There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about that
October day when we went down to play in Galliard Creek. I was in the sixth
grade at Claiborne Middle School, and it was the last Friday afternoon in the month of October. It was a
week or so after the big earthquake in Flomaton, the one that toppled the old
theater building there and blacked out a bunch of high school football games as
far north as Evergreen.
In most respects, this particular day was a fall day like
any other. Me and my two buddies – Adam and Chuck – had played in that creek
many times before, splashing along its banks in the cold, ankle-deep water
without regard to anything other than the loose rule that we be home by the
time the streetlights came on. Truth be told, we would have never gone down to
the creek had we known what lurked there, old and hungry.
About half a mile from where it flowed into the muddy Alabama
River, the creek funneled its way through a stretch with high limestone banks,
green with dank moss and riddled with the dim fossils of ancient shells. We had
searched those banks closely time and again and knew them as well as anyone. We
had even seen the crack before.
Only this time, this fissure in the limestone bank was
wider. In the time before the earthquake, the crack in the damp, gray rock had
only been a few inches wide, just wide enough for small bats to fly through. We’d
seen these rabies-carrying vermin fly in and out of the crack before and
figured there must be hundreds, maybe thousands, of them roosting somewhere underground
in the darkness.
The Flomaton earthquake had been a big one for our part of
the world, and it had apparently made the crack just wide enough for three
11-year-old boys to wriggle through. If memory serves, Adam had been the first
to notice the change in the crack because a stream of water was now running out
onto the soft bank of sand at the base of the widened crack. Before, there had
been no stream, just a wide fan of dry sand crossed here and there with the occasional
set of raccoon tracks.
Adam, tall and lean, was the oldest of our trio, nearly 12,
and he was also the most adventurous. He ran up to the crack for a closer look
and turned back to us with a look of excitement. Chuck and I soon joined him
and peered into the impenetrable blackness of the widened crack, which ran from
the wet sand at our feet almost all the way up to the top of the bank, a
distance of at least 10 feet.
“Guys, we need to bring flashlights back with us tomorrow
and see where this goes,” Adam said. “There’s no telling how far back it goes. I
bet it leads to a big cave or something. We’d be rich if we find some outlaw
treasure or Confederate gold inside. We might find a bunch of old Indian stuff.”
We stood there for a long time, throwing gravel rocks inside
the crack to see if we could tell how far back it went. We even turned sideways
and went in as far as we dared without lights. I imagined sightless bats
clinging to the walls in the darkness, their tiny teeth dripping with bacteria
that would make us seize and foam at the mouth. We eventually lost our nerve
and inched our way back to the daylight, our shoes filled with cold water.
Not long after, we began to make our way home. As the sun
set and our thoughts turned to what our mothers had made for supper, we
discussed the other gear we’d need to bring the next day along with
flashlights. I volunteered to bring a long roll of heavy kite string to help us
find our way. To this day, I believe that string’s the only reason I lived to
tell the story.
(All
rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and
incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or
dead is entirely coincidental.)
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