Gray Wolf Island

by Tracey Neithercott

  What we assumed was a straight shot west to the source of the sound turned out to be a straight shot west with miles and miles of tunnel in between. The trek would have been tiring enough with oxygen-starved lungs, never mind at a jog. But slowing Elliot Thorne when he’s on a mission is a little like stopping a cave-in after the ceiling has crumbled to the floor.

  I bend over my knees, gulping salty air. It’s breezing in through an arched opening in the far wall, which offers a glimpse of the northwestern coast and an aggressively gray sky. Water rockets through the opening, thrashing and throwing itself against the hard stone. Though the ocean has probably hurtled in and out of this cave for centuries upon centuries, it’s done nothing to blunt the sharp edges.

  As we raced after the music, I was amazed at what acoustics could do—drift a bit of nature for miles. But now I know that’s only half of it. This cave rumbles with sound.

  As does Elliot. “I’m coming for you!”

  Hundreds of rectangular rocks hold fast to the ceiling. It’s like the inside of an organ. And it sounds like an organ when the cave replies, I’m coming for you. I’m coming for you. I’m coming for…

  “Well, that wasn’t ominous,” Charlie says, searching for someplace to sit. But the ground is a riot of rock—short rocks, tall rocks, rocks the size of stairs stepping up the walls, rocks with flat faces and sharp corners that’ll slice you if you take a wrong step.

  He finds a small clearing among the stones, and I sit beside him. Elliot squeezes next to me, distracting me with that mussed-up hair and those light, bright eyes and that neck. I’m not sure how I’m expected to do anything but stare at that long neck with the beauty mark at one end and the tease of a tattoo on the other. I look away.

  Even though we’re positive the poem is talking about this cavern and even though our lungs are tired, Anne and I test our music on the cave. From her mouth comes a sound as breathy as the wind, as strong as the ocean, as high as the ceiling in this cathedral of a cave. I jump in with my harmonica. It’s a strange and wonderful thing, her singing between my riffs, her words dipping and curling around the notes.

  I play a final chord, let her voice finish the piece. We’re left with echoes of a song that plays to crashing waves and howling wind. Gabe stares at Anne as if she sang the universe into existence. “I’m…” He steps toward her but jerks to a halt at the last minute. “I’m making dinner, so you losers can set up camp.”

  Charlie muffles a laugh. “Anna Banana, you siren.”

  “If that were true, I’d never sing, so my voice wouldn’t lure you to a rocky death.” She blinks again and again. “Not that you’re going to die today.”

  “No, he’s not.” Elliot’s expression is fierce. “He’s going to die as wrinkled and bald as the day he was born.”

  “Hey, this hair isn’t going anywhere.” Charlie runs a hand over his head “My harabeoji’s hair grew three inches on his deathbed and another four after he died. My dad says it runs in the family.”

  Anne loops her arm through his. “My great-grandmother was bald until she was four. You’d make very normal babies together.”

  “Annnnnee,” Charlie groans. “That is the one hundred percent last thing I ever want to think about.”

  They traverse the cave, disappearing into a small alcove. Elliot pauses, but I don’t move. “Meet you there,” I say.

  He glances at Gabe, nods, then follows Anne and Charlie to the alcove.

  By now, Gabe has gathered twigs from near the cave’s oceanside entrance—most likely blown in during a storm or carried by water to the rocky shore—and built a small fire. He bends over a pot of boiling water. Shadows stretch across his face, but I can see his pinched mouth clearly enough to know he doesn’t want company. I sit down anyway. “Can I help?”

  “I’ve got it,” he says. Fat noodles go into the pot. Dehydrated veggies follow. We stare at them until the noodles soften and slide underwater. I’m sure Sadie would have something smart and funny and life-changing to say, but I don’t, so I stay quiet. He looks up, and in the fire his face is red as wrath. “Do you ever just hate yourself?”

  “I’m a work in progress.”

  He releases a low laugh, more breath than anything else. “In the valley, the grass whispered that truth brought freedom. The other day, after I told you guys what I did and the island stopped attacking me, I felt so much lighter. For the first time in forever, I thought I might one day forgive myself.” His eyes dart to the far end of the cave, where the others are setting up camp. “And then Anne sang that song and…”

  “You wanted to make out with her.”

  “Ruby! I’m trying to be all deep and stuff and—” He pours a powdery mixture into the boiling water, which turns creamy yellow. “And I’m trying to talk about beauty and worth and, yes, I wanted to kiss her.”

  “But you don’t feel worthy of her.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Not yet,” I say. “Become the kind of guy who is.”

  I wrap him in a hug. He squeezes tight, and I think maybe I’m getting this friendship thing. Maybe wickedness tears holes in our hearts, like it did for me the day Sadie died. But maybe we fill those hollows with the people we love, and they make us better, stronger.

  SEARCH FOR THE SIX,

  sturdy, solid, and true.

  For centuries they’ve been waiting,

  waiting for you.

  A slap to the face, and I’m awake.

  “Ruby!” Anne’s eyes are wild, her hair hanging around her face like a lion’s mane. “Wake up, Ruby. Wake up!”

  I startle to my knees. Blink into the blackness. “Charlie!”

  “He’s fine. For now.” Anne rouses Gabe with an elbow to the gut. “Get up, Gabe. We have to hurry.”

  He’s quicker to rise. He fumbles with his bag; then another light clicks on. “What’s going on?”

  Anne pauses. “I don’t…I don’t know. I felt this rumbling, like the island was growling with hunger and we were lying on its stomach. It was so strong, but none of you woke up, so maybe I imagined it.” She shakes Elliot’s shoulder. “It doesn’t matter, though. I have a feeling.”

  “A bad one?” Gabe tugs his shoes on.

  Anne’s face is white above her flashlight’s beam. “Worse.”

  “So let’s get out of here. Wake up!” Gabe yells, smacking Charlie awake. “C’mon, you idiot.”

  When my shoes are on, I help Anne with Elliot, who can apparently sleep through a pummeling. He finally blinks awake, swatting my hand from his sleeping bag. With a hard yank, I pull the bag back, leaving him shirtless and shivering.

  “Too cold,” he mumbles before Charlie douses him with water. He jumps to his feet. “You are so dead.”

  “We’re trying to prevent that,” Anne says with a huff. “We have to go.”

  A low rumble builds in the cave, as if the island is clearing its throat in preparation for a big announcement. And then the announcement comes, a sound like a stampede of angry cattle. Rock crashes into rock. Dust chokes the air, coats our skin, our nostrils, inside our mouths.

  Elliot shoves on shoes. Shoulders his pack. It’s half open and spilling its contents on the ground, but there’s no time to care. Our sleeping bags and any other items strewn around the cave are left in our wake.

  The tunnel that led us to this cave crumples. We race for the far wall, the only slab of rock not cracked and crumbling. I don’t know what’s on the other side, but it has to be better than this.

  “Charlie!” Anne yells without glancing back.

  “I’m okay!” He’s bookended by Elliot and Gabe, who scan the cave for the rock that’ll steal Charlie from us. “Just get us out of here.”

  And she does, her nimble body dodging falling rock as she leads us as far from the destruction as possible. But we don’t avoid it for long. The cave’s two sides curve inward, putting us in the middle of two rockslides. Something slices my head, knocks me sideways. My hip crashes into a felled stalactite. The ache
radiates to my leg, the whole way to my feet, but I shake it off and hurry after the others.

  It’s as if the island’s trying to eat us whole. I lift my face to the ceiling, where a wrecking thunder sounds behind a cloud of dust. Where a jagged rock the size of my head is hurtling toward— “Charlie! It’s going to hit Charlie!”

  Elliot and Gabe wrap him in a hug with their hands clasped over Charlie’s head. I hold my breath and count the seconds, but I don’t stop running. I nearly collide with the boys, who release Charlie from their embrace. He propels us forward, races toward the black hole at the end of the cave, and I don’t know if he’s hurt, but at least he’s not dead.

  He’s not dead.

  He’s not dead.

  He’s not dead.

  I say it over and over again as I follow the boys across the cave and through the rockslide and into the darkness. A rock crashes into Elliot’s face, but we don’t stop. Never stop. We run through the pitch-blackness for minutes or hours or years. Nothing exists but the rough earth beneath our feet and the inky air over, above, around, and beyond.

  Long after the earth’s stopped crumbling, we emerge into a large cave. We’re a circle of heaving, huffing bodies, slick with sweat and covered in dirt.

  “Charlie.” Anne lurches for him, and he catches her in his arms. “Please tell me you’re okay. Please.”

  “I’m fine.” He grins. “I think I’ll hire Elliot and Gabe as my bodyguards when I get my share of the treasure.”

  “Is everyone else okay?” Anne scans our faces, stops on Gabe. She rubs the dark streak of wet trying to sneak into his eye. “Just a scratch.”

  I wipe away my own blood, press my fingers to my forehead. The cut’s shallow.

  Elliot touches a finger to his lip, winces. His gaze flicks to my head, but only for a short second. Then he’s pulling me closer, palm hot against the back of my neck. As if he didn’t take a blow to the mouth, his lips crash into mine. This kiss is hard, almost frantic. It’s the rumble of falling rocks. It’s gasping and aching and running for your life. It’s want and worry all mixed up. And I have to pull away. I have to do it because if I don’t, I might miss the whole world crumbling down.

  “We’re safe,” I tell Elliot or maybe myself. “This cave’s safe.”

  “It’s strange,” Elliot says. “When we ran through that dark tunnel, the walls didn’t even shake. Not even a little.”

  “Because the island didn’t care if we were in there,” Anne says. “As long as we’re not where we used to be, it’s okay where we are.”

  “Which is…” He examines the room. “I have no idea where we are.”

  “I do,” Charlie says. He’s sitting with his back against a stalagmite in the center of the cave. He taps the rock once, twice, three times. We huddle in close, the beams from our headlamps overlapping so it’s impossible to miss the CHARLIE carved into the stone.

  Elliot straightens. “When did you…”

  “I found it when you were devouring Ruby’s face.”

  I bury my head in my hands.

  Elliot smacks the back of Charlie’s head. “No, when did you carve that?”

  Charlie leans his head against the stalagmite. “The night after the booby trap. I just…I wanted to stay around, somehow.”

  “Pointless—you’re not dying,” Elliot says. “But at least now we know where to go. The west exit leads to a booby-trapped tunnel filled with water. The northeastern exit leads to the gas-filled cave. We just came from the northwest, so south it is.”

  I know it’s the right choice. It’s not just that it’s the path least likely to kill us. I still suspect the map will lead us to the Star Stones. And that’s exactly the direction we’re headed in.

  It takes an hour of walking south until the twisting, turning network of tunnels opens into a large cavern. Through a crack in the ceiling, night paints moonlight on the ground.

  We survey the cave before setting foot inside. No rocks hanging by their toes on the ceiling. No spikes on the ground. The entire cave is empty, except for a handful of towering stones.

  “Not even a murmur,” Anne says.

  “What does she…” Gabe yawns. “What, Elliot, is the meaning of what she said?”

  “The island says it’s okay for us to go back to bed,” Elliot says with a laugh. We settle onto the ground, too tired to unload our packs. Too anxious about another avalanche of rocks.

  “This reminds me of the Star Stones,” Anne says. She stretches her arms out beside her. “It has the same skin-prickling feeling.”

  “It makes my arm not move,” Gabe says. “I think it’s magic.”

  For me it’s a buzz of energy racing my blood up my arm and back again. It’s exactly like the air inside the Star Stones, a bit thicker than air’s supposed to be. I gasp. “We’re there. We’re still within the Star Stones.”

  I point my flashlight at each of the monoliths scattered about the cave in a not-so-random pattern. They’re formed from the ground and shoot up through the ceiling, single slabs of stone. Elliot squints at the ceiling, where the moon squeezes through the rock.

  “A snake,” Gabe says, erupting in a fit of giggles. “It’s a rope-snake lasso like Indiana Jones’s.”

  “Dude, that made no sense. And Indiana Jones hated snakes.” Charlie kicks Gabe’s foot. “Go back to bed.”

  “He’s right,” Elliot says, words slurring as he removes his lip ring. The corner of his mouth has already started to swell. “That’s the rope I left hanging through the crack. So we’re really beneath the Star Stones. That’s why the slashed square led us here.”

  “It seems,” I say, “that this treasure hunt would have been a whole lot easier if the map had taken us straight south.”

  “Obviously,” Elliot says. “But there’s probably no direct route. Plus, what kind of treasure hunt would it be if they gave us all the answers? The hunt’s only fun because it’s convoluted.”

  “And because of the treasure,” Charlie says.

  Treasure.

  I close my eyes because this feels like a moment. Like one of those life events that come with a label for anyone telling our story when we’re gone. In Which They Discover the Treasure, this one would say. “ ‘Search for the six, sturdy, solid, and true.’ ” My voice is low and husky from dirt. “ ‘For centuries they’ve been waiting, waiting for you.’ ”

  “Tell the truth to get the treat, treater, trees…treaties?” Gabe laughs. “You’re so pretty, Anne.” He reaches for her hair but misses. This sets him off with deep, wall-shaking belly laughs.

  “Gabe.” Elliot kneels in front of him. “Gabe, look at me.”

  Gabe lifts his face, and there’s a line of blood from his nose to his chin. “I like to look at her.” He blinks against Elliot’s flashlight. “Nooooo. I was not being a creepiness, Anne. It was not what I was.”

  “Do you remember hitting your head during the rockslide?” Elliot’s hands run over Gabe’s head. “Dammit.”

  Elliot rips off his shirt, presses it to the back of Gabe’s head. “Gabe? Hey, Gabe, let’s not go to sleep.”

  “Yellow,” Gabe says. “Yellow and they said so.”

  Gabe’s eyes slide closed but flutter open in time for him to lean away from Elliot and throw up. “Not on Anne.”

  “Thank you, Gabe. Now sit up and talk to me.” Anne’s hands grasp Gabe’s face, slap him lightly. “Hey, wake up.”

  “Oh, hi.” He grins. “I hoped it was you.”

  Gabe shrugs Anne off. He pushes to his feet, his left arm hanging at his side like a sewed-on appendage. “Gotta go,” he says, wiping at his bloody nose. “Make Anne’s eyelashes closes, okay? Don’t watch, Anne.”

  He throws up.

  “Sit down,” Elliot says, rising to his knees. He reaches for Gabe’s T-shirt but misses. “No one cares about your puke, Gabe. Just sit down.”

  Gabe’s legs wobble as he makes his way back to us. His eyes are slits if they’re open at all. And then they’re open,
wide and clear. “I never told you, Anne,” he says with a slur to his speech.

  He blinks. Again.

  Gabe pitches forward, and time holds its breath. I live three lifetimes like this, knees to rocky earth, mouth full of a scream I can’t seem to let out. I watch the ground beneath Elliot’s feet slowly erode. I watch Anne’s hair grow so long it starts snaking its way through the cave, past the waterfall, and off the island. I watch Charlie’s fingernails claw at his bracelet for decades and centuries. For that long, Gabe hangs over the ground like a phantom, eyes rolled up into his head and nose watering the rock red.

  It takes forever and no time at all for Gabe Nash to fall to earth.

  I haven’t been back in Bishop’s room since the sky stopped crying. It smells stale and lonely.

  The backpack’s at the edge of the closet.

  Red as hurt.

  Red as pain.

  Red as blood.

  Bishop would say it’s red with potential. Like a red sky at night. Sailor’s delight.

  I pick it up. It’s not huge, but it’s heavy.

  Unzip it. Peek in.

  Holy sheet.

  I dump the backpack onto the bed. Heavy coins bounce on the mattress.

  Stones clump where the quilt puckers at its seams. Diamonds. Rubies. Emeralds. The blue ones, too.

  There are some other artifacts from Bishop’s collection mixed in with the coins and gems. A small bronze figurine. A wooden ax. An agate cameo.

  I don’t study the treasure for long. It’s not mine anyway.

  When it’s back in the bag, I leave Bishop’s room. Close his door. I think it’ll stay closed for a long while.

  The doorbell chimes, so I hide the backpack in the hall closet. I race down the stairs. Skid across the slick marble foyer.

  Sheriff March seems surprised to see me. Like sometime between getting out of his car and ringing the bell he forgot Bishop was gone. “How’re you doing, Coop?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  He winces. “Listen, I hate to do this to you. Wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to.”