Michael Koryta - Last Words

“Cave.” He said it aloud, and the sound of his voice made the darkness seem darker, made him feel smaller and more alone, more helpless. He shouted then, yelling “Help!” and “Hello!” over and over.

There was no response but an echo that made the place feel large and empty, as if he were a long way beneath the earth. He thought of Ridley Barnes, all those ropes and helmets and lamps scattered around his house. How far had Mark been taken into this place? And from what direction? Was the exit in front of him, or to the left, or to the right? Or, hell, above? How did you even begin to search for it?

The panic he felt then was unlike any he’d known before. A sensation of being trapped in someplace small and abandoned in someplace endless all at once. Anything would be better than this blackness — being adrift on miles of empty sea or being caught in a cage; either would be better, because at least it would be known.

He moved his hands down to the stone floor and spread his fingers wide and dug them in, felt his nails scrape against the rock. He stayed like that, as if he were hanging on to keep from being pulled away, and he closed his eyes, even though there was no point — eyelids shielded you from nothing down here — and he tried to confine his concentration to the physical sensation of touch, to the feel of the stone. It was a known entity here in a world without many.

“All right,” he said, and his words echoed. “All right, Markus. Go ahead and open your eyes, and know that nothing will change.”

Talking aloud provided some level of reassurance. He opened his eyes, and while there was another stab of fear when nothing changed, he contained it this time.

You ought to spend some time down there, Ridley Barnes had said. In the dark. Think about her, think about me.

“Let’s get out of here,” Mark said, still speaking aloud because sound was comfort. “Let’s go.”

There was the challenge. Go where?

Moving in total blackness was daunting even if you had an understanding of where you were. Without any, it seemed impossible. But he had no choice. In this cold, if he didn’t find a way out soon, he never would.

Right or left? Or straight ahead? Every option seemed the same. The only logic he could imagine was a process of elimination: pick one direction, head that way, and see what happened. Rinse and repeat and eventually he’d be moving in the right direction.

Unless there isn’t a right direction. Because if this is a pit, and you need to go up...

He decided to move straight ahead first, because it occurred to him that it would be easier to find his way back to the starting point if he moved in a straight line. That way, if he ran into an obstacle, all he had to do was move directly backward until he found the wall again. This realization was the first thing approaching an actual plan, and he felt proud of it, as if the notion of crawling forward were a true breakthrough and not something instinctive to such brilliant creatures as earthworms and ants.

He began to crawl, and even though the impact was minimal, the stone was brutal on his knees. He considered standing but thought that would be more dangerous — by crawling, he was at least limiting how far he could fall.

He had gone maybe twenty or thirty feet when his left hand made contact with what seemed to be a wall in front of him. He ran both hands along the surface as far as he could extend his arms. He found no break in the wall. A dead end.

Unless, of course, the passage opened up a little to the left or to the right. It could be just ten feet away, and he wouldn’t know.

His mouth was dry and his pulse hammered. He tried to calm himself with the reminder that he had no other choice but to keep trying. He was warmer when he was moving too, and that was important. That was critical. He could envision his mother in the snow of that Montana prairie, the blue tint seeming to come from within her flesh. Yes, it was important to keep moving.

He moved backward just as he’d come, but the going was slower because his feet weren’t as dexterous as his hands and made poor guides in the dark. When he finally found the wall, he felt a sense of triumph. He’d achieved what he’d set out to do. Never mind that it hadn’t actually taken him anywhere or changed his situation — he’d proved that he could move away from this spot and make it back again.

Now he was back to the old question: Right or left? He decided that right felt more natural, simply because he was right-handed. When he began to crawl again, he found that he preferred this path because he could keep the wall against his side. As he worked along the wall, he thought he heard sounds that weren’t of his own making. He stopped and listened and what he would once have called silence now seemed filled with soft murmurs. Whispers of motion.

Snakes.

His brain treated that just as it had the opening and closing of his hand; because he could visualize snakes, it was almost as if he’d actually seen them. He crept backward, banging his knees painfully on the stone, and had gone about five feet before he stopped himself. He listened again, and now he wasn’t sure there was anything. Sweat ran down his face despite the cold. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths and tried to clear the image of the snakes from his mind.

Doesn’t matter if the place is crawling with snakes. If it is, they already know you’re here, and they’ll come for you if they want. Moving will make you more threatening, scare them off.

Sure. The mental commandments were easy to make, harder to obey.

Go forward, damn it. Go!

He began to crawl again, faster now, ignoring the pain in his knees, and the amount of distance he’d covered from his starting position was encouraging, seemed to suggest this passage led somewhere.

When his right hand reached forward and didn’t make contact with rock, he wasn’t immediately scared. There had been small dips and drops here and there, and he assumed this was just another one, worthy of added caution but not cause for true alarm. Then he reached farther and still found nothing. He moved his left hand forward, and his left hand didn’t come down on stone either. He was sitting on his knees, waving his hands in the air like a mime in a box. Where in the hell did the passage go? What was he missing? He reached down, trying to find out how far the floor dipped, and his hands kept extending through air. He was leaning so far forward that his balance was precarious, and the pressure caused a fresh ache in his knees. He swore, edged backward, stretched out flat on his stomach, then reached again, determined to figure out which way the floor was curling away from him.

His hands found nothing. He reached until sharp rock bit into his armpits, and he still couldn’t find the floor. The drop ahead was a decent height. He fumbled around until he found a loose stone and then he pushed it over the edge, hoping he’d hear an immediate smack of contact that would tell him it was just a short step down.

Instead, he had enough time to be aware of the sound of his own breath — several breaths — before the rock landed with a crack on the floor below and broke into pieces.

Only then did he understand what was directly in front of him: a cliff.

Ridley had been in his workshop all day, never once venturing outdoors, but he looked snow covered nevertheless, his shirt and hair coated with fine flakes of sawdust, when the sheriff’s car pulled into the yard. He knew just from the height of the driver that it was the sheriff himself. It had been a long time since Ridley had dealt with Blankenship.

He went to the door, opened it, and said, “Everything okay, Sheriff?” working hard on his I’m-just-another-good-citizen voice. He needed more practice with that one. Never sounded right, not even to his ear.