Chapter 6
“What scared her?” Washington asks.
“Above us,” Tess says, “at the top of the Great Wall, the ledge where our rope was anchored . . . the ceiling seemed to glow.”
“From someone else’s flashlight?”
“Not exactly.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . .” Tess hesitates. “The glow was red.”
A sharp knock at the door.
The survivor jolts in her bed, but it’s just a nurse coming in to check vitals. Washington pauses her recorder and waits politely
as the woman logs Tess’s blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen levels. Her work finished, she smiles and ducks out.
The room feels a little colder now.
“Just this faint red glow. I don’t know how else to describe it.” Tess takes a breath and listens to the woman’s Crocs squeak
down the hall. “Whatever . . . whatever generated it must have been hovering just behind the cliff, just out of our view.
It was right at the edge of my perception, there but not there, like an optical illusion.”
Washington taps her pen against her thigh, a thoughtful tic.
In the late twentieth century, legend goes, Soviet engineers once tried to dig the deepest hole on Earth someplace under remote Siberia.
Nine miles down, their drill head broke through to an unexpected hollow cavity.
In this impossible space the unmanned apparatus measured a temperature of two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt cast iron.
Puzzled and curious, the engineers lowered a microphone and recorded several seconds of staticky audio: a chorus of wailing human screams. The cries of the damned, if you believe that sort of thing.
Washington sure doesn’t. “How long did this red glow last?”
“About five, ten seconds.”
“Then it faded?”
“It was so subtle, I honestly couldn’t say if it was ever really there at all or if I’d just imagined it because Allie saw
it first. I was creeped out, but I tried to act calm. We both stared up into the dark and waited for a few minutes, but it
never came back.”
“Did you want to leave the cave?”
“Honestly, yes.”
“Did you suggest it to Allie?”
She shakes her head.
“Why not?”
“I didn’t want her to think I was a coward.” Tess hesitates, reconsidering. “But the main reason . . . to turn around and
go back, we would have to go toward it.”
Washington nods. In effect, the bizarre sighting had cornered them.
She draws on her notepad and writes a new depth: 90 feet. According to the rescue team, the bottom of the fissure dubbed the Great Wall is approximately nine stories underground.
At this point, Tess and Allie were farther down than most of the New York City subway system, far beyond any radio or cell
signal, and now they were faced with a troubling dilemma—continue deeper underground, or face the unknown glow head-on?
“What did Allie think?”
“I’d never seen her scared before,” Tess says. “But I think she was more concerned than she was letting on. To make me feel better—and maybe herself, too—she climbed back up the rope to check it out, to see what it was.”
“She went alone?”
Tess sighs. “She was always the brave one.”
“There’s nothing up there,” Allie announced when she returned, tugging rope through her descender. “I didn’t mean to scare
you.”
Tess studied the space above.
“It was probably another group passing by,” she added. “Cavers bump into each other all the time. It can be spooky when you
see unexplained lights.”
“Why was it red?”
“Light dims as it bounces down tunnel walls.” Allie shrugged. “Or maybe for the first time in caving history, two people saw
the same bogey.”
“The same what?”
“A bogey. A cave hallucination.” She packed up her ropes and slings in her bag. “It’s normal for your eyes to play tricks on you down
here. Sooner or later, everyone in the group sees inexplicable things in the dark. So we just call them bogeys.”
“Everyone sees them?”
“Everyone.”
“How do you know they’re not real, then?”
“It’s a type of dissociative identity effect, I think. Spend enough time in darkness staring at deep pools of nothing, and
the part of your brain that recognizes faces and patterns goes haywire. Your mind insists on seeing something.”
Tess had heard of this before. The common, but poorly understood, psychological effect is what makes the Bloody Mary myth so enduring.
If you stare long enough at your reflection in a dimmed mirror, you’ll experience a similar thing.
The human brain isn’t designed to repeatedly receive the same information for a prolonged time.
After a few minutes, it’ll begin to misfire.
Some people see gruesome deformations in their own reflection; others see animal visages or dead family members or worse.
Allie claimed she’d seen her own face melt like clay.
For some reason, teenage Tess never saw anything in the mirror. No matter how long she waited, she saw only her own unimpressed
face, underlit by wavering candlelight.
Maybe you’re already a monster, Allie had teased.
Tess always was the best Changeling, after all.
As they ventured deeper their surroundings changed. The rock surfaces were smoother and cleaner down here, rippled with wavelike
patterns. Some were sculpted into surreal curtains and frozen waterfalls, reminding her of melted candle wax or even hardened
snot. This alien material was red brown in some places, sulfurous yellow in others (“Flowstone,” Allie called it). In a shallow
pool of clear water, she pointed out clusters of pale white orbs resembling amphibian eggs (“Cave pearls,” she said). The
stalactites and stalagmites were growing larger, too—some joined into columns as thick as tree trunks. The two women sidestepped
between them, like they were exploring an underground forest.
“I have a surprise for you farther down,” Allie said, shifting her pack to fit through. “When you go deep enough underground,
the laws of physics don’t quite work.”
“How so?”
She flashed a devilish smile. “It’s a surprise.”
The strangeness of this environment unsettled Tess. It was all dead rock, but somehow it was also alive in a perverted way,
always changing, silently twisting and rearranging itself in the dark, only freeze-framed by their lights.
“Now I need to know what this surprise is.”
“Be patient.”
“Am I being murdered?”
“Don’t give me ideas.”
The walls, too, were studded with strange, warty nodules. They looked oddly painful to Tess, like hives or blisters. She was
afraid to touch them. This speleological formation, according to Allie, was called cave popcorn.
“Or cave syphilis, if you prefer.”
“Gross.”
“Good luck unseeing it now.”
Even this far into the underworld, there were still faint signs of human exploration. Anchor bolts glimmered in the rock faces,
but much rustier than the ones on the Great Wall. Decades older, maybe. Tess wasn’t sure she would trust her weight to them.
On the sandy sediment floor, her headlamp found silver energy bar wrappers and corroded aluminum cans, but now the cans were
much older. She realized she hadn’t seen that particular Pepsi logo since she was a child. There it was on the ground, as
if manifested into existence.
“If everyone sees bogeys in caves,” she said, “what have you seen?”
“If I focus my eyes for a while?” Allie shrugged. “I’ll see something like a light show. Colors melting together like a big
churning cauldron of paint.”
Tess had never tried staring into the darkness before. Not consciously. She wondered what she would see if she kept looking.
“Sometimes,” Allie continued, creeping behind her, “I think I can see reaching appendages in the dark. Like something big and intelligent is right in front of me, just out of sight. If I had a night vision camera, I’d see it.
But I don’t. So I can only sense its form.
It’s a shadow of a shadow, always a few inches beyond my perception, and I can’t hear it or touch it.
The closer I step toward it, the farther it shrinks away, like our cautious little dance. ”
Tess felt breath on the back of her neck. “You’re trying to scare me again.”
“Is it working?”
She ignored her and stooped under low stalactites, accidentally scraping Ethan’s expensive helmet anyway, and tried to visualize
ten stories of solid earth overhead. All those millions of tons of bedrock and boulders and dirt, densely compacted. No wonder
phones and radios didn’t work down here. And every step took them deeper.
Allie helped her navigate a sharp drop. “It’s good to reconnect, Tess.”
“It is.”
“I feel like I don’t know you anymore. Like we’ve become strangers.”
Tess avoided eye contact. “Life is busy.”
“It’s also short.”
“You’re in a reflective mood.”
“Yes.” Allie smiled sadly, studying the way ahead. “I am.”
Tess thought about the two GoPro cameras silently recording on their helmets and her best friend’s macabre joke: In case we get murdered.
An odd thing to say, given the circumstances.
There were many things about Tess’s life that Allie (hopefully) didn’t know, and she had to assume the same was true of Allie’s.
If good fences make good neighbors, the same must be true of friendships.
Two weeks ago, Allie flew to Costa Rica on what was supposed to be a ten-day trip, but on day five, she’d inexplicably called Tess early in the morning and asked for her help in organizing a last-minute flight home from the nearest international airport in Liberia.
Her voice had sounded scratchy and congested, like she’d been crying.
Whatever had happened was somehow worse than the viper bite in Mexico, the time she’d literally died.
What could scare Allie Merritt worse than death?
She’d never told Tess. She never wrote the contracted pieces, either, which surely burned a few bridges with her sponsors.
All of it—Allie’s mysterious incident in Costa Rica, her recent trouble with her boyfriend—felt connected somehow. Maybe true
friends would’ve readily spilled their guts to each other, but theirs was a more complex and guarded relationship. Tess couldn’t
ask directly, so she dropped his name to see what she said: “If Ethan is our surface watch, he knows exactly where we are,
right?”
“He’d be a crappy surface watch if he didn’t.”
Just more jokes, smirking half-answers, their shared language. Allie had never been easy to read. Tess was getting frustrated.
And what aren’t you telling me?
On the way down their headlamps illuminated the final graffiti at the lowest depth, spray-painted by the most intrepid vandal:
a faded red pentagram.
“This is where we usually sacrifice a goat,” Allie said.
“Bummer we didn’t bring one.”
That wicked smile again. “Why do you think you’re here, Tess?”