline. She could be a scrapper in a fight, not that Jacqueline hoped there would be one to prove this conjecture. If Mica were indeed the sort who kept the world safe, one would have to hope she could punch her way out of a corner if it came to it. It seemed evident that people like Mica must exist because she had never heard of them; ergo, they did their jobs well.
"There isn't officially an off-season, but we go stretches with almost no one wanting to go down there," Mica said as she fiddled with keys and codes to let them in. "Once you see the caverns the first time, the rate of change is on the geological scale, aside from occasional renovation that is more about not getting sued. We open different parts of the cavern from time to time, but it is nothing special. Maybe if you were an inveterate lover of rocks, you'd get something, but I doubt you could say that for most people passing by. You don't necessarily make a special trip to come here." She exhaled, her cheeks puffing out. "Well, you did, obviously, but most people won't, and it's not like you know why you're here. You'll have to let me know if you see the stone of your dreams down there, won't you?" This request had the flavor of a gibe, though Jacqueline had neither the context nor relationship with the steward that would have justified a ribbing.
Jacqueline thought better of asking if they should be here. They were doing it, and it felt more of an adventure than looking at an enormous kaleidoscope. That was enough for her right now.
Mica led them past the gift shop -- it seemed far less fun than it had to Jacqueline a decade ago -- to a tight room with low railings meant to keep them from a rustic tableau with a chipped paint statue in antiquated clothes.
"The cave is a balmy fifty-two degrees year-round, summer to winter -- you are dressed right, but Wick will be chilly," Mica said, her tone of an automatedly cheerful tour guide reciting a spiel she could have pattered out in her sleep. "It was first discovered by cows looking for a place to cool down." Her demeanor dropped to wryness. "It couldn't possibly be that Native people who lived here for centuries before the white man might have noticed a little something. No, it must be cows." She perked up again. "The farmer went exploring, and the rest is history!"
A statue of Lester Howe shuddered to life beyond a railing, telling the story in more detail, in a voice that would have better suited a prospector with a gold nugget in his pocket. The robot's right hand, holding a cane, was painfully twisted. Jacqueline wanted to reach beyond the barrier and see if she could snap it back. Though she guessed that Mica would take no issue with that, it did not seem Jacqueline's place.
The Howe-bot maintained that nothing had changed in the cave in ten thousand years, so Jacqueline was not concerned about missing anything since high school.
The three bundled onto an elevator, waiting a shuddering moment until it hit bottom. It did not go quickly, so the distance could not have much, but the world inside the cave could not have felt more divorced from the sunny ground above their heads.
"It's always dank down here," said Mica. "We have these artificial lights everywhere -- it would be a liability lawsuit if we let people wander in the dark like Howe did -- but the atmosphere here doesn't let you forget where you are. Some daemons down here like it, I hear. Not the lights, but the rest of it. It's clean and private if you are in the right sections. I can respect that. It had space enough that they could quarantine last year. It kept the Purging at bay." She cleared her throat, annoyed at the recollection. "Most of the ones we lost were basically tourists, not residents, not that daemons always place nicely together in the best of circumstances. Did you hear about what happened in Pine Bush maybe two years ago?"
She didn't know anything about Pine Bush, beyond that it existed an hour away from her and held no relevance beyond that. Jacqueline felt watched as they entered, though she suspected this was closer to nervousness than fact. "Where are they? The daemons?"
"Oh, not in the areas where people go. The occasional kiddo screams about monsters in the wall, but I'm not sure that's the kobolds. They aren't too interested, no matter if the tourists are human or daemon. If you want to see them, your best bet is to go to the end of the boat ride. There's a switch there that shuts off all but the safety lights. We do that sometimes for the Valentine's Day romantic package, give people candles to walk back again, but we are still watching them on night vision cameras."
Jacqueline couldn't imagine this cave as romantic in most circumstances, particularly in February, no matter the consistent temperature. "Do we want to see them?"
Mica shrugged. "You want to see something. I'm not sure what else Howe Caverns has to offer you, so I'm operating under the assumption that we'll figure it out or be less bored trying."
Wick strode ahead of the women, peering into the clear, still stream beyond a railing. Jacqueline was not yet sure if this habit of his -- wandering away as though they had not come together -- was a fatal character flaw, but she guessed that it would irritate her to distraction before the end of this day.
Now, she was less bothered by it. She had wanted to interrogate Mica in hopes of pinning down some facet of the world in which she had stumbled blithely.
"How did you end up a steward?" Jacqueline pretended that she was keeping this question a secret from Wick, whom she was sure would not care that she asked it and plainly knew more than enough about stewardship. "Is it a birthright thing, or is there a job interview to be a savior?"
"The way anyone does: I killed my predecessor."
Jacqueline's eyes went wider, having never been near someone who was a killer. She scolded herself summarily because that was not true.
"It wasn't like that, exactly. The guy -- the previous occupant of this position, but I can't admit to knowing him before -- came at me, probably to victimize me somehow or stop me from doing spells on his turf. He basically killed himself, but I was there, so, according to some magical law, I got the blame."
"Blame with the police? Or the agents?" Jacqueline asked, the last word emphatic despite her intentions.
Mica stuffed her hands into her pants pocket, rocking on her heels, unbothered by the morbidity of the topic. "Neither of them would give a damn that he was dead. Natural causes for one and natural progression for the other. Cops don't exactly have 'desouling' on their list of felonies. I did call 911 for him, though, not that it did him even a little good."
"You can do that? Desoul?"
Mica shook her head, her short, dark hair moving a fraction stiffly for its gel. "I didn't do anything but have magic that cared about me -- or at least that wanted me alive. I couldn't do it again if I tried, and I don't know why I would ever want to try. I would like to keep the number of deaths in my presence at a minimum. But, you know, I'm glad not to be dead myself."
"So, he was dealing the landvaettir? The other guy?"
"They didn't mention. Most of the daemons like to keep mum as a rule," Mica said. "It's infuriating, but they are old enough that they've earned the right to some evasiveness. Or I am so generous as to think this until it pisses me off, which is not infrequent."
Mica started to walk to join Wick, this conversation no longer a priority for her.
"Am I a daemon?" Jacqueline called after her before she would have to raise her voice much. She thought she was on a roll getting answers that almost, but not quite, enlightened her.
Mica raised an eyebrow, looking her over in appraisal. "It seems like the sort of thing you would know better than I would."
She motioned Mica to come a little closer, and the steward obliged. "What about Wick?"
"Oh, him?" She peered at him, still leaning on the railing. "Yeah, probably daemonic. Not human enough, at least."
Jacqueline did not expect that she would become comfortable with the apparent casualness of these paranormal affairs. This was earth-shattering stuff, and she felt she deserved them treating it with more reverence so that she could be the nonchalant one.
She did not think any differently about Wick, knowing Mica's best guess at his species affiliation, though Jacqueline couldn't parse how Wick could be a daemon given his divine pedigree, but she wasn't.
"There are no animals down here, no bats or anything," Mica noted, motioning to the lit stream. "No fish in the river. People ask all the time, scared that something will swoop down into their hair. Even if animals did come down, they wouldn't stay."
Jacqueline peered into the crystal water, thinking there would be worse places to be a fish. "Why?"
"Probably just not a good place to live. There isn't going to be anything much to eat, they can't get down here in sufficient numbers, there are people here all the time, and it is too bright," she granted. "Or they don't like the landvaettir who, again, are perfectly nice people if you don't annoy them. But, you know, magic has that effect on things."
Jacqueline did not know this, but she was already tired of what she did not know and left it unremarked upon.
The cavern may not have changed in ten thousand years, but Jacqueline had. She remembered stalactite ceilings a hundred feet tall, spaces through which one could barely squeeze, one of the latter called Fat Man's Folly out of some sense of cruelty. The vague shadows of these mistaken recollections remained -- the ceiling was no more than twenty feet above her head and often half that, and there were no spaces she could access that she could not comfortably walk through at a normal pace.
"The river was worse during a hurricane a few years ago," said Mica. "It filled nearly to the top. We didn't let people in here then. The kobolds mostly came up and stayed in the hotel until it subsided, or they visited another thin spot in the Veil until things cleared up. It wasn't as though anyone else was too keen to spend the night in the hotel without the promise of descending into Howe Caverns. We had the space."
"Didn't people notice that there was a hotel full of fantasy creatures?" asked Jacqueline.
"You are new to this," she answered, sounding if anything impressed. "The landvaettir would look normal to you, like everyday people, if you didn't know they weren't supposed to and didn't have the right kind of eyes. I can barely see them as they are, and I'm the cool as fuck witchcraft-using steward. When they were up there, it was more like having a convention, and, like any convention, they felt oddly entitled and messed up the rooms, which I obligingly cleaned up. That's stewardship in a nutshell." She wrinkled her nose at her observation. "But they paid when no one else was going to. I figure management somehow knows what's going on, even if they would never articulate it, so what can you do?"
"They have money?" Jacqueline asked.
Mica snorted. "Money isn't a challenging thing to have. It's not like you can't have a job just because you live in a dank cavern."
They walked in the quiet for a few minutes. It was not that Jacqueline had any lack of questions to ask but that she didn't know whether the answers would satisfy her curiosity or only provoke more of it. Wordlessly, Mica and Wick seemed to be getting along better. After a minute, she realized that they were not silent but speaking so low that the faint burble of the water swallowed the near whispers.
She quickened her pace so subtly that she retained plausible deniability that she shuffled to get closer to their conversation. By the time she did -- totally casually, nothing out of the ordinary -- they had turned and went up a set of stone steps on the left. It was hard to act blase scrabbling after.
She recognized this place with a pang of embarrassment, stepping before a limestone heart embedded in brickwork. Somehow, she had convinced herself years ago that it was naturally shaped that way and likewise luminescent (she wasn't sure how, but she assumed it couldn't have been radioactive). She had stood near it on that high school trip and waited for her crush to take the hint, which he didn't because he had found the rest of the cave more interesting than her lips.
Looking at it now, it was clearly machined and lighted from beneath by a simple bulb. If this were supposed to be an omen, she did not care for it. It would have been, at best, trite and heavy-handed, so she opted to discount the possibility utterly. Better it be wise cave trolls than some homily about the authenticity of love.
She stomped on it once for good measure.
Mica snorted again, though it seemed to border on fondness for Jacqueline but might have only been condescension. "I've been there, more than is healthy for anyone."
Not long after that, Mica stopped beside a pillar of broken stalagmites that would have otherwise reached the floor. "Howe let his visitors chip away at this so they could have souvenir rocks, though what possible good was that going to do anyone? It's not like limestone is in short supply, and the rocks don't look like much. I assure you, these rocks are all but useless for magic. But it works for us now because it created the Pipe Organ."
Mica ducked under it, then said, "Jacqueline and Wick, I am the Great and Powerful Oz!" The sound of it surrounded them, sonorous and intimidating.
"How does that benefit us?" asked Wick.
"You've been announced," said Mica, ducking back to them. "They know to expect you now."
"And we want that?" asked Jacqueline.
"You don't want to sneak up on them," she replied. "The Pipe Organ is like my patron formation. People indiscriminately chipped away at it until it became accidentally useful."
"You've had enemies chipping away at you?" asked Wick.
Mica admitted, her laugh dry to a joke Jacqueline had not told, "Too many girlfriends. They had a little more shine in their lives from brushing against me, but I was a little less." She looked Jacqueline over. "You aren't a lesbian."
It was not a question, but Jacqueline agreed that she wasn't.
"It is for the best."
Jacqueline wondered if Mica meant that it was for the best that she was not a lesbian -- she considered the pros and cons of the sexuality different but not unequal from boyfriends -- or that Mica wouldn't consider her a prospect.
They came soon to a dented skiff in the water, one of several tied to the rocks. None looked exceptionally seaworthy, the one to which Mica directed them the worst of the lot, seeming rusted enough that it would pollute the pristine water.
Mica hopped in with no fear -- nor was fear necessarily owed given the lack of current and relative shallowness of the undoubtedly frigid water -- and held out a hand to guide the other two onto the boat. Jacqueline enjoyed Wick's hesitation before it came time for her to match, if not outright exceed it.
Settled onto the boat, she felt a little foolish for her apprehension. She had gained nothing much from the trip beyond an increased awareness that the world was stranger than she had anticipated, but the views had been pleasant enough.
Mica piloted the boat down the river, saying something visibly frivolous to Wick, which his smirk suggested he enjoyed. Jacqueline had been too distracted by her thoughts and watching the bottom of the water as though, despite everything Mica had said, there might be a fish in there.
Then, she saw nothing. The entire cavern plunged into darkness, its silence at once oppressing her.
"You didn't turn off the lights, right?" asked Jacqueline, a nervous quiver in her voice. "I assume you couldn't possibly have -- you were with us, after all -- but I'd like to ask."
"I did not," said the steward, though she did not seem concerned by this turn of events. Mica dipped her finger into the stream, quickly drawing a sigil into the bottom of the boat. From her jacket pockets, she removed a thin powder and blew it on the bottom of the boat.
Nothing happened. Or, Jacqueline revised, nothing that she could see, but the scarabs went wild in her pocket.
"What did you do?" she asked Mica.
"A warning, that's all. We'll know before it gets to us if something is trying to get to us. Coincidences are still possible, and it isn't as though anything was forewarned that you were coming here, so it probably isn't about you."
"And then what? We get warned, then what do we do?"
"Not be there?" replied the steward uncertainly. "We'll figure it out when it comes to that."
"Does this happen? The lights going out for no reason?"
"Not at all," said Mica. "There is always a reason. It wasn't a power failure, if that is what you are asking. Something intentionally turned the lights off." She pointed to the glow of an emergency light. "See? Backup power is still on. It runs on a different line, but the switch was flipped at the end. We're fine." Jacqueline could not tell if Mica believed this or intended a lie to comfort her.
"Should we -- I don't know -- get out of the boat?"
Mica nearly laughed. "Oh, absolutely not. The spell works in the boat."
Wick tapped his foot close to the symbol. "Is this not witchcraft you could effect on solid ground?"
"I mean, if you want to sit in one place, yes," she answered. "I don't expect that will do you any good, though. It's better that we see this through to the end."
"You are oddly casual," Jacqueline noted since Mica was the only person who knew they were here, had offered to let them in, and had announced them.
"I haven't died yet," said the steward. "I don't think that changes tonight. Plus, the landvaettir probably prefer me alive. They won't act against me without better cause."
"Then something else shut off the lights," added Wick neutrally.
Jacqueline took her phone from her pocket. She didn't bother checking to see if she had reception -- she was around two hundred feet below the ground -- but she flicked on the flashlight to get some bearings.
"Oh, you'd better not do that," said Mica, reaching toward Jacqueline. "It would make you a bigger target. Off it goes."
Mica pointed a bent finger at it. The flashlight dimmed and went out.
Jacqueline wished that either of her companions seemed to feel a portion of her anxiety over what was happening. She felt claustrophobia rise in her gullet, finding out for the first time that she was claustrophobic as it did. In the dark now -- darker than before given that she had been forbidden this tether of light -- the cave had unreadable proportions between the small islands of emergency light. Likely, it would not narrow into a bottleneck until she was all but crushed and could not as much as turn her head, but what if it did?
Through the near dark -- as her eyes adjusted, she could make out the safety lights better -- she fixed her gaze on the still wet symbol on the boat's floor, trying to understand its convolutions better, studying as though there might be a test on this later.
"You shouldn't look too hard at it," said Mica, whose head was turned away from her. "Do your best to take in the least amount of magic possible. It tends to infest you otherwise. It makes you more visible."
"More visible?"
"Like your flashlight, only you are the thing glowing and don't know it," added Wick. "It lets them see you."
She didn't care for this indeterminate pronoun, a them, as though he knew what had turned out the lights. Or was it a more significant them than the landvaettir? The daemons in toto? Or the agents? There were too many thems in this situation for her companions not to specify. It came off as exclusionary rudeness, mainly as she had come to realize in her marrow that she may have ended up in some critical danger without meaning.
It was only a couple of minutes before the skiff reached its destination. Before them was a metal bar meant to keep the boats from plummeting where the river might lead them. Around them were a dozen other boats, abandoned by tour guides, some looking as though they would not soon again see passengers.
Mica guided the boat to the shore, throwing perfunctory cautious glances to either side as though about to cross an empty street. She loped into the darkness, tapped something, and all the light returned.
Neither Wick nor Jacqueline took the initiative to leave the boat.
"Is there any evidence of who turned off the lights?" Wick asked.
Mica made a brief show of looking around the area where the panel was situated before pronouncing that there was not.
"Is it safe to get out, then?" asked Jacqueline, who had grown emotionally attached to a boat with some protective magic.
"We could see them now if there is something to see."
Jacqueline didn't hear a "yes" in all these words.
"The lights are on. You can get out safely," said Mica. "I 80% guarantee that you will make it to the exit unbothered."
"I don't love those odds."
Mica shrugged. "I 100% guarantee that it won't do you any good to stay in that boat once the sigil dries, so you might as well follow me out."
This was more compelling than the 20% chance that she would meet who or whatever had turned off the lights, a situation that Jacqueline had given up pretending had nothing to do with her journey to her father -- though she could not begin to parse what one thing could have to do with the other.
Though Jacqueline cleaved so closely to Mica that they might as well have shared a blanket -- something she was grateful the steward did not mention -- they arrived back at the elevator without incident.
At least, Mica did not mention anything until they were again aboveground, in the presence of the Howe-bot.
"Oh, something was stalking us. Not the landvaettir, though I'm going to ask them about it."
"What sort of something?" Jacqueline demanded.
"I didn't want to worry you," said the steward. "I'm not sure what it was, but it kept pinging in the back of my mind. Maybe it was simply curious."
"It turned off the lights?" asked Wick.
"No way to tell," said Mica. "You don't know what it was?"
Wick shook his head and, having done this, walked toward the exit with no further remark.
Jacqueline could not put Howe Caverns behind them quickly enough. She did not know their next destination, but she knew it would not involve her feeling trapped anywhere again.
Mica did not say goodbye to them but returned to her office. Jacqueline was a little taken aback at the rudeness of this, feeling that it had to be more of a personality deficit than a magical one. She did not dislike Mica but might have liked her more if she had seemed at all sorry for what had occurred, even if it was not technically her fault.
As she settled again into Wick's Spyder, Jacqueline tried to sort through what strangeness this day had contained and what it meant for their trip. With no ceremony or question, Wick started the car purring. She intended to interrogate him once they were out of Cobleskill again.
She saw Mica running toward the car, a backpack over one shoulder. She knocked on the trunk, which popped open at once for her bag.
"What are you doing?" Wick asked.
"Coming with?" Mica said.
"Why would you do that?"
"I have been working at a hotel above a nest of landvaettir for the last five years. As they are well-mannered as a rule -- aside from the times the caverns flood -- my excitement comes from watching unruly children smack their heads on rocks. So, when you tell me that two Begotten are on a road trip to go watch a god die and that magical beetles helped navigate you here? I mean, how much more engraved can an invitation be?"
Jacqueline didn't see how this was an invitation at all, but Wick accepted the addition to their party and the twisted logic it took.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.