The Second Coming

was a nice calculation. Your ordinary pro would make a great sweaty show of helping out.
    It was not his regular foursome. It was not an ordinary golf game.
    The first time he had sliced out-of-bounds, Lewis had gone through the fence with him and shown him something odd. At the base of a low ridge, they were halfheartedly poking at weeds, hoping to turn the new Spalding Pro Flite, when Lewis stopped and stood still.
    â€œYou notice anything unusual about that tree?” asked Lewis, nodding toward a flaming sassafras, not a tree really but a large shrub. The red three-fingered leaves caught a ray of sunlight and turned fluorescent in the somber laurels.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œPut your face next to it.”
    He did, expecting to smell something, perhaps licorice. Smelling nothing, he plucked a leaf for sucking, tasted the licorice stem. Lewis held a branch aside as if it were a drape at a window.
    â€œNow?”
    â€œNow what?”
    â€œYou still don’t notice anything?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œCome closer.”
    There was nothing to come closer to except a shallow recess in the rock of the ridge.
    â€œNow?”
    Something stirred against his cheek, a breath of air from the rock itself, then as he leaned closer a steady current blew in his face and open mouth, not like the hot summer breeze of the fairway, but a cool wet exhalation smelling of rocks and roots. His mouth tasted minerals.
    â€œWhere does that come from, a cave? I don’t see an opening.
    â€œYeah. My cave.”
    â€œYour cave?”
    â€œLost Cove.”
    â€œLost Cove cave? But that’s down below.”
    â€œI know, but it’s the same cave.”
    â€œSure I remember. I remember every detail, the room where you found the saber-tooth tiger, the Confederate powder works. Where does the air come from?”
    â€œIt’s a phenomenon around here. Like Blowing Rock. Warm summer air blowing up the gorge into the big entrance below, percolating up through the mountain, and coming out cracks like this, cool in the summer, warm in the winter.”
    â€œIt’s strange, but I remember every detail. I could go straight to the tiger’s lair.”
    â€œLet me show you something.”
    A thousand feet below the sunny golf links the tiger had crawled into the cave thirty-two thousand years ago, lain down in darkness, and died so long ago that slender stalagmites and stalactites had grown together over the opening and zoo-caged him, him a bone, a skull and curve of tooth fused with the floor as if he were shaped from rock. For a while Lewis Peckham had charged admission, shown the Confederate powder works and the tiger until the state claimed him, broke into the stone cage, and hauled him off to Raleigh.
    As he watched, Lewis seemed to vanish into the rock—and reappear as magically.
    â€œHow did you do that?”
    â€œLook. It’s a slot behind this rock. One step sideways and you’re in the cave.”
    â€œIt looks like a trick.”
    Lewis said it was, that the Confederates had used it as an escape exit.
    Now he stood alone in the glade after slicing out-of-bounds on eighteen. He was holding the three-iron, not like a golf club or a shotgun now, but like a walking stick. Its blade resting on a patch of wet moss sank slightly of its own weight and the weight of his hand. Tiny bubbles of air or marsh gas came up through the moss next to the metal of the iron.
    Once he was in the pine forest the air changed. Silence pressed in like soft hands clapped over his ears. Not merely faint but gone, blotted out, were the shouts of the golfers, the clink of irons, the sociable hum of the electric carts. He listened. There was nothing but the sound of the silence, the seashell roar which could be the eeing and ohing of his own blood or the sound of cicadas at the end of summer which seems to come both from the pines and from inside one’s head.
    Then he heard a chain saw so faraway that he could not make out its direction yet close enough to register the drop in pitch as the saw bit into wood and the motor labored.
    The golf carts were going away. They had crossed a rise in the fairway. Through the trees he could see their white canopies move, one behind the other, as silently as sails.
    He turned his head. Beyond the glade the pine forest was as dark as twilight except for a single poplar which caught the sun. Its leaves had turned a pale gold. Though the air was still in the forest,