Dawn began to gloss the horizon. They staggered, their legs failing—and then, quite suddenly, they were there.
The gray sand and paling sky. The black rock.
“Dypaloh,” Micah said. “There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands.”
Ebenezer and Minerva looked at him, confused.
“Read that somewhere,” he said. “Exact opposite of this.”
They rounded the face of the rock where it sheared on a ninety-degree scaling. It was the same as ever—towering, featureless, obsidian. There were no crags or outcroppings where birds might build nests, but then, it would seem an unwise choice for any living thing to dwell upon it. The rock was cold, though the day itself was heating up; a chill radiated off it, as if the coils of a refrigerator were humming behind a quarter inch of stone. The polished surface reflected their features with a funhouse-mirror warp: they somehow looked younger in that shadowy reflection, as if their old selves were trapped in there, too. In many ways, that was true, as a part of them had never left this place.
They hiked around the sheer obsidian angles, and in time they reached the cleft. Though it was now daytime, the sun was blanketed by thick gray clouds. But even if the sun had been shining at full wattage, its light would not have penetrated far inside the rock.
Micah unpacked the last of his gear. He lit the kerosene lantern and tested his flashlight. He patted his pocket to make sure his Buck knife was still there. He shouldered his backpack again. Minerva noticed him wince under its weight.
“You can stay out here,” he said to them.
“Shut up,” Minerva said. “You know we damn well can’t, so quit saying it.”
“We can’t?” Eb said.
“You can,” said Minerva.
Eb seemed to consider taking her up on the offer, but ultimately he shook his head.
“In for a penny,” he said, squinting up at the sky.
THAT OLD SMELL—the smell of living decay—hit their noses the moment they entered the cavern. Darkness swiftly closed over them. The lantern threw wavering shadows on the smooth, dripping rock walls. Their footsteps made no sound: they could have been stepping across an enormous wet sponge. They were filled with terror—as stark as the silvery flash of minnows in a dark pool—but they had no choice. They had surrendered that choice years ago.
“Olms,” Micah said at one point.
He held the lantern above his head; its light fled up to a domed ceiling bubbled within the rock. “There were olms up there last time.”
“The hell are those?” said Minny.
“Salamanders of a sort,” he said. “Thousands of them. White ones.”
Minny said, “Well, ain’t it a crying shame they’re gone.”
Micah managed a smile. If this had an endgame feeling to it—and yes, it surely did—then why not have a few laughs before the curtain came down?
They reached the ledge. The darkness yawned. The rope ladder was still there, rolled up right where Micah had left it. The strangest thing. He remembered watching Ellen climb it fifteen years ago, the backs of her legs trembling in exertion. He recognized that some part of her must still be here, too.
Micah kicked the ladder over the edge; its rungs clattered against the stone as it unfurled. They climbed down. Ebenezer stopped halfway, his knuckles white on the rope, breathing in short doglike pants.
“I’m okay,” he said, to himself more than to the other two. “I’m not, actually, but that’s okay. That’s perfectly acceptable.”
They clustered in the basin facing the tunnel mouth. A sound emanated from it: a languorous exhale, as if the rock itself were breathing. Their faces were pale and sweat-stung in the lantern’s light.
Micah unshouldered his pack and put it on backward so that it hung from his chest. He crawled in first, holding the lantern. The tunnel was peppered with other holes, both small and large, holding teeming knots of darkness. Not a goddamned thing had changed. It was like crawling through an old dream that got progressively worse, narrowing to a perfect speck of darkness—the center of the nightmare.
The kids, Micah thought. We saved them. They would still be down here otherwise. That is the only change—they are not here. That is a good difference.
Ooooh, but wait, whispered a silky, devious voice in his ear. Some of them are still here, aren’t they?
The tunnel ended. One by one, they crawled out and stood within the great, dark vault. Micah set the lantern down and shrugged off his pack. He found his flashlight and swept it through the inky—
“No” was all he heard Minny say. One word, flatly stated. Her voice full of horror.
3
FIFTEEN YEARS. One-fifth of the average human lifespan, give or take. Yet time tended to behave oddly; it was never static, and people felt it differently depending on circumstance. For a child squirming in his desk on the last day of school, those final minutes before the bell rang could seem endless. When that same boy passed through adulthood to old age, those same minutes could pass without his knowing.
Fifteen years. For the Reverend Amos Flesher, they must have been an eternity.
He hung in a web of scintillating red ropes. His body had shrunken and seized up; his feet, which had once touched the ground, now dangled nearly a foot above it. His skin was as brown and dry and moistureless as a chunk of liver forgotten in the back of a freezer. He looked somehow wooden. His toes were curled and hooked upward in grisly curlicues, like awful genie shoes. His lips had thinned away to transparencies, his teeth brown and cracked. The fretwork of ropes creaked softly like the hull of an old Spanish galleon on the night sea.
Micah swept the flashlight past this horrible sight, moving left… His breath caught.
“Pet.”
His daughter stood behind the Reverend. Motionless, her face crawling with dread. Micah stepped toward her. The flashlight disclosed another shape behind her. Its fingers curled possessively on Petty’s shoulder, its upper body swathed in darkness.
The Big Thing. The Flute Player.
“Daddy, please.”
Micah could not tell if it was his daughter who had spoken or the thing behind her—it was an uncanny mimic, as he recalled. He held up his hands in surrender.
“She is all I want.”
“Ass, gas, or grass,” the Big Thing said in his daughter’s voice. “Nobody rides for free, Daddy-o.”
Micah nodded. Instinctively, he knew what to do. He pulled the knife from his pocket and unfolded the blade. He approached the Reverend. The slit in his back, the one Shughrue had carved into it all those years ago, was still wet, still… weeping. Gingerly, Micah touched the tip of the knife to its edge. A membrane burst, spilling noxious nectar down the Reverend’s flesh. The smell was that of a cracked-open coffin. Micah glanced at Amos’s face, wondering if any of this was registering; the Reverend’s eyelids were fissured with tiny dry cracks that seemed on the verge of ripping open, spilling his eyeballs down his cheeks.
Micah turned his attention back to the slit. He drew the blade across it, severing the protective sac. Something turned inside the wound, fat and slug-like; the sight was reminiscent of a cat stretching itself on a warm windowsill.