“No, I haven’t,” she said. She almost added that Jack thought she and the girls were down in Baltimore visiting a friend but she stopped herself. She didn’t like Janney’s smug attitude and she wasn’t going to make it easy on him. Even the slightest insinuation that Jack would do something like that made her angry. How could all these people think that? What did they know about their situation? True, Jack was going through a tough time with the accident, things were strained right now, but he would never do something like this.
Then again, she never thought he would show up beside their bed with a baseball bat either. What if it were possible? Could he have come and stolen her out of the hospital under some kind of delusion that he was saving her. Could he have had another hallucination like last night? It would explain why no one heard Sarah scream when she was taken.
Lauren stopped the thoughts flooding her mind and refocused herself. When she looked over at Janney she saw the trace of a smile on his lips, now there, then gone. She knew he had caught the play of emotions across her face. He had seen the doubt and for some reason he liked what he saw. Lauren broke eye contact with him and looked around the room. Conversations immediately started back up as if they had never stopped. Not a single set of eyes in the room made contact with hers. She felt the cold sting of isolation and it unnerved her.
They all think Jack took her.
Janney stood. “Let me know when you hear from him, all right? And don’t worry, we’ll find Sarah for you.” Without giving Lauren a chance to comment, he walked out of the room followed by the police chief. Lauren was left alone at the table. For how she felt, she might as well have been alone in the world.
FIFTY-THREE
Narrow rock pillars formed the walls of the cage. They were spaced at irregular intervals, though none of the spaces between the bars was large enough to push more than a fist through. The pillars extended over fifteen feet into the air where thick rope weaved in and out between the bars, binding them together. The rope was now broken and frayed, in some places hanging limply in dried tangles.
Jack walked around the entire cage, exploring it from every angle. He felt that something was missing but he couldn’t place it. Then it occurred to him. There was no door. No opening of any kind. Whoever was put in this cage was meant to stay in it for a long, long time. Given the contents of the cage, it seemed the presumed sentence was forever.
There was a pile of bones in one corner, heaped up like the discard pile at a rib house. Balanced on top of this pile was a skull, clearly human, the black holes of its eyes staring at them, intact teeth set in a disturbing grin.
It was confusing at first, there were so many bones, but Jack’s eyes slowly picked out a pattern. It wasn’t just a random pile. There was a story in front of him. One large skeleton sat in the corner, its legs straight out, back upright against the stone bars. Gathered on top of it Jack counted four or five smaller bodies. Children. Small skeletons of children. Some of them babies.
“Oh my God. They were just kids.” He moved closer. “The adult. It’s a woman, right? Their mother?” Jack asked.
“I assume she’s their mother. All the adults here are female.” Lonetree looked around the cave. “Every single one of them.”
Jack could imagine their deaths. The mother, imprisoned, maybe abandoned in this dark underground pit, gathering her children to her as they died one by one. Or did the mother die first? Her children climbing on her. Crying. Trying to shake her awake as they lost energy and finally their will to live. Either way, it was horrible, too horrible.
Jack jumped, the image of the deaths vaporizing as Lonetree tapped him on the shoulder. He pointed to an arm of one of the small skeletons, the child buried beneath the others, maybe the first to die. Jack saw gouges in the bones but he didn’t understand what it meant. “What is it?”
“Bite marks. By the end, they were eating the dead to stay alive.”
Jack saw that he was right. The marks were all over the bones. Judging how small the skeletons were, it could only have been caused by the adult.
He looked back into the vacant eyes of the skull. Her head was cocked at an angle toward him and she stared him down, as if daring him to judge. A chill passed through him, a cold as the thought filtering through his consciousness; Did you wait until they were dead? Did you at least wait for that?
“Let’s keep going,” Lonetree said.
Jack was thankful to leave the cage and its tragic occupants behind. He wanted to remove the skull from his memory, but it lingered with him, floating around him in the dark like a black sun burned into his retina. But there was no sun in this place, no warmth, only cold night that lay over the bones like a death shawl.
The flare hissed and spat in the void ahead of them, a circle of red light that cast wild shadows across the cavern floor. Jack knew what to expect after his initial view from the platform, but seeing it up close was a different matter. Cage after cage filled with skeletons. There were hundreds of them. The same scene replayed over and over with only slight variations. A female adult with several children. Caged like animals. All left to starve to death.
They walked in awkward silence, like reluctant guests at a stranger’s funeral. Every now and then they would point to a scene in a cage that was different, a variation of suffering. One woman died lying in the center of the cage, the bodies of her children laid out in a circle around her. Another had her children stretched out on the floor in peaceful repose, each skull caved in from where she had used the rock walls as a weapon of mercy to end her children’s suffering.
Another skeleton had her arms stretched out through the cracks in her rock cage, her face pressed to an opening. Jack approached to take a closer look. He froze when he felt the crunch beneath his feet, like stepping on a pile of insects. He looked down, hoping he was wrong about what he would find there.
Crushed under his boot was a tiny skeleton. Jack tried to step back, but his feet were caught in the rib cage and his attempt to avoid the skeleton only desecrated the remains further. He regained his footing and carefully shook off the bones that clung to his foot. His shame for violating the grave of this little girl was harder to shake off.
Somehow this girl had escaped, but had stayed next to the cage until she died. Jack wondered why she hadn’t run away, but then looked around and imagined the cavern as the little girl would have experienced it. Complete darkness filled with the screams and moans of dying people. Where was she supposed to run? If they were all abandoned down here, where was the girl to go? She had escaped from one prison only to enter another. Jack imagined the woman in the cage holding the girl’s hand, soothing her as they died together.
What had it been like? All these people starving to death in the dark, aware of what was happening to them and helpless to stop it. Had they screamed? Cried for help? Begged for forgiveness from their captors? How long could a person scream before it was impossible to scream anymore? Then quiet. The end had to be quiet. They would be too weak at the end.
“Don’t try to imagine it,” Lonetree’s voice came out of the darkness. “No matter what you imagine, you wouldn’t do it justice.”
Jack turned his headlamp toward the voice. The flare had died out and Lonetree’s own light was turned off, as if he preferred the security of the dark. He seemed disturbingly at home among the cages, among the dead. “What happened here? Why were they in these cages?” Jack asked.