When we got to the far side of the compound we could see that there were several vehicles parked behind the main building, including a small shuttle van. But the compound was silent, and there wasn’t any light visible in or around the buildings; whoever owned those vehicles was probably underground.
As we moved past the entrance the trees closed in on us again, and Devon checked his GPS app. “That way,” he whispered, pointing southwest. We moved as quietly as we could in the thick underbrush. I kept looking behind me as I walked, straining to see if we were being followed. Thus far, it seemed, we were unobserved.
Then Devon whispered “There!” and pointed to something directly ahead of us.
In the dim moonlight I could make out a small cabin, its weathered planks green with mildew. At one time, the surrounding land must have been cleared, because there were no large trees near it, though dozens of smaller ones had sprouted up, and a thick carpet of tangled brush covered the ground. I was willing to bet that no one had come here in a long time. If we were lucky, the new owners didn’t even know this place existed.
The cabin had no door, just a simple rectangular archway like you might find at the opening of a mine. Someone had nailed wooden planks across it, and while the job wasn’t neat, it was thorough; there were enough nails in the wood to keep a recycling center busy for a week.
“Jeez,” Devon muttered. “I didn’t think to bring a crowbar.” He considered the problem for a moment, then took his utility knife out of his backpack and began prying loose fibers of wood from the edge of one of the planks. Rita and I couldn’t help him without getting in his way, so we stood watch. Finally, when he had made a hole big enough to fit his hand into, he grasped the upper edge of the plank, braced his foot against the door frame, and pulled. At first the plank didn’t budge, and it looked like we would have to figure out some other way to break inside. But then suddenly it gave way, and fragments of moldy wood went flying in every direction as he jerked the plank away from the archway and threw it into the brush.
Now there was room for all three of us to grab the next plank down, and we made short work of it. Two more gave way after that, until we had an opening large enough for a person to climb through.
Pausing to catch our breath—dismantling an eighty-year-old shack is surprisingly hard work—we shined our flashlights into the small building, to see what was there.
The interior was empty, and most of the floor was just flattened dirt. But near the rear of the building the ground looked darker, and when we swung our flashlights that way we could see the opening of a deep black pit. Inside, it looked like there might be some kind of staircase leading down. Devon’s research had come through for us.
I stared at the hole for a moment, and my hand trembled, making the beam from my flashlight jerk around a bit. The reality of what we were doing—and the sheer danger of it—was sinking in. If anyone other than Tommy had been kidnapped by aliens, I might have turned around and headed home right then and there. Only for family did you do something like this.
But we can’t go home, I reminded myself. I could see in my companions’ eyes that the same thought was running through their heads. If we returned home now, without answers, we’d just be putting our families at risk. No one was going to investigate this place for us based on the kind of evidence we currently had, so we’d wind up sitting at home helplessly, just waiting for someone to come kill us.
Better to take our chances with the unknown.
Deciding that since this was my venture I really should go first, I started to climb inside, working my way gingerly over the remaining planks. But the rotting wood gave way beneath me and sent me crashing to the ground inside the cabin. I fell full length, which mean that my head wound up less than a foot from the gaping pit. For a moment I just lay frozen, fear surging through my veins, while tendrils of cool air from the netherworld chilled the sweat on my skin.
“Are you okay?” Devon asked.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I think so.”
Slowly, carefully, I edged myself away from the pit. It took me a minute to catch my breath and to still the wild beating of my heart; then I crawled over to where my flashlight had fallen and retrieved it. Devon and Rita were climbing through the entrance—more carefully than I had done—and by the time I was back on my feet, they were standing beside me.
Now we had a better angle on the pit and could shine our lights straight down into it. There was indeed a flight of stairs, carved out of the bedrock itself. The steps were narrow, steep, and uneven, and it went without saying there was no handrail. They went down as far as our light could reach and then were swallowed up by the darkness of the pit. Nameless malevolence seemed to waft up from the depths.
“Just when you need an elevator the most,” Devon muttered.
“Should have picked one up at Walmart,” Rita chided him.
“Next time,” he promised.
The banter steadied my nerves a bit. I felt ready for this. Taking a deep breath, I started to descend into the earth. It wasn’t easy. The treads weren’t wide enough to accommodate my feet in a normal walking position; I had to turn them sideways and work my way down the staircase like a crab. The stairs were damp, too, which meant they were slippery. I tried to find handholds on the rock wall to steady myself, but there were very few, and the descent was pretty scary. Flashlight beams played about my feet as Rita and Devon descended behind me, balancing precariously on stairs that had not felt the weight of a human foot for eight decades. If either of them slipped, we’d all go down.
But I finally reached the bottom, and moments later the two of them joined me. As I waited for them I swung my flashlight beam around the long, narrow cavern that we were now standing in. The nearer end appeared to have been hewn from the rock by some sort of hand tool; deep gouges criss-crossed the wall in parallel groupings, as if a giant cat had sharpened its claws there. A few yards beyond that the space opened up into a natural chamber, the kind they call a “live cave,” whose walls were slick with moisture from recent rains. There were small calcite icicles hanging down from the ceiling, and ripples of glistening stone seemed to be have been frozen in place as they trickled from cracks in the walls. This place had been famous in its time, I recalled, and with caverns like Luray and Skyline right down the road, that meant it must have some pretty impressive formations.
There was only one direction to go in, so we started walking, following a path of rough bricks half-covered in mud. The original tourist route? Running along one wall I saw a horizontal ridge that looked man-made, no doubt disguising an electrical line. There were probably lights down here somewhere, disguised as cave formations so as not to distract tourists. But even if we found functional lights, and they were still hooked up to a power source, we could hardly risk turning them on.
Devon turned his phone off as we walked, to conserve its power. Our flashlights provided some light, but not nearly enough to drive back the oppressive cave darkness. As we walked, their narrow beams made the formations flanking our path look like stuff out of a horror movie. Spires would suddenly appear overhead, from nowhere; waterfall-shaped cascades of limestone seemed to shift position as we passed by, and curtains of translucent calcite rippled like jellyfish. My parents had taken me to visit Luray Caverns back when I was a kid, and I remembered how beautiful such formations could be, when viewed in the proper lighting. But when viewed this way they were unsettling, and we were all acutely aware of how many hiding places there were in the darkness surrounding us, that might shelter any manner of enemy or trap.
But thus far, no one seemed to know we were there.
Suddenly I thought I heard something other than our footsteps, and I motioned for everyone to stop moving. Straining my ears, I could just barely make out a sound in the distance.
I looked at my companions to see if they had heard it too. They both nodded. Someone else—or something else—was down here.
Rita and Devon switched off their flashlights, and
I kept mine pointed downward as much as possible; it barely gave us enough light to walk safely, but we had to minimize the chance that anyone ahead would see us coming. Periodically we stopped to listen again; each time the distant sound seemed louder. It was beginning to sound like human speech, though the echo from the caverns made it hard to pick out individual words. We seemed to be heading right toward it, and I wondered if we would really be so lucky as to have our path lead straight to the kidnappers we sought.
But then we came to a place were the line of bricks turned off to the right, while the voices were coming from the left. There seemed to be no way to continue walking in the direction we needed to go. Anxiously, we searched the left wall of the chamber for any kind of passage, and Devon finally found a narrow crevice hidden in the shadows. Little more than a crack in the wall, it looked like something no man in his right mind would enter; but then I saw the thin line of concrete running down one of its walls, and realized it must have been used as a maintenance tunnel. Good enough.
One by one we squeezed ourselves into the narrow space. Devon went last, and before he committed himself to the crevice he took out a piece of chalk and marked the ceiling overhead. Always the organized one. Rita had her knife in her hand again. I wondered what it would feel like to stab someone. I wondered, if circumstances called for it, if I would be able to. I wondered if Rita ever had done so.
The floor of the passageway was covered with a thick layer of mud, and our feet made soft squelching sounds as we worked our way through the narrow space. Way too conspicuous for my taste, but there was no helping it. Sometimes the ceiling dropped so low that Devon couldn’t get through without crouching, and at one point the passage grew so narrow that I had to slip off my backpack to squeeze through it sideways. Meanwhile the light was growing brighter by the moment, so we knew we were headed in the right direction. The voices were gone, though; even when we stopped our mud-squelching to listen for them, we could hear nothing.
Eventually it grew bright enough that I shut my flashlight off. Soon after that the tunnel opened out into a small chamber, just large enough for the three of us to stand in. Through a narrow slit at the far end we could see there was a much larger chamber beyond, and the light seemed to be coming from there.
Slowly, warily, we approached that final opening, and for a moment we all stood as still as the rock itself, listening for any sign of danger. But all we could hear was the distant drip of water, the music of a living cave. So I took the lead and squeezed through the narrow slit.
I emerged into a massive chamber. I didn’t need a guidebook to tell me that this was the crown jewel of Mystic Caverns, the point where all tours converged. The ceiling was so far overhead I couldn’t make out its limits, and a thick forest of columns and stalagmites surrounded me, making it hard to see what else was in the chamber. All about the room, inside crevices and behind formations, the light cast deep black shadows. God alone knew what might be hiding in any one of them.
As I crept warily forward I thought I could make out a large open area ahead of us, surrounded by a waist-high railing. The light we’d detected was coming from a series of lamps affixed to its support posts, and though the illumination must have been pretty dim by aboveground standards, it was nigh on blinding to us in our current state. I blinked as tiny purple spots swam before my eyes, as my eyes slowly adjusted. Then I got to where I could see what was in the central part of the chamber. And I froze.
Rita came up behind me. I heard her gasp.
Facing us was an arch. It was twice as tall as Devon and wide enough that he could not have touched both sides at once. The underlying shape of it was perfectly regular, but its surface was coated with flower-like clusters of cave crystals—anthodites—some of them so tiny I could hardly make out their details, others more than a foot long. The needle-like blossoms glittered as we shifted position, crystalline spines seeming to shift and sway as if they were living things.
The caverns hadn’t made this thing. Nor had human hands. It was … unearthly.
Beside the arch was a row of steel tables on wheels, the kind you might see in a morgue. Atop each one was a white sheet draped over what appeared to be a human body. I was about to move toward them when suddenly there was a loud metallic sound from the far end of the chamber. The lamps flared to sudden brightness, blinding us. From behind we could hear a large metal thing approaching … or maybe human feet pounding on metal.
“Hide!” Devon whispered fiercely.
As if we needed to be told that.
I looked about feverishly for cover and spotted a broad column near our entrance point that looked wide enough to hide behind. Fear lent fire to my muscles as I sprinted toward it. Rita and Devon ran off in other directions, presumably toward hiding places of their own. There were certainly enough of them in the chamber.
I dove into a thick black shadow behind the column, and I prayed that no one entering the main chamber would be able to see me. I leaned back against the wet rock and tried to stay calm, my heart pounding so hard I thought it would burst out of my chest. The metallic sounds were louder now, and yes, they clearly were footsteps. Curiosity warred with fear in my heart, and after a brief stalemate the former won out by a narrow margin; I peeked gingerly around the edge of the column to see who was coming.
In our fixation on the crystal arch we hadn’t noticed a suspended walkway leading away from the far end of the chamber. I could see two figures there, talking to one another as they walked along the metal grate toward us. On the left was a woman dressed in a navy skirt-and-jacket ensemble, a neat and conservative figure with hair coiffed to meticulous perfection. The other figure was thinner and taller, and the voice sounded male, but I couldn’t get a clear view of him.
“We don’t have the facilities for this,” the woman was saying. Her accent reflected the same odd cultural mix as that of my brother’s kidnappers, and she was clearly annoyed. “This party should have been broken up into two. At least.”
“This is the way the Shadows want it done, so this is the way it will be done.” The man’s voice was quiet, resigned. “Arguing with them is a bad career move, Delilah.”
She snorted lightly. The sound was derisive and delicate at the same time, and I got the impression it was something she’d rehearsed. “We wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now if they would let the other Guilds counsel them.”
“I strongly suggest you don’t let them hear you say that.”
“Of course, Malik. I’m not a fool. But they’re not here right now, are they?”
Then they passed out of sight behind the column. I inched my way around the back of it, seeking a safe vantage point on the other side.
“Are you sure of that?” the man said.
“Please. I can smell their undead presence from two spheres away. Maybe you’ve been around them too much if you can’t.”
If the man responded, I didn’t hear it. The woman’s words rang in my head, sending a wave of fear up my spine. No other focus was possible.
I can smell their undead presence.
For all our nervous banter about aliens and changelings and animal-controlling powers, I knew in that moment that I hadn’t believed any of it. Deep in my heart I’d clung to the belief that there was a rational explanation for everything we’d seen, and if we just looked in the right places and asked the right questions we would figure it out. That was why we’d come down into the caverns, right? To search for rational explanations.
I can smell their undead presence from two spheres away.
Maybe this was all a dream. Maybe I’d wake up soon, and I’d go into Tommy’s room and tell him all about it, and we’d have a good laugh together about how crazy my dreams were.
When the voices were audible once more, it sounded like the man was near the crystal arch. “Given how many people will be coming through today, you might want to stand back a bit.”
Heart pounding wildly, I dared another peek around the edge of the column. The two of
them were in front of the arch, waiting silently and expectantly for … what? I could see the man more clearly now. His skin was a mottled grey, the same color as the stone behind him. His eyes were large and dark and the outer corners were angled slightly upward, like a cat’s. His clothing was normal enough, but all of it was the same shade of grey as his skin, which made it hard to pick him out from the limestone background. I couldn’t tell if he was the same person who had carried Tommy out of our house or not, but he was definitely of the same type.
Then the archway began to glow. I pressed back into the shadows as far as I could without losing sight of it. I had the impression of a complex geometric design filling its interior, though it wasn’t something I saw, exactly, more like something that I knew in my gut was there, even though there was no visible evidence of it.
A man stepped through the arch.
His face was pale, and it had an unnatural sheen to it. His body was solid enough in the center but its edges looked strangely insubstantial, as if someone had begun to erase him. Wisps of shadowy mist played about him, and for a moment it looked as if they were about to coalesce into some sort of creature—or creatures—but instead they faded into nothingness before any features became recognizable. The long grey robe that he wore lent him a vaguely medieval air, a jarring contrast to the very modern clipboard he was carrying. For some reason that last item made him seem even creepier.
He took a few steps away from the arch, looked down at his clipboard, and started to read. His voice was a thin tenor that sounded … empty.
“Arianna Withersham, Apprentice of Elementals. Naomi Balfort, Master of Weavers. Nicholas Tull, Journeyman of Seers.” He recited maybe eight names in all, each with a title.
The grey man, meanwhile, had pulled out a smartphone and was checking those names against a list of his own. He nodded his approval as each name was spoken, and when the recital was done he said “Good to go,” and gestured toward the row of gurneys.
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