“He knows we’re coming?”
“I promised to meet him. It’s the way we can fix the lens. I’m sure of it. We get things back—the way they were, the way they’re supposed to work out—and we can go home.”
Ben flashed his light around again. It felt colder now.
“What makes you so sure?”
I shook my head.
I didn’t know.
“There are people there, Ben. Regular people. Not Odds and Rangers. I just know it.”
“Okay, Jack. If you say so. All I care about right now is getting the fuck out of this goddamned cave.”
I sat down and scattered the leaves of the map away from me.
“Me too.”
* * *
Sitting, waiting, made me shiver from the cold.
Ben started to nod off, but I could tell he felt guilty about it, so fought the urge to lie down and sleep.
“I don’t care if you sleep,” I said.
“I don’t care if you do.”
“I smell too bad to sleep.”
“I’d throw up in my dreams.”
Ben smiled.
“We came far enough this way,” I said. I looked at the options: the main tunnel stretching ahead of us, and the narrower one that bisected it, leading away on both sides. “I think it should be pretty light outside by now. At least, that’s what I’d estimate. So, if there was a way out that wasn’t too far from where we’re sitting, maybe we’d see a little light down one of these tunnel branches.”
“I was thinking that,” Ben said.
“Let’s get them up and stick our noses down there and see if there’s anything that shows up.”
“Like the fucking Nature Channel?”
“Fuck that shit, dude.”
I pushed myself onto my feet and held out my hand to hoist up Ben.
He kicked his brother’s feet. “Time to go, Griff. Red, get up.”
“My name ain’t Red.”
“Shit if it’s not,” Ben said.
* * *
We thought to first explore the tunnel that branched off to our right. If it happened to lead to a way out, I calculated that this would be the right direction to put us somewhere closer to the horses at the ag school.
But calculations based on time and place in Marbury were as pointless as dogs solving arithmetic in dreams.
I think we were all prepared to potentially fall into a different world with every footstep we planted ahead of us; with the possible exception of Quinn. I was convinced he was still keeping secrets; that he knew far more than he’d let on, as though knowing what might lie ahead of us gave him some likely edge to victory, winning whatever game he believed he was still playing.
Even as scuffed and banged up as he was, Quinn was next to impossible to figure out. Or trust.
We had to step up a good three feet in order to get inside the narrower side tunnels. Quinn complained that he couldn’t take the climb, that his balls hurt too bad, so Griffin gave him a boost by letting Quinn use the kid’s knee as a foothold, and I pulled him in by his hand.
Ben and I decided we’d give it five hundred feet, just to get a feel for what may be down that way, before turning back and exploring the tunnel that led in the opposite direction.
The narrowness of the passage kept us packed in a tighter group. There was no dirt covering the floor, only the ribbed steel of the drainpipe construction that made it seem as though we’d been swallowed and were passing through an enormous intestine.
Occasionally, we’d step over bones: pelvises, arms, and legs, mostly. The smaller things like teeth or fingers went mostly unnoticed. I found a skull with a hole in the back of it big enough to poke three of my fingers through. And everywhere there were shoes and belts—things made from leather or plastic that never seemed to go away or wear down into dust.
I picked up a wallet and thumbed through its contents. There were bank cards, receipts, a corner of a sheet of notebook paper with a girl’s name on it—Julie—and a phone number. No bills, but there were three undistinguishable coins that jingled inside a snap pouch. I took them out and put them into my pocket. I wanted to look at them more closely when—if—I got the time. And then I found an ID card from Glenbrook High School. There was some grime obscuring the lamination, and when I wiped it away with my thumb I could read Glenbrook High School 2011–2012.
Fuck this place.
The photo was of a leering sophomore boy named Chris Baker. I recognized him. He was the same kid who’d handed me a can of beer from his back pocket when we took a piss on the side of Conner’s house at his end-of-school-year party. That would have been—what?—maybe nine weeks ago.
In another world.
Fuck you, Jack.
And I stood there, trying to decide if I should hang on to the kid’s wallet or just leave it behind, entombed in the spot where Chris Baker was surely a meal for something once hungry in Marbury.
Ben kept walking. He was about twenty feet ahead of me, shining his light upward in front of us. “What’s that shit?”
I tossed the kid’s wallet away.
Sorry, Chris. Or not-Chris.
I looked over to where Ben pointed his flashlight. Up in the tunnel, great torn sheets of what looked like black rags hung down from the top of the pipe.
“Don’t touch that,” Quinn said.
We stood just behind Ben, who was close enough to the hanging drapes of black that he could reach out and grab them.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a kind of fungus. It gets you stoned, Billy. The Rangers call it black salt. It fucks you up good. You snort it up, or get it in your eyes or mouth, and you’ll piss yourself.”
“You do that shit?” Griffin said.
Quinn looked down, shaking his head. “Fuck. Why would I tell you, not-Ben?”
Ben shined his light through the forest of hanging moss, trying to see if there was any pathway through.
“But I never seen it growing so thick,” Quinn said. “It’s hard to imagine what some of them boys would trade you for just a handful of this.”
“Maybe another blowjob for you, huh, Quinn?” Griffin said.
“If that’s what I wanted, not-Ben, I could surely have it.”
Ben squatted down, duckwalking beneath the strands of mold that dangled like inverted seaweed, holding the speargun out with one hand and his flashlight in the other.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Quinn said.
Ben paused, looked back at us.
I got nervous when Quinn warned Ben. The fucker knew things about the Under.
“Ben,” I whispered. “Get out of there. Let’s go back the other way.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It doesn’t look like there’s any chance of us getting through here.”
And just as he started to pivot his body around, something small, the color of charcoal ash, slipped down from one of the black strands above him and fell onto Ben’s back, hitting him with a soft thud right between his shoulders.
“Fuck!”
Ben jerked and thrashed, swatting at whatever it was that landed on him. When he spun again, I could see that it was some sort of spider, soft and fuzzy, as big as a hand. It was the same kind of creature that had been curled up inside the map pouch Griffin found.
But this one was biting Ben.
Ben wasn’t wearing a shirt, and I could see the thing digging its fangs right into the flesh below his right shoulder blade.
“Don’t move!” I dropped down and began crawling toward Ben beneath the drapes of fungus. But it was too late. Ben yelped and backhanded the spider with his knuckles. When the thing let go of him and scooted away, farther down into the tunnel, Ben jolted to his feet. He stood up directly into the fans of black mold.
The fungus crumbled, turned to crystalline grains that rained down on Ben, covering him in black glitter everywhere. He looked burned, like he had crawled out from the soot in the bottom of a potbelly stove.
Ben coughed twice, and after that, he just stood there, staring at me with his mouth locked open in a yawn as I made my way toward him.
“Don’t get that shit in your mouth, Billy!” Quinn called. “Just let him come out of there on his own.”