Ralph could, and knew they were standing at the entrance to a different world. He could smell stale dampness, and something else—the high, sweet aroma of rotting flesh. It was faint, but it was there. He thought of that long-ago cantaloupe, and the insects that had been squirming around inside it.
They stepped into the dark. Ralph was tall, but the fissure was taller, and he didn’t have to duck his head. Holly turned on the flashlight, at first shining it straight ahead into a rocky corridor leading downward, then at their feet. They both saw a series of glowing droplets leading into the dark. Holly did him the courtesy of not pointing out that it was the same stuff her makeshift black light had picked up in his living room.
They were only able to walk side by side for the first sixty feet or so. After that the passage narrowed and Holly handed him the flashlight. He held it in his left hand, the pistol in his right. The walls sparkled with eerie streaks of mineral, some red, some lavender, some a greenish-yellow. He occasionally shone the light upward, just to make sure El Cuco wasn’t up there, crawling along the ragged ceiling among the stubs of stalactites. The air wasn’t cold—he had read somewhere that caves maintained a temperature roughly equal to the average temperature of the region in which they were located—but it felt cold after being outside, and of course both of them were still coated in fear-sweat. A draft was coming from deeper in, blowing in their faces and bringing that faint rotten smell.
He stopped, and Holly ran into him, making him jump. “What?” she whispered.
Instead of answering, he shone the light on a rift in the rock to their left. Spray-painted beside it were two words: CHECKED and NOTHING.
They moved on, slowly, slowly. Ralph didn’t know about Holly, but he felt an increasing sense of dread, a growing certainty that he was never going to see his wife and son again. Or daylight. It was amazing how fast a person could miss the daylight. He felt that if they did get out of here, he could drink daylight like water.
Holly whispered, “This is a horrible place, isn’t it?”
“Yes. You should go back.”
Her only answer was a slight push in the center of his back.
They passed several more breaks in the downward passage, each one marked with those same two words. How long ago had they been sprayed there? If Claude Bolton had been a teenager, it had to be at least fifteen years, maybe twenty. And who had been in here since then—other than their outsider, that was? Anyone? Why would they come? Holly was right, it was horrible. With each step he felt more like a man being buried alive. He forced himself to remember the clearing in Figgis Park. And Frank Peterson. And a jutting branch marked with bloody fingerprints where the bark had been stripped from it by repeated plunging blows. And Terry Maitland, asking how Ralph was going to clear his own conscience. Asking that as he lay dying.
He kept going.
The passage abruptly narrowed even further, not because the walls were closer but because there was rubble on both sides. Ralph shone the flashlight upward and saw a deep cavity in the rock roof. It made him think of an empty socket after a tooth has been pulled.
“Holly—this is where the roof caved in. The second rescue party probably carted the biggest pieces out. This stuff . . .” He swept the light across the heaps of rubble, picking out another couple of those spectrally glowing spots.
“This is the stuff they didn’t bother with,” Holly finished. “Just pushed it out of the way.”
“Yes.”
They started moving again, at first only edging along. Ralph, something of a widebody, had to turn sideways. He handed Holly the flashlight and raised his gun hand to the side of his face. “Shine the light under my arm. Keep it pointed straight ahead. No surprises.”
“O-Okay.”
“You sound cold.”
“I am cold. You should be quiet. He could hear us.”
“So what? He knows we’re coming. You do think a bullet will kill him, right? You—”
“Stop, Ralph, stop! You’ll step in it!”
He stopped at once, heart hammering. She shone the light a bit past his feet. Draped over the last pile of rubble before the passage widened again was the body of a dog or a coyote. A coyote seemed more likely, but it was impossible to tell for sure, because the animal’s head was gone. Its belly had been opened and the viscera had been scooped out.
“That’s what we were smelling,” she said.
Ralph stepped over it carefully. Ten feet further on, he halted again. It had been a coyote, all right; here was the head. It seemed to be staring at them with exaggerated surprise, and at first he couldn’t understand just why.
Holly was a little quicker on the uptake. “Its eyes are gone,” she said. “Eating the insides wasn’t enough. It ate the eyes right out of that poor creature’s head. Oough.”
“So the outsider doesn’t just eat human flesh and blood.” He paused. “Or sadness.”
Holly spoke quietly. “Thanks to us—mostly thanks to you and Lieutenant Sablo—it’s been very active in what’s usually its time of hibernation. And it’s been denied the food it likes. It must be very hungry.”
“And weak. You said it must be weak.”
“Let us hope so,” Holly said. “This is extremely frightening. I hate closed-in places.”
“You can always—”
She gave him another of those light thumps. “Keep going. And watch your step.”
20
The trail of faintly luminous droplets continued. Ralph had come to think of them as the thing’s sweat. Fear-sweat, like theirs? He hoped so. He hoped the fucker had been terrified, and still was.
There were more fissures, but no more spraypaint; these were little more than cracks, too small even for a child to fit into. Or escape from. Holly was able to walk beside him again, although it was a tight fit. They could hear water dripping somewhere far away, and once Ralph felt a new breeze, this one against his left cheek. It was like being caressed with ghost fingers. It was coming from one of those cracks, producing a hollow, almost glassy moan, like the sound of breath blown over the top of a beer bottle. A horrible place, all right. He found it all but impossible to believe people had paid money to explore this stone crypt, but of course they didn’t know what he knew, and now believed. It was sort of amazing how being in the guts of the ground helped a person to believe what had previously seemed not just impossible but downright laughable.
“Careful,” Holly said. “There’s more.”
This time it was a couple of gophers that had been torn to pieces. Beyond them was the remains of another rattler, all of it gone except for tatters of its diamondback skin.
A little further on, they came to the top of a steep downward slope, its surface polished as smooth as a dancefloor. Ralph thought it had probably been created by some ancient underground river that had flowed during the age of the dinosaurs and dried up before Jesus walked the earth. To one side was a steel railing, now spotted with florets of rust. Holly ran the light along it, and they saw not just scattered droplets of luminescence, but palm prints and fingerprints. Prints that would match Claude Bolton’s, Ralph had no doubt.
“Sonofabitch was careful, wasn’t he? Didn’t want to take a spill.”