The Devil Under Dunbar

The trees that gave Sequoia her name had long-reaching roots, and those roots had a tendency to trespass beyond mortal boundaries. Perhaps that’s why most Sequoioideae species are extinct. Their roots would wonder into sewage drains, crawl under concrete, and borrow into lifeless crypts that could sustain no life. Whether timber or decay, the redwoods bled into the mulch. Every axe won its declaration of war, and boundaries became unpassable with barbwire, fences, and border walls. For every tree that died, their southern superstitions died with them.

Sequoia learned this lesson from her mother, Inola, who named her for acting much like a root. No reservation could contain her, and in town, no apartment could keep her. For even in Clarksville there were fireflies in fields of farmland, wild bucks herding young doe, and walls of forestry surrounding tributaries and streams. There were these things. Before the trenches of grey stone drowned the tributaries, and the men in orange hats paved over the borrows.

Now, Clarksville was under a constant state of construction. It was a small town desperate to become a large city. A Nashville-Imposter. If it weren’t against state-regulations, there’d be skyscrapers in city hall. That possibility might even become a prediction given the flimsiness of laws when faced with money.

Concrete was cornering the market, fresh cement, and sheets of car-lots.

At nineteen, Sequoia didn’t have her etsi, [i.e. mother] [ééh-Ḡ] nor a family to lean on. She had sworn off relying on the reservation, which was too far away and impoverished to help her now. Through her poetry she had become isolated, but completely self-sufficient. But as the years passed, even Mother Nature herself seemed to have left her.

The rotary park, where she’d scour for black widows from within the low stream, now had a pavement parallel to the river. It trampled over a perfectly good path, and denied the childish escape from her concrete world. She only saw it as a ruinous rock and failed to note the elderly woman in a wheelchair. Smiling a slow, sentimental smile.

The Riverwalk, following the Cumberland River, was no longer tolerable to her. The Penny-fish stink of the rain was enough to drive her off. She saw boatmen using fisher-bows to snag fish, leaping from the water as it raced by. She noticed the invasive coy that destroyed the river’s ecosystem. She didn’t notice a giddy boy punch a fish midair as it leapt from the water. Nor the smiles of the family that bagged thirty coy in one day. The sound of the motor had drowned out the sound of his laughter.

Forests were nesting grounds for bottles and cans. Farmlands were shrinking and increasingly barbed. The overpopulated deer became deadly road-corpses – that ballooned out and detonated from the encroaching heat waves. Flooding turned lawns to lagoons, bringing out waves of mosquitos while the heat brought hornets. Plagues to Sequoia if she still believed in plagues.

There was only one place in the city untouched by man, one place she’d been told never to enter. She always had a kinship with raccoons, sneaking into places with sightless stealth. But no matter how dangerous her escapades were – from ghettoes to graveyards, her etsi mad her swear on her grave never to enter that cursed place. An act a superstitious woman doesn’t take lightly. Inola died not five months after that promise.

However, the entrance was only a mile from her apartment, and she was tired of letting the dead dictate her life. Her mother still believed in the old ways, before the land was pillaged and conquered. Even the churches believed in magic mirrors and holy water.

She decided if she didn’t go now she’ll never stomach the courage to leave at all.

Desperation overruled guilt, and she found herself on a dirt trail towards the cave.

She’d noticed the dead squirrel. She was so focused on the dead forest floor that she missed the sunset symphony of the canopy above. She remembered the day the invasive algae entered the pond, and cried when half the forest was cut down. But the saplings were too small to catch her tears. Even today, those saplings couldn’t reach her knees. There were recycling bins and a solar panel, but the occasional litter juxtaposed in her vision.

The three arches of white concrete stood just below the entrance, as if heaven itself was shielding her from those dark depths. But whatever darkness laid beyond, it couldn’t be worse than the darkness she saw in humanity.

Before her journey even began, she had changed into newly washed clothes, and thoroughly sanitized her hands. One of the main reasons the cave was closed off wasn’t its ominous reputation, but to prevent the spread of White-nose syndrome. A fungal growth that festers in bat’s skin, suffocating their muzzled and weighting down their wings. It caused entire colonies to collapse, which caused insects to remain unbeaten, which cost farmers billions in revenue every year.

When Sequoia was little, she remembered colonies of eastern-small-foot would fly over the farmers’ fields. Now she was hoping they wouldn’t go extinct.

She approached the entrance to the cavern, it’s breath a constant 57 degrees. Beside the entrance was a concrete bandstand and a similarly built concession stand. Both were from another era, before air conditioning and television, when the lip of the cave was invaluable for the big bands.

Both were empty now.

Upon reaching the gate, she pulled a toolbar from her purse and pried the bolts of the bars. She saw a bat; one could always see a bat from the cavern’s entrance of one knew where to look. When a sixth bolt fell or the ground, like a biblical omen, she unhinged the grates and slipped inside.

Her camera light was dimmed by her hands. Keeping her feet on the catwalk as she crossed the dried river. She crawled through shiners and passed columns of crystallized calcite.

A thousand years ago her ancestors considered Dunbar to be the portal to hell. Not the Christian hell, but an empty, colder dungeon. Where living things watch you from the shadows, but never touched your skin. She ignored the cave art on the walls as much as she ignored the graffiti in the Great Relief Hall. It reminded her of her mother’s stories:

“There are three worlds. And of these three the caves lead to the beneath-world. A place opposite to the sky, where black stars shine in reflection of our true world. It is not always an evil place, but can contain evil, or set it upon you.”

It was at the Herculaneum that she stopped to rest on her back, and saw the black stars her mother spoke of. Relief fossils, black rocks protruding from the grey ceiling. They reflected the light of her phone like glass-obsidian. She remembered that there used to be an ocean here. That these fossils were a preserved map of the ocean a million years ago. Like how the stars are just a snapshot of the cosmic past.

Something metallic hit the ground, she turned off her phone in a panic. She crouched to the floor, and glanced up to see a lantern bobbing in the distance, carried by a hunchbacked silhouette. She cursed, perhaps there were security cameras. Were they a cop, a ranger?

She couldn’t afford a misdemeanor like this. Not on her salary. A light shined at her, and she raised her hands as she stood. Then the stranger spoke:

“Wha'da'ya [wu – duă – yă] done on my property, Indian.”

She staggered, and saw his face was grimy with rock clay and rotten greens. His beard was like a clump of autumn leaves trapped in a roof gutter. He was almost five feet, short and stocky at the legs. Legs that seemed to bend at an odd angle the more she looked that them. If she didn’t know any better, she wouldn’t have known he was human.

She looked around and saw Christmas lights pinned to the ancient wall. There was also a hammock, a makeshift stove, and various bits and bobs of a makeshift life.

“Even here, even in hell itself i can’t escape it. How did you even get this junk in here? You’re ruining a sacred space you know, and this is supposed to be a public park.”

“Yeah, and I’m publicing it. Now get, get I say. Go on, before you get-get too. I ain’t fix' en to bunk with no Cherokee, now get!”

“Me get, I have just a right to be here as you do, you hapless hermit.”

“Ah, trust, everyone has a right to be here, but most only wish to visit. No one wishes to stay."

She saw the stacks of canned foods and snack cakes behind him, a decade’s worth of food in damp cardboard boxes. He guarded a can of soup in his claws, practically hissing.

“But why are you here?”

“Where else would I’s be? Up by the train tracks? The White House? Why do you live in a concrete box, why is it any different than my concrete box.”

The grubby hermit carried his soup to the stove. Sequoia saw cabals running alongside the Christmas lights up into the ceiling. It wouldn’t be possible to drill those wires without someone noticing. The hermit spoke:

“I’s been liv 'en in caves for some three decades now. Before I was anywhere else, I was in caves. Like you lot. It’s where I’s flourished. Where I’s most home.”

“What do you mean my lot?”

He smiled with yellow teeth that nearly appeared as canines, but she chocked this up to bad hygiene.

“Have you ever heard of a man named Pluto, and his famous cave?”

“I’m a poet, of course I know the classics. It’s a metaphor for how easy it is to be manipulated through religion and hatred. How education can lead us into the light of understanding.”

“Well Pluto has as many caves as y’all have build 'ens. You’re all the cats of Schrodinger, alls of y’all trapped in boxes, not neither live nor dead. Before, you’s were shepherded into one cave by me. I had the symbols, I made them shadows dance!”

His laughter was muffled by his beard. Sequoia wondered if this isolation made him mad,

or if it could make her mad. Could a gas leak occur in a dormant cave? She didn’t know. Still, he didn’t look dangerous, his only weapon being half a can of soup.

Her eyes followed the cheery red lights, which flickered as they ran through a hallway of black stone. There were native glyphs on the sides of it. Warriors with axes in their forelock braids and animal claws upon their feet.

“What is that?”

“Why ya wanna know poki, that’s just another tunnel. It’s like the rest of em.”

She ignored him, she was too perplexed by the cavern.

“I’ve seen virtual tours of this cave. I’ve seen schematics and maps, but I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Well, aren’t we lucky? I get some peace-quiet and you get to get going.”

He was drinking from his soup can. Most of the food here was of soup cans and packages. Was he some sort of doomsday survivalist? Her mind wondered to the mysterious passage. The hermit’s voice drifted to her ears.

“Don’t you want to see what others ain’t never seen Poki? Don’t you want to be alone? Really, truly alone? As alone as one can possibly be? The present world is tainted, but you’re pure...”

As he spoke, she felt her legs move before her, felt the echoes of bats emit from the deep. She longed for that freedom. No rules, no borders. Somewhere she can claim as her own.

“It’s your right to be here, Sequoia.”

Her boots paused. Her heart fluttered like wings. How did he know her name? As a matter of fact, how did he know that cursed nickname Poki from public schooling? Not even her own mother knew about that. Without turning she spoke:

“What are you?”

Then she noticed it. Something within the passage reaching for her. If she didn’t trip, she would’ve been caught in its talons. Its face was a muzzle of cotton grey mucus. That mucus dropped over its white eyes that glimmered like marbles. It wings were practically sown together in that living moss. She ran, and the snickering devil yelled back at her:

“Keep running Pocahontas, you’ll catch up to yourself eventually.”

The creature shrieked as it chased after her, sending swarms of bats spiraling like a vortex around her. Her skin felt patchy, like calcite, sticking together in webs and tendrils. Her lungs filled with the fungus. She could see its spores, massive, floating in the air. She stumbled against cave paintings, knowing if she made it out alive she’d need a respirator for the rest of her life. It already felt like one was hanging from her face. Forcing breath into her solid lungs. A muzzle, she felt a muzzle where her lips should be.

Like pomegranates from hades, something within herself pulled her into the cave.

The shrieks of bats echoed her own, and blindness glossed her eyes an opal white.

A metamorphosis had begun. Wings as heavy as parachutes held her back. The deadly moss clung to her insides and filled her sensitive ears. Yet she could still hear the devil’s laughter, as if he left just enough room to taunt her.

“If only you listened to you Etsi, if only you appre-she-ated the river, and the trees, and the sky. No sky no more. Your wings are too heavy to fly.”

Her body, twisting over her wing, slammed into a column. She felt pain jolt up her arm. An arm that grew spindly and hollow-boned. Her fingers grazed the catwalk, and she followed it like a trail of brail writing.

“Please let me go. Please I beg of you, let me go!”

“You were warned, you wanted to be here, and now you wish to leave? No, no one who enters may leave. Everyone stays.”

The catwalk trembled beneath her as the spiderweb-like moss suffocated her body. This was it. The end of her, the end of the beauty of her eyes. Nature had died on the surface and betrayed her beneath it. She succumbed to the noise of the swarm.

These was a second noise.

It was a note, a fast cacophony of stings and metal. She stood, feeling those wings weighting her down. Then she ran. The fungus dragged at her heels, but she ran like a sheep from a wolf.

A shepherd was calling. She can see the light. The air was cool. She grabbed a hand.

***

When she entered the present world, Sequoia was just as she had entered. No wings, no muzzle, no patches of mossy fur or opal-blinded eyes. And standing across from her was a man. In his left hand was an instrument that shimmered in the sunlight.

“You know the cave is closed, protects the bats and all that.”

She did her best to stand, or to keep herself from appearing to shocked to stand. Was any of that real? What stopped it? Why did this stranger help her?

“I’m Sequoia, and you are?”

“The name’s Johnny.”

He held out a hand for her to shake, his grip was farmer strong. She read his musical case.

“What’s with the fiddle?”

“Just practicing, Dunbar has some damn good acoustics.”

He smiled. Sequoia thought it was an amicable smile, a smile like cider and smores.

As he packed his gold-string instrument, she pushed herself to speak. Speak before she was alone with the cave again.

“Can you teach me? To play the fiddle, I mean.”

The words left her mouth before she had time to think of them. He chuckled and gave her a crescent smile. He didn’t smell of death, or oil, or concrete. All she saw was that glorious smile. He unpacked the fiddle and handed it to her.

“I’d like that very much.”

And the bandstand was no longer empty.