The Pit of Despair

“Slow the fuck down. We need to go back.” Bryant was yelling as Kevin remained dead-set and square shouldered.

“He may have gone ahead to look for it.”

“What’s wrong with you Kevin? Mattias has no light. He’s on foot. He’s not trying to steal the gold.”

“It’s in these tunnels up ahead. We can still make the claim.”

“No one is helping you claim shit now, you fucking clown.”

Kevin turned in his seat and stared at Bryant, his round face contorted, eyes narrowed.

“You’re not taking it from me.”

Alice saw the danger.

“Stop. Stop.”

She was slammed forward. Sound, glass and white became her world. The airbags going off were deafening. And then quiet, as the engine choked to silence.

She opened her eyes and felt around. Nothing broken. She found her seatbelt and with a click she was free. A single lop-sided beam of light pulled her through the cocoon of white plastic. Glass stung her arms as she fell out of the cruiser. Adrenaline carried her scrabbling to the driver’s side and she dragged Kevin, looking dazed, out of his seat. Bryant was worse, his face bloody. The truck had slammed into a jagged boulder of granite on the passenger side.

Alice could see Bryant’s jaw working as she wrapped his head in a compression bandage. His hardhat had split down the middle at the point of contact and the hard plastic had gashed him above the eyes. He stared darkly at Kevin who was inspecting the damage to the truck.

“Alright, looks like the bumper wore most of that. Help me push so we can get going.”

“Kevin, man, this is over. We go back, look for Mattias, call Twiggy and we go home.”

“No.”

Kevin turned, his hand resting on his knife as he stared them down. The red light lit his frame but left his face in shadow. Alice lowered her gaze. Bryant did not, his shoulder stiffened, and he stood. The room became still. As Alice looked back up, her headlamp passed over the wall.

“Look!”

Deep marks ran the length of the wall right up to the point where a section had collapsed and left the rubble.

“Those look like claw marks.” Kevin said absently.

“Nah, this’s fucked. We were just in an accident. We’re seeing shit.” Bryant turned away.

They had gone beyond the main tunnel and the green lamps. Only the red light of an unfinished tunnel remained. It looked less like a tunnel and more like a fissure in the rock. Kevin walked up beside her and followed her gaze. His hand was still on his side and his proximity made the hair on her neck stand up. She backed a step away but he’d lost interest. He was craning his head towards the fissure in the wall.

“You hear that?” Kevin wasn’t looking at her as he mumbled, “It wants me to find it.”

“What?”

With that he walked deliberately towards the red light. He was still talking and leaving spaces as if waiting for a response before he mumbled on.

“I think Kevin has a concussion. He’s disorientated and…”

“That guy is fucking crazy. Ms. Alice, we need to go.”

Alice’s legs felt heavy as she went towards the truck. The rush from the crash was starting to wear off and she felt exhausted and sore, Bryant looked even more so. As they reached the car, she felt grief threatening to push her down, under the ice. She had not found Olivia.

Taking the driver’s seat, she looked down. The keys were gone. There was no doubt in her mind who had taken them.

The fissure was tall; it stretched up at least 30 ft into darkness, but the main tunnel was narrow. It had been excavated enough that she and Bryant could walk beside each other but just barely. Side tunnels that were even smaller and narrower appeared without warning as they moved carefully. Alice didn’t know enough but thought these looked naturally occurring.

In the stillness and quiet she heard something like a far-off echoing screech.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“I thought I heard…. Oh god behind you!”

He whirled as Alice pointed her head lamp at the hulking figure behind Bryant. Her light shined into squinted dark eyes and glittering steel. Kevin shielded his eyes from the light and Bryant shoved the larger man back.

“Knew it. Come to steal it. My claim!”

Kevin trucked forward like a linebacker; his buck knife held low. Bryant managed to grab his arms and was slammed to the wall. The two pitched and Kevin came up on top. He was growling in rage as he pushed down with the knife. Seeing Bryant’s eyes wide with terror snapped Alice into action. She kicked hard with her steel toe at Kevin’s head. It connected with his shoulder, but she clipped his cheek and knocked him off balance. She found herself rushing forward as she tried to push him off as he grabbed at her. For a second, she had gotten his back and had two fistfuls of his hair. Then she was thrown back and rebounded against the granite wall. The next moment Kevin was plunging his knife into Bryant. Neither made a sound except a hard exhalation of breath. Then Kevin was rising, knife in hand.

Her beam of light bounced as she sprinted away into darkness. She didn’t, couldn’t look back but she could hear him behind her. There was no sound but her ragged breath and Kevin’s snarling. Her eyes, wide, held nothing but the never-ending darkness in front of her, as she half-gasped, half-sobbed.

She saw it at the last second, a fork in the tunnel. She hurled herself down the left branch and ripped off her headlamp. She pitched it in a desperate motion, and it flew down the opposite tunnel. Then she shrank against the wall and covered her mouth. She heard him reach the split, his headlamp either off or lost. Then she heard his boots scrape as he turned and ran after the light.

Alice walked in total darkness back, trying to find Bryant. As she looked for his headlamp she saw light and made for it. The tunnel opened into a large chamber. A red lamp had been bolted to the wall and cast a scintillating glow over the angular formations of quartz that spangled the walls. In the center of the room’s floor was a crater.

Protruding from the crater was an unnaturally perfect, oval rock. It seemed layered, the red light that reflected around the room turning the folds of the oval into twisting veins of crimson. Jutting needles of crystal made it, Alice thought, seem a gazebo-sized sea urchin. Blue figures hung high up on the needles. Alice blinked as her head throbbed. But the figures were still there. She caught a flash of auburn hair and scrambled forward.

Olivia hung there, like a coat on a rack, the crystal spines barely piercing the skin of her shoulders. There were more figures hanging, how many? Thirteen in all, desiccated, their skin taut and dry. Alice tried to breath, tried to focus. Olivia looked pristine, like a tree with one ripe apple and the others rotten. Had she moved? Was she breathing? Alice stared and didn’t know if she was looking at the corpse of her dead sister or something beyond her comprehension. It didn’t matter. She pulled Olivia off the needle. Her sister was heavy, and real in her arms as Alice fell back.

“You finally made it.”

Mattias stepped from around the other side of the strange obelisk, smiling his annoying smile.

“Where have you been? What happened?”

“So now you care?”

“What do you mean? We tried to look for you.”

“We both know that you only care about your twin. And you only care about her because you’re incapable of doing anything meaningful in your own life.”

“That’s not… what does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s everything. It’s why you’re here. Why you quit school, why you moved to Vancouver to look after your junkie sister, why you became an EMT. And now it’s why you’re in the depths, alone and without a light.”

“This isn’t happening.”

“Reality has always been too hard for you hasn’t it Alice? Too many choices and that crippling chance that you might fail.”

“What the--?”

“Why not let Olivia do all the living for the both of you? And the fucking up. She shot her college fund into her arm, and then you could swoop in. Save the day.”

“You don’t know this.”

“When she got her Environmental Engineering degree, Mom and Dad were so proud. Did they even show up when you got your certificate?”

“Fuck you!”

“Enough about the past, let’s look at the future. I’ll let you choose how this goes.”

“Mattias, this shit isn’t funny.”

“One of you can leave here.”

“Why? Why are you doing this?”

“You can leave. You’ll have a vague memory of doing the best you could, go home and finally live your own life. Or--”

“Or what?”

“She’ll leave and you won’t exactly die.”

The thing that looked like Mattias smiled with a jaw that reached too low and a mouth that opened too wide. Whatever was inside Mattias’s skin didn’t fit that well. Alice looked back to the glass-thin spikes, the twelve shriveled bodies and at Olivia who didn’t move except for a slight rise and fall of her chest. She sat there for what felt like a long time. The exit to the chamber felt miles away. Each breath hurt more—broken ribs probably—plus the panic. Olivia’s weight felt staggering.

“You two-faced bitch!”

Kevin staggered into the room. His eyes were flat, frame swaying hand shaking, but still clutching his knife. A meth head she’d treated, six months back now, mid-tweak, oddly, sprang to mind. He’d had a knife too. Kevin looked worse.

Then Alice remembered that somewhere far away from this, she was an EMT. She was a good EMT. She handled that meth head, and the protruding eye wound that followed, and the inexpert suicides and all the rest. She would go into this glacial state, beyond worry or regret, where only action mattered, and deal. And she loved being that.

She pointed.

“Kevin, Mattias is the one who wants your gold.”

She pulled Olivia aside as the thing wearing Mattias cocked its head. It looked like it was about to say something when Kevin came barreling at it, knife tearing into its flesh. The thing let its jaw come unhinged as rows of needle-thin teeth bulged out. It let out an unearthly shriek. Claws sprang through Mattias’s finger tips. Alice hoisted Olivia in a fireman carry, and stagger-ran.

The Land Cruiser was on when she arrived. It’s single functional headlight a beacon in the dark. Bryant lay slumped in the seat, holding his bleeding stomach and, he almost managed a grin as he showed her, the keys.

“Sumbitch dropped ‘em.”

Ignoring the thunking noise as the wheel bounced into the wheel well, Alice whipped the cruiser around, gripped the steering wheel white-knuckled as it jerked back and forth in her grip. She ignored the bone chilling screech that started far but was coming closer. When she got to the end of the tunnel would the light be red? Would the elevator be gone?

Pushing through the darkness, following the light she realized it had been her in the dream. Under the ice covered pond. She had been the one screaming without sound, fighting for the surface as the ice slowly closed. But she was also one looking down, beating against death, breaking through the ice.

If it could be red, it could also be green. All she could do was keep trying for the light.