by Stephen King
Ralph went to the door, Glock ready. He motioned Holly to stand against the path’s rocky side, then swung the door open, bending at the knees and bringing his gun to bear as he did so. Inside was a small entryway, empty except for the litter of boards that had been torn away from a six-foot fissure leading into darkness. The splintered ends were still attached to the rock by more of those huge, time-rusted bolts.
‘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. Spray-painted 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.’
‘So what? He knows we’re coming. You do think a bullet will kill him, right? You—’
‘Stop, Ralph, stop! You’ll step in it!’
He stopped at once, heart hammering. She shone the light a bit past his feet. Draped over the last pile of rubble before the passage widened again was the body of a dog or a coyote. A coyote seemed more likely, but it was impossible to tell for sure, because the animal’s head was gone. Its belly had been opened and the viscera had been scooped out.
‘That’s what we were smelling,’ she said.
Ralph stepped over it carefully. Ten feet further on, he halted again. It had been a coyote, all right; here was the head. It seemed to be staring at them with exaggerated surprise, and at first he couldn’t understand just why.
Holly was a little quicker on the uptake. ‘Its eyes are gone,’ she said. ‘Eating the insides wasn’t enough. It ate the eyes right out of that poor creature’s head. Oough.’
‘So the outsider doesn’t just eat human flesh and blood.’ He paused. ‘Or sadness.’
Holly spoke quietly. ‘Thanks to us – mostly thanks to you and Lieutenant Sablo – it’s been very active in what’s usually its time of hibernation. And it’s been denied the food it likes. It must be very hungry.’
‘And weak. You said it must be weak.’
‘Let us hope so,’ Holly said. ‘This is extremely frightening. I hate closed-in places.’
‘You can always—’
She gave him another of those light thumps. ‘Keep going. And watch your step.’
20
The trail of faintly luminous droplets continued. Ralph had come to think of them as the thing’s sweat. Fear-sweat, like theirs? He hoped so. He hoped the fucker had been terrified, and still was.
There were more fissures, but no more spray-paint; these were little more than cracks, too small even for a child to fit into. Or escape from. Holly was able to walk beside him again, although it was a tight fit. They could hear water dripping somewhere far away, and once Ralph felt a new breeze, this one against his left cheek. It was like being caressed with ghost fingers. It was coming from one of those cracks, producing a hollow, almost glassy moan, like the sound of breath blown over the top of a beer bottle. A horrible place, all right. He found it all but impossible to believe people had paid money to explore this stone crypt, but of course they didn’t know what he knew, and now believed. It was sort of amazing how being in the guts of the ground helped a person to believe what had previously seemed not just impossible but downright laughable.
‘Careful,’ Holly said. ‘There’s more.’
This time it was a couple of gophers that had been torn to pieces. Beyond them was the remains of another rattler, all of it gone except for tatters of its diamondback skin.
A little further on, they came to the top of a steep downward slope, its surface polished as smooth as a dancefloor. Ralph thought it had probably been created by some ancient underground river that had flowed during the age of the dinosaurs and dried up before Jesus walked the earth. To on
e side was a steel railing, now spotted with florets of rust. Holly ran the light along it, and they saw not just scattered droplets of luminescence, but palm prints and fingerprints. Prints that would match Claude Bolton’s, Ralph had no doubt.
‘Sonofabitch was careful, wasn’t he? Didn’t want to take a spill.’
Holly nodded. ‘I think this is the passageway Lovie called the Devil’s Slide. Watch your ste—’
From somewhere behind and below them came a brief squall of rock, followed by a barely perceptible thud that went through their feet. It reminded Ralph of how even solid ice could sometimes shift. Holly looked at him, wide-eyed.
‘I think we’re okay. This old cave’s been talking to itself for a long time.’
‘Yes, but I bet the conversation’s been livelier since the ground-shaker Lovie told us about. The one that happened in ’07.’
‘You can always—’
‘Don’t ask me again. I have to see this through.’
He supposed she did.
They went down the incline, holding the railing but being careful to avoid the handprints left by the one who had gone before them. At the bottom there was a sign:
WELCOME TO THE DEVIL’S SLIDE
BE SAFE USE HANDRAIL
Beyond the Slide, the passage widened still more. There was another of those arched entryways, but part of the wooden facing had fallen away, disclosing what nature had left here: nothing but a ragged maw.
Holly cupped her hands around her mouth and called softly, ‘Hello?’
Her voice came back to them perfectly, in a series of overlapping echoes: Hello … ello … ello …
‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘It’s the Chamber of Sound. It’s the big one that Lovie—’
‘Hello.’
Ello … lo … lo …
Spoken quietly, but stopping Ralph in the middle of drawing a breath. He felt Holly seize his forearm with a hand that felt like a claw.
‘Now that you’re here …’
You’re … you … here … ere …
‘… and gone to so much trouble to find me, why don’t you come in?’
21
They stepped through the arch side by side, Holly holding onto Ralph’s arm like a bride with stage fright. She had the light; Ralph had his Glock, and intended to use it as soon as he had a target. One shot. Only there was no target, not at first.
Beyond the arch was a jutting lip of stone that made a sort of balcony seventy feet above the main cave’s floor. A metal stairway spiraled down. Holly glanced up and felt dizzy. The stairs rose another two hundred feet or more, past an opening that had probably been the main entrance, all the way to the stalactite-hung roof. She realized the entire bluff was hollow, like a fake bakery shop cake. Going down, the stairway looked okay. Above them, part of it had come loose from the fist-sized bolts that held it, and hung drunkenly over the drop.
Waiting for them at the bottom, in the light of an ordinary standing lamp – the kind you might see in any reasonably well-appointed living room – was the outsider. The lamp’s cord snaked away to a softly humming red box with HONDA printed on the side. At the extreme outer edge of the circle of radiance was a cot with a blanket bunched at the bottom.
Ralph had caught up with many fugitives in his time, and the thing they had come looking for could have been any of them: hollow-eyed, too thin, used hard. He was wearing jeans, a rawhide vest over a dirty white shirt, and scuffed cowboy boots. He appeared unarmed. He was looking up at them with Claude Bolton’s face: the black hair, the high cheekbones suggesting some Native American blood a few generations back, the goatee. Ralph couldn’t see the ink on his fingers from where he was, but he knew it was there.
Tat-Man, Hoskins had called him.
‘If you really mean to talk to me, you’ll have to chance the stairs. They held me, but I have to tell you the truth – they’re not all that steady.’ His words, although spoken in a conversational voice, overlapped each other, doubling and tripling, as if there were not just one outsider but many, a cabal of them hiding in the shadows and the fissures where the light of that single floor lamp could not reach.
Holly started for the stairs. Ralph stopped her. ‘I’ll go first.’
‘I should. I’m lighter.’
‘I’ll go first,’ he repeated. ‘When I get down – if I get down – you come.’ He spoke quietly, but guessed that, given the acoustics, the outsider could hear every word. At least I hope so, Ralph thought. ‘But stop at least a dozen steps up. I have to talk to him.’
He was looking at her as he said this, and looking hard. She glanced at the Glock, and he gave the barest nod. No, there would be no talking, no long-winded Q-and-A. All that was over. One shot to the head, and then they were out of here. Assuming the roof didn’t fall in on them, that was.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Be careful.’
There was no way to do that – either the old spiral staircase would hold or it wouldn’t – but he tried to think himself lighter as he went down. The stairs groaned and squalled and shuddered.
‘Doing well so far,’ the outsider said. ‘Walk close to the wall, that might be safest.’
Afest … est … est …
Ralph reached the bottom. The outsider stood motionless near his strangely domestic lamp. Had he bought it – and the generator, and the cot – at the Home Depot in Tippit? Ralph thought it likely. It seemed to be the go-to place in this godforsaken part of the Lone Star State. Not that it mattered. Behind him, the stairs began to squall and groan again as Holly descended.
Now that Ralph was on the same level, he stared at the outsider with what was almost scientific curiosity. He looked human, but was oddly hard to grasp, even so. It was like looking at a picture with your eyes slightly crossed. You knew what it was you were seeing, but everything was skewed and slightly out of true. It was Claude Bolton’s face, but the chin was wrong, not rounded but square, and slightly cleft. The jawline on the right was longer than the one on the left, giving the face as a whole a slanted aspect that stopped just short of grotesque. The hair was Claude’s, as black and shiny as a crow’s wing, but there were streaks of a lighter reddish-brown shade. Most striking of all were the eyes. One was brown, as Claude’s were brown, but the other was blue.
Ralph knew the cleft chin, the long jaw, the reddish-brown hair. And the blue eye, that most of all. He had seen the light go out of it as Terry Maitland died in the street on a hot July morning not long ago.
‘You’re still changing, aren’t you? The projection my wife saw may have looked exactly like Claude, but the real you hasn’t caught up yet. Has it? You’re not quite there.’
He meant these to be the last words the outsider would hear. The protesting groans from the stairs had stopped, which meant Holly was standing high up enough to be safe. He raised the Glock, gripping his right wrist in his left hand.
The outsider lifted his arms to either side, presenting himself. ‘Kill me if you want, Detective, but you’ll be killing yourself and your lady friend, too. I don’t have access to your thoughts, as I do Claude’s, but I have a good idea of what’s in your mind, just the same: you’re thinking that one shot is an acceptable risk. Am I right?’
Ralph said nothing.
‘I’m sure I am, and I must tell you it would be a great risk.’ He raised his voice and shouted, ‘CLAUDE BOLTON IS MY NAME!’
The echoes seemed even louder than the shout. Holly gave a cry of surprise as a piece of stalactite high above, perhaps cracked almost through already, detached from the ceiling and fell like a rock dagger. It posed no danger to any of them, hitting bottom well outside the feeble circle of lamplight, but Ralph took the point.
‘Since you knew enough to find me here, you may already know this,’ the outsider said, lowering his arms, ‘but in case you don’t, two boys were lost in the caves and passages below this one, and when a rescue party tried to find them—’
‘Someone fired a gun and brought down a piece of the roof,’ Holl
y said from the stairs. ‘Yes, we know.’
‘That happened in the Devil’s Slide passage, where the sound of the gunshot would have been dampened.’ Smiling. ‘Who knows what will happen if Detective Anderson fires his gun in here? Surely a few of the bigger stalactites will come raining down. Even so, you might avoid them. Of course if you don’t, you’ll be crushed. Then there’s the possibility you might cause the entire top of the bluff to collapse, burying us all in a landslide. Want to risk it, Detective? I’m sure you meant to when you came down the stairs, but I have to tell you that the odds would not be in your favor.’
Those stairs creaked briefly as Holly came down another step. Maybe two.
Keep your distance, Ralph thought, but there was no way he could make her do that. This lady had a mind of her own.
‘We also know why you’re here,’ she said. ‘Claude’s uncle and cousins are here. In the ground.’
‘Indeed they are.’ He – it – was smiling more widely now. The gold tooth in that smile was Claude’s, like the letters on his fingers. ‘Along with many others, including the two children they hoped to save. I feel them in the earth. Some are close. Roger Bolton and his sons are over there, not twenty feet below Snake’s Belly.’ He pointed. ‘I feel them the most strongly, not just because they’re close, but because they are the blood I’m becoming.’
‘Not good to eat, though, I guess,’ Ralph said. He was looking at the cot. Barely visible on the stone floor beside it, next to a Styrofoam cooler, was another untidy litter of bones and skin.
‘No, of course not.’ The outsider looked at him impatiently. ‘But their remains give off a glow. A kind of … I don’t know, these are not things I ordinarily talk about … a kind of emanation. Even those foolish boys give off that glow, although it’s faint. They’re very far down. You might say they died exploring uncharted regions of the Marysville Hole.’ At this, his smile reappeared, showing not just the gold tooth but almost all of them. Ralph wondered if he had been smiling like that as he murdered Frank Peterson, eating his flesh and drinking the child’s dying agony along with his blood.
