Absolute

Part 1

When my father returned from expedition, he spoke of the woman in the cave, and the chains that bound her to a great stone rooted up from the muck like a plant. The stone cupped her, held her upright with the glory of a throne. And the chains seeped from the walls, a dozen or more snaking through the cavernous void to meet at cuffs so delicate, it was a wonder they didn't break.

They were molded to the woman's wrists like a labor of love, restraints forged for her alone. My father had called it prophetic; a word he'd never used before. But it wasn't what he wanted to say. He wanted to say there was something frightening about the woman and the cave, the chains and the dark.

The woman was dead, head slumped drearily into her chest, yet her skin was rife with youth, and the air around her, sweet like peaches plucked from a tree strewn with dew. Still, she was dead all the same, and my father was bemused because somehow, he knew she had been there as long as that stone.

I was young when he told me about her. I had embraced his account like a fairy tale. He'd stumbled upon a sleeping beauty, frozen in time, awaiting her prince. Only that prince wasn't my father, so he left her in that stillness and told no one about the cave except his idle son.

As I grew up, I came to understand that my father's mind was lost to adventure. He lusted after far-flung cultures far recessed in the annals of history, frittering away his life chasing legends that sprang from old books collected in his den like rainwater in a trough.

It was in those books and in the whispers of those forgotten peoples that he'd found the woman; a relic myth that spoke of an absolute truth buried in the mouth of the earth. He'd committed to the myth such tireless study that he'd convinced himself it was real, and that he'd discerned the location: a cave hidden deep within the lush African forests.

When he died, he left me his journals—the last surviving records of lore he'd gone mad with. I sifted through them each night over dinner, piecing his travels together by the dates in their pages. I'd never realized how much he was gone over the years or how far away he'd been. He'd seen half the world before I was old enough to understand the little one comprised of our four walls.

As I came to the journals detailing a trip to the Congo, I became invested. He had traveled through Cameroon where he'd met with Mardea, an American transplant descended from the Makouan. She was a professor of evolutionary linguistics who preferred translation, having mastered at least a dozen languages beyond her own.

My father had taken her into the forest with him, along with three guides. The stories he'd read of the cave mentioned carvings on a stone, saying nothing of what the carvings meant. He had hoped that Mardea could help with them if there was a stone to be found.

Or a cave to find it in.

I knew how the story really ended. Not with a well-preserved corpse chained to a rock—the stuff of a broken adventurer's dreams. It ended with him finding nothing, paying the guides for their time, and seeing Mardea back home.

That's what I told myself when I outgrew the fairy tale, and it's what I expected to read when I flipped through those pages, only I was wrong. My father had committed his delusion to paper the same as he'd committed it to my ears. There, in his unsteady hand, was the record of the cave in trifling detail down to the slickness of the moss that lined its floor.

And there was the description of the woman in chains just as he'd recounted it to me years ago.

According to his notes, the guides stayed at the entrance, but Mardea had gone in with him. She had seen the woman herself, and there were carvings on the stone, but she said nothing about either until they were back in Cameroon. Only then did she say she would translate.

The journals ended there, an era of my father's life retired to a shelf by an enigma. I didn't believe what I'd read, but I wondered why he'd document something impossible as if it were true. I was drawn to that question like my father was drawn to the cave, and I was curious about the translation of the carvings, which he failed to include.

More than that, I wondered why I spent the night staring at his final journal, convincing myself that the numbers etched into its spine weren't coordinates.