“Who is Billy?” I heard some
body ask, as I knelt by the side of the dead man. And then I didn’t hear anything. No wonder they call it diving, I thought, as what felt like water closed over my head.
Chapter Fifteen
There was no tent city this time.
“Okaaaay,” Billy said, looking around. “Are we too late?”
It kind of felt like it. Kind of looked like it, too. Darkness, deep and dark and cold, spread out all around us. It was quiet, but it echoed. Like we were in some vast underground cistern instead of somebody’s head. And every time I moved, every time I breathed, it came back to me, only magnified and louder.
It sounded like a whole army was breathing in here.
“Okay, that’s creepy as shit,” Billy whispered, because it was. And then we both paused, waiting for the inevitable return.
But there wasn’t one.
“Hey, why didn’t that echo?” he asked. “Helllllooooo!” he added, and we waited some more, but there was nothing. “What’s the deal?”
“I don’t know—” I began, and stopped, because it was suddenly like being inside a kettle drum.
“Don’t know. DOn’t KNow. don’T knoW,” echoed from a hundred different directions.
“Okay, weirded out now,” Billy said unevenly.
Yeah, that made two of us.
“Look, Cass, there’s nothing to see. We got here too late. Let’s just call it a—”
A light came on in the distance.
“—day?”
It was dim, almost indistinguishable against all the darkness, except it was the only light around. It was also distant, flickering somewhere off in the gloom, almost like—like a candle about to go out, I thought, as it was suddenly extinguished. I blinked in the dark, wondering if I’d imagined the whole thing.
“I vote we pretend that didn’t happen,” Billy said.
And then it happened again.
“Well, shit.”
“Come on,” I told him, and started forward—only to almost bean myself on something hidden in the darkness. I felt around, and it was sort of like a cave wall, if it had been buffed by water for years. Smooth and undulating, but weirdly spongy. “What the hell?”
“I don’t know, but it’s like a maze in here,” Billy said.
“Ghost light,” I told him, and winced as it came echoing back to me. He sighed.
“That’s gonna get old fast,” he said, and then light was spilling out all around us, green-tinged and bright, almost blinding.
“Tone it down,” I whispered, and then, when a thousand voices whispered “DOwn, down, doWN,” back at me, vowed not to do that anymore.
Billy toned it down.
We crept forward into darkness.
It was a maze, I discovered, filled with barriers I couldn’t pass, forcing me to find my way through channels I couldn’t see. That would have been bad enough on its own, but it was also a graveyard. Ghostly images flickered here and there for an instant, echoes in a dying brain. They were pale, translucent, but vivid against the gloom.
A little girl in an old-fashioned frock darted out in front of us, running after an equally ghostly cat, only to disappear a moment later. An old woman picked grapes in a vineyard high overhead, spilling pale light down on us for a moment, before she, too, winked out. And then a massive cavalry charge almost ran us down.