“You okay, Ruthie?” Fawn called back.
“Fine,” Ruthie said, her voice small and squeaky. Was the tunnel getting even smaller? She imagined the stones pushing down, squeezing her until her ribs began to crack and her eyeballs popped out. If her instinct was right and her mother turned out to be in here somewhere, Ruthie might just have to kill her for putting them through this. She was more frightened than she could ever remember being.
“Don’t worry, the tunnel gets wider,” Fawn promised.
“Who’s worried?” Ruthie mumbled, pretty sure her heart was going to seize up at any second. Her elbows hurt from dragging herself along the rough stone.
Suddenly everything went black.
“What happened to the light?” Ruthie called, panic rising.
“I think it died?” Fawn called back. There was the sound of the flashlight being shaken, batteries rattling dully in the plastic case.
It was pitch-black now, darker than anything Ruthie had ever imagined—a darkness that seemed to go on forever.
This is what it feels like to be buried alive, she thought.
“Never mind, just keep going,” Ruthie called out, trying to make herself sound brave.
Fawn was right, the tunnel did widen; but then it narrowed again. She closed her eyes tight, tried to trick herself into believing that it wouldn’t be dark when she opened them. Ruthie had to crawl on her belly, arms bent, as she used her elbows and toes to propel herself along. The tunnel itself went on for about ten feet at a steep decline after the flashlight went out. Her jacket and shirt rode up, and her stomach was scraped by the rough rock floor of the tunnel.
“Stop,” she said out loud.
“We’re almost there,” Fawn called back, her voice muffled. “I see light.” She sounded much farther away than Ruthie had imagined her.
Ruthie shoved her backpack in front of her, listened to the faint sounds of Fawn scrabbling along. When, at last, she dared to open her eyes, she saw the soft glow of flashlights ahead. A few more feet and Ruthie realized she could move to her hands and knees. A few feet beyond that and she emerged into a large, cozy chamber. Ruthie stood up tentatively, stretching, looking around. She shouldered the backpack and checked to make sure the gun was still in her jacket pocket.
Just don’t think about being underground, Ruthie told herself.
Fawn held the flashlight out to her. “It works again. I guess I just didn’t have the switch on right. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Ruthie said. “You’re a very brave kid, you know that?” Fawn smiled up at her.
The glow in the chamber hadn’t just come from flashlights; there were oil lamps lit all around the room. And a room it was—there were shelves, a table, a wood-burning cookstove with a pipe leading up into a crevice in the rocky ceiling. A fire was lit in it, crackling and popping and almost making Ruthie forget she was in a cave beneath the Devil’s Hand. There was even a bed, piled high with old quilts, in a jagged alcove to the left.
The place felt strangely familiar.
Ruthie walked over to one of the sets of wooden shelves. There were jugs of water, sacks of flour and sugar, boxes of tea and coffee, tins of sardines and tuna, canned vegetables and soups, a bushel basket of apples.
Ruthie picked up one of the apples. It had no rotten spots.
“The lamps were all lit when I got down here,” Candace said. She held the gun out in front of her, scanning the room with her headlamp. There were three tunnels in addition to the one they had just come down, each leading off in a different direction, each dark.
“Ruthie, look!” Fawn squealed. She was over at the bed, holding a garish purple-and-yellow crocheted poncho.
“It’s Mom’s!” Ruthie said.
Fawn nodded excitedly. “She was wearing it the other night! When she disappeared!”
Ruthie stepped forward to get a better look at the poncho, then froze when she saw what was sitting up at the head of the bed, beside the pillow.
Her old green stuffed bear—Piney Boy. Ruthie scooped up the bear and held him to her chest; a memory flashed back to her, cloudy and dreamlike. It felt familiar because she’d been down here before, in this room. She’d followed someone here.
She closed her eyes and let the memory take her further.
There was a little girl who lived here. But she wasn’t nice. She’d shown Ruthie something dark and terrible.
Later, her father told her she’d imagined the whole thing.
She looked around the room. It wasn’t possible, was it? How could a little girl be living in a cave under the Devil’s Hand?
“It’s yours, isn’t it?” Fawn asked. “From when you were little? It’s the bear you’re holding in that old picture.”
Ruthie nodded, still holding the bear tight, struggling to remember more from that long-ago day. What had the girl shown her?