Michael Koryta - Last Words

Once, Ridley would have cared about that more. Today, shivering and weak, he could only appreciate that he’d been one of the early ones. That he’d had the chance to see this at all.

The room he was in had ceilings at least ninety feet high that fanned out like a giant dome, vaulted like a holy structure. He considered lying down and soaking in the beauty of it and waiting until his light burned out again.

He couldn’t do that, though. He had a purpose, although it was not as urgent as the one he’d had the first time he’d passed through. He needed to find the place again. Where the dark man had lain in wait for attack and where, just above, Sarah Martin had waited for rescue. They were not places Ridley wished to see again or had ever wished to see — no one had understood that when they refused his requests for a return, over and over again; no one had ever understood that it would be worse for Ridley than anyone else. Ridley had given up on being understood long ago. What he knew now was that he had to keep moving or he was never going to reach those places again, and he had promised himself that he would do that before the end of his life. He had sacrificed much for it and it would do no good to stop here, no matter how beautiful the spot.

He pushed away from the oak-size rock and moved ahead, his steps sluggish. All around him, the massive formations spread their shadows, and Ridley’s own was very small against them. His shadow was the only one moving, though, and he was grateful for that. Trapdoor had turned a benevolent eye on him once more and would not hinder his way through the wilderness. He did not understand the reasons for her choices. She gave and she took and the order of those choices seemed indiscriminate and arbitrary at best and, at worst, cruel.

But it wasn’t his role to understand her. It was his role to get through her, that was all. She had been around for more millennia than he had years and he had no right to question anything that she did. You had to enter the darkness with some humility if you hoped to pass through it.

He traversed the full length of the domed room and then he faced half a dozen passages honeycombed in the far wall and did not hesitate before selecting one. He believed he’d tried several on his last time through, wasting valuable time, but the cave was guiding him now — it was either that or his memory, and Ridley’s memory had long been suspect and often loathed — and he knew that he was on the right path. The tunnel led past a wide pool like a lagoon, and air moved over the water and carried a clean, undamaged smell that seemed to heal him as he walked, the smell doing more to ease the pain than any pill could. The cold, not the pain, was the real killer and he knew he was beyond the threshold there, but he believed he had enough time left to see it through.

He stumbled over a rock and fell to his knees too easily, his body unable to offer any resistance, lacking the coordination necessary to simply regain balance. The landing was painful, and he cried out without shame because there was no one to hear him but the cave, and she’d watched him come all this way and had to understand that he was hurting. It would do no good to cry out to her, but it would do no harm either. She simply watched and listened in silence.

He closed his eyes and fought for breath and for a moment he could feel the girl’s weight on his shoulder again. He’d fallen many times with her, and each time he had apologized. Several times he had wept. Never had he stopped.

Sarah had been as silent and cold as the cave for most of the journey and Ridley did not hold great hope for her but he’d come too far to simply leave her behind and so he had talked with her and wept with her and he had carried her. For a long time he had carried her, so long that he had come to believe that he’d passed on and entered another life where there would be no pleasure, only pain and suffering and responsibility. But he’d understood the responsibility and so he’d bent to that task and he had never stopped carrying her through the darkness.

The surface world that had opened up to greet him was the same one he’d left behind, but it was no more welcoming than the underground one he’d shared with Sarah Martin. In many ways it was worse. Tell us what happened went from a request to a threat fast, and Ridley couldn’t tell them what happened because he didn’t remember all of it, and what he did remember, they refused to believe. When he spoke of things that sounded like magic, they were dismissed as lies and again and again people demanded the truth from him without accepting that he’d told the only parts of it that he knew.

His head fell forward, heavy with sleep, but his eyes snapped open and he shook himself awake. He couldn’t estimate how long he’d been going. He guessed it was well into a new day now, but perhaps he was wrong. All he knew was that he’d not allowed himself to rest so far and that he’d left much distance behind him. He turned and looked back and wondered if anyone would ever believe that he’d made it in the dark the first time while carrying her. He’d told them this, and he’d been ridiculed and scorned and even marked for death by many, and he could have accepted all of those things if only they had accepted the truth of what he had done to bring her out.

He rose from the ground with an effort and walked on and he’d gone maybe another fifty feet and the ceiling was getting lower when he saw his old backpack.

This was where he had started to climb ten years ago. Where he had heard her voice, her cries, and left his gear to try the crawling passage that led up to the level above, shedding weight to gain speed, because she was hurting. Where he’d left his last light, the backup light, the one he had not been able to find again when he emerged through a different passage with the girl in his arms. The fact that it was sitting out in the open, so visible now with the light, was hard to bear.

But you’re close. Yes. He was very close now. He just had to climb.

That sounded like an extraordinary task, but he reminded himself of what he had once achieved in this same place and he passed by his backpack and found the crawling passage and began to climb. He was slower than he had been on the first trip, but he allowed himself to be, for there was no hurry. The climb seemed endless but he doubted it was more than twenty feet, and it required no ropes, just dedication. Most of this stretch of the cave was that way. He came to the end and managed to shove his shoulders through and that was when he saw the bones.

The skeleton was intact and it looked quite beautiful. Its eye sockets were twin shadows, and one arm was extended and the finger bones were stretched toward the surface, as if it were begging for something.

Something glistened amid the bones, and Ridley reached forward and gingerly removed the object. Ten years of dampness had corroded the Benchmade knife a bit, but it still felt familiar, an old friend in his palm. He tried to close the blade but it would no longer shut, so he placed it back where it had been, as if the scene were a tableau the cave wanted to preserve.

Ridley sat back on his heels and looked at the skeleton for a long time.

What do you see that you did not see before?

“The dark man,” he said.

But the dark man was white and shining now. And the dark man had once been human.

Only my father,” Evan Borders said, “could sell the wrong part of his own land. If he’d just hung on to it, he’d have had the golden ticket he wanted. But he was in a hurry. You don’t get rich by being slow, he told me. He was broke when he said that, by the way. So he sold it, and the other fucking entrance opened up within the year. How about that?”