et ad inferos

Sasha found the cave in the evening.
     He’d been walking like he usually did, up and downriver. His usual stroll. It was a peaceful time for him, or peaceful is what anyone else would have called it; he had no particular regard for it except that it was just what he did. He found no particular enjoyment in the freshness of the air, or the site of birds or deer stooping to drink along the shoreline. The rippled reflection of reeds and treeline in the water was not particularly beautiful to him. He simply walked here to keep watch; because he knew that this was where the other things kept watch.
    Heavy rains had made the water level rise, and so the muddy shore along which he usually trod was presently underneath an inconvenient layer of H2O. That as it was, his path had been diverted itself a ways back into the forest. Then he’d seen the deer trail, and caught on a breeze the smell of rotting flesh.
     So naturally, he followed the scent.
     The land was lower here, east of camp, where the land crumbled away into the river. And through this thicket, Alexander sensed a place he had never yet been before. The trees were tangled in gorse, undergrowth so thick he had to swim through the brake. The path he’d been following had shrunk into a rabbit trail, unfollowable – except now he had an idea as to where he was going. Though he couldn’t see past the foliage scratching his face, brushing the finger-nail scabs on his skin, he knew there was something beyond.
    Because the ground was declining, softening, dipping. There was the meaty smell of an infected wound, and the pungent aroma of something stagnant, as crisp dead plants crunched under his boot.
    And then, as the sun sunk unto the horizon, the boy took the last step from the thicket – and found himself in a hollow.
     It was a gouge out of the land, a fracture in the surface of the forest. The ground was loose, mulchy, pebbled underfoot. He was looking at a small clearing, hemmed in by a net of gorse, with old branches spiderwebbing a lattice the distant sky above. There was a pool, small and stagnant and fetid green, choked with a corona of thornbushes. Opposite of the stinking water was a scab of rock set in the gully wall. The cleft was dark and weed-choked, and it took Sasha a moment of staring to realize there was a hole in it.
     His hand had gone to the dagger hidden at his side, but he was not afraid.
    Instead his cold eyes harbored something that could almost be called excitement, as he stepped into the hollow. His boots squelched in the mud next to the pond, and he saw where the smell of death was coming from. There was the ragged grey corpse of a possum, half-rotted, and half-way out of the water. Its eyes, among other things, were gone, pecked out by crows or scoured out by ants, he didn’t know. He moved it with a toe, and its body shivered with maggots. He wondered how it had died. Maybe drowned in a storm. And after kicking the cadaver into the black water, he briefly wondered if the maggots would drown too.
    And then he turned to the cave.
    It stared at Alexander from across the dim glade. Black and narrow, like the pupil of a serpent.
     He stared back.
     And, dagger at hand, he stepped forward to breach its shadows, wondering what breathing things he might find inside.
     But there was nothing inside.
     The tunnel inside was as narrow as the cave mouth, too narrow for his shoulders, and so he’d pressed in sideways, holding the blade low before him in the darkness. The cave opened up about half a dozen feet in, and Alexander felt empty space around him, cool damp air. Hearing nothing but his own respiration.
    His teeth showed in a smile. This was what peace felt like. Cold void.
    Slowly, Alexander knelt to the damp dirt, feeling the exposed entrails of the earth between his fingers. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness he could make out more of the details of his surroundings, though in the dusk the light was dim. He could tell, something or a family of somethings had lived here once; coyote or fisher cat perhaps, by the droppings. He felt fur and the small, frail bones of prey animals, too. But the occupants were long gone. Must have moved away, with the advent of the human camp just a little ways west. Well, that was just fine. That particular human camp had lately been giving him a mind to move away, as well.
     He found the back of the cave, and sat there, eyes fastened on the distant entrance, which was now just a sliver of cool, twilit light in the darkness.
    “Cuius est solum,” he said to no one, “eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos,” words conjured up through flipped pages in old textbooks of his memory. He remembered asking his father what the strange language meant, as his father drank coffee, and little Sasha read over his shoulder. Whosoever has the soil, it is theirs all the way up to heaven and all the way down to hell. Little Sasha hadn’t known what that meant at the time.
    Alexander breathed a sigh, knife still in his palm, as his other hand traced the claw-scabs on his cheek.
    The moon was up, now. He would spend the night here, sitting, watching. There was no hurry returning to camp tonight.
     Because now, he thought, smiling, Little Sasha had some soil of his own.