Chapter 2
It looked like a gunshot wound in the earth.
There was something unsettling about how the cave blended into the hillside of mossy rocks and knuckled tree roots. Your eye
might pass over the shadowed cavity without registering its true depth. Even at a distance, Tess felt an exhaled coolness
on her skin.
“That’s it?”
“In all its glory.” Allie slid off her backpack. “What’d you expect?”
Tess wasn’t sure. Signage, maybe? The cave’s entrance looked too small, too cloistered, under sticks and dead leaves. To enter,
they would stoop under lichen-coated boulders and brush aside hanging green sprouts, as if trespassing into a witch’s lair.
The way Allie had described the Devil’s Staircase—also known as the Devil’s Stomach or the Devil’s Throat—Tess had envisioned
a majestic tunnel wide enough to drive a truck through. Not this.
“More like the Devil’s Butthole,” she said.
“I’m sorry, are you unimpressed?”
“I thought it’d be bigger.”
“It is, on the inside.”
“Is there a Minotaur?”
“Sadly, no. But plenty of bats and spiders.”
Tess found herself oddly fascinated by the darkness within.
Something about it looked like a special effect: a portal of absolute black on a bright morning.
A creature could be staring back at them from just a few feet in and it would be fully invisible.
A part of her was irrationally afraid to get any nearer—a hundred feet felt too close already—and just as irrationally, she dreaded the thought of turning her back to it.
The helmet she’d borrowed already felt like wearing a bucket, the interior chafing her sweaty scalp. It smelled like pine
and cinnamon. Probably Ethan’s cologne. She rubbed her arms. “These spiders. How big do they get?”
“Let’s focus on the positives.”
“Such as?”
“You’ll be happy to know there’s still cell signal out here.”
Tess had researched this already but played along and checked her phone anyway. Just a bar or two on her extended network.
Calls might be patchy, but it was certainly enough to contact 911. “As long as we’re outside the cave,” Tess clarified. “Right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Have they invented a phone that works underground?”
“Two hundred years ago,” Allie said. “It’s called a landline.”
“Funny.”
The forest felt prehistoric out here. There’d been no trailhead or parking lot; Allie had just pulled over and parked on the
edge of the dirt road at some unremarkable spot she’d mentally landmarked. Then they’d hiked for almost an hour on a primitive
horse trail over punishing switchbacks, a creek crossing, and acres of freshly logged wasteland stripped to bare soil. By
then Tess’s calves had burned and her throat was raw, but she’d kept pace with Allie.
Ever since they were teenagers, Tess had always been highly conscious of their different bodies and particularly their different skin.
Allie’s was tanned gold from hours of sun, always flecked with healing bruises and exotic insect bites from far-flung lands.
She had a white scar under her chin. Her left pinkie finger was broken once and couldn’t fully curl.
Her body was a record of every risk taken and lesson learned.
Tess envied it not because it was pristine but because it was so well used.
Tess’s skin was still new, soft, baby pale. Corpse-like in the winter months and instantly sunburned in the summer. When she
was a teenager, other kids called her Wednesday, after the goth daughter in the Addams family. She had a scar of her own,
too, but it was a monstrous one that embarrassed her. She wore clothing to conceal it: a massive red chemical burn stretching
down the entire length of her back, from collarbone to hip. Skin grafts had been unsuccessful, and it had been infected twice.
She’d had it since she was fourteen.
Allie exhaled. “Damn.”
“What?”
She pointed a quarter mile down the forested valley, to a parked Jeep camouflaged in the undergrowth. From this distance it
looked like a green toy car with a kayak atop its peeling roof. “I hate running into other groups,” she said.
“But it’s safer to have more people around, right?”
“Depends on the people.”
Allie studied the faraway vehicle for a moment longer but said nothing. She seemed reluctant to comment on the more troubling
fact: off-roading was prohibited out here, meaning whoever drove that vehicle was either an employee of the lumber company
or a trespasser.
“Let’s trog up,” she finally said.
Tess unzipped her backpack and slid a battery-powered LED headlamp over her forehead, purchased on . The elastic bands
squeezed her temples. She’d forgotten to wear wool socks as Allie had recommended and hoped she wouldn’t notice. She clipped
brand-new kneepads over her jeans, trying to act like she’d done this all before.
“Those are upside down,” Allie said.
Damn it. They were.
Tess double-checked her smaller essentials: water bottle, spare batteries, Swiss Army knife, and energy bars. She’d forgotten
to bring a wide-mouthed pee bottle, too. But they would be down there only a few hours, probably not long enough to worry
about that, and definitely not long enough to need Allie’s foil wrappers (burrito bags, she’d called them with a juvenile grin).
“You’ve got your big three, right?”
Tess patted her headlamp (“One”), her flashlight (“Two”), and her pack of emergency glowsticks (“Three”). Three sources of
light are the absolute, no-excuses minimum when venturing underground. Bulbs can crack, batteries can die, and flashlights
can be dropped into unreachable places. Without light, any cave can become deadly.
“Hold still.” Allie clicked something to the front of Tess’s helmet.
“What’s that?”
“To document the day’s adventure.” She already had one affixed to her own helmet, too: a rectangular GoPro camera with a beady
lens. “And in case we get murdered, the police will know exactly what happened to us.”
“I didn’t know you had two of these.”
“That one is Ethan’s. That’s why it fits your helmet.” Allie stuffed a sandwich bag containing a few spare memory cards into
her pocket. Then, digging deep into her pack, she untangled a spidery mess of black belts and buckles and held the knotted
thing out toward Tess. “Your harness,” she said. “For descents.”
Tess blinked. “Descents?”
“Yes.”
“Vertical descents?”
“Is that okay?”
“Yeah. I just figured it was a . . .” Tess tried to sound nonchalant. “A horizontal cave.”
The map she’d downloaded off the internet was hand drawn and two-dimensional. With no axis of depth, she’d assumed it was
a top-down overview, and maybe it was, but the idea of rappelling down a vertical crevasse deep underground, trusting her
fragile body to her own ropework, was a bit more extreme than she’d anticipated.
Ominously, different sections of the cave had been designated nicknames.
The Drainpipe.
Razor Alley.
The Chimney.
And deep within, something called Worse Than Death.
“Just like we practiced, you step into it.” Allie guided the loops around Tess’s right leg, then her left, and the harness
rode smoothly up to her hips. “Like hooking up to a zip line.”
She’d never zip-lined before.
“Or rock climbing.”
Nope. But Tess worked up a stoic smile. “Seriously, how big do these spiders get?”
“Big enough that they can’t sneak up on you.”
“I hate you.”
“You’ve got this.” Allie drew the belt tightly around Tess’s waist. “I know this is outside your comfort zone, and I’m happy
you’re doing it.”
“They say to do something every day that scares you. So, check.”
Allie held her smile, but her eyes dimmed with a faraway look. For an uneasy moment, her lip curled and she seemed on the
verge of tears.
Tess stopped. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
She scanned her best friend’s face, but Allie had always been a natural performer, skilled at controlling her emotions. Whatever
it was, she’d already buried it.
“Just something with Ethan.” Allie forced a shrug. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“Are you okay?”
“Later.”
“Did he—”
“Later. Please.” Allie pointed toward the cave. “I’m twenty-nine, and I’m alive, and I just want to forget the world and go on an
adventure with my best friend. Can we do that?”
Tess nodded, dry-mouthed.
Hearing her say it aloud—best friend—gave her a flicker of guilt. Allie was Tess’s best friend, sure, but Tess could count her friends on one hand; and she was
never quite certain if she was Allie’s. Allie seemed to have social contacts on every continent. She networked in her sleep.
For all their years of physical proximity, they’d never been truly close. Tess kept guarded with her secret anxieties, and
Allie was seemingly too perfect to have any. They mostly spoke in humor: Allie’s terrible puns versus Tess’s sarcasm. The
main thing they had in common was that they were both very good at making each other laugh. Making Allie explode with it—a
genuine belly laugh, her tendency to snort—was a little shot of dopamine to Tess. But it was never in question who was reaching
and who was settling, and in the years after high school their differences had only calcified. Letting a friendship die is
easy—all you have to do is nothing—and Tess sometimes wondered why Allie hadn’t yet done so.
Allie was already moving ahead, the subject purposefully changed. “They say this cave is a portal to Hell, you know. Witches used to gather here to consult with their upper management. Hence the name.”
The air grew noticeably cooler on approach. Allie’s voice already seemed different, slightly tinny, like the opening in the
earth swallowed sound.
Tess could feel her heartbeat in her neck, now accelerating.
It’ll go fine, she reminded herself.
As for the other word Allie had used—it had been a long time since Tess had done anything that could be considered an “adventure.”
Over various unfulfilling jobs at law firms working for high-functioning alcoholics, three years of evening law classes, and