As Gansey walked through the tunnel, he felt a sort of insane joy and sadness rising in him, higher and higher. There was nothing around him but a featureless stone pathway, but still, he could not shake the rightness of it. He had imagined this moment so many times, and now that he was in it, he could not remember the difference between imagining it and experiencing it. There was no dissonance between expectation and reality, as there always had been before. He had meant to find Glendower, and now he was finding Glendower.
Joy and sadness, too big for his body to contain.
He could feel the time-slipping sensation again. Down here, it was palpable, like water rushing over his thoughts. He had a thought that it was not just time that was slipping around him, but distance. It was possible this tunnel was folding back in on itself and taking him to an entirely different location along the ley line. He kept an eye on his mobile phone battery as he walked; it drained quickly with the torch function on. Every time he glanced at the screen, the time had changed in some impossible way: sometimes moving forward twice as fast, sometimes jerking backwards, sometimes sitting on the same minute for four hundred of Gansey’s steps. Sometimes the screen flickered and went out entirely, taking the torch with it, leaving him in a second of blackness, two seconds, four.
He wasn’t sure what he would do once he was left in darkness. He had already discovered on previous caving missions that it was very easy to fall into a hole, even with a torch. Even though the cave now appeared to be more hallway than cavern, there was no telling where it would end up.
He had nothing to trust but the ravens and the feeling of rightness. All of his footsteps had led him to this moment, surely.
He had to believe the light wouldn’t go out before he got there. This was the night, this was the hour; all of this time he was supposed to be alone for this.
So he walked and walked, as his battery flickered up and down. Mostly down.
When it was only a warning-red sliver, he hesitated. He could turn back now, and he might have light for a little bit. The rest of the walk would be in darkness, but at least he knew there had been no pitfalls in it during his trip down. Or he could keep going until the very last bit of light was gone, hoping to find something. Hoping he wouldn’t need it once he got to wherever he was going.
“Jesus,” Gansey breathed out loud. He was a book, and he was holding his final pages, and he wanted to get to the end to find out how it went, and he didn’t want it to be over.
He kept walking.
Sometime later, the light went out. His phone was dead. He was in utter blackness.
Now that he was standing still, he realized it was also chilly. A cool bit of water dripped on the crown of his head, and another slid down the collar of his shirt. He could feel the shoulders of Henry’s borrowed sweater getting wet. The darkness was like an actual thing, crowding him.
He could not decide what to do. Did he press forward in the dark, inch by inch? Now that he was in absolute blackness, he remembered well the sensation of the ground being robbed from him in the cave of the ravens. There was no safety rope to catch him here. No Adam to keep him from sliding in further. No Ronan to tell the humming swarms to be ravens instead of wasps. No Blue to whisper to him until he was once again brave enough to rescue himself.
The darkness wasn’t just in the tunnel; it was inside him.
“Do you not want me to find you?” he whispered. “Are you here?”
The tunnel was silent except for the faint pat of water dropping from the ceiling to the stone floor.
Fear mounted in him. Fear, when it was Gansey, had a very specific form. And unlike the hole beneath Borden House, fear had power in a place like this.
He realized that the tunnel was no longer quiet. Instead, a sound had begun to form in the distance: an intensely familiar note.
Swarm.
This was not a single insect travelling down the hall. Not RoboBee. This was the oscillating wail of hundreds of bodies bouncing off the walls as they approached.
And even though it was dark in the tunnel, Gansey could feel the blackness that had bled out of that Cabeswater tree.
Gansey could see the entire story spread out in his head: how he had been saved from a death by stinging a little over seven years before, as Noah died. And now, as Noah’s spirit decayed, Gansey would die by stinging again. Perhaps there had never been a purpose to all this except to return to the status quo.
The hum came closer. Now the gaps in the buzzing were punctuated by nearly inaudible taps, insects ricocheting through the dark towards him.
He remembered what Henry had said when he put the bee in Gansey’s hand. He’d told him not to think of it as something that could kill him, but rather as something that might be beautiful.
He could do that. He thought he could do that.