There was only one way to find out.
Justin started walking.
He made a couple of agreements with himself. He made up his own safety rules.
First, he would turn back if his headlamp gave out. The candle should be enough light to get him back to safety, as long as he was careful not to let it go out too often. Second, and related to the first, he would only follow the dry riverbed if it was safe and easy to do so. As soon as he reached a place that required climbing, or traversing a pit, or fighting deadly snakes, or outrunning a pack of wild dragons, he would stop and turn around. This walk was all about alleviating boredom and killing time. He was not going to put himself in jeopardy just because he was bored.
The underground riverbed wound left and then right.
Justin felt the wind on his face. His headlamp flickered.
After a deep grinding that shook the floor—it sounded like stone on stone—the wind disappeared.
Justin stopped and moved his light around the space. It had sounded like a heavy stone being slid into place. That visual made sense with the wind being blocked at the same time. He imagined that a giant stone was now covering an exit that led out into the night. He’d heard the sound before, right after they came into the mine. It sounded more sinister this time—probably because he was alone. Where was Miguel to freak out and run away when he needed him? Making fun of Miguel always made him feel a little more calm.
Justin took a deep breath and looked up the sloping rocks. He had a sense of where the wind had come from.
“Here goes rule number two,” he mumbled.
Justin grabbed the shoulder-high rock in front of him and jacked himself up. He swung a leg up and looked back to orient himself before he went higher. The ceiling of the cave followed the contour of the wall, so it closed in on him as he climbed. He still had plenty of room to move around. He wasn’t really in jeopardy as far as he could figure.
He came to a place where the rock that was the ceiling curved upwards. The wall got pretty steep as well. He was standing on a ledge in a long horizontal channel that was a few feet wide. Justin glanced down to make sure he still knew how to get back. He couldn’t shut off his curiosity. Just above his head, it looked like the cave opened up again. He had to know if it was true.
Justin made short work of the climb. It really wasn’t difficult. He dusted off his pants and stood up in this new space. It was bigger. In fact, it was almost as big as the mine shafts he had started this adventure in. It was clearly not hand-dug though. The contours had been shaped by flowing water, just like the caves below.
“Speaking of which,” he said. He looked down and scuffed an arrow on the rock with his shoe. His effort left a pretty good indicator. With that, he would know where it was safe to drop back down to the cave below.
The cave was flat and easy. It ran like a planned tunnel in both directions. Justin walked along it, just to see if he could tell where it went. He turned several times to make sure he could still see his scuff mark on the ground.
When he turned back around, he jolted with a minor shock. There was a face looking back at him.
-o-o-o-o-o-
Justin exhaled a relieved laugh. He reached forward and touched the painting. It was done with just one pigment, but it had been expertly applied to indicate shadows and highlights. The woman depicted was beautiful. She had a bold, straight nose and sad eyes. The hair framed her face perfectly. It wasn’t the only drawing. Justin took another few steps and found a man’s facing looking back at him. He kept walking and found an old man and then a girl. He cast his light down the cave wall—people stretched forever. He looked for some clue about the age of the drawings. They didn’t wear any jewelry and the drawings never included the neck or any clothing. They could have been made last week or a thousand years before.
Did the native people of California ever create realistic cave art?
He didn’t know.
Justin stopped in front of a young woman who looked very sad and frightened. Her mouth was open in what must have been a moan or a scream. The emotion was so clear on her face. It gave him the creeps to look into her eyes. Justin backed away from the cave painting.
“I’m going to add this to the list of crazy things about this cave,” he whispered. Justin glanced up the length of the cave. It extended as far as his light penetrated. He had no idea how many paintings he would find. After looking at the sad and frightened lady, he had no interest in seeing more of those faces. There was a cold spot growing inside his chest.
He wandered back to the first woman.
She didn’t look nearly as miserable. But her eyes—they were so sad. Maybe his perception had been colored, but he didn’t even like looking at her anymore. None of the faces looked even a little happy. Justin wondered if this was the fault of the artist, or if the models had all shown that same emotion.
He turned his light back up the cave when he heard the grinding sound again. Cool air blew in his face. His nose twitched at the odor. It wasn’t overwhelming—in fact, he could just barely smell it. It reminded him of walking by a puddle of vomit that has mostly dried.
“Fuck this,” Justin whispered. He backed away from the wall of paintings. He didn’t want to turn his back on the breeze. It seemed like that breeze might be bringing something his way. If it was, he wanted to see it coming. Justin backed all the way until he found his arrow, scuffed into the face of the rock. He felt vulnerable climbing back down through the gap, but he stopped to brush away the evidence of his arrow. If the artist of those sad portraits was still around, he didn’t want them following him back down into the cave.
Justin stole glances over his shoulder to see where he was going. The breeze was still blowing in his face. He heard the grinding sound again and the air stopped.
Justin stopped too.
His light moved around the cave as he thought. An image popped into his head. He imagined an enormous corpse, buried under the desert soil. The cave was petrified tube leading into the corpse’s lung. But the thing was waking up and starting to breath again.
The thought made him shiver. He was a tiny explorer, the size of bacteria compared to this giant creature. Something that size wouldn’t even know of his existence. It would live and die without a thought for the miniature invader.
Justin imagined that somewhere there was an enormous skull, the size of an apartment building, buried under a mountain. He imagined that the thing’s once-dead eyes were opening to the darkness.
R
OGER
HELD
THE
ROPE
out to his side as he walked. He didn’t like when it brushed against his leg. When he heard the sound up ahead, he reached up and turned off his light. Whatever else was in this mine, Roger wanted a chance to observe it before it knew of his presence.
He crept as quietly as he could.
He stopped when he heard static. After the click, he heard laughter. The sound was foreign in this place. It made goosebumps rise on his arms. Roger inched towards the corner and poked his head around. He saw her in the distance. She was crouching down, doing something on the floor.
He must have made a sound—she whipped around and pointed her light right at him.
“Don’t run,” he said. “Please?”
She stood slowly, tucking something under her arm and brushing off her hands.
“What do you want?” Florida asked.
“Probably the same as you,” he said. “I want to get out of here while I’m still young.”
He came around the corner with his hands raised like a bank robber. A thought flitted across his mind—how did he become the bad guy in this scenario? He brushed it off. It was what it was. She had the bag with the radio and the extra batteries, so she was in control.
“What’s that in your hand?” she asked.
Roger looked. He had forgotten. “Dead rope.”
“What?”
“It’s a rope,” he said. “I assume it belongs to a dead guy. If not dead, then the guy is missing a couple fingers.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” he said. He inched forward and she held her ground. “What are you doing?”
“Mapping,” she said.
“That’s good. That’s what I’m doing, too. I’ve marked all the passages I’ve explored. I think I’m getting a sense of this place. It’s like a giant loop.”
She tilted her head and regarded him. “It’s not a loop.”
“Pardon?”
“I mean, it’s a loop, but not in two dimensions.”
“Oh!” he said. He had no idea what she was talking about, but he had a real problem with admitting ignorance. He had the feeling that if he had nothing to offer to the conversation that she might run off again. Roger could never hope to keep up with her.
“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“No,” he said. He walked forward and looked at the thing she had carved on the floor of the mine. It was a circle with a set of lines inside. “What does that mean?”
“It’s my system,” she said. “I think I’m close to finding the center point.”
“What does that mean?”
“The center will have the exit,” she said. “I haven’t figured out how we got into this section, but I think I’ll know when we find the exit. It should be obvious.”
“That’s the part I figured out,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Roger said. “We got into this section because this place is magic.”
Florida frowned.
-o-o-o-o-o-
Florida counted under her breath as she walked. Roger didn’t bother talking. He figured out quickly that she wouldn’t answer or even listen to him when she was pacing out the steps to her next measurement.
She stopped and held up her hand for him to be quiet. He hadn’t said anything.
Florida clicked the button on the radio, listened to the static. Once that stopped, Roger heard the strange laughter again. Florida knelt and began scraping the floor with the drop-stamp mounting tool.
“What the hell was that?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s useful.”
He tried to figure out the sense of her lines, but it remained a mystery. She didn’t seem at all inclined to explain her system.
“Tell me about that rope,” she said as she stood up. “Where did you find it?”
“Well,” he said. He scratched his head up under his helmet and looked at the coil. “I’m not sure how to describe where I found it. It was a while ago. I marked all the tunnels since then, and the spot was the only one with a double mark.”
“You said it belonged to a dead person?”
“That’s a bit of an assumption on my part,” he said. “I think some unfortunate person had looped it around his fingers and then it got pulled off. See this bloody end? There were a couple of fingers and part of a hand tangled in here. The flesh looked torn.”
Florida scrunched up her body at the thought and then shook it off.
“From what I saw, all the packs that Dr. Grossman gave out were identical,” Florida said. “And that rope doesn’t look anything like the rope we had in our packs. I have to assume it’s from a different expedition.”
“You think there are two groups in here studying the mines today?” Roger asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not
today
,” she said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You heard the laughter after I used the radio, right?”
Roger nodded.
“Do you see anyone around who was laughing?”
He shook his head.
“Where do you think the laughers are?”
“I don’t know. It’s a disquieting sound though.”
“Exactly. Your disquiet could be an instinctive response to something that shouldn’t be here. It makes you uneasy because it’s not of our time.”
“Time-traveling laughter?”
“Maybe ghosts,” Florida suggested.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m not going to reject the idea just because it seems preposterous,” she said.
She turned and started walking again. Roger followed her and listened to her count. She stopped again and clicked the radio.
Static.
Nothing.
He waited for the laughter. It didn’t come. Florida nodded and bent to mark the floor. Roger waited for her to finish with her strange lines.
“So where were your ghosts?”
“We’re out of range,” she said. “One more set and I’ll be able to triangulate the center.”
“I hope you’re right.”
-o-o-o-o-o-
“Okay,” Florida said. “This is the last spot.”
Roger had been following her around for a dozen readings. He still had no idea what she was doing, but she seemed confident that she had it figured out.
“So this is the center?” he asked.
“No. This tells us where the center will be. We go this way and then take our next right. Then the tunnel we want will be on our left.”
Roger shrugged. He was content to follow. He could tell that his headlamp was becoming weaker. If he had to, he would wrestle away her bag and take the batteries from her. She hadn’t yet offered to give him any.
As she turned the corner, Florida turned on the radio and clicked the button. This time, she didn’t pause. The radio gave static. When she clicked it again, the static was intermittent. He saw a tunnel coming up on their left. Florida clicked it once more before they turned. There was no static following the click. Florida looked at Roger with a triumphant smile.
“That’s good?” he asked.
“That’s very good,” she said. So quiet that it was almost impossible to hear, she added, “I think.”
“There was no laughter?” he asked. It wasn’t really the question he meant to ask. Roger revised it. “Was there supposed to be no laughter?”
“I think we’re getting farther away from the spirits and closer to reality,” she said. “The center should be right up here.”