He had no concept of night or day. He had only the torchlight to go by, and if he stared at it long enough, everything around it started to flash bright white, and the flame itself became a black spot, eating deep into his brain.
He had suffered depression as a teenager, and the worst thing about it was that he knew when it was coming. He could feel the dread wafting in, a soft breeze through a cracked window. One little taste of the hopelessness and he knew that more was on the way. It was unstoppable. In human form, it would have been twice Fermona’s size and just as charming. He was hopeless to resist it and, at times, he didn’t even try. It was seductive, the way it urged you to stop caring. It could overpower him so easily, which of course was one more thing to be depressed about.
Like Teresa, Ben’s mother was a night nurse at a local hospital. Her very job was despair, and she could tell when the depression was hitting Ben. He looked just like any of the terrified family members she saw sitting in hospital waiting rooms. Sometimes, after a twelve-hour shift, she would come home and find him in bed. And then she would take his hand and just hold it. No words. No orders. Sometimes she would stroke his hair and run her fingers along his neck. That was usually enough to get him out of bed and head off to school with the depression still perched on his shoulder.
Three times a day, Fermona would stop by the hole to open the door and dump some turkey legs and water down for him. Her visits were all he had to look forward to. She was going to murder him and suck on his bones, but at least she was pleasant about it. Neighborly, even.
On the seventh day, she opened the door and looked down at him.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Not good.”
“Talk to me.”
“My head hurts. And my knee. And I miss my family, although I know that bores you.”
“No, no. I understand. Perfectly normal to miss your family when you know death could come for you at any moment.”
“Right, yeah.”
“Tell me about them. Your family.”
“Well, my wife’s a nurse.”
“Noble profession. God bless her for that. Not easy work.”
“Um, my daughter loves foxes.”
“Ooh, I bet she’s a little spitfire. Hang on. I might have something for you.”
She left the door open and Ben tried scaling the wall of the hole to reach it. He was a bit stronger now, after a week of food and rest. His hand was scarring up, too. But it was no use. After four steps up the side of the hole, he lost his grip and fell back to the floor. Fermona poked her head back through the flap.
“Did you just try to escape?”
“Yes.”
“That’s fantastic. You’re getting your strength back. You should be ready soon. Here . . .”
She threw down a plush fox toy. It was fat and round, like a beach ball, with two little ear flaps and four little balled paws. He could see the fox smiling at him in the darkness. Flora had a fox like this. She kept it in her bed at night, along with fifty-seven other small stuffed animals, each one arranged in a precise order. She slept with a Greek chorus observing her. Ben clutched the fox to his chest and wept.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Fermona closed the door and he lay back down on the ground, closing his eyes. The flashing white from the torchlight grew wider and wider behind his eyelids, glowing bright.
• • •
He opened his eyes and found himself lying on a hospital gurney. Cheap, thin sheets were covering him. How’d you get here? You were just in the cave, weren’t you? Cave? What cave? There’s no cave. Don’t you know where you are? You’re at Ridgeview Hospital. Ridgeview, Minnesota.
He sat up on the gurney. There was no scar on his hand. But why would there be a scar? You never cut yourself. You’re thirty-five years old and perfectly fit.
Over on the other side of the room was a fat, bald doctor in a white lab coat, presiding over a table littered with assorted trinkets sealed in very small Ziploc bags. He looked over at the wall and saw a bunch of stainless steel doors, each one about the size of an oven.
I know what kind of room this is.
The doctor turned to Ben, looking surprised.
“Ah! You’re awake. Good. Now you can give me a positive ID.”
“A positive ID?”
“Yes, of course. You never did come and lay eyes on him, did you?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Come on over here. I’ll show you.”
Ben got up. He was wearing a dress suit with no tie. The doctor waved him over to the table and showed him a handful of blackened objects spread out on a cloth: a gold ring, a watch, a pair of charred shoes.
“Do you recognize these objects, Benjamin?”
“Yes.”
“Do they belong to your father?”
“Yeah. They do.”
“Do you want to see his body?”
Ben shook his head. “I don’t think I want to.”
“Just for a second. Look at his teeth. Help me out.”
“I can’t . . . I don’t . . .”
“You don’t want be here, do you?”
“No.”
“That’s all right. No one ever does.”
The coroner walked over to one of the steel doors and opened it. Ben felt the blast of icy air come from inside the refrigerator. The doctor reached in and pulled out a sliding steel tray. The corpse was covered in a blue sheet, with two blackened, crumbling feet poking out at the front. The toes were nearly gone. There was barely anyplace to hang the ID tag.
“Would you like to see the whole body, or just the face?”
“The face,” Ben said. The coroner reached for the top of the sheet to turn it down. Ben braced himself, like he was ready to fend off a punch.
His father’s head was pure anthracite. Nothing but dark bone. There were some stray hairs left, but the old man’s face had been fully incinerated. His teeth were his only remaining discernible feature, with one gleaming white incisor—the product of a dental implant—parked between its yellowing, nicotine-stained partners.
“Well?” asked the coroner.
“Cover it.”
He did as Ben instructed.
“Is it him?”
“Of course it is.”
“He died quickly in the blaze. Became highly intoxicated, dropped his cigarette . . . probably didn’t suffer for very long, if that counts for anything.”
“It doesn’t.”
“How do you feel right now?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s okay. It’s okay to be glad. You’re glad now, aren’t you?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth.”
“He was a piece of shit, you know.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Remember that boat he got after the divorce? That lousy boat of his?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember those ‘fishing trips’? You would beg your mom to switch shifts at the hospital so you wouldn’t have to go on them. He’d send you out on that crappy white Boston Whaler to bake in the sun while he threw down can after can of Schmidt beer out on Halsted Bay. That old man barely ever put a hook in the water.”
“We never did catch anything.”
“And he always brought along those shady friends of his, remember? The burnouts, and the divorcees who spent every waking minute after 11 A.M. getting shitfaced at Lord Fletcher’s. Nothing you hated more than that boat, right?”
“I did. I hated it.”
“It’s okay to be glad, Benjamin. You built a whole life for yourself even though he did nothing for you. Paid your way through school. Got a job. Got a wife. That was all you and your mother. You got everything you would ever need from him. And yet he still demanded you come out to see him. To that shitty apartment in Mound. It’s okay to be glad that’s all over: to have him out of your way, to know you can finally get on with your life. That’s why you never bothered to come look at his body or go to his memorial, right? I bet you looked forward to him dying.”
Ben started to cry. “I did.”
“You were hoping he’d die.”
“I was.”
“Fell right off you when you heard the news, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all right. Perfectly natural.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“You have an appetite for grief like a cow’s rumen, Benjamin. You have chambers inside you for all that grief and rage, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Tell me: What would you do with all that space if it were empty? Aren’t you tired of putting everything in there and leaving it?”
The coroner grabbed a scalpel.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked him.
“Let’s free up some space.”
“Get away from me. . . .”
“Let’s see if we can get all that sadness out of you.”
The coroner charged at Ben’s abdomen with the gleaming blade and jammed it into his stomach. There was no pain, only a great easing. Everything went slack. His jaw went soft. His muscles unknotted. He exhaled as if doing so for the very first time.
• • •
He woke up in Fermona’s hole. On the ground, three feet next to him, he saw a blackened lump. He reached out for it. It was a ring. His father’s class ring, still covered in soot. He wiped the soot off and the pockmarked brass gave off a dull shine in the torchlight. Then he slipped it over his right ring finger.
He heard the flap in the door slap open and shut.
“Psst!”
“Who’s there?” Ben asked.
“It’s me, Shithead.”
“Crab?”
“Shhh!”
“How’d you find me?”
“Gas station gave me directions. How do you think I found you, you nitwit? I snuck around.”
“For a week?”
“Eh, I might have taken a few detours,” Crab said. “Lotta good fish parts down on that beach.”
“You let me stew here for a week?”
“I came back, did I not? Quit your bitching. You should have seen some of the other guys I found. You’re the picture of health by comparison. Besides, I found something of yours on the beach. . . .”
Crab bolted from the door and then pushed an old water bottle through the slot. It was the same water bottle Ben had used to send the note to Teresa. But the scroll wasn’t inside. Maybe she got the letter somehow. Maybe she’s summoning forensic experts as we speak to analyze the salinity of the water trapped in the paper, to pinpoint my exact location, with a joint Coast Guard/Navy convoy setting off on the high seas to rescue me from this mountaintop: gunboats and warships and fighter jets with impossibly destructive payloads. . . .
“Another crab probably ate the letter,” said Crab.
Ben looked up, annoyed. “I need my bag,” he said.
“Where is it?”
“On that pile of crap the giant sits on.”
“She sleeps on that pile, too.”
“She does?”
“Sure as hell does. How am I gonna get the bag?”
“Grab it when she’s asleep.”
“Easy for you to say. She’ll squash me like a bug if she catches me.”
“What other option is there? I can’t help you get the bag if I don’t have the bag. You see my problem, Crab?”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.”
Crab thought about it for a moment. “All right. I’ll do it. Stay there.”
Ben sank back down. A few seconds later, he heard the flap in the door. Another few seconds later, a flying backpack hit him in the back of the head.
“Ow.”
“Sorry,” Crab said. He was not sincere about it.
“That was fast.”
“I’m not gonna take my time in there when the lady could wake up at any moment and stomp the shit out of me.”
“You could have had me out of here days ago.”
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about. This is a nice cave. I was wrong about it being boring. It’s got mud, centipedes. . . . I could hang out here for a while.”
“Shut up and make sure no one is coming.”
“You’re fine. She’s still asleep.”
Ben rooted through the bag and then let out a heavy sigh.
“What?” Crab asked.
“My boots. My boots and pants and jacket . . . those are still on the pile. They’re not in here.”
“So?”
“I need the boots to put on the crampons to climb out of here,” Ben said.
“You’re kidding me. I gotta go back and bring you more crap? That bag of yours was heavy!”
“Yes.”
“What if she wakes up?”
“She didn’t wake up the first time.”
“Yeah but she could wake up this time, you asshole.”
“I need the boots.”
“You need a lesson in manners, is what you need.”
Ben took the ice axes out of the bag and started climbing in his bare feet, jamming his toes into the crumbly dirt walls of the hole.
“What are you doing?” Crab asked.
“Coming up there so that I can kill you.” Ben made it halfway up before falling back down again.
Crab looked down on him, a principal disappointed in his student. “I’ll get you your boots. But you need to make me a promise, you whiny baby.”
“What?”
“Don’t give up. I know that’s not easy given the fact that you’re trapped in that fucking hole and she wants to kill you, but don’t give up. No matter how long it takes. No matter what it takes for you to keep going. Promise me you won’t stop.”
“Why?”
But Crab didn’t answer. Instead, he scampered away from the door and came back with a boot, the laces gripped in his tiny pincers. Then he left again and came back with the other boot, then the jacket, then the pants, and then the sweater. Ben put everything back on, including the boots and crampons. He was about to crawl up the side of the hole when he paused for a moment and took the phone out of his bag. The screen was dead and black. He tried to turn it on but nothing happened. He gazed up to the earthen dungeon ceiling.
“I know I said just that one time, but please . . . Please, let me see them again.”
There was no answer.
Ben dropped the phone into the dirt and pressed a crampon spike through the screen, the glass shattering and the guts of it cracking up inside. Then he took the stuffed fox that Fermona had gifted him and put it in the sack instead.
He scaled the side of the hole effortlessly. His muscles had rebuilt themselves. Nagging pains aside, he felt fitter than he’d ever been.
“I promise you that I won’t stop,” he told Crab.
“Good.”
“Let’s go.”
At the end of the dungeon corridor, he and Crab found a dead end. When they turned back and entered the main cavern, a very large and very awake Fermona was waiting for them. She had nothing but welcoming smiles for Ben.
“Well, I think you’re strong enough to fight now!”