As the youngest of the staff archeologists at our local museum, I am often asked why I decided to commit to a career at our small hometown museum rather than trying for one of the larger museums in a bigger city. My answer is always the same, “I remain here so that I can study La Chiave.”
Most people don’t even know what I am referring to. But that’s to be expected. When something has been there for all of your life, you stop noticing it. Besides, it’s not like it’s the only one in town. There are at least six other mine caps that I know of and probably several more that don’t stick up out of the ground like the more recent laws say they have to.
One of those non-raised caps that is level with the ground is located in my uncle’s back yard. Actually it is right in the four corners where his yard meets his next door neighbors and the two lots directly behind them.
A while back, a young couple from upstate bought the house next door to my uncle. While everyone was out raking leaves that fall, the couple told him that they thought it was an indication of really good neighbors that the four of them had gotten together to build a concrete slab to hold everyone’s tool shed– there were four tool sheds bunched together on the top of the cap. The husband almost went ballistic when my uncle explained what the concrete was actually for.
“This used to be the entrance to a mine shaft,” my uncle explained. “When they abandoned the mine, they just boarded it up a little ways underground and covered the hole. Nothing was officially reported so it didn’t appear on the deeds when they created this subdivision. If it weren’t for the state coming out and finding this, we wouldn’t have known it was here until it collapsed and maybe took one of our kids down with it.”
He tapped on the concrete with the end of the rake he was holding. “This cap will never collapse,” he said firmly. “They lowered a bunch of beams into the shaft that were all tied together in the middle. Once it was down a little ways, they bounced the cable so the beams would spread out and dig into the walls of the shaft. Then they dropped heavy cloth and tarps down on top of the beams and started pouring concrete.”
He pointed to the wide ruts that were still slightly visible in one of the yards. “Concrete trucks were backing in here day and night for three days until they got it filled all the way up. They put a form around it and smoothed out the top like you see here. That cap will be there a thousand years from now.”
I was there when he said that and I couldn’t help but think of the mine cap near my house. It was much higher out of the ground than even the newer raised caps, but it was old... really old. It was so old that the concrete looked almost like stone... or maybe it really was stone. I used to play on it a lot. I ran my little toy cars around on the flat top of it and sometimes I climbed up there and launched them off the sides hockey style with an old tree branch.
Sometimes I would just go down there and sit. I don’t know why. Mom always worried when I did that. She was sure that something bad had happened to me... or was going to happen to me. One day, when I was about seven or eight, I was down there reading a book aloud. I don’t know why, but when I read while sitting on the mine cap, I always read aloud. Anyway, mom came running down the alley screaming and yelling, “Don’t you know what day it is? Get off of there! Stay away from there! It’s Halloween. The Gateway might open and swallow you down.”
Mom called that mine cap “The Gateway.” My grandfather, who had worked in many of the mines around town called it, “La Chiave,” which is the same thing, only in Italian. I once asked him why he called it that and he told me that he called it that because that was what it was.
“Who told you that?” I asked in my childish innocense, and he replied, “Some things get passed down from miner to miner. Other things are whispered to you in the darkness of the side cuts while you are kneeling there with your pick and shovel. That cap was already here before the first white man sank a shaft looking for coal in these hills. It doesn’t seal a mine. It seals a hole between this world and... ”
His voice faded away and he made a motion with his hands, holding them together with the fingers almost closed in a fist and then opening them up and pulling them apart as if something had exploded between them.
“Who knows what it might be holding back?” he said in almost a whisper.
Their warnings should have scared me off, but they had the opposite effect. La Chiave became my special place. When childish toys gave way to books and notepads, I still went down to the mine cap to read, and to be alone. Except I was never really alone. I always felt as if someone were there with me... especially when I snuck down there during the day on Halloween. That’s when I would talk directly to my special someone. Sometimes she would talk back, but usually she just sang songs in my head.
I took a year off between high school and college while I tried to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I was working minimum wage jobs and living in the small apartment over the garage where my grandfather lived before he passed. I watched the trick or treaters walk up to my parents’ house for a little while and then decided that I would visit La Chiave on Halloween night. My mom would have had a fit and I know that Grandpa would have cussed me out in at least three different languages, but I was an adult now and could make my own decisions.
I walked down the alley behind my parents’ house for the two half-blocks that led to the huge stone cap of La Chiave. The first half block was because my parents’ house was in the middle of the block. La Chiave was also in the middle of the next block, right in the middle of where the alley should run. So instead of an alley running straight behind all the houses, There were two L-shaped alleys that went up to the huge stone and then turned at a right angle out to the cross street. For some reason no street lighting reached the huge stone. There had been several accidents because strangers thought one or the other of the alleys went through and ended up smashing into the cap. The city said they keep trying to put a streetlight directly over “that old mine cap,” but for some reason the lights would fail after only a few days. That Halloween night, the light on the pole next to La Chiave was brand new, but it was dark. And no light from the streets or the houses reached to the center of the block.
I put my hands on the edge of the flat stone and swung my legs up to that I could more or less roll onto the top and sit up. As I did, I remembered the many times when I was young where I had to push my tricycle or wooden crates over to the edge of the stone and then struggle to climb onto the top to play. I put my hands down to steady myself and suddenly froze in place. Something was wrong. The stone was soft beneath my hands as if it were covered with a thick layer of grass... or a carpet!
I pushed myself to my feet and stood fully up. It was no longer dark, and beneath me was an ornately woven carpet vividly depicting a chariot driven by four white horses. I blinked my eyes and shook my head. Did I fall and hit myself hard on the head? Did I perhaps fall asleep and was dreaming?
“No, my dear,” a soft voice said, “you are fully awake.”
“Where am I?” I asked as I turned around to face the voice.
A young woman stood in front of me dressed in a white tunic with a reddish purple sash going across her front from right to left. There was a wide leather belt around her waist.
“You are where you have been many times,” she replied smiling.
Her smile widened and she cocked her head slightly to one side. Then she said, “But you are not WHEN you were a few moments ago.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. Somehow it sounded like a question.
“This temple has been here since the beginning of time,” she said, gesturing with her hands at the columns that now surrounded us. “And it will be here when time turns dark and stops,” she continued.
“How is this possible?” I asked, walking closer to her. “How can I be here, in this time, with you?”
“Perhaps it is the magic of this night,” she said as she reached out and touched my arm. “Or perhaps we have just grown to that point where it was time for us to meet.”
“You were the one I read to,” I said, matching her actions and reaching out to touch her arm. For some reason, I was surprised to feel how warm her flesh was. I had expected her to be cold like a statue.
“And I sang to you,” she replied with a smile.
“We were children then,” I said, looking into her blue eyes.
“But we have grown up,” she replied, brushing against me with her breasts and then reaching up to kiss me.
We kissed deeply for many minutes. Then she drew me over toward a low bed-like couch and began tugging at my clothes. My jacket and shirt were soon on the floor. So were her sash and belt. We continued to kiss, breaking only for me to reach down and remove my shoes and pants, and for her to pull her tunic up over her head. She wore nothing beneath it.
Her body was young, firm, and exquisite. Her breasts were somewhat small and almost conical in shape. The nipples were long and erect. Together, they reminded me of the breasts on the ancient Greek statues at the local museum. One of the archeologists who gave lectures at the museum said that women’s breasts have grown larger over the eons while the nipples became less prominent.
We lay stroking each other’s bodies for a long time. Then I began trailing kisses down her neck and onto her breasts. Her breasts were very firm and her nipples seemed to grow even longer as I kissed and lightly licked my way around those conical mounds. She gave a soft inhaling “aahhhh” when I first took one of her nipples into my mouth.
I suckled for many minutes as her groans and moans increased in pitch and volume. Then I moved back to her mouth and used my hands to massage her breasts and tweak her nipples.
My kisses again moved south on her body, but this time I traveled past her breasts and began licking between her legs.
“What?... What are you doing?” she gasped out.
“Something that evidently didn’t exist in your time,” I replied. “I’m eating your pussy.”
She groaned as my tongue slid between her nether lips. Her hands were now desperately clutching at my body and squeezing my neck almost to the point of being painful. She was bucking up into my face so hard I had to pull back to keep from cutting her with my teeth.
“Enter me,” she groaned out. “Put your seed inside me.”
I shifted my position so that my hips were now between her legs. As soon as the tip of my prick touched the lips of her pussy she again drove herself up at me, burying me fully inside her love channel.
I thrust and pounded into her as she screamed and yelled for me to go harder. I could feel her pubic bone pounding against mine each time I buried myself deep within her. Then her yells began to morph into a high-pitched keening scream that almost sounded musical. She was once again singing to me.
I could feel my own orgasm boiling up inside me. I got to the short strokes and then slammed one last time into her and stayed pressed hard against her. I could feel her hands digging into my butt cheeks holding me hard against her.
I gave a deep groan as my balls emptied themselves into her womb. In response she let out with an earsplitting scream that started out high-pitched and got even higher as her body shook beneath me. Bright lights surrounded us as if lightning were flashing in the sky. Thunder boomed all around us as we soared to the heights of passion together. Then all was quiet.
She said softly, “We have made a man child. I shall call him Aeneas.”
I lifted my head so I could look at her face and asked, “Will you bring him to me so I can see him?”
Her face suddenly looked fallen and sad, “He will be long dead before you are born,” she said. “But you will know all about him.”
“Will I see you again?” I asked. Now it was my turn to look sad.
“That depends upon the gods and the stars and serendipity of time,” she said with a sad smile. “But if you come back next Halloween, who knows, perhaps I can be here to sing for you again.”
“I will be here,” I promised. “And every Halloween after that.”
“Until then,” she said, and suddenly something was poking me hard in the back. I turned my head to look and Sergeant Reynolds was poking me with his nightstick.
“You must have gone to one hell of a party,” he said gruffly. “I could run you in for public indecency.”
I looked around and realized that the sun was almost coming up. I was laying in the middle of La Chiave naked. My clothes were scattered all around me.
I hurried to gather my clothes and started getting dressed. “Please don’t tell my mother,” I said plaintively.
“Tell her what?!” the policeman barked back. “That you were naked in public??!”
“No,” I said loudly. “Don’t tell her where you found me. She would explode at me if she knew I spent the night on top of La Chiave.”
“You what!” he said. His eyes were wide and his mouth remained open.
“I guess that’s never happened before,” I said as I finished pulling on my shoes.
“Oh, it’s happened before,” he said softly while shaking his head. “You aren’t the first to try to spend Halloween night here.”
He looked like he wanted to say more, so I looked at him and said, “... and?”
“Not and,” he said firmly, “... but. You aren’t the first to try it, but you are the first to be alive in the morning.”
“Oh,” I said softly. Then Sergeant Reynolds pointed to the corner of the stone and said, “Let me show you something.”
He pulled several clumps of grass away from the edge of the stone and said, “Can you see that?”
A word was carved into the side of La Chiave in strange looking letters. The word was “Roula.”
“Nobody is sure what it means,” he said. “People have dug a little around the base of this over the years, but that’s the only thing they’ve ever found.”
He paused a moment and then said, “Hey, Doc Bentley at the museum said they have an apprentice position open. If you tell him you are interested in this rock, I bet you could get that position.”
I talked to Doctor Harold Bentley and he accepted me as his apprentice. The museum helped pay for my schooling all the way through my doctorate. I specialized in mythological beings and their temples. I’m known for finding obscure temples and structures all over the world.
I have written many books about what we found on those digs. But my most famous– or perhaps infamous– work is a book which I entitled, “The Love Life of the Gods.” The subtitle is “Pillow Talk From Roula.” One of the interesting things I discovered in my studies is that Roula was a nickname for Aphrodite. She does actually look like her statue... except she has arms.
I always set aside a few weeks at the end of October to further study La Chiave. I even have a city permit to put up a temporary shelter over the stone. I said in the application that it was so I could conduct special tests at all hours, but Sergeant Reynolds and I both know it is so no one else finds me naked on top of La Chiave the morning after Halloween.
