It’s Not Just the Dark
If she squinted and imagined nightmares, the house would have looked haunted. With eyes wide open, and her darker dreams tucked away, it was just a big gray building adrift in a sea of trees. Charity Barnes opened the rental car door in a cloud of dust she’d trailed in from the gravel road and dirt driveway. Either the person who supposedly lived here had gotten her texts, or they hadn’t. There was no answer, so her next move was an unannounced visit.
Charity climbed two stone steps to a weather-beaten door. She opted for the rusty gargoyle-headed knocker that squeaked more than it knocked. Half-expecting there to be no answer, she wondered how many snakes would turn up if she tried to walk through the knee-high dead weeds and around to the back of the house.
As she waited, she cursed Jason Biggs for the thousandth time for this assignment. The worst boss she’d ever had. A dozen unsolved murders or missing persons waited within a two-mile radius of the Cold Case Inc. offices in Indy. So why here? Because Jason fancied a country boy, for one thing. Secret sins of reclusive farmers and deadbeats who lived hard, scrabble lives up close to nature (his words) were more compelling than tweaked-out bums killing each other in urban drug-addled stupors.
The door swung noiselessly open. Her sun-drenched eyes could see nothing but darkness. The smell of moldering, exotic leaves drifted out into the sunlight. It reminded her of something her mother had called potpourri, but her father had called yard waste.
“You are not expected,” a male voice said from behind the door.
“No,” she answered. “That is true. I’m Charity Barnes, from Cold Case Inc. I sent you some emails and texts explaining my project. I just wanted a few minutes to talk.”
Henry Grayson stepped around the door, looking only slightly older than she expected. He was taller than Charity, slim, wearing jeans that were faded to near transparency, a long-sleeve black Duluth T-shirt, and a pair of moccasins that didn’t come from Walmart.
“Since there was no response, one might assume there is no interest.” He stepped back and began closing the door.
“Mr. Grayson, please. The last thing I want to do is bother you in any way, but I have an assignment—not that you should care about that . . . it’s just—you are the only person I can find who might remember something about the disappearance of Marie Simpson. I need to write a few paragraphs from a local perspective. I won’t mention your name. Please?” She omitted, “I’ve been told to get this story or to clean out my desk by the end of the week.”
“People have moved on from all of that. I see no reason to bring it back up.”
“My job is writing about interesting things. Whatever became of Marie Simpson, even if we never find out anything for sure, is extremely interesting. I’d like to think she would appreciate not being totally forgotten.”
Grayson paused, the door halfway closed.
Charity added, “I know some people suspected you of having something to do with Marie’s disappearance. I also know there was never any evidence of that whatsoever. But you did know her, if I have my facts straight. Could I just maybe hear a little of your side of the story?”
“My side.”
“Your opinion or impressions. Just tell me what you think of the whole thing. I think something is fishy, so to speak. Not with you, but with the community moving past it all so quickly.”
“My side,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
Grayson sighed and pulled the door fully open. “Abandon all hope .. . as they say.”
Charity stepped across the threshold. “Duly noted.”
Dark varnished hardwood floors. Walls plaster, not drywall. Ornate light fixtures suspended from the ceiling in the foyer, front sitting room, and a library she could see through walnut-frame French doors. Oriental carpet runners lined walkways. T.C. Steele landscapes and still lifes hung in ornate frames, somehow glowing from within, like all his work.
“Water, coffee?” he asked.
“No, thank you.”
Grayson sat down in a straight-backed chair facing her. “Cold Case Inc.?”
“I know. It’s cheesy. We publish articles in weekly free newspapers and online in our web magazines. We’re not Harper’sor The New Yorker, but people really like the cold case angles.”
“I imagine they enjoy a hint of resolution,” Grayson said. “Unfortunately, mysteries with no evidence of motive or foul play might be less than compelling.”
“On the contrary,” Charity objected. “Those are the very best ones.”
“So be it. Tell me what you think happened.”
Charity took her steno pad from her purse and flipped to the page titled Marie Simpson. “In June of 2019, Marie Simpson and her family came to Martin County for their annual summer, woodsy cabin vacation. It was Marie, sixteen years old; her brother, Jake, eleven; with Gustave, the father; and Anastasia, the mother.”
Grayson said nothing, which Charity took as confirmation she was on track so far.
Charity continued. “That cabin, owned by Ezekiel Bartlett, is one-half mile west of here—Persimmon Ridge, I believe. On June 14, Marie was reported missing to the local sheriff at 10:45 p.m. Marie had gone hiking with her brother right after lunch. Jake Simpson returned alone to the cabin around 3:00 p.m. He said Marie had insisted on exploring a cave they’d found near the site of an abandoned quarry—Gabriel Creek Quarry. Jake begged her not to go into the cave. He was deathly afraid of them. He told the police that she called him a baby, and that she just wanted to try out her new flashlight, which was the last thing she said before disappearing into the cave.” Charity flipped her pages. “I don’t have a name for the cave, assuming it has one.”
“It does not,” Grayson said.
“You know of this cave?”
“There are 130 named caves in Martin County, according to the state geological survey. I doubt that is even half of them, but yes, I know the cave you’re talking about. I can show it to you if you like.”
“We can drive there? I could take pictures?”
“We can walk there—and yes, you can take as many pictures as you want.”
“I was warned not to wander around the woods in this part of the world,” Charity said, taking the sheriff’s words to heart.
“The God of the backwoods is Private Property. People guard it as if a step over their line would kill them and everyone they know, but this place is safe. No one will bother us. Your backstory is missing a key point.”
“What is that?”
“Marie Simpson wasn’t longing to try out her new flashlight.”
“That did sound sort of lame.”
“I’ll not go into details of which I have no direct knowledge, but it was well known that Marie was afraid of her stepfather. I knew Gus Simpson, from a distance. He was not a joyful person.”
“So, you’re saying Marie might have been hiding or running, and maybe Jake was lying?”
“It wasn’t the flashlight.”
Charity’s phone vibrated in her pocket. “This is my boss,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute.” Using the map function on the way here had nearly drained her battery. Five percent left. She reminded herself to get a more dependable car charger.
“Let me guess,” she answered from the front doorsteps. “You found somewhere even more off the grid for me to go.”
“Very funny.” Jason Biggs, editor, manager, son of whomever actually funded the Cold Case Inc. operation that likely never made any money, did not like jokes. “I found some additional details about the Marie Simpson thing—not directly having to do with her, but some ambiance you might be able to mix in.”
Jason Biggs cared about nothing less than the circumstances or details of Marie Simpson’s disappearance. He wanted a good story with as many shady details as possible. When Charity accepted this job, she assumed at least part of her work would involve finding answers to some of the cold cases. However, the ones that remained unsolved were just fine, and maybe even something that could be followed up on—two stories for one, a win-win situation, and the creepier the better.
“There are caves where you are,” Jason continued.
“I know.”
“Lots of them.”
“I get it, Jason, so what?”
“Secret societies are what. They apparently use the caves for some ritual or voodoo shit, or whatever, and have been for a while. Could be a new angle for your piece.”
“I’ll see what I can find out,” Charity said. “I need to go. I’m about to see where Marie disappeared.”
“Get pictures.”
“I will.”
“Don’t come back with nothing.”
“Got it.”
Charity ended the call and went back inside.
Grayson had changed into a sturdy-looking pair of cargo pants, hiking boots, and a blue flannel shirt. A light pack was strapped to his back.
“How long a walk is it?” Charity asked.
“Not far. You may want to go in.”
“To the cave?”
“Sure.”
“Not in a million years. I’ll get some shots of the entrance. You can tell me about Marie Simpson while we’re walking.”
“So be it. Let’s go.”
Grayson led her away from the house, down a gentle slope to a grassy clearing in the woods. Two paths led on, likely deer trails from what she remembered of summer camps when she was a kid. One path went due north of the clearing, the other angled off to the right. He ignored the northern path and started down the other.
“The road less taken?” Charity said, ducking low tree limbs and stepping around what looked like briar bushes. Her jeans and running shoes were only good enough for some of this.
“Indeed. The path to the north is to be avoided. Put that in your story if you’d like.”
“Why?”
“It leads down to the Gabriel Creek Quarry. It was abandoned before any quality limestone could be extracted. They breached the water table, which is expected, but the water was bad. No one within ten miles of here uses water wells. It’s trucked in or rain harvested. The quarry is to be avoided.”
“Got it.” Charity makes a mental note: Water.
The path led farther downward, into a steep, narrow valley. They followed a dry creek bed winding through the narrow cleft. That continued for about fifteen minutes, when their way was blocked by a lichen-encrusted cliff face pushing through the forest floor as if thrust up from an earthquake.
Grayson pointed to the ground, “This creek runs two or three feet deep when it rains for more than a day.”
Charity found this only mildly interesting. “Okay.”
Grayson pointed upstream from where they had come from, then pointed down at the pebbled creek bed. “Where does the water go?”
“I don’t know. Where?”
He pointed at the base of the limestone cliff, “Look closer.”
She walked past him, her eyes on the ground as if looking for Easter eggs in the grass. The dry creek bed made a turn to the right just before its flow would splash up against a horizontal slab of stone. Just beyond the bend was a hole in the ground, about the diameter of a sidewalk manhole—maybe a bit smaller—and pitch black within. The sight of it clenched her chest, stopped her breathing, and caused her legs to go limp. She landed hard on her butt in the middle of the creek bed. “No. Please no,” she wheezed.
Grayson sat down beside her, opened a bottle of water from his pack, and handed it to her. “It’s just a hole,” he said.
Charity took deep breaths and closed her eyes while she remembered the summer when she was ten years old and stayed with her cousins on their farm for two weeks. One day, her raucous cousins dared her to crawl through a concrete culvert running under the county road in front of their house. Her cousins made it through, scratched and muddy, but Charity was terrified to try. As usual, they teased her about being a soft city girl. They said maybe she’d rather catch a ride to Starbucks for a latte.
Without a thought about anything bad that could happen, she pushed her fear of cramped, dark places aside and got down on her hands and knees in the weedy ditch. “No way!” the cousins shouted, cheering her on as she began crawling. Halfway through, the two boys blocked each end of the concrete pipe with rough, ragged planks. They laughed as the last shred of light disappeared. She panicked and froze, then scrambled blindly ahead, scraping her elbows and knees into bleeding, mud-caked wounds. After finally pounding her way out, the cousins were gone. Her Uncle Ross found her curled up and crying in the weeds by the side of the road. He carried her back to the house and beat the two boys until Aunt Janet threatened to call the police and grounded the girl for the rest of the summer.
Charity’s phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Jason, with another new angle. She left it on speaker.
“Get a photo of where they found her purse in the cave. Get the old guy to take it if possible. I want you to be sitting there. No one else is doing anything like this. We may get that city journalistic award you keep talking about.”
“No,” Charity said. “I’ll shoot the entrance, which I’m looking at right now. That’s it.”
“Come on . . . boy scout groups camp out in those caves. I Googled it. How bad can it be?”
“I’m done,” Charity said, then ended the call.
“Trouble?” Grayson asked.
“He wants me to go in there. He wants a pic of me sitting where Marie Simpson’s purse was found.”
Grayson stood up, stretched his back, and smiled upward at what sky could be seen through the canopy of trees. “I thought as much. I can take you down there. Forty minutes round trip, if that. Easy steps and walking for the most part.”
“No way in hell.”
Grayson bent and sat back down on the smooth rocks of the creek bed. He tilted his head toward the hole in the earth. “Why do you suppose Marie Simpson went in there alone?”
“Running from something?” Charity guessed.
“Possibly.” He picked up a pebble and tossed it into the hole. “That,” he said, “is the safest place you can imagine. Hasn’t changed in a thousand years. As long as you don’t find yourself down there when a hard rain is happening up here, there is nothing to hurt you.”
“Bears,” Charity said, “and snakes, worms, bugs.”
“None of that. Nothing is alive down there. There is no light, and there is nothing to eat. The air is a constant sixty-eight degrees, summer or winter.”
“It’s like a tomb.”
“There are places down there where you could easily play tennis if the floor were smoothed out a little. As I believe your colleague said, it is true that scout troops and hikers regularly camp in the caves.”
“In this one?” Charity asked.
“Not this one. This is private property. Marie was perhaps running but was technically trespassing when she ducked in there.”
“Who owns this land?”
“I do.”
“So, that’s why you’re a person of interest in the old news stories.”
“It is. My crime was that I did not post sufficient ‘No Trespassing’ signs, nor did I block this entrance to the cave.”
“This entrance?”
“There are fourteen others within a half-mile radius of where we are right now.”
Charity stared at the hole, trying to sort her preconceptions. “Play tennis, huh?”
“It’s not what you think.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Let me show you.”
Charity rubbed her iPhone between her clasped hands, wishing the photo of her within the cave was already on her roll. “You know where Marie’s purse was found?”
“I do. I found it. I led one of the search parties. We looked through three other caves before finding the one she chose to hide in. It’s not far. You’ll have your photo, and we’ll be back out here in less than an hour, in time for a late lunch.”
“Why are you willing to do this with me?”
“The more I contribute to solving the mystery of Marie’s disappearance, the less suspicious I look. I am not trying to hide anything.”
Charity took his hand and stood up. “If I say stop, then we back up, and get the hell out. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Grayson went first. He sat on the ground and swung his legs around into the hole. He took a right-angle, military-looking flashlight from his vest pocket and clicked it on. “Have a look,” he said.
Charity stepped closer and peered down into the hole. She saw ledges that could be steps, an old Doritos bag, and a faded message scrawled on one of the stones, which read, For a good time, call Cindi . . . The phone number had been marked out.
“We make our way down here,” Grayson explained, “stepping down back and forth for about twenty feet. We’ll drop into a horizontal shaft—one of the old channels of the underground river that formed the cave. It’s just walking from there on, with a couple of places where we have to stoop down. I found the purse on a ledge just above a crevice that leads to the river, which is still flowing or meandering, as the case may be.”
Charity checked the time. 2:40 p.m. “Back in time for dinner?”
“Absolutely.”
She took a deep breath, turned off her phone, and stowed it in her shirt pocket. There was maybe enough juice to take a shot. If not, Grayson could take some with his phone. She’d email the photo to shithead Jason the second she crawled out of this thing. “Let’s go.”
As she went down, Charity tried not to look down or up, focusing instead on the rough gray stone inches from her face. Grayson went down first, watching her descent and pointing with his flashlight at the best places to put her feet.
“Just breathe,” he told her. “Plenty of room down here.”
“Something Satan would say,” she told him. She anticipated the first rumblings of a crushing panic attack to be churning in her stomach by now. She didn’t even like riding in small cars. Lowering herself slowly, one step at a time, she left the hot summer air behind. The cave air was cool but not damp, as she expected. A glance up made her pause. The hole in the earth she’d climbed into was now a small circle of light. Her chest began to tighten. She wanted out—up and out immediately.
“I can’t!” she shouted down at Grayson. “I can’t breathe.”
“Easy, easy,” he said. “Just come down two more steps. Then you’ll be on flat ground with me. If you want to go back up, we will, but you should rest here for a few minutes.”
Charity drew a ragged breath, fearing she was about to cry. She would need to rest before climbing the hell out of here, that was true. She found the last two steps, then lost her balance and fell. Grayson caught her and let her down gently to a floor of packed sand.
She looked at the walls of the narrow shaft and the tiny disc of light above. “I’ll never get out of here,” she said.
“Yes, you will. Getting out is easier than getting in. You can see all the steps and handholds on your way up. Easy peasy.”
Charity closed her eyes and breathed deeply, anxious to get the climbing started.
“Look at this,” Grayson said, nudging her with his flashlight. She opened her eyes and looked at where he was pointing. Stretching out in front of them was a tunnel wide enough for a car to drive on, angled downward at a gentle grade. The flashlight beam reached about seventy-five feet before dissolving into darkness.
“Marie Simpson had a flashlight. This is what she saw that day after she climbed down and eluded whoever was chasing her. That’s what I believe. I also think it wasn’t the first time she’d been here. Interviews after her disappearance agreed that she liked caves and was frequently asking friends and relatives to come explore with her.”
“She was a brave girl,” Charity said.
“Absolutely.”
Grayson stood up. The passage was tall enough that he had to bend just a little. Charity would be able to stand tall if she wanted.
“So, here we are.” Grayson swept the flashlight beam back and forth in the descending tunnel. “If you want to go back up, we will. If you want to carry on a bit further, we will do that as well. The option to turn around any time you want remains.”
“How much farther?” Charity asked.
“Fifteen minutes of walking, two or three minutes of ducking through a smaller space, then another wide passage.”
“Marie made it that far?”
“That last time she did. As I said, I believe she’d explored even deeper previously.”
“Then something happened to her, where we’re going.”
“It appears so.”
“Do you have any idea what that was?”
Grayson smiled. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Charity considered her situation. She touched the side of the passage with her fingertips, maybe trying to deduce some evil intent or potential in the stone. It was just rock, she told herself, just like it had been for a million years and would be for a million more. She sensed a reassuring indifference in the silent limestone, the same sensation she felt when swimming in the ocean. The rock and the water did what they did, whether she was there or not. She was a nonfactor.
“I can go on a bit.” Charity stood, taking one last peek at the dot of light in the shaft above her head.
“Here,” Grayson handed her a second flashlight from his pack. “Sometimes it helps if people have their own light.”
“An illusion of control.”
“Control implies managing change. Nothing here changes, not in the span of our brief existence. There’s nothing to control, except, of course, yourself.”
“Spare me the philosophy,” Charity said, although she thought she might use that observation in her reporting.
Grayson nodded. “Onward, then.”
He went down the slight incline in short steps and tilted his head to the side to avoid scraping the top of the passageway. As they went, their two flashlights revealed a slight but manageable narrowing; however, headroom increased, and Grayson was able to stand all the way up.
Charity imagined making this trip alone, running from someone, hoping whoever was chasing her didn’t see her climbing down into a hole. If someone had seen, then maybe she was being followed, even here, listening for sounds of pursuit, scared and out of breath, likely moving down the passage a lot faster than her and Grayson were doing.
After a few minutes, the passage took a sharp turn to the right and appeared to end at a stone wall that bore the marks of swirling water from long ago.
Grayson said, “You will need to trust me one last time.” He pointed his light down to a small passage at floor level. It looked ominously like the entrance to the culvert from her cousin’s farm.
“We have to crawl?”
Grayson nodded, “Not very far. I found Marie Simpson’s purse at the other end of this passage. It is wide where it comes out—sort of like a sitting room. Here, you can see it’s a short crawl.” He knelt and shined his light into the hole. “Takes a minute or two, then we take your picture and head back. I have some great sliced ham and sourdough bread for sandwiches. I’m getting kind of hungry, to be honest.”
Charity paused. She tried to project her assessment of risk into the floor-level hole, realizing the parameters of the profile hadn’t changed. She was in a cave, deep underground. She’d feared the air would become thinner as they descended, making it harder to breathe, but that was not the case. It was the same. The stone walls were the same. The packed sand on the floor was the same.
“If you want,” Grayson offered, “I can go on and take the picture for you while you wait here. Is it a requirement for you to do it yourself?”
“It is,” she answered quickly.
Dipshit Jason would see the spot where Marie Simpson’s purse was found, and it would be a selfie of her pointing to it. If anyone questioned her about the veracity of the shot or her story, she could confidently swear on whatever holy book anyone could produce that she was here.
Charity took a deep breath. “Let’s go.”
Grayson twisted out of the straps of his backpack, set it aside, then got down on his hands and knees. “Military crawl,” he said, lowering his chest to the ground, elbows out to the side. He pushed forward, inches at a time, until his boots disappeared into the hole.
Charity did the same, wishing she’d selected a long-sleeve shirt for the trip. Ahead, she could see Grayson’s boots, as he’d made it through and stood up. It was a short crawl, tight but short. She emerged scratched up and dirty. Grayson helped her to her feet. He pointed to yet another crevice with his flashlight. It was larger than what they’d come through but angled steeper down and almost vertical.
“No way,” Charity shook her head.
“No, we stop here. That passage leads down to the active part of the cave, a lost branch of Gabriel Creek that winds on for about a half mile before flowing out into the old quarry.” He pointed to a ledge about knee-high next to the dark tunnel. “Here. Her purse was here.”
Charity unbuttoned the pocket flap on her shirt, took out her phone, and clicked several pictures of the ledge and the passage down to the river. She handed the phone to Grayson and sat down on the ledge, laying her hand flat on the stone. “Will you take a couple of shots?”
Grayson pointed the phone’s camera at Charity, got one shot, then handed it back to her. “Your battery appears to be dead.”
“Thought that might happen. Do you think she went down there?” She put the phone in her pocket and leaned forward to look down into the dark passage.
“I do,” Grayson said, “but not the way you imagine.”
“How, then?”
Grayson folded his legs and sat down. He laid his flashlight on the floor of their little room, its beam angled down the dark hole.
“Let me tell you a quick story, then you can make your way back.”
Charity didn’t like the way he said “you” instead of “we.”
“The people around here—within twenty miles of where we are—some of the families have lived here for a long time, before America, before the Indians. The Miami and Shawnee didn’t live or hunt anywhere near here. They were afraid of the hermits that lived in stone huts and steeped evil plants in blood, so the story goes—the Mekwashonee. These ancient sorcerers believed nature could be bent to their peculiar needs, but not by planting, harvesting, or even mixing seeds. They distilled a thick, syrupy brew that wasn’t for drinking. They poured it into the earth, into the cracks and crevices in the rock, and yes, even some caves. For hundreds of years, they cooked, poured, and waited.”
Charity heard something from the crevice leading down to the river: water sloshing and waves against stone.
“What was that?” she asked.
Grayson continued, “On June 10, 1947, Everett James and Sons signed a lease with my grandfather for the rights to explore and potentially extract premium-grade limestone on our property. They drilled boreholes and looked for two years before settling on the location of what was to become the Gabriel Creek Quarry. Roads were built, and equipment was hauled in to begin the excavation. They dug, blasted, and sawed for three months before uncovering a thick seam of pure white stone, about seventy feet below grade. When they dug down to the seam, they also dug into the water table, which is not unusual. Most quarries accumulate water if they aren’t pumped out.”
The sound from the crevice came again. In the beam of her flashlight, a scatter of droplets dotted the edge of the passageway. “Something is down there,” she said. “We should go.”
Grayson leaned over and shined his own light down into the hole. He nodded and continued, “Two years, one month, and fourteen days after the mineral lease was signed, the quarry was closed. No usable stone had been extracted. There was an accident on that last day. My father was with Everett James, watching the operation from the north edge of the pit. A slab of pure stone had been cut and was ready to be hauled out. A twenty-ton crane was stationed at the southern rim. Steel cables were secured to the slab. At that moment, something moved in the water at the bottom of the quarry. My father said it was like a slow, rolling wave, as if the black water itself had gone syrupy and something down there had been disturbed. The wave settled just as a gray mass reached up out of the water and latched itself to the slab of stone. The thing enveloped the stone, then began pulling downward, as if it meant to keep the slab. The crane revved up, diesel engine screaming, and hydraulics pumped to bursting. The crane itself was being pulled over the edge.”
“What does this have to do with Marie Simpson?” Charity asked, scooting away toward the low passage through which they’d come.
“If you go and look at the quarry—and I don’t recommend it—you will see the rusted remains of the crane poking up out of the water.”
A larger splash from the hole soaked Grayson and sprayed Charity like the first wave of a summer storm.
Grayson wiped water from his face but stayed where he was. “You have a story to tell. If it matters to you, I have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, as was my father and his before him. So, what happens next is inconsequential. However, you have to convince what is left of Everett and Sons to backfill the quarry and block up this cave, to cover it all back up. You will find some papers on my dining room table telling you who to call to make that happen. I should have done that long ago. Marie Simpson should be alive today. Blame me if you’d like, but I did not know she’d come down here. I would have done anything to stop her.”
“Something in the water . . .” Underground rivers. The old ones—they were feeding something, pouring their potions into the rocks for years and years. Did they even know what they were doing?”
“They did,” Grayson sighed.
Suddenly, a thick tentacle, gray and rippled with slime, shot up from the crevice to the river and wrapped itself around Grayson’s chest. Charity screamed, turned away, and hit her head on the top of the tunnel entrance that was the way out. A foul, acrid smell swirled into the cave passage, like used burnt motor oil mixed with rotted yeast, burning her eyes and triggering deep, wheezing coughs.
Behind her, Grayson grunted as if trying to lift something extremely heavy. Against her better judgment, Charity pointed her flashlight at him. The sound wasn’t grunting; it was the air being squeezed out of him by whatever it was that had him. The tentacle had expanded into something that resembled a slug with grayish, translucent skin and a mouth opening large enough for Grayson to be sucked in. He was gone up to his chest, and his arms and head jerked back and forth as the slug thing seemed to spasm and gulp, pulling more of him in with each seizure. His bulging, watery eyes found hers one last time. “Close the quarry!” he screamed. “Now go, as fast as you can. Now!”
With a final jerk, the remainder of Henry Grayson disappeared into what Charity suddenly realized may just be the head of something much larger. The mutated slug shivered and twisted in the stone socket formed by the tunnel down to the river. Its partially transparent skin blossomed a dark red as Grayson’s body burst within its guts.
There were no eyes, but the thing, momentarily calm, turned what seemed to be its head toward Charity. It pushed itself up, looking like a poisonous, malignant wad of paste squeezed from a stone tube. It moved faster than she would have thought possible.
She turned to the wide, low passage that led out, flattened herself as much as she could, and started crawling. There was no hurry on the way in, but now she wished someone was up ahead, pulling her hard with a strong rope. She pushed the flashlight ahead of her, its beam darting wildly on the rock and the surrounding darkness. Her elbows and knees warmed with blood as she scraped and clawed on the sand and rock, scrambling forward. She kept banging her head on the top of the low passage, desperately looking ahead and avoiding looking behind. Besides the liquid, squishing sound when it first lifted itself up from the river, the thing made no noise. Twice, she felt something pulling on her feet, the last pull taking the sneaker from her right foot.
Finally, the knocked-about flashlight shone on something other than the narrow passageway. It pointed ahead into darkness. She had reached the wider passage and urged her body forward, far enough to sit up and try to catch her breath. She scooted to the far side of the tunnel and looked back at the horizontal crevice. The flashlight, momentarily forgotten, lay on the sandy floor stained with her blood, its beam shining back into the hole and reminding her of an animation she’d seen in freshman biology class. What could have been the edge of an amoeba flowed slowly out of the crevice, reaching for the flashlight.
Charity’s first impulse was to get up and away from the thing, but she needed the light. The shock of seeing a human being eaten alive still hummed in her brain and muscles, nearly crippling her. It could happen to her if she didn’t get out. Contrary to what she might have imagined, the potential of being stranded without light in a cave scared her more than whatever was oozing into her current personal space. She reached out quickly, before she could think, and snatched the light off the floor. Strings of viscous, foul-smelling slime dripped from the light and her hand.
She turned and hurried away, retracing the path she and Grayson had taken to get here. Her steps were clumsy and uneven due to her missing shoe. She stopped and pulled off the remaining shoe, flinging it back at whatever could be following her. One particular rock that looked like it had fallen from the ceiling of the wider passage, and one she swore had not been there on the way in, tripped her, stubbing her toes, sending her hard to the floor. Flashes of light danced at the edge of her vision. She’d broken her arm falling out of a tree when she was ten, so she knew what it felt like. That familiar shock of pain in her neck and shoulders came with her fall. The flashlight had gone flying and was gone, likely in pieces somewhere ahead. The sparkles of her probable concussion flared and then died in her eyes. The darkness was complete and began to squeeze.
Panic jittered in her chest and fingers. Words like “buried” and “suffocation” paraded through her mind. She became painfully, intimately aware of the tons upon tons of rock suspended inches above her head and of gravity pulling down hard. She didn’t care if the rock had been there unmoving for a million years. One day it would move, and gravity would win.
“Breathe,” she told herself. There was plenty of air. In and out. Slow breaths. The safest place in the world, Grayson had said, except not for him, and not for her if that thing was nearby. After the event in the culvert when she was a kid, she’d had nightmares—choking, suffocation, being tied up and buried alive while shovels of dirt pounded her chest, covering her face, and filled her nose and mouth as she strained to scream. There was therapy, some of which she remembered, some she didn’t. Hypnosis was involved. Someone said to her, “Do you know why people are afraid of the dark? It’s not because the world goes away when there is no light, it’s because you go away. Your body is no longer the boundary between inner and outer. There is no difference between you and the darkness. You become one.”
Charity breathed, held the image of a sunny afternoon in her mind, and imagined herself slowly making her way out of the cave and seeing the sky above her. Now that she was back in the wide entrance, if she moved carefully, she should be able to make her way back to the entrance shaft. Nothing was stopping her. Like a nighttime hunter, she moved ahead—or what she hoped was ahead—step by careful step on the packed, damp sand. Grayson had to bend slightly in the wide passage, but Charity had not. Still, she tilted her head forward, a bit too far, which made her dizzy. She traced her fingertips on the smooth ceiling as she went. She never encountered a wall and could have been walking down a path a mile wide. If there was a chasm down to forever before her, then she was about to go into it. Nothing she could do about that.
Walking, even the slow, searching, barefoot steps, helped quiet her mind. Deeper in her mind than the reality of being alone, hopefully, in a dark cave, was the thing that had taken Grayson. That bastard knew that thing was down here. He’d wanted her to see it. “Fill in the quarry!” If she could get out, she would put some of that in her article—some of it. No one would believe there were man-eating slugs in the caves of Indiana.
Charity smelled it before she saw it—the dust of fallen leaves, the air of a forest supporting a thousand different forms of life. Cave air was clean, but it was dead. Above her, the top of the passage began angling up. She stood tall, her arms now in front of her. Slowly, the shapes of her arms and pale hands became visible.
Drawing three breaths to let her eyes adjust to the light, Charity began climbing. It was as Grayson said; seeing where you were going and the places to grab or step was a lot easier than going down. She emerged from the vertical cave entrance out of breath and squinting into what was now twilight. She allowed herself a minute to rest, then walked back up the creek bed and path to the house. She opened her car door, got in, and started the engine. Her phone beeped in appreciation of the faulty charger cord plugged into its socket. Within thirty seconds, she got a notice of three text messages. All were from Jason. Before she could open them, a small car bumped up the dirt driveway. It stopped next to her, and Jason got out.
“Where the hell have you been?” he asked, slamming the door behind him.
She rolled down the window and held up her phone. “These things don’t work underground.” She tapped her photo icon, and there were the pics of her sitting where Marie Simpson’s purse had been found. “Except for these,” she held the phone out for him to see.
Jason squinted at the photos. “Great, you went down there alone?”
“No. The guy who lives there,” she nodded toward the house, “Henry Grayson, went with me.”
“I see. Did he go back in the house?”
“He stayed down there. . . . He said there was a different way out, but it was too rough for me. I just came back up the easy way on my own.”
Jason leaned against the fender of her rental. He looked up through the trees where the first stars were coming out. “So, you got some more dirt on why Marie Simpson hid in the cave?”
“I did. I’ll have a draft to you tomorrow. Pretty wild stuff. But I was going to do one more thing before it gets too dark. That way,” she pointed at the path that forked into the tree line, “there’s a quarry down there. Some connection between it and the cave. The locals think it’s haunted or something. I wanted to get a couple of shots.”
Jason stood up. “Haunted quarry, huh?”
“Maybe. . . . I was going to suggest layering that into the story.” She opened her car door and started to climb out. “It’d only take a few minutes. I think we have enough daylight.”
“No, you’ve done enough for one day. The pics, the story, even a joint byline. I’ll get them.” He grabbed his phone from the dashboard of his car and headed for the path.
“There’s a fork,” Charity called after him. “Take the northern one to the left! Get close!”
About the author
J. Stanton lives and writes in the miasma of humidity and refinery fumes of southeast Texas. His work has appeared in Edgar Literary Magazine, Driftless Review, and Schlock! Magazine.