Last Words

by Michael Koryta

  “The trailer?”

  “Yes. Nobody’s been back since last night. You got ’em all distracted now. Of course, it doesn’t take much in this county, there aren’t that many police. What do you think of our sheriff anyhow?”

  “You’ll meet worse.”

  “I agree,” Evan said, seeming to miss the predictive quality of the statement. “He’s a good man. He wouldn’t say the same of me, would he?”

  “He hasn’t yet.”

  “I didn’t think so. You tell him I appreciate him, though. Always did.”

  Mark made a left turn and they were now just two miles from Trapdoor. The open fields came into view and with them the snow-covered collapsing trailer that Carson and Evan Borders had once called home, on the last of their family land.

  “Almost done with it,” Evan said. “Maybe I’ll think different in a little while, but right now, I’m almost glad you blew into town. The wait has been too long for too many good people. Maybe it worked out well for me these past ten years, maybe not, I could argue either way, but there are too many good people in this place who cared about Sarah. Why in the hell did you come back, though? Close as you came to death down there, why in the hell make a return trip?”

  “Somebody tried to kill me.”

  “Exactly. That’s the point of leaving for good.”

  Mark shook his head. “That’s the point of coming back.”

  “You want to die?”

  “I’m in no hurry to. But somebody tries to kill me, I’m going to try to find out who he is and why I was worth it to him.”

  They reached the trailer and Mark pulled into the drive. There was crime scene tape around the front door and the ramp, and the snow all over was trampled. In the distance police vehicles were visible at Trapdoor.

  “Congratulations, then,” Evan said. “You’re about to find out why you were worth it. Now we’ll have to hustle. Only a matter of time before somebody stops in, and I’ll need to be on the road before that. I hope you don’t mind me taking your car. Nothing parties like a rental, right?”

  Mark shut off the car and Evan nudged him with the muzzle of the gun. “Be good when you get out, now. You’re close to what you came for.”

  64

  Ridley walked alone through a forest that was so spectacular he could almost forget the pain.

  In a room with a towering ceiling and stalagmites that rose like trees, triple his height or even greater, Ridley stumbled forward, his headlamp beam small in the vastness. The first time he’d been here, he’d hardly believed what he was seeing. The second time, he’d been unable to see and he had the girl over his shoulder.

  Now there was no reason to rush ahead because the only cries of pain were his own. He could take his time to savor this place, and so he did, pausing and leaning against a rock formation that was as thick as an oak tree. He gazed around, painting the high domed ceiling with his headlamp beam. He had read about caves in places like Mexico and Russia and Vietnam that held unbelievable wonders—caverns with their own ecosystems, home to animals and trees. Son Doong in Vietnam contained a river and a jungle and even its own cloud system, and it hadn’t been explored until 2010. There were wonders beneath the earth beyond anything most had seen on its surface, but Ridley would take Trapdoor over any of them.

  Because he’d been the first one through. Or so he’d always thought. That was becoming hard to believe, though. There were things down here that did not belong.

  He was sad about that, because he’d always viewed himself as an explorer of the first order, breaking new ground. But maybe there was always somebody who’d beaten you there. When John Colter returned from the West and reported his discovery of Yellowstone—a discovery for which he’d been mocked, with his outlandish tales of giant, boiling geysers rising from the earth—there had been Indians living there for hundreds of years. Maybe there was always someone ahead of you.

  Once, Ridley would have cared about that more. Today, shivering and weak, he could only appreciate that he’d been one of the early ones. That he’d had the chance to see this at all.

  The room he was in had ceilings at least ninety feet high that fanned out like a giant dome, vaulted like a holy structure. He considered lying down and soaking in the beauty of it and waiting until his light burned out again.

  He couldn’t do that, though. He had a purpose, although it was not as urgent as the one he’d had the first time he’d passed through. He needed to find the place again. Where the dark man had lain in wait for attack and where, just above, Sarah Martin had waited for rescue. They were not places Ridley wished to see again or had ever wished to see—no one had understood that when they refused his requests for a return, over and over again; no one had ever understood that it would be worse for Ridley than anyone else. Ridley had given up on being understood long ago. What he knew now was that he had to keep moving or he was never going to reach those places again, and he had promised himself that he would do that before the end of his life. He had sacrificed much for it and it would do no good to stop here, no matter how beautiful the spot.

  He pushed away from the oak-size rock and moved ahead, his steps sluggish. All around him, the massive formations spread their shadows, and Ridley’s own was very small against them. His shadow was the only one moving, though, and he was grateful for that. Trapdoor had turned a benevolent eye on him once more and would not hinder his way through the wilderness. He did not understand the reasons for her choices. She gave and she took and the order of those choices seemed indiscriminate and arbitrary at best and, at worst, cruel.

  But it wasn’t his role to understand her. It was his role to get through her, that was all. She had been around for more millennia than he had years and he had no right to question anything that she did. You had to enter the darkness with some humility if you hoped to pass through it.

  He traversed the full length of the domed room and then he faced half a dozen passages honeycombed in the far wall and did not hesitate before selecting one. He believed he’d tried several on his last time through, wasting valuable time, but the cave was guiding him now—it was either that or his memory, and Ridley’s memory had long been suspect and often loathed—and he knew that he was on the right path. The tunnel led past a wide pool like a lagoon, and air moved over the water and carried a clean, undamaged smell that seemed to heal him as he walked, the smell doing more to ease the pain than any pill could. The cold, not the pain, was the real killer and he knew he was beyond the threshold there, but he believed he had enough time left to see it through.

  He stumbled over a rock and fell to his knees too easily, his body unable to offer any resistance, lacking the coordination necessary to simply regain balance. The landing was painful, and he cried out without shame because there was no one to hear him but the cave, and she’d watched him come all this way and had to understand that he was hurting. It would do no good to cry out to her, but it would do no harm either. She simply watched and listened in silence.

  He closed his eyes and fought for breath and for a moment he could feel the girl’s weight on his shoulder again. He’d fallen many times with her, and each time he had apologized. Several times he had wept. Never had he stopped.

  Sarah had been as silent and cold as the cave for most of the journey and Ridley did not hold great hope for her but he’d come too far to simply leave her behind and so he had talked with her and wept with her and he had carried her. For a long time he had carried her, so long that he had come to believe that he’d passed on and entered another life where there would be no pleasure, only pain and suffering and responsibility. But he’d understood the responsibility and so he’d bent to that task and he had never stopped carrying her through the darkness.

  The surface world that had opened up to greet him was the same one he’d left behind, but it was no more welcoming than the underground one he’d shared with Sarah Martin. In many ways it was worse. Tell us what happened went from a request to a threat fast, and Ridley couldn’
t tell them what happened because he didn’t remember all of it, and what he did remember, they refused to believe. When he spoke of things that sounded like magic, they were dismissed as lies and again and again people demanded the truth from him without accepting that he’d told the only parts of it that he knew.

  His head fell forward, heavy with sleep, but his eyes snapped open and he shook himself awake. He couldn’t estimate how long he’d been going. He guessed it was well into a new day now, but perhaps he was wrong. All he knew was that he’d not allowed himself to rest so far and that he’d left much distance behind him. He turned and looked back and wondered if anyone would ever believe that he’d made it in the dark the first time while carrying her. He’d told them this, and he’d been ridiculed and scorned and even marked for death by many, and he could have accepted all of those things if only they had accepted the truth of what he had done to bring her out.

  He rose from the ground with an effort and walked on and he’d gone maybe another fifty feet and the ceiling was getting lower when he saw his old backpack.

  This was where he had started to climb ten years ago. Where he had heard her voice, her cries, and left his gear to try the crawling passage that led up to the level above, shedding weight to gain speed, because she was hurting. Where he’d left his last light, the backup light, the one he had not been able to find again when he emerged through a different passage with the girl in his arms. The fact that it was sitting out in the open, so visible now with the light, was hard to bear.

  But you’re close. Yes. He was very close now. He just had to climb.

  That sounded like an extraordinary task, but he reminded himself of what he had once achieved in this same place and he passed by his backpack and found the crawling passage and began to climb. He was slower than he had been on the first trip, but he allowed himself to be, for there was no hurry. The climb seemed endless but he doubted it was more than twenty feet, and it required no ropes, just dedication. Most of this stretch of the cave was that way. He came to the end and managed to shove his shoulders through and that was when he saw the bones.

  The skeleton was intact and it looked quite beautiful. Its eye sockets were twin shadows, and one arm was extended and the finger bones were stretched toward the surface, as if it were begging for something.

  Something glistened amid the bones, and Ridley reached forward and gingerly removed the object. Ten years of dampness had corroded the Benchmade knife a bit, but it still felt familiar, an old friend in his palm. He tried to close the blade but it would no longer shut, so he placed it back where it had been, as if the scene were a tableau the cave wanted to preserve.

  Ridley sat back on his heels and looked at the skeleton for a long time.

  What do you see that you did not see before?

  “The dark man,” he said.

  But the dark man was white and shining now. And the dark man had once been human.

  65

  Only my father,” Evan Borders said, “could sell the wrong part of his own land. If he’d just hung on to it, he’d have had the golden ticket he wanted. But he was in a hurry. You don’t get rich by being slow, he told me. He was broke when he said that, by the way. So he sold it, and the other fucking entrance opened up within the year. How about that?”

  “Other entrance?” Mark said.

  Evan nodded. “You got it, brother. You’re the one who’s going to need to understand this shit and weigh it against whatever comes out of Cecil’s mouth. That’ll be intriguing.”

  “All right. Tell me what I’m weighing.”

  “First entrance to Trapdoor was the one on the property my father kept. But he was secretive about that, was scared to death to tell people, because he was looking at ten years in Pendleton if things went wrong during his trial, and that’s a long time to let your oil well sit, right? He thought somebody would claim it, somehow. So he went looking for money and lawyers fast as he could.”

  “So Cecil connected him with Pershing.”

  “And that didn’t work out so well all the way around. I’ll say this much for Cecil—he never said shit about the cave, to the best of my knowledge. He had to scramble once the other entrance opened, though. The second entrance opened twenty months after my father found the first. Think about all the time the cave has sat down there, right? A thousand years, or is it a million, I don’t know. Hell of a long time, just sitting there. And then one year it rains too much. One year out of all those. One wet year too many. For all those thousands of years, nobody would have killed over this land. Then something shows itself under the ground, and now we’ve got, what, three dead already, and Ridley down below somewhere. All because of the chance to take money out of the ground.”

  Mark followed him around to the northern corner of the trailer, closest to where the ground sloped off into a deep sinkhole, a farmer’s nightmare. The trailer was raised on cinder blocks and skirted with a rotting piece of fascia. Evan pulled one of the fascia panels loose and crawled under, and Mark followed. There wasn’t much clearance, maybe two feet at most. It was a belly crawl. Evan slid forward over the wet soil, pulled a flashlight from his pocket, and turned it on. The beam showed an elevated concrete ring with a rusted manhole cover over the top.

  “What do you think that is?” Evan said.

  “Somebody wants it to look like the septic tank, but you don’t drop a trailer on top of your septic.”

  “That was a last-minute call. My father spent the days just before his trial out here with Cecil Buckner. They rented an excavator and did the job alone. He still didn’t trust it, though, so they moved the trailer too. I suppose it worked. Not the worst idea in the world, really. Most people don’t pause to study on trailers and septic tanks.”

  He crawled over and pushed the lid back. He had to set the gun down to do it; the lid was plenty heavy. When it had scraped clear, Evan rolled onto his right shoulder and waved for Mark.

  “Not bad, right? Only my old man could think to hide his golden ticket in shit. More I think about it, more it suits him.”

  Mark crawled close enough to see, and then Evan lifted the flashlight and shone it down. The false septic tank spread out into a narrow and deep chamber of stone. Deeper than the light could reach. In the center, a long ladder made of steel cables and aluminum steps dangled. The walls sloped inward, forming a V, and it looked tight at the far end.

  Mark glanced away from it and out at the fields that swept toward Trapdoor, and the distance seemed extraordinary. He’d made it all that way in the dark?

  “This is where you put me?”

  “Hell, no! You’d still be down there, your bones sitting alongside my old man’s. You went in the main entrance, the one people know about. And not far in, either. But in your attempt to get out, you just went farther in.”

  “I thought I was getting close,” Mark said. “I thought I was heading the right way.”

  “You were heading deeper into the cave.”

  It seemed impossible to believe, but if anyone would know, it was the man who’d left him there.

  “The entrances connect,” Evan said. “Only two people ever figured out how. My dad from this end and, apparently, Ridley Barnes from the other. Because Ridley got there, didn’t he? Hard to kill a man if you don’t get to him.”

  “Your father is the dark man,” Mark said.

  “The what?”

  “He’s down there,” Mark said. “Your father’s body is down in that cave.”

  Evan nodded.

  “The teeth came from Detroit,” Mark said. “The police seem convinced of that.”

  “That’s because they were mailed from Detroit, yes. Cecil needed people to stop looking for my father. The longer they looked for him, the more trouble it would be. Good news was, there was already somebody in the game who’d promised to kill my dad. And his people were in Detroit. Cecil drove up there and mailed them down and damned if he wasn’t right—it quieted the search awfully fast. Everybody had been waiting for my dad
to get popped when he came out of prison, so when they finally had evidence that he had been, they were content with that. The old boy who put the hit on him, he wasn’t one to miss. That’s why, during the short time my dad was back in this town, he was stealthy about it.”

  “Cecil pulled your father’s teeth out of his mouth?”

  “No,” Evan said. “I did that.”

  He didn’t look away from Mark. His face was hard and his voice steady and dark. “Cecil offered. I didn’t think that was right. I thought if anyone was going to treat his body like that, it should be family.”

  Mark tried to imagine what that had been like. How long had it taken? How easily did they come out? How often did Evan see those images when he closed his eyes at night?

  “I was told he never came back to town after he was paroled,” Mark said. “Everyone seems to believe that. How long was he really here?”

  “If they believe it, then Cecil did his job. All summer, from the day my father got paroled to the day I came in here with Sarah, Cecil was hustling to keep my father quiet and invisible. It wasn’t easy. My old man was fixated on the cave and he would drink and do dumb shit, call Pershing and make threats, go down there and tag the cave with paint like a little kid. Cecil would rip his ass and then put the blame on Ridley, and that was easy enough because Ridley Barnes is the craziest fucking man who ever walked through this county. He’s talking to caves, right? Got himself friends down there, rocks he thinks are people. You know how convenient Ridley Barnes was for Cecil Buckner? Damn, brother, you have no clue just how valuable that old boy was. He was like one of those loons who stand on street corners preaching about the end times and government conspiracies or whatever. People expect him to say crazy shit, do crazy shit. They don’t expect him to say the truth.”

  “You took Sarah in there for your father?”

  “I did not take her in there for him!” For the first time, his mask of good nature shattered and Mark could see the dangerous rage that existed beneath it. When Mark spoke again, he took care to keep his voice gentle.