CHAPTER 11

 

“Hi,” Colin said.

Stella looked up and swallowed.

Colin seemed riled, his full lips tensed into a thin line.

“Hi,” she muttered.

“You were up there a long time.” He observed, glancing up the path before sliding his eyes back down to hers.

“You were busy,” she countered, searching the empty basketball court behind him.

A pleased glint sharpened his gaze.

“Jealous?” he probed with a soft grin.

“Uh–no.”

The grin faded. “Maybe I am,” he added softly.

Butterflies swatted around inside her stomach. Was he teasing her?

“Jealous of a man that is probably older than my grandfather?”

“He doesn’t look it. And I’ve seen him. He doesn’t look at you like a granddaughter. He watches you.”

Stella was still trying to process Colin’s innuendo that he was jealous. He couldn’t be? Could he?

“Frederic knows I’m interested in learning more. He let me see his maps.”

Colin snorted. “I bet he did.”

“Seriously?” She slammed her hands on her hips. “Just a few minutes ago you were watching Loren. So much so that I couldn’t even catch your eye before I went up there.”

A flare in his eyes suggested she’d hit her mark. She decided to dig in.

“And speaking of jealous. Don’t you have a girlfriend back in college who you’re cheating on with Loren?”

Colin sighed, but instead of looking angry he appeared more amused. That swagger on him was damn fine.

“First,” he began, “I have no girlfriend. I had one sort of. She said I was too busy. I’ve got two degrees I’m working towards. I have zero social life right now. I can’t afford the distraction. Second,” he reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “How am I cheating? I was just talking to Loren. She seems nice.”

“I’m sure she’s charming.”

“Stel.” He grinned. “I was looking for you. I was looking for you when I ran into her. I–”

Suddenly Mr. Composure seemed unsettled. He reached out to touch her arm, but his hand dropped back down.

“Ah, forget it. I–”

“You what?” she prodded, calmer now.

“So what did the maps reveal?”

The obvious segue amused her. She actually smiled, which Colin slowly reflected. The tension dissolved.

“It’s what they didn’t reveal.” She began to explain about Frederic folding over the map to hide the section behind the waterfall.

“Well, you know what that means?” Colin hinted.

Stella tried to quell her nerves. “That means we’re going behind the waterfall?”

“You don’t have to go. I’d rather you stay safe back here.”

“And who is going to keep you safe?” she countered. “Of course I’m going with you.”

Colin looked conflicted. “All right, but if we see any sort of creatures, I’m hiking you right back out of there.”

“If we see one of those things you’ll be chasing my heels. No need to hike me out.”

He grinned. “We’ll have to wait. Until after the evening bell. After everyone is asleep. Will Jill hear you? She doesn’t know what happened to you, right?”

Why hadn’t she shared what happened behind the waterfall with her best friend? It was a rather simple answer. Jill saw the best in situations. Stella didn’t want to crush that optimism. That trait was something she was lacking and she needed it from Jill.

“No, I didn’t want to upset her. And I’ll wait until she falls asleep.”

Colin nodded his approval. “For now, I’ve got to deal with my father.”

“Deal? What do you mean?” She frowned.

“Maybe that wasn’t the right word to use. He’s upset, naturally. He spends all his time with Mom. But–”

“But?”

“There’s some tension between Dad and me. Down here–well, everything is amplified. He is spiraling into a depression and it’s hard to communicate with him. I pray Mom pulls through. He needs her. We all need her.”

Stella’s chest twisted at the pain in his eyes. She wanted to touch him. To offer some form of comfort, but felt self-conscious about it.

“She’ll be okay,” she assured feebly.

Colin looked back over his shoulder. “I better go to her.”

“If–if you want company,” she hesitated, “I can come with you.”

His gaze swung back. “I’d like that.”

“I don’t want to be invasive. I mean, I’ll wait outside while you talk.”

“Stel, you are family. You don’t have to wait outside.”

And there it was. The words to shoot down any fantasies she had been entertaining. Family. As she suspected, Colin thought of her as nothing more than a sister. She was deluding herself for thinking otherwise.

Stella hung her head and trailed after him.

Colin’s summation of his father was pretty accurate, Stella thought. He was reticent at times and combative at others. They took him from the infirmary to the evening dinner, but he remained sullen, his eyes fixed on the bowl of white lumps that were supposedly crab meat. Stella ate it. She needed strength to negotiate the erratic terrain of the caves.

Don just shoved his spoon around in the bowl. Already she could see signs of weight loss. The man was muscular by virtue of the rugged demands of his favorite sport–deep sea fishing. But now his shoulder bones protruded under his t-shirt. She glanced at the younger reflection next to him. Colin was slightly taller than his father, and he carried the same athletic physique the elder Wexler once possessed.

Stella shoveled another spoonful in her mouth, trying not to breath as she swallowed. It helped avoid the taste.

“How is Anne doing?” Margie asked to break the silence. As soon as she voiced the question it was apparent she regretted it.

Don did not look up. He did not acknowledge her in any way. His dark graying hair was matted and unwashed. He had not used the cleaning facilities yet. A quick whiff of the air confirmed that.

Beside him, Colin looked clean with the exception of the shadow of stubble that clung to his jawline. He had told her earlier that Jordan gave him a razor and he intended to try it. The last thing he wanted was the heat of a beard down here. Stella looked at the bristles on his chin and imagined what that texture would feel like under her fingertips.

She jammed the spoon in the bowl again.

As soon as Jordan rose from the table, Stella grabbed his bowl and her own and mumbled something about washing the dishes. Jill appeared at her side with two more plates.

“I’ll help with that.”

Some of the tension left Stella at the sound of Jill’s voice. It was melodically mundane in a world filled with tinny chaos.

“Thanks. I’m going to turn in after this.” Stella rolled her eyes. “Long day.”

Jill giggled. She grabbed a pail and filled it with water from the stream. When she returned she said, “I’m sorry you had to see my Dad that way today. He’s really depressed.” She scrubbed a bowl with a wiry cloth. “I mean, every time I look at Mom I want to cry, but I’ve come to terms with it, and I hate seeing her like this.”

“So do I,” Stella murmured in sympathy.

“But Dad–Dad gets so angry. He doesn’t deal with grief well. He’s not thinking about her. He’s thinking about being alone.”

“All you can do is be there for him. You and Colin are doing a great job at that.”

“Poor Col,” Jill shook her head. “He takes the brunt of it all. You know, they’ve been fighting since the end of last semester when Col announced he wanted to switch his major.”

“I thought he was all in for finance,” Stella frowned.

“He was. But it was really Dad’s dream for him to get an MBA in finance and follow the same career path. Colin stuck with it, but it wasn’t what he really wanted. He wants an electrical engineering degree, but if he switches now it means at least two additional years of school. He told Dad he would pay for it. He’d take out loans–”

“Wow, he had mentioned something about two majors, but I had no idea.”

“Yeah, it’s not something that comes up in conversation because we don’t want to rile Dad.”

“So what’s he going to do? Is he switching?”

“Yeah,” Jill nodded and looked up to make sure they were alone. “He announced that before we got on the boat.”

“Whoa. I knew I felt tension when we pulled out. Usually Col and your Dad are all excited about fishing trips.”

“Yeah. Well, unless we get up to the surface, their argument seems pretty lame now.”

They finished up and soon the bell rang. Jill searched for Daniel, but finally ducked her head and crawled into the back of their dwelling. She whispered a soft good night and Stella waited for the even sound of her friend’s breathing before attempting to move. She climbed out of the desk chair and peered out into the empty common area. Behind her Jill emitted a soft snore.

Stella studied the men’s bungalow next-door but all was idle. Finally a shadow emerged from the pointed hull. It hugged the base of the peak and stayed off the main path. She followed its trek until it slipped behind a boulder just outside the café area.

Glancing over her shoulder she saw that Jill was sound asleep in the hammock with an arm flung over her nose. Stella watched her for a second and then slipped out of the wheelhouse. When she reached the café there was no sign of Colin. The nearby torches cast dancing phantoms across the packed ground. The wide cavern trapped enough of a breeze to stoke the flames into animation.

“Over here.”

Stella swirled towards the hushed call and located Colin’s silhouette ahead on the path. He had circled around the base of the pinnacle and was now out of sight of the village.

Stella jogged a few steps to catch up with him.

“Everything okay?” he whispered.

“Yeah. Jill’s asleep. Your Dad?”

“Yeah.” He stepped away to yank a torch from the ground.

“Where are we going exactly?”

Colin held the torch up so that his face glowed. “You’re going to show me where you saw that thing, and I’m going to go investigate.”

Stella stalked to the nearest torch and used both hands to pull it from the ground. She spun around. “We are.”

Before he could respond she led the way, losing the sound of his trailing steps in the soft hiss of the waterfall. Once past it she clutched the splintery staff. No one was going to knock this from her grip.

No one.

No thing.

The cascading water grew muffled and the sound of Colin’s steps resumed. She paused until he fell in alongside her, and pointed to the darkness clinging to the arched walls.

“That’s where I saw him,” she stated in the softest of whispers.

Colin leaned in to hear her. “Then that is where I am going,” he declared.

Half of his face was cast in shadow. “Are you sure I can’t convince you to stay behind?” he added.

A twist of her lips was his answer.

“Fine. Then stay close,” he ordered solemnly.

“That’s a command I’ll obey.”

Shoulder to shoulder they crept deeper into the darkness. Perspiration beaded on her forehead and her torch revealed that Colin’s t-shirt was stained by sweat as well. Strain as she might to find them, there were no luminous eyes glowering back at her.

As she and Colin advanced, Stella began to question her own sanity. Had she imagined it? Did the band of bruises on her arm look less like deformed fingers and more like the linear formation of rocks under the water she had fallen into?

“Careful,” Colin cautioned, “we’ve gone off the path.”

Stella lowered her torch to view the spongy-looking rocks.

“Did we reach the end of the trail?”

“No.” He stretched back and held out his hand to help her negotiate the uneven terrain. “I thought I saw a gap in the wall. We should check it out.”

Stella grabbed onto his forearm as her toe clipped a boulder. Stable again, she looked up and searched the jagged black wall. Under the glow of the torch the wall wasn’t really black, but rather a deep ginger with rusty rivulets of ancient water tracks–weeping lines from long forgotten tears.

There was an opening in the palisade, a black scar wide enough to fit your shoulders through.

Colin stopped before it, jabbing his torch into the gap.

“Let me get a quick look,” he suggested. “It may be impassible in a few feet.”

They had traveled deep enough into the abyss to talk above a whisper.

“No.” Her fingers stiffened around his arm. “If anything happens to you–”

With the torch extended away from him, it was hard to see Colin’s eyes, but she could feel the weight of his stare.

“Careful, Stel. I’ll start to believe that you care about me,” he teased.

Stella dropped her hand and tucked her head. “Too much carbon dioxide,” she muttered.

There was enough light to catch Colin’s quick grin before he turned into the void.

Stella switched her torch into her left hand and concentrated on Colin’s back as they advanced deeper into the narrow channel. Gravel crackled beneath their feet, but aside from that persistent crunch, all sound was severed. There were no echoes of vast space. This chasm was only a few feet wide and the ceiling low, swallowing the resonation from the cave. In this tight space her eyes welled from the flames.

Colin halted.

Stella was so close on his heel she stumbled into his back, pushing him forward.

“Whoa, sorry,” she whispered. “Have we reached the end?”

“No,” he hesitated, “but there is something ahead.”

He splayed his free hand behind him, holding her at bay.

“What is it?” she hissed, hiking up onto her toes to try and see over his shoulder.

“A gate?” he murmured. “No, a cage.” He stepped forward, swinging his torch from side to side.

“No,” he corrected. “A cell. Cells.”

Another step and she glimpsed what he saw. A gap in the wall to the left. The hole was about four feet wide, barricaded by a stockade of wooden posts.

Colin swung his torch to reveal another barred cell on the other side.

“These aren’t really cells, Col.”

Colin ran his hand along the end posts, both impaled to the cave wall with crudely formed spikes.

“You’re right. There are no gates.”

“Whatever was inside was not supposed to get out.” She stuck her nose between the posts. “Unless there is another exit.”

Holding the torch as close as possible to the barricade, Stella gasped.

Colin was at her side immediately.

“What?”

“On the wall.” She pointed. “What does that look like?”

With the flickering light from both torches filling the vault, the craggy walls came into view. She wasn’t a geologist. She didn’t know the rock composition down here. But the slashes carved in the bedrock were not a natural phenomenon. Four parallel gashes, like the mark of bear claws. This grouping was found in multiple spots, the focus mostly towards the front of the cell–the area where the posts were spiked into the bedrock.

“Whatever–whoever was in here tried to claw their way out,” Colin murmured.

Stella trembled, but forced herself to look past the frenzied scratches, deeper into the shadows.

“I don’t see another way out.” Her voice wavered.

“Me either, but–”

Col spared stating the obvious. There were no skeletal remains or anything so macabre. Yet those claw marks reached out and tore at her soul. There was desperation to them. Madness.

He wrapped his fist around one of the posts and tugged. It didn’t yield. He tested another with the same results.

“Come on,” he said. “We better get back before anyone notices us missing.”

It was a wonderful suggestion. Suddenly, her perpetual curiosity was tempered. She had a sick feeling that she didn’t want to learn more about these cells, or their inhabitants.

“Are you going to ask Etienne about these?” she asked.

“Not yet. I doubt we’d get the truth from him. He wants us to believe this is paradise.”

“People don’t claw their way out of paradise.”

The Underworld was still sleeping when they returned. Preparing to slip back into their respective bungalows, Colin and Stella were startled to see his father emerge from his splintered dwelling. He snapped to attention at their approach. A hasty head to toe scan of their dirty clothes produced a dour look on his pallid face.

“Where have you two been?”

The suggestive question brought heat to Stella’s cheeks and a deep frown from Colin.

“We were investigating,” he whispered, patting the air with his hand, instructing his father to keep it down.

“Yeah, right.” Don rebuked in full volume.

“Dad, quiet.” Colin hastily glanced up the trail, but there was no sign of activity. He leaned in so that his mouth was closer to his father’s ear. “We found something,” he declared quietly.

Don’s eyebrow rose. He looked from Colin to Stella and back again. With a jerk of his head, he motioned them into the inverted boat.

Stella climbed in behind the two men and caught a pungent whiff. She realized the foul scent came from Don. He hadn’t been too concerned with self-hygiene lately.

Colin stood just inside the doorway, his arms crossed, his face lost in heavy shadows. He bowed his head to peer back outside and their eyes connected for a heavy second. He gave her an assuring nod.

Don turned around, his hands on his hips. His shirt was rumpled and draped over a stomach that was once much fuller.

“What are you two up to? I know you’re both adults, but–”

“Dad, come on.” Colin shook his head. “I’m serious. We found something. There were cells, like a man-made dungeon far back behind the waterfall. And we saw signs that they were once occupied.”

“Dungeon cells?” Don repeated. “Take a look at this place. If one of the handful of people acts up I’m pretty sure they’ll just get a strong lecture–not a jail sentence. They don’t seem like barbarians–”

Even as he made the declaration, Stella could see the wheels of doubt spinning on the elder Wexler’s face. He reached up and scratched the back of his head. “You probably just found more storage facilities. I’m sure things wash up down here that these utilitarians want to regulate. Might as well put the good stuff behind bars.”

“There was no door, Dad. It was a chamber barricaded with the intent to keep whatever was inside from getting out.”

Don wiggled his fingers and waved his arm. “Ooooh, scary.” He snorted. “Nothing surprises me down here. We are screwed. Is that what you want to hear from me? We are screwed and we’re all going to die, so what does it matter if you think you found Alcatraz, or you two sneak away for a kissing fest?”

“Dad,” Colin warned in a gruff voice. “We’re not all going to die. Stella and I are looking for a way out of here. We’re not staying.”

Don’s lips twisted. “Bravo. Great performance. But the only way out of here is to swim. So help me God, if anything happens to Anne I am going straight to that pool.”

“You can’t swim to the surface,” Colin argued. “You know that.”

The glow from the outdoor torches reached through the windows and captured Don Wexler’s eyes. Stella witnessed the first signs of gravity in them. For a moment he was not overcome by grief. Carbon dioxide wasn’t affecting his decision-making. Those eyes were lucid. And they were sad. In that moment he was the surrogate dad she had spent so much time with. The man who picked her up from school when her mother was working late hours. The man who taught her how to parallel park.

Outside the bell announced a new morning.

Don’s eyelids dropped closed and pressed deep into his cheeks as if he was in great pain. When they opened again the clarity was gone. The man she knew was gone.

“I’ll make it,” he vowed. “Whether you come with me or not.”

“We’re all sticking together. We’re a family.” Colin’s eyes slid to hers. “All of us.”

Stella swallowed and nodded.

“Good. Then as a family we can all swim to the surface.”

The bitterness to his tone was disturbing. This environment was proving toxic to Don, and Stella saw the toll it was taking on Colin as he swung away and placed his hand against the wall and hung his head.

“I’m going to check on Mom,” he announced.

He looked at her questioningly. Yes, she would join him. There was no way she was staying here.

Inside the infirmary they saw Sarah hunched over Anne’s inert figure. The nurse was humming an unrecognizable tune.

“We’ve got to find a way out of here,” Colin vowed in a whisper before they ducked through the doorway. “Tomorrow night we’ll go past the cells.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

Yes, she repeated in her mind as she watched Sarah Fournier rocking back and forth as she hummed her tune and fingered Anne’s blonde hair.

Finally sensing their presence, Sarah jerked her head in their direction. Pale eyes rounded, the circles beneath them etched in black. Thin lips sagged and her narrow chin dropped in contrition.

“I’m sorry,” was all she said.