The Best of Kage Baker

Caverns of Mystery





They had been driving since before the sun rose, along the coast highway.

She had been up, packed already, when her father woke the boys and marched them downstairs to help him load the station wagon; she had heard her sisters complaining sleepily as her mother dragged them out of bed and made them dress. The baby wept in his cornflakes at the breakfast table, bewildered by morning in what seemed the middle of the night.

Everyone shut up once they were in the car at last. The little ones went to sleep in the back and even the boys were unable to stay awake long enough to punch each other more than once or twice. Her parents spoke quietly together in the front seat, while her mother drove through the dark, and she watched through the window as the city lights dimmed and fell behind. There were miles of lemon groves, appearing gradually as night drained away; the fog hung low over the long aisles of trees and the long drooping leaves of eucalyptus swayed as they rushed past, but all in silence.

The road turned inland and dawn broke over a rolling plain of oak trees and blackberry bramble, white starred with blossoms along the two-lane, all summer country.

Now and again there were the phantoms, but she had learned long since never to call attention to them. A man crouched beside his campfire, lifting his graniteware coffeepot from the coals, as his horse grazed peacefully nearby. Smoke rose from the stone chimney of a log house, and a woman in a long dress trudged out from the house to a shed carrying a milk can. A thing crawled up out of a creekbed, a skinwalker with a coyote’s head, and it turned to watch as the station wagon approached. Meeting her gaze, it leaped at the door; she pulled her glasses off and covered her right eye, as it clawed at the window. She turned her face away, refusing to

see it.

“Are you having another headache?” her mother said. She opened her eyes and met her mother’s gaze in the rear view mirror.

“No,” she said, a little sulkily. Her mother would never admit the phantoms were there, but she seemed to have developed radar that lit up whenever they were around. “I just got something in my eye.”

“Bill, is there any Kleenex in the glove box?”

Her father handed her a tissue over the back of the seat. He lit a pair of cigarettes and passed one to her mother.

She heard the thump and the yelp that meant the skinwalker had fallen away, and she relaxed. Her brothers woke and began to punch each other again. Her sisters woke and began to chatter like birds. The baby woke and cried. The road ran past barn-red Burma Shave verses appearing out of the fog, always rendered cryptic by one missing sign. The billboards began to feature ladies in bathing suits and the promise that they were only thirty miles from their destination; then fifteen miles; then five.

They came through a long tunnel of oak trees arching overhead, emerged into brilliant sunlight. Her father cranked his window down. “Man!” he said. “Smell that sea air!”

She sat up and looked out with interest. The station wagon was going slowly down a little white street with the sea at the end of it. There were old houses with gardens full of lilies. There were motor hotels, courtyards of tiny cottages. All the neon signs were rusting, all the paint was peeling, and sand blew in drifts and piled against the curb.

At the end of the street was an OFFICE sign in the shape of a swordfish, pointing to the nearest of a row of cottages on the edge of the dunes. Each cottage had its own palm tree, looking gray, weatherbeaten and miserable. But the blue sea sparkled and roared just beyond, a full four lines of breakers foaming white. Her mother steered into the crushed-shell drive and pulled up to the office.

“Okay, kids.” Her mother got out, went around to the back of the station wagon, and opened it to pick up the baby. The little girls scrambled out and ran immediately over the sand to the sea. She climbed out too. Her brothers were still fighting; her father hauled them out and belted them both, and they glared as he ordered them down to the beach in his master-sergeant voice. They marched off down the dune face, still shoving each other.

“Watch them, will you, honey? We need to go get the key,” said her mother, groping in the box of groceries they’d brought for a teething biscuit. She nodded, staring around in fascination.

There was an old gray building behind the cottages with the word ROOMS painted on one wall. Phantoms clustered on the porch, old men with pipes. They all looked more or less like Popeye the sailor, and all gazed listlessly out to sea. She followed their gaze to the beach.

The children played and fought amid more phantoms: fragments of ships, running horses, weeping women. A double row of old pilings ran from the bottom of the street ramp out into the water, long-broken snags, but their phantoms still rose under the sun of another year. Along the phantom planks of the pier a phantom donkey plodded, drawing a cart full of fish, and phantom men sat at its end mending nets.

She shivered and turned to look at the office. It was an old frame cottage with a bow window. Growing up against the window was a fuchsia bush. Its flowers were like little firecrackers. It had branched into the cottage through a broken pane and sprawled, profuse, lush, into the window seat. A phantom pirate stood on the other side of the glass, among the scarlet flowers. He looked into her eyes. He smiled at her, tenderly.


The station wagon was unpacked, the cottage inhabited. Theirs had two real murphy beds in the living room, one for the boys and one for the girls, and a kind of camp bed in an alcove off the hall, which would be hers. Her mother stalked about checking the mattresses for bedbugs while her father set up the baby’s crib. The other children were wrestled into bathing suits, towels were distributed, and her mother gathered up the wet clothes to take them to the washing machine by the office.

“Can I go for a walk?” she asked her mother. Her mother paused, her arms full of laundry, and gave her a searching look.

“No, you need to lie down for a while first. I think you’re overtired. Bill, doesn’t she look overtired to you?”

“Don’t argue with your mother,” her father said automatically, shrugging into his bomber jacket.

“I didn’t,” she said, sullen. “Sir.”

“Kids!” he said. “Line up! Wipe those smiles off your faces. It’s fourteen hundred hours and we will proceed to the beach. There will be no swimming beyond that last piling. There will be no fighting. There will be no crying. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir!” the others chorused. He marched them out of the house, and her mother went to do laundry. She unpacked her suitcase, setting her copy of The Wind in the Willows on the dresser at the foot of the bed.

She couldn’t sleep, and after a while got up and explored. The cottage was all right; there was only a little phantom in a sailor suit crouched in the windowseat looking out at the sea, and he seemed happy, and a kind-faced woman in the kitchen, cooking something on a phantom potbellied stove. They had been there a long time. On the back porch a phantom woman sat alone, smoking a cigarette and muttering angrily to herself.

When they were angry like that it was best not to notice them, best to close the right eye tightly and look away. Paying attention made them pay attention back, and that was never good.

She locked the back door, and settled down to re-read The Wind in the Willows.


The beach, when she was able to get down there early the next day, was wide and sky-reflecting, the tide far out, half a mile of flat sand rippled with wave patterns. Gulls roamed there, stabbing now and then at sand crabs in a half-hearted way, eyeing her approach but not troubling themselves to run. She walked along with her head down, absorbed in looking for shells and wave-tumbled glass, putting the best pieces in the bucket she carried.

There were phantoms drifting here and there, but they could be ignored. When she’d been younger they had frightened her badly, until she’d learned the trick of closing her right eye. It had helped to understand what they were, and to classify the different kinds.

None of them seemed to be ghosts, in the sense of spirits of the dead. Some were apparently like photographs, a lingering stain on the air, a moment of someone’s happiness or misery endlessly replayed. Some were so vivid they had attained a sort of awareness. Some weren’t even people: furniture, buildings, trees that had stood in one place so long their images had worn through time and remained when they were gone.

Some were old and wild, like the skinwalker, and inhabited the outdoors. Those could be dangerous, though some were benign. Some looked like real people, but weren’t, and those were always dangerous and she had learned never, ever to show that she noticed them. They did not drift, but moved sleek and arrogant through the world, doing what they liked.

There were others, too, who seemed to be hauntings of things people had only imagined, like the pirate in the window. The library was full of them, posturing or sitting alone in corners…

The beach grew narrower the farther she walked. White cliffs rose up to her right, full of fossil shells. She looked up at them and stopped in her tracks, with her mouth open.

Ahead, out on the clifftop, was the figure of a brontosaur. It stood stiffly in profile, and there was something wrong with its head. It was near a little brick house at the edge of the cliff.

Fascinated, she walked closer, ignoring the desperate phantom of a man who was trying to pull a phantom mule from a cave swamped by a phantom high tide. The brontosaur never moved; she got close enough to see that it was made of cement over a chickenwire frame, and had no head, but only a rusting unfinished wire outline. What was it doing there?


She had to choose her words very carefully.

“So, when I was out on the beach today, I went walking down by the caves? And, you know what, sir? Up on the cliff, somebody has built a pretend brontosaurus. Out of cement? And it’s really big. And I was just wondering if we could drive out there, and look at it?”

“Are you making this up?” said her father.

“No, sir!”

“Then you take me out on the beach and show me,” he said.

“Bill—” said her mother.

“No, I can show you!” She was already at the door, pulling on her hooded sweater. “Come on, Dad!”

Muttering, he lit a cigarette and followed her out to the edge of the dune. He scowled as he looked where she pointed, and then his face cleared.

“Son of a bitch!” he said, grinning. “What is that?”

“A brontosaurus, sir,” she informed him.

“Hey, Willis?” He turned and called to the motel’s owner, an elderly man who was presently cleaning fish at the little open shed in the courtyard. “You know anything about the dinosaur up there?” He jerked a thumb at it over his shoulder.

“Caverns of Mystery,” said Mr. Willis, without looking up. “Place up on the highway. Fellow has some caves on his property. Sells tickets to see ’em.”

“Huh.” Her father rubbed his chin. “Would the kids like it?”

Mr. Willis shrugged. “If they like caves,” he said.


The headless dinosaur stood in an open field, knee deep in the grass of late summer. At its feet was a leaning plank sign, painted in straggling letters: CAVERNS OF MYSTERY.

Her mother parked the station wagon at the edge of the field. The children ran at once down the unpaved track to the dinosaur. She followed more slowly, savoring the approach. Her parents followed more slowly still, for the baby had decided to walk between them, holding their hands.

They circled the dinosaur three or four times, peering up at it, before her father said: “And the mystery is, what’s the mystery?” The children looked at him.

“But it’s a dinosaur,” said one of her brothers.

“I expect there are fossils in the caverns,” said her mother. They followed the path to the little brick house at the edge. It had a dutch door with the top half open, and a sign that said OPEN and another that said Admission 25 cents.

“Jesus, this had better be some mystery,” said her father.

There was a boy on the edge of the cliff, a little older than she was, wearing only swimming trunks and sandals. He was throwing stones far out into the sea, with a smooth grace of movement that made her stare. He looked at them and turned away deliberately, with something defiant in the set of his shoulders. There was a scar on his neck, a raised pink line.

Inside were shelves and a dusty counter, displaying a case of arrowheads and baskets of rock specimens for sale, with faded typewritten labels describing what they were. A man sat behind the counter, faded and dusty as his wares. He looked up at them with no particular interest.

“Where’s the caverns, pal?” said her father, with a slight edge in his voice. The man stood and, without a word, opened a door to his left.

There, instead of the room with faded wallpaper and dusty windows she had expected, were wooden steps going down into blackness loud with the boom and hiss of waves. The man flipped a bakelite switch and a lightbulb went on, somewhere far below.

“Here you are,” he said, flatly. “That’ll be two dollars.” Her father grimaced but paid it, and the man counted out eight pink tickets and handed them around, unsmiling. He edged past them and leaned out the door. “Ricky! You get off your lazy butt and come mind the counter. Step this way, folks.”

He preceded them through the doorway. She was the last to go down and heard a scatter of thrown shell-gravel strike the windows, but the boy remained outside.

They descended three flights of splintery stairs into the cavern, with a steep drop from the last step into a bank of shingle. Her brothers leaped and ran crunching to where the sea washed in under a lip of rock with a rank iodine smell.

“Boys!” cried her mother. “Stay back!”

“Yes, Ma’am, they should,” said the man. “Every now and then you’ll get a big wave through there. You can get soaked.”

As the children staggered about and picked up agate and jade pebbles, he told them about the Spanish who had thought these cliffs were haunted, because strange moans came from the area during high tides; he told them about the rancher who had discovered the caverns in 1902, when his cow had fallen in through a sinkhole. He told them about the Indian bones that had been found there, and the cannon from a shipwreck, and the fossils.

“But no dinosaurs?” her father asked.

“There might be,” said the man, with a shrug.

At the far end of the cavern another one, smaller, opened out into darkness. It was blocked off by sawhorses. She made her way there, climbing from rock to rock, and peered over them. She saw fathomless blackness and a glimpse of light, a pure cokebottle blue so lovely she caught her breath.

“What’s in here?” she called, looking back over her shoulder.

“That part’s closed. Some of it fell in and it’s not safe now,” said the man, with an edge of flint coming into his voice.

“You come away from there right now,” said her mother, handing the baby to her father and starting after her.

“Okay, okay. Sheesh.” She turned and jumped down.

Back in the station wagon, her father said: “Well, that was some crock.”

“I thought it was neat,” she said.


Every Saturday night, Mr. and Mrs. Willis held a barbecue and clambake in the motel’s courtyard. After the children were put to bed the adults came out again and sat around the fire, drinking beer and chatting under the stars.

She couldn’t sleep, so she tiptoed into the front room and climbed into the windowseat, sitting with her feet drawn away from the little sailor phantom. She opened the window a crack and breathed in the night air, shivering in her pajamas. The adults were black silhouettes against the night, though now and again the fire would flare up and eyes would gleam out briefly, or beer bottles wink in the red light. She heard her father’s voice:

“Say, Willis, what’s the deal with the dinosaur up on the cliffs? That guy’s a goddam fraud.”

The old man chuckled. “Well, you didn’t expect a real Gertie the Dinosaurus, did you?”

“No, but a couple of bones or a skull or something, for the price he charged!”

“I reckon he figured folks would see it from the highway and pull over to find out what it was all about,” said Mrs. Willis. “He used to be pretty sharp, Sam Price.”

“Why doesn’t the dinosaur have a head?” asked her mother.

There was a pause. “He never finished it,” said Mrs. Willis at last.

“How come? He can’t have run out of money,” said her father.

There was a longer silence. Mr. Willis opened another beer, had a drink and said at last: “Guess he lost interest. His wife died around then.”

“Oh, dear,” said her mother.

“They bought that land, with what Sam’s brother paid him for his share in old Price’s ranch,” said Mr. Willis. “Real nice young couple. Sam built the house and the stairs down into the caves. He reckoned he could get rich showing ’em. Then he went and fooled around with another woman.”

“Alex,” said Mrs. Willis, reproachfully.

“Well, he did.” Mr. Willis looked sidelong at Mrs. Willis. “Anyhow. He broke it off and made up with the wife and they had that boy. But she didn’t get over it and she drowned herself.” He gulped down his beer.

“That ain’t how I heard it,” said Mrs. Willis. “Don’t you listen to him! That poor girl drowned by accident. The baby crawled down the stairs into the caves, somehow, and she went down there to get him out, only it was high tide, and she fell and the waves dragged her under.” She rose, shaking out her skirts. “That pie ought to be cooled now. I’ll go cut us some.”

“Bring me out another beer?” said Mr. Willis.

“You had enough,” she said, and went into the house. When the door had closed after her, Mr. Willis cleared his throat and leaned forward, and he spoke in a low voice that nonetheless carried:

“He did have another woman,” he said. “Foreign girl, I heard. And she went crazy when he broke it off and went back to Winnie. And what I actually heard was, she came sneaking back one day when Sam wasn’t there and got Winnie down in the caves and tried to kill her, and they both drowned.”

“Oh, that’s awful,” said her mother.

“And there was worse. She’d tried to kill the baby, too. Cut his throat.”

“Jesus!” said her father.

“At least he didn’t die. Grew up into a holy terror, though. Already been in trouble with the police.”

“I’m not surprised,” said her mother. “Poor child.”


She couldn’t get the lovely blue out of her mind. It had seemed like a window into another world. Was it a pool, that went down under the rock and had an outlet on the beach, where the light came in?

On the strength of that idea she got up early and went out by herself, all the way down the beach as far as the caves, looking up at the dinosaur until she was too close underneath to see it. The tide was out, with little purple crabs wandering to and fro, and deep wells of glass-clear water around boulders projecting from the sand. There were anemones and starfish there, and a cormorant sprawled out flat at the tideline. Its dead eye had a bloom on it, looked like a black pearl.

There were more caves around the far edge of the cliff, though she had to wade far out to get round to them, through surging water like ice and the unsettling caress of weed on her ankles. She became so preoccupied with exploring the caves that she nearly forgot about the pool; the caves arched up high, like cathedral vaults of limestone, and were carved all over with names and dates. There was a cartoon profile of a sailor dated April 2, 1886; there were even older inscriptions. The oldest was dated 1805 and followed by words in Spanish: Las Lloronas.

An old phantom sat on one of the boulders, a peaceful-looking man with white side whiskers, smoking a pipe. There was a second one a few paces away, but neither of them seemed in any way conscious of each other. The other phantom was a young man, wearing only trousers, and he was soaking wet and staring out to sea. Tears streamed down his face, he gulped back silent sobs, but never took his gaze from the bright water. He looked vaguely familiar.

She paid little attention to either of them. Backing into the water, she squinted up at the cliffs above, to see whether she could glimpse the brick house. “Oh!” she said, and shaded her eyes with her hands to see better.

Switchbacking up the face of the cliff was the remnant of a flight of stairs. It ended abruptly some dozen feet above the beach, its lower section swept away by a long-ago winter storm. Nor did it extend all the way to the clifftop; the earth had slid and buried its first dozen or so steps. What planks remained were silvered ancient wood, and a few mortared stones that anchored its landings.

“That must have been how people got down here in the olden times,” she said aloud. She saw a way to get up to them, by a series of finger-and-toeholds on the cliff face. The thought of what her mother would have said, were she standing there, decided her; she set her shoulders and ran forward, and scrambled upward.

It was harder than she thought it would be; she nearly slipped twice, and had at the last to grab for a bush thinly anchored in soil to pull herself over the edge. She was gleeful, though, as she tottered upright on the stair landing, and turned to look out at the sea. I bet I’m the first person that’s stood here in a hundred years, she thought.

She sat down and luxuriated in the isolation a while, until something went whizzing over her head. She looked up, following its trajectory: a rock? It plunked into the ocean. She remembered the boy, then.

Cautious, she climbed the stairs in a crouch, and went up the rest of the slope on hands and knees. Rising to the edge of the cliff, she looked up into the face of the boy. He dropped the stone he had been about to throw, and took a hasty step back; then started forward, scowling. He had a dark bruise over his cheekbone.

“Where’d you come from?” he demanded.

“The stork brought me, ha ha,” she said, and he didn’t laugh, so she added hastily: “Up the old steps. Did you know there’s a lost staircase down here?”

“Sure I know,” he said.

“Oh.”

They considered each other. He was shirtless, and barefoot; his upper body made a neat triangle, like an arrowhead pointed down. He had green eyes. This close, she could see the terrible scar on his throat; someone must have tried to cut it from ear to ear. She tried not to stare at it, never liking it herself when people stared at her eye.

He bent now and picked up the stone again, and hurled it into the sea.

“I liked the Caverns of Mystery,” she said.

“It’s just a big cave,” he said. He sat and pushed himself over the edge, and she backed down to the staircase. They stood there together a moment, looking out to sea.

“Stairs to nowhere,” he said. “Pretty neat.”

“Like you could walk down the stairs and end up back in time,” she said. “Like in the days of the pirates or something.”

“Except you couldn’t do that, because you can’t live in the past,” said the boy. “That’s what my dad says. It isn’t there anymore.”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “It’s all around. People just don’t see what isn’t happening right now. But everything that ever happened is still going on.”

“Aw, that’s nuts,” he said. “Like, cowboys and Indians fighting right there in town, while the cars go by? And dinosaurs on the freeway. And pirate ships out there!” He pointed at the sea.

“Yes,” she said. “You just can’t see them.”

“That’d be really something. I wish I could,” said the boy.

No, you don’t, she thought. The boy sat down on the staircase, and she sat beside him. He turned and looked at her. “What happened to your eye?”

She winced, turned her face away. “I have this problem with seeing,” she said.

“Is it blind? Because if it was blind, you could wear an eyepatch,” he said. “Except I don’t think girls wear eyepatches.”

“Yes, they do,” she said. “Just not black ones. I had a green one for a while. It didn’t help. And the kids at school made fun of me.”

“I hate school,” he said. “My dad made me wear a tie. Like it was Sunday School. Everyone laughed. I hate my dad. Do you hate yours?”

“No-o,” she said. “I think my brothers do, though. But I hate my mom sometimes.”

“How come?”

“She never stops talking about my eye,” she said. “She never thinks I can do anything by myself. Like I was retarded or something. And she’s watching me all the time.”

“My dad watches me, too,” he said. “What’s he think I’m going to do, anyway? Sometimes I think, well, I’ll show him. I’ll do something. But my mom’s dead.”

She stopped herself from saying I know and merely said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I don’t remember her. You can’t live in the past.”

“But the past lives,” she said. “So you could say your mom is alive. She’s just in the past.”

“I guess.” He grew restless, jumped to his feet. “Let’s see where these stairs go.” She followed him, and stood aghast when he came to the last step and launched himself out into the air and sunlight. He landed in the ankle-deep surf and rolled, laughing. She stepped to the edge and froze, terrified; then she thought, Well, he didn’t get hurt, and so she jumped too, not wanting to seem a coward.

For a second she almost went somewhere wonderful, a realm of possibilities where there were pirate ships and kindly satyrs; but gravity stepped in and she hit the wet sand as the tide receded, and folded up. Her chin hit her knees, her glasses went flying, and she fell over and lay there trying to get her breath back. He hadn’t noticed. He was staring out to sea. She was grateful.

Climbing to her feet, she retrieved her glasses and limped over to him.

“That was cool,” he said. “Want to explore the caves?”

“Uh-huh,” she said. She heard her name called and turned, and was horrified to see her mother and sisters far down the beach. “Crumbs. I have to go.”

“You could stay if you wanted,” he said, hopefully, not taking his eyes from the horizon.

“No, I couldn’t. She’ll yell, and she’ll come get me.”

“Fine, then.” He waded out into the surf, and dove like a cormorant into a wave and vanished.

“Wasn’t that the boy from the dinosaur caves?” said her mother sharply, when she joined her.

“Yes.” She looked out at her sisters, who were shrieking with excitement as they jumped through the lines of surf.

“I don’t want you playing with strange children,” said her mother.

“We weren’t playing,” she said irritably. “We were just talking.”

“And look at you, you’re soaking wet and you’ve got those circles under your eyes again. Were you reading under the covers last night?”

“No.”

“Go on back to the house and put some dry clothes on. And I think you ought to take a nap.”

Muttering to herself, she trudged back to the cottage.


Her father was leaning against the fish shed, smoking and talking with an old man who was opening clams there.

“Sir, what does “Las Loronas” mean?” she asked, as she approached.

“What? Sounds like something Mexican,” said her father.

“What was that?” The older man turned. She repeated it. “Las Yoronas,” he corrected her.

“This is one of my kids, Luis,” said her father. “What’s it mean?”

“La Llorona? She’s a ghost. Means, “the crying woman”,” said Luis. “Old Spanish story. Her, ah, her baby drowned, and she walks all night by the water weeping and moaning, trying to find it. Bad luck to hear her, I always heard.”

“But it’s only a story,” said her father, glancing at her.

“Sure,” said Luis. “Nothing but a ghost story. ‘Las Lloronas’, I don’t know, that means more than one of them.”

“It was carved on a rock down by the caves,” she said.

“Oh! That place,” said Luis, and turned away.

“I’ll bet some Mexicans carved it there,” said her father. “You remember what the guy at the Mystery Caverns said, about the wind moaning in the caves, and people used to think they were haunted? That’s all it is.”


They went on a picnic the next day, farther up the highway, a place where a creek flowed down to the sea. There were moonstones here and there in the shingle, and her parents set the children searching for them, until the boys tired of it and started throwing handfuls of pebbles at each other. One of her sisters saw a snake, and screamed. The baby found a sun-dried dead fish and protested when her mother pried it out of his fist. There was an Indian crouched on the streambank, filling jars of water, but he was only a phantom.

That night she dreamed of the blue light that had shone up through the water in the cave. It was fathomless, so beautiful a blue she woke crying.


The next day was Sunday, and her father made them all dress and go to the church in town, even though they were on vacation. When she made her way back to the caves after church, the boy was sitting on the old staircase, looking a little forlorn. He started as she pulled herself up over the edge.

“Oh, it’s just you.”

“Just me,” she agreed. “I had to go to church. Do you go to Saint Catherine’s?”

“I don’t go to church,” he said.

“Your dad doesn’t make you go?”

He shook his head. “My dad tried to have me baptized there when I was a baby, and the priest wouldn’t do it. So my dad said he was never setting foot in there again.”

She was scandalized. “But babies who don’t get baptized go to Limbo! Gee, that was some mean old priest.”

“I don’t care.” The boy stared out at the sea. The wind was from offshore, bringing the sound of bells ringing for the midday service. Gulls circled and cried overhead.

“I have twenty-five cents,” she said. “I was supposed to put a dime in the collection plate, but I dropped it and it rolled under the pew, and by the time I crawled under and found it the man with the little basket was gone, but there was another dime and a nickel down there. Can I go see the Caverns of Mystery again?”

“You want to see something better? Come on.” He led her up over the top of the cliff, and then trotted off in the direction of the dinosaur. She followed along the dirt track through the high grass. He crouched and scrambled under the dinosaur’s belly, and vanished. She got down on hands and knees and crawled after him, and a moment later stood up and found herself in a barrel chamber of lath and chicken wire. He was sitting crosslegged a few feet farther in, looking at her expectantly.

“Wow,” she said. “This is pretty neat.”

“If you climb up the neck, you can spy on the cars on the highway,” he said. “Go on, take a look.”

She obliged him, gingerly avoiding rusty nails, climbing up the long slanting tunnel of the neck to the blue window where the dinosaur’s head would have been. The wind whistled through the ends of wire that stuck out into space. She looked out at the highway and watched a pink and black sedan zoom past. She looked down at the meadow below. Two phantoms stood there, looking up at the dinosaur proudly.

The man was wearing overalls and work boots, had his arm around the woman. He was grinning, gesturing, speaking silently and pointing at the dinosaur. The woman was small and meek-looking, with her hair pulled back in a bun. The man had the same face as the weeping phantom on the beach. More: he had the same face as the man behind the counter.

She made the connection, and filed it in with the other adult sorrows she had catalogued. Something sad had happened here, but sad things happened all the time. They were better ignored. She turned her face away and crawled back down out of the dinosaur’s neck.

“You should put a head on this, one of these days,” she said. “With the mouth open, so you could still look out.”

“My dad won’t finish it,” the boy said. “He never finishes anything. I think he’s nuts.”

“You could do it when you grow up.”

“I’m not sticking around here when I grow up,” he said, scornfully. “I’m going to join the Merchant Marine.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like the Navy, only different,” he said. “You want to go see the caverns now?”

There was no one behind the counter. “Where’s your dad?” she asked.

“He went into town. I run the place when he’s away,” said the boy breezily, opening the cave door and turning on the light. “We don’t need tickets. Let’s go down.”

They descended. The light was streaming full through the gap where the sea was only just beginning to wash in, with the turning tide, a few cream-edge waves running up the shingle. She glanced over at the smaller cavern, beyond the sawhorses, and saw blue lights dancing in the darkness. “Oh—” She started toward them. He followed close.

“I wish this part hadn’t fallen in,” she said.

He pulled back one of the sawhorses. “It didn’t fall in. You want to see?”

“But your dad said it wasn’t safe.”

“He just made that up,” said the boy, and bounded up the slope into the cavern. “It’s keen in here. I swim in here all the time. Come look.”

She followed. The blue lights swam lazily. There was the grotto she had only glimpsed from the entrance, glowing like an aquamarine. Some trick of sunlight shining down into all that white limestone, reflected somehow up into the cavern where it opened out, who knew how far below?… And there was something down there, shining in the other world, a flash of gold in the blue…

She moved forward involuntarily, and then saw the phantoms.

The women were locked together, struggling at the edge of the pool, and the limpid water in a bygone hour roiled and foamed white. The small woman no longer looked meek; her teeth were bared, her dark eyes flashed with hatred, her wet hair snaked around her face as she clawed at the other. And the other…

The other woman groped for her adversary’s throat with salt-white hands. Her lips were coral-red, her golden hair floated out behind her as she sank further into the water, her eyes glowed like green moons. Something broke the water in a white fountain, sending slow drops spinning upward as light coruscated on gleaming scales.

She stared. Beside her, the boy had turned his back and was pulling down his trunks. He stepped out of them, turned and dove into the pool. He was grinning when he surfaced.

“Skinny dipping! You want to come in?”

She blushed. “No, thank you—I—”

“Nobody’ll see,” he said. “It’s nice. It’s not cold. Really.”

Still, she hesitated. She was pretty sure that if her parents ever found out that she’d taken off her clothes in front of a stranger, the punishment would be unimaginable, certainly worse than what her brothers had incurred for setting fire to the garden shed. And yet, she wondered what the water would feel like on her bare skin…

And his body was a beautiful color, in the undersea light. The gold glinted up from below, backlit him. She cleared her throat.

“What’s all that gold, down there?”

He looked at her sharply. “You see it?”

“Yes.”

He swam close, looked up into her face. “It’s treasure,” he said, earnest, pleading. “Gold and jewels from old wrecks. The storms washed it in. There’s tons of it down there. You can dive down and touch it. It’s easy. Come on.”

“Can I come in with my clothes still on?”

“Sure, if you want. Come on. There’s this neat place down there, I can show you. Nobody stares at you there, nobody laughs. You’re like me, you’d really like it. Come see.”

She was reaching up to take off her glasses when the hoarse voice cried, “What are you doing there?”

She turned, and saw the faded man standing at the bottom of the stairs, no phantom now. He crossed the cavern in what seemed like four bounds, and had grabbed her by the arm when he looked down and saw the boy. There had been anger in his face, before; now there was an emotion she couldn’t understand at all, some adult compound of revulsion and fear.

“I gave you a chance, didn’t I, Ricky?” he said, in the sort of voice one grownup uses to another. He let go her arm and drew something from the pocket of his overalls: a monkey wrench. “I gave you every chance. You come out of there.”

“You go to Hell!” the boy snarled, and only then did she see that the pink scar on his neck had opened on either side and was pulsing, pulsing in the water.

“Oh,” she said, realizing that this was one of those places where the jagged edges of the world showed, the parts people weren’t supposed to see, the madness under the smooth rational surface. Yet here all the story fragments linked up, all the images came together into coherence. “Oh. She wasn’t jealous after all. She just wanted her baby back—”

The man whirled, staring at her. She didn’t know what this new look in his eyes meant, either, but she understood well enough that if she didn’t get away from him as fast as she could, something bad was going to happen.

She turned and ran across the outer cavern. Her foot slipped on the shingle; she lurched straight down into a receding wave, and before she could rise to hands and knees another one burst in beneath the rock and caught her, pulling her under.

A second later she burst into sunlight and air, and dogpaddled frantically, looking around. The wave was sucking her out to sea. She caught a rock and managed to hold on, losing her glasses as the wave receded. Once she got her feet under her she was able to wade for the base of the cliff, leaning against the pull of the tide. Around the cliff’s edge and she walked up onto hard sand, and after a moment got her breath and ran.

Her mother scolded her for coming home soaked and with skinned knees, and for having lost her glasses. She was sent to bed, where she huddled gladly, trying to get warm.

Las Lloronas. She thought about the woman looking for her baby, moaning and lamenting. But the caves had moaned long before the boy had been born. The Indians and the Spanish had known they were haunted. She wondered whether there were stories so powerful they settled in a place and shaped everything and everyone around them, so they played out over and over again. And some of them must overlap, in layers, to make new stories…

On their last night by the sea, her parents threw a party for the friends they’d made. They built a bonfire on the beach. Her father carried down two cases of beer and a barbecue, and her mother brought blankets and marshmallows and hamburger wrapped in aluminum foil. Her brothers and sisters ran around in the dark.

The stars glittered, thousands, more than she’d ever seen in the city. The Milky Way trailed down to the horizon. She walked away from the firelight to see it better. The tide was out, and the stars were burning on the wet flat sand too, the dark mirror disturbed only by a crab that made its slow sidelong way down the beach.

She heard the boy calling, and looked up and saw him standing just beyond the first line of breakers. He looked cold and scared.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“They came and took my dad away,” he said, in a hoarse voice. His lip was split, and he was missing a tooth.

“Who did?”

He didn’t answer her. He just stared.

“What are you going to do now? You want to come up to our fire?”

He shook his head. “I’m going to run away,” he said. “Join the Merchant Marine. You want to come, too?”

“Yes, but I’m a girl,” she said, “We can’t do that kind of thing. Please, come up to our fire and get warm.”

But he shook his head again, backing away into the dark water, and she knew he wouldn’t come ashore, and she ached to run after him and dive into the night waves with him. She didn’t, though. She stood there with tears running down her face, watching him vanish in the white spray and the starlight.