Chapter 25
Itry to shift backward, to ask Tessa if she’s up for crawling under a colony of sleeping bats, or if she’d rather retrace our steps and find another way over the mountain to the other cave systems. But the ground is wet here, and I slip on something slick underfoot, sending loose rocks rolling loudly into the cave ahead, gaining momentum as they barrel downhill.
Before I can tell Tessa to run, the bats burst into startled flight, a dense cloud of strongly-scented fur and wings barreling straight toward us.
“Get down!” I reach for her as I drop into a crouched position, pulling her to the cave floor beside me, but I’m too late.
“Hair! Hair! They’re in my hair,” she screams, her eyes squeezed shut as her hands flap frantically around her head.
I reach out, lifting a heavy section of hair on her right side, setting two small, panicked-looking bats free. Their eyes are round and terrified in the glare of my headlamp before they race to join the rest of the fleeing colony. The rational part of my brain understands that the bats are every bit as terrified as we are and only want to fly away to safety.
The irrational part of me can’t think of anything except how damned creepy they look with their fangs, squashed faces, and horror-movie wings.
“Another one,” Tessa shouts, her voice trembling with terror. “Oh my God, it’s on my neck, Wes. I can feel it!”
I shift forward, hoping to gather her abundant hair in my right hand and shoo any bats still underneath away with my left, but my feet slip again.
I fall flat on my belly with an “oof,” and start sliding, gaining momentum fast on the smooth stones. My hands scrabble on the cave floor, but the slick mess beneath me makes it impossible to find purchase.
Only, it’s not a mess.
It’s shit. Bat shit.
The realization hits and I lift my hands with a gagging sound, but that only speeds my fall. Worse, it turns out to be pointless. My palms are already coated with the stuff, frustrating my attempts to grab onto the cave wall. My fingers slide off one stone, then another and another.
By the time I hit open air and start to fall, I’ve gathered an impressive amount of momentum.
I have a split second to see the roof of the cave illuminated in my headlamp before I hit the ground again—hard—knocking the lamp from my head and plunging me into darkness.
I try to suck in a breath, but the wind has been knocked from my chest. I hear Tessa screaming my name, but I can’t call back to tell her I’m okay. All I can do is writhe on the ground, my bruised body aching as I wait for my lungs to remember how to pull in air.
Finally, I’m able to cough, gasp, and call out, “I’m here! Down here. Be careful, the cave floor is crazy slick.”
“Oh my God, oh my God. Thank God,” I hear Tessa sob from what sounds like a great distance, way farther than I could have fallen in just a few seconds.
Or, at least, I hope that’s true. I suppose that last drop could have been longer than I thought. I can’t see anything right now. Without my headlamp, the cave is pitch black, like the bottom of the sea.
I shiver, feeling like an idiot for getting myself—and Tessa—into this mess. I’m a lawyer, for fuck’s sake, not a professional spelunker.
Swiping my filthy hands on my hiking pants, I sit up, wincing as pain flashes through my hip and up the left side of my back, but nothing’s broken. I’m just a little bruised. The only thing truly wounded is my pride.
But I’m not sure about Tessa…
“Were you bitten?” I call out, heart racing in the darkness as I fumble around on the thankfully clean rocks beneath me, searching for my headlamp.
“No, I don’t think so,” Tessa says, her voice closer now. “But my adrenaline is pumping so hard, I’m not sure I’d feel it if I had been. I’m pretty sure we’re both going to need rabies shots, though. Just in case. I’m seeing an emergency room trip in our future.”
I wince. “I’m sorry, Tessa. So fucking sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. This is as much my fault as yours. I’m almost forty years old, I should know better than to go climbing around in caves pretending I’m Indiana Jones.” Suddenly, a beam of light appears above me, slanting across the top of the pit. Before I can call out to warn her again, Tessa says, “Are you down there?”
“Yes,” I reply. “Be careful. It’s deeper than I realized.”
“Okay.” Her light tips down. I wince, shielding my eyes for a beat before she shifts the beam to my right. “Sorry. Are you sure you’re not hurt?”
I do another quick body scan, then shake my head. “No. Just a little bruised.”
She sighs. “Well, that’s good at least. Think you can crawl out? If I keep the light on the side of the wall so you can see the rocks? It looks like there are some decent footholds and…” She trails off with a soft gasp. “Wes, look!”
I glance down, scanning the circle of illumination around me. “Do you see my headlamp?”
“No, look! There!”
I turn again. “I can’t see where you’re pointing. All I can see is the glow of the light.”
“About four feet behind you and a little to your left,” she says, the excitement in her voice making my stomach tighten. “There, can you see it now?”
She shifts the beam slightly, until it centers on a small pile of rocks. The stones are arranged in a pyramid shape that reaches nearly to my knees, and clearly aren’t something that occurred naturally. Someone stacked them that way.
And why would someone do that here, at the bottom of a pit, halfway through a cave unless…
“Should I see what’s under there?” I ask.
The words are barely out of my mouth before Tessa hisses, “Yes, but be careful. If you feel any cursed vibes, stop right away.”
My lips twitching, I ask, “What do cursed vibes feel like?”
“You’ll know them when you feel them,” she says. “Just take it slow. And maybe say a Hail Mary or something before you start.”
I glance up at her, squinting into the light.
“I don’t know,” she says. “That’s supposed to help in times of need, right? Sorry, I was a really bad Catholic. My mom only made me go until I was eight. Then she got into a fight with the priest about birth control and we never went back. He apparently didn’t think I should be an only child, but she very much did. I did, too, honestly. My mom’s a good person, but she shouldn’t have been a mom. It was obvious to me, even as a kid, that she didn’t enjoy children.”
My brow furrows. “I’m sorry. That sucks.”
“It’s okay. We get along much better now that I’m a grown-up and give her space. And I don’t take it personally. At least, not anymore. Some people just aren’t maternal.” She exhales. “Now, are you going to see what’s under there or not? The suspense is killing me.”
Pulling in a bracing breath, I nod. “Yeah. On it. Let’s see if we can find my headlamp first, though. I’ll be able to see what’s going on under there better if I have more light. Can you scan the floor for me?”
“Sure thing,” she says, slowly guiding the light around the rest of the small depression until it lands on my headlamp. “There. See it?”
“Yeah, thanks.” Wiping my hands on my pants again, I reach for it, positioning it on my head, almost gagging again at the smell lingering on my fingers.
As far as shit goes, it isn’t awful—more of a musty, ammonia-tinged scent—but I’ve never wanted a wet wipe as much as I want one now. I have hand sanitizer in my pack, but it won’t do anything to clean the actual filth from my skin and there wasn’t a single body of water between here and the campsite. I’ll just have to deal with my stink until we get back to the camper.
Holding my breath to ease my gag reflex, I move back toward the stones, pausing to study them in the brighter light of my own lamp. There’s no dust or anything down here in the cave, nothing to hint at how long ago these stones might have been gathered.
They don’t look like something that’s been lying in wait for over a hundred years, but I can’t know for sure. Time passes in strange ways inside caves and underground. It’s why so many archeological finds are discovered in places like this, places protected from the elements that damage artifacts left in the open air.
“Any bad vibes?” Tessa asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t think so.” I reach for the stone on top, letting my fingers linger on the rough edges for a beat before I shift it gently to one side.
“Still good?” she asks again, making me laugh. “Sorry, I’m excited. If we actually find something, we only have to feel half as embarrassed about getting scared by bats and covered in poop.”
I glance up at her over my shoulder. “Shit? Did you fall in the shit, too?”
“Oh yeah. Covered in the stuff,” she says. “But on the upside, I caught myself before I came sliding into the hole after you. And I found your phone when I fell.”
My brows shoot up as I touch my pants, realizing my cell isn’t tucked into my back pocket where it usually is.
“Don’t worry, it’s fine,” she says. “I mean, it’s filthy, but not broken.”
My shoulders relax. “Good. Thanks.”
“No problem.” She makes a disgusted sound I feel at the back of my throat. “I think we’re going to need showers before the emergency room. Surely, as long as we get the shots sometime tonight, we’ll be fine, right? Do they still make you get a circle of rabies shots in your stomach? Or is that an urban legend?”
“I’m not sure,” I say, turning back to the stones. “But I can look it up on my phone once we have cell service. I had two bars for most of our ride.”
“Good idea,” she says as I begin to dismantle the pile in earnest, shifting larger and larger rocks to one side. “I should have brought my phone, but it wouldn’t have done us much good. Since Freya unplugged the charger last night.” She makes a worried sound. “I hope she’s okay. And won’t be too mad at us for showing up stinking of bat poop and then leaving again. But I can’t take a ferret to the emergency room, not even on a leash. Sorry, I know I’m babbling. I’m just nervous. Logically, I know this isn’t the part of the movie where the intrepid adventurers make the mistake of continuing to pursue the treasure, even after they should have run away—we’re not in a movie; this is real life—but my gut is screaming that we’re about to be attacked by hungry outlaw ghosts.”
I grunt, not wanting to admit out loud that I’m feeling the same way. Instead, I ask, “What would outlaw ghosts be hungry for?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “But it wouldn’t be something we’d be keen on giving them. Probably our blood or our souls. Maybe the skin on our faces. I have an irrational fear of losing the skin on my face.”
“I think that’s a perfectly rational fear. It would be really unpleasant to live without skin on any part of your body, especially your face,” I say, my pulse picking up as I near the bottom of the pile, and something dark gray and smoother than the stones comes into view.
I move faster, depositing the rest of the rocks in the new pile as Tessa asks, “What is it? Is there something there?”
I take a beat, catching my breath before I shift to one side, letting her headlamp beam fall on what we’ve discovered.
She sucks in a breath. “Am I crazy or is that an antique lockbox?”
I smile. “You’re not crazy. I think we might have just found Butch Cassidy’s long-lost treasure.”
Tessa emits a soft squeal that makes me laugh. “Should we open it? Or take it outside first? I’m putting on a brave face, but honestly, I’m ready to get back out into the sun, where me and the bats have more room to stay away from each other than we do down here.”
I try pushing the buttons on the front of the box, but they’re rusty with age and the lid remains firmly closed. “I can’t open it. It’s either stuck or we need some kind of combination. I’ll put it in my pack and we can work on it later.”
“Sounds good,” she says, squealing softly again as I slide my backpack off my shoulders and angle the large rectangular box inside. It’s made of some kind of iron and isn’t light by any means, but I think the nylon fabric will hold long enough for us to get back to camp. “Could be slipping in poop was the best thing that happened to us today!”
I zip my bag and slide the straps back on, grinning up at her as I start to climb. “As long as we don’t die of some kind of exotic poop-borne illness.”
She makes a gagging sound. “Oh God, I didn’t think of that. We should research that first. First, bat poop illnesses. Then the protocol for rabies shots.”
“Sounds good,” I grunt, pulling myself up the wall, wincing as my bruised hip twinges in protest.
“Actually, you have bars down here,” Tessa says from above me. “Crazy. What’s your passcode? I’ll start googling while you climb.”
“Five, four, three, two, one,” I tell her, earning a judgmental huff I deserve.
“Yeah, you’re going to have to change that,” she mutters. “A passcode like that is a good way to…” She trails off, going so silent that I call out after a moment, “You okay up there?”
“I’m fine,” she says, but her voice is tighter than it was before, all the fun, and even the anxiety, gone out of it.
I want to tell her that she doesn’t sound fine, but I’m currently using all my strength to cling to one rock while finding a foothold higher up the wall. The next few minutes pass in almost eerie silence, building the anxiety swelling in my chest. By the time I pull myself over the edge, I half expect Tessa to be gone, stolen away by those hungry ghosts she was worried about.
But she’s crouched a few feet back from the edge of the pit, my phone in hand.
As I emerge, she looks up, her wounded features illuminated by the blue light as she asks, “So, were you going to tell me that Darcy texted you and we were fine to go home? Or were you going to lie about that, too?”