Deepest, Darkest

by William Ritter

  “I’m fine,” said Raina.

  “That’s her not-actually-fine voice,” whispered Fable.

  Raina gave her a barbed glance. “We are moving farther away from my forest,” she admitted. “I can barely feel my trees anymore.”

  “Ah,” said Annie. “Does it help if you think of it as just a deeper part of the forest?” She tried to keep her voice comforting in the gloom. “I mean—Evie is right, this is only a hole in the ground. If you dug a hole and buried a seed in it, it would grow into a new part of the forest, wouldn’t it? It’s all connected.”

  “If you dug a hole and buried a seed at this depth, it would die,” said the queen flatly.

  Annie did not have a motivational answer to that.

  “This is it!” called Tinn.

  Everybody circled around as the boys pulled the last few broken boards away from the deep chasm that had almost swallowed them a week before. When they were done, just one sturdy crossbeam remained intact, a four-by-four, fixed by thick iron spikes to the rocky floor of the tunnel. The light of several lanterns could not pierce the gloom all the way to the bottom of the shaft.

  “You nearly fell down that?” said Annie. “What were you thinking?”

  “It was a mistake,” said Tinn.

  “Everybody makes mistakes,” said Cole.

  “You don’t make very many if you make ’em that big,” said Old Jim, tossing a pebble down the shaft. It fell a very long time before it ticked against the rocks below.

  “At least we’ve got rope this time,” said Cole.

  “Mm,” Old Jim grunted. “The fall ain’t the only thing that can kill you. Evelyn and I brought protection, in case it turns out we’re not alone once we get down there.”

  “No guns,” said Annie. “We talked about this.”

  Raina narrowed her eyes at Jim and put a hand reflexively to her chest. Jim had not been the one to pull the trigger, but it was his rifle that had nearly ended her life in the battle at the forest’s edge. The scar still had not fully healed.

  “I know. No guns.” Jim held up his hands defensively. “Wouldn’t want to cause a cave-in, anyway. I’m not an idiot. Show ’em what we packed, kiddo.”

  Evie stepped into the light. She and her great uncle had swung by his place before the trip, and they were now wearing matching vests covered in pouches—the sort hunters and fishermen in town liked to use to store spare ammunition or tackle. Evie’s was much too big for her, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “I brought all sorts of useful things,” said Evie. She unbuttoned a few pouches as she got going. “We both packed a bulb of garlic and a small onion, because everybody knows those are good at warding off evil things, and I picked us some of those plants that Candlebeard showed me the other day, the ones that help clear your mind. They’re called bitterwort, apparently. This pouch here has a little salt in it, and this one has wild rose petals. Let’s see. I also brought an iron railroad spike and a silver knife. It’s only a butter knife, but it’s real silver, and that’s the important bit.”

  “That’s my girl,” said Old Jim proudly.

  “Who’s going down first?” said Tinn. He was gazing into the darkness at the bottom of the shaft.

  “Me,” said Annie. She shifted the pack on her back. “It should be me.”

  “Okay.” Jim nodded. “Let’s get you strapped up.”

  Soon, one of the ropes was looped around the beam and passed to Annie. She drew the rope between her legs and over her shoulder as Jim instructed. She would rappel down the shaft, using her body to gradually release the cord until she reached the bottom. The spare rope, it was decided, would be tied around her waist just in case the first failed and she needed to be caught.

  Six sets of hands carefully helped lower Annie Burton into the darkness.

  Cole hardly breathed until he heard his mother’s voice call: “I’m at the bottom! I made it! I’m okay!”

  “What’s it like down there?” Fable yelled. “Any monsters?”

  “There’s a lot of dark,” Annie called. “I could do with a little less of that, if you don’t mind.”

  They felt the emergency line go slack, and they pulled it up quickly and tied the rope to the lantern’s handle. They lowered it down until Annie could grab hold of it.

  “I see the wood and broken glass from the lantern that the boys dropped,” she called up. “And there’s a tunnel down here. It’s definitely big enough for someone to walk through it.”

  “Just wait for us to join you,” Old Jim called down. He turned back to the group. “Who’s next?”

  “I’ll go,” said Cole.

  The rope bit into his leg, but it was easier to control his descent than Cole had feared. His feet soon touched solid ground, and his mother was immediately there to steady him. He looked around.

  Beside them was a tunnel at least as tall as he was. It did not have any of the man-made supports or tool marks of the paths above them. The walls were smooth and a bit lumpy, more like a natural lava flow. It went on for a long way, and the light of the lantern did little to pierce the gloom of the natural passage. His eyes scanned the ground. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to find. A footprint? A torn piece of his father’s clothing? In the dancing light of the lamp he saw nothing but rocks and dust.

  One by one the rest of the party made their way to the bottom of the shaft, and soon only Old Jim remained up above. He lowered the second lantern to Evie before finally joining the rest of them.

  “Welp,” he said, dusting his hands off on his trousers, “nobody dead or broken yet. Good job so far. Hey now, wait for us!” This last he yelled after Tinn and Evie, who were already twenty feet down the next tunnel.

  “Come on, then,” said Tinn.

  “It looks like it opens up a little farther ahead,” Evie called.

  The walls all around them looked as if they had been carved by some enormous worm tunneling its way through solid rock. Raina was shaking her head, her eyes narrowed and her brow creased.

  “You okay?” said Annie.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” said the queen. “I can feel it. Wards. Protective charms. There’s old magic in these tunnels. And it is not my magic.”

  “Something doesn’t want us going forward,” Annie said. “Unfortunately, that sounds like a pretty good sign we’re going the right way.”

  Raina nodded, but she did not look happy.

  “The path forks up ahead.” Tinn’s voice echoed back to them. “There’s three more tunnels to pick from!”

  By the time Annie and Raina joined the rest of them in the next cavern, Cole had already drawn a wide chalk C on the wall of the tunnel they had come through. “So we can find our way back if we get turned around,” he said.

  Annie couldn’t help but smile. It was a clever habit that had helped her catch up to the boys when they had first gone off into the Wild Wood without her.

  “So, which one do we try first?” said Fable.

  “We could split up and check all three,” suggested Tinn. “Then meet back here in a few minutes?”

  “No!” said Annie and Raina at once.

  “We are not splitting up,” said Annie.

  “Splitting up is a bad idea,” agreed Old Jim.

  “Let’s just try the one in the middle first,” said Annie. “All together, okay?”

  They trod carefully down the central corridor, hand in hand so nobody could get lost. That, at least, was the plan—and it was a good plan, right up until the earth suddenly shook, the ground crumbled beneath their feet, and all seven of them plummeted in a frantic free fall into a yawning abyss.

  Fourteen

  Tinn screamed until the air had left his lungs, and still he was falling.

  The pit that had opened beneath them was wider than the spriggan tunnels—even wider than the first shaft they had descended to get into this mess.

  “Tinn!” his mother’s voice cried from somewhere nearby
. “Take my hand!” He reached out blindly, trying to find her, but his wrist slapped against a sharp rock as he fell, and he pulled it back to his chest. His breaths were coming in gasps. He could scarcely tell up from down as he plummeted into the dark, and his mother’s voice was soon swallowed by the roar of wind and echoing voices. He could hear the frantic cries of his friends and family bouncing off of the walls all around him until—worse—he couldn’t hear anything at all.

  His ankle smacked against another rock in the gloom, sending him into a wild spin as pain blossomed through his leg. Flashes of light flickered in his peripheral vision, but he had no time to focus on anything before his back slammed into something broad and solid and the wind was knocked out of him.

  Still he fell.

  He couldn’t see anything, and even if he could, it was all moving too quickly. The stony surface whipping past him sloped more and more as he fell past it—until eventually he was not falling past it at all, but rolling along it, and soon the wall felt less like a wall and more like a steep hill, and then like an uneven floor. Tinn tucked his chin to his chest to keep his head from slapping against the rocky ground as he slid, at long last, to a stop.

  He lay, dazed—unable to move, unable to breathe—for what felt like an eternity.

  How far had he fallen? A hundred feet? A thousand? Somewhere in the distance he could still hear the clatter of rocks, their echoes piercing the heavy silence in an uneven rhythm. Eventually he managed to gulp a lungful of air, and then another. He heaved shallow gasps in the pitch-black underground.

  He was, for the moment, alive. Any more than that he would have to confirm later. A light blossomed in the darkness somewhere nearby. He tried to turn his head toward its source, but his muscles refused to respond.

  “Hello?” came a frightened voice. “Is there anybody there?” It was Evie, her words trembling.

  Tinn willed himself to sit up, to wave, to call out to her. His body stubbornly ignored every instruction.

  “Tinn?” The light grew nearer. “Tinn!”

  I’m here, Tinn tried to say. But his lungs, already exhausted with the effort of each shallow breath, had no energy to spare on speaking.

  A candle flame danced into his eyesight, and behind it hung the blurry face of Evie Warner. Tinn’s heart thudded in his chest, and he managed a wobbly smile. Evie was saying something else now. It sounded like a question, but her voice was muffled as if she were speaking through a pillow. Such a pretty face, thought Tinn. He should tell Evie how happy he was to see her face. But then her candle was going out again—or Tinn was. The cavern grew dimmer and dimmer. Tinn lay on his back in the cold as Evie knelt over him, and the world went gently black.

  Fable screamed as the earth fell away beneath her feet.

  A lantern spun past her. In front of her, she saw Annie Burton grab hold of one of the twins and then reach out a frantic hand for the other. “Tinn! Take my hand!” Annie was yelling.

  Fable’s own hands flapped frantically, searching for something, anything, to catch hold of—and then strong fingers gripped her arm and she heard her mother’s voice cry out: “Gale!”

  A burst of air swept around them, sending Fable’s curls whipping across her face. Fable’s mother could have felled a tree with the force of the wind at her command if she had been in the Wild Wood. The breeze that followed her voice now did little more than set them spinning in circles as they fell.

  “Gale!” Raina cried again. “Gale!” Fable felt each burst of air rising, like great big bubbles. The currents slowed their fall by only the faintest degrees.

  Fable took a deep breath. The next time her mother cried out, she joined her. “Gale!” The two of them shouted as one. This time, the burst of air slapped them backward. Fable could not see through her own hair, but she felt the hard ground crash into her shoulder as her mother’s hand was whipped out of hers. They were suddenly tumbling down a narrow side tunnel. The Wild Wood would not have allowed its witches to be so abused—but the Wild Wood was far above them now.

  When the world had stopped thundering like a freight train around Fable, she gingerly sat up. It was too dark to see anything. Her shoulder stung, but she could still lift her arm enough to clap her hands together in a spray of sparks. It was her weakest “slappy sparks” in a long time—but against the total darkness, the flash still illuminated a female figure just ahead of her in the tunnel.

  “Mama?” she called, but the woman did not respond. Fable slapped her hands together again, and this time she concentrated and held on to one little ember with her mind, coaxing the timid thing to life. It glowed a weak orange. “Mama?” The tunnel in front of her held nothing but shadows.

  “Nnngh.”

  Fable spun around. Her mother was behind her, pushing herself up to sitting, her back leaning against the smooth rocks.

  “Mama!”

  “I’m here.” Raina stretched her neck this way and that, wincing slightly. “Are you all right?”

  Fable did a silent inventory of her own injuries. Her shoulder was throbbing, but she could move it. The stinging and aches in her legs and arms told her she would be covered in fresh bruises by morning, but nothing had struck too deeply. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “You?”

  Raina grunted in pain as she rose to standing, but she managed it. She rotated each ankle carefully and twisted her torso to the left and right. “Nothing that won’t heal.”

  “What do we do now?” said Fable.

  “We find the others,” said Raina. “And then we get out of here.” Gingerly, she reached a hand toward Fable’s timid ember. It swelled to a flame for a second and then split into two, and Raina drew one of the lights toward herself. The fire bobbed obediently in front of her, making their shadows bounce to and fro on the walls behind them.

  “What if we’re too late?” whispered Fable. “What if the others—”

  “There is no such thing, remember?” Raina leaned in close and looked her daughter squarely in the eyes.

  Fable swallowed her panic and nodded.

  “Good,” said Raina. “Let’s get moving.”

  Cole screamed, his feet sliding out from under him as the ground buckled and collapsed. He felt himself go weightless for just a moment, and then a hand grabbed his shirtfront and he was pulled into a bear hug that could only be his mother’s.

  The two of them fell together.

  “Tinn! Take my hand!” he heard her yell, and one arm left his back for a moment as his mom reached for Tinn. A lantern spun freely in the air beside them for several seconds until it caught the side of the shaft and was snuffed. He felt his mother’s arm slap back around him. Where was Tinn?

  Cole clung to his mother as tightly as he could. He felt a jarring bump as her backpack scraped the wall, and then a lurch as they were spun off to one side by a gust of wind. They hurtled down another shaft.

  Cole closed his eyes and buried his face in his mother’s shoulder. She groaned and tightened her grip as they skidded along an uneven stone chute.

  The tunnel curved left and right in the impenetrable gloom, rising and falling like a Coney Island thrill ride, until finally it leveled out long enough for them to slide to a stop. The echoes around him told Cole that they were in a cave with a low ceiling. Somewhere nearby, water dripped serenely in the perfect darkness.

  His mother’s arms did not loosen for several seconds.

  “Mom?” Cole managed. “Are you okay?”

  She took five or six deep breaths before she finally let go. “Where’s Tinn?” she wheezed.

  A thumping, shuffling clamor arose behind them, and before Cole could reply, someone else came tumbling down through the pitch-black tunnel, skidding to a stop close beside them.

  “Tinn?” said Annie.

  The groan that followed was not his brother’s. “Nope,” grunted Old Jim. “Ungh. What were you saying about not splitting up?”

  Annie sat up shakily, and Cole heard her patting he
r pockets. “Hold on. I’ve got a candle. I just need to find my matches. Where are my matches? Ugh, the pack’s torn wide open.”

  “Allow me,” said a nasal voice Cole didn’t recognize at all.

  They fell silent.

  Slow footsteps echoed in the chamber around them.

  “Hello?” said Cole.

  The footsteps neared.

  “Who’s there?”

  The scritch of a match answered, and Cole squinted as a tiny flare burst to life in front of him.

  “Hold still,” the voice said.

  Cole’s eyes finally adjusted and found their focus on a figure. It was a man—male, anyway. He could not have been any taller than Cole, and he wore dirty gray workman’s clothes that hung off him as if they had once belonged to a much larger man. On his head was perched a miner’s helmet, but the face beneath was all wrong. The ears that stuck out under the brim of the helmet were leathery and pointed, his eyes were beads of glistening black and spaced far apart, and his nose was pushed up like a cave bat’s. He smiled in a manner that might have been reassuring if it had not come from a mouth that was unsettlingly wide.

  “You,” said the creature, “are out of your depth.”

  Fifteen

  The strange figure leaned down and touched his match to the candle still clutched in Annie’s hand. The wick flickered and caught, and the darkness ebbed back a few more feet. Illumination did nothing to soften the stranger’s features. He stood slightly hunched, holding on to a knotty walking stick. The candle’s reflection bobbed in his glossy black eyes.

  “That’s better, isn’t it?” He shook out the match and flicked it over his shoulder.

  Annie managed to keep the candle steady, but her eyes were fixed on the stranger. “Who are you?”

  “Nobody special,” he answered, leaning on the stick. It looked like a thick tree root and bent ever so slightly under his weight.

  “You’re a Tommyknocker, aren’t you?” said Cole. “I’ve heard knockers dress like miners.”

  The figure shrugged. “I’ve heard that humans dress like delvers.”