Paul Christopher - The Lucifer Gospel

“Like the Haunted Mansion at Disney World,” said Finn. “Only God is doing the haunting.”

“It’s awful,” said Hilts, staring. They continued along the boardwalk and into the next cave. It was the size of a front porch and about as exciting. It was also grotesque. A huge Last Supper undulated across the arching ceiling, like a huge picnic table in flight, Apostles and cherubs and clouds, Judas with a hairline like Dracula and a winding tale like a bad dream by William Blake. Tasteless, talentless, and badly researched. Christ facing left instead of right, Simon the Zealot with long hair rather than bald, chalice in front of Christ when there was none. Thirteen disciples, not twelve.

Now that’s interesting, thought Finn. Even an illiterate who was even remotely Christian in this nation knew there were twelve, although almost no one except a priest or minister could actually name them. She had specialized in religious art of the Renaissance and she wasn’t sure she could do it herself. She stared up at the gigantic, hideous meal floating above her on the stony dripping ceiling and ticked them off in her mind, left to right: Bartholomew, James the Lesser and Andrew, Judas, Peter and John, or Mary Magdalene if you were a Dan Brown fan, followed by Thomas, James the Greater and Phillip, then Matthew, Jude, and lastly, Simon the Zealot. So who was the thirteenth figure, looming off to one side behind Simon in this ghastly rendition of the world’s most famous painting and second most famous literary meal? She stared. There wasn’t a lot of detail in the eight-foot-tall figure glowing on a slime-covered rocky wall made even slicker by the volumes of rain seeping through from above. It was a male, wearing a robe, bearded, one arm at its side, the other raised and pointing at… what?

“The last figure on the right?”

“The one pointing?”

“That’s the one.”

“What about him?”

“What’s he pointing at, exactly? Can you tell?”

“Looks like some kind of drapery over in the corner,” answered Hilts, pointing the flashlight. On the far side of the room a large flow of soluble lime had dropped down to form a pool. When the water in the cave had receded or been pumped out there was nothing left behind except a flowing cascade of stone called a Baldacchino canopy.

“I want to take a look,” said Finn. She slipped under the guardrail of the boardwalk and stepped carefully onto the wet surface of the cave floor beyond. Water trilled coldly up to her ankles. Slipping now was not an option.

“Why?”

She still wasn’t quite sure, but she suddenly knew that something from her distant childhood was calling her. The excitement of opening the secret door in the wardrobe to Narnia, of entering Merlin’s Crystal Cave, stepping into Dr. Who’s phone booth or Ray Bradbury’s Green Town, which if she recalled was also in Illinois.

“Did you know that they call this whole part of Illinois Little Egypt, and nobody knows why?” she called out, her voice echoing in the semidarkness. She kept carefully in the cone of light thrown by Hilts’s flashlight and concentrated on the slippery footing.

“I didn’t know that, no,” said Hilts, following her off the wooden boardwalk.

“Some people say it’s because southern Illinois supplied a lot of grain to the north in the bad winter of 1830-31. Other people say it’s because the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri reminds them of the Nile Delta. For some reason people gave places a lot of Egyptian names around here: Cairo, Karnak, Dongola, and Thebes. Even Memphis, if you want to stretch a point. They even have a giant glass pyramid for a basketball arena.”

“I’m not sure I see the point.”

“If you’re in a Catholic church, where do you hide a candle?”

“With all the other candles,” he answered.

“Exactly,” she said. She reached the Baldacchino canopy, braced herself, and slid around to one side.

“What?” Hilts said, coming carefully up behind her.

“I think I found it,” she whispered.

“What?”

“The candle.” She moved two feet to the right and disappeared before his eyes. Hilts stared, playing the light over the waterfall-like slab of ancient flowstone. There was no sign of her.

“Where are you?”

“Right in front of you,” said her disembodied voice. Suddenly she was there again, her bright face and wet, spiky dyed hair shining in the flashlight beam.

“How did you do that?”

“It’s the Caverns of Wonder. A miracle.”

“Show me.”

“Give me the light and take my hand.”

He put his hand in hers and squeezed. She squeezed back and he handed her the flashlight. Suddenly the cave was plunged into total, blind man’s darkness, the complete absence of light. She tugged his hand and he slipped behind the canopy with her.

Hilts found himself in a stiflingly small passage directly behind the oozing apron of rock. It was a space so close he could feel the wet stone brushing against him front and back. He was in some terrible crawl space: a crack in the world.

“Oh, jeez.”

“It’s okay.” A click echoed in the stifling space. Light flushed to the right and he saw that the narrow passage led to his right. There wasn’t even room enough to turn around.

“You’re kidding.”

“Come on.”

She shuffled to the right down the stick-thin passage, and he had no choice but to follow. It was either that or be left in the darkness. The farther he went the higher his heart moved into his throat. He thought of a hundred situations: a fall of rock, more rain, mud, simply getting stuck, glued in place. Some basic Freudian-Jungian-Stephen Kingian thing: man’s unholy heart-pounding nightmarish fear of being buried alive; the slight tension as a train goes into a tunnel under a mountain of suffocating rock.

He shuffled forward, concentrating on the feel of the soft pads of flesh on her palm and the curl of her fingers around his own. She was as small and light as a child, but there was a fierceness in her that he would have associated with a drill sergeant. It was as though times like this brought out the strength in her, a steel core able to withstand the worst that man or nature had to offer. Survival instinct. Something in her DNA that went back a million years.

“Look,” she whispered. Hilts suddenly realized that he’d been shuffling along with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. He opened them. Directly ahead the tunnel seemed to widen. Finn reached up with her free hand and touched the stone.

“This has been worked,” she said.

“Worked?”

“It’s not natural. It’s man-made.” She shifted along another few feet and Hilts felt as though he’d been released from jail. There was room to move. The passage had at least a foot of leeway on either side.

Hilts saw that she was right. In the pale glow from the flashlight the marks on the stone were obvious. Someone had carved out the passage in this godforsaken hole in the ground. They moved along with ease now and both of them became aware that the tunnel was gradually both turning and sloping downward. Sometimes the natural untouched stone could be seen; whoever had done this had followed the course of a natural fault. Thinking about the drapery of rock back in the cave far behind them, it occurred to Hilts that this might have once been the natural course of a stream or spring. Finn agreed.

They went on for an hour. Hilts began to have fond sense memories of the huge Heartland Big Slamble, or whatever it had been at the Interstate Denny’s that morning. A cup of the worst roadside coffee in the world would have truly been a miracle at this point. The rain and the steady forty-degree chill of the caves was striking to his bones. The claustrophobia had receded but by no means had disappeared. An hour in meant an hour out if they went back the way they’d come, and his imagination was fully capable of constructing desperate, gloomy horror stories. So far at least, thank heavens, there had been no bats or other subterranean wildlife. Hilts was not a big fan of things that made your skin crawl; deserts, not storm drains, were his area of expertise. And then, instantly, the narrow path came to an end. Light.