A Boat Made of Bone (The Chthonic Saga) (39 page)

As they drew closer to the ridge which was in the dark side of the moonlight and covered in its own shadow, the light and sparks given off by the dragonfly illuminated the dark crags of the rock face. Instead of revealing the face of a cliff, a part of the mountain opened up and the little insect continued further in.

It was a cave.

Kate stopped. The dragonfly disappeared around a turn, shadows cropping up as it receded away from her. Kate waited, too scared to keep going. She hated caves. She hated closed in spaces.

Her throat constricted. There was no way she could go in there. Eventually her guide returned. It hovered erratically in front of her.

“You’re kidding, right?” Kate said to it. It remained silent. The moon was directly overhead by then, smothering the stars with its brilliance. Around them, Kate heard insects creaking and chirping. Some kind of night bird began a mournful cry and a wave of chills crashed over her. “A cave? There’s no way I’m going in there, Lassie. I have . . . A phobia. I can’t. I just can’t.”

The dragonfly swooped toward the mouth of the cave and then floated back to Kate.

“No, I can’t. Tell me where you’re taking me. What’s on the other side? Will? Is it Will? If it’s Will, tell me.”

The insect stared at her with those glowing eyes. Kate sighed and rubbed the back of her neck with one hand. Her pack began to feel like it weighed a ton. She considered leaving it behind, but immediately scrapped the idea. She might need it. She remembered momentarily the snacks tucked away in some of the small pockets. Fruit leather, granola bars, and such—not exactly enough to last her very long, but it could be the difference between living and dying. She started to wish she’d filled up the rest of her water bottle, but maybe there was a stream somewhere and she’d be able to later. They hadn’t passed anything like that yet, but they still could. The canyon was obviously formed by something—a glacier or a river. She didn’t remember noticing that they were ever near a dry riverbed, but it was dark and she’d been sort of out of it.

The dragonfly zoomed toward the cave again and then rushed back at Kate. It stopped just an inch from her face. She dodged her head back, but it didn’t hit her. She relaxed a bit and then returned its stare. “What?” she asked, irritated and aggressive. “Look, why am I even following you? You’re probably a demon. Are you guiding me toward a camp full of rapists and plunderers? Geez. What the hell am I doing?” She closed her eyes, shrugged, and rubbed her neck again. She began to wish she was asleep, that she’d never left her tent in the first place. This whole thing was crap. She just couldn’t . . .
couldn’t
go in the cave. It was like going into a cemetery at night: scary as hell.

She let out a long sigh.

“I need to know if what’s in the cave is worth it. Can you please just give me some kind of indication that I won’t massively regret following you into a creepy cave in the middle of the night?”

When she finished with her plea, the dragonfly started to act weird—at least, weirder than the whole thing had already been—it darted repeatedly toward her face like it was trying to smack into Kate. She brought her hands up to protect her face and the dragonfly landed on her hand. Just like that, it turned cold and metallic, returning to its ring form upon her finger. Its light went out completely. Kate was swathed in darkness. The moon was still bright overhead, but after the amount of illumination the little insect had been giving off, it was quite a change.

Kate’s gut twisted in fear. She looked around, the night sounds increased—crickets, distant night birds, the whooshing sound of bat-wings overhead.

“Come back?” Kate whispered. “I’m sorry I doubted you. Please, come back.”

As though it understood her, the dragonfly lit up and flew off her finger, sparks of fire dripping off it. It hovered before her, the glowing eyes just centimeters from her nose. She saw a reflection of herself in them for a moment. Her hair was wildly messy and her eyes looked tired. There was also a smidgeon of shame in her face—for even doubting that the dragonfly was taking her where she wanted to go: to find Will. She sighed, it was a dragonfly ring. From her dreams. That Will gave her. The reasons to trust it were numerous, and besides, her gut was telling her to go and that’s why she made the decision. 

“I’ll follow you. Lead the way, Lassie,” she told it, screwing up her courage. Kate was about to attempt to overcome a fear that had crippled her since childhood.   

***

The cave mouth was a maw, really, opening up into the mountainside at an angle. Kate had to step down into it and sort of squeeze through, which set her heart racing immediately. As she lowered herself into the opening, her pulse thundered in her throat and ears. She swallowed and tried to fend off thoughts of being stuck and dying from starvation.

She went under a rock that protruded straight down, leaving just a bit of clearance for her to sidle under, then shimmied through the narrow opening and when she came out the other side, she was able to stand up. The dragonfly hovered nearby, spilling light on the rocks around her. The cave was natural, Kate could see that immediately, and it opened into a huge, wide-open chamber, the roof of it curving overhead about thirty feet up. The dragonfly buzzed further into the room, looking like a small, glowing blip in the midst of the cavernous space. Boulders, rock, and debris were scattered across the floor of the chamber. The dragonfly was leaving her behind and utter darkness came quick in that space where there wasn’t a speck of light to break up the black monotony. Kate hurried after it, picking her way carefully across the jagged floor. At least the room was open enough that the panic of knowing she was in a cave hovered at the fringes of her mind.

They reached the other end of the room and the walls narrowed to form a tunnel, which her guide darted into full throttle. Kate kept up, stepping gingerly and carefully. She battled against visions of the walls collapsing onto her. The dragonfly maintained its speed so that Kate had no time to really focus on thoughts of her annihilation.

Parts of the tunnel narrowed and the only way through was for her to turn sideways, suck her gut in and squeeze between a jutting rock and the wall each time, and always Kate tried to clear her head and keep her thoughts in check so that she didn’t descend into a panic attack.

Sometimes the dragonfly went too fast and Kate couldn’t keep up. When that happened, the black closed in around her, pressing in on her so that her fears choked her and left her gasping for breath.

After a while, it began to feel as though they were going up. The slope of the floor changed. Soon her fingers brushed across soft, moss-covered rock wherever she touched the cold walls, and it seemed as though the darkness was lightening. Was she hallucinating?

The tunnel curved and they entered another chamber. Kate inhaled sharply. There was a small pond in the middle of the cavern, and the roof vaulted and opened to the sky like they’d just come to a natural observatory. The water in the middle of the room was still as a mirror, and reflected in the calm waters was the amulet-like, unnaturally huge moon.

Kate gasped.

“Is this what you wanted me to see?” she quietly asked the dragonfly, which hovered at her shoulder as though it too was awe-struck by the beautiful view. “It’s—it’s amazing.”

Kate strode cautiously to the edge of the water and crouched down, enthralled by the detail in the moon’s reflection. Kate knew the Sea of Tranquility because of a beginning astronomy class she’d taken in college and it was visible in the water, which was as much like a mirror as anything. She reached her hand out to touch the water, hesitated, and then withdrew it. She didn’t want to disturb the image.

“Now what?” she asked, standing and turning to find the dragonfly. It floated down on a breeze coming through the tunnel. Instead of answering, which she didn’t really expect it to, the little glowing insect approached the water and the moon’s reflection. For a moment it just hovered there, like it was pondering the perfect mirror image.

She knew from her research into dream symbolism, that dragonflies lived in water before they became insects of the air, which was part of the weight of their allure, being a creature of both water and air. So when it dropped lower, she expected it to land on the glassy surface of the water and stay there, instead, the insect sank deep into the water.

“Hey!” she called out. Her voice echoed back at her, cold and empty. She shivered.

The moon’s reflection didn’t move like she expected it to—she waited to see ripples flowing out from where the insect disappeared, but they never came. The water remained as still as if nothing happened.

She bent down and touched the pond. Her hand moved into the water. It was cold. But like with how it had done with the dragonfly, the water didn’t behave like it should. She stood up. “Eff this,” she muttered. “Like hell I’m just going to stand here alone, wondering what’s going to happen next.” Hesitating only a second, she strode straight into the cold fluid, expecting something like water, even though she’d just watched it behave differently. Water sank around her legs like quicksand or mercury. She headed for the moon, wondering where the dragonfly went.
Did it just commit suicide and totally abandon me?

The moon
’s reflection is too large,
she thought once she’d closed the distance. It was as big as a kiddie size pool, like the one her neighbor’s kids played in. Any minute now, she thought the dragonfly should surface in a reassuring explosion of flight. She couldn’t remember for sure, but she didn’t think they maintained their ability to breathe underwater once they’d become flying insects. Kate touched the strangely behaving liquid where it had taken on the image of the moon and her hand moved as though through a ghost. There was no water, or imitation-water, like whatever she was standing in.

Now she really knew something was going on. Something stranger than her dragonfly ring coming to life. She’d made her choice. She’d crossed the point of no return back when she entered the cave. She was following the dragonfly. She was. She really, really was.

Inhaling deeply, Kate tried to take a step into the area where the moon was. The shallow pool only came up to her knees. When she lifted her foot and moved to plant it in the area where the moon was, it never touched the ground and the reflection never stirred. She tumbled forward, losing her balance, and fell unceremoniously into the moon’s reflection. Despite clinging to some abstract expectation that she’d locate the ground at some point, she merely continued to fall until the water had closed over her face. And when she held her arms out to catch herself somehow, on some kind of surface, somewhere, her hands simply passed through air.

25: Chthonos

Kate fell. Her eyes were open. The walls of whatever surrounded her glowed—a tunnel like a chute of light. It was as though she’d entered a moon beam. She screamed, but no sound escaped her lips. She was so disoriented, and so scared, that she didn’t quite grasp that she’d stopped falling for a few seconds.

She blinked.

The scream died on her lips. She couldn’t even find her vocal cords to create a single sound as she scanned the horrifying vision around her. She sat in the midst of a forest of fire.

Not a forest fire, but a land with trees that looked like they were on fire. The ground beneath them was black and charred like the remains of a forest fire—Kate had seen pictures of how Yellowstone look after its infamous forest fire and that was how this place appeared, only the trees rippled and wavered with continual flames. She studied them, trying to see if they diminished as they burned, but they didn’t. She could make out a black skeletal frame in the midst of the fire.

The atmosphere was only slightly smoky. Overhead a dim, dark orange sun hovered in a pale yellow sky. Further to her left, through the trees, she could see a mountain range, which was also covered in the burning trees. The air reeked of singed plants, like that slightly delicate fragrance of burnt sweet grass interlaced with the odor of melted evergreen sap.

The dragonfly rested quietly on a black stump next to her. It was the only normal thing nearby—as normal as a glowing dragonfly guide could be.

“Where the hell am I?” she whispered, noting the fear in her voice and standing up. She groaned. Her body hurt where she’d landed. Her backside and elbow felt bruised.

“So you
are
taking me to Will, Lassie. Thank goodness. If I could hug you, I would,” she told the dragonfly. “This place is . . . scary. You could have at least warned me. I would have packed better.”

Her clothing stuck to her as though with some kind of clear, jelly-like goo. She hoped it was goo . . . and not something else. She didn’t even want to think about what it could be.

Kate unzipped her pack, then stopped and stared at the dragonfly steadily. “Wait, do I need to be worried about those weird fire-trees coming over here and burning me? Should I, uh, be running?”

When the dragonfly didn’t fly off, she took that to mean she had time to change her clothes. She dug through her pack until she found a clean shirt and another pair of hiking pants—which she was sure she packed, but all she could find was a pair of climbing shorts. So she put those on. It was hot anyway, what with the burning landscape and all.

Once she’d changed and shoved her dirty clothes into the bottom of her pack, she told her guide to lead on. As they hiked through the burning forest, she mused aloud about the impossible vagaries of the ecosystem. “So tell me how those trees burn without ever being consumed.”