Michael Koryta - Last Words

“Settle down, damn it,” someone said.

“The boards are melting,” Mark said. “Look at them. They’re melting!”

Another slap, and the fog that returned was gray, and Mark didn’t mind it so much because at least he didn’t have to see that wall melting in front of him anymore. His fear ebbed away and he became aware of a repeated question. Asked patiently but insistently.

“What did Ridley tell you?”

Ridley. That didn’t make any sense. Ridley hadn’t seen the reef. Nobody but Mark and Lauren had. The other divers were scared of going that far. Hell, Mark had been a little scared too. Lauren wasn’t, though. He could see her blond hair fanned out wide in the current, could see those sleek legs in a smooth churn that drove her down effortlessly, and he remembered that he’d been scared of her in that moment. Scared for her, yes, but scared of her too, because nobody can hurt you worse than someone you love. Lauren was reckless in the way that you could be only if you’d never had true cause for fear. Mark didn’t want her to be afraid, but maybe she needed to be. Fear protected you at times.

“She was just young,” he said.

“What?”

“Just too damn young. Came from a different place than me, and I thought that was good. I thought that was perfect. But some people don’t need to be older to understand what the world can do to you. She wasn’t one of those, though. She wasn’t.”

“Sarah? You’re talking about Sarah?”

The gray fog parted and Mark saw the melting boards again and felt panic again, but then the boards peeled away and there was nothing but water behind, shimmering curtains of water. Good. They weren’t going to burn after all. You couldn’t burn underwater, could you? Maybe in the right conditions you could. Things blew up underwater. Maybe in the right—

Another slap, then the voice, louder, and warm breath against Mark’s ear. “What... did... Ridley... tell you?”

Ridley hadn’t told Mark anything about Lauren. Why would he? He didn’t know her. Wait. Wait one minute. He had said something about her.

“Dates were the same,” Mark said.

“What dates?”

“When they died.”

Hands fell on his shoulders, their grasp rough, shaking him, and when the voice returned, it had added urgency. Mark couldn’t see anything but shadows now. One large shadow, looming above him. Too tall to be a man. Something bigger than a man, something worse.

“He knows they died on the same day? He’s sure?”

“Yeah. Yeah, he’s sure.” Mark didn’t understand the confusion about this. The dates were obvious; all Ridley had to do was read the newspaper. Maybe the shadow should learn to read. Mark started to laugh. The shadow didn’t like the laugh, and he slapped him again. That was getting old. Mark was tired of the slaps.

“What else? Think hard, now, tell me the truth. What else did Ridley have to say?”

Mark wanted to please the shadow, which seemed strange because the shadow kept slapping him, but there was something in its voice that was so urgent, nearly desperate, that Mark wanted to provide the right answers.

“He said...” What had he said? They’d talked, hadn’t they? Yes, they’d talked, and he’d said that the dates were the same, and that had bothered Mark. Mark got upset with Ridley then, he remembered that.

“He said what? ”

“That I needed to go there.”

“Where?”

Good question. Where was there? For a moment he was convinced that the right answer was the reef, but the reef hadn’t involved Ridley, that had been just Mark and Lauren. Why did the reef keep coming to mind, then? Tanks. Tanks and rebreathers. Yes, he’d seen those with Ridley, that made sense. But Ridley didn’t dive, he...

“Wanted me to go to the cave,” Mark said.

“To Trapdoor?”

Mark nodded, happy to have been of help. “Yes, he knows about the cave. It is all about the cave with Ridley. Cave, cave, cave. That’s all he wants to talk about.” He started to laugh again. He got smacked again. He felt like crying. He felt like sleeping. Where was the water? Where was the reef? Where was his wife?

“Why did he want you in the cave?”

“That’s what it’s all about,” Mark said.

The shadow went silent. Mark saw the melting boards again so he closed his eyes and tried to find the water. There it was. Gentle currents pushing and pulling at him, and somewhere up ahead was Lauren. Glimpses of her hair. Here and gone, here and gone. Why wouldn’t she slow down and let him catch up? Going too fast was dangerous. It was reckless. It would get someone killed.

“Slow down,” he whispered. “Wait.”

“I’m thinking,” the shadow said from somewhere behind Mark. The shadow had misunderstood; Mark didn’t care if he slowed down. “I’m thinking that maybe Ridley was right. Maybe you need some time down there. It’ll stir things up, won’t it? Let’s stir things up.”

“Okay,” Mark said agreeably. “Let’s do.”

Something was pulled over his head then, and the melting boards vanished and so did the water behind them. He’d never make the reef now. Lauren was up there ahead, and she was all alone.

Full consciousness had been with Mark for a while before he accepted that it had returned. It was difficult to believe that his mind was functioning, because the world he existed in now was stranger than what he’d experienced in the drug haze.

Blackness was all that he knew, but the hood was off his head, his eyes were open, and he believed he should be able to see. It took some time before he understood that the problem wasn’t with his eyes — there was nothing but darkness.

What finally put him in motion was the cold. It wasn’t bitter and wind-driven and there was no snow. The cold simply rose up and soaked into him. He ran his hands over his body and found his skin prickled with gooseflesh. He was naked except for his underwear, and at first he’d hoped that was an imagined condition, just as he’d hoped the blackness was. Another hallucination that would pass eventually.

It wasn’t.

He extended his hands and swung them around, testing the blackness to see what was out there. His fingers made no contact with anything. He lifted one hand and held it directly in front of his face, then opened and closed it. He saw nothing, but there was a bizarre sensation that he could. He could visualize what the hand was doing, and so his brain seemed to accept it almost as if he had seen it.

There was a stone wall at his back and a stone floor beneath him but what was in front of him, or even nearby, was unknown.

Fear seized him then, a swift panic that made him get to his feet too fast, and he almost fell. His legs were numb from the long period of sitting, and all of him ached. He stood in the dark and tried to make some sense of it, of how he’d come to be in this place. Memories came at him in disjointed fragments, and that only exacerbated the panic.

Slow down, he told himself, slow down and relax. You’re alive, you’re safe.

Wasn’t he? Maybe he was. How could you know when you couldn’t see a single thing?

Where the hell are you? How did you get here?

He remembered the drive through the snow, the truck behind him, the van ahead of him, the men with shotguns. Three of them. Then he’d been in the van. Then he’d been somewhere in the snow with a knife against his throat and questions coming. Then...

He couldn’t put that together. That was the point where memory turned to fragments and then to dust. None of the memories told him where he was now. Some sort of basement? No. The stone wasn’t smooth like poured concrete. It was rough and smelled of soil and water, no trace of human interference. This was some kind of pit, some kind of...