THE CHASE: LUCY
ONE AFTER ANOTHER, Pierre, carrying the French horn case, Arielle, Adam, and I ran across the basement, ducked, then squeezed our bodies between the stone lips. For one step inside the cavern, light followed us, but a dozen steps ahead was utter darkness. I extended my hands, as though the darkness were a series of curtains I must part.
“In my pocket, I always have a small torch,” Pierre said, turning on the device. “Farther down the corridor, we will find my workshop.”
“Matches?” Adam asked. “Perhaps spare flashlights?” I heard the quick edge in his voice that arose whenever the situation was urgent and in need of practical action.
“In the storeroom.”
Light from Pierre’s small flashlight bored into the darkness, and he began to move forward. “No doubt the gang will eventually force the door and follow us.”
“Your father?” I asked.
“I have obeyed him,” Pierre answered.
When Pierre seemed to disappear sideways, I knew he had stepped through a fissure in the wall and into the cavity he had used for a workshop. Pierre’s light illumined a rough wooden table, a pile of small stones, and flashlights. Red, yellow, and blue flashlights stood upright on the table.
“Will they have lights?” I asked.
“Perhaps they brought torches with them,” Pierre answered. “Or they will find torches in the house. No doubt they will follow us. They want your flash drive, Lucy, as well as the codex.”
A thud reverberated through the cave. “They’ve forced the door now. They see the darkness. But perhaps they’ve not found torches yet. Probably they’re running down the stairs. Quickly, quickly—” He touched my arm. “You’re trembling, Lucy.”
“It’s chilly. I’m not afraid.”
“No,” he agreed. “Not intrepid Lucy. Not bold Arielle.” He touched his daughter’s shoulder. When he took off his jacket and placed it over my shoulders, Adam immediately gave his jacket to Arielle. “And here are matches for your pockets.”
“We have a great advantage,” I said as I flicked on my flashlight, “having been here before.” The beams from each of our flashlights were strong and bright, more powerful than Pierre’s elegant pocket light.
“Follow me,” he said.
As we stepped back into the passage, another low thud sounded.
“They went back for something.”
With all the flashlights burning, the corridor seemed safer. When we came to the first crevasse, no one hesitated to step over it, though the clatter of the stone Pierre had dropped into the crack still echoed in my memory. We hurried on, Pierre in front and Adam in the rear. Ahead I saw the shadow of a bear, then realized that a rock shape had cast the image. In the corridor coated with calcite, the white mineral reflected and brightened our lights.
Here was the white-veiled panel depicting animal tenderness, but we passed it without pausing. The thought skipped through my mind that probably many other drawings and paintings had been totally obscured, sealed beneath the calcite, and I wondered if there might be some way to melt it away. Our footsteps echoed off the stone walls. We sounded confident and unafraid, but in my mind, Gabriel in his tweed jacket pointed the barrel of a handgun at me.
Because it was difficult to see anything lower than our knees, random rocks and shallow but unexpected depressions were more menacing. When we had earlier explored, we had moved slowly.
The corridor opened into the large arched room where aurochs, bison, and wedge-faced lions ran across the ceiling. When I directed a slash of light at the stampeding animals, the intention on their faces frightened me. The animals, too, were fleeing, their bodies jostling one another, and I felt the muscles of my own face tightening with the intention to survive. Pierre’s light sought out the giant black cow, upside down, falling from the sky. She seemed awkward and disproportioned but also mythic and sinister.
Below her black bulk, Pierre stopped the group. “Perhaps you remember—here we have a choice of three arteries.” Although he gestured with his light in three directions, shadows concealed the openings. In the distance, we heard the echoes of men’s voices calling to one another.
“They are gaining on us,” Pierre said. “I want Lucy and Arielle to go together the way we went before. But I think it might be wise, Adam, for our group to split.”
“Which way shall I take?” Adam promptly asked, though I wanted to question the idea of dividing up.
“The middle way,” Pierre answered Adam. “It empties near the panel where the animals are drawn in outline jumbled atop each other. The chaos panel. My corridor runs through the section with ‘The Killed Man.’ All three of the corridors come to the place of the spotted horses and the handprints, but we must not wait for one another. Each must exit into the countryside as quickly as possible. Go down the valley and across to one of the farmhouses.”
“Your father—” I began, remembering the sound of gunshot as we rapidly descended the staircase. “I hope—”
“Go now,” he interrupted. “I’ll hide here. They will be confused when they reach this room. I will wait until they seem to arrive at a decision, then lure them after me. Along my corridor there are many crevasses and sudden drops. I know all the pitfalls and traps—very well. Should you hear screaming, know it will not be my voice.”
Although we hesitated to part, we all heard reverberating footsteps.
“Godspeed,” Adam said, and disappeared into the middle tunnel.
Arielle and I both embraced Pierre, then hurried on, with Arielle in the lead.
With only two flashlights, the darkness pressed more insistently. Our path began to descend steeply, and the continuous rock bed underfoot looked and felt slick. When one of my feet slid, I reached out to steady myself against a wet rock wall. Arielle was gliding on, sure-footed. I resolved to run faster to keep up with Arielle. I trailed my fingertips along the stone to give myself confidence, but moving with an extended arm both unbalanced and tired me. The wall I touched spoke its unforgiving hardness. As my light splashed the wall, I saw where two fingers, ancient ones, surely had stroked the surface when it was soft clay. Farther on in a small bulbous chamber, I saw high scratch marks of prehistoric bear claws in the rough, flat stone, and then an outline of a bear’s head and neck frightened me.
The passage kinked, and turned, and descended still deeper. When Arielle passed the cunning little goat, drawn low and near the floor, she pointed her beam down to spotlight it and looked back to smile at me. Shadows mottled Arielle’s face with a darkness like a mask. My girl! my heart insisted. When I had followed her through the bright, mazelike streets of the village of Nag Hammadi, Arielle had turned her head back to be sure she was followed, her sunglasses like a mask.
A sudden catch in my side, cruel as a hook, made me stop. As I pressed the pain in my side, I panted. My lungs disliked taking in the cave air so quickly. My mind whirled with tight dizziness, and I admitted to myself my need to move more slowly. “Arielle, Arielle,” I called, as softly as I could. When she heard me, she promptly stopped. “Run on for help,” I directed. “I’ll find my way. I remember.”
Rapidly Arielle sped back—the sound of her feet pattering on the stone—and put her hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure?”
I gasped for breath. I looked down at her good running shoes. In another world, Arielle was a runner of marathons.
“Do you want me to take your pendant?” she asked.
“No. I—I’m used to keeping it.”
“Turn off, remember, before you come to that graffiti, the vulva, or you’ll have to backtrack.”
“Go.”
While I caught my breath, I listened to the lonely retreat of Arielle’s quick running till nothing but silence was left, and the sound of my own breathing. For a moment I knelt down to rest. I splashed the light again on the little goat, sweet with innocence, and strangely I thought of how Anne Frank had decorated her walls with pages torn from movie-star magazines.
So as not to waste its power, I turned off my light and sat down to rest in the darkness. The world was utterly and uniformly black. I thought of fear, though I myself was not afraid, and wondered if fear were not the original sin. Not disobedience. Every child knows that at some point it becomes wise to disobey. And every wise parent forgoes punishment for disobedience at some point.
Fear and violence, twin sins. Gabriel and his men feared the modification of ideas—the idea that a fatherlike God had literally created a first man and woman, the idea of the uniqueness of life on earth and our cosmic significance.
In the silent dark, I half fell in love with nimble-footed thought.
The friend of P, the Priest, had only written his own thoughts: the miracle of creation, for him, was the birth of new being, of children, and since that act required two, his ideas of creation were dualistic. The Strophe of his dance of ideas was Something, and the Antistrophe had been Nothing, and the synthesis had been Everything. The ground of being was Everywhere. I thought it a lovely idea, mystical and appropriately abstract. In his creation narrative, Thom would have written of matter and antimatter and the Big Bang.
P’s friend had written a human-centered, a family-centered, procreational version of Creation. P’s own version was one based on an idea of art: the lone Artist as Creator. It takes only one to create. One man, one woman, could create art. By himself, P’s God fashioned Adam from the dust. For the first time in my adult life, I liked that version. Did I not believe in the sacredness of Art?
I rested till I could no longer hear rasping in my breath. How strange to be tucked in a pocket, deep in the earth, to dwell in the black blank of darkness, to be pursued by my fellow humans, and to feel no fear. After all, with Adam, I had dwelt in paradise. I felt fulfilled, safe from a certain kind of failure. The satisfaction made me fear death less. Shining the flashlight before me, I slowly made my way along.
From some other direction, from all directions, I heard a faint scream. Gabriel? I could not wish him dead. I had known him too long and well. His pistol seemed the toy of a child. Perhaps I was losing my mind in the darkness.
My light shone on the large image of a shaggy vulva. The strokes depicting a woman’s hair were bold and angry. The man who had made them may have felt passion or mere insistence, but not tenderness. I had come too far, missed the turn.
Now I must backtrack. I pulled Pierre’s jacket closer to my body as I reversed my direction and moved back through the dark tunnel.