“Wanted me to go to the cave,” Mark said.
“To Trapdoor?”
Mark nodded, happy to have been of help. “Yes, he knows about the cave. It is all about the cave with Ridley. Cave, cave, cave. That’s all he wants to talk about.” He started to laugh again. He got smacked again. He felt like crying. He felt like sleeping. Where was the water? Where was the reef? Where was his wife?
“Why did he want you in the cave?”
“That’s what it’s all about,” Mark said.
The shadow went silent. Mark saw the melting boards again so he closed his eyes and tried to find the water. There it was. Gentle currents pushing and pulling at him, and somewhere up ahead was Lauren. Glimpses of her hair. Here and gone, here and gone. Why wouldn’t she slow down and let him catch up? Going too fast was dangerous. It was reckless. It would get someone killed.
“Slow down,” he whispered. “Wait.”
“I’m thinking,” the shadow said from somewhere behind Mark. The shadow had misunderstood; Mark didn’t care if he slowed down. “I’m thinking that maybe Ridley was right. Maybe you need some time down there. It’ll stir things up, won’t it? Let’s stir things up.”
“Okay,” Mark said agreeably. “Let’s do.”
Something was pulled over his head then, and the melting boards vanished and so did the water behind them. He’d never make the reef now. Lauren was up there ahead, and she was all alone.
Part two
The world below
15
Full consciousness had been with Mark for a while before he accepted that it had returned. It was difficult to believe that his mind was functioning, because the world he existed in now was stranger than what he’d experienced in the drug haze.
Blackness was all that he knew, but the hood was off his head, his eyes were open, and he believed he should be able to see. It took some time before he understood that the problem wasn’t with his eyes — there was nothing but darkness.
What finally put him in motion was the cold. It wasn’t bitter and wind-driven and there was no snow. The cold simply rose up and soaked into him. He ran his hands over his body and found his skin prickled with gooseflesh. He was naked except for his underwear, and at first he’d hoped that was an imagined condition, just as he’d hoped the blackness was. Another hallucination that would pass eventually.
It wasn’t.
He extended his hands and swung them around, testing the blackness to see what was out there. His fingers made no contact with anything. He lifted one hand and held it directly in front of his face, then opened and closed it. He saw nothing, but there was a bizarre sensation that he could. He could visualize what the hand was doing, and so his brain seemed to accept it almost as if he had seen it.
There was a stone wall at his back and a stone floor beneath him but what was in front of him, or even nearby, was unknown.
Fear seized him then, a swift panic that made him get to his feet too fast, and he almost fell. His legs were numb from the long period of sitting, and all of him ached. He stood in the dark and tried to make some sense of it, of how he’d come to be in this place. Memories came at him in disjointed fragments, and that only exacerbated the panic.
Slow down, he told himself, slow down and relax. You’re alive, you’re safe.
Wasn’t he? Maybe he was. How could you know when you couldn’t see a single thing?
Where the hell are you? How did you get here?
He remembered the drive through the snow, the truck behind him, the van ahead of him, the men with shotguns. Three of them. Then he’d been in the van. Then he’d been somewhere in the snow with a knife against his throat and questions coming. Then...
He couldn’t put that together. That was the point where memory turned to fragments and then to dust. None of the memories told him where he was now. Some sort of basement? No. The stone wasn’t smooth like poured concrete. It was rough and smelled of soil and water, no trace of human interference. This was some kind of pit, some kind of...
“Cave.” He said it aloud, and the sound of his voice made the darkness seem darker, made him feel smaller and more alone, more helpless. He shouted then, yelling “Help!” and “Hello!” over and over.
There was no response but an echo that made the place feel large and empty, as if he were a long way beneath the earth. He thought of Ridley Barnes, all those ropes and helmets and lamps scattered around his house. How far had Mark been taken into this place? And from what direction? Was the exit in front of him, or to the left, or to the right? Or, hell, above? How did you even begin to search for it?
The panic he felt then was unlike any he’d known before. A sensation of being trapped in someplace small and abandoned in someplace endless all at once. Anything would be better than this blackness — being adrift on miles of empty sea or being caught in a cage; either would be better, because at least it would be known.
He moved his hands down to the stone floor and spread his fingers wide and dug them in, felt his nails scrape against the rock. He stayed like that, as if he were hanging on to keep from being pulled away, and he closed his eyes, even though there was no point — eyelids shielded you from nothing down here — and he tried to confine his concentration to the physical sensation of touch, to the feel of the stone. It was a known entity here in a world without many.
“All right,” he said, and his words echoed. “All right, Markus. Go ahead and open your eyes, and know that nothing will change.”
Talking aloud provided some level of reassurance. He opened his eyes, and while there was another stab of fear when nothing changed, he contained it this time.
You ought to spend some time down there, Ridley Barnes had said. In the dark. Think about her, think about me.
“Let’s get out of here,” Mark said, still speaking aloud because sound was comfort. “Let’s go.”
There was the challenge. Go where?
Moving in total blackness was daunting even if you had an understanding of where you were. Without any, it seemed impossible. But he had no choice. In this cold, if he didn’t find a way out soon, he never would.
Right or left? Or straight ahead? Every option seemed the same. The only logic he could imagine was a process of elimination: pick one direction, head that way, and see what happened. Rinse and repeat and eventually he’d be moving in the right direction.
Unless there isn’t a right direction. Because if this is a pit, and you need to go up...
He decided to move straight ahead first, because it occurred to him that it would be easier to find his way back to the starting point if he moved in a straight line. That way, if he ran into an obstacle, all he had to do was move directly backward until he found the wall again. This realization was the first thing approaching an actual plan, and he felt proud of it, as if the notion of crawling forward were a true breakthrough and not something instinctive to such brilliant creatures as earthworms and ants.
He began to crawl, and even though the impact was minimal, the stone was brutal on his knees. He considered standing but thought that would be more dangerous — by crawling, he was at least limiting how far he could fall.
He had gone maybe twenty or thirty feet when his left hand made contact with what seemed to be a wall in front of him. He ran both hands along the surface as far as he could extend his arms. He found no break in the wall. A dead end.