“Couple days, you’re gonna look back and see that Buzz was right. And you’re gonna thank me for doing what I had to do. You’re just lucky we found you in time. You trust me, Sweeney, things are gonna get better. You’re one of us now. Isn’t that right?”
Buzz didn’t bother to look, but Sweeney was sure that all the Abominations were nodding this time. Even Piglet.
“’Course you’re one of us,” Buzz said. “You helped yourself to a piece of Nadia and you had your first ride. Just one thing left for you to do.”
Sweeney had been waiting and now here it was. Some kind of initiation. Something awful and lasting. They were going to take turns beating the life out of him or they were going to pin him down and cornhole him. They were going to cut him or brand him or maybe drag him down the mountain, tied to the back of Buzz’s hog.
“It’s nothing major,” Buzz continued. “And it’s nothing to be scared of. It’s symbolic, s’what it is.”
Sweeney picked out Fluke because he looked like the slowest and the dullest. Piglet was smaller but it was obvious he was pure psychotic. He tried to play it out in his head. He’d wait till they pulled out their knives or their ropes, then he’d charge the Fluke. He’d run head down and try to hit him midsection, drive the wind out. Then he’d go for the knife and, if there were any chance, mount the Fluke’s bike and head for the trail.
But no one took out a knife or a rope and no one unhitched his jeans. Buzz came up to him and once again draped an arm over his shoulder. He began to walk Sweeney to the opposite side of the precipice, where some scrub brush was growing against the wall of shale that stretched another hundred yards into the sky.
“See, Sweeney,” Buzz said, “we come up here every now and then. Get some fresh air and commune, you might say, with the natural world. Now last time we come up, we left something here.”
He let go of Sweeney’s shoulder and sank into a squat. He picked up a fallen branch and used it to push back some of the overgrown scrub. And in the mountain face behind, Sweeney saw a small hole cut into the granite, a little hollow that led into a cavity of some kind. It wasn’t big enough to be called a cave. It was more like a burrow, a lair of some sort, fit for a fat possum or unusually small bear.
“We need you,” Buzz said, “to scoot on in there and get it.”
Sweeney stared at him.
“Don’t worry,” Buzz said. “You won’t get stuck. It opens out once you get inside.”
“What is it?” Sweeney asked.
“That,” Buzz said, “would ruin the surprise. You gotta trust me.”
Sweeney took a step forward, went down on one knee and tried to peer inside the hole.
“You want me to climb in there?”
Buzz nodded. “Like I said, it gets bigger once you’re in.”
“I bet it does.”
“You go in. You get what we want. You come out.”
“I come out.”
“You come out. Right. What the hell you think?”
“I think,” Sweeney said, “that once I’m in you’ll block up the entrance and laugh your asses off while I suffocate.”
Buzz looked back toward the tribe.
“You really got a low opinion of us,” he said. He reached in his boot, pulled out a small box of kitchen matches, held them up for Sweeney to see, like he was about to do a magic trick. Then he tucked them in Sweeney’s shirt pocket and said, “You’re a real paranoid fucker. Nobody’s going to block you in there.”
“I’m not going in.”
Buzz smiled and said, “Like you weren’t coming with me in the first place. But here you are.”
Sweeney just shook his head.
“Time you understood something, son,” Buzz said. “I can be your savior. Or I can be the scariest fucking nightmare you ever had. I’ll go either way. Whatever’s required to take care of my family. So get in the fucking cave. ’Cause if I have to, I’ll send Piglet in there with you.”
21
He had to get down on his belly and crawl on his forearms to make it under the archway. His hips rubbed stone as he edged inward. The burrow was a bit longer than the length of his body. When he cleared it he got on his knees and reached his hands up in the darkness until he touched rock. There wasn’t enough room to stand, but now he could get off his stomach and crawl on hands and knees. The air inside was cool and dank and smelled like charcoal. And the light from outside didn’t make it in very far.
He began to crawl in an ever-widening circle, patting the earth and waving a hand to the side. He felt ridiculous, but he guessed that he was looking for some sort of contraband. A bag of dope or money or maybe even guns.
It took him a while to realize the initial chamber opened into a larger one, that the burrow was actually a series of caves, a honeycombed maze of linked vaults and passages. He struck a match and let it burn down to his finger and thumb. It didn’t throw a lot of light but he’d never have seen the graffiti without it.
It was in the second chamber, at eye level if you were on your knees. And when he got closer he could see that it wasn’t really graffiti. There were no obscene or obscure phrases, no insults or limericks or drawings of Kilroy or human anatomy. The writing was painted on the granite in Day-Glo lime but the numbers and letters were small and precise. The writer had etched them with a stick or a brush. This was not the work of some drunken teens with a spray can, but slow, close, methodical transcription.
Sweeney knelt in front of the first line, instinctively touched a random letter because the paint looked wet. It wasn’t, at least not the lines he found in that second chamber. But he knew immediately what the lines meant. And he thought, incorrectly it turned out, that they’d been painted specifically for his discovery.
He found writing on the wall of every chamber he visited after that. But by the fourth room he could no longer translate it. The writing had gotten too small and the lines ran too long and became nonsensical with tangential notations above and below the main text. By then he’d burned through his last match. And lost his sense of where he’d entered the cave.
He didn’t panic immediately.
The panic came when he called out for help and received an answer in the form of a laugh from somewhere close by. It was male and highpitched and sloppy and it echoed. Sweeney couldn’t pinpoint the laugh’s origin but that didn’t stop him from trying to run from it. He hit a wall almost at once, bounced off unhurt, but went down on his ass.
That was when the first beer can hit him. And when the laugh sounded again, it was in the same chamber. Sweeney scrambled backward, got his back against the stone, and said, “Who’s there?”
More laughter, then the sound and the smell of someone urinating.
Someone belched, sniffled, said, “Buzz send you in for me?”
When Sweeney didn’t answer, the voice said, “It’s been a fuckin’ week already?”
A flashlight beam snapped on, found Sweeney, and focused on his face. Sweeney put out a hand and shielded his eyes.
“You want a beer?” and a can landed in Sweeney’s lap. “Warm as piss but what the hell.”
Sweeney heard the cluck and hiss of a can being opened, then a moment of quiet and a second belch.
The beam of light came off Sweeney’s face and swung up onto the wall next to his head. It ran down the line of letters and numbers painted there.
“You know what that means?”
“Some of it,” Sweeney said.
“Buzz said you’d know. So you’re Danny’s old man, huh?”
The light moved again, jumped across the ceiling, and went into spasm. It darted back and forth over their heads until it blurred, then it vanished for a second, leaving an afterimage before Sweeney’s eyes. When it snapped back on, it was positioned beneath the speaker’s chin, lighting up the face Halloween style. The cheeks of the face were inflated, the eyes too large.