Go back. Do it now while you still can.
For the first time since I had set out, I realized that the warning from within myself wasn’t really me. It had a sharper, darker undertone that I couldn’t quite place. Then it hit me: the dream from a few nights before. The dark, soupy blackness that formed itself into a man. The hollow warning it spoke to me before opening its bloodred eyes. What had it said?
No death for your brother…
Why did I have to remember that here of all places, now of all times? My mind, despite all the insanity of the past week, had made a special note of that dream, had locked it carefully away behind a rickety door that could be opened at a moment’s notice. That dark tone wasn’t quite like a man’s voice, but something that might have once dreamed it was a man. I was trying to talk myself out of doing what I knew I had to do, but my mind had added this awful darkness to further dissuade me. It made sense, in a twisted way. After all, dreams come from within, and every grim moment, every curdled image is provided by our own subconscious. I didn’t know any of this, not as a kid, but I did believe that somehow, my mind was using my fear against me, doubling, tripling my terror.
No.
Yes, of course it was just a dream.
No, it wasn’t.
My voice now, all me, clear and vivid.
There was more to that dream, and you know it. No dream in your entire life ever felt like that one. And for good reason.
No. There was no good reason. Dreams were dreams.
Precisely. And that was no dream.
I clapped my hands to the sides of my head and went down on one knee. Maybe there was something there, some shred of truth about what I was telling myself, but it didn’t matter – not now anyway. Later there would be time: time to sort all this out, time to make sense of the circus behind my eyes. But not now. Now only one thing mattered, and that was Andy.
“So stop,” I said aloud, certain that every voice in my head could hear me. “And keep walking.”
And I did. In an unbroken march, stepping over the low hanging fence, I went past the quarter mile of tall grass, past the jagged remnants of rock, the uncut pillars that seemed to rise from hell itself. On and on, until the ground began to slope downward, and I caught sight of it: the sheer face of gray granite, a hundred feet at least, ending in a bottomless well of dark water. I stepped to the edge, peered over, felt the world tilt underfoot. The path ended here, ended in a drop to almost certain death. I checked left and right, retracing my steps to the last marker I could find, but the trail had gone cold. For one desperate moment, I considered the possibility that the awful monster really didn’t have any sort of lofty ambitions for Andy. It wasn’t a kidnapping. It was merely a murder. I pictured it tossing him over the edge, maybe with a rock tied around his neck for good measure, his last pleas for mercy heard by nothing more than the passing crows.
“Andy.”
I whispered his name, and the sound of my own voice made me want to scream. Down both sides of the canyon, the sheer cliffs were impossible for me to climb, and as far down as I could see, there was nothing but flat gray rock. Somewhere in that moment of final desperation, I realized there were tears streaming down my face. The dark clouds rolled overhead, but I was too tired to care, and I flopped onto the bare dirt and began to sob. I couldn’t go back. There was nothing to go back to. But to stay here was to admit to myself that there was no hope.
Once I had just about cried myself out, I sat up and stared down at the black water. I hated the sight of it, so dark and full of secrets, and in weak, helpless defiance, I kicked a rock off the edge and waited. But instead of a splash, I heard the unmistakable crack of rock on rock. Once more, I peered over the edge, leaning as far forward as I dared to. There wasn’t much to see, only the bulging wall stretching out before me. I had assumed, wrongly perhaps, that the rock wall was sheer, just like every other part of the quarry. Again, I found a small rock, reached out, and let it drop. It left my field of vision, and I expected to hear it splash down, but once more it cracked, stone upon stone.
Somewhere down there, just out of my field of view, was an outcropping. I scrambled to my feet and began pacing the edge of the cliff. I couldn’t see much of anything until I had walked about a hundred yards to one side. The quarry wasn’t exactly straight, and with the narrow, grading curve, I could just make it out: a flat platform of rock, maybe thirty feet wide, was hidden under the bulge of the wall. Even more incredibly, behind it was a hollow.
A cave.
I could even make out the remains of an old path to the bottom of the quarry farther down the right-hand side – a rutted trail just big enough for a single vehicle to drive down. In a sprint, I made my way to the narrow road, which hugged the side of the quarry and toward the rocky platform I had seen. I kept one hand on the wall as I stepped carefully down, unsure of how deep the water at the bottom was. It was a slow, awkward walk, but I made it without any issues, at least until I hit the bottom. At one point, vehicles could have easily been driven down here before the workers gave up on it. Now, with the floodwaters low, I could see the bands on the walls where the water level had gone up and down throughout the year. It was somewhere in the middle now, the washout from the day before bringing everything up a bit, but it had been as much as ten feet higher in the past.
The narrow road fed right down into the murky water, and I put a tentative foot in. There was no drop-off, just the continuous, gentle slope leading ever downward into the still, dark water. The road ended some fifty feet away from the entrance to the cave, and I began to shuffle in place like I was about to piss my pants. There was something about that water, so still and tepid, as warm as a bathtub. It felt dirty somehow, like wading through sewage. There was no way around it though, so I bit my lip and stepped in, clinging to the wall as I passed deeper into the murk. Past my ankles. Above my calves. My knees. The middle of my thigh. When the water passed my belly button, I stopped to reassess and sighed when I realized I was still thirty feet away.
But I was closer to the cliff wall now, and I could see it for the first time. It wasn’t just some divot as I’d feared it might be. It was an opening, a gaping mouth that had once been cut into the earth, in search of granite or marble, before this place was given back to nature. I could see the opening big enough to drive a truck through, but the line of the water was just below the lip of the cave. And it was a cave. Man might have made it some long, forgotten years past, but this was no longer a place that men knew. I felt exposed and helpless splashing through that dark water, but I couldn’t go back. This was it. It had to be, and so I hitched my backpack off and held it over my head, walking forward on my tiptoes until the water was up to my chin.
I wasn’t the strongest swimmer in the world, but I was comfortable enough in water to press off the bottom and tread over the last few feet. I caught the edge with my left hand just as my face went under, and I sucked in a mouthful of that sour, tepid water as my feet found the sloping bottom once more. With a coughing spasm, I tossed up the backpack and scrambled up the slope, dropping like a rock once I was on the dry land of the cave entrance. With a glance up, I peered into darkness, wondering just what I might find when the light of the summer day died away.