ECHO CAVE THE remarkable REVELATION
ECHO CAVE THE remarkable REVELATION
Echo Cave
had been only recently opened to tours.
Previously it had been regarded potentially unstable. But the state had needed a good way of
raising money without taxing anyone, so cave specialists and then construction
workers were sent in, to make the place safe and tourist accessible.
The specialists
had seen thousands of caves, and so Echo
Cave did not stick out to
them. A nice, relatively large cave of
type such-and-such and that one structure, of course, but they had seen dozens
like it.
The construction
workers were a little more careful, a little more wary, only about half of them
had been on cave jobs before and those that had moved around slowly with their
heads bent a little forward, and peered around constantly, as if something
might fall down if they didn’t notice it first.
There were enough workers on the team, and they were being paid little
enough, that when one of them briefly disappeared, no one noticed. What they did notice was the unnatural
paleness of his face when he returned.
He stared straight ahead, and his chin shifted, as if he were simultaneously
chewing on something and thinking very hard about it. His fellow workers obligingly made the
expected comment that he looked as though he had seen a ghost. But either he had not seen enough movies or
he had no narrative instinct about him at all, for he refused to enlighten them
as to what had happened to him. He
simply quit the next day, without giving any reasons to them or to the
boss. They shook their heads. He had always been a strange one anyway. Within a couple days, he was no longer talked
about, and by the end of the week, he was no longer even occasionally thought
about. Whether society in general was
better or worse for this development is beyond the scope of this narrative.
Echo Cave
was opened to tourists as planned—on schedule and with all the necessary
precautions in place. The opening day
there was a big event touting the cave’s “natural wonders” and “extravagant
beauties.” However, despite the
overblown add campaign—which the governor insisted would draw thousands and
thousands of dollars and surely pay back for itself very quickly with tourists’
dollars being spent in the state—despite all of this, Echo Cave refused to
perform as expected at first, and drew only minimal amounts of curious cave
enthusiasts or random fun-seekers. After
a few truly atrocious weeks, the private aides of the governor were advising
him to step back the ad campaign and warning him that it might be best if he
just not mention the cave at all anymore, because it was truly becoming an
embarrassment, a giant sinkhole of a project which was going absolutely
nowhere. Some whispered that it probably
should be shut down, because it could become a flash point for bad PR,
especially with the next round of elections coming up. Others opined that it really should never
have been invested in the first place.
But all of this did
not prevent Paul David Hope from making his last minute decision to join a
lonely tourist group heading in there late in the afternoon of a remarkably
chilly late October day. Neither did the
fact that he really knew nothing about caves and had just stepped in as a
lark—because he had some time to kill before catching his redeye flight back to
New York—keep him from lagging behind the group. His thoughts were vaguely, and in fact,
almost unconsciously, preoccupied with his sister’s divorce from a guy named
Seth, which she had insisted that he, Paul, manage, although he was just out of
law school and barely set up in his own practice, and thus not nearly as
qualified as all his family and acquaintances seemed to think, at least not in
his own eyes, and probably not in the opinion of anyone in the profession,
anyone who had a reasonable idea of how messy these things got. And yet, his impetuous sister had got the notion
in her head somehow that he was the one for it, and had insisted, and he found
himself saddled with the case, and immediately more than little bit in over his
head. He had been highly concerned,
until he discovered that Seth had not hired a lawyer at all and intended to
represent himself, a very unwise move, in Paul’s book, which had ensured that
things actually went rather smoothly after all, and Paul was able to wrap
things up smoothly, boosting his own self confidence and his reputation in the
eyes of his flighty sister.
All at once, Paul
looked about him and there was no one in sight.
Somewhere in the distance he could hear voices, but this cave did
strange things to sound. There was no
way to tell where the noises, the floating fragments of conversation, were
coming from. Something about the rock
walls, how they wound around, passages doubling back on themselves, again and
again, a twisted maze—somewhere in all of that, time and sound got mixed up.
Suddenly he heard echoes, but these
reflected noises were different, oddly familiar. His spine tingled, but for a moment he did
not understand. What? Where had he heard that odd voice
before? Strangely like his sisters, yet
masculine, like his own, yet more reedy. . . . He stopped dead. He remembered his voice on his own answering
machine. Take out the fuzz, and that was
it. Almost. The weird echo was in fact his own voice
reflected back to him, as if from the other side of a universe of
difference. There was still something
off. And he could not make out what this
voice—it? him? was saying. . . .
“Hello? Who’s there?” he called.
“Paul David Hope,” came the answer,
booming, reverberating.
“That’s, that’s MY name!”
“And it’s my name. You’re not going to understand, but I am
you. In 2054. Don’t you hear the sound of an old man in my voice? I’m . . . what you become. What we become, I suppose. But we have to have this conversation.”
Paul puts his hands to his
head! “Why?”
“Because you, I, we, must hear it,
in 2010, so that I can exist in 2054. If
I, if you, do not hear this conversation then, in your now, in your present, I,
or you, or we—whatever—do not become who I am in my now!”
“And who am I then, I mean, in
2054?” Paul heard a weird desperation in
his own voice.
“Well, you’re me, of course!”
“I mean what are you, what am I,
like?”
“I can only say that I am what you
will become with the knowledge of this dramatic conversation. It will change our life, Paul.”
“No!
Come on. This is bizarre. This is too weird!”
“It’s strange for me too,” the
spectral voice booms back. “To return to
this cave after all these years, knowing that I inflict upon myself the very
thing that has turned me into what I am, a man of science, who has seen both
great progress and great setbacks, great love and great isolation, and who is
continually wondering over time and space.
I forgot, until I told you just now, what year it was I was told. In a few days, you will forget it, try as you
will not to. And so I wondered, you will
wonder, when this day will come again.
That is the price of forgetting.
You will pay a price for the knowledge too, though. Your family will abandon you. All that respect you were feeling as a lawyer
will evaporate.”
“No!” Paul murmured. “I don’t want things to change. You know we hate change. So why are you doing this?”
“Don’t you see? We have no choice. This conversation happened the first time,
and so now it must happen again! I came
here because I had to. And you, alas,
you, I in 2010, have no choice but to listen, unpleasant though it be! And yet . . . I just have to try this: watch your step!”
“What?” Paul’s head was spinning. He staggered backwards, stumbled into a
stalagmite, and tripped. Rock leapt up
to meet his forehead.
When
he awoke, he was frigid, and alone.
Fun!
ReplyDeleteThanks! An old one but a fun one.
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