Last Words

by Michael Koryta

  After a short silence, the ice returned to his face. He tried to concentrate on only that sensation, tried not to think of the things that he wanted to think of, the things that could raise odd smiles at the wrong times. Knives and blood; shadows and screams. No, no. Don’t think those thoughts. Just the ice. Just concentrate on the ice.

  Her voice floated toward him then, softer and lower.

  “Tell me your awareness of this space. Tell me what you feel.”

  “The ice. Only that.”

  “The ice, yes. You feel it on your skin, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And below the skin, on your nerves. Do you feel the ice on your nerves?”

  “Yes.”

  “Follow the cold then. Down from the skin, down into the nerves. Let it go. Let it travel. Then travel with it, but only when you can see your path.”

  Silence. He kept his eyes shut, trying to visualize it, seeing his nerve endings like sea grass, loose and shifting. Saw the ice spread through them, slide down, find tunnels, and seep into them.

  Then her voice again. Softer. “Let’s imagine the way down. Do you mind if I touch you?”

  “No.”

  Her hand moved to his and turned it over, and she began to tap rapidly and rhythmically on the inside of his wrist. Then she moved to his face, her fingers avoiding the swollen areas Novak had left. The sensation, jarring at first, quickly became pleasant. So much tension—and things worse than tension—seemed to evaporate at the touch. It was like turning on windshield wipers, the way ahead suddenly clear again, the clouded vision gone.

  “What do you see?” she asked as if she understood.

  “Stone walls. Stone all around.”

  “Yes. And what does it smell like?”

  “Damp. Old water.”

  “Yes. Tell me what you feel now that is different than before.” The tapping never disrupted her voice. They could move at distinctly separate rhythms but in perfect harmony.

  “Cool.”

  “Too cool? Cold?”

  “No. Just right. Just right.”

  “Yes, it is. Yes. Look farther now, out ahead. What does it look like ahead?”

  “Darker.”

  “Is the dark bad?”

  “No. No, it’s good.”

  “You’re right.” Her voice became softer still, fading, receding. “Now imagine a version of yourself that stands ahead, already there in the dark, already waiting. Perhaps he has always been here. Perhaps he watches over you from this spot. Go to that version of yourself now. Become that version of yourself. Now look back from that spot. What does that version of you see now, from this spot, that you did not see before?”

  “That it’s dark behind me too. That I’ve always been in the dark.”

  “What does that mean to you?”

  “The darkness is within me. I don’t have to search for it.”

  “Are you still moving?”

  “I’m moving,” he said, and the ice was harder to concentrate on now, his own voice farther away too, remaining with hers, wherever hers was. “I’m going farther down the tunnel. Farther down…”

  A glimmer then, a flash of steel and a spray of crimson mist, and Ridley winced against it, trying to close eyes that were already closed. He had to hold the right visual. The wrong ones were dangerous. Don’t take those tunnels. Find the right ones. He breathed deeply, slowly, and imagined himself returning to a chamber with many options. Imagined going down another passage now, one that led away from that glint of steel and blood. Here there was nothing but darkness and cool. Good. Follow it on, then. Go down, go deeper.

  And keep going.

  32

  The exhaustion that had settled into Mark while he was with Danielle MacAlister peaked as he walked back to his car, every muscle ache amplified by the uphill walk through the snow. Cecil Buckner came out of his garage, where he had the bay doors open and appeared to be tinkering with a snowblower, and stood with his hands on his hips.

  “Ain’t she a treat?” he called.

  “She was more cooperative than most.”

  Cecil shook his head. “Be careful with her, buddy.”

  Mark stopped. “Why?”

  Cecil turned to look at the big house. There was smoke rising from the chimney now. Danielle had started a fire. Snowflakes had just begun to fall, joining the thin trail of smoke. When Cecil spoke again, his usually booming voice was softer.

  “Everybody’s got an agenda. Don’t you forget that.”

  “What’s hers?”

  Cecil wouldn’t take his eyes off the house, as if he was afraid someone would see them talking. “I couldn’t say. But she sure as hell hustled up here once you got inside the cave, didn’t she? First time I’ve seen her in almost three years too. I’ve asked her to come up and she says, ‘No, thanks, keep up the good work,’ click. But you got in and the police got called, and now she’s camped out at that house. Staying the week, she says. For what? I says. But she won’t answer that.”

  “What’s her father like?”

  “Aged and addled now. I haven’t seen Pershing in five years, at least. Back when he was around, when the cave was open, he was popular with some, I suppose. You want to know what Pershing was like, you just close your eyes and picture the nineteenth hole at a country club. Any country club. They’ve all got one like him. Old-timer camped out at the bar acting like he’s not an old-timer, telling bawdy jokes, silver hair that wouldn’t slip out of place in a cyclone, a big tipper when people are watching, ten percent when they aren’t. Tell me, buddy, ain’t you met a guy like that somewhere along the line?”

  “A few.”

  “Exactly. You got a sense of him, then. Some people take to that, others don’t. He rubbed some of the cavers the wrong way because of how he treated Trapdoor, like personal property.”

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  Cecil frowned. “Yes, except there’s a certain understanding with caves. A respect. It’s a small community of people who care about them, and Pershing didn’t get that. He just saw it as something like an oil well, a lucky piece of ground that was worth some dollars. Nobody else’s business.”

  “Now he doesn’t care about the dollars?”

  “I field offers for this place on a regular basis. State officials, parks people, some private buyers. They come down here and talk to me, and I relay the messages. The answer is always a firm no. The MacAlisters don’t want to sell or open the cave. But if you’re not going to open the cave, why not unload it and make a couple million? I suppose he has the money not to care, but I don’t understand it, and it surely doesn’t sit well with people around here.”

  “Why do they care so much?”

  Cecil rubbed his thumb and index finger together in the universal gesture meaning “money.” “When the ground opened up and the cave came into view, people thought it was manna from heaven. The town was going to become a tourist economy, don’t you know. Then that girl got killed, a sad deal to be sure, but no reason to shut the whole show down. But Pershing did shut it down, so there’s the sense that he didn’t ever give a damn about this place or the people in it. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong; all I know is that in the past ten years, I’m the only person in Garrison who’s been making a living off him.”

  “How’d that come to pass?”

  Cecil pointed at a massive tree beside them. “See that red oak?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what I know. Trees. My family moved up here from Carolina in the early 1900s. Came for jobs at the resorts over by French Lick. But back in Carolina, they worked with timber. Until it was all cut. That’s the problem with the way they handled that job back then. Cut off the hand that fed them, eventually. Then you had to move on. My family moved here. The knowledge of these trees, hell, that goes back to men I’ve never even seen in pictures. My family loved trees. That might sound strange considering they’ve always cut them down, but it’s true. My father was in the timber business, and
I came in behind him. Pershing was just a buyer. My job was to scout property for him. I chose this one for those trees. A lot of red oak, some walnut stands. Good hardwood. Turned out to be the most valuable find anyone ever made for him, but not because of the trees; they didn’t count in that equation. The cave was where the money waited. Still waits. Anyone who opened that cave now, if it’s everything Ridley Barnes claimed, would be a hero.”

  “Have you dealt with Barnes much?”

  Cecil pulled off his knit cap and ran a hand over his bald head, his mouth twisting as if he’d tasted something sour.

  “Dealt with him? Shit. I s’pose you could say that I’ve dealt with him. Crazy bastard showed up a few times over the years, trying to get in. Caught him once when he was set to go to work on those doors with a damned arc torch. Last time I threw him out, he took to begging. Got down on his knees like he was about to blow me. The man is everything people say, and then some. But the dealings I had because of him, those were the real bullshit matters.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Cecil pulled the cap back on. His eyes had never left the house. “You heard what he had to say about his time in that cave before he found her?”

  “I’ve read most of it, at least.”

  “Then you heard about the dark man.”

  “Yes.”

  Cecil gave an unpleasant smile. “You haven’t been around town long, but let me ask you, how many black faces you seen?”

  “Just you.”

  “There you go. I’m not completely alone in Garrison, but closer to it than not. Tell you just how, um, politically correct our local police are. They heard the phrase dark man and brought me in for questioning. No bullshit, it was that fast. Dark man.” He shook his head, still in disbelief a decade after it had happened. “So I got grilled like a suspect while Ridley was being treated for hypothermia and, at that time, like a hero. For a few hours. Then they realized he was talking about some sort of damned ghost or phantom and thought the cave was a person and that the girl was alive but, no, maybe she was dead, she either said something or she didn’t, maybe it was the cave talking to him, and he didn’t remember her having handcuffs on, but maybe she did. Got to scrambling all over the place and then he just stopped talking, period. But not before he explained that the dark man lived in the cave and always had and couldn’t die. He was eternal, that’s my understanding. So me, this dark man, I got thanked for my time and sent on my way. But I haven’t forgotten that. Shit, would you?”

  “No,” Mark said. “I wouldn’t.”

  Cecil nodded and spit into the snow. “There ya go. As for Miss MacAlister up there? If I were you, I’d be careful with her, that’s all. With that family.”

  “They seem to have been good enough to you.”

  Cecil’s cockeyed grin held no humor. “Seem to, right? But that’s another question you might think on before you throw in with the MacAlister family, buddy. You might ask why in the hell it’s worth paying a caretaker to live down here if you have no intention of opening the cave or selling it. Why not seal the fucker down, pour some concrete in that entrance, and be done with it?”

  “You’re the caretaker,” Mark said. “You tell me.”

  Cecil shook his head. “I can’t, honestly. I keep expecting to get my walking papers. They never come. I stick on because, well, I like the place. I live for free, I hunt for free—there are fine deer in these woods, I take a buck every season—and what work there is ain’t so bad. Painting and roofing and general repairs. I like working with my hands, I like my solitude, I like this place. But I’m providing maintenance on a forgotten property and one without any future. There are times I wonder about that. But then?” He spit into the snow again. “Then I remind myself to be grateful for the job. It’s a paycheck, and it’s a fine place to live. Better than any I had before. Long as I can get away with it, I’ll stay here. But there are questions.” His eyes remained on the smoke wafting from the chimney and joining the leaden sky. “There are certainly questions.”

  Mark was so tired when he reached the car that he wanted nothing more than to start the heater and sleep with his head on the steering wheel. Instead he drove through the blowing snow back to town, back to the same hotel where it had all begun.

  The same clerk was on duty, the one who had looked the sheriff directly in the eyes and lied to him. When she saw Mark, she walked into an office and shut the door. A moment later, the door opened and a fat man with a receding hairline, pleated pants, and a stern expression appeared. Management.

  “What do you need, sir?”

  “A room, please.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that.”

  Mark raised his eyebrows. “The sign says vacancy.”

  “It’s not an issue of space.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Let’s not play dumb, please. The last time you were here, you caused some problems. You frightened my staff. You’re not welcome back.”

  Mark leaned on the counter, a move the man apparently took as a show of aggression, because he backed up fast.

  “I didn’t cause any problems, and if your staff member was frightened, she was frightened by whoever convinced her to lie. Either way, I just want a shower and some sleep.”

  “Please don’t make this difficult. I don’t want to call the police.”

  “Call the police? I’m just asking for a damned room!”

  “They have some across the street,” the fat man said, and then he, too, turned and walked into the office, leaving Mark alone in the lobby where once he’d believed he’d met Diane Martin. He stood there for a moment, then gave up and shouldered his bag. He walked back out into the cold and across the parking lot. The only other options were the kind of motels he hated, where the doors opened directly to the outside. The crime scene–tape doors. There was one across the street.

  The clerk there was a bored-looking woman with dyed-blond hair and long, bright red acrylic nails. She didn’t seem happy that Mark had interrupted her television viewing with his arrival, but she rented him a room without question or curiosity.

  According to the thermostat, the room was warm, but Mark’s body argued that. He cranked the heat up and fastened both the dead bolt and the flimsy chain and then sat on the bed, thinking of Danielle MacAlister and the information she’d provided and the questions he could have asked, should have, while she was talking. It had been a surprise that she was that willing to talk. From Jeff London to Sheriff Blankenship to Cecil Buckner, nobody had given him the idea that she’d be cooperative.

  Why had she been, then? There was something wrong with that. He’d intrigued her with the information about Ridley, yes, but had he hooked her enough for an attorney, no matter how young or inexperienced, to begin to tell the family stories to a stranger, let alone a potentially problematic stranger? No. She should have been more guarded than that, and she’d intended to be when he walked into the house. Then she’d pulled a one-eighty during the conversation. Why?

  He leaned back on the bed as warm air smelling of burned dust swept out of the small heating unit, then he closed his eyes and fell asleep on the grimy comforter before even removing his boots. When Jeff London called, he didn’t hear the phone ring.

  His dreams were filled with maps. Obstinate, senseless maps. Frustrated in his attempts with them, he laid a compass down on the paper, trying to get his bearings. It was the compass his uncle had given him for his tenth birthday, a plastic device with a rotating bezel and a signal mirror to be used in case you needed rescue. To see the compass, you had to lift the top of the case, exposing the mirror. In the dream, when Mark set the compass on the map, the needle began to spin, true north impossible to find. Any true direction impossible to find. As the needle spun faster, the bezel began to move, too, going counterclockwise, so the magnetic needle and the guide were turning in opposite directions, spinning faster and faster. Something moved in the signal mirror then, and when Mark looked at it, he saw that the m
irror was filled with Ridley Barnes’s face. As the spinning compass picked up even more speed, Ridley smiled.

  33

  The drive to Stinesville usually took more than an hour in good conditions, and it took Ridley two hours in the snow. The county roads hadn’t seen a plow yet, and though the accumulation was minimal, the changeover from rain to snow had allowed for a thin layer of ice. The rubber on the tires of his old truck was thinner still. He nursed the truck along, a tow chain jingling among the sandbags and cinder blocks that he’d tossed in the back to add weight over the rear axle.

  The snow was blowing harder in Spencer, and the town streets were empty and unusually dark, none of the neon glowing at him from the gas stations along the highway. A power outage, evidently. He turned east and drove with the wind at his back, as if being offered up to the world by the storm itself.

  The old family land was down a gravel road marked by sets of massive ruts left behind by an oversize four-wheel drive. Ridley decided he’d rather hike than shovel his tires out, and he left the truck on the side of the road, slipped his backpack over his shoulders, and stepped out into the wind. His breath was coming fast, fogging the air in quick puffs like antiaircraft fire. He didn’t like this place, never had, never would. It was where he’d buried the darkest parts of him. Or where he’d tried to.

  He walked down the road, his boots occasionally catching gravel but more often just snow, and above him the naked branches of the ash and walnut trees weaved and creaked. Shadows flickered ahead, dancing from one side of the drive to the other, and once he was certain that he saw his father among them. He kept his head down after that. His mother was the only one who belonged here—they’d scattered her ashes on an autumnal wind beneath a sky so blue that it hurt to look at—but it seemed unlikely she’d make an appearance. She’d been a quiet presence in Ridley’s life and when his father was around, not much of a presence at all.

  He wasn’t certain who lived in the old house now. It had changed hands a few times, he was aware of that. He didn’t care much. He’d sold the place as soon as it was his to sell, used the money to send his younger sister through two years of college. She lived in Rhode Island now, and he didn’t hear from her often. Christmas cards always came, but they bore no message beyond whatever the card company had thought to offer. Once they had spoken on the telephone with some consistency. That had ended about ten years ago. He hadn’t fought it. She had children who would ask questions about their uncle if they knew he was out there. You had to be understanding of something like that.