“Ralph, look at this. It’s interesting.”
She was holding the door and bending to examine the lock, which had been pretty well destroyed. It didn’t look like the work of a crowbar or tire iron to Ralph; he thought someone had hammered it with a rock until it finally gave.
“What, Holly?”
“It’s a one-way, do you see? Only locked if you’re on the outside. Somebody was hoping the Jamieson twins, or some of the first rescue party, were still alive. If they found their way here, they wanted to make sure they weren’t locked in.”
“But no one ever did.”
“No.” She crossed the entryway to the fissure in the rock. “Can you smell that?”
Ralph could, and knew they were standing at the entrance to a different world. He could smell stale dampness, and something else—the high, sweet aroma of rotting flesh. It was faint, but it was there. He thought of that long-ago cantaloupe, and the insects that had been squirming around inside it.
They stepped into the dark. Ralph was tall, but the fissure was taller, and he didn’t have to duck his head. Holly turned on the flashlight, at first shining it straight ahead into a rocky corridor leading downward, then at their feet. They both saw a series of glowing droplets leading into the dark. Holly did him the courtesy of not pointing out that it was the same stuff her makeshift black light had picked up in his living room.
They were only able to walk side by side for the first sixty feet or so. After that the passage narrowed and Holly handed him the flashlight. He held it in his left hand, the pistol in his right. The walls sparkled with eerie streaks of mineral, some red, some lavender, some a greenish-yellow. He occasionally shone the light upward, just to make sure El Cuco wasn’t up there, crawling along the ragged ceiling among the stubs of stalactites. The air wasn’t cold—he had read somewhere that caves maintained a temperature roughly equal to the average temperature of the region in which they were located—but it felt cold after being outside, and of course both of them were still coated in fear-sweat. A draft was coming from deeper in, blowing in their faces and bringing that faint rotten smell.
He stopped, and Holly ran into him, making him jump. “What?” she whispered.
Instead of answering, he shone the light on a rift in the rock to their left. Spraypainted beside it were two words: CHECKED and NOTHING.
They moved on, slowly, slowly. Ralph didn’t know about Holly, but he felt an increasing sense of dread, a growing certainty that he was never going to see his wife and son again. Or daylight. It was amazing how fast a person could miss the daylight. He felt that if they did get out of here, he could drink daylight like water.
Holly whispered, “This is a horrible place, isn’t it?”
“Yes. You should go back.”
Her only answer was a slight push in the center of his back.
They passed several more breaks in the downward passage, each one marked with those same two words. How long ago had they been sprayed there? If Claude Bolton had been a teenager, it had to be at least fifteen years, maybe twenty. And who had been in here since then—other than their outsider, that was? Anyone? Why would they come? Holly was right, it was horrible. With each step he felt more like a man being buried alive. He forced himself to remember the clearing in Figgis Park. And Frank Peterson. And a jutting branch marked with bloody fingerprints where the bark had been stripped from it by repeated plunging blows. And Terry Maitland, asking how Ralph was going to clear his own conscience. Asking that as he lay dying.
He kept going.
The passage abruptly narrowed even further, not because the walls were closer but because there was rubble on both sides. Ralph shone the flashlight upward and saw a deep cavity in the rock roof. It made him think of an empty socket after a tooth has been pulled.
“Holly—this is where the roof caved in. The second rescue party probably carted the biggest pieces out. This stuff . . .” He swept the light across the heaps of rubble, picking out another couple of those spectrally glowing spots.
“This is the stuff they didn’t bother with,” Holly finished. “Just pushed it out of the way.”
“Yes.”
They started moving again, at first only edging along. Ralph, something of a widebody, had to turn sideways. He handed Holly the flashlight and raised his gun hand to the side of his face. “Shine the light under my arm. Keep it pointed straight ahead. No surprises.”
“O-Okay.”
“You sound cold.”
“I am cold. You should be quiet. He could hear us.”