Michael Koryta - Last Words

“You wish to enter trance here.”

“A form of it.”

“There’s only one form I know.”

“She knows others. She’ll guide the process. You’ll facilitate, but she will guide. It won’t be what you’re used to. She won’t allow that.”

“There are many reasons you don’t want to leave here now,” she said, “and it is obvious that whatever trust you had in me has been damaged, but for your own well-being, I would like you to listen to me when I say that trance here is a dangerous thing for you.”

“Remaining on the surface is far more dangerous.” Ridley dropped to his knees on the stone and removed his backpack and began to assemble the special equipment he’d brought for this portion of the journey. He had a white wax candle and a small crystal base, and he fit the candle into it carefully and withdrew a pack of matches and struck one, tingeing the damp air with sulfur. The wick accepted the flame immediately.

“This isn’t how we do things,” Julianne said. “Not with candles and crystals, Ridley. You know better than that.”

“Things are different here. Do you have the necklace?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Hold it in both hands, please. And turn your headlamp off.”

She removed the helmet to turn off the lamp. She was clumsy with the equipment, and he watched that with dismay, because he knew they would have some traveling to do. At least she was not scared of tight spaces, or hadn’t been so far. Trapdoor could breathe new fears into you swiftly, though.

When her headlamp was off, he was relieved. The candlelight was softer and it shifted and breathed and it was natural. Ridley’s mouth was the driest it had ever been. He freed a water bottle from his pack and drank heavily. It made no impact.

Mark had spent hours in a cave in a way few people alive could relate to, and yet he’d never experienced one in anything but blackness.

In the light, it could take your breath away.

The deepwater channel with its odd coloration set the tone, but it was the way the cave expanded as it descended that really created a sense of awesome power, a promise that there was so much more here than you would have guessed.

The small flashlight seemed weaker with each step. He thumped it against his hand and adjusted the focus, trying to coax more light out of it. The sense that it was dimming was an illusion, though, created by the size of the cave and the totality of the darkness.

He walked on a ledge to the right of the water because it was the only option.

Drops of fresh blood painted the cave floor. Cecil was wounded, but he wasn’t bleeding badly. Just a steady drip. Mark’s flashlight caught something reflective and glistening up on the stones. A strip of duct tape, sliced neatly in half. A twin of what had been on the floor in Cecil’s apartment, only without any of Danielle MacAlister’s blood on it.

He stepped over it and moved ahead.

For a while he did not need to attempt any tracking or even consider it because there was only one path. Then, in a spot where the water channel opened up into a wide pool, he saw the looming blackness of a tunnel on the left and another one on the right, and for the first time there was a decision to be made.

He dropped to one knee, removed Ridley’s decade-old map from his pocket, and got his bearings. He’d been walking along the Greenglass River and now he had the choice of scrambling toward the tunnel on the left or bending toward the one on the right. According to the map, the tunnel on the left emptied out into a circular room named Solitude. There was no indication that there was a way out of Solitude, but of course Ridley had stopped recording the passages at some point and it was entirely possible that there were numerous ways ahead from the supposed dead end. All the same, Mark found himself guessing that Ridley had gone right, toward the Chapel Room and then the Funnel Room, where Mark had been told they’d begun the search for him, Ridley traveling up when everyone else was looking down.

His turn was the right choice — Cecil’s blood was visible again, meaning that he, at least, had come this way. Whether he’d had visual contact with Ridley at the time was another question. Inside the cave, Ridley held all the advantages — knowledge of terrain, technical expertise, every level of comfort one could have on his home turf — but he’d hindered himself by bringing Julianne along. The things that Ridley could do down here alone using his ropes and wetsuits and challenging high walls and narrow tunnels, he would not be able to do with Julianne, or at least not with any speed. That meant if Mark kept up a good pace, he stood a chance of finding them fast, but moving quickly would be a struggle because he was beginning to feel the return of the unease with the cave now. As he entered the tunnel that led to the Chapel Room, he was positive he heard a sound behind him, and he whirled and banged the rifle barrel off the stone walls. The flashlight illuminated nothing that could have moved or made a sound. It was only in his head.

Mark knew he had to hurry to catch them, but he wanted to go slowly. No, that wasn’t even the truth. He wanted to get out. There was a bad feel to the place once the walls of the tunnel narrowed around him and the ceiling angled down and he saw that he was going to have to crawl.

You may only be making this worse, he thought. An amateur chasing a pro in a place like this, it could be a disaster for everyone.

True, but that was not enough to make him leave. It would take them a long time to get caving experts in here, and who knew what the police would want to do at that point? Caving experts were still civilians. The police might decide to enter themselves, and they’d be just as slow as Mark. Maybe slower.

Cecil was out there ahead, and Mark wanted to catch up to him, at least. Together they would have a better chance. Mark understood the adrenaline, the desire for immediate pursuit, but Cecil had scarcely entered the cave when Mark arrived. He should have seen Mark’s car pulling in and known that someone was here, someone who maybe could help. If nothing else, Cecil should have asked Mark to call for reinforcements while he went after them.

Decisions made in battle often lacked clarity and logic, though, and Cecil had certainly been under fire. His home had been ransacked, his employer brutally murdered, and Ridley had a hostage. Mark hadn’t even thought to check the phone in Cecil’s apartment and see if it worked. He’d called the police from his own cell. Perhaps Ridley had taken away Cecil’s ability to call out. The only chance for Cecil then would have seemed the hero’s play, trying to stop Ridley alone. After seeing what Ridley had done to Danielle, that took real courage.

Mark stopped crawling and rested his bruised knuckles on the stone, the .22 in his left hand, the flashlight in his right. He leaned against the tunnel wall as sweat dripped from his forehead and his heart thundered. Adrenaline coursing, the same thing he was busy ascribing to Cecil. He’d been telling himself he couldn’t pause, couldn’t slow, that it was all about speed now, and Ridley had had a head start.

Speeding in the wrong direction wasn’t worth a damn, though. Speeding in the wrong direction was a good way to die.

Did you see things right, Markus? Did you see the truth back there?

He’d seen brutality, a murder victim awash in blood, and he’d identified her killer without pause. Ridley was the threat, and Ridley was on the property, ergo...

But why hadn’t Ridley killed Cecil, then? If Mark’s perception was right, it meant Ridley had been armed with a shotgun in Cecil’s apartment and had used it on Danielle. Why Danielle? And why let Cecil live?