Michael Koryta - Last Words

To the right.

Dripping and splashing. There was moving water somewhere ahead. And at some point, it had come from the surface.

He found the source in another twenty feet, a shallow creek, just a few inches deep, but enough. He cupped his palms and lifted the water to his lips and drank greedily. It was muddy and tasted of the earth, and fine bits of grit coated his tongue and his teeth, but it was also delicious.

He drank enough to slake the thirst and then forced himself to stop, not wanting to push it and not sure if he’d even be able to hold it down. For a brief time he felt nauseated, but that passed and he moved along the underground stream just far enough to determine that it was going uphill.

The only thing he could possibly do to make himself colder, to accelerate his course toward hypothermia and death, would be to slip into water. His core temperature would begin to plummet then, and he had no means of raising it.

He just wasn’t sure that he had any other choice. Staying dry was the thing to do if you believed that rescue might be on the way. Mark did not. So far as he knew, he’d been left in this place to die. Getting out was up to him. And while getting wet would hasten the onset of hypothermia, he knew he didn’t have much time on that front anyhow. The difficulty in concentrating and the loss of his fine motor skills had already arrived, but what concerned Mark more was not the symptoms he was noticing but the one he’d stopped noticing: shivering. At first blush, this might seem like a good thing, an adaptation to the temperature. That was a cruel prank of biology, though. The body never really adapted to a change in temperature. His body was reacting to the temperature, but reacting was very different than adapting. While shivering was an unpleasant sensation, it generated heat.

He attempted to check his pulse, but he had trouble feeling the beats because of numb fingertips. As he ran his hands over his body, trying to warm himself, he was aware of how muscular he felt. His chest and abdominal muscles and triceps were taut the way they might be after a good weight-lifting session. This was the worst sign yet. An increase in muscle tone meant he was well down the road to hypothermia. In severe cases, the muscles actually began to mimic rigor mortis, the body dying around you even while you still drew breath.

“Got to stay moving,” he said, and his speech was slurred. Getting wet and getting colder might speed things along, but he didn’t have enough time left to worry about wasting it.

He crawled into the stream going against the current. There wasn’t much force to it here, but the water sounded louder ahead, and that might be a problem.

He had nothing but problems, though. Might as well add another. He put his head down and crawled, and time and distance faded from him, and for a long while there was nothing but the cold. He splashed on, and the pitch of the slope became much steeper, turning his crawl into a climb. It took an enormous effort — several times he fell and slid back down, banging painfully against the rocks — but he wasn’t certain how much distance he’d gained for all the work.

He stopped crawling twice, when he became convinced that he was not alone. That someone was moving with him, splashing along right at his side. The most alarming thing was that in those stretches, he believed he could also see this other person. A white figure in the blackness, shapeless and featureless. When he stopped and stared, though, there was nothing but the darkness and the feeling of the water and the cold.

Better hurry, Markus. Once the mind goes, you’re done.

He almost laughed at that. He didn’t feel as if his mind had been his own for a long time.

A light broke in the darkness then. A glimmer of white, and he thought, That is the snow. That is the surface.

Then the light went away. He blinked and stared, squinted. Closed his eyes and counted to five — he thought it was five, but he seemed to get lost on the way there — and then opened them again.

Nothing. No snow, no surface. For a moment, though, he’d been so sure.

He pushed on, wishing that he hadn’t imagined the light. Wishing that it might return for him. He thought of the girl — What was her name? — who had died down here. Had she seen a light at the end? If so, depending on the source, it might have scared her. That seemed terrible, to be scared by a light. It was unnatural. Light was supposed to help you in the dark, it was supposed to guide you and protect you. How wrong, if she’d died fearing a light and hoping for blackness.

What was her damn name? He couldn’t forget that. It was the reason he was here.

Sarah.

He wondered who’d said that. Where the voice had come from. It didn’t matter, though — the voice, which came through the darkness in a whisper, was correct. Her name had been Sarah. He said it aloud to make sure that it felt right.

“Sarah.”

His voice wasn’t right but the name was. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten it. He couldn’t allow that to happen again. Keep saying it, then. Keep on repeating it, and that way he couldn’t forget it.

“Sarah,” he slurred. “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.”

The cave walls returned the name to him each time — Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. He thought it was an echo but maybe not. Maybe it was whoever was down here with him; maybe whoever had told him her name to begin with was saying it too. He tried to determine whether that mattered and couldn’t reach a conclusion. A rock caught his shin, hard, and this confused him. He stopped walking and looked down and, of course, could not see the offender.

When had he begun to walk? He’d been crawling for so long because crawling was safer. He considered that and then he got it: He couldn’t crawl here because the water was too high. He should have remembered that. Like the name. He should have remembered...

He felt a wild surge of panic, because she’d escaped his mind again. Damn, but she was crafty. She could slip right past you. He’d had her, though. He’d just had her, and he could get her back. It was...

“Sarah.”

Yes. Keep saying it. Keep walking.

He moved on, or thought he moved on, using her name as fuel.

Splash. “Sarah.” Splash. “Sarah.”

The cave whispered it back to him every time, and he was grateful for that. The cave wasn’t going to let him forget again. He’d remember her.

Ridley had expected to make a stir with his arrival and was almost looking forward to watching Blankenship have to deal with that, but when the two of them got out of the car and began to move through the snow toward the cave, Ridley wearing his helmet and carrying his backpack and a loose coil of rope, there was already a stir going on.

“We can hear him!” a uniformed officer shouted, rushing up, slipping in the snow. “Sheriff, we can hear him! But we can’t figure out how to get to him.”

“Let me in,” Ridley said, shoving past him. “If you can hear him, then I can find him.”

“That’s the thing,” the deputy said, following behind. “It’s like his voice is coming up from under the rocks. It’s creepy, to tell you the truth.”

Ridley made for the cave, Blankenship struggling to keep up. A few heads turned toward them and someone said, “What in the hell is he doing here?” but Ridley ignored that and passed them and entered Trapdoor Caverns for the first time in a decade.

He stood on the wide shelf of stone where steps had been carved so visitors could get down to the tour boats. The passage beyond was filled with people and voices. It was bright and loud and crowded. It was everything a cave should not be.