TWO

At the sound of voices in the moist, cool air, Mason Lee stopped pacing on the rocky ground at the bottom of the underground waterfall. Because of the sheer blackness of the interior of the cave, Mason Lee had long ago lost any rational ability to sense the movement of time. He could only guess by his count of rat tails that it had been nearly six weeks since he had heard any voice but his own, an isolation so long that his right arm, broken and put into a cast in the days before entering the cave, had fully healed and he’d been able to strip the cast away.

Mason should have died from dehydration, far above on one of the ledges of the giant shaft above him and the river.

A stab of brightness in his right eye had saved his life. He’d been fading in and out of consciousness on a stone ledge near the top of the water, mouth torn and bloody from chewing on rope, delirious with thirst, maddened by the sound of water that was so close, yet so far, and sent even closer to absolute insanity by his fear of the dark.

The intensity of the sudden pain in his eye had clarified his conscious thoughts, and in that instant he realized that one of the rats he’d listlessly allowed to explore his body and lick at the blood on his mouth had bitten into the softness of his eye. Reflexes that made Mason such a good hunter served him, weak as he was, and he’d snatched the rat off his face and, in rage, snapped its head off with his own teeth.

Without thinking about it, he’d sucked greedily at the copper of the rat’s blood. Instead of flinging the rat’s body into the giant shaft that the waterfall had carved downward in the cave throughout millennia, Mason held on to the rat, feeling power return to his body as its warm liquid renewed him.

Complete insanity, brought on by the darkness, had retreated at the stimuli of the rat’s actions and his own. Rational thought began again, and Mason’s cunning had returned.

The presence of rats told him that he wasn’t as completely buried inside the mountain as he had feared. Somehow, somewhere, they were able to enter and exit at will. The rats, then, gave him hope.

And nourishment.

Mason didn’t eat the entire body of that first rat, but saved enough as bait to catch another. And, when needed, another. He saved the tails, guessing that he was eating one rat every day.

In those first few hours of his return from the dead, he’d also begun to apply rational thought to escape. He knew he was on one of a series of ledges that led to the bottom of the waterfall. Before she’d eluded him, he’d been in pursuit of the girl, aware that the series of ledges was part of an escape route. Metal hooks at the edge of the uppermost ledge supported a rope ladder that hung down to the next ledge. But climbing down was useless because the second rope ladder, leading to the third ledge, was missing.

There was a solution though. If Mason could find a way to split the rope ladder lengthways, he’d be able to use one half of its length to drop to the next ledge and take the other half with him to drop to the ledge below it. From there, he’d be able to descend the other rope ladders already in place. He knew at the bottom there was a way out. She had taken it. She. Caitlyn. The freak who had humiliated him and left him to die this horrible death.

In his few days trapped on the uppermost ledge, overwhelmed by panic because of his fear of the dark, he’d been uselessly chewing like an unreasoning animal on the rungs of a rope ladder coiled beside him, hoping to split the ladder.

But with the rat that had attacked his right eye safely digesting, Mason had searched for a better way. He’d felt around in the dark until he found a rock with a sharp edge. Then he’d patiently hammered at the center of the first rung with that rock, imagining with each blow that he was driving granite splinters into the skull of Caitlyn, for hate sustained him as much as the protein and liquid he drew from the rats.

Once that had succeeded in cutting through the rope, Mason knew he’d survive. There were plenty of other sharp rocks in this cave, and with rats to hunt, he’d have all the time he needed. Three weeks later, an estimate based on the count of rat tails and the length of his shaggy beard, he’d hung one length of rope from the metal hook at the edge of the ledge, and with the other half coiled around his waist and tied securely in place, he’d slid down to the second ledge, then repeated the drop to the third ledge with the uncoiled rope.

All had gone as expected. Until he reached the bottom of the huge vertical cavern, where the final rope ladder had dropped him onto a small semicircular landing area carved into the rock beside the water.

Sound, not sight, told him that the flow of the waterfall disappeared via an underground river. He couldn’t cross the river; the flow was too fast. With no way of seeing how the water exited, he could not evaluate his chances of survival by holding his breath and going into the river, especially because he did not know how to swim.

Yet Mason Lee was too angry and too filled with hatred to give up on life. Caitlyn was Outside, somewhere. Fueled by fantasies of how he would exact revenge before drinking her blood just as he did from rats, he’d paced the semicircle, stopping only to kneel at the edge of the fast-flowing water when the pacing made him thirsty, grateful that he’d had the foresight to take with him as many dead rats as he could knot together by their tails. If this had been how the girl escaped, sooner or later others would come. His energy did not diminish, but rose with each day. Hatred and anger.

Now finally, he heard voices.

And saw the glow of flashlights, the first visual stimuli he’d had since being trapped on the ledge. He’d been so long in pitch black that the light was a stabbing pain again, but only in one eye, and it was in this moment he realized the rat had permanently blinded his right eye. His good eye, for his left eye was milky and had a tendency to wander.

He’d lost his good eye. Because of Caitlyn.

He’d deal with that soon enough.

Now he was offered escape. The lights and voices came from two men bobbing in the water with life jackets.

So this was how their kind fled Appalachia to the Outside.

Their flashlights were directed in front of them, showing the end of the cavern, where a small gap existed between the top of the river and the channel into which it flowed. This close to freedom, they would not have expected any more danger.

Mason couldn’t swim. But all he needed was a life jacket.

“You smell something?” one man asked as they neared Mason.

“Yeah,” the other said. “Some kind of animal.”

They began to turn their flashlights toward the edge, where Mason was squatting.

He’d conquered his greatest fear—darkness—and now felt immortal, exultant with life and rage, and as flashlight beams pinned him, he pounced from his squat, throwing himself through the air like a panther.