TWENTY-SEVEN
W
herever he was, it was so dark that he was essentially blind. He couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face. And he had some vague awareness that he was hurt in a significant way; his leg felt odd, as if it didn’t quite fit on his body the way it was supposed to. There was pain, but it was oddly distant like a siren just out of earshot. Where was he? How had he gotten here?
He had a foggy recollection of Finley kneeling over a woman who was obviously dead, her face smashed. And Rainer had been trying to pull her away. Clearly, they were out of their depth, and the snow was getting heavier. They were both getting frostbite; Finley’s mouth was literally blue. It was time to take charge of the situation, he remembered, thinking, and if Finley thought he was being controlling and overbearing, well, that was too bad.
“Finley,” he said. “She’s dead.”
Finley hadn’t said a word, just kneeled there, rocking in a weird way. She’d gotten blood all over herself, and it was seriously freaking Rainer out. He was about to lift her to her feet and carry her out of there, when he saw something in the bushes, a dark form that slipped in and out of the trees and then was gone.
“Who’s out there?” he called. He didn’t like that his voice sounded high pitched and scared.
Man, he really hated the fucking woods. There was a primordial wildness that unsettled him. It was like you could die out here and your body would just become one with all the other organic debris. Animals and insects would come and feed on your flesh; your body
would decompose in its own acids, and the earth would rise up to swallow it. No grave, no headstone. There was nothing clean or sanitized or palatable about it. There was not some part of you that stayed forever, body preserved in a coffin, ashes in an urn on someone’s mantel. You’d be gone as if you never were, just absorbed like a rotten log. Only your bones would bear witness to the form you’d held.
“But that’s what it is,” Finley had said, though Rainer hadn’t said a word. She’d done that before when she was like this. “That’s as it should be. We are one with the earth.”
“Sure,” he said. “But not today. We are
out of here
, Finley.”
He saw the shadow again, and then there was the laughter he’d heard before. Or was it just the strange way the wind sounded, caught in the hollows of the trees, whistling?
“I have to help her,” said Finley.
He leaned in as close as he could stand to the bloody mess on the ground. Dead. Definitely dead, skull smashed in, face just a mass of ruined flesh.
“She’s dead,” he said. “The only way we can help is to get the police.”
Finley was light, and he hoisted her easily.
“Put me down,” she protested weakly. Rainer headed back the way they came, with Finley pounding on his back. That’s when he saw her.
“What the fuck?”
He put Finley down, and she immediately ran back to the dead woman’s body.
That girl in the shadows; he’d know her anywhere. It wasn’t just the moonlight of her skin or the ice of her eyes. It wasn’t just the twisted spools of her fire-kissed hair, or the delicate lines of her neck. It was her scent—something grassy and clean; it was her essence. He’d come to know her as he etched her picture into the delicate flesh of Finley’s body. Abigail, the oldest of The Three Sisters.
There was a deep intimacy to ink work, especially when he worked with Fin. He
saw
what she wanted him to see. And when he put the needle to her skin and inked those images onto her flesh, he
was closer to her than he was at any other time. She trusted him, opened herself to him. She let him mark her body with total faith in their connection. Even when their other connections—as lovers and friends—were strained, that remained. In that bond, Abigail dwelled.
“You’re not real,” he said. “I’m losing it.”
It was the cold, right? Hallucinations as hypothermia set in?
Abigail just smiled.
“Finley,” Rainer said, his own voice sounding wobbly and scared.
But Finley was in her own world, lost to him.
“Fin,” he said again, louder still. “Will you
wake up
?”
Then he was following Abigail, because there was just no way
not
to follow. She danced like a sprite through the trees, and he found himself running to keep up. He’d see a flash of red, a starburst of white, hear the bells of her laughter. Even though he knew that she was leading him away from Finley, he followed anyway. Even though he knew that Abigail was a bad girl and not to be trusted, he found that he couldn’t help but play her little game.
He’d had a friend like that when he was growing up, Scott from three doors down. Rainer’s folks weren’t always around. His dad worked nights, slept days. His mom worked days and wasn’t usually home until right before dinner. But there were rules and chores, and he knew his parents loved him. Scott, on the other hand, was a stray dog. He never seemed to have to answer for where he was, skinny, rangy, dirt under his nails. He was smoking by the time they were ten, got Rainer his first beer when they were twelve. He was the kind of kid who said, “Hey, let’s go set these bottle rockets off in that abandoned warehouse.” And even though you knew it was a bad idea, you did it. With Scott, Rainer shoplifted, drank, smoked, explored a condemned building, and nearly got stuck inside an old refrigerator. Scott was dangerous; Rainer knew there was no bungee attached to that kid, nothing to pull him back from the hard landing of ugly consequences. Still, Rainer followed.
There are always going to be people like that
,
Rain
, warned his dad.
They open dark doorways and invite you to walk inside. Just remember that you don’t have to go.
But that was the problem. Rainer wanted to go. He wanted to
find the edge and push it, see how far you could go before you broke the seal and fell through. He always believed that he could pull himself back—just in time. And so far he had. He eventually graduated from high school, though several of the kids he hung with did not. He wasn’t dead like Jeb or in a wheelchair like Raife, who got into an accident drag racing. He wasn’t in jail like Scott, who was serving time for grand theft auto. It was like Finley always said about The Three Sisters, that she suspected they couldn’t get her to do anything that on some deep, dark level, she didn’t want to do herself. Rainer didn’t want to go all the way down. He just wanted to peer over the edge and see what was waiting below.
But this time, as he chased Abigail through the woods, the ground beneath his feet gave way. And he fell and fell, knocking against protruding objects on his way down and landing hard. He could barely comprehend anything but the surprise of it at first, his stomach lurching as he knew he was falling, calling out for Finley, who he knew couldn’t hear him. The pain, the fear came later.
And now, here he was in the darkness. He could hear the dripping of water somewhere, but that was it. And his own breathing. The ground around him was cold and wet, and he thought that if he died here no one would ever find him. Maybe a few years from now, some kid out in the woods with his friend would fall as he had and find Rainer’s broken bones down here far beneath the ground, the rest of him long ago eaten away.
Shit. No way. In spite of the rockets of pain shooting up his leg, so bad he had to cling to consciousness and breathe deep to keep himself from hurling. One hard push and he was sitting up unsteadily, sick, but not flat on his back. He forced himself to run a hand down his leg. Warm, slick and sticky with blood, but there was nothing sticking out, like a bone. He hadn’t impaled himself on anything. All good things.
That girl doesn’t want you, Rainer.
His mother always knew how to cut right to the quick.
If you follow her to that place, you’re just asking for heartache.
But his heart was already aching. It never stopped aching for Finley. From the minute he saw her, he was hopeless.
If you want her, if you love her, go get her
, his dad said.
If it doesn’t work out, at least you’ll know it wasn’t for lack of trying. Otherwise, you’ll always wonder.
That’s why he’d followed her from Seattle to The Hollows, because he never wanted to wonder. Now he was wondering what would have happened if he’d just stayed in Seattle. At least he wouldn’t be down whatever hole he’d just fallen in.
Rainer felt on the wall for something to hold on to and found a grip. What was it? Wood, like a two-by-four. He knew where he was then, in one of those abandoned mine tunnels that Finley was talking about. He’d looked at the maps, marveled at how vast was the network, how deep and far the tunnels stretched. Finley had said that a kid falls into one nearly every summer, in spite of repeated warnings not to veer off park trails, in spite of the rangers’ attempts to find and cordon off weak areas. She said that a man hid down there for months while the police hunted for him. Did she say if they ever got him? Was he still down here? Surely not.
His heart was pumping—with fear, with effort—he tried to slow his breathing. He’d heard Jake talk about the mines, too, hadn’t he? Jake was some kind of history expert about The Hollows, was a total geek for the place, a lifelong member of The Hollows Historical Society. He said that there were climb-outs, places where ladders had been placed and led to openings, many of which had been sealed off by the park rangers.
Was it better to stay near the opening into which he’d fallen? Or feel his way deeper into the tunnel, hoping for a climb-out? He thought of the maps he’d looked at. There was a major mine head that Finley had circled, somewhere near the trail that he had been on. Had it been North? Rainer wasn’t great with directions.
“
Finley
,” he called, hearing his voice bounce around. “Finley, are you out there?”
His phone. Where was it? He patted at his pockets and found them empty. It must have fallen from his pocket when he fell. He reached around on the ground for it, finding only the damp and bumpy surfaces, not the slick, flat one he wanted.
“Come on,” he said. “Where are you?”
He kept feeling around.
Please, please, please. Come on.
Then, as if in answer to a prayer, the phone started to ring, just out of his reach to the right. It vibrated, filling the small space around him with its light. He reached, straining, and with effort and a nauseating wave of pain, he grabbed it. Finley’s face smiled out at him, a picture he’d snapped when she first loved him. Every time she called, he got to see the look that he didn’t get to see on her face in real time anymore.
He slid the answer bar. “Finley,” he said. “Hello?”
But there was only static and then the click of the line going dead. He had no signal bars at all. Then one flashed, tantalizingly, but then was gone. He tried to call back. “Calling Finley’s Mobile” it read, teasing him with an expectant line of ellipses. But it hung there. Call failed. He tried again, and again, and finally slumped back against the dirt wall.
He’d watched that movie about the kid who’d gone out in the desert, fallen into a gap between rocks, got pinned, and wound up cutting off his own foot to survive. Or was it his hand? Either way, Rainer knew that he was not that kind of guy, not that he had any call to cut off a limb at the moment. But if it came to that, he knew he was not going to be the guy who did “whatever it took to survive.” He just didn’t have that kind of energy, the “belly of fire,” as his father liked to call it. In fact, if Rainer had a light for the joint in his pocket, he’d be smoking right now to take the edge off his fear. Then he’d probably pass out, wake up too dopey to even think about how he might get out of this. Generally that’s what he liked about pot; it softened the sharp edges of anxiety and fear and worry. You didn’t
forget
about any of the things that nagged at you; you just stopped caring about them. When he was high, he was less angry, too.
Yeah, but all of that energy?
Finley countered during an argument about his pot smoking.
That’s what keeps people from just lying around all day, eating Doritos and playing
Call of Duty.
He dialed the phone again, lifting it high into the air, as high as he could to try to get the signal. Nothing. He let his arm drop to his belly.
He remembered thinking, too, what kind of an idiot went out into the desert alone to begin with, not telling anyone where he was going? That was just plain hubris. And what was so great about being “a survivor”? Why was that such an admirable quality? It wasn’t like that guy was risking his ass for someone else. He just didn’t
want to die
. What was so unique about that?
No one
wanted to die. At least Rainer had an excuse for being out here alone; he was taking care of Finley, which is the only thing that had ever gotten him off his ass to do anything. If it weren’t for Finley, he wouldn’t have graduated high school. He wouldn’t have driven across country. He wouldn’t have opened his own tattoo shop. He did all of those things just to be worthy of her. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have fallen down this hole either.
The phone rang again, sending an electric startle of hope through his body.
“Finley,” he said. “Christ.”
“Rainer?” She sounded young and panicked. “Rainer?”
“I fell down one of those mine tunnels. I’m down here. I’m okay, but I can’t get out.”
“Where are you?” she said before the line started to crackle and buzz.
“Fin?” he said. “Can you hear me?
Finley!”
Silence was the only answer. He let out a cry of frustration, tried to call back. The call failed and he tried again. Nothing. Then he took a few more deep breaths, tried to calm himself down.
He used the light from the flashlight app to illuminate the area and realized he was sitting beside a narrow set of tracks. Looking up, he could just make out the place through which he’d fallen, a thin mouth where some ambient light stole in.
He rallied, using all his strength, pulling himself to his feet with a roar of pain. Then he was standing, looking around for one of those ladders, for a place where he could get a signal on his phone. He had to get out of here. He couldn’t die in an abandoned mineshaft while Finley was in trouble above.