Michael Koryta - Last Words

“People will understand,” Mark said. “I’ll help you with that. Julianne will. Hell, I think at this point, the sheriff will.”

Ridley seemed uninterested in that. He looked around the cave with an appreciative gaze.

“She works on you. People will tell you that any cave will, but people are wrong. She’s special. Trapdoor really is special.”

“Can you get up here somehow, or do I need to go find help? There’s a ladder to the top if you can just make it this far. You’re very close to the surface now.” Mark was studying the wall beneath the ledge. It was too smooth to allow free-climbing. They’d need ropes or another ladder.

“I’m going to get help, Ridley. I don’t think you can make it up this wall. We need the right gear. You need to get out of the cold.”

“Cold’s not so bad.” Ridley got to his feet. It took some effort. “Thank you, by the way. What I wanted from you, from both of you, was just to know. It didn’t go as planned, did it? But I know now. I don’t need my name cleared, don’t need to explain myself to anyone, never did. I just needed to know.”

“I think more people will understand than you expect.”

“I’ve never been much for talk,” Ridley Barnes said. His teeth were chattering violently. “I’m supposed to go up there, sit with police, have cameras in my face, and then what do I tell them, exactly? I killed one man, and a girl died because of it.”

“You just say what happened. Self-defense with Carson, and with Sarah Martin, good Lord, that wasn’t your fault. You were the only person who even came close to saving her.”

“I was never good up there,” Ridley said. “I was better down here, always.”

He stepped into the water, and for an instant Mark thought he was going to cross the stream and try to make it up the wall. Instead, he waded away, moving unsteadily through waist-deep water. On the far wall, his silhouette was an enlarged version of his staggering form.

“Damn you, Ridley, get out of the water!”

“Head on back to the surface and tell them all what happened down here,” Ridley said. “That was the job, and you did it. You’ve almost done it, at least. The last part is in the telling. It will mean a lot to people. More people than either of us have met.”

“Then we’ll tell it. Get out of there. I’m going for help.”

Ridley swiveled his head, and the beam of his headlamp threw a glare into Mark’s eyes, forcing him to lift a hand against it.

“I was wrong about you,” Ridley said. “And about myself. I thought I’d have to come back up, but I don’t. You’re the one who has the job on the surface. When things go dark, you’re the one who will have to bring the light back.”

“I understand. Now if you—”

“No!” Ridley’s voice boomed with a near desperate sound. “You don’t understand yet. There’s a lot of responsibility ahead of you. A lot of pressure, Markus.”

Ridley had never called him that. Never called him anything but Novak. The new man, the stranger, he’d said with such delight during their first meeting.

“Okay,” Mark said. “I’ll handle the pressure. Right now, I’m going for help.”

Ridley turned away, the light traveling with him, and began to wade again.

“Get out of the water!” Mark looked at the wall, searching for any way down that wouldn’t end with a broken spine. There wasn’t one.

“It’s beautiful up ahead,” Ridley said, and then he turned his headlamp off, plunging the passage into darkness. He was out of the range of Mark’s flashlight.

“Travel safe,” he called from the blackness. “She doesn’t want you yet.”

Those were the last words Mark heard from Ridley Barnes. Mark called for him again and again, shouting for him to come back, but the only voice that answered was his own.

Searchers worked for four days straight without finding Ridley or his body, but then Sheriff Blankenship called it off, partly, he confessed to Mark, because they seemed to be growing more interested in the cave than in the search. There was a lot of it. Nobody could agree on the total size, but early estimates were high. Maybe top ten in the country. Maybe top five. Maybe better.

It was a remarkable find, they all agreed. Endless potential.

Endless.

Evan Borders was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee, when a state trooper pulled him over for speeding and discovered the active warrant. Borders didn’t resist arrest, which was a career first. He was due to be transported back to Garrison County on the same day that Mark left. The same prosecutor who charged Cecil Buckner with the murder of Danielle MacAlister said he was weighing allegations and evidence concerning Pershing MacAlister.

The first lawsuit over the Trapdoor Caverns Land Trust was filed before the search for Ridley Barnes had stopped. The news was filled with opinions on who should have the right to the cave, and legal experts weighed in on who already did and what could be done about it. Mark avoided those stories.

He went to see Julianne Grossman before heading out of town. She was still in the hospital but had been moved out of intensive care, and the doctors were pleased with her progress. She’d sustained a fracture in her skull but there had been no bleeding in the brain. He sat beside her bed and they talked in low voices for more than an hour and several times they paused so that she could weep.

“At first I wanted him to pay,” she said.

“You weren’t alone.”

“But that’s my job,” she said, “to be open to the subconscious, to help others learn how to be. When I had to open, I closed down. I heard what he said, and I closed down. I stopped wanting to help Ridley Barnes when he said those things. I wanted to help Sarah Martin then.”

Mark assured her that everyone had. That was the worst of it, really. Everyone had been willing to help and join the cause. It took a village to kill a monster, after all.

“I could have just walked away from him in the end,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Once he was underground, once he was in trance, he was content. Maybe even before trance. It sounds strange, but it took a lot out of him to get back down there. I saw it. He was pushing himself toward the thing everyone claimed they wanted from him. By the end, I wanted to help him get there. Maybe I shouldn’t have, though. Maybe I should have tried to convince him to just leave.”

“He’d have gone back down soon enough,” Mark said. “Or he wouldn’t have, and things would have gone worse for him up here.”

She nodded. They fell silent but he did not leave. For a long while he just sat there at her side and then she reached out and took his hand.

“Your mind has enormous potential,” she said. “You might not want to hear that from me. Not after this. But... there are special things ahead for you if you want them, I’m sure of it.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything at all.

“You’re going home now,” she said. “Florida.” She enunciated each syllable so that the word sounded like a song.

“Yes.”

“Your firm understands what happened here?”

“They know.”

“If there’s any problem, I’ll tell them what they have to hear. I’ll tell them whatever you need me to so that you can return to work.”

He thanked her and did not tell her that he’d written his resignation letter the previous night in his hotel room. His resignation letter, and a proposal. He wasn’t sure how either would go over, but it was time to deliver them.

“Be in touch,” he said. “And I mean that. I’d like to hear from you again.”

“Likewise. Stay open, Mark. Stay open.”