“Now you just stay here,” said Mom. Cole swung leadenly in her hands, watching the sandbox come closer with a vague, disconnected interest. “Just stay here and have fun for a while, okay?”
Then she left, and Cole proceeded to do as she was told. She was, after all, five years old.
She piled the sand up and knocked it down.
Then she drew pictures in the sand and smudged them.
Then she dug a big hole – a REALLY big hole – and as she was preparing to fill it in, she heard a noise at the edge of her head, so tiny it was barely a buzz.
Cole looked around. No noise. She looked up. No noise.
She stuck her head in the hole. Oh, there it was! And it was louder, too!
Cole crawled down the hole. It was a tight fit, but she was small and determined and wasn’t old enough to worry about structural supports or caveins or anything like that, and besides there was a light down there, a glimmer as faint as the buzz that had turned into a hum that made her teeth tickle. Then it was brighter, then nearer, and then Cole pulled herself up and out and into the middle of somebody’s picnic.
“Ow.”
Four separate small hands removed the jug from her head simultaneously while one very large and wrinkled pair pulled her clear of the ground and onto a soft blanket. It was red, she noted through the lingering ache in her scalp.
“Feeling alright?” asked the owner of the hands.
“Yes,” said Cole. Then she remembered her words. “Thanks you. Who are you?”
The woman shrugged, and Cole watched the lines on her face scatter as she smiled. She was very old, older than Cole’s grandma, who was the oldest person in the world. “Nobody in particular. How’d you get here?”
‘Here’ was soft. Something green that wasn’t quite grass underfoot, under a blue thing that wasn’t a sky, with stalagmites that were pretending to be trees, or maybe the other way around.
“A hole,” said Cole.
“I can see that. Well, if you’ve come for a visit, you might as well stay for a little bit. Besides, I could use some help babysitting, and you need at least four for a proper round of hide-and-go-seek.”
Cole nodded. This was a true thing. And so she ran and hid and tagged and laughed and spent a long time down there in the cave, until she heard the thud of grownup feet.
“Come back if you’d like,” the old woman told her, as she scurried back down her tunnel. “We like visitors.”
And Cole remembered that, all the way through the lectures she got on wandering off in the car on her way home. And she did visit, and often, because it was so EASY to do. All you had to do was dig a hole, any hole, crawl a while, and there you were again, popping out of the ground in a cave like a summer meadow, ready for freeze tag or snacks or really almost anything, because there was a whole village down there in that little place, with small people who spoke soft words and always were patient with her.
It was a nice place.
It WAS a nice place, but it was so small!
Cole towered over the buildings. She loomed over the stalag-trees. She was even bigger than the old woman, and that had taken her ‘till her last growth spurt. Nothing was good for hide and seek anymore, and besides, that was for babies. She was bored, bored, bored, bored! It was hard work finding holes that could fit her anymore, and once she got in, she wasn’t sure it was worth the effort.
“I’m bored,” she told the old woman. “Bored, bored, bored, bored! I’m not even sure coming here is worth the effort.”
“Yes, I can see why,” she said. “Why don’t you go exploring a little? Perhaps you’ll find something new.”
“But I’ve BEEN everywhere!” said Cole. “I’ve been down the meadow-cave and up through the wood-tunnels and round and round and round the cavern of streams! There’s nowhere left!”
“Not in the upper caves, no,” said the old woman. “Here: take my cane and knock on the side of the biggest tree in the meadow. Go on now.”
Cole rolled her eyes a lot, but she didn’t have anything better to do. So you can imagine how surprised she was when the soft brown rock of the stalag-tree slid away like parting silk, revealing a ladder made of hard grey stone that Cole took down three steps at a time, sliding the last body-length on her palms and grinning through the sting.
It was dark down there, in the middle caves.
“Helloooo?” she called. “Helllooooo?”
“Aieee,” responded someone. “Help.”
“Rawrgh,” added someone else. “Rrrrooowwrrrll.”
Cole followed the voices and came upon a most disconcerting thing: five large angry men that looked like beetles crossed with lions crossed with athletes from her brother’s MMA magazines. They were holding up a much smaller and less alarming man by his ankles and repeatedly dunking him in some sort of vat.
“Hey!” shouted Cole.
They looked at her, and she realized that all those terrible cartoons she’d watched when she was a baby were good for something.
“Lunch break’s over,” she said. And then she ruined it by giggling.
The men were hard to read because they only had about a fifth of a face between them, but as a group they were not impressed and immediately ran at her. But Cole was ready, and more importantly Cole was slightly larger than they were – something that none of them seemed to be used to. Oh, they pinched and punched and bit and beat at her with their hands and feet, but they just weren’t strong enough to give her more than bruises. She’d had tougher playground squabbles back in fifth grade.
Also, possibly due to the strange shapes of their snouts, none of them had ever encountered a head-butt before. Cole was happy to bring innovation and enlightenment into their noses, and after the third man had reeled away and spun into a wall they decided they’d had enough, and lit out faster than a half-burnt match.
“Thank you,” said the less alarming man, who Cole realized was actually not alarming at all and had a rather adorable nose. He’d used the time of the brawl to reclaim his clothing, most of which, alas, was sodden in gravy. “I’d have helped, but you seemed to be doing alright.”
“No big deal,” said Cole.
“There must be some way I can repay you,” said the less alarming man, futilely adjusting his soaked shirt, which seemed to have shrunk a few sizes. “Come to my parent’s house, and we can get you some food at least.”
“Huh?” said Cole. “Oh! Yeah, food. Great! What’s your name?”
His name was Azit, and his parents were a king and a queen, and their home was a very small and polite sort of castle. Which was half the problem, the other half being the ant-lions who had crept in through the walls of the middle caves over the years. Each apart from each other wasn’t so bad, but combined they made a few problems.
“They’re not so bad, really,” said the queen, as she was showing Cole to the Royal Staircase.
“They tried to eat our son,” reminded the king.
“Well, maybe a little bad,” she admitted. “They’re perfectly respectful if you can shove them off, but we’ve had problems with that.”
“Large problems,” said the king.
“We could use someone to help with that.”
“A hero, say.”
“See you soon!” they called up after her, as she hauled her way back into her yard.
And they did. They saw Cole week in and week out for years, and they got what they wanted. She beat the ant-lions until they gave in and turned to vegetarianism, she halted the underbear invasions, she bested the fearsome darksquid, and rescued Azit from kidnappers no less than seventeen times.
She could never get annoyed at him for that, though. He was cute when he pouted, and besides, it was all one big adventure.
One big, grand adventure. That was what Cole had thought life would be like as an adult. Well, first they chained you to a school for a few years, one with harder homework and more vicious results, and then you went to work in a cube somewhere, doing Very Important Things for Very Important People.
Much of that work involved staring at the ceiling and waiting. Cole was doing that very thoroughly, and had managed to catalogue, index, and file every square inch of the panelling and ventilation system within her sight, losing herself in the cheap tiling and crooked grates, the mites and motes of dust. It seemed to get bigger as she watched, until she was almost falling in, dropping through the gaps in the vent…
…All the way down through the roof of Casa Mezzo, and half-onto the meal that the royal couple was enjoying.
“Ow, argh, urk,” said Cole. “Oh. Hello. Ah. Been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Six years,” said the king, retrieving the lower third of his wine glass.
“Sorry; I was busy. School and then work and then and then…sorry.” Cole attempted to tame her hair with her hands, and succeeded only in angering it. “How’s Azit?” she asked, desperately searching for a way to salvage her manners.
“Oh, he’s fine, fine, fine,” said the queen. “He did, ah, get married.”
“Oh,” said Cole, with some relief. She’d been wondering how to explain her fiancée. “Well, that’s nice! Very nice! What a lucky girl. Is she nice?”
“Yes.”
“Well. That’s good. I’ll, uh, just be going. I’m sorry about this, it looked like a lovely meal.”
The king shrugged. “Dull as ditchwater.”
“Yes, the country’s been deathly quiet ever since you drove out Impraxxus the Endless Night,” sighed the queen. “Very peaceful. Very dull. It’s bliss. And you know, you could use a bit of that bliss. Let me show you the Royal Staircase.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come down it the usual way, it was sort of an acci-”
“No, no. The OTHER Royal Staircase.”
It was a slim little thing tucked away in a room barely big enough for a broom closet, and it creaked under Cole’s weight. But she held her breath and kept her tread study and before she knew it sand was whispering under her bare feet as she stood on a calm purple beach underneath a glowing sunset in a place with no sky.
“This,” said the queen, who’d taken off her crown and put on a nice bonnet, “is a proper place to be.”
“Mind if I visit?” asked Cole. Down the beach, a young couple was playing tug-of-war with a friendly shark, and losing. The breeze smelled like strawberries, faint and calm.
“It’s not my beach. And I’d love it. The book club meets down here Friday nights, and I could use someone else who hates romance novels.”
And Cole still hated romance novels, and always did, so that was nice. She came down to the lower caves more than just Fridays, whenever the world got too exhausting and the days got too dreary and whenever she could let her mind wander for a while, turning five minutes of forever into hours of calm. And it worked, and it dropped her blood pressure – although some of that was the honeymoon. Cole’s wife was as determined a vacationer as the queen, but much more personal about it.
She could make the strangest places feel as cosy and personal as your bedroom, but there was only so much someone could do with a hospital bed. And besides, the old dear got so tired nowadays, and after three hours of happy times she’d nod off with her hand in Cole’s and stay there until visitor’s hours ended.
Not that Cole minded. She didn’t have the energy to make noise nowadays. And she had her ways to fill empty hours, she still did. Even if she’d nearly forgotten them while Emma and Jacob were growing up – good lord, she’d had some sympathy for her own mother after that.
Cole fixed her gaze on the gap in the window that led out into the summer night, walked up to it, and slipped through into the lower caves on a day nearly as pleasant as her last had been. Calm waves on a calm sea under a calm wind with dozing figures bured in sand to their chins, basking in a soft glow. She walked along the beach, kicking seashells and watching them splash.
It was nice. It was restful. But it was a little too quiet. Lord knows Cole had gotten enough bed rest over the past year to fill centuries. Maybe she couldn’t move too fast herself anymore, but she could at least live vicariously. Just a little.
She kicked a seashell and stubbed her toe.
After some violent swearing, further careful prodding revealed not a seashell at all, but a hatch. And under the hatch, a passage.
Well, what was one more trip?
Cole crawled, then Cole crept, then Cole squirmed, and at last, at the end of the tightest squish she’d been in since the car accident back after Jacob was born, Cole heard something buzzing at the edge of her hearing aid, twitching on the tips of her pupils.
Then light and sound, and she tumbled head over heel onto something soft and green that couldn’t be grass, out of a sun without a sky.
“Oof,” she declared, and dusted herself off, brushing away the offers of help from concerned villagers. “Ouch! Wouldn’t want to do that again. Tell me, which way’s the tunnel? I’ve got to be going now.”
The tunnel was too small.
“Damnit. Well, which is the largest tree? Just find me the cane, and I’ll-“
There was no cane.
“Oh fudge. Where is it? Where’s the old woman?”
Gone away? But her house was empty, so…
…There Cole sat, whittling and worrying at the head of a stalag-tree-carved cane, singing silly songs to herself and minding the minds of the village’s young, because they weren’t near big enough to mind themselves. As proven by how many times their little hands reached eagerly for the handle of her carving knife, or her chisel, or her hot mug of tea, or…
“ENOUGH!” she told them. “We’re going outside! Out! You are far too busy with your fingers for house and home today! Your lunch will have to wait until you pack this basket, and pack quick or we’ll leave without it!”
So they did – children listen when food is at stake – and they left. And it was quiet out there in the meadow, and peaceful (almost too peaceful), right up until the moment when the jug of water went THUD. Then “ow.”
Oh, thought Cole. Of course.
And as she reached down into the little burrow next to their picnic blanket, she smiled a little bit, and was happy that she’d never really bothered to learn all that much about the cave. Otherwise she would’ve spoiled all manner of surprises for herself.
“Are you alright?”