Texas Gothic

24



i felt around for my flashlight, promising myself that when I got out of this—however I got out of this—I would indulge in an almighty freak-out about the fact that I was covered in bat crap. But for now I’d be thankful it had broken my fall.

Turning on the light helped. Knowing your situation, even when it sucked, was better than not. I was in a cave of reasonable size. One section seemed to go deeper into the ground, though I couldn’t tell how far because stalactites—or stalagmites, I could never remember which—blocked my view. I was not at all inclined to investigate, because that would mean crawling on my belly into places where neurotic control freaks were never meant to go.

In central Texas, school field trips to the big tourist caves are a requisite. Inner Space, Natural Bridge, Longhorn Caverns … limestone caves riddle the hills—big, little; dry, active; open, closed—and I knew from helpful docents—not just from Ben McCulloch—that sinkholes do open up now and then.

This one, judging by the pile of guano, had been there for a while. It only felt as though I’d been swallowed by the earth. Really I had just, literally, leapt before I looked.

The slope I’d slid down was way too steep to climb. The mouth of the cave was a flat oval with an overhang, ten feet or so above my reaching fingers. A few fluttering black shapes clung to it; it was probably solid with bats during the daytime.

I had nothing against bats. They ate bugs and were good for the ecology. I just didn’t want to be there when they got back.

Get a grip, Amy. You’re going to get out of here. It’s a bat cave, not the Grand Canyon.

And this wasn’t the Dark Ages, either. The solution, once I’d calmed down, was simple. I wiped my hands on a tiny clean spot on my shirt and fished my phone from my pocket with two fingers. There was not enough Purell in the world to make me happy just then.

Phin did not answer her phone.

“Dammit, Phin!” My shout scared the last of the bats away.

Habitually not answering her phone was annoying. Ignoring it while we were in the middle of a mystery was infuriating. Shouldn’t she be getting the heebie-jeebies about now?

I thumbed through my recent connections, hoping I’d phoned Mark or vice versa. But there was only one recent call that didn’t have a name attached to it, and I knew exactly who it was.

Would I rather die a slow, lingering death and be found by archaeologists someday, buried in petrified bat crap? Was that seriously worse than calling Ben McCulloch for help?

I swallowed my pride and hit “dial.” He answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

That pride stuck in my craw when I remembered he was on a date with Caitlin. My night just kept getting worse.

“Hello?” he repeated. “Amy, is that you?”

“Yes.” Where to begin? “I don’t suppose you have a rope in your truck.”

“A rope? What kind of rope?”

“About fifteen feet long? Strong enough to hold, um—” I rounded up generously for safety. “—a hundred and twenty-five pounds?”

Over the phone, I heard a car door opening and closing with a slam. “Stop being coy. Where are you?”

I leaned my head against the stone wall. “Other than down a very deep hole, I don’t really know.”

After a pause—I didn’t even try to interpret it, because I was miserable enough—he said, “Does that phone have GPS on it?”

“Yeah. I think so. It finds the nearest Starbucks for me, so it must, right?”

Another pause, and this one I could interpret. “I can’t believe your aunt said you were her smartest niece.”

“She must have been talking about Phin.”

“God help your family, then.” I heard the gruff growl of his truck starting up. “Hang up, then find your position with your phone. You should be able to send it to me in a text, and I’ll put the coordinates into the GPS in my pickup.”

“I can do that.”

“Of course you can. It’s not rocket science.”

I decided to forgive him for being a jackass, because the spark of annoyance warmed my insides, which had gone cold with worry. “I’m in town,” he said, “but I’ll be there soon. You’re not hurt, are you?”

“Only my delicate sensibilities.”

I must not have sounded as resilient as I intended, because his reply was firmly reassuring. “Just sit tight, Amy. It’ll be all right.”

I accepted his word for it and tried not to think about snakes. Or rabies. Or suffocating from the methane fumes from the guano.

After sending him my location, I turned off the flashlight to save the battery. It was very, very dark, with the overhang blocking out any stars or moonlight. The damp crept into my skin and made my tired joints ache.

I closed my eyes to pretend I wasn’t down a deep, black hole. It was a horrible feeling to just … sit there. Waiting on help. Maybe this control-freak thing wasn’t working out for me as well as I thought. Especially since I had lost so much control over my life.

Time stretched interminably, then snapped back as the sound of tires on rocky ground and the rumbling chug of a diesel pickup truck shook me out of self-pity. Ben must not have been very far away. He may not have liked me, but I never doubted he would come for me.

I opened my eyes and reached for my flashlight to signal him, but something jolted my hand. The unseen force knocked the light from my fingers, and it clanged against the rock.

Heart slamming against my ribs, I swung around, putting my back to the wall so nothing could sneak up on me in the pitch dark.

Only it wasn’t pitch dark anymore. The inky blackness lightened until I could see the shadow of my hand in front of me. Then the shape of my fingers, then the lines of my palm, bathed in a cold glow that was the color of moonlight where moonlight couldn’t reach.

A faint breeze, like a frigid breath on the back of my neck, stirred my hair. I could smell leather and metal and damp stone as the cave floor pooled with icy fog, cold creeping up from the earth.

The air, as always, stung my throat and lungs, and I took shallow breaths, even though fear said to grab deep gasps so I could fight, or run.

Where could I run? The specter gathered in front of me, mist and light pulled together. I wanted to change what happened next, but I couldn’t look away from its dark eyes and gasping mouth. He raised his arm, grasping, and the cold rooted at my heart spread through me like a vine of ice choking off my air.

One thing was different. Nonsense sounds wove through the blood rushing in my ears. They grew louder and louder in my skull, ricocheting around like bell peals in a church tower. I stumbled, fell back against the cave wall with a grunt, pushing out the last of my breath.

The panicked gallop of my pulse had become a lurching stumble. I was going to die in this hole, and no one was ever going to find me. I knew it with a certainty.

Tears blurred the pale figure of the ghost; it ran like a chalk painting in the rain. The tears were for my mother, who wouldn’t know what happened to me.

The sob of fear and fury was for me. I was so scared and so pissed.

Only the wall kept me on my feet. My vision was nothing but pinpricks as I raised a trembling hand, fingers outspread, warding off the cold that the specter had brought with him from beyond the veil of death.

And the ghost vanished, leaving the cave so black and silent, I thought for a moment I had died. That this was now my grave.

But I could feel my aching lungs taking gasping breaths, and hear my heart, pounding but steady. The air was warming slowly to a normal cavelike chill.

Where had the specter gone? And why?

In the restored quiet, the nonsense syllables that had rattled my brain settled into a pattern in my mind. Not nonsense at all, but a foreign word.

Cuidado. Cuidado.

Be careful.

Was it a warning or a threat?