t went back much farther than that. The caves, they were known round about as
Ephraim’s Echo. Not that people spoke of them much. A slightly uncomfortable silence
surrounded the caverns. The idea of them would sometimes bubble up to the
surface of someone’s mind, and with the thought there would be an echo, an echo
back in time, faint and disappearing. Then the mind would look away reflexively. No,
the caves weren’t often mentioned. But when they were, people knew them, almost by osmosis, as Ephraim’s Echo.
The story went like this.
Ephraim Marwood was a homesteader. People had forgotten exactly when. But he camped out on the land and started building a little farmhouse, the first step to calling the land his own.
A simple structure was really all that was needed. An improvement to the property, enough to claim a title and become an owner of the land. But Ephraim did not file his homesteading claim when the first glimmers of a simple structure had started.
Ephraim had a wife, and he had brought her to the land with him. She was a quiet woman, who did not make friends among the few local families. She went through her daily chores enshrouded in silence, her eyes pointed downward, her eyes never glimpsing up to heaven or to the eyes of another. She cooked for him, cleaned for him, stayed in a small tent-like hutch through the cold, hard evenings before a real structure was built on the land. She did not complain, did not seem to feel the need to reach out into the world, did not live outside herself. The world of her own mind, and the constant need for physical labor, filled her days.
Meanwhile, Ephraim built.
The farmhouse was never finished. They moved in when there was a small structure, and Ephraim’s wife spent her days cleaning, polishing, painting. She carved intricate ornaments to line the walls.
Her husband built. A second storey. A round tower, with stairs up to the top. A stable, extra rooms, doors carved in unusual shapes. Secret passageways, they said. Doors that were hidden, leading to impossible rooms with bizarre geometry. Farmers would stop on the road with their cattle, and stare blankly into the structure as it grew. It seemed almost to shift before the eyes, an optical illustion.
Ephraim would come out and shoo them away, the onlookers. No one had the right to look on his home.
Rumors started among the town, about the strange man with the silent wife, who lived so solitary among his building, building, building.
Ceremonies, between the man and woman, taking place on the full moon. Strange sounds emanating from the odd-shaped windows in the shadowy nights. Creatures coming out from the forests and gathering at the house, gathering in circles around the glowing midnight building, staring into its strange structure. Rumors, just rumors. But soon people began avoiding the way past the farmhouse, as it continued to grow and change shape behind a curtain of isolation.
Ephraim would spend time in the caves. They were on the land he was homesteading, a source of constant worries to mothers who strove to keep their children away from the unknown dangers. He would dig in the dirt and find stones, rocks, veins of interesting minerals that he cut from the earth with a small pick and embedded into his building. Boys had spied him at work there, in the dimness.
The sound of his pick against the dirt and rock, dull and aching, would echo through the caves. Boys knew, as they approached, whether Ephraim was inside, because they could hear the echo. Chunk, chunk, chunk, through the cavernous hollow.
One day he walked into town, covered in blood.
“I killed her,” he said simply. “I had to kill her.”
The men went out in a group, with Ephraim bound, to find his wife’s body. They could not get any sense out of the man.
“She was a demon, she was possessed. I could see the devil’s darkness in her eyes.”
He led them though, docile enough, to the mouths of the cave, where he said her body was. They walked in, walked in to the chill, with the damp dripping off the cave walls. They walked in and saw the empty cave with its empty floor.
Ephraim saw the emptiness, saw the blankness, and let go a piercing wail. The wail echoed, echoed, and he fell to his knees. Ephraim started to seize, his face turned purple, and his tongue seemed to swell. And the echo of his voice seemed to come from hell, and reverberate back to those sinister sulferous underdwellings.
Ephraim’s Echo, they called the caves, where Ephraim died that day.
His wife was never seen after that. Whatever was behind her silent exterior, the neighbors could only wonder, in hushed undertones.
The intricate house slowly crumbed, the homesteading papers never filed, and the farmland remained unoccupied. For a while.
ileen-Virginia-Marion stopped the car over by the caves and got out, wiping the sweat off her forehead. She had driven straight here without stopping except for gas, because she liked the feeling of the open road and she really felt like driving fast. Now, she was hot.
The sky was bright, almost white, and clear. The weeds were about halfway up her calves, and as she stepped away from the car, she felt a prickly attach itself to her sock, nestling under her pantleg. That’s how they got around, some plants, through little prickly stickers that attached themselves to fur or socks and rode somewhere else to plant the next generation. Hitchhikers.
The plants didn’t come back home, ever, or think about what they left behind, but Eileen-Virginia-Marion was not a plant, and here she was, back home, or almost home.
To her, it seemed like a paradise, because the air was fresh and the smell of the plants was familiar and the sky was clear and she wondered why she’d ever left to begin with because clearly her father loved her and wanted what was best for her and what had she ever found in Hollywood but broken people and broken dreams and a man who didn’t understand her like she thought he did, when she first saw him biting into that blueberry pie.
It was worth the wait, Hank had said, meaning the pie, but also meaning her because they had been waiting for each other their entire lives.
Marion sighed. Maybe she just needed a few days here to clear her head and find out what was going on and think about what she wanted to do.
She blinked at the mountains in the distance and someone’s cows over in a field down the way. She couldn’t see the house from here, and it was just as well because she didn’t want to go there yet. Not yet. She was almost home, and she wanted to stay in a state of almost home for a moment.
I know a lot of things, more than you could know, and I knew already that she was there, had known that she was coming for quite some time. I’m pretty busy, as you might imagine, so I don’t have a lot of time for meeting people and talking to people. But I was interested in this one, Eileen-Virginia-Marion.
She walked down to the caves and looked toward the harsh line of darkness that separated them from the glaring sunlight. It was like flipping a light switch on a clouded, moonless night in the middle of the mountains. Inside, the darkness seemed total, as if the rays of the sun just didn’t want to go in there. They’d bounce all over the place anywhere else, but not in there. They weren’t going inside those caves.
Eileen-Virginia-Marion stepped into the caves from the sunlight and a chill went over her. The sweat on her face and arms turned to ice. She let out her breath, and it turned to crystals in front of her eyes, just like the last early morning that she saw this area of the world. She reached out her hand as if to touch it, but it was just a cloud, dispersed as quickly as it formed. She shivered and blinked, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness.
It wasn’t, after all, total darkness.
There was, just a little bit, sunlight coming in. It was, when it came right down to it, daytime, whether you were in the caves or outside of them. Reluctantly, cautiously, some sunlight had seeped into the caves after all.
She ran her hand over the surface of the rocks and felt the clammy water drip-dripping down the thin, fang-like shape of an early stalactite, a “soda straw.” The ceiling was covered with them, longer ones and shorter ones, drip-dripping down like solid raindrops.
In the cold, clammy air, she was calm, content, at peace. She had stepped into her own private world, with its familiar sights and smells and caresses.
She meant to explore the cave, go back into the farther reaches, where she was too afraid to play as a little girl, for fear of getting lost. She didn’t even know how deep or how far the caves went. They just seemed to stretch off into the earth.
She meant to sit down and eat the sandwich that she had in her pocket and think about things and converse with her own soul, which she felt she had left behind somewhere in the hustle and bustle of life.
Somehow, she didn’t really do those things.
She was standing in the first room of the cave, in the very entrance, hardly a few steps into the interior. She hadn’t even sat down. The sandwich was untouched in her pocket. She had only been there a minute, hadn’t she?
The sound of something’s wings woke her up, bats, probably, because there were certainly bats in the cave, coming out at night to feast on fruits and insects. She was looking toward the cave entrance, but it was different than it had been a moment ago. The light was different, not as bright. The sun was going down, the light was fleeing the sky, and pretty soon the cave itself would be pitch black. What happened to the time all of a sudden? She didn’t even have a flashlight with her.
Yet, something about her just wanted to stand there and look at the sky changing color and the rocks disappearing in the spreading darkness around her.
She shook her head to clear the cobwebs out of it, and it did feel like there were cobwebs growing in there, binding down all those neurological pathways where the electric impulses wanted to jump and run and be free. This sluggishness, not wanting to move or think or act, was why she had to come here in the first place, get free of it, get clear.
She took a step out into the gloaming and stretched. Man, she was hungry. Unwrapping the sandwich, she gobbled it down on the way to the car, not the pleasant picnic alone with her thoughts that she’d imagined, but her stomach was hollow and echoing. Hopefully, there was some food at the house, since she’d not stopped to buy any groceries. She’d had plenty of time, but now it was late, somehow, and she was tired.
The car started up and marked its mechanical mile-and-a-half down the road to the house. Eileen-Virginia-Marion got out and strode up to the porch, not registering the fact that there were lights in the windows that shouldn’t be on, because after all, no one lived here. She didn’t know I was there, of course.
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