“Sounds like that’s happening anyway,” she said. “The grinding noises that elevator makes? My teeth hurt.”
“It sounds bad”—he laughed—“but you get used to it. This cave is similar to those I’m restoring in Matera. The houses there are all built on top of hand-carved foundations, sometimes a few rooms, sometimes multifloored palazzi. The families added on to the structures above as they amassed greater wealth. Which is essentially what happened here.”
“Interesting,” said Callie, looking around.
“This wasn’t carved with hand tools, though. Granite is not soft, like tufo stone; these are a natural phenomenon. The structuring of the floors and the passageways—what you saw from the elevator—was done later by construction crews.”
“The more money, the bigger the house?”
“Exactly. Though the original Whiting wealth was amassed almost entirely from ill-gotten gains.”
“Bootlegging,” she said. She’d also heard gunrunning.
“Among other things. Cocaine and heroin in the early seventies. We were quite the family before my father married my mother. Thanks to her, fame, fortune, and respectability are our new métier.”
Callie walked over to what appeared to be an open well in the stone floor surrounded by a polished wooden rim. She could hear water lapping. “What’s this for? Bathtub gin?” Now she could hear the sound of the ocean.
“One would think,” he said. “We call it the sea well. Actually, it’s an early attempt at a hot tub, for seaweed baths. There’s kelp lining the walls, and when the water is heated, it releases its oils.”
“Seaweed baths? That sounds kind of…slimy.”
“It’s great for the skin.”
“How do you heat the water?”
“There’s a gas heater a few feet down that warms the water in the upper level.”
“It has levels?”
“It’s very deep. The water goes in and out with the tide.”
“Are there seats?”
“About three feet down, there’s a rim you can sit on.”
She ran her hand along the top of the well and then tested the water. Her left hand had been burning since Northampton. Probably from the roughened quartz surfaces of the bowls. Or the encounter with Sister Agony. The warm water and the oils were soothing. “It’s quite warm.”
“Only when the tide is high.” He laughed. “When I was younger, this place was off-limits, so it was, of course, the only place I wanted to go. I used to sneak down here. And I loved the sea well. I got stoned one night and decided to stay in longer than I should have.” He shuddered. “Not such a good idea.”
“Did you turn into a prune?”
“The tide was going out. Below the pipes and the heater, the walls are slick with kelp. There’s no way to climb out. And it’s much colder below the heater. I was in there for six hours before the tide came up again.”
“Oh God,” she said.
“Almost died of hypothermia. And sufficiently scared the hell out of myself. Amazing the things you experience as the body is shutting down. It was like some kind of limbo between life and death.”
I can understand that feeling better than most.
“The colder I got, the more I imagined I was dead already, that bony fingers were grabbing me and trying to pull me under. It was lucky I knew that putting up a struggle would just send the blood to my extremities and kill me faster. Otherwise, I would have fought those hallucinations, and I probably wouldn’t be here right now.”
“God. That’s horrifying. Did your parents rescue you?”
“The tide came up, and I crawled out. They hadn’t even known I was down there.”
“Did you tell them?”
“I made it to the phone,” he said, pointing to the house line. “I had to be hospitalized for several days. As soon as they were certain I was going to live, they grounded me for a month and forbade me from ever going in this tub again without their supervision. Which was totally unnecessary. I haven’t been in it since.”
He led her away from the sea well to the middle of the room. “Anyway, this room, and not the hot tub of horror, is what I brought you to see. The acoustics in here are a lot like those in the healing caves in Matera,” he said. He sang a note, and the sound circled the room, vibrating against the granite. She listened, then added a note in harmony, and the echo circled the room.
“The sound is amazing,” Callie said, impressed. “We could be inside one of my singing bowls.”
“There are veins of quartz running through the granite,” he said, pointing to one. “Limestone as well. I think this would be a great place to treat my mother. I’d be glad to set up the room for you.” He took the bowl off the couch, carried it to the middle of the room, and carefully placed it on the floor, motioning for her to play.
She hit the bowl once with the rubber wand to prime it, then slowly began to pull the wand around the perimeter. The sound was even richer and deeper than she had imagined.
“This is unbelievable.”
She played it again. The sound moved elliptically, circling both from left to right and then from overhead to the floor. She listened, her eyes following the pattern. “It needs to be cut back a bit. The sound is supposed to circle clockwise, but it’s moving this way as well.” She indicated overhead and along the floor.
“Would a blanket on the floor fix that? Maybe a rug?” Paul said.
She hit the bowl one more time, listening intently, nodding.
“You think it will work?” Paul asked.
“It should work well for her. Your mother’s resonant frequency is strong.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“Everything and everyone vibrates to a certain frequency. Measured in tone and sound waves. If you can match it, the tone acts like a soothing massage on her cells.”
“Will that stop the pain?”
“Pain is interesting,” Callie said. “It has a particular frequency that’s as unique as that of the individual, but our pain receptors can only handle so much information. If we can match the vibration of the pain frequency, making the same sound it makes, the receptors get overloaded, and the pain often just disappears.”
“And how do you do that?”
“I listen,” she said.
Paul looked at her oddly.
“You think I’m crazy,” she said.
“I don’t, actually,” he said. “There was a sound study done in some of the healing caves around Matera. They were trying to discover the caves’ frequency. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but I know they all came out with the same number.”
“Do you remember what the frequency was?”
“I think it was ten something.”
“That’s impressive,” she said. “Very low. Ten and a half herz is supposed to be an ideal healing frequency.”