“Just reflecting on life,” Eb said.
“That so, Alec Guinness?” Big Al bit his thumbnail; his teeth crunched on the calcified enamel. “Does that reflection include a desire for midquality consumer goods?”
Ebenezer smiled. “I guess not.”
“Then I’ll kindly ask you to fuck right off.”
Ebenezer laughed. “And the horse I rode in on, yes?”
“That’s about the size of it. I don’t need your nose prints all over my glass.”
Still chuckling, Eb walked back to the car. Big Al glared after him. Eb slid behind the wheel and fired up the Olds. “Eve of Destruction” was playing on the radio. He cranked the volume knob and peeled out of the lot, heading back in the direction he’d come.
7
DARKNESS HAD NEARLY FALLEN by the time Minerva and Micah reached the rock. They stopped twenty yards from its southern face. It was black as obsidian. Its outcroppings were sharp as cut glass, impervious to the scourings of wind and rain. Its sheer face climbed nearly two hundred yards before reaching a flat apex. Micah wondered if there was a route to the summit—and, if one existed, did they really want to see what was up there?
They circumnavigated the rock, working eastward. They kept their distance from it, walking through the clingy sand that carpeted the slope. The sun’s dying rays washed the woods, but did not lighten the monolith itself. It was as if the sun’s light was consumed by it.
It took half an hour to cut around to its eastern face. The monolith was carved sharply, its angles nearly as neat as those on a skyscraper. The new face rose even more sheerly: a black mirror that, instead of reflecting, swallowed the reflections of anything set before it.
The sun set behind the firs. The woods were quiet. The only sound came from the rock itself: a low bristling hum, as if, behind its edgeless face, trillions of flies were filling its core with the seethe of their industry.
“This place is terrible,” Minerva said, standing off Micah’s shoulder.
Micah could not disagree. It was dreadful to encounter such spots: places that appeared to have experienced horrors that, while unseen and ages-old, were still trapped there—held there by whatever malignancy had minted them. But there was no visible evidence. No sacrificial altar, no open graves or moldering skulls mounted on pikes. Just the implacable rock and the fearsome chill it gave off.
They came upon an entrance of sorts: an inverted V in the rock face, about twenty feet tall at its apex. Darkness crawled out of it. It gave off a more profound cold, too: Micah’s forearms broke out in gooseflesh. He removed a flashlight from his pack and shone it into the cleft. The beam gave no indication how far in it went or where it might lead.
“Think the kids are in there?” Minerva said. Her voice was tight with strain. “We could keep walking around the whole—”
“This is the place, Minny.”
“Yeah. Feels like it.”
The cleft was five feet wide at its base, but it narrowed quickly; they had to duck to get inside. The cleft gave way to a cavern carved through the rock. The flashlight picked up a scattering of pebbles on its uneven floor. Mineral deposits jagged down from the cavern’s ceiling: they were two feet long, skinny as soda straws. These weird rock icicles. One raked the top of Micah’s scalp like the scrape of an emery board. The rock was wet here, with a popcorny appearance: it resembled a vast exposed brain.
The tunnel was set on a gradual decline, almost too imperceptible to discern. The air was stale with an alkaline undertaste—the taste that comes up off hot pavement after a storm. Micah swept the beam over the walls and ceiling, which was no longer carbuncled but instead perfectly rounded, as if it had been smoothed with a grinder. Their breath filled the cramped space, creating vibrations that flitted against the sensitive apparatus of their inner ears.
A sly squirming noise emanated overhead. Micah stopped. Minerva ran into his back and let out a squawk. He pressed a finger to his lips. The squirming was wet, unctuous, lush. He swung the beam up to the cave ceiling. Minerva dry-heaved in revulsion.
The ceiling was covered in a seething mass. Eelish creatures, each roughly three inches long, carpeted the rock. They were pale yellow, the color of margarine or the fatty tissue of an excised tumor. Their pencil-thin bodies were belled at one end and tipped with a flagellate tail at the other. Thousands of them squirmed on the rock above.
“Olms,” Micah said quietly. “A kind of salamander. They are not native to this part of the world.”
The creatures massed into large balls the size of grapefruits. The balls quivered pendulously, threatening to fall and splat on the floor—or on their upturned faces.
“What the hell are they doing?”
“Breeding,” said Micah.
They moved past the olms, deeper into the cavern. The flashlight swept over something… Micah registered it the next instant and swung the beam back. A hair barrette. Dull pink. The sort of thing a girl wore. The little Rasmussen girl, for instance.
The cavern narrowed until they had to walk single file. Minerva grabbed ahold of Micah’s belt loop. The blackness pushed back at them, almost a physical presence; if he shut off the flashlight—or if the batteries suddenly died—Micah imagined it slipping over them, inside of them, sliding around their eyeballs and between their lips, a predatory darkness seeking something to feast upon. He stumbled and set a hand on the wall to steady himself. The rock was not cold to the touch, at least not this deep inside the monolith: it was warm and slick, like the flesh of a sleeping giant.
The floor dropped away five feet ahead; the flashlight beam picked up motes of dust swirling in a mammoth darkness.
“Hold up,” said Micah.
They had reached the lip of a precipice. There was just enough room to perch at its edge. Micah shone the light down. The drop was nearly straight. Micah guessed it was a thirty-foot fall. At the bottom was a basin with a ten-foot-wide base. He could make out the mouth of a tunnel down there; it was more cramped than the cavern they had already traversed—the tunnel looked to be about four feet in height, three feet in diameter. It must lead deeper inside the rock.
A rope ladder traveled down the face of the drop; the rope was sturdy but old, the wooden rungs worn smooth with age. Micah shone the light upward. The ceiling bellied a few feet above them. There was just the precipice, the drop, and the tunnel mouth below.
“Who would put a ladder here?” Minerva said.
Micah grunted. It wasn’t a question worth contemplating. The ladder was here. That was the only thing that mattered. He kicked a pebble over the edge and followed it with the flashlight. It bounced off the rocks at the bottom of the basin and skipped toward the mouth of the tunnel—
Micah’s breath hitched, then whistled out on a near-silent note.
Four sticks. Craggy and white as driftwood. Four sticks were latched around the top of the tunnel’s mouth. At least, that’s what they looked like on first blush. So much so that Micah’s mind tried to immediately dismiss them as such. Except for their placement. How would sticks get to such a place? How would they find themselves latched round a tunnel mouth so deep within this place? Maybe they were exposed roots—but if so, roots to what? What tree or weed could grow down there? And how would those roots push themselves out of solid rock?
Then it dawned on him that those sticks were moving ever so slightly. They were vibrating minutely, in fact, the outermost stick lifting and coming down again on the rock. Tapping, almost…
…almost like a finger.