Rick Shelley: Son of the Hero

Then I heard something else, sort of a soft scraping sound. The first time, it came and went so quickly that it might have been my imagination. But it certainly got my attention.

"What the hell's going on?" I mumbled as I stood. I looked around quickly while I dug out my flashlight. My heart seemed to be thumping around a little crazily. It didn't help at all to see that I was certainly in a cave, not just in some part of the basement I had never known about. I could see a faint light-still off to my left-and guessed that it was coming from the mouth of the cave.

Then I got the flashlight turned on and discovered that I wasn't alone in the cave. The flashlight started shaking as if 1 had a bad case of coffee nerves, like after pulling an all-nighter to get ready for finals. Deeper in the cave-on the side away from the faint glow-maybe twenty feet from me, beyond a small pool of water, there was a lizard staring at me. Some lizard. It was seven feet from nose to tail, two feet high, as close as I could make out under the circumstances-the circumstances being that I was scared a lot worse than I like to admit. A long forked tongue flicked in my direction. The eyes blinked once. It was no Komodo dragon, and I couldn't think of any other lizards that could be so big.

I thought it looked hungry, but that might easily have been my imagination.

For a long moment I stood frozen in place, not daring to move an inch, though that didn't stop the beam of my flashlight from continuing to wobble all over the place. I wondered how much time I would have to react if the lizard decided to charge. I had both hands full, bow and flashlight. I couldn't use the bow one-handed, and I couldn't do much of anything without the flashlight. I ruled out running for the cave's exit. First of all, I didn't know if I would be able to outrun the lizard. Secondly, I wanted to make sure that I could find the doorway back to the basement before I moved too far from where I was. I didn't know any other route home, and it looked all too certain that I was going to want to find my way back, maybe pretty damn fast.

Drop the bow, switch the flashlight to the left hand, pull the pistol, and shoot the damn thing, I told myself. Then I realized that I hadn't jacked a cartridge into the chamber.

"You're not scoring points for being prepared," I told myself as softly as I could.

The lizard's tongue kept flicking in and out. It blinked again. I glanced at the wall but didn't see any trace of the doorway at first, and that pumped another load of adrenaline through my system. When I finally caught a glimpse of badly tarnished silver, I breathed a little easier.

Pop back through the basement, get the gun ready, and shoot the damn thing from the doorway.

That sounded like an excellent plan. I could even run upstairs and get more firepower to bolster my courage.

That's the ticket, I decided. I counted three in my head and made my move. But the second I started to move, the lizard moved too-in my direction. It didn't move fast, but I wasn't waiting to find out for sure if it had "hostile intent." I threw my bow to the ground, more or less in the direction of the lizard, and started fumbling to get my pistol out and ready.

I was slow-way too slow. If that lizard had really been determined, I'd have been supper before I got a shell jacked into the chamber. But when my bow clattered on the stone, the lizard turned and scuttled off deeper into the cave. I could hear it moving farther off even after I lost sight of it.

I looked down at my hands. They were trembling. A deep breath helped, but for a bit all I could do was stand there. That lizard didn't have any business being there-or anywhere.

Finally, I realized that I wasn't accomplishing anything and that the damn lizard might come back. I took another deep breath and then took a long, close look at the wall until I could follow enough of the silver tracing to locate the door mentally. When I touched the silver with my rings, I could see into the basement room, and that reassured me.

I stepped right through then, just to assure myself that I could. Back in that strange-but-familiar basement room, I took my hand away from the door and breathed deeply, several times. There was a crazy jumble of thoughts bouncing around in my head, and "crazy" was still the operative word. I dearly wanted to dig out the rest of those beers and polish them off… but I remembered why I was in the cave in the first place.

"You're going to have to go back through there," I told myself. I may even have nodded. But after my encounter with that damn lizard, I had to make a quick trip upstairs. Somehow, my bladder managed to avoid letting go when I saw the lizard, but it was clamoring for attention-and it gave me an excuse to put off my return for a few more minutes.

Then, reluctantly, I stepped back through into the cave and let the doorway close behind me. This time, I had the pistol in my hand, cocked, with the safety off. At least I knew that if I could get back to the cave, I could get home.

If I could get by the lizard again.

I picked up my bow and started toward the mouth of the cave, counting my steps going out so I would know how far I had to come in to reach the door tracing.

Although I didn't waste a lot of thought on it (I had enough on my mind without that), the cave didn't look altogether natural. Dad and I had done a little spelunking. There wasn't much that we hadn't sampled over the years. Dad was gone so often on his "business trips" that he always wanted to spend a lot of time with me when he was home. For Dad, that meant doing things like hiking, camping, and exploring caves, not just watching ballgames or parades-though we did that too. This cave had been altered. Low spots in the ceiling had been hacked out. The floor was flat and met the walls almost at right angles. Most of the passage was room-high and eight feet wide.

Twenty paces from the tracing I didn't need the flashlight any longer. A few steps beyond that, the cave widened into a chamber about twenty feet square. In the center of the chamber, an altar-a large cube of rock with arcane symbols chiseled into its surfaces-had been erected. The cave walls around it were painted with exaggerated nudes, fat-bottomed women with huge breasts, like the fertility goddesses of the ancient Mideast.

Beyond that chamber, the cave narrowed down again, but the mouth wasn't far off. The last few steps I had to take hunched over. I stayed inside the mouth of the cave long enough to let my eyes adjust to the outside light. I had had one surprise too many already.

It seemed to be about mid-afternoon, not thirty minutes past dark-wherever I was. It had to be afternoon (rather than morning) because there had been light visible in the cave when I first looked through the green-trout door. I saw a lot of green outside the cave, even wilder and more disorganized than our backyard. The hillside around me was covered with something like Scottish heather, except for a few large bushes and trees. The cave mouth was some feet above the path. I could see it running off into the forest. The path didn't come directly to the cave but went around the base of the hill to my right. It was a well-defined track, wide enough for a subcompact car, but rough enough that I'd want four-wheel drive to try it. In the ten minutes that I watched, I didn't see any traffic.

"None of this is real," I told myself. "It can't be." There was no tract of land like this anywhere near our house. It wasn't in our yard, and that cave hadn't been long enough to get me clear of our subdivision.

I wasn't too crazy about continuing, but I also wasn't quite ready to go back and risk facing that lizard again. Well, I knew what was behind me, and I didn't know what was in front of me. That may have made the difference. I moved out of the cave, put the safety on my pistol and holstered it, then stretched. The hill rose two hundred feet behind me. I considered climbing to get a better look at the land, but that scratchy heather wasn't very inviting. It was knee-deep, stiff and prickly. It smelled vaguely like lilacs.