Michael Koryta - Last Words

He’d worked with her long enough to understand the double message here, the way she was using the word remember as often as possible, a guide that went beyond the surface message.

“Whenever you are ready, you may focus all of your attention on that portal,” she said, her voice rising and falling in subtle shifts. “You may begin to consider all of the places that it can take you. All of the places that lie beyond. You may remember those now, if you choose. You may vocalize those, if you choose. The seeing is within your reach and yours alone. You know this, and you know that even though it is dark to me, it is not to you.”

“Yes,” Ridley said in a dried-out whisper. “Yes.”

“Would you like to approach it now? Would you like to pass through it and tell me some things about what lies beyond?”

“Yes.”

“Listen to the water and to the other sounds that you might hear, sounds perhaps different than those that I can hear.”

He knew what she could hear: the steady, tinny drip of water from the ceiling, plinking down into a puddle that was patiently working its way through the stone, unhurried by the passing centuries. It was a pleasant sound, not unlike the ticking of a clock. In its own way, that was exactly what it was.

“Allow yourself to pass through, if you wish. Give yourself that permission now. Permission to go down that path. Moving forward, yes, but also backward. As far back as you choose. You know the path. You’ve been on it before. Follow it now, if you wish. Follow it and see where it leads. I will count down from ten to one, and when I reach one, you will be on the path as you once were before.”

Ridley closed his eyes even though he was in blackness, and his head bobbed in rhythm with her voice, and his thumb worked lightly over the knife. Though it drew blood, he felt no pain.

Mark was on his hands and knees again, freshening the bruises from his last time in this terrible place. If you wanted to make it out of Trapdoor alive, you had to be willing to spend some time on your knees. There was no other option.

The pain from the bruises was bad but the memories it triggered were much worse. Each ache forced him to recall the way it had been down here before, when he was alone and shivering in the blackness. When he had called on every resource for survival and found that your resources didn’t matter much when you were lost in the dark. You needed help from outside the blackness then. That had been the most unsettling realization of his life: I cannot save myself.

These memories should have made him even more grateful for the light, but instead he found a strange resentment of it. He maneuvered through the tunnel without needing to make any effort or even give any thought to avoiding the walls and the rocks, and he felt almost outraged by how simple it seemed. He knew what he’d earned in the dark, he knew how hard it had come, how much it had taken from both mind and body. That anything so arduous could be made so easy felt almost insulting, a mocking of what he had achieved.

The tunnel opened up, and the flashlight exposed a wide chamber with high ceilings and an odd, staggered floor that looked almost like bleachers, as if the water had carved seating for some grand performance. The Chapel Room, he assumed. There was no trace of Ridley or Julianne, but there was blood from Cecil. Less of it now, spaced out by larger distances.

Mark set down the rifle and withdrew Ridley’s map once more and checked. Yes, this was the Chapel Room. Here again he had options — three passages, one that went up to a second level of the cave, one that went straight ahead, and one that curled to the right. The passages both directly ahead and to the right took you to the Funnel Room, the place where they had first heard Mark’s voice. According to the dimensions on the map, the passage to the right was much larger, a walking passage with a twelve-foot ceiling. The passage ahead was labeled in Ridley’s scrawl — belly crawl, very tight. The wider passage was a much longer trip toward the same destination, a distance of a quarter of a mile to achieve what the belly crawl would do in three hundred feet.

He stepped back and moved the light around and saw that what looked like one rock angled in front of another was actually a gap in the wall. The obvious opening was a dead end, but the hidden one led on. There was blood on the floor here. Cecil had taken the walking passage.

Mark hesitated and looked back at Ridley’s map. For ease of access, he should follow Cecil’s route. If he took the crawl, though, and he moved fast enough, he could pull ahead of Cecil.

He turned from the open passage and walked back to the crawl without allowing any pause for reflection. When he saw the opening, it did not look so bad: a gap at least three feet high and equally wide. Easy going. He dropped back down to his hands and knees then and shone the light into the tunnel and saw a shelf of rock ceiling so low that it didn’t look as if a basketball could roll through.

“No,” he whispered. “Not worth it.”

That was when he heard a voice. Too soft to be understood but undeniably human. He ducked lower, listened. Heard the voice again and this time he recognized it: Julianne’s.

She was alive, and she was speaking. Cecil Buckner, who had left behind a gruesome scene that made no sense to Mark, was heading toward her. How close Cecil was to her, Mark didn’t know, but thanks to Ridley’s map, Mark knew exactly how close he was — three hundred feet. One football field, that was all.

One football field that he would have to crawl over on his belly, his shoulders squeezed on each side, the ceiling brushing his head.

He lowered himself onto his stomach and crawled forward, once more pushing the .22 ahead of him with his left hand while holding the flashlight in his right. Five feet in, then ten, and he was feeling fine, he believed that the visual intimidation of the crawl was harder than the process.

Then his shoulders brushed the walls. No big deal. Just wriggle forward. He lifted his head so he could extend his elbows.

His head cracked off the stone ceiling, and when he lowered it, his chin bounced off the floor.

Terror now. A flood of it. Not even fifteen feet in and he felt trapped, felt as if he should scramble backward.

He closed his eyes. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead and over his eyelid and across his lips. He licked it away, tasting the salt. Opened his eyes.

Everything ahead of him was blurred. The passage was too low, too narrow, too dark.

But he could breathe. He could breathe and he could move.

He also knew where it led. He knew that because Ridley Barnes had passed through here before. More than once. He’d passed through it with enough calm and composure to not only see where it led but chart its dimensions. Belly crawl, very tight.

A voice became audible again. Julianne’s. Soothing, composed. What she’d endured to this point Mark had no idea, but he’d seen Danielle MacAlister’s corpse. He knew what waited ahead for her.

We’ll all end up here, he thought. It’s just a matter of time. I’ll join them all down here. Sarah Martin. Diane Martin. Lauren.

He crawled ahead. Ten feet, fifteen, twenty. His breathing came too fast and his heart thundered. For the second time in this cave, he thought that he heard snakes, but there weren’t any. This time he had the light to prove it. He paused for a few seconds and steadied himself and then pushed on. Again he tried to look up and banged his head and felt a shudder of pain all the way along his spine. There was a reason you were supposed to wear a helmet. He crawled on, shoving the rifle in front of him, and he was cursing his slow progress when he heard two voices, a man’s voice joining Julianne’s, and this time he could understand the words, and the first one that registered was light.