Sam Weller - Shadow Show

The rock slide had left a slanting hill where Lana had been standing. Besides that, there was nothing, only a set of her footprints, which were surprisingly larger than his. He lifted a small red boulder, then another, then a third, hoping to see a flash of her silver suit, the tread of her black boots, the glassy enclosure of her rounded helmet. But there was only more dust, only more red dirt. He tossed rock after rock aside, and as he did, he began to cry. He pounded on the sides of his helmet. His face—drenched in sweat—twisted itself into a rictus of dismay. With the helmet on he was unable to wipe the salty tears from his eyes, and so it felt as if he was drowning. He doubled over, feeling like he might begin to vomit. And as he leaned there, bile rising up in his throat, he saw something move.

Something.

The smallest of movements.

A light.

A soft pink light, emanating from between the piles of triangular rocks.

Quinn fell to his knees and began to hurl the pieces of stone aside with his heavy gloves, clawing at the upturned angles, digging his fingers into the sediment, until a ray of soft pink light poured out—the light the same color as the mysterious crystal tree he had discovered a few weeks before—and then, as he scuttled more of the gravel aside, the light struck against the curved exterior of his helmet, refracting, pouring against his eyelids, his nose, his mouth. For a moment he thought he was going blind, the light shifting from pink to white, his eyes struggling to make sense of the shape before it. But then, only a few moments later, he saw it was a hole. It was large and light-filled, just about as wide as his shoulders. He lowered his right arm inside, his hand momentarily disappearing into the uncanny brightness. There was a sound rising out of it, something familiar yet oddly affecting, like a swell of singing voices. It was like the music Forrest Blau would sometimes play at the beginning of prayer service, a chorus of vibrant, joyful noise. The boy felt his arm quivering with heat, the white light filling the space between his flesh and joints with a decided ferromagnetism. And then, forsaking all common sense, wisdom, and the world he had always known, Quinn crawled inside, forcing his entire body into the hole. Falling—the feeling of losing the fight with gravity—was all he remembered before the seething whiteness filled his eyes.

For a moment he was certain he was sleeping, or maybe, he began to wonder, he had died. But no; he sat up stiffly, placing his hand against the side of his helmet. He had been lying on his back, and the colors around him now shifted from a pulsing white to a faded pink and then a terminal blue. All around him there were other colors, too, yellows and greens and vibrant reds, and as he got himself up, his back sore from the fall, he saw something moving before him, something he had only ever seen in books, or in the videos in the library: a lean, nimble-footed deer sipping at a brook.

It was not quite a deer but something with a similar shape, the animal wearing a gray-blue coat of fur, and reddish-pink antlers that entangled themselves as the animal snuffled at a stream of clear water. There was water. Somehow there was actual water or something that looked like water down here. Quinn stood now, weak on his feet, dumbstruck. There was water, and there were plants and flowers of all kinds, some with petals as large as his face, growing all around. He had, in fact, landed in a pile of what appeared to be great pink poppies, in a small field full of them.

Quinn looked up, seeing the shape of the place he had fallen into. It was a cave, a cavern, and above, nearly ten meters up, was the opening. He could see the hole he had fallen through hanging there like a false black moon, and through it, the nighttime sky, still reeling. For a moment, all he could do was stare, and then something else, a bird—like a hummingbird, but much bigger, nearly the size of his face—darted past. It disappeared inside the trumpet of an otherworldly flower and then buzzed away. He watched the shape the bird made, amazed by the swift pattern of its thin purple wings, flitting from oversized flower to flower; he had never before seen a bird or anything move through the air under its own volition. The bird wound itself through a grove of waist-high vines and troubled a stand of reddish fruits. Following the bird’s turbulence with his eyes, he saw Lana, her body lying on a hillock of orange flowers. He began to panic again, rushing over to where she lay, on her side; the front of her helmet had been cracked, a slight silver spiderweb running the length of the convex glass. Quinn quickly checked the gauge on her air tank. It was empty, exhausted by the leak in the helmet. For a moment Quinn froze, then he scrambled to get the helmet off Lana’s neck, pulling at the small silver locks until they gave.

She was unconscious, her face looking passive, as peaceful an expression as she’d ever worn. He found the auxiliary mask and hose at the side of his own tank and placed it over Lana’s nose and mouth. Soon she began coughing, and then, her eyes wide and frightened, she tried to pull the apparatus away from her face. He did all he could to hold the mask against her face, but she was stronger than he would have guessed and pushed it away even more forcefully, her face turning red. Quinn shoved it back over her mouth, and finally she began to relax, starting to breathe once again. Moments later the air in his own tank had dwindled to emergency levels, and he could taste the nitrogen inside the helmet as the tank began to hiss, all but empty.

This accident, all of it had been his fault; he could admit that now. He had been led into temptation, and the consequences of his betrayal were going to be fatal for the both of them. He grasped Lana’s hand in his own, hoping to black out first, as he did not want to see the horrid expression Lana would make as she began gagging on the carbon-dioxide-flooded air. He waited, hoping for the world to quickly go dark.

But then nothing happened. Lana held his hand in her own and continued to breathe, looking up at him, first terrified, then confused, then at last—as his air tank ran dry and the emergency tone beeped faintly, warning of imminent failure—her face shifted to a kind of teary-eyed delirium. Somehow she was breathing. Somehow she could breathe. Carefully, uncertainly, she removed the auxiliary mask from her mouth and took a shallow breath from the air inside the cavern. And then—not coughing up blood—she began to smile. It was a smile Quinn had never seen on her face before, and though it only lasted a moment, it was enough to convince the boy to unclasp his own helmet and take in a short breath.

The air, the plants down here—somehow there was enough oxygen for both of them to breathe.

Quinn set the helmet by his feet and took in a gulp of air once more, the striking odors of ripe flowers filling his nostrils with a fragrant, almost corrupted smell. Lana sat up and did the same, the two of them breathing together, looking over at each other, quietly laughing.

It was what the two of them would later come to think of as a miracle. In this deep, forsaken cave, somehow there was enough air to breathe without wearing a helmet, and there were animals and birds and flowers and a world as colorful as it had been described in the first book of the Bible. The children stood then, hand in hand, making their way together along the foliage’s pink, rambling edge.

It was easier falling through the hole than climbing back out of it. And then there was the problem of their empty air tanks and the crack in Lana’s helmet. Quinn solved the question of their egress simply enough by finding a path up along the stony outcroppings of vines and dirt. The empty air tanks required a much more thoughtful solution. Here Lana decided to purge both of their tanks completely, then used a narrow twig to force the valves of both their tanks open again. Her coup de grâce was using the suits’ filters to create a vacuum, drawing in enough air from the cavern itself, before sealing the tanks again. The crack in her helmet held, leaking a little air whenever she took a heavy step, and as they climbed back up and out of the cave, Quinn stared at the fracture dividing the girl’s face, sensing, for the first time, that something for the two of them had begun to change.