Night Chill

by Jeff Gunhus

  Jack looked down at his hands and lifted them to his face. They shimmered like they were made of water. The beam of light from his miner’s helmet shone right through them. With the sight came sensations of his new body. It was loose, not like free falling because that meant motion. It was more like how he imagined walking in space would feel. Smooth and effortless. He felt oddly comfortable with the sensation, as if he was in a place he’d visited before.

  Before he had a chance to question where he was, a little girl came and took his hand. He mistook the girl for Sarah and felt a pang of guilt for wishing it had been her. His intuition told him it was better that Sarah was not there with him. It was better that his daughter was someplace else. Even if it meant he never saw her again, it was better than if it were her holding his hand and guiding him forward. Better that is was this strange little girl he didn’t recognize.

  He let the girl holding his hand lead him through the tunnel. Even without looking down he knew he wasn’t moving his legs but he still went in the direction he wanted. Forward. Toward the light ahead of him.

  “Do you remember me?” the little girl asked.

  Jack looked away from the light glowing in front of him and down at the pretty face staring up at him. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I—”

  Then the image hit him, fast like the beat of a strobe light. The side of the girl’s head was caved in. Her face gouged by glass. Bright red blood poured down her neck and chest. Her mouth stretched wide in a scream. Then, a beat of the strobe light later, the girl was back, pure and beautiful.

  “Oh God.” It didn’t occur to him to pull his hand away. It didn’t occur to him to be shocked by the little girl’s identity. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you. I’m so sorry. So sorry”

  The girl whispered back, “I know you are.”

  Jack didn’t know what to say. Somehow he knew throwing himself at her feet and begging for forgiveness wasn’t allowed. There were rules in this new place. Nothing posted or written, but clearly there were rules. He could feel them.

  “Did it hurt?” he asked.

  The question felt somehow too personal, too intrusive. But he couldn’t stop it from coming out. He’d spent every day for over a year wanting to know the answer to the question.

  “Yes,” Melissa whispered, “there was a lot of pain. Even after I came to this place.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I am too,” Melissa said.

  She tugged at his hand to continue forward but he pulled back. He choked on his words on his first attempt. He needed to speak the forbidden words out loud.

  “That day, the day I…killed you. Everyone said it was an accident. Just one of those tragedies. But that’s not the truth.” He let the tears fall down his cheeks. “It was my fault.”

  “You were reckless.”

  “Yes,” he whispered. “I was rushing to a meeting about…something, I don’t even remember what it was. Talking on the phone, not paying attention. I knew I was going too fast, but the meeting. I had to make the meeting.” He tried to steady his voice. “I saw you on the bicycle, you know. All the way down the road, but by the time I was at the end of the street I forgot about you. It wasn’t until you were lying there, bleeding to death on my windshield that I realized what I had done.”

  “Go on.”

  “It wasn’t enough that I killed you, but I let them cover it up. The police. They knew. There were eye-witnesses. But I let them cover it up. You were poor so they looked the other way and I let them. I let everyone believe I was innocent, even my wife. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing seventy on a residential street full of kids. I didn’t pay for my sin. I’m so ashamed.”

  The girl was silent for several seconds “The people here told me I should never forgive you. That I should make you pay for what you did. I listened to them. It’s the reason I’m still here.”

  Only then did Jack notice the dark forms of people moving in the walls around him. But they weren’t really walls, just dark edges of his vision. The world there was different than where he walked hand-in-hand with Melissa. The place in the darkness was deep and thick with its own viscosity. A black environment where shadow creatures struggled like insects caught in the sinewy stickiness of a spider web. “What is this place? Who are those people?”

  “Purgatory. Limbo. Ether. Choose a name. It’s a place for those who are not ready to go home because they don’t want to leave home. Do you understand?”

  Jack looked down at the little girl, realizing the small figure was misleading. Melissa Gonzales, killed at the age of eight when she crushed her chest cavity against the front bumper of his car and smashed her head open on his windshield, was no longer a child. She was much more now.

  “They are holding on to their lives before they…before…Melissa?”

  “Yes, Jack?”

  “I died in the river, didn’t I?”

  The girl stopped and pulled his hand toward her until his face was even with hers. Leaning forward, she kissed him on the cheek. When she pulled back she gave him a smile so beautiful that Jack felt he might cry. “I forgive you for killing me. I forgive you for everything. I want you to know that.”

  Jack choked down a sob as the weight of his guilt dissolved with the girl’s words. He felt shame at his reaction even as he felt awed at her gift to him. ”I don’t deserve it.”

  “We all deserve it. I learned that here.” She grasped his hand tightly. “What I told you before was wrong. It doesn’t work to run from the devil. You have to face him and defeat him. You can beat the devil, but only if you’re strong for your family.”

  As she spoke the words images flashed in Jack’s mind. The pages of scribbled numbers Sarah wrote with the word ‘run’ scrawled across the back. Albert James whispering in his ear, warning him to take his family away. The voice in his head the night Huckley almost made him take a baseball bat to his family. Jack put it together. “It was you? It was you all along trying to warn me?”

  “I’ve stayed to help you, to show that I’ve forgiven you. The men who want to use your daughter must be stopped. There are many here who cannot go home until those men are destroyed. You can stop them. You have to stop them.”

  The light ahead of them blossomed, a brilliant flower of light that reached out for them, begged them to walk forward, pleaded for them to surrender to it. Jack was mesmerized but the girl tugged on his hand. She pointed behind them. Jack turned and saw a pale point of light, no more than a candle that seemed a mile away.

  Motion. The sensation of falling. The point of light sped toward him, suddenly as big as the sun. And the heat. His skin burned. Jack covered his face to block the pain. But his lungs were filled with fire. It was melting his insides.

  God, he was going insane from the pain. He had to get it out. He turned to his side and heaved, expelling the fire, expelling the pain.

  When he inhaled, he expected more heat but it wasn’t. It was air. Cool, sweet, beautiful air.

  Lonetree’s voice floated into his stirring consciousness, “There you go. Breathe now, breathe.” Jack’s eyes fluttered open and Lonetree’s face hovered over him, a wide smile pasted on it. “You had me a little nervous there. Thought you were gone for good.”

  Jack tried to smile, rolled on his side and threw up again.

  He was alive. And whether he deserved it or not, he had another chance to make things right.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  While Jack recovered Lonetree told him about his own part in their shared adventure. Just like Jack, he had tumbled along with the current, sure that he was one lungful of air away from death. He saw small pockets of air on the ceiling but the river moved too fast for him to take advantage of them. The limestone walls were worn too smooth for him to grab hold, but it didn’t stop him from trying until the very end.

  It was at the end, right when he thought his lungs might either collapse or explode that the impossible happened. When he reached up to try and grab hold of the ceiling, his hand bro
ke the surface of the water. With a violent kick, he pushed himself up just as his lungs gave way. Instead of sucking down water, he breathed air.

  Getting his wits about him, he splashed his way over to the side of the channel, swinging the light from his miner’s helmet over the rock face. It was only three or four feet high but there was no way he could climb it, not with the current rushing him past it. But then he saw the steps carved into the rock. He swam toward them with everything he had left, knowing it was probably the one chance he was going to get to save his life. He reached the steps and caught his breath in time to pull in the rope as Jack’s body floated by.

  “You weren’t breathing. No pulse. You didn’t respond to CPR either. I worked on you for a while,” Lonetree looked away. “To tell you the truth, I gave up on you. I’m sorry but I thought you were gone. I had already pulled the backpack off your body and was checking my gear when you started to puke all over yourself. I pumped the rest of the shit out of you though,” he added defensively.

  “Thanks,” Jack said. “I mean it. If you hadn’t fished me out of the river I’d still be floating to God knows where. You saved my life.”

  They sat in the cave for a few seconds, both men alone with their thoughts. Lonetree decided to speak his out loud. “You could have let go of the rope when I fell in the river. I saw how you wrapped it around you. It wouldn’t have taken much to get out of it.”

  Jack shrugged. Lonetree had made his observation the way someone might describe any commonplace thing. But Jack understood there wasn’t a question buried underneath the statement, and there was nothing else to be said about it. He couldn’t help but smile as he realized Lonetree had just thanked him for trying to save his life, even though he had failed miserably.

  “I know you think you’ve got the market on crazy stories,” Jack said. “But let me tell you what happened to me. Well, what I think happened anyway.” He told Lonetree as much detail as he could remember from his near-death experience. He hadn’t decided if the label was accurate but he had to label it as something. A hallucination? A discharge of electrical impulses in his brain that created one final dream? Those rationalizations didn’t feel right. Even considering them made him feel like he was betraying Melissa Gonzales again, belittling her act of forgiveness. He wouldn’t do that to her. He had to believe that what he saw was real.

  Lonetree listened to the story without asking questions. When Jack was done he said only, “She’s your protective spirit. Your guardian angel if you like.”

  “But I still don’t get it. I killed her. Why would she help me?”

  “She told you, didn’t she? Until she gave up her anger she could not go into the light you saw. She had to stay in the shadow world until she could forgive you. Most religions talk about such a place. Somewhere between here and…”

  “Heaven?”

  “Maybe. Maybe it’s the wrong word. Makes it sound like we can actually understand what it is. And just maybe we can’t understand it or describe it with words at all.” Lonetree shook his head like a dog shaking the water out of his coat. “Anyway, this is beyond me. All I know is that I hope your little guardian angel was right about one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That we still have to find a way to beat the devil. You realize what the steps carved into the rock over there means, right?”

  Jack shone his light over to the steps, then back to Lonetree. “They used this place. It means this must connect to the main cave.” He struggled to his feet. “We’ve got to get going.”

  “There’s something I haven’t told you yet. But now things are… well… different. I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

  Jack didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Look,” Lonetree started, “I thought you were dead. Still, I was going to try and save your kid if I could. For whatever that’s worth.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that,” Jack said.

  “Save your thanks. See here’s the thing. I told you how I rigged the cave with the C-4 charges, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I thought you were dead. Hell, I thought I was dead at one point. The whole thing shook me up. If we hadn’t got lucky, the bastards would have won.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m saying I decided I couldn’t take any more chances.” Lonetree checked his watch. “I started the timer. Less than forty minutes from now there’s going to be one hell of an explosion down here. So if we don’t make this quick, you’re going to die twice in one day.”

  SEVENTY-NINE

  They made short work of the passage leading up from the river. Lonetree came to a halt and crouched to the ground, turning his helmet light off. Jack slid next to him and followed his lead by turning off his own light. The tunnel ahead of them glowed softly. They were getting close. Jack cupped his hand over his watch and pressed the light. Just the short passage from the river had already taken three minutes. Thirty-seven minutes until the explosion. He shook his head and whispered the status to Lonetree. They crab-walked forward, staying close to the walls until the tunnel opened to the main cave.

  Lonetree nodded left. “We came in the first time over there. Looks like the river parallels this side of the cavern.” He pointed to the lights on the right. “Our friends are already here.”

  Two halogen lamps set up on tripods bathed the area in stark white light. Although the lights were pointed the opposite direction from Jack and Lonetree, they still cast a faint circle of illumination across the rows of stone cages nearest the stone structure. Just as when Lonetree had first thrown the parachute flare into the open space of the cavern, Jack was shocked by the sheer enormity of the space. Even moving quickly, it would take them five minutes just to reach the lights.

  “I don’t see any movement,” Jack whispered.

  “I thought I saw something when we first came in, but I’m not sure now.”

  “Either way, we’ve got to go. Let’s do it.”

  “Right, follow me through the cages. There might be traps. Once we get close, hand signals only. I don’t know what we’ll find so we have to improvise. “Remember, if you have to shoot—”

  “Head shot or multiple to the chest. Got it. Let’s go.”

  Lonetree grabbed Jack by the arm and pulled him close. “We can do this.” Before Jack could say anything, Lonetree was gone, a dark shadow picking his way through the maze of stone cages.

  Jack followed quick behind as a thousand skeleton sentinels silently marked their progress. He found himself wondering how many of the poor souls laying in these cages were the same creatures he’d seen in that dark in-between place where Melissa Gonzales had guided him. Had those who died here learned to forgive as Melissa had? Or would they stay in that dark place forever, caught up in their hatred and anger? Even with the adrenaline and the exertion of keeping up with Lonetree, Jack still felt a cold chill cover his skin. The skeletons all seemed to be watching him, as if they expected something.

  As they closed in on their brightly lit objective, Jack searched for any sign of the men. They took care to block their movements by keeping a stone cage between them and the lights whenever possible. By approaching from directly behind the lamps, there was little chance of them being spotted by anyone within the circle.

  But that was the problem. As they approached the lights, they couldn’t see anyone around the stone structure. No voices. No movement. Nothing. It seemed as if they were alone in the cave. That was one contingency they hadn’t thought out.

  Lonetree crouched in the dark shadow of a cage and waved Jack to come in close to him. He broke his own rule against talking. “I don’t get it,” he whispered close enough to Jack’s ear that he could feel hot breath on his skin. “I’m almost sure I saw movement under the lights when we first came in. Did you see it?”

  Jack shook his head that he hadn’t.

  “OK, let’s split up and meet here in five. Careful, maybe they heard something and they’re
looking for us.” He removed his gun, pointed Jack to go right and then headed left himself.

  Jack slid the safety off his gun and took a deep breath. Keeping close to the stone cages, he ran to his right until he came to a break in the cages where a wide swath of light lay across his path. He dropped to the ground and spread out flat on his stomach. He leaned his head around the corner to look into the open space.

  He had a clear view of the round structure, the Source. It was only sixty or seventy feet away from him. Seeing no one, he took the chance to stretch his head out farther to get a better look.

  He froze. There were two men crouched on the ground on the opposite side of the stone structure from where he and Lonetree had stood a minute before. Jack was looking at their backs but if either of the men turned around they would be staring right at him. He knew he should scramble backward and get out of sight, but he was fixated by what they men were doing.

  They were hunched over, working hard on something lying on the ground between them. The man closest to him, the smaller of the two, was doing most of the work. His back was moving back and forth in a steady rhythm matching the forward and backward thrusting of his right elbow. Even from the distance, Jack could hear the man grunting from his exertion.

  The man paused to drag the sleeve of his shirt across his face, like he was mopping sweat from his brow. He lifted a small object and handed it to the other man. This larger man then inserted the object into a small hole in the round structure. The object disappeared into the stone wall.

  The smaller man decided to stretch before he resumed his task. As he stretched both arms into the air Jack saw the instrument the man held in his hand.

  A saw.

  He wore yellow gloves. They were covered up to the forearms with blood.

  It was the ritual, just like Max had described. The men in front of him were cutting up a victim and feeding it through the hole in the structure.

  A cry escaped Jack’s throat. Both men stood and looked in his direction but Jack didn’t care. It wasn’t the blood on the man’s gloves made him cry out. It was a flash of color on the ground. Yellow. No, not yellow. Blonde. Blonde hair.