He weighs it. There’s nothing to watch while he does, no glance at the entrance, no furrowed brow. With him, the pause is the only sign he’s thinking at all. I’ve learned that much.
“There’s water in the cave,” he says. “A pool.”
He crosses to the lantern and turns it up, and what I’d taken for shadow on the far wall turns out to be a crack in the rock, wide enough for a man if he turns his shoulders. The cave runs back further than I guessed.
He goes through without telling me to follow.
I follow.
The passage is low and tight, with one turn where the rock pinches in. I keep my hand on the wall the whole way and fix that turn in my head, because if I ever have to come through here in the dark, this is where I’d get lost.
It opens into a second chamber, smaller and warmer. A pool sits at the back, fed by a thin sheet of water sliding down the far wall. Dark in the middle, clear where the lantern reaches, white gravel and fine sand under the shallows. The cold comes off the water before I’m anywhere near it.
He sets the lantern on a ledge, sits on a flat shelf of rock facing the way we came, and puts his back to the pool. His shoulders fill most of the opening. He doesn’t look at me, and he doesn’t say anything about not looking.
“You’re really going to sit there while I bathe?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Why?” I look around. “It’s not like I can go anywhere.”
“I’m staying.”
“Fine,” I mutter. “Weirdo,” I add under my breath. There’s no point in pushing it, so I start on my boots.
The cold hits the second I’m in. I keep my underwear on and lower myself until the water reaches my ribs, and for a while there’s nothing but the cold and the washing—face, neck, arms, the grit and dried blood along my hairline.
“How far back does this go?” I ask.
“That’s the end of it.”
“Did you find it or make it?”
“Found it. Worked the groove for the boulder. The rest is how it was.”
“You bring people up here?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“No reason to.”
I duck under and scrub my hair through. Come up, wipe my eyes. “Doesn’t it get to you? All this quiet? All this…nobody?”
“No.”
“Everyone says that. Then you leave them alone for a week, and they start talking to the furniture.”
“I don’t own furniture.”
I stop scrubbing and stare at the back of his head. Was that a joke? His voice didn’t change. Nothing changed. I honestly can’t tell.
“You have a cot,” I tell him.
“Everybody sleeps.”
Good to know. I was starting to wonder if he functioned like the rest of us.
