Inhabited

by Ike Hamill

  “Thanks a lot,” Justin said.

  “The flashlight would probably only last an hour. A candle will go a lot longer,” Miguel said. “Besides, we can’t use a candle when we’re walking, but you’re staying in one place.”

  “Yeah,” Justin said, frowning. “Thanks.” He turned away from the crack and began to walk towards the middle of the cave.

  Chapter Fifteen — Puzzle

  ROGER LOOKED AT THE floor. He swept his light up to the wall and then across the ceiling. There was nothing to indicate anyone had been there. He had heard a woman’s voice. Hell, he had heard a conversation and saw the lights. Then, nothing. Where could the people have gone?

  It didn’t make any sense.

  Roger covered his mouth with his hand and spoke to himself as he thought.

  “Hallucination. Dream. Ghosts,” he mumbled. “Three possibilities. Four if I allow that someone could be fucking with me. But how?”

  He pointed his light down the tunnel one way and then the other.

  “Straight tunnels in a grid. If it were a mine, wouldn’t they follow the ore? Wouldn’t there be big sections carved away to dig up the good stuff? What were they doing here?”

  He walked a few paces.

  “Does it matter? I have to get out. I’ve got nothing.”

  He patted his pockets. That assessment wasn’t exactly true. He began to pull things out. He had the cards he had made for the numbers. He had the original sheet of paper from Dr. Deb. He also had some matches, his house key, and his wallet. That had been a debate with himself at home—should he bring his wallet to a mine? Since he didn’t have anything of real value in it, he had decided on yes.

  At the moment, the cards and the paper seemed most useful. They were white and very visible against the rocks, and they were disposable.

  He began to walk back towards the last intersection he had found.

  Roger looked at his cards for a moment while he devised a plan. He would mark where he had come from with a tiny corner of paper. He would place it on the right wall, one foot in from the intersection. He nodded and considered the idea in reverse. To track backwards, he would simply examine the right wall of every option and then take the tunnel with the paper. It might not help him find his way out, but it would stop him from walking in circles.

  First, he needed a starting point. While he thought, he peeled the tape from a card.

  Roger considered the problem even longer. He thought about when he and Florida had left hangman’s room. He thought about when she’d run away and how he had chased her. After replaying it in his head several times, he thought he had a pretty good grip on how it had played out.

  “She ran down that one tunnel, took a left, got to the next intersection and I lost her,” he mumbled. “Then I heard the voices and saw the light. I went right and came down here.”

  He marked the corner of the tunnel and tried to backtrack his route.

  It looked familiar, but then again, all the tunnels looked the same.

  At the next intersection, he marked it and continued on.

  Roger’s eyes reported nothing, but the hair on the back of his neck made him pause. Against his better judgement, he reached up and shut off his headlamp. Roger blinked at the darkness and waited for his eyes to adjust. He gave up. There was nothing. He fumbled for the switch to turn his light back on. Just before his finger found the switch again, he stopped.

  The glow was there. If he looked straight forward, he didn’t see it. But if he turned his head slightly to the side, his peripheral vision picked up the yellow light. Roger crept forward in the dark towards the shaft. He stopped a few feet away, when the glow was obvious. He had found the shaft to the hangman’s room.

  He didn’t want to turn on his light. He didn’t want anything to draw more attention to himself.

  Roger backed away. He traced his finger down the wall of the tunnel and stared at the yellow glow.

  He stopped.

  The light was changing. He blinked again.

  It almost looked like a black smoke was coming down from the shaft, obscuring the light. His brain tried to make sense of what he was seeing. It tried to form the dark mass into the shape of a person, or a bat, or anything. If it was smoke, he couldn’t smell it.

  Roger backed up more.

  After a few more paces, the smoke was blotting out the yellow light.

  Roger’s hand found the intersection. It was already marked, but he didn’t want to take the turn in the dark. That was a sure way to get lost.

  Roger took a breath in slowly and turned on his light.

  The tunnel looked perfectly normal in the light from his headlamp. He was too far back to see the hole in the ceiling of the tunnel, but…

  “That’s perfectly normal, right?” he asked himself. A chill ran down his back. He glanced at his scrap of paper—yes, he had marked this tunnel. This tunnel was special though. It was the tunnel with the hangman’s room. He tore another dot of paper and set it next to the first. The hangman’s tunnel was double-marked. He would know it if he ever came back this direction. He was beginning to believe that coming back this direction was a very bad idea.

  His light swung back upwards with his attention and he saw down the tunnel again. Something had happened. Roger was paralyzed at the sight. The tunnel was easily half as deep as it had been a second before. Either that, or his light was now refusing to penetrate the depths. Whatever the reason, Roger didn’t want to stick around to see if the phenomenon would progress.

  He oriented himself and turned. He walked quickly backwards, keeping his light focused on the last intersection. When he got to the next break in the wall, he found his dot and verified that this tunnel was marked as well. He saw the flaw in his plan. He could easily tell if he’d been in a tunnel, but he didn’t know which was the next tunnel to explore.

  “Fuck it,” he said.

  He had a pretty good idea of where he’d left off. He went straight across and turned his back so he could walk forward. It took all his willpower to not look over his shoulder. Roger broke into a jog. It didn’t last long. He didn’t have the stamina to keep it up.

  Another intersection and he dropped another of his breadcrumbs.

  “How did Hansel and Gretel get to the gingerbread house?” Roger whispered to himself. “Didn’t some bird lead them there? Wait.” He stopped. “Yeah, a bird. And there was a bird that helped them once they escaped, too. And birds ate the breadcrumbs. That story is lousy with birds.”

  He walked on.

  A sound, like a distant release of air, stopped Roger in his tracks. He spun slowly, fearing what he might find in the tunnel behind him. It was just a normal tunnel. The rock walls looked the same as every other rock wall he’d seen. Still, there was something back there in the darkness. Even if he couldn’t see it, he could feel the presence. Roger tried to shake it out of his head. He tried to not think about the mountain of dirt and rocks above his head, keeping him from seeing daylight. There was an exit here somewhere, and he was going to find it.

  He was Hansel. Gretel had run away and he hadn’t met the witch yet, but he was going to shove her in the oven and get away. That was the full extent of his plan.

  Roger came to the next intersection. He left behind a breadcrumb and decided to continue straight. Eventually, if he kept heading one consistent direction, he would have to find something. That was the plan, at least.

  There could be worse things. As far as he knew, he was still getting paid to walk around underground. For a second, he imagined himself stumbling around the tunnels in complete darkness. That might happen when the batteries in his light wore out. He had matches, but those would make a lousy light source.

  The cave was too quiet. The sound of his feet shuffling across the rocks was a lonely sound. Roger started talking to himself again just so he wouldn’t have to listen to his own feet.

  “Hansel and Gretel survived because they were able to predict intentions. They knew their parents were go
ing to abandon them in the woods, so they left a trail to get home.” Roger ticked off the things he knew on his fingers. “They knew the witch was fattening them up, so Hansel let her feel a bone instead of his finger. Gretel predicted that the witch was going to push her in the oven, so she plays dumb until the witch checks it for herself. So all I need to do is perfectly predict the future so I can outsmart my captor.”

  Roger smiled to himself as he walked.

  He glanced up at the ceiling. “My captor is a mountain. All I have to do is figure out what it wants.”

  Roger shot another look behind himself.

  “What do you want, mountain? It’s going to take some work to break my spirit, if that’s what you’re after. I’ve been through a lot.”

  It was an exaggeration. Roger knew people who had been through a lot worse than he had. Then again, he’d certainly met many people who were way more fortunate. Sometimes Roger thought that empathy was his greatest attribute. Other times he figured that it was the one thing holding him back. He would never force his way to the front of a line, or even really stick up for himself. There was always someone more deserving.

  After all, he had a room with a bed. It didn’t have air conditioning, but it had hot and cold water. In the winter he got enough heat from his neighbors to keep from freezing. It was a decent existence compared to Sioux Falls.

  “And if you believe my parents,” he mumbled, “Sioux Falls was Utopia compared to Russia. I’m not sure what’s creepier—the silence, or me talking to myself.”

  Roger stopped again. His light picked up something in the distance on the floor of the mine. A deep, primal instinct told him it was a snake.

  -o-o-o-o-o-

  He spoke to himself as he crept forward.

  “There’s a part of my brain wired to recognize and react to that type of shape,” he whispered. “Some survival mechanism from when people were little more than clever monkeys with a capacity for learning.”

  The stripes on the thing made Roger search his memory. Which colors was he supposed to be afraid of?

  With one more step he relaxed and picked up speed.

  He put on a British accent to narrate his approach. “It’s not a deadly cave snake at all,” he said. “It’s merely a simple climbing rope.”

  Roger knelt in front of the rope and let his light stray down the length. It disappeared around a corner and into the darkness.

  His accent drifted from proper British announcer to cockney, or at least his version of the accent copied from movies. “I suppose that might come in ’andy, that might.” He reached for the rope. Roger jerked back from the rope when his fingers touched it. He got a small shock from the rope, like touching the toaster after scuffing across the carpet.

  “Hmmm,” Roger said. The next time he touched it he got nothing. He shrugged and picked up the rope. He stood, holding the rope like it might be attached to a bomb. As he walked, he coiled it. When he got to the intersection, he put down the coil so he could mark the corner. Roger tore a scrap from a card and moved to set it down on the right side of the tunnel. He froze.

  There was already a scrap there.

  Roger dropped into a crouch. He whipped his head around, sending his light down each tunnel.

  He still had his cockney accent. “Somebody is fucking with us, they are.”

  He picked up the scrap. It was one of his. He saw a portion of a word written on the back. The scrap was a piece of one of the cards he had written as a cheat sheet for Dr. Deb’s precious procedures. Roger set it back down and put his second scrap next to the first. He turned his attention back to the rope. He half expected it to not be there when he looked again. It was there.

  “So where did you come from?” he whispered.

  The rope didn’t answer.

  “I guess we’ll just have to see where you go.”

  Roger turned the corner and resumed coiling.

  “Mysterious rope, lying in a mine, in a tunnel where I’ve already been.” As he walked and coiled, he tried to imagine how it was possible that the tunnel was already marked. He could only come up with two possibilities. Either someone was messing with him, or the tunnels were curved enough that he had made a loop.

  Neither option was very encouraging. If someone was messing with him, then they could be watching him right now. If the tunnels were curved, then he could loop forever.

  Roger gave the rope a little tug. He wanted to get a sense of how long it was. It came freely. Roger started to reel it in faster. Something snagged and then popped free. Roger stopped and set it down when he saw the stains coming towards him on the rope. He stepped to the side and walked next to the rope, shining his light down the length.

  The stains appeared closer together. Soon, the rope looked like it had been soaked in some dark fluid.

  “Who am I kidding?” he whispered. There was no mystery to this—the dark fluid was blood. In the distance, he saw where the rope ended. He saw something tangled in the cord.

  Roger backed away even more as he walked down the tunnel. The rope was stretched along one wall and he was near the other. Roger felt his neck tense up as he kept his light locked on the end of the rope. The thing wrapped up in the rope didn’t make sense. It looked like a hand was coming right out of the floor.

  Roger drew within a few feet of the thing before he really saw it for what it was. There were two fingers wrapped around the rope, gripping it. The fingers led down to the top part of a hand, but that was it. Beyond the first knuckle, there was no more hand. Roger scuffed the rope with his foot and the fingers tumbled over. Roger was looking at torn muscle and the ends of broken bones. He felt his stomach make a slow turn in his guts. Roger bent with an abdominal cramp, but he didn’t take his eyes off those fingers.

  He took in every detail. He saw black hair on the digits. The trimmed fingernails had a little dirt under them. The finger pads weren’t calloused at all—they were either young, or hadn’t been exposed to hard work. His body shook with revulsion, but he had to know. He had to be sure these were real fingers and not some trick played on him by the college students on this research trip.

  Roger reached down with an extended finger.

  He clenched his teeth and touched the flesh. The fingers were real.

  Roger exhaled slowly. The stakes on this mystery had been raised.

  Chapter Sixteen — Rescue

  “ARE YOU SURE THIS is right?” Kristin asked.

  “No,” Joy said. “I’m not sure at all. It looks okay though, don’t you think?”

  Joy looked up at the big red arrow painted on the wall. At least she was certain that they had the right shaft. The big arrow was good confirmation.

  They regarded Carlos. Kristin pulled him forward so she could check the way the ropes looped under his arms. It had been hard enough carrying him—nearly impossible. Kristin had taken his legs and Joy had lifted under his armpits. They had moved him a dozen shuffled paces at a time. They stopped every time they were out of breath. Finally, they had found the vertical shaft where they had climbed up into this section of the mine.

  Now they just had to get Carlos down.

  “There has to be another way,” Kristin said. “You go out for help and I’ll wait here with him.”

  Joy shook her head. “No. Nobody goes alone. That’s rule number one. We can’t leave him here alone and neither of us is going to try to get out alone. It’s a recipe for disaster.”

  “We’re already in a disaster,” Kristin said. “I don’t know why we can’t wake him up, but it’s not good.”

  “Agreed,” Joy said. “But we can’t compound the disaster. We get him down this shaft and then we only need to carry him to the exit. We’ve already proven we can do that.”

  Kristin put her head to Carlos’s chest to hear his heart and breathing. She looked back up to Joy. “Okay. What’s your plan?”

  “We both stay up here. We lower him down until his feet touch down. Then you hold him here while I climb down and make sure
he makes it to the floor in one piece. You climb down and we’re out,” Joy said.

  “Okay,” Kristin said.

  They slid Carlos over to the hole and positioned his legs over the lip. With his body ready to go, Joy showed Kristin how to anchor the line. Joy then took up the slack and nudged Carlos into the drop. Kristin grunted with effort as she felt his full weight on the line.

  They began to lower Carlos down.

  “The rope is rubbing,” Kristin said between clenched teeth.

  “It’s okay,” Joy said. “This rope can take a beating.”

  It was impossible to lower him smoothly. The women let him drop a little and then struggled to arrest his fall. The result was barely-controlled chaos. They were both sweating and panting by the time they felt the tension ease on the line. Joy worked her way, hand over hand, to the edge of the shaft and looked down.

  “His feet are touching,” she said. “Can you hold him here while I climb down?”

  Kristin’s face was red with effort. “No.”

  “Okay,” Joy said. “We’ll go a little lower to take more weight off the line.” She braced herself again and they played out another foot or two of line.

  “You okay?” Joy asked.

  “Yeah,” Kristin said, grunting. “I can hold him here.”

  Joy let go of the line carefully, ready to reengage if Kristin couldn’t maintain. She imagined Carlos crashing down to the rock, breaking open his skull. They couldn’t afford an injury. If Carlos got injured, he would be impossible to move and they would have to violate the rule and split up. Joy didn’t want to do that.

  She turned her back on the shaft and reached her foot down to find the iron rung on the side of the shaft. Mentally, she was already three steps ahead. Once they were all down in the lower tunnel, it was only a couple of turns before they would find the exit. She would leave Kristin with Carlos while she and Ryan went to call for help.

  Suddenly, the rope sang as it was pulled over the lip. Kristin’s grip was firm, but she was being dragged towards the edge of the shaft. Joy saw how it was going to play out. Kristin would be pulled right into Joy and the two of them would tumble down the shaft and collide with Carlos on the mine floor. They would all three be injured.