The Light of the World, page 16
But what if he said that on purpose to keep us away? There was merit to the suspicion, but Theo was Al’s dad and Liv’s boss. If they weren’t worried about him, she probably shouldn’t be, either. She moved quickly to clarify her question when Al and Liv looked at her oddly. “I mean, what would Theo know about this sort of thing?”
Exchanging a long-suffering look with Liv, Al let out a slow breath. “I’ve learned that it is better to never, ever, underestimate what my father does and doesn’t know. He’s a failed academic, which means he’ll do just about anything to prove he’s smarter than you.” He followed the path of the alien footsteps with the beam of his flashlight. “The only person who can give it as good as he does is Liv.”
Liv’s laugh was gentle and calming. She smiled serenely at Eva and gestured that they should start moving again. “I just fell in with him because he was curious about the same things I was.” She started to walk again. “And he likes to argue with me.”
Eva knew that well. She’d seen them go at it a few times over the proper handling of documents and what to buy from estate sales. Liv had an eye for rare books that rivaled Theo’s, but Liv’s tastes tended to be more on the practical side of things. She favored books that they would be able to sell, whereas Theo tended to favor those that interested him.
“But you win,” Al pointed out. “You and dad are like oil and water, but you always can get him to see reason.” Water was dripping somewhere. Plink. Plink. Plink. The hair on the back of Eva’s neck rose and a shiver ran through her. “You win way more than you should against him. He’s like, super intense, and you’re all logic and he’s all grumpy mutterings.”
“Well, someone has to verbally spar with the poor man,” Liv sniffed. She shifted forward, brushing against Eva. Her fingers tangled in Eva’s free hand. Eva’s breath caught in her throat. She glanced down at their joined fingers and a smile blossomed across her face. She could deal with this, she really could. She liked Liv and she liked holding hands. Liv seemed to chase away the darkness. She would keep them all safe. “Goodness knows you weren’t going to do it.” Liv’s tone was derisive.
Al folded his arms across his chest. “I resent that,” he groused. “I can argue with my dad perfectly well, thank you very much.”
Eva giggled, leaning against Liv’s shoulder and smiling brightly. “Sure you can, Al.”
“I can!” The petulant tone was enough to make Eva roll her eyes. “I seriously can.”
“Uh-huh.” Liv leaned in close. “Don’t worry about Theo, Eva, I’ve got him.” The promise was a whisper at her ear. “Nothing bad is going to happen.”
“You’re awful sure of yourself.” Eva turned. Liv was right there. Eva couldn’t look away. Liv’s fingers tightened their grip.
An exaggerated groan jolted them from their moment. “Oh my god, you two. Stop it.” Al made a face.
Eva laughed. “Oh fair sir, lead the way then, and I shall stay as far away from you as I can with my lady knight.”
“You are both awful and ridiculous.”
The moment was ruined, but the promise of it remained. Eva’s cheeks burned as she let Liv lead her farther into the darkness, where even their flashlights were snuffed out.
Al continued leading their charge. The path grew steeper with every step they took. Disaster scenarios played through Eva’s mind—an abyss, the tunnel suddenly ending, and then stepping out into a void. She kept her gaze firmly on the beam of her flashlight as it bounced off the damp walls. Eva hoped they wouldn’t end up in the river, or worse, the sewers.
Al was three steps ahead of her when he stopped short. His light shone off to one side and vanished into the crushing blackness. Eva drew level behind him and Liv peered around his shoulder, turning her own light to join his.
There was an opening in the wall. It was so small it looked like nothing more than a jagged slash in the rock face. Al pointed his flashlight at it, and the light seemed to be sucked into the crack.
Eva’s heart pounded as she stared into the crevice. She had no idea how far they’d come, or how Al had managed to spot this in almost complete darkness. She clung to Liv’s hand. “Are we going in there?” she asked.
“Come on,” Al said. Liv seemed to agree and followed him. Eva allowed herself to be drawn after them into the narrow entryway.
It was a tight fit. Eva’s shoulders scraped against the wall and Al had to stoop to avoid banging his head against the rock above. Somewhere in the distance, Eva could hear water dripping. If this meant that they were close to the sewers, they were going to turn around right now. She was not having that misadventure, not today.
They pressed forward. Her hand was sweaty against Liv’s palm. She couldn’t quite catch her breath. The air was warm this far underground, and moist with humidity that seemed to cling to everything. Eva’s hair was frizzing, falling into her eyes and making it hard to see. Liv’s hair, usually so straight, was doing something similar. There was a halo of unlocked fuzz around Al’s head reflecting in the light like a divine glow above his head.
Their footsteps echoed in the large chamber into which they emerged. Liv let go of Eva’s hand and stepped forward, her light pointing upward toward the ceiling. There was an awestruck look on her face. Her lips moved in silent words.
“There’s no way,” Eva breathed. “This place cannot exist.” This was a dream. The cavern wasn’t as dark as the tunnel had been. A single beam of light filtered down from far above. A crystal formation caught Liv’s flashlight and refracted it down onto them.
“This is the place.” Her voice was hushed, as though she were standing in a church. “If we were here during the day we’d know for sure. But I’m almost positive. This is the place.” Al and Liv stayed silent. “Do you think this is it?” She sounded hesitant now, but the high ceiling and arching blackness around them had a heady effect on her. There was something almost terrifying about this place. She couldn’t put it into words.
Liv nodded and turned her flashlight to the far wall. Eva followed the beam of light, but as the light hit the wall, her breath caught in her throat and her fingers rose hesitantly to cover her lips. “Oh my god…”
“Exactly.”
Across the wall was one of the most beautiful graffiti displays that Eva had seen in her life. A swirling plume of light arched upward toward the ceiling and curled outward toward the far walls. It was truly stunning. Each line of color seemed to refract the light of the flashlights, glowing with a strange sort of radiance for which Eva had no term of reference. The colors seemed to dance as the light hit them.
Behind them a camera shutter clicked, and then it went quiet once more. Eva turned to see Al standing with his flashlight tucked under his chin, fiddling with his camera, a film canister held carefully between his teeth.
“I hadn’t realized that you’d brought your manual camera.” Eva turned to watch Al hurriedly remove the old film. Eva hadn’t used a film camera since middle school, but Al was an expert. He moved with quick, sure actions, extracting the old film and tucking it into his pocket before popping the canister he held between his teeth open and letting the fresh film roll fall into his waiting palm. The flashlight tucked under his chin bobbed dangerously but it did not drop. He nimbly caught the film around the catch, snapped the back shut and started the auto-wind process.
“Yeah,” Al answered, spitting out the film canister. “Wish I’d brought the digital now though, because I have only one roll of film left.”
He raised the camera and adjusted the stop as Liv stared up at the wall before them. One of Liv’s hands was playing with her necklace. Eva had wanted to ask her about it many times, but had never quite found the words to do so. She watched as Liv’s lips moved silently, the fingers of her other hand moving to trace one arching plume of red-gold that seemed to glow against the darkness.
Liv was entranced, as was Eva, by the great mural on the wall. Their lights were not enough to do it justice. Eva wished that it was daytime and that the light could filter through and illuminate the wall, as it was so obviously meant to do.
Her grandmother had stood here, right here, holding hands with the girl she was starting to fall in love with. The idea of it set Eva’s heart racing faster. She thought about the symmetry of the moment, her thoughts going a mile a minute. There was no Al snapping pictures back then, just Mary and Wren, two people who were flirting with something that should have been so much more than what her grandmother had eventually ended up with.
The Mary that Eva had come to know from the diaries would have been disgusted that she’d become a soldier’s wife, sitting at home with a young child as he went off to war, and then another war, and then another one, again. She’d been alone all those years with only Eva’s father to keep her company.
Eva turned her flashlight to the ground and took in the mix of sludge and silt. Their footprints were everywhere. But the other set they’d seen before was there too, pressing at the edges of the story their own feet told. Eva’s flashlight tracked the strange footprints across the cavern. The light caught on something and she stepped forward. There was a deep groove cut in the mud where something appeared to have been dragged away from the wall.
This is it. The voice was like a whisper in the back of her mind. This is the answer, it has to be. Everything that you’ve done up to this point has been to find this clue that will bring everything together and give this fool’s errand meaning.
She moved away from the others. The grooves that she’d found went all the way to the far wall. A little shiver ran through her. She moved quickly, squishing through the mud.
The far-side wall held deep scratches. It looked as though nails had been dragged along it. Big, scary nails. The kind from horror movies. Beside the scratches were embedded slivers of wood.
The smell of cedar was so strong that Eva’s nose wrinkled and she sneezed. Rubbing at her nose, she moved closer. It was the remains of an old trunk. The red cedarwood on the inside prompted her allergies to act up. All around it were muddy pieces of clothing half buried in the muck.
This is it! Eva’s triumphant whoop echoed through the chamber. “Hey Liv,” she called. Liv’s beam of light snapped over to her and bathed her in a warm yellow glow. “Come check this out.”
Eva bent to examine the scraps of clothing. They were hand stitched, and the fabric felt old and scratchy under her fingers. Liv drew level with Eva, depositing her coat and bag on a dry patch of floor and aiming her light at the… “Is this a girdle?”
“I don’t think so.” Liv laughed. She reached for a lace glove beside the not-girdle. “It’s a corset, maybe. But man, this is really old.” Her voice was hushed. A train rumbled by, brakes screeching, above. There was an intermittent roaring that made Eva wonder if the Rangers were playing.
“Yeah,” Eva agreed. There were no papers anywhere in the mess, just clothes and the shattered pieces of cedarwood. Eva picked up one of the larger splinters. Under closer inspection, she could see that the wood was pink on the inside. Her eyes widened.
“Look.” She cradled her flashlight between her cheek and shoulder, holding up the piece of wood for Liv to see. “It’s been snapped apart recently.”
Liv ran a fingertip over the faded gray side of the wood. That was the side, Eva reasoned, that had been exposed to the elements and the pink had faded away. “Anything that’s been down here a while would fade like this.” She took the splinter from Eva and flipped it over and over in her hands. “And if it was just recently broken…” She frowned and Eva moved closer with her light. She cast Liv into shadows. The hollows of her cheeks and throat were tantalizing, and the gold of her necklace chain glinted from under the collar of her shirt, momentarily captivating Eva’s attention. “Someone’s been here.” Liv straightened up and broke the spell. “And they’ve taken whatever was locked in that trunk.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah,” Liv said. Her hand holding the splinter of wood was shaking. She gathered a few pieces of clothing and pushed them back into the trunk. Her light caught one dress that was stained the rusty brown color of dried blood.
Eva let out a slow, steadying breath. “Something bad happened here.”
Liv made an affirmative noise.
“We should get out of here.” Eva pushed herself upright. “If someone else is down here, they shouldn’t find us.”
Liv tucked the glove that she was holding into her back pocket. “We should go,” she agreed. She bent and scooped up her jacket and bag. “Obviously, whatever was down here is gone. We need to regroup. Figure out what brought Wren and Mary to this place initially.”
“You sure they didn’t just want to make out?” Al called. He had dug a small hole in the mud and positioned his flashlight so it caught the wall and its strange luminescence. He was leaning back, his face half-hidden behind the camera. “Because, from what I’ve read, your Gran totally had the hots for that Wren chick, Eva.”
“Hey, Man Ray,” Liv called. “Wrap it up, we’re gonna bail.”
Eva’s thoughts were racing. She was so glad that she wasn’t the only one who saw the deep connection between Wren and her grandmother. Before she’d had to leave college, she had taken a women’s studies class that had talked about what it was like to be queer in the ’20s, and Theo’s books had expanded upon that point somewhat, but it still wasn’t talked about. Her grandmother never mentioned it outright. Eva wasn’t even sure Mary knew what was happening when she went off with Wren into the city as if they were a couple. She’d even said that Wren played the gentleman to her lady.
Still, though, they wouldn’t need to escape down to a place like this just for a moment alone; they could do that behind closed doors at Mrs. Talbot’s boarding house and no one would be any the wiser. Eva shook her head.
“There’s gotta be more to it than that. They had plenty of time to be alone.” She trained her flashlight on the smashed trunk and then flicked it back to the wall with the mural painted upon it. “Maybe this trunk had something to do with it.”
Liv shook her head. “There would have been notes, papers, something.” She jerked her thumb toward the chest. “The cedar was picked deliberately because it would hold up down here. It would preserve the contents. There must have been something important in there.” She wrinkled her nose, toeing the battered edge of the trunk with her shoe. “Not just clothes.”
Eva wondered what was in store for her grandmother and Wren in the next few diaries that she’d just started to read. She, Theo, and Liv had focused on the earlier ones first, trying to establish a timeline to help pinpoint what exactly they were looking for within Mary’s account of her life at sixteen. Theo was looking for references to the light of the world, while Eva and Liv were trying to figure out who Wren was. There was nothing in what they’d read to indicate that anything other than a single trip to this place had occurred.
Someone had gotten here first and had taken the precious clues that Eva had been hoping to find. Disappointment flooded through her. She’d gotten obsessed with the idea of finding out who Wren was, and now it seemed like a dead end. Her hands clenched into fists. They were so close to something huge and to run into a brick wall was devastating.
Eva’s shoes squelched as she turned away. Liv was fingering her necklace again, her flashlight making a pool of light at her muddy feet. Her expression was dark, clouded by something that Eva could not describe.
The necklace intrigued Eva. There must be a great importance to it, and yet Liv, who usually was rather open about everything, kept it as good as concealed yet was drawn to it whenever she was thinking or stressed.
It has to be important to her. Maybe a family thing? Fuck it. Eva took a deep breath, intending to ask.
Al’s light flashed in their direction and Eva was able to see the look on Liv’s face. Pure anguish was written across it. Eva wondered if she’d hurt herself and was trying not to show it.
“Are you okay?” She kept her voice low so as not to draw Al’s attention.
Liv started. Eva raised her light to point somewhere off to Liv’s left. She wanted to be able to see Liv’s face to know if she might be lying. “I’m fine.” She pulled her lips into a strained smile. “It’s just this place, you know? I felt like we were on the verge of actually finding something, and then there’s nothing here but someone’s memories all mixed up in the mud.”
Eva put her arm around her. She getting used to Liv’s constant presence, and starting to know the signs when she retreated into her quiet moments, such as chain-smoking on the bookshop’s front stoop. Those were the moments when touch seemed to be what Liv needed more than anything. Maybe she was like Eva. Maybe she had moments when she just felt sad.
Liv curled into Eva. Her breath was warm on her neck, and they were close, so close to mirroring what Eva suspected had happened to Mary when she came down here for the first time. Liv’s eyes were shining and her fingers were trailing a shaky pattern up Eva’s arm.
“I won’t give up if you won’t,” Eva said. Her lip jutted out stubbornly as her fingers slowly started to become slack, loosening her grip on her flashlight until it seemed as if it would slip from them at any second. Liv’s fingers were touching her side now, moving slowly toward her hip. Eva let her eyes flutter shut, knowing what would come next.
Warmth blossomed across the pit of her stomach and Liv twisted into her, her hot breath on Eva’s ear. “You never struck me as the quitting type,” Liv whispered. Her lips brushed against the delicate gold loop in Eva’s lobe. “And I am entirely serious,” she added. “Should you be willing.” And then she stepped out of Eva’s arms.
Eva was flabbergasted to see a bemused smile on Liv’s lips. Her dimples deepened in full effect. She thought this whole thing was funny, the… Eva let out a frustrated noise and scowled at Liv. She knew exactly what she was doing… the tease.
