by Erik Hyrkas
Michael’s phone gave out twenty minutes later, possibly because he turned it on more frequently than Hunter or possibly because it was a less battery-efficient phone. Either way, they were in the dark.
“Let’s rest,” Brit said when Hunter finished a particularly artful string of profanity directed at Michael, leveraging a few words from the urban dictionary she wasn’t even familiar with.
“I don’t want to die here,” Marcy said for what felt to Brit like the billionth time.
“We have no light now, and we are all sore and tired. It shouldn’t matter if we rest for a few hours,” Brit said.
“The way out might be around the next corner,” Michael said.
“And there may be no way out,” Hunter said.
Marcy started muttering prayers under her breath and making promises to her deity about what she would do if he got them out of the cave.
“There is a dry spot on the ground over here,” Brit said. “It feels relatively big and flat.”
She heard the others clamber toward her. They used their voices as best they could to navigate the dark, and after a few minutes and some uncomfortable touches that Brit wasn’t sure were entirely accidental, all four were lying in the dark.
“We shouldn’t all sleep at the same time,” Michael said.
“I wasn’t planning on sleeping,” Hunter said. “We’re only resting for an hour or two.”
Five minutes may have passed before Brit heard Michael snore for the first time in a long succession of snores. She marveled at his ability to sleep on hard stone in these circumstances.
Between Michael’s snoring and Marcy’s constant stream of promises and pleading to the dark in a muddled whisper, Brit had no worries about falling asleep; but she was concerned about whether she’d hear a creature coming to eat them.
“Wake up,” Hunter whispered urgently as he shook Brit.
It wasn’t until that moment that Brit realized that she had fallen asleep.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Listen.”
She listened. Michael wasn’t snoring and Marcy was panting, so neither of them were asleep either. She listened harder though, trying to make out whatever sound alerted Hunter to something wrong. In the distance, she thought she could hear music. It was faint and difficult to make out, but there seemed to be a strong bass line.
“Music,” Brit said.
“I thought I was imagining it at first,” Hunter whispered. “Sitting in the darkest dark makes you see things after a while, and I thought maybe I was hearing things now, too.”
“I hear it too,” Michael said.
“Let’s go,” Hunter said.
Brit heard him crawling away.
“Wait,” she said.
“If it is music, how dangerous can it be?” he asked.
“You’re right. We should check it out, but I don’t want anybody to be left behind,” she said. “I’ve been thinking that, maybe instead of crawling, we might move faster and safer if we held hands and walked in a chain.”
“We might hit our heads,” Hunter said.
“The first person can feel with their hands for obstacles, and the person next to the one leading the way can help keep them from falling,” Brit said.
“Do you think you are strong enough to keep me from falling?” he asked.
“No, but you are strong enough to keep me from falling if I lead,” she said.
Hunter was quiet for a moment. “Fine, but if I hit my head on rock, I’m going to be really pissed.”
“I’ll lead, followed by Hunter, then Michael, and then Marcy,” she said.
“Why do I have to be last?” Marcy asked.
“Because you wouldn’t be strong enough to keep Hunter standing,” Brit said, and she purposely didn’t point out that the only person possibly strong enough to keep Michael standing was Hunter and even that wasn’t a sure thing.
“Lead the way,” Hunter said.
Brit found Hunter’s hand in the dark, and the others did the same, the exercise accompanied by a number of expletives from Hunter and apologies from Michael.
“Everybody have the correct person?” Brit asked.
The others all answered affirmatively, and then they slowly made their way toward the music. Brit felt along the wall with her hand, and with each step she tried to make sure that there were no low hanging parts of the ceiling that might hit Hunter in the head. At first the trickle of water along the floor was louder than the music, but the further along they crept, the more distinct the music got and the harder it became to hear the water.
“It is getting warm in here,” Michael said.
Brit realized he was right. It was getting warm. The air was also moving more rapidly, and it felt like there was a steady wind at their back now.
Brit led them around a bend, and they all saw the faint glow of flickering light. The music was now the volume of a college dorm room.
Hunter let go of her hand and ran ahead. The others followed, forgetting their injuries and fatigue. He stopped at the next bend and cautiously looked around the corner, then pulled his head back just before a car sped right into the wall next to them and vanished.
The music and light were gone for a moment and then restarted again in the distance.
“Holy shit,” Hunter said. “It nearly hit me.”
Brit walked past him and around the corner, where she saw the headlights of the car and the music was deafening. She resisted every urge to dive out of the way as it drove toward her, knowing that it wasn’t real, but then at the last moment she dove away. The car drove into the wall again.
“What are you doing?” Marcy asked. “Are you insane?”
“It’s not real,” she said.
“Then why did you jump out of the way?” Hunter said.
“Because it looks pretty real,” she said.
“A ghost car?” Marcy asked.
“I think it’s like the boy, maybe a hologram,” she said.
“We are definitely in hell,” Marcy said.
When the car drove by the next time, Hunter threw a rock at it as it passed. The rock sailed straight through it.
“Definitely not solid,” he said. Then, as the music resumed with the reappearance of the car at the end of the passage, he shouted to be heard, “We’ve lost our water source. We need to backtrack.”
Brit looked around the passage and realized that Hunter was right. Still, despite how loud it was with the car and the music, having light was remarkably comforting.
“Maybe we should look around the next bend while we have light here, before backtracking in the dark. You know, in case we’re right next to an opening?” she said.
“I’m not walking anywhere near the ghost car! I think we should backtrack,” Marcy shouted.
The car vanished into the wall again.
“We’ve been in the dark for hours,” Michael said. “Let’s just rest a little bit in the light.”
“What if it turns the corner and runs us over?” Marcy asked. “I don’t want to die in here.”
“It’s not real,” Brit said in exasperation. “It’s some sort of hologram.”
“Ghosts move through walls and stuff, but they kill people just fine when they want to,” Marcy said.
“It seems to be stuck in a loop,” Michael said. “Just like the boy.”
When the car reappeared, Brit looked at the others. Their clothing was filthy with red mud, and there were tears in the knees of their jeans and streaks of blood on everyone’s hands and pants. She sat down against the wall, and everybody followed suit, even Hunter, who didn’t look nearly as beat up as everybody else.
Marcy was shivering and hugging herself. Hunter moved over next to her and put an arm around her.
She pulled away. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t worry. I’m not into short and ugly,” he said. “You have wet clothes and it is cold in here. I was trying to keep you from getting hypothermia.”
“Jerk,”
she whispered, then moved next to Michael and leaned against him.
Michael didn’t move a muscle as if Marcy might have been a deadly spider that had crawled onto his shirt and now he was hoping it would simply crawl away without biting him. He kept his eyes straight ahead and stayed perfectly ridged.
Hunter pulled off his sweater and threw it at her. Under the sweater, a torn dress shirt and t-shirt stretched taut over his muscular body. “Your jacket is thin cotton and wet. Take it off and put this on. It’s wool and will keep you warm.”
“Turn around,” she said.
Hunter sighed and turned around. Marcy stripped off her jacket and shirt, laying them on a rock, and then pulled on Hunter’s wool sweater, which was long enough to be a short dress on her. She had to roll up the sleeves a number of times for her hands to stick out. Michael’s face was bright red by the time she sat down next to him again.
“I’m decent again,” she said.
Hunter made a show of looking back in Marcy’s direction, then sat down against the wall, his bright white dress shirt against a backdrop of muddy red walls. If he wasn’t such an asshole, Brit thought, he probably would have looked really good, in a rugged sort of way. His hair was messed up, and he had two days of stubble that was a stark contrast with his dress shirt, slacks, and leather shoes. He was, in fact, surprisingly attractive.
While they sat there, Brit took to throwing small stones at the phantom car each time it made a pass, and each time the stones would fly through it.
“I’m really hungry,” Michael said.
“Everybody is,” Hunter said. “You don’t have much to worry about though. You aren’t going to starve any time soon.”
“Fuck off,” Michael muttered.
Hunter laughed. “As long as we have a source of water, which we left back there somewhere,” he said with a gesture into the darkness, “and are able to keep warm and dry enough, we should be able to make it a week down here. Maybe more.”
Brit didn’t like the thought of living in the dark for even another day. Absently, she stood and walked toward the car. It whooshed past her blaring music, and she stepped into the dark corridor it had left behind. She waited for a few moments for it to reappear and to give her light, then slowly crept toward the car as it raced toward her, trying not to trip over the uneven ground or lose her nerve.
“What are you doing?” Marcy shouted in alarm.
“I’ll be right back. I’m just looking around the next corner,” Brit said.
She cringed and braced herself as the car sped right through her. Brit let out a long sigh. She had been pretty sure that was going to happen, but being pretty sure was not the same as certain. The car looked perfectly solid and real, even if she had thrown some rocks through it and had seen it go through a wall.
She repeated the process as she walked carefully down the tunnel with the car running through her every thirty seconds. She paused halfway along the corridor when she saw something black and glossy on the ground, a small black glass disk the size of a quarter. It reminded her of the larger glass disk that fell out of Peter’s ilo in her bedroom.
She picked it up. It was smooth and undamaged, and none of the red mud of the floor clung to it. When she wiped her finger across the surface, the car that had been barreling toward her, along with the noise and light, vanished.
“What the fuck happened?” Hunter shouted from the dark behind her.
“I can’t see,” Michael said.
“No fucking shit,” Hunter said. “It’s dark. You’re not fucking used to it being dark yet?”
“I think that I turned off the car,” Brit said.
“We should try to find our way back to the water,” Hunter said.
Brit swiped her finger on the disk again, but nothing happened. She tapped it and flipped it around, but more nothing happened.
“Brit?” Hunter called.
She slipped the disk into her pocket and felt for a wall to orient herself.
“Give me a few moments to get back to you,” she said.
“What’s the sound?” Marcy asked.
Everybody was quiet for a moment.
“I don’t hear anything,” Brit said.
“I hear it,” Michael said. “That creature is coming this way.”
“We need to move,” Hunter said. “Go toward Brit.”
Brit couldn’t hear anything above the sounds of the other’s scrambling toward her. She turned around and carefully felt her way forward. The ground became smoother and wetter. There was a soft burbling sound not far away.
“Watch out, guys,” she said. “The ground is a little slippery here.”
The sound of scraping claws was loud enough now that she definitely could hear them.
“Keep moving,” Hunter said. He was right next to her and his hand touched her shoulder in the dark.
She jumped at the unexpected contact but continued on as quickly as she could.
“Oh no!” Marcy shouted, and then she screamed somewhere to Brit’s right. It sounded like she was quickly getting farther away.
In the next step, the floor was much further down than Brit expected, and she slipped, then began sliding. The water was deeper now, and she slid faster and was out of control. She gasped for air as she tumbled and flew down an uneven water shoot, occasionally hitting rocks and sliding past them before she could grip them, all the while gasping for air.
She lost momentum when the ground below her fell away and the water became deeper. There was a faint green glow to her right, and she swam toward it. She heard splashing nearby, which she hoped was coming from one of her companions and not something that would eat her.
Chapter Eleven
Brit knew when the water was shallow enough to stand the first time she hit the bottom with her foot while still kicking vigorously as she swam for shore. The pain overwhelmed her senses for a few moments, but the knowledge that her friends would be following her and that they may be chased by the azure monster was enough to keep her going. She couldn’t stand, however, despite the water only being two feet deep because the ground was too slippery. So she went on half-swimming and half-crawling. There was vigorous splashing somewhere off to her right, and the soft burbling of the water chute that had carried her down to the more placid water.
Even as she approached the green glow, she couldn’t tell what was making it. Merely looking at it confused her senses. It wasn’t until she had dragged herself onto the shore and touched the green, crusty plantlike material that she realized it was some form of lichen growing on the shore and walls of the cavern in this spot.
As she rested on the shore catching her breath, she could hear the splashes of another person in the water.
“I’m over here,” Brit called, hoping that she wasn’t calling that monster to her.
“Help!” Marcy gasped from the dark a few yards away.
The faint glow of the lichen was pretty, but it was not a useful light source. Brit could only make out the silhouette of her hand if she held out her hand next to the glowing rocks she sat on.
“You are nearly here,” Brit urged Marcy, unsure if she dared go into the water, and not merely due to the fear of the creature that pursued them but the treacherously slippery rock surface in the water that made it impossible to stand.
The splashing was really close now, and the wet slap of Marcy’s hand on the shore was enough to help Brit find Marcy and pull her onto the dry shore.
“I slipped,” Marcy said between gasps.
“Are you hurt?” Brit asked.
“I don’t think so,” Marcy said. “I think I bruised my hip when I slipped into the water, but nothing feels broken. Where are the others?”
Brit listened, and the sound of the gentle burbling at the far end of the cavern now sounded more threatening than loud splashes or the scraping of claws. Had the creature caught them before they could slide down? Was the creature gliding silently through the water toward them even now?
“Is that the sky?
” Marcy asked.
Brit looked up and then turned around. Behind her was a pinhole-sized dot of pink. She could not tell if her eyes were playing tricks on her. If she leaned back, the dot grew to about the size of a quarter.
“I don’t know,” Brit answered, unwilling to hope that they had found a way out for fear of being disappointed if it was an illusion or a different type of glowing plant.
Brit clambered to her feet and moved cautiously toward the light, feeling the air with her hands to avoid running into rock and taking careful steps. When she found a wall, she was able to walk more steadily and found that she was in a narrow corridor; but after it made an S-turn, it opened up and the patch of pink grew. Ahead, too bright for her eyes to adjust to immediately, more light overcame her senses.
A loud splash behind her caused her to turn.
“Who’s there?” Marcy called into the dark.
“We’re over here!” Brit called.
The splashing became intermittent, as if the person doing it was occasionally forgetting to move.
“There is light over here,” Brit said. “You don’t have much further to go.”
“I made it,” Michael whispered.
Brit and Marcy tried to help him stand, but he couldn’t. They let him rest for a few minutes, and finally he got slowly to his feet.
“I can see the sky from around the corner,” Brit said. Brit led the way with her voice. Marcy gripped her shoulder as they walked, and Michael trudged behind them.
Once in the light, they could see they were in a deep ravine with sharp cliffs around them. A fog hung low near the ground, which was hidden in the shadow of the high cliff walls. A tree grew on the far wall and was one of the most beautiful sights Brit had ever seen. She turned to see if the others were taking in that same scene when she saw that Michael had collapsed on the ground.
Brit shook him. “Michael?”
“So tired,” he whispered.
She looked at the bright red blood glistening on his forehead. “Stay with me,” Brit urged. “You hit your head and can’t sleep yet.”
Michael’s eyes fluttered open. He looked ahead at the light and the fog-masked ground. Slowly, he gathered his legs under him and rose. He looked unsteady, and both Brit and Marcy moved closer to help him.
