Michael Koryta - Last Words

A glimmer then, a flash of steel and a spray of crimson mist, and Ridley winced against it, trying to close eyes that were already closed. He had to hold the right visual. The wrong ones were dangerous. Don’t take those tunnels. Find the right ones. He breathed deeply, slowly, and imagined himself returning to a chamber with many options. Imagined going down another passage now, one that led away from that glint of steel and blood. Here there was nothing but darkness and cool. Good. Follow it on, then. Go down, go deeper.

And keep going.

The exhaustion that had settled into Mark while he was with Danielle MacAlister peaked as he walked back to his car, every muscle ache amplified by the uphill walk through the snow. Cecil Buckner came out of his garage, where he had the bay doors open and appeared to be tinkering with a snowblower, and stood with his hands on his hips.

“Ain’t she a treat?” he called.

“She was more cooperative than most.”

Cecil shook his head. “Be careful with her, buddy.”

Mark stopped. “Why?”

Cecil turned to look at the big house. There was smoke rising from the chimney now. Danielle had started a fire. Snowflakes had just begun to fall, joining the thin trail of smoke. When Cecil spoke again, his usually booming voice was softer.

“Everybody’s got an agenda. Don’t you forget that.”

“What’s hers?”

Cecil wouldn’t take his eyes off the house, as if he was afraid someone would see them talking. “I couldn’t say. But she sure as hell hustled up here once you got inside the cave, didn’t she? First time I’ve seen her in almost three years too. I’ve asked her to come up and she says, ‘No, thanks, keep up the good work,’ click. But you got in and the police got called, and now she’s camped out at that house. Staying the week, she says. For what? I says. But she won’t answer that.”

“What’s her father like?”

“Aged and addled now. I haven’t seen Pershing in five years, at least. Back when he was around, when the cave was open, he was popular with some, I suppose. You want to know what Pershing was like, you just close your eyes and picture the nineteenth hole at a country club. Any country club. They’ve all got one like him. Old-timer camped out at the bar acting like he’s not an old-timer, telling bawdy jokes, silver hair that wouldn’t slip out of place in a cyclone, a big tipper when people are watching, ten percent when they aren’t. Tell me, buddy, ain’t you met a guy like that somewhere along the line?”

“A few.”

“Exactly. You got a sense of him, then. Some people take to that, others don’t. He rubbed some of the cavers the wrong way because of how he treated Trapdoor, like personal property.”

“Well, isn’t it?”

Cecil frowned. “Yes, except there’s a certain understanding with caves. A respect. It’s a small community of people who care about them, and Pershing didn’t get that. He just saw it as something like an oil well, a lucky piece of ground that was worth some dollars. Nobody else’s business.”

“Now he doesn’t care about the dollars?”

“I field offers for this place on a regular basis. State officials, parks people, some private buyers. They come down here and talk to me, and I relay the messages. The answer is always a firm no. The MacAlisters don’t want to sell or open the cave. But if you’re not going to open the cave, why not unload it and make a couple million? I suppose he has the money not to care, but I don’t understand it, and it surely doesn’t sit well with people around here.”

“Why do they care so much?”

Cecil rubbed his thumb and index finger together in the universal gesture meaning ‘money.’ “When the ground opened up and the cave came into view, people thought it was manna from heaven. The town was going to become a tourist economy, don’t you know. Then that girl got killed, a sad deal to be sure, but no reason to shut the whole show down. But Pershing did shut it down, so there’s the sense that he didn’t ever give a damn about this place or the people in it. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong; all I know is that in the past ten years, I’m the only person in Garrison who’s been making a living off him.”

“How’d that come to pass?”

Cecil pointed at a massive tree beside them. “See that red oak?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I know. Trees. My family moved up here from Carolina in the early 1900s. Came for jobs at the resorts over by French Lick. But back in Carolina, they worked with timber. Until it was all cut. That’s the problem with the way they handled that job back then. Cut off the hand that fed them, eventually. Then you had to move on. My family moved here. The knowledge of these trees, hell, that goes back to men I’ve never even seen in pictures. My family loved trees. That might sound strange considering they’ve always cut them down, but it’s true. My father was in the timber business, and I came in behind him. Pershing was just a buyer. My job was to scout property for him. I chose this one for those trees. A lot of red oak, some walnut stands. Good hardwood. Turned out to be the most valuable find anyone ever made for him, but not because of the trees; they didn’t count in that equation. The cave was where the money waited. Still waits. Anyone who opened that cave now, if it’s everything Ridley Barnes claimed, would be a hero.”

“Have you dealt with Barnes much?”

Cecil pulled off his knit cap and ran a hand over his bald head, his mouth twisting as if he’d tasted something sour.

“Dealt with him? Shit. I s’pose you could say that I’ve dealt with him. Crazy bastard showed up a few times over the years, trying to get in. Caught him once when he was set to go to work on those doors with a damned arc torch. Last time I threw him out, he took to begging. Got down on his knees like he was about to blow me. The man is everything people say, and then some. But the dealings I had because of him, those were the real bullshit matters.”

“What do you mean?”

Cecil pulled the cap back on. His eyes had never left the house. “You heard what he had to say about his time in that cave before he found her?”

“I’ve read most of it, at least.”

“Then you heard about the dark man.”

“Yes.”

Cecil gave an unpleasant smile. “You haven’t been around town long, but let me ask you, how many black faces you seen?”

“Just you.”

“There you go. I’m not completely alone in Garrison, but closer to it than not. Tell you just how, um, politically correct our local police are. They heard the phrase dark man and brought me in for questioning. No bullshit, it was that fast. Dark man.” He shook his head, still in disbelief a decade after it had happened. “So I got grilled like a suspect while Ridley was being treated for hypothermia and, at that time, like a hero. For a few hours. Then they realized he was talking about some sort of damned ghost or phantom and thought the cave was a person and that the girl was alive but, no, maybe she was dead, she either said something or she didn’t, maybe it was the cave talking to him, and he didn’t remember her having handcuffs on, but maybe she did. Got to scrambling all over the place and then he just stopped talking, period. But not before he explained that the dark man lived in the cave and always had and couldn’t die. He was eternal, that’s my understanding. So me, this dark man, I got thanked for my time and sent on my way. But I haven’t forgotten that. Shit, would you?”

“No,” Mark said. “I wouldn’t.”

Cecil nodded and spit into the snow. “There ya go. As for Miss MacAlister up there? If I were you, I’d be careful with her, that’s all. With that family.”