Last Words

by Michael Koryta

  It was also a world that extended far beyond what anyone understood. During the summer of 2004 Ridley had believed he’d learned most of what the cave had to offer, but at some point in the search for Sarah Martin, after the food went but before the batteries did, he’d found himself in spectacular new territory. Afterward, in total blackness, carrying a handcuffed corpse, he couldn’t say what he had passed through.

  When they reached a wide chamber where the ceiling climbed to forty feet and rock formations jutted out of the water like abandoned pilings from a collapsed dock, he nudged Julianne to the right and into the walking passage that led to the Chapel Room. The Chapel Room was the first grand feature of Trapdoor, with a high domed ceiling and gorgeous stalactites that hung like prehistoric icicles over a series of descending rock ledges that had once been the ground formation of a waterfall but now, left high and dry, resembled empty church pews. Ridley paused when they entered the room, considering stopping there and sitting and taking this spot to engage Julianne in the talk that must begin soon, but he shook that off and led her deeper.

  “There are passages all around us,” he said, breaking the silence. “Above and below and on each side. Some are navigable, some aren’t. Some go places, some don’t. Picture a bowl of spaghetti, and each strand is a passage. That’s what it’s like down here.”

  Julianne said, “May I speak now?”

  “Not yet. Thank you.”

  The simplest route out of the Chapel Room led to the right. The fastest was straight ahead, the crawling passage that had given Blankenship so much trouble. You could get to the same place in far less time through the crawler. Ridley was impressed by the way Julianne forged ahead once they were inside, the walls squeezing, the ceiling lowering. She was much smaller than Blankenship but size didn’t necessarily affect claustrophobia. There was much ahead that she would not be capable of doing, though, passages that required technical expertise, but he was counting on Trapdoor to cooperate once his mission was clear. Trapdoor would simply have to. Not only was Julianne incapable of following him as far as he’d gone on that last trip; he was incapable of guiding her. He didn’t remember the turns he’d made, the paths he’d chosen. After he’d pulled on his wetsuit and slipped into the water, things had gotten away from him fast, and now that trip existed only in splashes—of water and of blood—and in whispers. Oh, maybe some screams too. Yes, there had been some screams.

  Once, he thought he heard something and came to a stop. Killed his light and listened. All he could hear was Julianne’s breathing and, up ahead, the soft sounds of moving water. He turned the light back on and kept crawling.

  They came out of the crawling passage into the Funnel Room and Ridley guided Julianne away from the basin and toward a high ledge at the far wall. The stalagmites here were taller than a man. Where the floor and ceiling sloped steeply toward an angled meeting point there was a shallow stream that bubbled up at one end and had carved a small portal through the wall at the other.

  The only sound beyond his own breathing came from echoing drips of water that were carving new crevices that would later become new passages and, later still, spectacular chambers. The drips had a leisurely pace as they went about their work, and why not? They had literally all the time in the world.

  Julianne disobeyed the order of silence to say, “It really is incredible.”

  Ridley didn’t answer. He was looking at the stalagmites and remembering when they had started to move. There had been a time, in a room not so far from here, when the rocks had begun to move around him. At first he’d believed it was a trick of shadow, but then the rocks had grown hungrier and he could hear them sliding in from behind and cutting him off up ahead, circling him, drawing ever closer. He’d taken to the water then in a hurry—in a panic, fine, he would admit that. He had panicked when the formations moved; who wouldn’t?

  It was then, entering the water in the panic, that he’d lost his first light.

  He wiped sweat from his face. He was sweating freely, though not due to either temperature or exertion, and his mouth was so damn dry. “Yes, it is a special place,” he said.

  Up ahead, the stream trickled through an opening in the wall about the size of a truck tire. Ridley pointed at it.

  “That’s where I went into the water for Sarah Martin. It’s where I came back from the water with Mark Novak.”

  “They were found in the same place?”

  “No. She didn’t want me to go that way for Novak. It was too easy. She wanted to have some fun with me. She made me earn him. I had to climb up and crawl down, that was all she would give me, but once I got to him, she gave me an easier out. She was done with Novak by then, I guess.”

  “When you went in after Sarah, this is where you left the group?” Julianne was ignoring the directive of silence, but he didn’t care to stop her. It was time to begin.

  “Yes,” he said. “This is where I left the group.”

  Julianne stared at the opening. “It’s tight. And the water doesn’t look deep.”

  “Not here, but you crawl through for about fifty feet, and it gets much deeper. Crawl a little farther than that, and you begin to swim. When the water table is high, you’re bouncing right off the ceiling. The best way to explore this section is with diving equipment.”

  “What’s that in the water?”

  He followed her gaze and, sure enough, saw something floating. That was odd. He walked closer, with Julianne trailing, and trapped the object in the beam from his headlamp: it was a remnant of crime scene tape. The rest had been torn free when they cleared out of the cave ten years ago, but this short length had been missed, and now it undulated slowly in the water, like a dying snake. Or a long strand of a girl’s blond hair.

  “A welcome mat,” he said. “She knows we’re here. I think maybe she even knows why.”

  Julianne had taken a few steps back, but she said, “This is good. This is perfect. I hadn’t dared hope for anything so perfect.”

  “Why so pleased?”

  “It’s ideal visualization. That narrow opening is a literal portal.”

  Her voice was natural again, just as if they were inside her living room for a scheduled appointment. As if she’d never had a knife at her throat and tape over her mouth. He was both pleased by that and disarmed by it. He needed her to be a willing, focused participant, but her calm suggested that she believed she could gain control again. She simply had to learn that down here, neither of them would have control.

  “A portal is exactly what it is,” he said. He thought he saw one of the rock formations moving, shifting as if leaning down to overhear them, but he didn’t turn toward it. He knew better. “This is where your work begins.”

  “You wish to enter trance here.”

  “A form of it.”

  “There’s only one form I know.”

  “She knows others. She’ll guide the process. You’ll facilitate, but she will guide. It won’t be what you’re used to. She won’t allow that.”

  “There are many reasons you don’t want to leave here now,” she said, “and it is obvious that whatever trust you had in me has been damaged, but for your own well-being, I would like you to listen to me when I say that trance here is a dangerous thing for you.”

  “Remaining on the surface is far more dangerous.” Ridley dropped to his knees on the stone and removed his backpack and began to assemble the special equipment he’d brought for this portion of the journey. He had a white wax candle and a small crystal base, and he fit the candle into it carefully and withdrew a pack of matches and struck one, tingeing the damp air with sulfur. The wick accepted the flame immediately.

  “This isn’t how we do things,” Julianne said. “Not with candles and crystals, Ridley. You know better than that.”

  “Things are different here. Do you have the necklace?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Hold it in both hands, please. And turn your headlamp off.”

  She removed the helmet to tu
rn off the lamp. She was clumsy with the equipment, and he watched that with dismay, because he knew they would have some traveling to do. At least she was not scared of tight spaces, or hadn’t been so far. Trapdoor could breathe new fears into you swiftly, though.

  When her headlamp was off, he was relieved. The candlelight was softer and it shifted and breathed and it was natural. Ridley’s mouth was the driest it had ever been. He freed a water bottle from his pack and drank heavily. It made no impact.

  56

  Mark had spent hours in a cave in a way few people alive could relate to, and yet he’d never experienced one in anything but blackness.

  In the light, it could take your breath away.

  The deepwater channel with its odd coloration set the tone, but it was the way the cave expanded as it descended that really created a sense of awesome power, a promise that there was so much more here than you would have guessed.

  The small flashlight seemed weaker with each step. He thumped it against his hand and adjusted the focus, trying to coax more light out of it. The sense that it was dimming was an illusion, though, created by the size of the cave and the totality of the darkness.

  He walked on a ledge to the right of the water because it was the only option.

  Drops of fresh blood painted the cave floor. Cecil was wounded, but he wasn’t bleeding badly. Just a steady drip. Mark’s flashlight caught something reflective and glistening up on the stones. A strip of duct tape, sliced neatly in half. A twin of what had been on the floor in Cecil’s apartment, only without any of Danielle MacAlister’s blood on it.

  He stepped over it and moved ahead.

  For a while he did not need to attempt any tracking or even consider it because there was only one path. Then, in a spot where the water channel opened up into a wide pool, he saw the looming blackness of a tunnel on the left and another one on the right, and for the first time there was a decision to be made.

  He dropped to one knee, removed Ridley’s decade-old map from his pocket, and got his bearings. He’d been walking along the Greenglass River and now he had the choice of scrambling toward the tunnel on the left or bending toward the one on the right. According to the map, the tunnel on the left emptied out into a circular room named Solitude. There was no indication that there was a way out of Solitude, but of course Ridley had stopped recording the passages at some point and it was entirely possible that there were numerous ways ahead from the supposed dead end. All the same, Mark found himself guessing that Ridley had gone right, toward the Chapel Room and then the Funnel Room, where Mark had been told they’d begun the search for him, Ridley traveling up when everyone else was looking down.

  His turn was the right choice—Cecil’s blood was visible again, meaning that he, at least, had come this way. Whether he’d had visual contact with Ridley at the time was another question. Inside the cave, Ridley held all the advantages—knowledge of terrain, technical expertise, every level of comfort one could have on his home turf—but he’d hindered himself by bringing Julianne along. The things that Ridley could do down here alone using his ropes and wetsuits and challenging high walls and narrow tunnels, he would not be able to do with Julianne, or at least not with any speed. That meant if Mark kept up a good pace, he stood a chance of finding them fast, but moving quickly would be a struggle because he was beginning to feel the return of the unease with the cave now. As he entered the tunnel that led to the Chapel Room, he was positive he heard a sound behind him, and he whirled and banged the rifle barrel off the stone walls. The flashlight illuminated nothing that could have moved or made a sound. It was only in his head.

  Mark knew he had to hurry to catch them, but he wanted to go slowly. No, that wasn’t even the truth. He wanted to get out. There was a bad feel to the place once the walls of the tunnel narrowed around him and the ceiling angled down and he saw that he was going to have to crawl.

  You may only be making this worse, he thought. An amateur chasing a pro in a place like this, it could be a disaster for everyone.

  True, but that was not enough to make him leave. It would take them a long time to get caving experts in here, and who knew what the police would want to do at that point? Caving experts were still civilians. The police might decide to enter themselves, and they’d be just as slow as Mark. Maybe slower.

  Cecil was out there ahead, and Mark wanted to catch up to him, at least. Together they would have a better chance. Mark understood the adrenaline, the desire for immediate pursuit, but Cecil had scarcely entered the cave when Mark arrived. He should have seen Mark’s car pulling in and known that someone was here, someone who maybe could help. If nothing else, Cecil should have asked Mark to call for reinforcements while he went after them.

  Decisions made in battle often lacked clarity and logic, though, and Cecil had certainly been under fire. His home had been ransacked, his employer brutally murdered, and Ridley had a hostage. Mark hadn’t even thought to check the phone in Cecil’s apartment and see if it worked. He’d called the police from his own cell. Perhaps Ridley had taken away Cecil’s ability to call out. The only chance for Cecil then would have seemed the hero’s play, trying to stop Ridley alone. After seeing what Ridley had done to Danielle, that took real courage.

  Mark stopped crawling and rested his bruised knuckles on the stone, the .22 in his left hand, the flashlight in his right. He leaned against the tunnel wall as sweat dripped from his forehead and his heart thundered. Adrenaline coursing, the same thing he was busy ascribing to Cecil. He’d been telling himself he couldn’t pause, couldn’t slow, that it was all about speed now, and Ridley had had a head start.

  Speeding in the wrong direction wasn’t worth a damn, though. Speeding in the wrong direction was a good way to die.

  Did you see things right, Markus? Did you see the truth back there?

  He’d seen brutality, a murder victim awash in blood, and he’d identified her killer without pause. Ridley was the threat, and Ridley was on the property, ergo…

  But why hadn’t Ridley killed Cecil, then? If Mark’s perception was right, it meant Ridley had been armed with a shotgun in Cecil’s apartment and had used it on Danielle. Why Danielle? And why let Cecil live?

  Maybe Cecil fought back. He resisted; he escaped.

  Fought back well enough to avoid death, but not well enough to kill Ridley? Cecil was a large and powerful man. He had no shortage of firepower in that gun cabinet. If he’d been able to gain the upper hand even for a moment, why had it ended with Ridley and Julianne already out of sight in the cave, and Cecil limping after them?

  Something was wrong in there. Something didn’t make sense in there.

  Danielle’s body had occupied Mark’s focus. Her body and the blood. So much blood. It had been hard to consider much else. But there had been other things. Paracord, the kind that lay in neat coils all around Ridley’s house. Duct tape, more of which Mark had seen in the cave. The tape had been different, though. The tape on the floor in Cecil’s home had been pulled off and lay in a tangled clump. The tape in the cave had been sliced perfectly in two. The latter made sense. Ridley was a knife man. Ridley and that ever-present Benchmade. His reflex weapon, the one he’d drawn on Mark.

  Far more important, though—Ridley was also a rope man. He cared for them, worried over them. Ridley was a knot master. He’d have untied the paracord, not cut it. Rope men did not cut their ropes if they could possibly avoid it. And even if for some reason he had decided to cut it, Ridley would never have needed to find a pair of kitchen scissors for the task. He’d have used the knife, just as he had on the tape in the cave.

  That wasn’t his work. Someone else cut Julianne loose.

  Or they hadn’t cut Julianne loose at all. There was tape left behind in the cave but no rope. Why would there be? Ridley would have untied it and kept it. Rope was valuable to him. So who had been cut loose in Cecil’s apartment? The work had been awkward—all the lengths of cord hacked into pieces. That was the product of someone who didn’t under
stand the knots at all, who simply kept cutting until all the cord was loose. Had Ridley bound Danielle up, leaving her to be hastily freed by Cecil?

  Not Danielle. There wasn’t enough time for her to go through all of that. I’d just spoken to her. So that leaves…

  Cecil.

  Which meant that Danielle had freed him.

  So who had pulled the trigger on her?

  I’ll send for Cecil. It’s his baby now, she had told him just before she hung up the phone. He’d thought that meant that she was going to ask Cecil to block him from the property. That the trouble Mark represented was about to be Cecil’s baby. It had seemed obvious. She was calling her caretaker in to do his job. But maybe she wasn’t calling him in for the obvious reason. Maybe she was calling in Cecil for another reason entirely—to answer for himself.

  It’s his baby now.

  For the first time, Mark was fully aware of the cold in the cave and of the darkness ahead and behind. There were three people belowground with him. He’d thought one was an enemy.

  Maybe he had two.

  57

  Julianne sat on the stones with her legs crossed. Her helmet was beside her, and she held the sapphire necklace in her hands. Her face was obscured by shadows in the flickering candlelight, and Ridley couldn’t make out her eyes. He wanted to see them and find the comfort that they held, but he couldn’t afford to sacrifice the darkness. The truths that he wanted out of Trapdoor had all been lost in the dark. He would have to find them there.

  “We’ll start with an offering,” he said. He set the knife on the stone near his right hand, blade open.

  “No,” Julianne said. “No, Ridley, that’s not how we start.”

  “Things are different here.” He reached into his backpack and pulled free a roll of papers.