Mark flicked the switch on the infrared scope and put a red dot on the center of Cecil’s chest.
“Put the gun down!” he shouted.
Cecil spun toward his voice, but Mark was on the ground, below the light. Cecil couldn’t see him, but that didn’t stop him from shooting.
The sound was enormously loud in the trapped space, like a mortar round. Rock fragments exploded into the air, and needles of pain found Mark’s cheek and neck as he pulled the trigger on the .22 and shot Cecil in the chest.
Cecil rocked back and fired the shotgun once more as he fell, this blast connecting with the ceiling, and then he was down on his back and the shotgun clattered over the stone and into the water. He sat up and fumbled for it. Mark worked the lever action on the rifle as he rose to his feet, and this time he put the red dot on Cecil’s eye.
Cecil stopped searching for the shotgun. He moaned in pain as he put a hand to his chest and found it wet with blood, but he wasn’t going to die from the wound. Not from the .22, which had hit low, missing his heart. The killing gun in play was still the shotgun, and Mark needed to claim it.
Ridley had been silent and motionless until Mark was almost to Cecil. Then he spun with such speed and agility that Mark nearly shot him out of surprise. But Ridley ignored him, splashed into the water beside Cecil, and came up with the shotgun. He pivoted toward Mark, his finger drifting to the trigger.
“Don’t,” Mark began, but he didn’t need to bother with instruction, because Ridley simply threw the gun onto the rocks.
“Those don’t belong here,” he said. He sounded groggy, distant and uninterested. He stared at Mark as if he did not recognize him or even understand what he was.
“Same team, Ridley,” Mark said. “I’m here to help you. And Julianne. Let me help you.”
“You’re not here for her,” Ridley said.
“Yes, I am,” Mark said, though he had no idea whom Ridley meant by her. Julianne, Sarah Martin, the cave? All of them? “Step back,” Mark said. “Ridley, just step back.”
“None of you belong here,” Ridley said. “She doesn’t want any of you.” He stepped over Cecil and moved through the water, heading deeper into the cave.
“Ridley! Stop moving!”
Ridley ignored him. He dropped to his hands and knees in the water and crawled toward a narrow gap in the wall. Mark had the choice to shoot him in the back to stop him or let him go.
He let him go. Ridley crawled through the gap and vanished into the darkness. Then it was just Mark, rifle in hands, and two people on the ground in front of him, bleeding into the rocks.
59
Cecil was terrified of his wound, pressing on it with both hands and giving a high, strange moan that echoed around the room. His eyes were wide and panicked as he watched the blood flow through his fingers.
“Help,” Cecil said. He looked from the wound to Mark, his face desperate. Taking blood was one thing to him; watching it leave his own body another. “I’m dying. Don’t let me die!”
Mark ignored him, set the .22 beside the shotgun, both weapons well out of Cecil’s reach, and turned to Julianne. She was facedown, and blood ran through her hair and joined the water on its slow journey deeper into the cave, chasing after Ridley Barnes.
Her wrist showed a pulse, and her breathing seemed steady. The blood loss was the only immediate threat, or at least the only one Mark was qualified to do anything about. He removed his jacket to serve as a compress but he needed something to secure it. Ridley surely had brought rope with him, and his caving pack was still here.
There was rope, but once Mark had the pack open, he realized he didn’t need it. Before Ridley Barnes had decided to try to kill Julianne Grossman, he had packed a first-aid kit for her. There was a packet of pads coated with a clotting agent, and there was a roll of three-inch-wide gauze. Mark took both of them and left the rest of the kit. All he was concerned with right now was stopping that bleeding as fast as possible. He pushed her hair out of the way as best he could and applied two of the sterile pads. When they contacted the blood, a sticky gel formed. He wrapped the roll of gauze around her head, keeping it tight. Blood stained the first layers but did not continue to soak through.
Through it all, Cecil had moaned and called for help, and Mark hadn’t responded. When Julianne spoke, he almost dropped her head onto the rocks again.
“Worked,” she said. Her voice was as thick as if her mouth were packed with cotton. “Worked.”
He moved so he could see her face, and her eyes tracked him but they had a foggy look.
“Julianne? Julianne, do you understand where you are?”
“It worked,” she said. “Detail. He gave... detail.” She put together sentences like a climber clawing toward an icy summit.
“Just rest,” he said. “Rest for now. We’ll talk about it. But right now we need to get you out of here. That’s the—”
Light splashed over the wall behind them then and Mark whirled and reached for the shotgun. He realized quickly that the light was coming from the tunnel that led back to the Chapel Room and not the one Ridley had vanished into, but that didn’t mean a whole lot; Ridley was capable of circling back in ways no one else understood.
“Who’s there?” Mark shouted.
The light’s motion stopped and there was a pause before another voice responded. “Indiana State Police. Who are we talking to?”
Cecil stopped moaning. For the first time, he seemed aware of something beyond his wound. Julianne’s face showed no response at all.
Mark said, “You’re talking to Markus Novak. You’re clear to approach. There are two wounded in this room, and there’s one missing somewhere else. There are two weapons that I’m aware of, but they are not in play.”
The light went back into motion and he turned to face Julianne, hoping she understood that rescue was here. She didn’t look relieved, though; she looked concerned.
“We didn’t end trance,” she said. “That... that is dangerous for Ridley now. The worst possible thing. He doesn’t know what is real down here... that could be very bad.”
60
Ridley embraced the cold water, swam down until his hands touched the bottom, and then pulled himself forward along the rock lining the streambed. Only at the last possible second, when his head had begun to throb and his lips threatened to part despite his will, did he allow himself to break the surface.
The water-table line was high and he struck the limestone ceiling with enough force to snap his teeth together; the impact drove his face back into the water. Choking and sputtering, he rose again and this time he leaned his head back and got a fuller breath.
He treaded water there, in a place where he had anticipated it would be shallow enough for him to stand, and got his breath back as the cold found his bones. He saw motion to the right, perhaps a stalactite relocating from one side of the stream to the next, a process that not even a millennium could bring about in another cave but that could occur within seconds in Trapdoor. She was shifting around him, changing the rules; all night she had been changing the rules, and he was weary of that. What the cave had done tonight revealed her true character.
Something Ridley had always understood about Trapdoor was that she protected the past. The cave wanted to hold her secrets and so she had wiped Ridley’s mind clear with blackness before she sent him back to the surface. Certainly there had been a price to pay for that, not one without pain — the hostile police, hateful neighbors, relentless media. And, of course, what memories the cave had allowed him to keep. Those seemed carefully crafted, snapshots of blood and scrabbling fingers and echoes of screams and then, far worse, echoes of whispers.