There was a long, long pause. In order to stay alive, Ray needed to stay here, now, in this moment. Stay alert and away from his thoughts, the well of fears. He listened to the drops falling from the ceiling and counted, like breaths in meditation. One, two, three …he was at twelve when Seth finally answered.
“If you want to come back, you need to come to me. Here, now.”
“I’m not coming there if you have that gun. Throw it in the pit.” That was dumb. If Seth got rid of the gun, Ray would have to come to him. As he was climbing up that last bit Seth could push him. But Seth didn’t answer.
Ray said “That lemon-squeezer must have been hard. You’re a big man.” Big man could have a second meaning. “And with that gun and light.”
“The lemon-squeezer. That’s what it’s called.”
Did Ray hear a shudder in his voice? He was pretty sure the reason Seth was still there was not because he was waiting for Ray, but because he didn’t want to go back through that awful crawlway again. That made them both stuck in both directions. Seth didn’t want to go back and didn’t know how to cross the pit. Ray couldn’t get past him, and wasn’t trying that exit again.
The first step in Ray’s plan had been getting Seth to talk spiritual turkey with him. That accomplished, the next step revealed itself: getting Seth to come to him. Ray said, “You don’t have to go through that crawlway again. There’s another way out of here, past me. It’s much easier than the way in.”
“Then why didn’t you take it?”
“Because, as you of all people should know, there is no easier way. There’s only The Way. Your way.” This multiple-meaning trip was seductive. Ray was starting to almost believe his own bullshit. Maybe that was what had happened to Karl. He started believing his own bullshit.
Seth pointed the lantern down at the ledge like he had before. “How do I do it?”
Had Ray made the sale? Maybe. But Seth still had the gun. Except Ray didn’t need to worry about it. That first move required a hand for that nub of rock. Both of Seth’s were occupied. So he had to lose the weapon or the lantern. Advantage Ray.
And he didn’t need to worry about whether Seth bought Ray’s scam or not. Whether he thought Ray was going to follow him as a teacher or not, he wanted to get across this pit and avoid that lemon-squeezer.
Even as Ray was thinking this hopeful thought, Seth slung the gun over his right shoulder, leaving the lantern in his right hand and the left free. The gun had a strap. Fuck. But the next part of the plan came to Ray, and it didn’t matter.
“Okay. You can’t see the foothold, but it’s there.” Trust me. “Step down and put your weight on…” On your right foot. Where there’s no slot. And fall into the void.
But Ray couldn’t say it. He couldn’t just send Seth to his death. “Your left foot. Now grab that nub of rock and swing over the hole, shifting your weight.” Betrayed by his weenie tongue. What the living fuck was he going to do now?
Seth was over the gap in no time and moving carefully toward Ray. He’d inherited some of his father’s feline agility. That gun was heavy. So was the lantern. Heavy enough that having them must make balancing hard. But he seemed to be managing fine.
When they’d been talking, Seth could see Ray and hadn’t taken another shot. Why? Because he needed him to get across the pit.
Ray spoke softly so as to not startle him. “Seth. You need my help to get out of here. There’s a second climb, like that one.”
Seth stopped, glanced up at Ray, then kept moving.
If he thought he needed Ray’s help, he wouldn’t shoot him when he got up here. Then Ray would tell him, “Your light’s brighter than mine, you should go first,” but when they reached the next pit and Seth was busy climbing, Ray would turn around. And hightail it out.
Ray was shivering again. The cold had worked its way into his core. If he didn’t get moving, the shaking was going to become uncontrollable.
Seth was halfway across the ledge when he stopped. Why? He’d reached that bulge, which Ray had put his hand on to balance as he crouched under it. Seth’s hand was busy holding the lantern. And he was taller than Ray, so he needed to crouch lower.
Seth asked, “What do I do here?”
It was a good damned question. “I told you that you needed my help. You need your hand. Put the light down.”
“Where?”
“On the ledge in front of you. Reach for that bulge in the rock, step over the light, crouch down and get past the bulge. Then you can turn and pick up the light again.”
Seth was agile. He put the light down, got to the bulge, was crouching, moving forward…
A wild arc of light. Silence and then a splash. And they were in the dark, because Ray’s light was still off, and Seth had just knocked his lantern into the pit.
“Help me!” It was no whisper, no voice of Karl’s, but that of a terrified kid.
Ray noticed his own ragged breathing, out of sync with the steady drip, drip of groundwater from far above. Seth couldn’t make it back across that ledge in the dark. If he came this way, Ray would just have to wait until he was at the top of the slope then give him a push.
What if he shot Ray? He couldn’t. That slope was impossible without both hands.
“Please. You have to help me.” What had it been like growing up with the great junkie Karl Maxwell? Whatever Seth had done, he did not deserve to die.
Ray clutched a second time. He snapped the light on and trained it on Seth, who was frozen on the ledge. Ray said, “Okay. No funny business. Come here. Carefully.”
Seth looked right at him, huge animal eyes gleaming. He inched forward.
Seth reached the slope, hesitated for a moment, then bolted up like a rocket. He lunged for Ray’s head, which jerked up and smashed into the roof. Ray’s arms thrust forward and shoved and he collapsed onto his belly, stunned.
An instant of yawning silence, then a grunt and the scraping of cloth on mud. A longer silence, almost two whole seconds. Then a big splash, echoing up the walls of the pit. Only it wasn’t a pure splash, but had this crunch element to it.
Seth had fallen into water, which was better than hitting rock. But it wasn’t deep enough. That crunch Ray heard wasn’t the gun. It was Seth’s bones breaking. Ray listened for signs of life below. But there was just that drip, drip, and now his breath as it started up again.
Seth had joined his father.
Ray lay there for minutes, violently shivering, but he didn’t care. His body flooded with animal relief, and his mind was wiped clean.
He was sure he must have lost the Mag-Lite pushing Seth. But here it was in his palm, gripped so tightly that he wondered if he’d ever play guitar again. His arms had known to push Seth. His hand had known he needed light. He clicked it on.
Ray inched to the edge of the pit and peered down into the blackness. He couldn’t see it, but down there in the water was the broken body of Seth. Nobody survived a seventy-foot fall.
And Ray had killed him. A torrent of feeling rose up, but there was no time for it now. Not if he wanted to live.
Had Seth been alone in The House? Ray imagined someone up there, wondering where Seth went, eventually coming down here.
He had to cross the pit. He’d been dry on the way in. Now he was wet and muddy. He’d have to be extra careful. He started across. He restrained the shaking in his arms and legs but couldn’t keep his teeth from chattering. And they held the Mag-Lite.
He was almost there! He relaxed. Just a little, but enough so that the flashlight slipped from his mouth and clattered down into the pit. A splash, and he was in the black of deepest midnight. Absolute darkness, Bodine had called it.
Ray’s body went numb as he shrank down inside to a tight ball of terror. And in the absence of light he was not sure where or who he was anymore. Whether he was a man in a cave or a black hole at the end of t
he universe.
A breath, and Ray knew he was here, on this ledge. And he remembered: that last bit was tricky. He latched every ounce of consciousness onto the tips of fingers touching rock and the soles of feet on the ledge. There was no pit, no cave, only inching forward. Skin of fingers and feet, breath and movement.
He felt for the gap in the ledge with his foot. This must be it.
He was panting, thoughts spinning out to the abyss yawning in front of him. He slowed his breath and reeled in his mind. He reached a foot over the gap. He told himself: it’s easier if you can’t see it.
He tentatively shifted his weight. But that wasn’t it. If he hesitated he’d overthink it. He lunged for the handhold. The next part happened so fast that he didn’t know how he did it. But he was lying on the flat floor, gasping, quivering.
The lemon-squeezer was nothing now. He was through in a minute.
He was chimneying now, careful not to slip into the crack in the floor. It was better if you couldn’t see it. Past the worst of it, he restrained the desire to rush, to get the hell out of here. He stopped, felt below with a foot. There was no crack in the floor. And it started near the entrance. He was almost out.
Except the passage was growing smaller and smaller. Then too small. He panicked, pounding hands on the rock. He hit that bum finger and let out a yell.
He was lost. Lost in pitch black in this fucking huge cave. As hope leaked from him, his body became listless until the whole of him was paralyzed, the only activity the thought loop, I’m lost, I’m lost, lost, lost….
An abrupt spasm, and he was shivering again. This was the sub-arctic big time version, completely out of control, arms and legs convulsing, whapping against the rock.
He couldn’t stop it, but he could get his mind working. He remembered coming in here with Bodine. He must be in that side passage, at the end of it. Or was this another one he hadn’t noticed then? There was only one way to go, out, and only one way to do it, backward. It was cumbersome but warmed him up so that the shivers were only periodic.
How would he know when he got to the main passage? If he turned the wrong way, he’d be headed into the cave again. He groped the floor, feeling for that crack. When it was there, he’d be back in the main passage.
But which side of the cave did this passage come off of? His memory of passing it coming in an hour ago was confused with when he came out with Bodine. Left or right? Fuck if he knew.
Relief flooded him as icy fingers sensed the crack. But should he go right or left? He hugged the rock. Breathed and let his mind go blank.
He was cold, yes, but his face was especially so. There was air blowing on it. It should be headed out into the basement then upstairs into The House, where it was colder. What direction was it going?
He licked a finger and held it up.
He crawled into the wind. Minutes later his hand crashed onto the pile of bricks. It hurt, but he wanted to kiss every one of them. Marry them.
He stood and felt his way toward the door. As he entered the Meeting Room, he became aware of the dim light of the candles in the foyer, and his light-starved eyes actually narrowed. He passed the midpoint of the room with Karl’s coffin in the gloom to his right.
It occurred to him that the cave was a crime scene. He lifted one of the candles from the shrine and returned to the mouth of the cavern. He stacked bricks up to hide it.
He was passing the coffin again when he stopped. He needed to see Karl one last time. He stood over the body, dripping wax on the floor. Karl didn’t care anymore. Neither did Seth.
Karl had never had any fat on him, but he looked even thinner. As usual, he wore a long-sleeved shirt, quietly elegant, fine cloth in a pleasing shade of dark blue. This one was buttoned at the wrists, the way they’d always been, even in the August heat. It was typical of his fastidiousness.
Or maybe it was something else. Ray closed his eyes. A second later, he was dizzy and intensely nauseated. He opened them again and looked out into the room. Did he really want to see? To know?
He reached down—even at the risk of touching dead flesh—and undid a sleeve button. There was a bad moment, thinking the skin might adhere, slough off as his hand tugged on the cloth.
He teased the sleeve up the arm, and the skin didn’t slide off. But the inner forearm was a mess. And it wasn’t rot. Scabby circles extended from the pit of the elbow down a vein towards the hand.
Ray had never seen the tracks of a heroin addict, but he knew that’s what he was seeing. Bodine said Karl had been into smack in the sixties. Lorraine spoke about Karl getting Beaky to rob drugstores. Ray hadn’t believed them. But Karl had been a user. A heavy user.
And Ray didn’t know why, but he was pretty sure his teacher had OD’d.
Had he been using at the end of the group? Is that why he’d gotten so weird, why the mask slipped? Ray would never know. Karl might have had a “Way” at some point, but he’d surely lost it. Forsaken it for the way of the needle.
One thing was clear. Whatever the truth of Karl’s great spiritual lineage, stretching back to Jesus Christ, it had just ended with Seth. According to Karl, that should mean the end of all hope for mankind. Though it seems that line had fizzled out a bit earlier, around the time Karl started poking a spike in his arm.
Ray gave Karl’s face a last look and headed to the foyer. It’s time. Time to get the car and go home. He felt a great letting down inside, and his body checked in with its complaints: a stabbing pain at the end of his finger and a jaw aching from biting on the flashlight. Oh, and he was desperately thirsty.
He reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped. He knew now who’d been doing the computer stuff, the hacking and anonymous remailers. Seth was from a generation that knew technology. Ray also knew that he was crazy, but crazy enough to mummify his own father? Had he really been living alone in this place, all by himself? It didn’t make sense. Unless Seth hadn’t been alone.
Ray listened. Not a sound.
But…they must be setting him up. Suddenly he was six years old, alone in a basement in a dark house, the shadows outside the dim circle of candlelight crawling with menace. They were upstairs in the original Meeting Room, sitting waiting for him, along with an empty cushion.
Waiting, not to embrace him, not even to punish him, but to begin it all again. The endless days of boring physical work and the browbeating and the terrible, awkward meals.
A tremor arose in his chest and, a moment later, his whole body convulsed with violent shivers. He needed to get warm, right now, people upstairs be damned. He sprang for the steps, but his feet had turned sluggish and he missed. He crashed into the wall, knocking the candle out.
He prized the other one from the niche, hands shaking, and trudged up the steps. What if Seth had locked the door? He tried to be quiet, but the shivers had his arms thumping into the wood-paneled walls of the stairwell.
The door was open. He stopped to listen. The shaking got worse. He crept into the great room with the stairs to the second floor. He felt The House around him, its enormous weight. It felt empty. And it was definitely unheated.
He should leave. But it was probably colder outside. He had to get warm before doing anything else. He was no expert on hypothermia, but he was surely well into it. Seth had been living here. There must be a coat.
Back in the group they’d hung theirs up by the Front Door. He stumbled through the room he’d first worked on all those years ago. He slowed down so the candle didn’t go out. The same furniture was here, but the wood has lost the gleam they’d labored so to give it. Dust covered everything. It smelled like a museum unvisited in decades. No group had been here in a long time.
Coat hooks still lined the wall of the foyer, but there were no coats. He headed back then turned to the hall with the grand stairway.
Light streamed from The Bedroom upstairs. He bounded up, and the candle
went out.
As he entered the room, he caught a strong whiff of that homeless person stench, mingled with another incongruous smell: tuna fish. The faint thrumming of the generator came from down the hall.
His eyes jumped to the bed. Where Karl had videotaped Susan. Where Seth slept. He saw the red cover at the bottom edge, looking its age, threadbare and faded. Otherwise the bed was piled high with a tangle of blankets and coats. Seth’s smell was strongest here. Ray wrestled one of the coats on. It reeked, but it was wool.
He rushed to a space heater by the window, turned it on, and huddled over it, toasting his hands. It would take more than this to dry his clothes, but he finally got the shaking to stop. Thirst returned with a vengeance. He looked around frantically and saw a half-filled water bottle. Seth had drunk from it, but Ray chugged the contents.
As his body climbed out of survival mode, questions rushed in. When did Karl die? How did Seth live?
A bookcase next to the bed was crammed with religious texts, from the Bhagavad-Gita to The Bible. There were odder things. The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral. Something about Atlantis, and Secrets of the Pharaohs. Was that where Seth got his embalming technique?
The bottom shelf contained bound notebooks. Ray opened one and recognized Karl’s ornate hand. Here was his philosophy, laid out in quotes, some lifted from the books above, many of which he remembered Karl saying.
Without the charm of his intonation it all seemed a bit fussy. Here was a nugget Ray had heard from him once. “If a man doesn’t find his way by age fifty, he might as well blow his brains out.” Ray had obsessed about that one at the time, but when the big five-oh rolled around he had mercifully forgotten it. Now it seemed overheated, portentous.
Wait. How old had Karl been when he died? According to Wikipedia, he’d been born about 1950. Even figuring in the ravages of heroin, his corpse hadn’t look sixty. So maybe Seth’s embalming hadn’t been so bad. Karl could have been as young as fifty when he died.
Never Speak: A Mystery Thriller (The Murderous Arts Series) Page 29
