Chapter 31 - The Girl in Green

In the dark, back against the wall of a small hole in the cave, I picked up the knife. I ran my hand along the walls of the nook searching for and finding a relatively smooth surface. I scratched my name.

I moved my hand four or five inches down.

I scratched Ava on the side of the cave. I had never asked for her last name.

D for dead.

Madison—D.

My fingers needed the task. I needed something to do, something that felt useful, because if I didn’t put my full attention into something useful with my hands, my mind would return to the monster, and I’d start screaming.

G-L Sims—D.

Her medical records said she’d died of misadventure. I had to imagine misadventure meant that someone had thrown her down here to face the monster. Alone, barefoot, missing a chunk of her brain.

The monster had eaten her.

And then, the monster had taken her face.

Dr. Jacobsen had said the green lady of myth lured people in by assuming the form of a sad girl and begging for help.

No one was more pathetic and helpless than Gay-Lynne Sims.

A perfect form to copy.

I heard a small whimper echo through the tunnel, and I realized that it was me. I was crying. I bit my lower lip, held it tightly between my teeth to make the noise stop.

I needed to leave a record on the wall.

Layla—D?

I put a question mark because I didn’t know if she was alive or not.

I shined the light on the wall, and next to where I’d scrawled my name, I put a question mark.

Jess—?

I barked a bitter laugh at my own joke, a joke that no one would ever understand if they found my writing on the wall of the cave. My laugh echoed through the cave. I straightened, listening for the sound of my own voice coming back to me. Was it my voice?

But I didn’t trust my own voice anymore.

I’d heard Madison, wait! echoing back to me over and over. Over and over and over.

Madison. I’d had such big plans of wading across the pool with her, carrying her down the mountain, but the mountain had claimed her, hadn’t it?

My voice had killed her.

No, that wasn’t right.

The mountain wanted her.

Dr. Jacobsen said Fortis, the name on all the gravestones, wasn’t a name. It meant “strong” in Latin. Well, Madison had been strong, and what did that get her?

I hadn’t been strong. I’d hidden, and I hadn’t taken my shot at the thing when I had the chance. I’d seen it move, a blur of focused motion. I knew I would never have the chance to stab it.

Too fast.

I had to keep hiding.

I had to get out.

I should have kept running while it was eating Madison, should have made my way down the tunnel and the infernal stink of death, holding my nose until I reached the freedom beyond.

Assuming that the tunnel led somewhere. If Coach Mullins had told the truth about their plan to trap the monster in the mountain, chances were that tunnel had been blocked long ago.

And what now?

Should I head back up through the hospital, with its dim lighting and smooth walls and nowhere to hide from the thing that had called out with my own voice, hoping against hope that Barlow or Kenzie had opened the iron door to the incinerator?

And what if the door was still closed?

No. I needed to keep going, to find that mythical secret passage through the cave, to patiently explore every avenue in the dark—but what if there was nothing? What if they’d already closed all the avenues of escape?

I was so tired. My feet hurt. My head hurt. The thought of Madison was a hole in the center of my chest. We’d held hands in the dark, feeling our way together, promising each other silently that we would see it through to the end together and now she was gone, and I’d done nothing to help her.

And I’d survived.

For a while. If I died here, no one would know that I had my chance to be strong and I’d hidden, knife in hand. That I’d let the monster take Madison.

I had no sense of the passage of time. Maybe it had been minutes since I ran from the horrific scene. Maybe it had been hours. My head seemed to have cleared the last of the drug, and that as much as anything was a sign that I’d been down here a while.

The longer I spent alone in the dark, the more confused and lost I felt. I grabbed the knife and started to get to my feet when I heard a noise.

It wasn’t my own voice echoing down the passage.

It was a different sound, but one I understood instantly. I’d heard it before, on the video Ava had taken before her death. It was a low, uneven dragging noise. Step step, pull, step step, pull, step step, pull . . .

The thing was dragging Madison back to its lair near the bottom of the tunnel. My stomach lurched at the sound, and I clasped a hand over my mouth to keep from crying out.

I pulled farther back into the hole and stayed perfectly still, all my muscles tensed as the monster dragged Madison past a tunnel that connected to the side branch where I hid. In the pitch dark, the noise seemed louder and closer than it was. I stayed still until the noise receded and disappeared. The monster was now on the other side of the tunnel, blocking my escape down the mountain.

I’d lost my chance at escaping through the tunnel.

Now I had only one choice, and that was to find a way through the maze of cave passages. But I was too tired. I couldn’t face it. I leaned my head against the wall and drifted.

* * *

The water was an unnatural turquoise blue, lit from beneath. I stood at the water’s edge and looked down at the thousand moving lights in the water, glowing bioluminescent fish. Not fish, but some kind of strange spindly things without eyes, like crabs or spiders under the water.

I leaned over to get a closer look. A halo of mermaid hair swam up from the depths of the pool, blond and pin straight, floating in the water. I reached into the water and pulled a strand of that hair, but it wasn’t a mermaid that bobbed to the surface. It was the top half of Madison, ripped apart where the monster had bitten through her midsection. She turned her watery dead eyes to me with an accusative look.

“Madison, wait!” she said, in my voice.

I let go of Madison’s hair and watched as she drifted down toward the bottom of the pool, her lips mutely mouthing the words “Madison, wait!” as she descended.

* * *

I awoke with a start. Full dark. No idea where I was, I panicked. I reached for the bedside lamp and felt the cave wall. I reached down, found my flashlight, turned it on and then flipped it off again. The monster could follow the light. The monster could follow the noise.

How long had I been asleep?

The sound of feet echoed through the corridor.

The miner had returned on his tragic, doomed search for an escape. But it wasn’t the miner, was it?

It was the monster.

I had a knife.

Suddenly, after all this time, my fear was replaced by rage.

I picked up the knife and stood.

My knife hand was ready. I had to be ready to stab the thing. If I’d had this kind of resolve before, I could have saved Madison, or at least slowed the thing down.

A beam of light flashed around the corner, dim and reflected.

Could the thing mimic light?

I froze, and pulled against the wall, willing myself to blend in.

The light turned the corner, shining in my face and blinding me temporarily. I slashed out with my knife, willing it to hit the target.

“Whoa knife—big knife,” Barlow said.

There was a frantic shuffling in the tunnel, two people backing up as the light bounced around the small space.

Barlow.

I didn’t trust the sound of my own voice. It had betrayed me.

But I trusted Barlow. Every instinct told me that it was really him.

I dropped the knife and ran at Barlow, hitting him full force in a bear hug. He wrapped his arms around me and held me tightly. I melted into him, his broad chest against mine, my face nestled deep in his neck, inhaling his warmth, and I clung to him as if he was a product of my fevered imagination and might dissolve into nothingness if I ever let go. I didn’t deserve this rescue, and yet, here it was.

“You came back for me,” I said.

“Of course I did,” he whispered into my ear. “I couldn’t leave you down here.”

“How did you know?” I asked.

Had I been gone for days? For hours? I had no sense of the passage of time.

“Kenzie told me,” he said.

Kenzie. How I’d doubted her when she meekly followed Ms. Burton up the staircase to freedom. But Kenzie was smart. The only way to save us was to play along.

Us.

I choked back a sob for fear of the noise. My mouth closed tightly against her name.

Madison. It was too late.

Barlow pulled away reluctantly.

“I brought Soren with me,” Barlow said. “Safety in numbers.”

Soren stood behind Barlow, clutching a tiny flashlight in one hand and what looked like a closet rod in the other. He shined the light around the small space of the tunnel.

“Kenzie said Madison was with you,” he said. “Where is she?”

I looked at Barlow in the gloom and shook my head. His face told me what I needed to know. Barlow was here for me, but Soren was here for Madison.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Madison is dead.”

“What?”

Soren blinked in the gloom.

“What happened?” Barlow asked in a low whisper. He had one arm around my waist as though unwilling to break contact.

“She ran,” I began. “I tried to tell her not to, but she fell off of a cliff and then the monster got her. I couldn’t stop it.”

Soren trained his light on the writing I’d left on the wall, coming to rest on Madison’s name. I felt guilty for writing her name there, but I couldn’t say why.

“How can you be sure she’s dead?” Soren said.

“I know she’s dead,” I said. “I watched her die.” I didn’t want to relive that moment, much less tell Soren about watching the monster rip Madison in half.

“Where is she?” he demanded, his voice rising.

“Down in the main tunnel,” I said. “The monster took her there.”

Soren turned around and headed back the way we’d come. “We need to go there,” he said. “I need to find Madison.”

His voice was too loud in the small space.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Barlow said.

He reached for the back of Soren’s shirt, but Soren shrugged him off.

“We have to turn the lights out as much as we can,” I whispered. “And we need to stop talking. She follows sound.”

Barlow nodded.

I pulled away from Barlow and searched the floor for my knife. I gave Barlow the big flashlight.

For the first time all day, I thought I might survive.

Let the monster come.