Mercy Point Page 21

  Sam cut in. ‘You guys can keep talking about it if you want. But if you don’t want to die down here, I’d suggest following the person who hasn’t already gotten everyone lost.’ He kept walking, not even turning back to check on them.

  ‘Wow,’ Michael said, ‘that was harsh.’

  She took a step closer to Michael and whispered, ‘He’s been acting really weird since we got here.’

  ‘Yeah, even weirder than normal.’

  ‘I guess everyone reacts to stress differently.’

  ‘It turns some people into jerks.’ He glanced at her, and his eyes didn’t look angry anymore. ‘I want to trust your navigation over his, I really do.’

  ‘But you don’t?’

  ‘Would you?’

  She looked away from him; she didn’t want to see his face. Instead, her eyes went to the light down the tunnel from Sam’s torch. It was already getting faint.

  ‘No. I guess I wouldn’t. Let’s just keep going. We can’t leave him by himself anyway.’

  ‘Okay, but if we’re still going downwards in ten minutes, let’s stop and talk properly, alright?’

  She nodded.

  They continued. Emma didn’t need ten minutes. She knew that they were going the wrong way. But as irritating as Michael was, she understood his point. She was the one who had got them lost. Sam was probably angry at her too, and that’s why he was acting strangely. All of this was her fault. If they got out, but Fabian and Tessie were lost forever, it would be her fault. If they all died down here, it would be her fault.

  She swallowed. Thinking like that wasn’t going to help right now, but she couldn’t help it. She shuffled forward, and her foot caught on something. Her arms flapped out to try to find something to grip onto, but they only felt slippery-smooth rock walls. Plunging forward, her hands went out to stop her fall and her knee hit the floor with a crack. She clenched her eyes shut, expecting the pain to be intense.

  ‘You okay?’

  Her knee throbbed, but it didn’t hurt as much as she’d thought it would.

  ‘Yep. Fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Michael asked. His light was on her like a spotlight. She felt stupid, sprawled there on the ground.

  ‘I’m fine!’

  ‘Alright, whatever.’

  He turned and the light went with him, but as it did it lit up the edge of something on the wall next to her, which slightly reflected the blue light of his phone. She pushed herself back up onto her feet and pulled out her own phone. First she looked at her hands. There were grazes on the pads of her palms, but they weren’t too bad. Her knee hurt, but she could put her weight on it so that was okay. She shone the torch down onto where she’d seen the sheen of light. At shin height there was a metre-wide circle of the rocky wall that had a pearl-like shine. She crouched down next to it. Reaching out, she touched it with her hand and instantly pulled away. It hadn’t felt like rock against her fingertips. It had felt sort of like rubber.

  ‘Michael, Sam, hang on a sec!’

  She reached out again, pushed her fingers into the surface. It wasn’t rock at all. It almost felt like leather, but thinner. Sort of like dry seaweed or something. It stretched against her fingers, then it broke.

  ‘Emma?’ Michael called.

  ‘Come back!’

  She put her other hand into it and pulled at the hole she’d made. She heard footsteps and then Michael appeared next to her.

  ‘Yuck, what is that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She pulled the material apart even more. When it was big enough, she used her phone to light up the inside. It was another passageway, narrow and small, but just big enough for them to fit inside. It went steeply upwards.

  ‘Emma?’ Sam came towards them.

  ‘There’s something here. A passageway. It’s like someone tried to hide it.’

  ‘What is that stuff?’ Michael asked. ‘I’ve never seen a substance like that.’

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s like it was here to hide this passage.’

  Sam folded his arms. ‘We should keep going.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Emma glared up at him. ‘This passageway goes upwards.’

  Sam shook his head. ‘No. That stuff was over it for a reason. We can’t go in there.’

  ‘Can’t? Why can’t we?’

  He glared back at her, then slowly smiled. ‘Because I saw light further down that way. It looked like moonlight.’

  Michael’s mouth fell open. ‘Really? Oh thank God. Come on, let’s go look.’

  Sam reached a hand out to Emma, but she pushed herself up and rubbed the muck on her jeans.

  ‘Come on,’ Sam said, then he turned and started running down the hallway.

  Michael and Emma looked at each other, then hurtled into the tunnel to follow him. Maybe it was true. Maybe he really had found the right way. Moonlight. Open air. It would be amazing.

  She was expecting it to be another endless corridor, but it was only about ten metres long, with a sharp twist at the end. Before she turned the corner, she noticed the musty smell change, becoming cleaner, fresher.

  There it was. The light. Spilling around the corner. Sam rushed towards it. Emma could have almost laughed with relief. It was all going to be okay. They were getting out of here.

  Michael raced around the corner, then stopped dead in the opening of the tunnel. She heard him take a sharp breath and she stopped running. The light on Michael’s face wasn’t the silvery grey of moonlight. It was green.

  CHAPTER 28

  TESSIE

  Tessie felt sick. Gut-wrenchingly, full-body sick. The message-board conversations glared down at her from the walls. All her stupid, naïve sentences about how alone she felt, how she didn’t fit in, how the others were the only ones who understood her. What an idiot.

  ‘I guess this is why they say don’t meet strangers online.’ Fabian looked at her. ‘He led us down here, didn’t he? This was all intentional.’

  She nodded. Prickling heat was rising across her forehead. She couldn’t seem to pull in enough air. Her throat was gripped tight with that awful feeling of imminent vomit.

  ‘Tessie?’

  She leaned her hand against the wall, the paper crinkling against her palm. They had to go, had to find Emma and Michael, but she was going to vomit. It was happening, right in front of Fabian.

  ‘It’s okay.’ Fabian put a hand gently on her back. ‘Just try and breathe.’

  ‘I’m going to puke,’ she gasped out.

  ‘That’s okay — puke! Puke all over his creepy stalker wall.’

  She laughed and clenched her eyes shut. The laughter seemed to open her throat back up, allowing her to take in a slow wobbly breath. Maybe he was right, maybe she should puke all over Sam’s creepy stuff. It would serve him right. The heat in her forehead started to fade. The sick feeling receded.

  ‘Sorry.’ She straightened up, rubbing the sweat from her face. ‘I think I’m going to be okay.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Fabian shrugged. ‘I was really on board for the puke plan.’

  She laughed again; it sounded a little shrill. She couldn’t meet his eye. ‘I’m sorry. It happens sometimes and . . . I don’t know. I know it’s weird.’

  ‘Tessie,’ he leaned in close to her, ‘if you weren’t freaking out right now, that would be way weirder.’

  She shook her hands, trying to get the feeling out of her. Fabian turned back to the papers on the wall.

  ‘Do you think he’s done something to them? To Emma and Michael?’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was cracking. ‘How long has it been? Only an hour or so, right? He can’t have.’

  ‘But why bring us here? What does he want?’

  She looked up at the photographs of them above his bed. She recognised her own — he must have grabbed it off her Facebook profile.

  ‘He must be crazy. Proper lunatic crazy.’

  Fabian looked around them in disbelief, then reached for her hand. ‘We should go. We shou
ld try to find the others if we can. Warn them.’

  ‘Do you remember the way?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘We can figure it out between us, I’m sure.’ Her voice sounded unconvincing, but he nodded anyway. It wasn’t like they had much choice.

  As she turned to go, she noticed something lying half under the blanket on Sam’s bed.

  ‘Hang on.’ She reached down to grab it and began flicking through the pages. It was a notebook, like the ones they might have at school, except the paper felt different. It felt rough between her fingers and thick. Each page had a heading like ‘mobile phones’ or ‘high school’, with notes underneath explaining each thing.

  ‘What is it?’ Fabian came to stand next to her.

  ‘It’s almost like he’s studying civilisation. Trying to figure out how it works.’

  He leaned over her to look at the book. She flipped to the next page — ‘family’, with dot points underneath it like: there is a mum, female, and a dad, male. Sometimes they both work, but sometimes just the dad. The dad has the most power in the family, although it is not polite to mention this.

  Tessie slapped the book shut and tossed it back onto the bed. ‘Let’s go.’

  They left the light on and went back into the corridor. Tessie looked down at all the other doors. She knew she should try to open one, see what was inside. But she didn’t want to know. They had to reach the others as soon as possible. Every moment they wasted gave Sam more time to do whatever he was planning to do with them.

  The light from Sam’s room made it easier to scale back up the uneven staircase, but once they were through the hole and continuing down the tunnel, any light from Sam’s creepy little dungeon room was too far away.

  It was hard to walk back into the pitch blackness after being in that bright light. It took her eyes minutes to adjust. Fabian’s torch just looked like a pale grey circle. She didn’t ask him how much battery he had left. She didn’t want to know. She put a hand to her chest and felt the silver necklace her dad had given her through her T-shirt. The pendant pressed against her skin, warm from her body heat.

  They marched forward quickly, and soon they were back at the fork. She looked at the other tunnel, which went downwards, wondering if that linked up to where those doors had been. They kept walking back the way they’d come.

  ‘You know,’ she whispered, ‘I heard this weird noise when we first walked in. Sam was too far in front of me to really be able to see him, but I heard this creak, then like a minute later that airlock door slammed.’

  ‘You think he did something to it?’

  ‘He must have.’

  As they continued, more and more things started coming back to her. The way he was so pushy about going to the caves in the first place. The way he’d gone up to the gate when they first arrived. He said it’d been left unlocked, but maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe he had a key somehow. Or he had been the one to leave it unlocked.

  ‘You know he came to my room a few times,’ Fabian said. ‘After the hospital and just last night. I didn’t let him in last night though.’

  She turned to look at him, but couldn’t see his face. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. I was so stupid. Now it’s so obvious it was the two times he thought I might have been trying to back out of everything.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I guess I thought,’ he paused, ‘that it might have meant something else. So stupid. I mean, how did he even know where I lived?’

  ‘Do you think, what, that he followed us around or something?’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe. It can’t get much weirder than this.’

  Tessie thought further back, way back to when it had started. That email. She’d received the email telling her about the message board. She’d thought it was because of the sites she’d been on about adoption, but maybe it wasn’t. Judging from those pictures, it seemed like Sam already knew who she was before they’d met at Mercy Point that day. Maybe he had targeted her, targeted all of them, right from the beginning. She shivered.

  ‘Cold?’ Fabian asked.

  ‘Yeah, but more just super freaked out. How could we have been so dumb, Fabian? How could we have not figured out there was something weird about him? I mean —’

  Fabian grabbed her wrist.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stop talking,’ he breathed.

  She stopped. Trying to look into the torchlight, see whatever he had seen.

  ‘Listen,’ he said.

  At first, she couldn’t hear anything. Just the echo of his command. But then she heard something. Voices. They were very far away, but getting fractionally louder by the second.

  ‘Is it them?’ he whispered. ‘The others?’

  The relief flooded through her. If they could hear the others, it meant they were okay. He hadn’t done anything to them. Even if he was with them, this was a good thing. It would be four against one. He’d have to answer their questions. Maybe he knew a way out.

  She listened harder. The voices sounded strange. They didn’t sound like their friends.

  ‘Emma?’ Fabian looked like he was about to cry with relief. ‘Michael?’

  ‘Shut up!’ she whispered.

  ‘Why?’

  She could feel the relief being replaced by dread. That definitely wasn’t Emma and Michael talking. Tessie put her finger to her lips, and Fabian nodded. Together, they listened.

  ‘What language is that?’ Fabian murmured.

  He was right. It didn’t sound like any language she’d heard before. It was a mixture of hisses and clicks. Coldness crept over her.

  ‘I don’t think it’s human,’ he whispered, his eyes wide with fear. The voices were getting louder.

  ‘Run!’ gulped Tessie, and she dashed down the biggest tunnel. Fabian rushed behind her.

  Tessie threw all her weight forward. Fabian scrambled after her, the sound of his movement drowning out the strange voices. Good, Tessie thought, she didn’t want to hear them. She didn’t want to imagine what kind of monstrous animals were making those sounds. She bolted forward, reached the cavern they’d stopped in and picked an entrance at random.

  Hurtling down the passageway, she tried to pretend she was out on a run. She tried not to notice the sounds and the smells. She tried not to notice that she was hunched forward. Instead, she imagined a soft breeze on her face and the smell of cut lawn, not the cold, musty stench around her. She couldn’t even see anymore, but she didn’t care. She stretched her arms out in front of her and kept going. She imagined the sun on her skin. One foot in front of the other, breathing evenly and steadily.

  The sound of the voices was gone now. They’d made it. Fabian and her had outrun whatever was making those sounds. They were going to be okay. Leaning her shoulder on the hard cave wall, she stopped to catch her breath. It filled the silence around her. Nothing else, just the sound of her own rapid breathing. She held her breath for a moment: complete silence. Not a footfall, not an echo, nothing. She peered down into the dark passageway — the shining light of Fabian’s phone was gone. He wasn’t behind her.

  ‘Fabian?’ she whispered, and her own voice echoed back at her. He wasn’t there. She was alone.

  For a moment, she considered going back. Perhaps he had turned off somewhere different to her. That would mean going towards the voices. Finding out what kind of monster lived down here in the dark.

  She sank down onto the ground and wrapped her fingers around the silver necklace her dad had given her. She’d worn it for good luck. What a joke.

  Fabian probably hadn’t even realised that she was gone. Or worse, that was what he wanted. He’d intentionally taken a different passageway. Maybe he thought he’d find the others without her. That it would be easier without her. He was sick of hearing her complain all the time, sick of how weird she was. He’d seen her freak out and he had judged her for it.

  Deep down she’d known this would happen. If she let someone close enough, if she l
et them see the real her, they would always leave. Hadn’t she learned that already with her dad? She should never have become involved with them. She should be sitting in room twelve right now, not down here.

  Looking around, she began to lose her bearings. She wasn’t sure where the walls were, what was up and what was down. The darkness was absolute. She knew she could take out her phone and shine it around, but she didn’t. She couldn’t bear to see how alone she was. The darkness wrapped around her tightly. Whether she was in room twelve or here, maybe it didn’t matter. She was always going to be alone.

  No. She straightened her back, forced a breath. She couldn’t do this alone. Fabian didn’t want to be alone down here either, there was no way. It was thoughts like these that were cutting her off, not her real self. She needed the others, and they needed her. They were stronger together.

  Then she heard something. Just the faintest click. She fumbled her phone from her pocket with damp fingers. Turning it back on, it lit up a figure, standing just a metre away from her.

  Its face glowed blue. White eyes. No hair.

  She screamed. It echoed back around her, ear-splitting.

  CHAPTER 29

  MICHAEL

  ‘Michael?’

  He turned back to look at Emma. She was staring at him from a few metres away, her mouth open. ‘What’s in there?’

  How could he explain it? It wasn’t an exit, that was for sure. It was a cavern. A huge cavern, almost the size of the first they had seen. But it wasn’t the size that was so unbelievable. It was the lights. The beautiful blots of glowing lights coming from the floor, the roof and the walls. They were shaped like mushrooms, glowing green and purple.

  Then he noticed what was behind them, what was covering the walls. Titanite. Glittering titanite, more than he could even comprehend. Millions and billions of dollars’ worth.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ he said. ‘Come look.’

  Emma came to stand beside him at the lip of the tunnel. Her face was glowing with the beautiful colours, her expression filled with wonder.

  ‘Should we go in?’ he asked. Without thinking, he extended his hand to her. She looked down at it, then back up at him. For a moment, he was sure she’d have a go at him, tell him she still hadn’t forgotten the way he’d talked to her before, ask him what the hell he was doing trying to hold her hand, but she didn’t. Instead, she took his hand. Her fingers curled between his.