Michael Koryta - Last Words

“What?”

“There’s nothing down there but solid stone floor. You could drill all night and not make any progress. So we go up.”

“I don’t follow you, Ridley.” This was from Cecil Buckner, and he was the only person who’d spoken Ridley’s name. The only one who didn’t have pure contempt in his voice. Regardless of what he thought of the past, he understood this about the present: Ridley could help. Ridley had drawn the maps.

“Shelves,” Ridley said. “The cave is built in shelves.” He made a stacking gesture with one hand. “But they’re not laid properly. It’s like an old fieldstone wall — uneven, overlapping. What can always find its way down through one of those walls?”

“Water,” the sheriff said.

Ridley nodded. “So we turn into water. To find him, we become water. He’s below us, but we can’t get there from here. We’re sitting in a little catch basin. This is where water gets trapped. So we go up and we go sideways until we get off this shelf. You follow now?”

Several headlamps turned upward, putting a gloss of light across the ceiling.

“There’s no passage up there.”

“You didn’t draw the maps, Cecil.”

“And I didn’t get to see them either. But there’s no passage up there.”

“There’s a crawler. A chute that will take us to the shelf below this one. Down toward his voice.”

“Has anybody ever been through it?”

“Only one,” Ridley said. “And it’s tight.”

“Can you make it again?”

“Yes.” Ridley slipped his backpack off his shoulders and unzipped it.

“I’ll stay with him,” Blankenship said, but the unease in his voice was obvious.

“We need an experienced caver with him,” Anmar said. “With all due respect, you’re not right for the job. I’ll do it. I’ll make sure that whatever happens in here today, there are eyes on him.”

Ridley ignored them both, removed a drill powered by lithium ion batteries from his pack, then opened another compartment and grabbed a handful of expansion bolts.

“What are you doing with that?” the sheriff asked.

“Building us a ladder,” Ridley said. “And we need to do it fast. It’s wet down where he is, and it’s cold. Time isn’t on his side.”

As if to confirm this, the whisper came again, softer than ever: “Saaarraahh.”

Mark met Sarah Martin in the water.

She came to him only after he quit fighting ahead, when he finally stopped moving and let the current take him.

There wasn’t much current to speak of, because he’d made it back to water that was only up to his waist. Wading through waist-deep water was chore enough for a strong man, though, and Mark had stopped being strong long before, and he’d stopped being a man somewhere along the streambed, someplace where the water ran high and every now and then he’d stepped into a hole and was completely submerged, choking, close to drowning.

It was her name that brought him back to the surface on those occasions. The repetition of her name had felt critical to his memory once, but after a while, it became equally critical to his forward motion. He’d fallen into an unconscious cadence, saying her name with each step, and eventually he began to feel as if he could not do one without the other. Name, step. Name, step. He felt as if he had to say the dead girl’s name in order to move forward, had to remember it. The past drove the present, always.

The next time he forgot her name, he froze. Her name had been right there on his tongue, he’d said it at least a thousand times in a row. But then...

What was her name?

He stumbled on the rocks, and the water pushed at his legs, and then he gave up because he could no longer remember, and once you forgot the past, there was no point in pushing to the future. The two were intertwined. He understood that now in a different way than he had before.

And so he knew it was time to quit.

The water caught his weight and carried him away from this hopeless place and back to the one where he could have made different decisions, chosen different paths. He let himself drift, and for a long, beautiful moment, he believed that was how it would feel forever — an endless slow drift through the blackness, going backward, always back, and that was good because it was where everything he wanted waited for him.

When he hit rock with his shoulder, the beautiful dark path was gone, and pain replaced it. The impact was so jarring and painful that it temporarily cleared his mind and he was aware of the water, the stone walls, and the blackness again.

He was not aware of the cold. In fact, he realized that he’d reached hot water. A hot spring, perhaps? It had to be. What began as a creeping warmth quickly became scorching, and he blamed the water and tried to escape it. There was a flat shelf of rock above him, and though it was not even chest high, it felt like it would be an impossible climb. On the fifth try, he finally made it, pulling his body out of the searing heat of the water.

The heat didn’t leave him, though. It lingered, and the misery was terrible. He felt as if he were trapped inside a fire, one that would not burn over him and move on but was here to stay. He tried to brush the heat away from him, but his hands didn’t obey his commands anymore. He thought that he was still too close to the water, and the farther from it he got, the deeper into the stone, the better. He slid and scooted and scraped along the shelf until he made contact with a wall, and there he stopped, and that was when he saw her.

She was sitting on a flat rock just across from him. There was an impossible brightness to her, as if light came from her pores. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and running shoes, and she sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around them, as if to keep warm, which seemed a very strange thing to do down here where it was so damn hot. She didn’t seem hot or cold, though, didn’t seem bothered by the temperature in the least. Just comfortable. Watching him. Waiting. What was she waiting for? What did she want from him?

To remember.

Yes, that was right. He was required to remember her, to think about her in the dark. That was his instruction. No wonder she’d appeared; no wonder she was waiting on him. Knowing that you’d been forgotten had to be a unique and relentless pain.

“Sarah,” he said. She didn’t react, which was frustrating, because he knew that was right. That was her name. He thought that she must not have heard him. It had become loud down here, the water going from a trickle to a roar, and not only that, he seemed to be hearing voices from some other place, somewhere up above. Whatever they were saying, it wasn’t the right thing, it wasn’t pleasing to her, and it probably kept her from hearing him. He called her name again, louder this time, and still she didn’t react.

He tried again, and again, and still she just sat there, knees held to her chest, her eyes fastened on him, watching and waiting. Unsatisfied by him but still hoping.

For what? he wanted to scream, but he was terrified of upsetting her. No — of disappointing her. What in the hell did she want from him? If not to be remembered, then what?

He leaned his head back against the stone, and though he could no longer see her face, he could still see the light from where she sat in the darkness, watching and waiting and hoping.

They’d put in seventeen expansion bolts by the time Ridley reached the ceiling. From the bolts hung seventeen etriers, short stretches of rope ladder. Ridley didn’t travel underground with those, but the rescue team had, and he allowed them to be used because it would help others move up when he needed them. Not everyone was as skilled with single-rope techniques as he was, and he knew that when — if — the time came to move Novak down, the ladders would be a help.