47

Time fell away, lost in the darkness of the winding cave. I walked for a while and then grew tired and lay down on the cave floor and slept for some interminable amount of time. It might have been minutes or hours, or even days. The quiet inside the bluff got to me, made me paranoid, made me fear the slightest sound—the scuffing of my own boots against the rock floor once made me scream out in a sudden panic—and soon I began to move like a cat, slinking across the endless cave.

This is how it starts, I thought. This is how you lose your mind.

As much as the silence comforted me and the smallest sound disturbed me, I also began to feel irrevocably alone, as if I’d been condemned to live out the rest of my days in this stone prison, isolated from everything.

And everyone.

I lost track of what was and what was not. The invisible became the visible and I soon saw more in the darkness than I’d ever seen in the light.

Maybe I was asleep or maybe I was walking, but eventually I returned to the warm, silent place I’d visited on the suspension bridge over Backslide Gap. The dead place, where it felt too comfortable, where there was nothing to look forward to, nothing to strive against. I began to feel detached from my body, as if the whole of the darkness was me and my essence had been scattered across the vast universe of the cave. Size and shape were banished. Time slipped.

I was losing it. Losing it quickly.

I forced myself to keep going.

Why?

I searched my mind and realized I wasn’t completely sure. Mary was gone. Rufus was gone. Ronnie? There was Ronnie, I supposed, but as long as I was in here, he was gone too.

What was left?

Me.

Nothing.

I felt as if I were floating. I reached for a wall, but they’d all somehow vanished. This was a dark world, a vast and unending universe. There was no way out.

I tried to quit, but something deep inside me, some spark of light, or of the divine, stopped me. My hand went to my mouth, and I pinched my lower lip, digging my thumbnail into the flesh. I kept doing it until I drew blood, until I could taste it. To escape the darkness, I had to endure the darkness. It was the only way.

It had always been the only way. There was no shortcut, no ledge. You fall, climb, or die. It was that simple.

As if I were a vampire, the taste of blood seemed to rally me. I was okay. I was fine. The darkness could not last forever.

Could it?

I walked again. I would walk until I found the edge of the world. I would touch the end and know the end and map the end, or if there was no end, I’d create a world within my mind, one I could carry with me forever and always, one that would keep me safe from the darkness to come.

A voice came to me from the darkness, from inside my head. Rufus. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but his voice was a comfort. He droned, the deep gravel of his voice scraping the bottom of my soul. One word came clear.

Blind.

I saw his face, sans the sunglasses, his eyes scarred by what appeared to be chemical burns. What had blinded him? And more importantly, what had he believed in to help him move forward? Not God. Rufus was what I called a conscientious objector to the divine. He wouldn’t serve on principal.

What was I then? I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of having nothing else to fear, nothing else to keep me moving, and nothing else to defeat me.

So I kept on moving, digging deeper into the spiraling heart of the mystery that would as soon devour me as reveal its secrets.

*   *   *

When I saw the light at last, I was moving blindly, one foot in front of the next, mentally checked out. I’d already resigned myself to spending the rest of my days in this maze of darkness, sure it was some punishment—some kind of hell—I was owed for my sins.

The light was dim at first, but at the first small hint of it, I picked up my pace, nearly running toward what I hoped would be an exit.

I wasn’t disappointed.

The light grew stronger, blazing into my eyes, my skin, making me stumble under its glare. I picked myself up, dusted off my blue jeans and what was left of my shredded shirt, and kept on going, eyes shut, toward the glorious light.

Once I felt the sun on me, I opened my eyes in a squint and saw I was in a forest somewhere. Trees surrounded me on all sides, their branches parting directly above me to allow the bright light in. Birds sang, charging me with newfound energy. The warmth of the midday sun felt good on my skin, at least at first. It took no longer than a few minutes before I started to sweat and longed for the coolness of the caves again.

My best guess was I’d been inside the cave for about twenty-four hours, maybe a little less.

But where was I now? I walked a bit, noticing the land sloping downward gradually. The trees grew dense as I moved downhill. After walking awhile and finding nothing even resembling a trail, I turned and looked behind me. Through a gap in the trees, I could see the towering, rocky bluff. I’d been underneath this bluff, inside it. Like some dwarf in Middle-earth, I’d burrowed straight through the mountain instead of climbing over it.

I had to guess that was exactly what Harriet had done some twenty-eight years ago. And once she was here, she would have been free to go anywhere in the world. It seemed abundantly likely to me she’d done just that. Why stay in a place like Coulee County? As a gay woman—hell, as a woman period—I couldn’t imagine her sticking around this godforsaken place one minute longer than necessary.

Then again, I hadn’t been able to imagine myself as a seventeen-year-old straight male sticking around either, and I’d come back. Sometimes I wondered exactly why I’d done that. What had I been trying to prove?

The answer, of course, was that I’d been trying to prove myself worthy, first of this place, and later of Mary. But there was more.

I wanted to change my home, to make it all the things it could be. There was so much here to recommend it, so much beauty, so much ruggedness, so many hidden places that revealed themselves like slow-blooming flowers. And the people—the ones who hadn’t been blinded by their own ignorance—were a people you could not find anywhere else. I wouldn’t trade a thousand people from anywhere else for one Rufus, and as flawed as Ronnie was, I couldn’t imagine a more loyal friend.

So, I was here for the long haul, with or without Mary, I realized. Great. That was one less thing to worry about, but the more pressing matter still remained: finding Harriet.

Finding her could be the key to Chip’s article and the missing piece that might complete the picture of the school’s—and, by extension, Jeb Walsh’s—corruption.

Ahead, I noticed the first sign of what I took to be a trail. There was a stream curving along a tree line, and on the other side of it was another crevice, just a small niche in a wall of trees.

I followed it and didn’t stop until I saw the ground had turned to gravel. I squinted at the sun’s shimmering reflection off the aluminum siding of single-wide trailers.