It’s his baby now.
For the first time, Mark was fully aware of the cold in the cave and of the darkness ahead and behind. There were three people belowground with him. He’d thought one was an enemy.
Maybe he had two.
57
Julianne sat on the stones with her legs crossed. Her helmet was beside her, and she held the sapphire necklace in her hands. Her face was obscured by shadows in the flickering candlelight, and Ridley couldn’t make out her eyes. He wanted to see them and find the comfort that they held, but he couldn’t afford to sacrifice the darkness. The truths that he wanted out of Trapdoor had all been lost in the dark. He would have to find them there.
“We’ll start with an offering,” he said. He set the knife on the stone near his right hand, blade open.
“No,” Julianne said. “No, Ridley, that’s not how we start.”
“Things are different here.” He reached into his backpack and pulled free a roll of papers.
“What is that?”
The pages were larger than normal, the long format of legal documents.
“This is a trust document,” Ridley said. “Dated October second, 2004. You know what’s special about that time and this place. I don’t need to explain it to you. All that matters to you are contained in a few lines.”
He knew the document so well he could have recited the lines from memory, but still he flipped through the pages. They deserved to be read once more.
“‘To be executed ten years from the date of this agreement or at the time of my death, whichever comes first,’” he read aloud, “‘with the stipulation that all terms of this agreement are rendered wholly null and void if the circumstances of my death are determined to be the result of criminal action.’”
Julianne was staring at him with an expression he’d never seen on her face before.
“What is this?” she said. “Why was this agreement made?”
“Let me finish. Let me read the beautiful line, the one that gave me hope and patience for so long.” He worked his tongue around his mouth in a fruitless attempt to bring moisture to it, and then read, “‘At which time all holdings of Trapdoor Caverns Land Trust will become the property of Cecil Buckner and Ridley Barnes.’”
Julianne didn’t speak. Ridley took a deep breath and shook his head. “How much that meant to me, I can’t explain. But those were in different times. Patience can hold you only so far in the absence of truth. Cecil doesn’t understand that, because Cecil doesn’t have the same questions. I’ll trade for the truth. It’s a bargain I hate to make, but I’ll trade the trust for the truth.”
He was speaking more to the cave than to Julianne now. He fed the title page of the document into the candle flame. The flame chewed around the edge of the paper and flared brightly but then died, leaving one charred corner. He shouldn’t have been surprised.
“She has no use for documents,” he said. “Certainly no use for talk of ownership. I always understood that. My request was that I be referred to as a steward of Trapdoor Caverns. That was the role I wanted. Apparently, it was not the right legal term, but it’s all I wanted to be.”
He set the partially burned document aside and took the knife in his hand. “Now it’s about to be your show,” he said. “Are you ready for that?”
“Let’s talk more about this.”
“No.” He shook his head. “We will talk about Sarah. Where she was found, how she was found. You’ll have to trust the cave. We’re so much closer to the truth now. All you have to do is open the door for me. You’re the only one who can do that.”
For a long time she was silent, but when she finally spoke, her voice was perfect, the cadence he’d come to know and require.
“If you would like to face the water and focus on that portal, you may do so,” she said.
He turned obediently, and now Julianne and the candle were in his peripheral vision, a flickering in the corner of his right eye. He could see the shadow line of the stream and the place where it disappeared. He turned to look at her. With the blackness at her back and the candlelight before her and those pale clothes and her blond hair, she seemed to glow.
“I’ll need total darkness,” he said.
“Even from the candle?”
“Yes. I’ll need it the way it was back then.”
She hesitated, but then she leaned her face close to the candle’s warm, soft light, parted her lips, and exhaled soundlessly, and the candle extinguished and they belonged to the blackness.
“All right. Let’s work our way toward that day together, shall we?” she said. “Always together. Never alone. Remember that you are never alone here.”
Not a problem, Ridley thought. Not in Trapdoor.
“You may focus on that spot,” Julianne said. “On that portal. It may be the place where the present ceases for you and the past begins. Take your time if you wish, and maybe you will wish to let the water guide you. You may wish to remember all of the days we have done these exercises together and all of the progress you have made. Your confidence and your strength. Remember that you are required to follow it only as far as you wish.”
He’d worked with her long enough to understand the double message here, the way she was using the word remember as often as possible, a guide that went beyond the surface message.
“Whenever you are ready, you may focus all of your attention on that portal,” she said, her voice rising and falling in subtle shifts. “You may begin to consider all of the places that it can take you. All of the places that lie beyond. You may remember those now, if you choose. You may vocalize those, if you choose. The seeing is within your reach and yours alone. You know this, and you know that even though it is dark to me, it is not to you.”
“Yes,” Ridley said in a dried-out whisper. “Yes.”
“Would you like to approach it now? Would you like to pass through it and tell me some things about what lies beyond?”
“Yes.”
“Listen to the water and to the other sounds that you might hear, sounds perhaps different than those that I can hear.”
He knew what she could hear: the steady, tinny drip of water from the ceiling, plinking down into a puddle that was patiently working its way through the stone, unhurried by the passing centuries. It was a pleasant sound, not unlike the ticking of a clock. In its own way, that was exactly what it was.
“Allow yourself to pass through, if you wish. Give yourself that permission now. Permission to go down that path. Moving forward, yes, but also backward. As far back as you choose. You know the path. You’ve been on it before. Follow it now, if you wish. Follow it and see where it leads. I will count down from ten to one, and when I reach one, you will be on the path as you once were before.”
Ridley closed his eyes even though he was in blackness, and his head bobbed in rhythm with her voice, and his thumb worked lightly over the knife. Though it drew blood, he felt no pain.
58
Mark was on his hands and knees again, freshening the bruises from his last time in this terrible place. If you wanted to make it out of Trapdoor alive, you had to be willing to spend some time on your knees. There was no other option.
The pain from the bruises was bad but the memories it triggered were much worse. Each ache forced him to recall the way it had been down here before, when he was alone and shivering in the blackness. When he had called on every resource for survival and found that your resources didn’t matter much when you were lost in the dark. You needed help from outside the blackness then. That had been the most unsettling realization of his life: I cannot save myself.