This would be the worst of it, Priest Dave assured her from the other side of the hellhole. This would be the only tight squeeze on the entire adventure, and after that, everything would feel like a breeze.
Esther was still at the front of the group. She had no choice; she had to go first.
She lay down flat like Dave had and started to army crawl forward. The rock pressed against her helmet, her shoulders, slanted up slightly to press into her stomach and thighs. The space tightened as she moved through it, seizing up to swallow her body.
Her goal was not to screw around. Get through the hole before the cave collapsed (which, in her head, was inevitable). Survive for two weeks underground by eating Dave, who would (tragically) die in the accident. Write a book about her grand tale of survival, and then write the screenplay for the film adaptation. Maybe win an Oscar for screenwriting. A Golden Globe at the very least.
There was a slight bend in the tunnel up ahead, and a puddle of water about two inches deep. (Of course, of course, of course she was going to get wet again.)
“Goddamn you, Jonah,” she muttered to herself as she navigated the turn, trying and failing not to think about earthquakes and cave-ins and flash floods. “Damn you, damn you, damn you.”
The tightest part of the tunnel was just on the other side of the bend, where the roof dipped down and Esther had to turn her head sideways to keep her mouth and nose out of the water. She shuffled forward another foot before both of her arms became pinned beneath her, elbows bent, and she couldn’t lift her cheek more than an inch from the pool of muddy liquid.
Fuck.
Don’t freak out.
She tried to push one of her arms forward and unpin it from under her, but this crushed her ribs. She tried to scrabble her legs against the rock to squeeze herself through, but couldn’t find a foothold. Backward. Go backward. She tried to use her elbows to force herself back, but her body was still half wedged in the turn in the tunnel.
Fuck.
The hyperventilation started before she even realized she was panicking.
“Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey,” said Priest Dave, who was there suddenly, in front of her face. (It reminded her how quickly things could sneak up on you in caves.) “Slow your breathing. Listen to me, slow your breathing.”
“I’m stuck,” Esther managed to strangle out. “I’m stuck.”
“You’re not stuck. I’m gonna help you out of this, okay?”
Esther nodded. Dave already had his hand underneath her cheek so she could rest her neck without drowning.
“Have you seen The Descent?” she asked him as he gave her a moment to catch her breath.
“Yeah. That’s what got me interested in spelunking in the first place, actually.”
“What is wrong with you?” she choked out.
Dave laughed. “The opportunity to see things that humans have never seen before. To discover secrets that were billions of years in the making, it was too good to pass up. Plus I was scared shitless of small spaces, but I didn’t want to let my fear get the best of me, so I found a way to enjoy it.”
“You can’t say shitless. You’re a pastor.”
“Priest, actually. Look, Esther, I’ve been through this cave system a hundred times, okay? Haven’t been eaten once. Not even nibbled. So what do you say we get you out of here so you can check out the beautiful cavern on the other side?”
Esther thought of the package Jonah had brought her after 1 of 50. Everything you want is on the other side of fear, it had said. She’d never particularly wanted to see a beautiful cavern in a cave system, but she did want to be in an open space, so she supposed that what she wanted was on the other side of fear, in a way. She nodded again.
“Shuffle forward for me, okay?” said Dave. “Just like you’ve been doing. Tiny little army crawl steps.”
As Esther moved, inch by inch, she felt less and less trapped. Her arms became freer, the rock let go of its crushing hold on her rib cage and—a couple of minutes later—the tunnel spat her out entirely, into a cavern that was every bit as picturesque as Priest Dave had promised. And there, on the other side, was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen: the return of the metal platform. Humans had been here, and they hadn’t all been consumed.
“Good work!” Dave said as he clapped her on the back. “Why don’t you take a look around while I help the others through?”
Esther stood up and took several deep breaths. It was over. She’d done it. The tunnel hadn’t collapsed, she hadn’t drowned in a flash flood, and she hadn’t even been eaten by troglofaunal flesh-eating humanoids. As she left the damp darkness of the tunnel, still uneaten by the monsters from The Descent, Esther thought she understood, for the first time, the quote Jonah had written on the newspaper after 1/50.
Esther had never before believed that there was anything nice or useful on the other side of fear. Fear was a sensible barrier that kept the living from becoming the dead, and it shouldn’t be crossed under any circumstances. Yet as she stood up in that room built by the hands of the Earth itself, she found a hole punched through the cavern roof where green-tinted sunlight rushed in, and directly beneath it, a peridot-colored pool where millions of years of rain and wind and floodwater had carved away at the rock. Emerald-bright plants and moss grew from the walls, devouring the daylight, and birds spiraled down to their nests to bring their chirping chicks fat worms.
She’d passed the fear barrier, and she’d lived, and she’d discovered not certain death, as she’d imagined, but impossible splendor.
What other beautiful things had fear been hiding from her? What else had the curse long kept her from discovering?
For the first time in a long time, she wanted to find out.
15
THERE ARE SOME MORE DIRECT ROUTES TO DEATH THAN MOTHS AND LOBSTERS
ESTHER SAW them on a Tuesday morning before school, during the week before 5/50. The bathroom door was ajar, and Eugene was shaving his measly excuse for facial hair in the mirror. As he lathered his shaving cream, turning his wrists this way and that, she caught sight of a flash of red—a series of long cuts running down the length of his arms.
“You should see the other guy,” said Eugene when their eyes met and he caught her staring, and then he shut the door. He wore long sleeves that day. In fact, he’d worn long sleeves every day for months, even in the summer.
Esther felt sick. How could it be that someone you loved could be in pain for so long without you noticing?
Of course, this wasn’t the first time that Eugene had been sad. Depression was a real sneaky asshole. Like that baby girl doctors thought they’d cured of HIV after aggressive antiretroviral treatment, because her viral load was undetectable, but as soon as they took her off treatment, the disease came back. Like HIV, depression was a king at playing hide-and-seek. It concealed itself in reservoirs deep inside the mind, waiting for the walls you built around it to eventually erode. Depression could be at undetectable levels for months or years. You’d be all happy and stable and think you were cured, you were a survivor, and then BAM, out of nowhere it resurged. Imagine, like, surviving the sinking of the Titanic or something and thinking you did it, you lived, you won the game against death, but then a few years passed and the Titanic started hunting everyone who got away, killing them one by one on the streets of New York. We’re talking an I Know What You Did Last Summer–style revenge horror movie, but with a 46,328-ton passenger liner as the crazed murderer, floating around in a sea of fog. That’s how irrational depression was.
Eugene was afraid of darkness, and so he’d die of it. That was how the curse worked. Esther had always wondered exactly how darkness would kill him; it took until that morning, the image of his scored wrists burned into her head, to understand that darkness could live in a person and eat them from the inside out.
So, while she waited for Rosemary and Eugene in the car, Esth
er did something she deeply hated doing. She made a phone call.
Jonah picked up after three rings.
“Solar, what’s up?” he said. It sounded like he was eating cereal.
“I’m so scared of losing Eugene. That the curse is going to kill him before I can break it. We aren’t trying hard enough.”
Jonah was quiet for a beat. “If you’re really worried about him, maybe he should see a therapist or something.” Which is what people always said when they knew people were mentally ill. Like it was so easy to treat and fix and cure. Esther thought about who she could tell. Thought about who would care enough to do anything to help Eugene. Their parents? People so weighed down by their own fears that they could barely function? Or a school counselor perhaps? Someone who’d look at her brother and not see him as the complex, brilliant human that he was, just a problem to be solved, a sickness to be medicated, a darkness to be locked away.
Breaking the curse made just as much sense to Esther as seeing a therapist did. Maybe even more.
When Esther didn’t say anything, Jonah changed tack, his voice light and playful once again. “Look, it’s not my fault you’re scared of some dumb Mothman who’s never gonna attract Death’s attention.”
“I’ll have you know that the Mothman precipitated the deaths of forty-six people in the Silver Bridge collapse of 1967.”
“Why’re you calling? I normally have to call you. I thought you hated making phone calls. It’s on your list.”
Esther checked the weather app on her phone. “I think I might have an idea for Sunday. Something insanely dangerous that will in all likelihood result in our untimely demise.”
Jonah crunched his cereal. Swallowed. “Now we’re talking. I’m in.”
Eugene might be looking for Death, but she’d be damned if they weren’t going to find him first.
16
5/50: LIGHTNING
TO ATTRACT the attention of Death, you couldn’t just be afraid. It didn’t matter how deeply into your bone marrow your fear got. You had to truly believe you were going to die. It was like a beacon, that belief. A ping sent out to the Reaper that added you—even if only temporarily—to his list.
Come find me, it said. Come and take my soul.
At least, that was Esther’s theory, which could be totally wrong. It could be that your death was predetermined, and the Reaper knew the exact time and place that you would die, and didn’t bother paying any attention to you until your time came, but she couldn’t work with that.
The Sunday of 5/50 happened to coincide with the forecast for a wild weather warning in the afternoon. A thunderstorm, a remnant from the fast-dying warmth of summertime, was set to roll across the outskirts of town, and even though number forty-six wasn’t lightning (it was graveyards), Esther asked Jonah if they could swap the fears and—much to her surprise—he said yes.
She didn’t bother with this week’s ridiculous excuse. (“I’m making millinery, sorry.”) She ran out to Jonah’s moped when he arrived, climbed on the back, and gave him directions to a field directly in the radar path of the storm. She was dressed as Mary Poppins—white shirt, black skirt, red bow tie, and an umbrella. They drove out together to the flat plains of grass that surrounded the town, miles and miles and miles of nothing. Not even so much as a scraggly tree. Jonah had brought a picnic, and they ate in the afternoon sunshine, checking the weather radars on their phones again and again to make sure the thunder and lightning were still coming their way. The sun-bleached grass swayed around them, a sea of blond hair. When they got bored, they listened to “Bohemian Rhapsody” over and over again, yelling the line: Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening me! every time it played.
And then came the first distant growl of thunder, which made them stop and stare for the first time at the storm that had been gathering like folds of gray silk on the horizon.
“Shit,” Jonah said slowly, hitting pause on Queen. “Would you look at that.”
They sat in the swelling darkness, watching the cell roll across the plains. Out there on a horizon unencumbered by houses or mountains or trees, the edge of the storm seemed alive and hungry. It sucked and grumbled, shaking the ground beneath the duo as it came toward them like a wall.
“This is really stupid,” Jonah said. “Like, we could actually die stupid.”
“That’s the point.” Esther pulled him down into the grass next to her, because they couldn’t be standing, couldn’t even be sitting, not if they wanted to survive as the storm edged over them and started to send its electric fingers out before it, searching for somewhere to strike.
“Remind me again why I agreed to let you plan this week?”
“Because you thought I’d wimp out.”
“I’m gonna have to seriously rethink that opinion.”
The air went cool and still, as if the storm was drawing all the power from the atmosphere to feed itself. The world grew darker. Rain began to fall, no more than a mist at first, then droplets so large and fast they stung Esther’s skin.
“You’re getting wet around me again,” said Jonah.
“It’s still not funny.”
“But it is true!”
And then came the lightning. Esther had never been in the immediate vicinity of lightning before. She’d always had to count the seconds—four, five, six, seven—before the thunder to figure out how many miles away the strike was. There were no seconds between strike and thunderclap here. Brightness tore across the sky at the same time her eardrums shuddered and the ground beneath her lurched. It was so sudden, so violent, that the world seemed to blink in and out of reality for a few moments, and thunder rumbled away and away and away from them, going to warn all the people of the town that the storm was coming. But they were there, at the epicenter, at the beginning of the sound that wouldn’t hit counting children for three, four, five seconds. It started with them.
Jonah took her hand, because this really was stupid, but they couldn’t run now. They had targets painted on their souls that stretched up into the heavens, begging the lightning to funnel through them to the ground. More brightness came and she understood for the first time why lightning was called a strike. It stabbed down through the air to violently connect with the earth. Esther jammed her eyes closed. If Death was coming, she didn’t want to see him. So she and Jonah held hands tightly, and their closeness made her skin shiver with delight, and every time the lightning struck, he said some iteration of, “Holy fucking shit that one was close did you feel that my God woman you will be the literal death of me!”
The strikes grew further apart, and the thunder grew distant. The rain cleared and they didn’t die.
When the rain stopped altogether, Esther opened her eyes and sat up. They were gloriously, miraculously alive, but for a moment, a flicker, a heartbeat, she swore she saw a dark figure moving away from them through the grass across the plains. It was not Death as folklore imagined him, not a tall, gaunt skeleton in a cloak with a scythe in hand, but a small figure dressed in a dark coat and black hat.
Death as her grandfather described him. Jack Horowitz.
Esther blinked and the figure was gone, swallowed by the tall grass shivering on the horizon, but she was very nearly almost certain that she wasn’t hallucinating.
How Esther imagined it in her head: That morning, a woman who wasn’t supposed to die until May 5, 2056 forgot her office keys on the way out her front door, requiring that she reenter her house to find them, which added twenty-five seconds to her daily walk to work. Twenty-five seconds might not seem like a lot in general day-to-day life. Generally, not much can be achieved in twenty-five seconds. You can reheat a cup of coffee in the microwave. Hold a yoga pose. Listen to just under half of the instrumental opening of “Stairway to Heaven.” Small victories, accomplished again and again by people every single day without killing them.
The woman in question was
not to be so lucky. In the finely tuned business of death, twenty-five seconds was the difference between arriving to work still breathing, and being buried almost four decades before your time. As it happened, this unexpected exercise of free will threw off Death’s careful calculations, and the woman was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time for a piece of metal shrapnel thrown up by an industrial lawnmower to decapitate her.
A gruesome freak accident, if ever there was one, that would have the people of the town speculating about the cruel Final Destination nature of Death for many years to come. How meticulous the Reaper must be, they’d say, to so finely tune, so perfectly time a woman’s death, so that if she had left home one second later or one second earlier, or not stopped to retie her shoelace, or not bothered to go back for her office keys, or this or that, she might still be alive. There’s much that could be said here about predestination—the reason why no house was built on the lot, how the shrapnel in question came to be hidden in the long grass, how the mowing was scheduled for the afternoon, but the maintenance worker operating it had a custody hearing then and so had shifted the work to the morning. How, if his wife hadn’t discovered the text message from his mistress revealing their two year affair, then there would be no custody hearing, and so on and so forth. Hundreds and thousands of choices and chances in one unending string leading to that very moment, when a two-foot-long piece of pipe got caught in the mower blade and sheared its way through the woman’s left temple and out the other side.
Little did humans understand that Death, too, was surprised by death sometimes.
Because of this unexpected change to his schedule, an infant due to die of SIDS was not reaped. (His parents were successfully giving him CPR by the time Death arrived; the baby would go on to live to the age of seventy-seven.) Thus Death found himself with a fifteen minute smoke break from his duties. Having given up his pack-a-day habit many years earlier, he instead decided to wander the countryside and think—about life, and death, and everything that happened in between. It was then, during this unexpected and unplanned solstice, that the Reaper happened across two teenagers laying in a field, a lighting storm going on above them. He momentarily panicked. He’d already reaped one soul just that morning who was not supposed to die, and here, again, were two more. Was this the beginning of some cataclysmic anarchy against death? How much extra paperwork would this require? Would he still be able to take his vacation to the Mediterranean if the entire circle of life went to hell?
A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Page 12
