CAVES

He couldn’t leave the apartments. For starters, he had no money—his salary went to rent and utilities, that is to say, back to the university that paid him. The rest went to his ex-wife. He kept her ring on a chain and thought of her often; when he did he’d touch the diamond and wish he’d done things differently. There wasn’t time to feel sorry for himself, though. He had classes to teach. He had the ghosts.

He lived in the campus apartments. The university was a small liberal arts college built into a limestone ridge overlooking the river and the city beyond it, and the apartments were part of the not-yet-renovated corridor on the eastern side, where they had served as housing for enslaved people before the American Civil War and as servants’ quarters after. The professor regarded those human beings—slaves and servants—as links in the chains of the history of capitalism. He was a Marxist, and had spent his life as a psychologist applying neo-Marxist principles to his field, with varying degrees of success. Always one to see big ideas but not the people who dreamed them, he thought. Well, I’m trying to change that, but it’s difficult to change. He’d spent so many years helping other people through his research that he’d never considered himself deficient. High emotional intelligence, he’d say. Look where it’s got you.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays he taught in Banner Hall and he could walk to it from his doorstep. Another brick building but a newer one built at the turn of the twenty-first century. Sleek, contemporary. Smartboards in the classrooms. Laptop stands on the desks and plentiful Wi-Fi. The classes were small: six or seven students. The university specialized in two things—first, in students from other countries, and second, in remote learning, especially for military families around the country, army wives and veterans, chiefly. As an institution it also made money from allowing companies to mine for limestone in the mountain beneath the school. That was strange to him. He knew only a limited amount about the process, and the sounds of blasting and excavating unnerved him. He supposed they were using dynamite or some other explosive to loosen the rocks and cart them away. Would the entire ridge collapse? he wondered. At what point would the ground give way beneath them?

Other strange features of campus troubled him. The student union was underground, presumably in corridors that had long ago been mined out—or maybe they were caves first, he couldn’t say. There were stalactites and stalagmites in the library; it was part of the same cave system, as was a large underground parking garage and the student bookstore. Many of the buildings were connected by subterranean tunnels.

The professor, Dr. Martínez, had never lived in such a place. He had lived in New York and Bogotá. The university felt gothic, though, as if Edgar Allan Poe had dreamed it up, and maybe that had something to do with the tricks his mind was playing on him.

“Students invent these stories,” his friend, David Summers, told him. “You’re taking your current anxieties—and your depression—and you’re inventing new stories that correspond with the tales you’ve already heard. That’s how ghosts work.”

“I admit I don’t know much about it,” Dr. Martínez said. “Ghosts or building codes.”

“It’s an old building,” David said. “Plumbing, electrical, structural.”

“This feels different.”

“Sure,” David said. “Your mind makes it real.”

“I’m not sleeping much.”

“Nikki?”

“I don’t want to talk about her.”

“Alright,” David said. “Okay.”

They’d walked down from the university to the township along the edge of the river. Quaint shops and cafés kept alive by students and by twee hipsters who commuted to the city some ten minutes away. Trains passed through once or twice a day. In times of heavy rain, these streets would flood, and already the changing climate had nearly washed away the buildings. People kept rebuilding. Stubborn, Dr. Martínez thought. He knew enough about behavioral psychology that he thought he could unpack it but he was not a therapist and had no interest in speculating. People did things.

“How are the students?” David asked. He was a professor, too. Mathematics.

“They’re fine.”

“You’re not telling me something.”

“Sorry. I’m not feeling myself today.”

“Okay,” David said. “Alright.”

That night he experienced his first auditory hallucination: a woman’s laughter. He had heard noises before, especially footsteps and closing doors, and he’d seen lights flicker. His coffee maker had turned itself on without warning; his fridge door continued to open in the middle of the night, as if the latch were broken. He’d not heard any ghosts, though—he’d not seen them. He could feel them. What such a thing meant he couldn’t say. Ghosts were not real. He didn’t believe in them. His father had, and his mother, and their parents, but he did not. He knew they were an invention of his creative mind; he knew it was an invention, this numinous feeling, these spirits. Yet he couldn’t shake the woman’s laughter. He sat upright in his bed and looked at the clock on his nightstand. 3:42 a.m. He listened for the laugh again—so unlike his ex-wife’s laugh—but he didn’t hear it. What do they want, he thought, and hated himself for thinking it. He stood up and went to the bathroom to piss. He got a glass of water and shut the door to the refrigerator. I’m losing my mind, he thought. Well, so be it.

“Perhaps you should engage with them as if they’re real,” another one of his colleagues, Dr. Leslie Smith, advised. She was a psychologist and a therapist. “What is real anyway? Your mind is making them real, so they’re real to you.”

“That doesn’t sound helpful,” Dr. Martínez said. “Why would you say that?”

Dr. Smith shrugged. They were in the student union, deep inside the oldest caves, which had been hollowed out and made to seem contemporary.

“They’re like intrusive thoughts—they’re troubling you.”

“Yes.”

“Your ghosts are not thoughts but they behave like thoughts. Because you’re experiencing these physical phenomena—noises, objects moving, whatever—and for some reason you’re having intrusive thoughts related to those physical things.”

“Maybe.”

“So, the only way to have them stop troubling you is to face them, to make them into something that doesn’t disturb you.”

Dr. Martínez wanted to say he thought the ghosts were real. He wanted to say he needed to move to a new apartment. That he needed to resign his position as a professor, and to return to New York City, where he could resume his life. He could see his ex-wife and his daughter again. He loved them very much. That’s what I want, he wanted to tell his friend, I want to go home. I want to go back to how it was. An impossible dream. You can’t uncross certain lines. You can’t mend relationships if they’re too broken—especially if you don’t know how you broke them. You’re supposed to be a student of the human mind and the soul it projects. Humiliating.

“You could move,” Dr. Smith said. “Get a different place.”

“I can’t afford it,” Dr. Martínez said. “Not on this salary.”

Talking about it didn’t seem to help anything, Dr. Martínez decided. He had spent too much time talking about it already. The conversations were making him seem unhinged. They made him seem like he was cracking up. He wasn’t doing any such thing. He was perfectly sane. Or if he wasn’t sane then he knew what he was doing. The ghosts had something to do with the caves; that seemed clear enough. In movies, ghost stories revolved around finding the ghosts, laying their spirits to rest. Unquiet graves needed tending. Remains—perhaps the blasting, the constant mining, had disturbed a long-forgotten graveyard somehow. He didn’t know. That seemed like too easy of an answer. Some other mystery might be at the heart of it.

He decided to investigate on his own. The school’s website had a map of the open tunnels through the caves—the underground passageways to the parking garage, for example, and the service roads used by the mining trucks. Many of the maps were incomplete. But he used his access as a professor to find some faculty-only files with more complete maps and he tried to combine those as best he could with the public access tunnels and passageways. Then he started to look for unexplored caverns.

He went to a sporting-goods store and bought hiking equipment on a credit card. Spelunking supplies: a helmet, headlamp, flashlight, an oversuit and undersuit, good sturdy boots with rubber soles. He also bought a tackle bag and gloves. After he cut up the credit card and threw it in the trash. He didn’t plan to make payments on it.

He started with the noises. That night. First, footsteps. Several times he followed them and found himself face to face with tired, startled-looking graduate students, including, once, a young mother with her kids. Sorry, he said. So sorry—I thought you were someone else. He spent the night that way but didn’t find anything.

The next night he heard the laugh again. High-pitched. Fading. He had not slept and had consumed a pot of coffee and his nerves were jangling. He followed the laugh as far as he could but lost it in the basement near the laundry rooms. Down there it was warm and the air hummed because of the dryers. He stood for a while listening.

Two weeks later he met David at the café again.

“You look good,” his friend said. “No more ghosts I take it.”

“No,” Dr. Martínez agreed. “They’re not bothering me anymore.”

David was a tall red-headed man with freckles and a perpetual squint.

“Good,” he said, in the tone of voice people use when they’re not paying attention.

That night Dr. Martínez found the entrance to the caves beneath the apartments. No noises led him to it. Instead, while wandering the hallways, listening for the laugh or the footsteps, he found his way to the basement again, and this time he noticed a door he’d never seen before. It was locked but the frame was rotten and he forced it open.

Inside, a narrow stone passage led into the darkness. He switched on his flashlight—his torch—and he noticed old-fashioned knob-and-pin wiring along the ceiling. Lightbulbs from the 1920s strung like tiny globes dead against the brick. The passageway was disused but it wasn’t decrepit. Dusty, yes. Filled with cobwebs and spiders or rats but not like what you’d find in a haunted house. This wasn’t a ride at an amusement park like Walt Disney World. He had always wanted to take his daughter to the Disney parks with his wife; they had never made it there, not as a family, not ever. He had an idea that his daughter would have found the experience magical. He had wanted to fill her childhood with wonder and not with pain. Another failure.

He walked for a long time underground. He took several turns, lost his way a couple of times. After the second or third turn he backtracked until he knew where he was. From that point on, he used a penknife to make a mark at the corner so he could find his way back. He was not suicidal. People had died doing things like this. He did not want to leave his life as much as he’d ruined it. He had hope for a future. Only he wanted to see what darkness lay beneath the apartments and the university. He wanted to know if he was strong enough to face it even for a few moments. He could not live down here. He could not vanish into the caves. He would not allow himself to do something like that. Giving in to the void would be selfish even if returning to the Earth seemed like the most natural thing in the world for the time being. He knew someday he would die but he had no inclination to hurry that by recklessness or inaction or carelessness. He wanted to live. Yet he knew he needed to explore, too. He needed to know what ghosts were in the caves and how they’d come to stay there.

I can spend time here, he thought. I can try to understand this place and then leave it.

* * *