“I said find another way,” screamed Gary. “Or you go swimming.”
“Gary!” yelled Zee, but I didn’t fight. Part of me wanted him to let go, drop me to my death. Part of me wanted to become a ghost just so I could see him struggle to find a way out without me, just so I could laugh as he slowly starved to death at the bottom of the world. I almost said as much, but thankfully I managed to keep my mouth shut. You don’t call the bluff of people like Gary.
“There is no other way,” I repeated, never taking my eyes off his. “We can’t go back. We can’t make that jump to the other side of the ledge. We don’t have a choice.”
“What’s that down there?” said Zee. I dropped my gaze and Gary saw that as a sign of submission. Hauling me back onto the ledge he pushed Zee aside and looked down into the crack. I joined them, peering past their tangled limbs to see a ragged circle of darkness a few meters below us. “That’s a tunnel, right?”
“It might not be,” I answered. The hole in the rock didn’t look much wider than any of us, and the thought of climbing into it not knowing where it led or how much more it shrank made my stomach churn. “We’re better off heading up, anyway. Even if that is a tunnel it looks like it goes deeper.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Gary. “Not going anywhere near the wheezers.”
There was no arguing with him. With another eerie dance of light and shadow he started climbing down the vertical scar, grunting as he eased himself toward the hole.
“This is wrong,” I said to Zee. “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this. We should be heading up.”
But even as I said it another guttural scream skidded down the wall like fingernails on a blackboard, and before it had ended Zee was following Gary. I would happily have left them to it, so great was my terror of crawling even deeper into our stone sarcophagus. But if I let them go I’d be alone in the darkness, and that would truly have driven me to insanity.
“This is wrong,” I said again to deaf ears. Then I grabbed hold of the rock, swung my body around, and descended into the abyss.
THE THROAT
IT SEEMED TO TAKE FOREVER to climb down that fractured wall. It was so dark that I had to run my fingers over the slick, cold rock to find a grip, and pretty much every step I took one of my feet would slip, threatening to plunge me into the void. I felt like a piece of bait—a maggot pinned on a hook and squirming in pain as I was lowered toward the throat of some nightmare predator.
By the time I’d reached the hole three more haunting calls had dropped from the ledge above, each louder and more frenzied than the last. My damned imagination projected the image of the wheezers onto the stone in front of me—hundreds of them swarming over each other like flies over a corpse. It was crazy, of course: there couldn’t have been that many of them. But the growing volume of the shrieks made it clear that the crowd up there was swelling.
“Move it!” came a voice from below. I assumed it was Gary’s, but when I angled my head down I saw Zee directly beneath me, clinging to the lip of the darkness and gesturing me on with his head. Gary was next to him, on the other side of the opening. I wasn’t sure why neither of them had climbed in, but I should have guessed.
“Ladies first,” hissed Gary when I scrabbled down the last stretch and braced my foot in the hole.
“You’ve got the light,” I protested. I should have saved my breath.
“Won’t tell you again,” the bigger boy growled. “Get in there.”
I looked at Zee but he didn’t meet my eyes. Not that I blamed him. The tunnel was barely wide enough for any of us to clamber into, the same width and height as a coffin.
Cursing with every foul word I knew, I dropped past Zee and thrust my head into the shadows. The air inside had none of the freshness of the river. It was hot and heavy, like the breath of some ancient creature. Like it had been back in the prison.
“This is wrong,” I said again, the darkness swallowing my words so quickly that neither Gary nor Zee seemed to hear them. Biting my lip to stop myself from screaming, I eased my shoulders into the throat and shuffled until my entire body was inside.
The panic set in immediately, the feeling that there was no oxygen, and that the rock pressed against my stomach and my back was closing in, crushing my lungs. I tried to reverse—better to fall to my death in the river, or be caught by the wheezers, than to die cowering in some hole clawing for the last scrap of air—but Gary was already halfway in. The light from his helmet barely had enough room to squeeze past me, and by its strained yellow fingers I could see the red ragged walls of the tunnel shrinking in on each other ahead.
I thought back to the things that had happened in general population, the main prison. I remembered the time Zee and I had been chased by the dogs, rescued by Donovan; the day I’d nearly been caught by Moleface as I crawled free of Room Two; the fight between me and the Skulls in the arena; the moment we’d made our break, Toby and I held up by giant hands as the fuse burned down toward the explosive gloves.
At the time each one of those events had been terrifying, and I’d been convinced that death had finally caught up with me. As I looked back now, however, everything that had happened up top seemed like a game, like a school trip. I wished I was back in my cell, Donovan by my side, laughing about Zee having to clean the toilets or something. Because compared to the guts of Furnace, to the merciless river and this gullet of ancient rock, gen pop was a country club.
“Go,” Gary said, his voice muffled. I took as big a breath as I was able, then eased my way deeper, my elbows grating against the stone as they pushed me along. With every movement the claustrophobia threatened to consume me, and several times I had to stop as the fear rang bells in my brain, making my entire body convulse.
I don’t know how long we were in that tunnel. It could have been a lifetime. Each agonizing inch seemed to take hours, and every time I managed to wrench my body forward I thought it would be my eternal resting place. Somewhere in my mind I pictured what would happen if I did just die. Gary and Zee would have to retreat backward down the pipe. Then I imagined Gary’s fate if both Zee and I were to perish right here—trapped between two corpses as the darkness came to collect him.
Despite the horror of the thought, or maybe because of it, I started to laugh again—shallow gasps that sounded more like sobs.
“You see anything?” came Gary’s voice after what might have been an hour, or a day, or a minute. “Air’s getting thin in here, better be a way out ahead.”
“Nothing,” I replied after another age. “Tunnel’s dropping.” It was, the angle getting steeper, sloping downward. It was narrowing too. I could feel its cold embrace on both my shoulders, its knuckles on my scalp. “We have to go back, there’s no room.”
“Can’t go back,” came Zee’s voice, faint and echoey like it was coming from a mile away. “No way, we can’t turn around.”
“Right, we go on. Just go on,” Gary said, although his voice was a whisper broken up by the breaths he snatched in after every word. This was hell for me, but for him with his tree-trunk chest it must have been infinitely worse.
I wiped the sweat from my brow and obeyed, feeling the blood rush to my head as I wormed down the slope. The tunnel was becoming less smooth, blades of ragged stone jutting out at every angle and threatening to slice my arms to shreds. It only got worse up ahead, the broken walls forming a knot of stone that was so tight I couldn’t see what lay beyond it.
“Dead end,” I said, shuddering to a halt. “There’s no way we’ll get past that.”
“Don’t stop,” Gary barked, as if by shouting the words he could somehow weaken the blockage ahead. I felt his hands on my legs, pinching and pushing, and I could picture his fat lips sucking down all the air. It was all I could do not to lash out, kick him until he wasn’t breathing anymore, but instead I opened my mouth and flooded my lungs with oxygen until the panic had gone. Then I shuffled onward, praying we’d be able to find a way through.
I don’
t know if anything heard me. I can’t see how. I mean, we were crawling through a stone coffin with more than a mile of solid rock and a hell of a lot more worthy prayers above our heads. But when we reached the knot I saw that it wasn’t as tight as I’d first thought. The tunnel was blocked by a shard of stone hanging from the ceiling like a guillotine blade, and a short distance past that was a solid mound that rose from the floor. If they’d been any closer together, then we would have rotted right there, but it looked like there was just enough room to weasel past.
I pushed my head beneath the blade, its unforgiving edge scraping the hair from my skull and gouging its mark along my neck. I pushed hard with my feet, yelling in pain as I wrapped my arms around the mound and pulled myself up. For a moment I thought the angle was too much, that my spine would just snap, but then I squeezed my bony backside through the gap and was free.
To my utter relief the tunnel seemed to have widened out on this side of the knot, and as Gary’s head emerged from the twisted rock I saw why. The throat had opened up into a cavern, so big that the writhing helmet lamp failed to illuminate a floor, a ceiling, or even the walls. It was like we’d emerged in deepest, darkest space, with only a crumbling ledge between us and infinity.
“Give me a hand,” wheezed Gary, his words close to cries of distress. “I’m stuck.”
It would have been so easy to leave him there, caught fast in a bear trap of solid stone, to steal the helmet and just run. Only I could hear Zee’s frantic cries squeezed from the tunnel, begging us to hurry up. I knelt and grabbed Gary’s trembling arms, feeling the hot, sticky sheen of blood on his skin. He burst free with such comical speed that I swore I could hear a pop. His momentum caught me off guard and together we tumbled down a slope and crunched to a halt on the cavern floor.
I was the lucky one, landing on Gary’s chest so hard that a fountain of blood arced up from his lips, silhouetted against the flickering light. He coughed wetly then shoved me off, groaning as he sat up.
“Did that … on purpose,” he said, but the words carried none of their usual force. Gary was a tank, but something bad had happened inside him. You couldn’t bleed like that and still have all your guts intact.
“You okay?” I asked. He looked up at me, his face barely visible beneath the lamp on his helmet, and his expression seemed like one of surprise.
“Gonna be,” he said eventually. “Gonna be fine, soon as we get out of here.”
“Guys,” came a voice from above our heads, further up than I thought. “How’d you get down there? I can’t see anything.”
“We rolled,” I suggested.
“Rolled?” echoed Zee. I could hear him muttering as he tried to scramble down the slope. There was a clatter of stones on the floor, followed by a squawk as he fell. He staggered, then found his feet, chuckling with relief. “Thank Christ we made it out of there. I thought I was gonna die with Gary’s butt in my face. Hey, man, you all right?”
Gary snorted, and I wondered if it had been a laugh. He wiped his hand across his mouth, giving himself a bandanna of blood, then tried to stand. It took him a couple of attempts, and by the time he was upright he was swaying and panting equally hard.
“Just took a few hits, that’s all. Not the first time I’ve had the crap beaten out of me. That river was a pansy compared to my old man.”
Zee and I exchanged a look that neither of us could really interpret, then turned our eyes in the direction of Gary’s beam. The darkness in the cavern was so profound that it seemed to devour the sickly light before it could travel more than a couple of meters. But every now and again as it swept across the floor the golden edge of a stalagmite would rise up from the shadows before fading as the search continued.
“You reckon there’s a way out from here?” said Zee, helping me to my feet. I didn’t dignify his stupid question with an answer, just followed Gary as he set off across the cavern. Each step we took echoed from the ceiling—God only knew how far above our heads—the muffled sound like the patter of giant raindrops. It was enough to make me smile, until I realized there was something wrong with the sound.
“Stop a minute,” I whispered, halting and grabbing Gary’s shirt to make sure he did the same. I felt Zee’s hand on my shoulder, but despite the fact we were all as silent and still as the stone pillars around us the sound of footsteps didn’t recede. There was the distinct slap of bare feet on wet rock, followed by its echo. Two steps, three, four, and then silence.
“What was that?” I asked, realizing that my question was as pointless as Zee’s.
“Probably just water dripping,” Zee suggested. “That’s how these things form, stalagmites and stalactites. I saw it on a documentary once with my mom and dad. Know how to remember the difference between the two?”
There was no answer except for the patter of light steps, faster this time, like someone running.
“That’s not water,” said Gary, turning and pointing the lamp behind us. The whole cave seemed to move as the beam swept around, shadows coming to life like beetles. More steps, off to the left, the clack of insect legs.
“There,” said Zee, pointing in the direction of the sound. “No, further over.”
The lamp lurched, picking out another needle of stone that rose from the floor nearby. Only this one had two silver eyes which reflected the light back at us like distant planets.
The shadow screamed, a vast wet maw opening in the misshapen lump where its head should be, then it lunged forward. In the split second before Gary ripped the light away I made out a body of glistening sinew, packed with muscles too large for its skin and stitched together like a rag doll. I assumed it was a dog, only it was pounding toward us on two feet and reaching its skeletal fingers out for our throats.
Then the darkness of the cavern washed over it, leaving only the relentless slap of its feet and the gargle of blood in its throat to let us know death was approaching.
DAYLIGHT
I MIGHT HAVE HAD A CHANCE, might have outrun the beast, if Gary hadn’t decided to use me as bait. For an instant the light blazed, brighter than ever, and I felt rough hands on my chest shoving me backward. Then the boundless night reasserted itself and I floundered on the uneven ground, bouncing off a shape that loomed up before me and caused us both to trip hard.
I thought it was the creature, and expected to feel teeth in my neck, filthy claws in my skin. Lashing out, I caught it on the jaw with my palm, heard a choked cry.
“Alex, it’s me!”
Zee, his hands held up to his face to guard against my blows. I put my fists to better use, pushing myself off the wet stone and helping him get to his feet. The footsteps were so close I could feel them, the tremor traveling up my shins, and I was almost grateful that Gary was now so distant that only the merest flicker of yellow light remained—it meant I couldn’t see the nightmare at our heels.
“Run!” I yelled, although it was hardly necessary. Zee was already ahead of me, nothing but smoke against shadow, his guttural breathing the only thing giving him away.
I managed to run too, sprinting across the cavern even though my legs felt like they’d been broken in a million places. It’s funny how much strength the human body can find when it’s really pushed, and there’s nothing like the fear of a grotesque monster breathing down your neck to help you reach your full potential.
I’d only taken a dozen strides when I struck something on the floor beneath me. I cried out, more in shock than in pain, feeling the cavern spin as I cartwheeled over the broken rock.
It was on me before I could pick myself up—a skid of feet, then fingers like iron on my chest. It screamed, a shriek of triumph that pierced my ears and my heart, a fog of sickening breath smothering me like a net. I tried to think, tried to pull my arms free, tried to fight it, tried to do anything other than wait for it to take my life. But the truth is I was too scared to move, too scared to breathe, too scared to think. I lay there as motionless and silent as if it had already killed me.
; I’m not sure what happened next. I could hear more feet pounding toward me, surely too quickly to be human. I heard a crack right above my head and the dead weight lifted. There was a shout, another scream, the scuffling of cloth on rock and the dull thump of fist on flesh, snarling, spitting, then incredibly a voice seeming to rise from the confusion.
“Go,” it said, the sound of sandpaper on wood. “There isn’t much time, get up and run.”
I didn’t need to be told again. I heaved my aching body off the ground and staggered blindly away, not caring where I was going so long as the madness was behind me. There was another crunch, this time followed by a pitiful groan, then I felt hands on my arms again, wrenching my body around, the grip so hot I could feel the sting even through my overalls. They twisted me to my left then pushed me forward.
“This way,” said the voice, a whisper that nevertheless seemed to make the air tremble. “Watch your feet.”
I lifted my leg high, feeling a rock graze the bottom of my foot. There was a chilling shriek from behind me, followed by another, and the arms pushed with more urgency, guiding me around a stalagmite that I could never have seen.
“Who are you?” I asked between gasped breaths.
“It doesn’t matter. You need to go.”
“But why are—” I stopped as we rounded a corner and a light came into view, so insubstantial that it looked like the last scraps of a morning mist. The pressure on my arms vanished, leaving only the memory of its touch, and I turned to see my guide. But he was already retreating, his body blurring into what looked like a starry sky.
Except the glinting sparks I saw before me weren’t stars. They were the demonic eyes of a dozen creatures tearing this way.