Michael Koryta - Last Words

Mark put the flashlight in his teeth and bit down on the rubber handle so he could have both hands on the ladder. The climb felt long, thirty feet at least, maybe forty, and still his feet hadn’t touched the ground. When he heard a grinding noise, he looked up to see Evan sliding the manhole cover back in place.

“With any luck,” Evan called, “you’ll be talking to the police before I am. We’ll see. But if you do, you tell them something. Tell them I loved that girl. People won’t believe it, but it needs to be said.”

He shoved the lid all the way over the top then and sealed Mark in the blackness.

Mark’s feet touched stone but still he clung to the ladder, feeling around carefully to make certain it was the floor and not just a ledge. He had to be fifty feet down, and it was a straight descent. He tried to imagine Carson Borders taking a look at that crack in the earth and deciding to rappel down to see what he had. How many tries had it taken him?

He stepped away from the ladder and took the flashlight out of his mouth and for the first time he saw the room around him. There was nothing impressive about it. It had the size and feel of the cellar in an old house, cold and cramped, with a low ceiling and smell of old moisture. There was an opening about twenty feet across that looked like a tunnel. Mark considered it and then looked up at the ladder, wondering if the best course of action was simply to climb back out and call for help.

That was when he heard the moaning.

The sound seemed far away, but it was clear, a low wail of pain or anguish or both, and the way it whispered through the cave and echoed raised the hair on Mark’s arms and neck.

“Ridley?” he called, and even in the cramped room, his voice sounded small.

I’d be careful walking up on Ridley Barnes down there, though. It usually goes bad.

He turned from the ladder despite his desire to keep one hand on it and moved toward the tunnel, toward the sound. The walls were narrower here but the ceiling was about the same, so all he had to do was stoop. He’d gone no more than twenty paces when the cave opened up to his left and spread out in an immense chamber filled with bizarre and glorious rock formations. The stalagmites rising from the ground were far taller than him. He stood transfixed by the size of it for a moment and then took a few steps into the room, awed by its scope and grandeur. Carson Borders had seen this beneath his own land while police were investigating him for drug dealing and robbery, had gone away for seven years and sat in a cell knowing that it was there, waiting.

Mark was turning to his right when he saw a flicker of light in his peripheral vision to the left. He turned back and lost it in the beam of his own flashlight, so he turned the flashlight off, and there it was. A faint glow in the farthest reaches of the room, coming from the opposite direction. Another tunnel.

He turned his light back on and picked his way through the rock formations, and the second light grew brighter and brighter and then he rounded a corner and nearly walked into thin air.

He was standing on a ledge, and some twenty feet below him was a stream, not as wide as the boat channel at the main entrance, but close. Ridley Barnes sat on a shelf of stone beside it. He was wet and he was shaking and he looked at Mark without much interest.

“This is where she was,” he said. He angled his headlamp down and Mark saw water jugs and tin cans and a spoon and the remains of a blanket.

“This is where you found Sarah?”

Ridley nodded. “There’s a body back there. I don’t know who that is. I would like to know. I came a long way and I think that I deserve to know.”

It didn’t sound as if he was talking to Mark.

“It’s Carson Borders,” Mark said.

Ridley cocked his head as if surprised that the answer had come from Mark and not the cave.

“Carson.”

“Yes.”

“Carson kept her down here. You know that?” He looked at Mark then, swinging the headlamp to face him. His long gray hair was plastered against his neck in wet tangles. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. I just heard it from his son.”

“No teeth,” Ridley said. “The skeleton had no teeth. You’re right. That’s Carson. Who took his teeth?”

“Evan.”

It was a thought that would have revolted most, but Ridley took it in stride, nodding as if it made some sense to him.

“Nobody would look for him then.”

“Exactly. He’d been holding her down here. He told some people he was going to let her go, but he wrote ransom notes while he said it.”

Ridley thought about that for a while in silence, then indicated the old cans and water jugs. “But he was caring for her. You can see that much. She was alive and she had food and water. So long as she had him, she was all right.” He spoke through chattering teeth.

“You don’t know that, Ridley. She was abducted by a violent man who was fresh out of seven years in prison and didn’t want to go back. You don’t know how it would have played out.”

“I know how it did. I can remember that now. Julianne got me that far and then...” He closed his eyes. “Is she safe?”

“She’s alive,” Mark said. “She’s fine.”

Ridley opened his eyes slowly. “You’re sure?” he asked. Certainty seemed to be Ridley’s focus today. He wanted reassurance on every answer.

“I brought her out. I spoke to her. She’s alive.”

This seemed to mean something to him. There was no spoken response, but it was like a coil that had been wound tight inside of him loosened just a bit.

He pointed at the blanket and the tin cans. “If I’d had light left, I would have made it. No trouble. She was so damn close. It’s a simple turn. But in the dark...” He shook his head. “When I ran out of light, I ran out of time.”

“Nobody will blame you for it.”

Ridley didn’t answer that. He was shaking hard.

“We need to get you out of here,” Mark said.

“Julianne’s all right?” Ridley said. “She’ll make it? You’re not lying? I cannot hear any more lies. Whatever I hear has to be true now.”

“It’s the truth, damn it. Let’s get you the hell out of here so you can see her for yourself.”

“I wish it hadn’t gone the way it did,” Ridley said. “With her, I mean. Cecil Buckner, he earned what he got. But Julianne? She was good to me. She was scared of me, sure, but she was good to me even when she worked against me. You know why? Because she wanted to hear the truth, and she understood that I couldn’t say it yet. Not without her.”

“You just need to explain it. You can finally do that now.”

“What I want explained,” Ridley said, “is how hard it was. I want people to know that, but they can’t. They can’t ever know, because even if they believe it, they won’t have felt it. When I got her out of here alone in the dark? Not many men could have done that. Not many.”

He wiped tears from his eyes.

“That was a long trip,” he said in a whisper.

“I know it was. We’ll make sure everyone else knows too. Now you’ve got to—”

“There aren’t many who will understand,” Ridley said as if Mark hadn’t spoken. “You will now. That’s funny, when you think about it. You’d never even been underground. But now you get it, don’t you?” He looked up, and Mark squinted against the headlamp glare. “You know how she is in the dark.”

She was Trapdoor. Mark said, “I get it, Ridley. Yeah.”

“You understand how a man’s memory could go. Alone in the dark, down here? You understand what nobody else could. Things happen in the dark that you can’t make any sense of. So then you try to. You do that by telling yourself a story. Maybe the story is wrong, but it’s the only one you have, and so it becomes the truth. You need it to be the truth.”