Michael Koryta - Last Words

“I can’t. Too tight.”

“I didn’t say sit up. I told you to lift your head. Just lift until you can feel the stone.”

There was a pause and then a clink of plastic against stone as the helmet found the roof.

“Okay. It’s right there on top of me.”

“Sure it is. But you had to move to touch it, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.” Already the sheriff’s breathing was steadier. The simple act of following instructions kept him from feeling alone, and that made a dramatic difference.

“Then you know it’s not actually squeezing you,” Ridley said. “You can move. But the direction we need to move is forward. You ready?”

“Yeah.”

Ridley reached out and tapped Rachel on the back of the leg. He felt the muscle go taut. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Don’t touch me. Don’t you ever touch me.”

“Let’s go,” he repeated.

She began crawling again, moving faster, and that was just fine. Speed would help the sheriff, because he would imagine he was getting closer to an open space instead of deeper into the tunnel. Ridley would have preferred to take his time and let Trapdoor talk to him, but the circumstances weren’t right. He wasn’t communing with the cave now; he was just passing through.

When Rachel entered the chamber and stood, Ridley said, “Made it, Sheriff. You might need to duckwalk in here, tall guy like yourself, but you’ll be all right.”

“Duckwalk?”

“Just watch me.” Ridley rose to half standing, upright but bent at the waist, knees flexed. “You ever play baseball, Sheriff?”

“Yeah.”

“Think of yourself as a shortstop going after a ground ball. You’re moving laterally, you’re bent over, but you’re still fluid, still loose. Pretend you’re closing on second base, but you’ve got to keep your eye on the plate, right? That’s where the ball is coming from.”

“I played third.”

“Pretend you were a little more athletic, then.”

The sheriff scrambled awkwardly to his feet and imitated Ridley’s posture as best he could.

Rachel said, “Let’s go. It’s not a tour.”

“You think it would be faster if he’d frozen up back there in the crawl?”

“I’m not freezing up,” Blankenship said. “Let’s move.”

“Good man.” Ridley followed as soon as Rachel went into motion, moving in a side step, watching the sheriff’s footwork. Blankenship crossed his feet over now and then but he did all right. Being as tall as he was, he was going to have one hell of a stiff back by morning.

They were almost through the chamber and closing in on the next passageway when Blankenship said, “I can hear him!”

“No, you can’t,” Ridley said. He’d been listening to the voices for a while. “Those are the people who are trying to find him.”

They curled through the passageway and came out on the other side in a room larger than any they’d seen since the entrance chamber. This was the Funnel Room, so named because it was shaped like an upside-down volcano. In the center was a nearly perfect funnel formation, thirty feet in diameter at the top and about three feet at the bottom. There were six people in the room, five men and one woman; two of the men were down in the bottom of the funnel, clipped to ropes. You could make it up and down the funnel without the use of ropes and ascenders, but the rescue teams took their safety protocols seriously. They’d seen what happened to those who did not.

One of the men up on the ledge looked at Ridley when he entered and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“That line has already been used tonight,” Ridley said. “Hope somebody comes up with new material.” He didn’t look any of them in the eye, but that wasn’t because he felt intimidated — looking these folks in the eyes required staring into the beams from their headlamps. He crouched on the ledge and watched the men in the bottom of the funnel. One was Cecil Buckner; the other was Anmar Mirza, the cave rescue coordinator.

“He’s down there?” the sheriff asked.

“That’s where you can hear his voice,” Rachel said. “At first we weren’t sure it was a voice. Pretty weak.”

“Is he responding to you? Can you communicate?”

“He seems to be talking to himself.”

Down in the funnel, Cecil said, “Quiet! Listen!”

Everyone fell silent and looked toward the base of the funnel, casting their beams downward. For a time there was no sound, but then it came, faint but clear, a drawn-out call.

“Saaaarraaah.”

The sound whispered out of the funnel and echoed through it, the name clear as a bell.

Silence lingered until the sheriff broke it with a soft question. “Who’s he talking to?”

“We’re not sure,” Cecil answered. “He’s stuck on that name, though. It’s all we can hear.” He pushed back from the wall on his toes, letting the rope take his weight, and wiped sweat from his face. “To tell you the truth, it’s kind of freaking us out. Those of us who were... you know, in here before. Back then.”

They all looked at Ridley. It was impossible not to realize that; their headlamps followed their eyes. In the cave, there was no such thing as a surreptitious stare, because light couldn’t lie. Ridley felt as if he should say something, felt as if he should be defensive and angry or dismissive and wiseass or any combination thereof as long as he was something. But he couldn’t come up with a response. When the voice came again — Saaarrraaah — gooseflesh broke out across his arms, and his spine prickled with a fear he’d thought he would never know again.

I’ll be curious to see how being back in that place works on you, the sheriff had said. The way it worked on Ridley was supposed to be private, though. Internal. If the cave called her name, Ridley should have been the only one who could hear it.

He looked around the group then with an urgent need to make sure that they were hearing it. Because down here, your mind could warp a little. Down here, real things could become false, and imagined horrors could leave bruises.

Nothing was imagined about this, though. They all seemed to be hearing it. If he was imagining—

“Saaarrraaaah...”

— this, then he was as good as done. What happened next could be very, very bad. Could be the end of him. He knew that better than any of these suspicious sons of bitches. He’d lived it.

His heart was racing, and all those beams were lancing at him from different directions like searchlights, and he closed his eyes against them despite himself.

“Saaarrraaaahh.”

“You think you can get to him?” the sheriff asked Anmar after the last echo of that hair-raising whisper was gone. “Do you need blasting equipment, something to get through the rock?”

Ridley kept his eyes closed, but he was glad the sheriff was talking, providing a moment of distraction. Ridley concentrated on his breathing, trying to get steady. It wasn’t easy. He was waiting on that whisper again, although it wasn’t a real whisper, more of a weak howl. A cry from someone who wanted to sound strong but was too close to dead to achieve anything near that.

He heard it again, weaker still: “Saaarrrraaaah.”

Everyone went silent when it came, the way you did when the minister spoke in church. Even if you knew the message, you had to listen to it respectfully.

“Can you get to him?” the sheriff asked again.

“I don’t know,” Anmar Mirza said. “We’ve got to find him first. It sounds as if he’s just a shelf below us, but how he got there... I have no idea.”

“Could we drill it?”

“We go up,” Ridley said. He opened his eyes, and though he shielded them with his hands, like a golfer reading the green before a putt, he wasn’t bothered by the harsh beams from his audience this time.