Texas Gothic

40



my heart tapped out a Morse code of tight, trapped panic. I might have fulfilled my duty to the ghost, but I’d still be linked with him forever, because my bones would lie with his for eternity.

And Ben’s. I could feel his breath on my neck, stirring my hair. A strand tickled my nose, and my legs began to cramp. I ached to move but any scrape of rock would echo through the cave and give away our position.

The voices became clearer as they rose in frustration and anger. Definitely not Phin and the state troopers, but Sparks and Kelly.

“They’re searching for us,” Ben whispered against my ear. “We must have left a trail like a wounded buffalo.”

I could feel his fight-or-flight tension, but there wasn’t room for fight and there wasn’t any place to go.

And then I heard a rustle, something I’d never have heard if we weren’t crouched like mice in a trap. The sound made me notice something else I’d missed while distracted by bones and ghosts and the certainty of my imminent demise.

“Do you smell that?” I whispered. I felt him inhale, then sort of cough. “Guano.”

“If there are bats, then there’s an opening to the outside.”

Ben carefully twisted to check all angles, and I felt the change in his tension when he saw something. “Over there.”

There was a flat opening hidden behind the soldier’s resting place, an infinitesimally lighter darkness against the cavern wall. I’d missed it because I hadn’t wanted to disturb the remains. But there was no helping that now.

We had to crawl over the skeleton to get out. I tried to be careful, but in the dark I had to feel my way across. The fabric disintegrated, and bits of remnant flesh fell like scraps of leather. The bones cracked like dry twigs under my hands.

On the other side, Ben boosted me over a row of stalagmites, and we worked around a bend … and suddenly I knew where we were.

“I’ve been here before.” I looked up in disbelief at the cave opening, shaded with an overhang covered with bats. I’d been only twenty to thirty yards from the ghost’s remains two nights ago. “This is my bat cave.”

Ben stumbled on the uneven footing of the layers and layers of bat guano and followed my gaze to the mouth of the cave. It was a long way up. “But we’re still trapped.”

The rabbit warren of the cave carried Sparks’s voice to us, calling that he’d found our trail. How badly did they want to follow us? If they presumed the cave was a dead end, maybe they’d just let us rot, like the soldier without a grave.

But the voices were getting closer, and Mike Kelly was a small guy—he could probably worm his way right through. I backed up a step in spite of myself, edging up against the nearly vertical cave wall. Ben stepped forward, hands clenched into fists.

Then I felt a hard tug on the knot in my stomach, a wrench of warning.

Cuidado, breathed a voice in my head.

On instinct, I reached for Ben and yanked him against the wall. The phantom knot in my psyche gave a jerk and came loose, wrenched free by the force of what came next. There was a bang, and a whump that shook me to my bones, and the stone sky crumbled with a mighty crack that sent the bats into the air with squeals that made my teeth ache.

I’d pulled us to the one spot without rock overhead, and Ben swung around, putting his back to the thundering stone rain, pressing me against the wall, tucking my head against his chest as he covered his own with his arms. The shaking of the earth melded with the shaking in my bones and the quake of fear even deeper, in the part of me that wasn’t ready to die yet.

The roar went on and on, until I realized we were standing in sunlight, and the noise was in my head. Dust swirled in thick clouds around us, but it wafted up into open air. The roar became a ringing, and Ben raised his head to look around in amazement that must have mirrored my own.

“Are we alive?” I asked, still in the shelter of Ben’s arms, squashed between his body and the rock wall that had saved us.

“Seem to be,” he said, turning his head stiffly to look down at me, and wincing when he tried to smile. “I hurt too bad to be dead.”

The sinkhole was now the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and we stood at the deep end. The roof of the bat cave had collapsed, at least as far as the low cavern where the solider lay. It cut Kelly and Sparks off from us, but judging from the continued rumbles and curls of dust, it might have done worse than that. The cave-in might continue far into the mine, trapping the men … or their bodies.

I looked up at Ben. His hair was white with limestone and dust. Pale dirt clung to his face and caked in the places where he was bleeding. He had new cuts, and there were probably more where I couldn’t see them. And I didn’t even want to think about the bruises.

Very carefully I stretched up and kissed the unswollen side of his mouth. “Thank you.”

“For what?” He started to smile and thought better of it. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“For making sure that I didn’t end up spending the rest of my life with you.”

He laughed, then winced, then cursed. Then he said, “The hell with it,” and kissed me the best he could. It would be giving him too much credit to say it was as good as the night before, but it was still better than ninety-nine percent of kisses in the world.

“Great Caesar’s goat.” Phin’s voice floated down from the rim of the sinkhole. “The earth caves in, and you two are making out?”

I craned my head to squint up at her. “Tell it to me when you’ve had a near-death experience, Phin Goodnight.”

She put her hand over her heart. “I just did. You gave me a coronary. We are going to have to invent an entire new category of the heebie-jeebies for you.”

Mark appeared over her shoulder, lacking his usual upbeat luster. “The troopers are yelling at us to stay back until proper rescue workers get here. They’re worried the cave-in is still unstable.”

Ben let me go, after making sure I could keep my own feet. “Tell them to get a move on. Amy needs to go to the hospital. She’s not as hardheaded as I thought.”

Mark nodded. “Ambulance is already on the way. We found a guy with a head injury, dehydrated, but mostly coherent, except for talking about a ghost hitting him on the head. When we saw the dust, and felt the quake, we weren’t sure …”

I waved that off for more pressing concerns. “Warn them there’s a whole network of caves under here, Mark. It’s a mine. Mike Kelly and Steve Sparks have been blasting underground, following the vein.… ”

I trailed off, thinking about the ghost’s warning. Had he known the caves were going to collapse? Or had he caused it?

“The blasting must have destabilized the caverns,” said Ben. “They’re in there, somewhere.”

My stomach twisted in guilt, even though they’d been plotting to kill us. I looked at Ben, hoping he would understand. “Was there any way they could have survived?”

He ran a comforting hand down my arm and linked my fingers with his. “If we did, maybe they did.”

I hoped so. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death. Even secondhand, through my connection with the ghost.


The field was full of emergency vehicles: state trooper units, the sheriff’s department, the fire department, an ambulance, and the CareFlite helicopter on standby.

I offered to get Lila to look for the missing men, but another rescue-dog team was on the way. The EMTs wouldn’t let me do much but sit and watch and wring my hands with guilt. They wanted me to go in for an MRI, and Ben was threatening to haul me off to the hospital by force, but Mark pointed out that he’d probably keel over from his own injuries if he tried.

The state troopers were on hand to confiscate the blasting caps and the dynamite I hadn’t seen. They had no trouble chalking up the collapse to an accident by a pair of claim jumpers, though Deputy Kelly insisted that, while he didn’t condone what his brother did, since Mike worked for a mining company, he would know how to handle explosives. The state law enforcement didn’t necessarily agree, and had some pointed questions for the deputy about why he hadn’t noticed someone was blasting underground in his part of the county.

I’d figured that Sparks and Mike Kelly had used the old Mad Monk stories to stir up the ghost hysteria—to keep people speculating about any strange sounds rolling through the hills—but I hadn’t really thought about whether they’d included the other Kellys in their plans.

Phin hung up her phone and slid it into her pocket with a decisive motion. “Mom is on her way to the hospital to meet us. Let’s go. No arguing.”

I looked up at her from my seat in one of the patrol cars. “But I want to see if they find Kelly and Sparks. Steve Sparks just got in over his head, I think.”

“Amy, they tried to kill you.”

“I know.”

“And they collapsed the cave with their own blasting caps and dynamite.”

There, I paused. “No. Well, yes. But. It was the ghost’s last act. I felt our tie unknot. I found him, and he saved me.”

She considered that for a second. “Well, that’s a fair trade. I’m sorry I called him ungrateful.”

“But that makes me responsible for …” I gestured to the massive hole in the ground, and the emergency vehicles all around us.

“How do you figure that?”

“I called the ghost. And it led us to it and then it warned me …”

She gave me a long look. “Could you have warned Kelly and Sparks?”

“No.”

“Did you make them explode dynamite and hit people on the head and try to kill you?”

“No.”

“What a relief. I was worried you’d developed an over-inflated opinion of your powers of mind control and time travel. Because that’s what it would take for all this to be your fault.”

I just stared at her, wondering if it was my headache that made her sound like she had actually mastered irony. Gingerly I touched the lump under my hair. “I don’t know what I think about your developing a sense of humor, Phin.”

“Does that imply you don’t think I could build a time machine or master mind control?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I didn’t.

Phin took my arm and pulled me to my feet. I thought she was going to say something else, but for a long moment she scrutinized every bruise and scrape on my face, as if she were cataloging the damage for some experiment. And then she put her arms around me in a too-tight hug.

I held in an “ow” and a little bit of a sniffle.

Then she let me go and pretended it hadn’t happened. “Now stop arguing with me. Mark and I are taking you and Ben to the hospital, because it’s obvious you two can take care of everyone but yourselves.”