The tunnel was lighter now, thanks to the flames, and though the smoke was beginning to rise, it would be some time before it filled the tunnel completely. We moved carefully, watching our steps, so as not to twist an ankle in one of the knotted holes.
“You shouldn’t have come for me,” he said after a moment of silence.
“You don’t mean that,” I replied.
“I do,” he said without hesitation. “We shouldn’t have made it out of there. I think you know that.” His face in the semidarkness was wracked with a mixture of relief, fear, and something I couldn’t quite place. “I can’t believe you found me,” he added, his voice breaking.
“The jelly beans,” I said. “They were in your pockets, weren’t they?”
He didn’t speak, but he nodded his head, sniffling. He reached for me, and I did the same, and all at once, I realized that look on his face had been pure, unabashed love for his sister.
A charred hand shot up from a hole in the rock just next to my feet and grasped my ankle. I screamed, shook free, and fell to the cave floor as it swiped the air blindly for me. I didn’t need to see the white, scabby hands or the fresh burns to know who it was. I tried to shake him off, but he had me, his grip like cold iron. Andy was yelling something, but all at once I couldn’t hear him. My ears were filling with the sound of that voice, the one from my dream of the man made of darkness.
You…
There was a pressure on my leg, a warmth that spread up to my knee, that grew and bloomed, changing from a gentle heat to a fire, a blaze within my skin.
It’s you…
It was baking me, singeing the flesh off my muscle, the muscle off my bones, and boiling the marrow within. Somewhere high above me, I could hear Andy screaming – far off, inside of a tunnel miles away, as I swirled into a murky pit of darkness. I sank into it, and shapes seemed to rise in the blackness: silhouettes of people, moments frozen in time.
Children, reading an ancient book, something they know they shouldn’t, making a game out of it as they speak the old words aloud. What are they doing? Why are the shadows upon the firelit wall moving, almost dancing? One of the boys, a blond, shaggy- headed preteen, begins to writhe as one of the shapes solidifies and slips from the wall, a shape like a half spider, half rat spilling into him, covering his face with black tendrils before disappearing behind his grim smile…
Another scene rises from the dark, this time an old man, hunched over a table, his son watching him paint the faces onto wooden toys, his hands careful, dexterous, and clever. The boy wants to be like him, and he will be, but not in the way he imagines. Something is watching them, a weak, gangly creature that hides in the planks above like a giant spider. It wants the boy, needs the boy, because the body it hijacked, the body that’s been its home, is giving up, even after the changes, even after the long dark of the cave it calls home…
Now a boy with a soft face, listening to his mother read him stories as he gazes into a snow globe, her gift to him, the only possession that he can remember. Neither of them sees the face leering from the window, another body now spent, used up, ready to be discarded. In a flash, the mother is gone, and the boy is lifted from the bed, never to be seen again…
“No,” I heard from some far-off place, the voice of a girl’s brother fighting for her life across some unimaginable gulf of space and time. But his voice pales in comparison to the voice within that blackness – a rumbling hum that is all around her, inside her, is her.
This feeling, the voice moaned with obscene longing. After all this time. I’ve never known this feeling…
It was me. I was that feeling, something ecstatic to taste, something unknown and new after countless years of boredom. I was nothing more than a new prize.
Pressure. A light hand on my face, pulling me back from that edge, and another voice.
“Let her go!”
Never, it moaned. Such possibilities…
“You son of a bitch, let her go!”
Your brother bores me. I think I’ll have you instead…
The grip on my bare leg was broken, and I shot back into reality so fast my head spun. My first concern was my leg, and I looked down, afraid to touch what must now be bare, empty bone. But I saw nothing more than my own skin, spotted with a light red handprint. Andy was holding a rock, and the skeletal white hand was bleeding from where he had been pounding on it. Andy slid under my arm, lifting me, and the two of us limped farther up the tunnel, away from the small hole, which was now filling with black smoke.
Just once, Andy and I looked back to see the Thief pushing his head through the hole. He was red, half-covered with horrific burns, the skin peeling around the pink eyes. All that was bad, but it paled in comparison to the mouth. The lips were gone, burned away, and all the madness in that thin frame seemed driven into that gaping wound of a mouth. We both gasped aloud as the arm receded and the face pushed forward, but there was no way he could make it through a hole that size, a hole smaller than a basketball.
Then an awful thing happened as the face crept closer and closer, edging through the impossibly tiny hole. The shoulders, wide and bony, seemed to hinge and split, slipping through – first one, then the other, as if the horrid creature were being born before our eyes.
I remembered a strange thing in that moment, one of those weird facts that kids pick up from their parents, the kind of thing you stow away and forget that you ever knew. My dad had told me about mice one year. We had found a bunch of little brown pellets in the pantry. Mouse shit. It looked just like rice. We were laying traps out, and he told me about mice and rats, how they could sneak in just about anywhere. Their bones were flexible, and they could shift them around if they needed to fit into a tiny space. Ribs could flatten out; shoulders could float freely. Basically, if they could fit their heads into a hole, they would figure out a way to get the rest in too.
I didn’t know if it was true or just another one of Dad’s stories, but when I saw the Thief squeezing through that hole, his face a ragged mess, his eyes filled with murder, I knew it was the truth. Bit by bit, he was making it through, driven by sheer, unparalleled malice, and the sight seemed to lock every one of my joints in place. Once again, it was Andy who peeled me off the floor, got me moving, got me out of the side tunnel and into the cooler, fresher air beyond. We tumbled out of the cave and landed on the carved stair steps of the mine, and for the first time, I actually heard the drone of the storm outside.
“Come on,” I said, my senses finally returning to me. I led us down the darkened stair steps of rock, taking them two at a time. Andy tumbled down behind me, catching one of the steps wrong, and we both fell down the last one, expecting to break a rib on the rock floor. Instead, we splashed into knee-high water that drenched us from head to toe. Sputtering, we helped each other to our feet, and I saw the absolute amazed confusion on his face.
“Where the fuck are we?” he screamed.
“The rain,” I answered. “Flooding the place. We gotta hurry.”
I clutched his hand and pulled him down the slope, into the dark, deepening water. The stone-cut room, half-lit to begin with, was now nearly black as the rising water blocked both the tunnel and the light outside. The water passed our waists, and I felt Andy pulling me back.
“No,” he said, a look of pure terror in his eyes. “I can’t.”
He’d never liked closed places, a fact that I used against him on multiple occasions, daring him to go into closets or to get into a car trunk. The thought of it alone was enough to make him violent, but this wasn’t the time or place to hesitate. I could hear the Thief somewhere in the dark behind us, spitting and shrieking. If we waited for another minute, we’d both be dead.