His damn lighter had gotten wet.
Bard crouched in the darkness, one hand cupped around it against the strange wind blowing through the tunnel while his thumb worked the wheel.
Click.
Nothing.
Click.
For an instant, the spark illuminated something farther down the narrow passage.
Bard stopped.
He flicked it again.
Nothing.
“Come on.”
The tunnel was barely large enough for him to kneel in. Behind him, the trapdoor hung somewhere overhead. He had already tried pushing it back open, without luck.
He shook the lighter, blew on it, and tried again.
A flame appeared.
Bard immediately held it to the torch.
The old material caught reluctantly, then flared to life.
“Thank you.”
The tunnel extended beyond the reach of the torchlight. Smooth, interlocking blocks formed the walls and ceiling, leaving barely enough room for Bard to move in a permanent half-crouch.
Unfortunately, the torch revealed something else.
A body lay on the floor.
Bard stared at it.
“Okay.”
He approached carefully.
The remains looked ancient. Human. Possibly Native American, although Bard wasn’t about to pretend he could identify a culture from a corpse in a tunnel.
The body had dried into something between a skeleton and a mummy. Leathery skin still clung to parts of the skull and torso, with bone showing through in several places. Fragments of decayed clothing remained around it.
Around its neck hung a necklace.
Bard crouched beside the remains.
The pendant was shaped like a bat, carved from what looked like white stone or polished bone.
Something about the discovery gave him his second or third wind.
He wasn’t tired anymore.
He examined the body as closely as the weak torchlight allowed. Nothing immediately told him how the person had died.
“Well, I don’t think you’ll mind if I take a little souvenir for old times’ sake.”
Bard looked around the tunnel.
“Hopefully I don’t end up like you.”
He reached for the necklace.
Whatever ancient cord had once held it together disintegrated almost immediately beneath his fingers.
Bard caught the pendant before it fell.
He slipped it into his pants pocket.
Then reconsidered.
“On second thought.”
Bard pulled the chain from around his own neck and threaded the little white bat onto it. He brushed away several cobwebs and put the necklace back on.
“Never know. Maybe I’ll need the magic to get out of here.”
He made a mental note of the body’s location.
Then Bard continued down the tunnel.
There wasn’t really a comfortable way to move. He alternated between squatting, kneeling, and an awkward hunched walk while holding the torch ahead of him.
At least it provided some warmth.
The trade-off was that the thing looked a hundred years old and already seemed ready to go out.
The wind helped.
Without it, Bard suspected the smoke would have choked him.
“Well. At least there’s some luck.”
He kept moving.
Ten minutes became twenty.
Then what felt like half an hour.
The passage didn’t change.
Same fitted stone.
Same darkness.
Same relentless wind moving past him from somewhere ahead.
Bard stopped.
“I’m wondering when I turn back.”
The torch went out.
Bard stared into the black.
“Well, shit.”
He sat there for a while and considered his options.
He hadn’t made much of an attempt to climb back out after falling through the trapdoor, but the drop was high and the walls offered nothing useful. No handholds. No grooves. Just clean, smooth, interlocking blocks.
Going forward was stupid.
Going backward didn’t seem particularly useful either.
Then the wind strengthened.
Bard lifted his head.
It moved through the tunnel with enough force now to produce a low howl.
That was something.
“I mean, I guess that’s promising.”
He closed his eyes for a moment.
And saw the forest.
Bard’s body jolted.
For perhaps a second, the tunnel disappeared. He could see trees and an opening somewhere ahead, and the wind seemed to pass through their branches.
Just come this way.
His eyes opened.
Darkness.
Bard remained still.
Maybe he hadn’t gotten that second wind after all.
Nonetheless, he continued.
He moved through the black with one hand against the wall, following the wind.
Minutes stretched strangely.
Maybe an hour passed.
Maybe several.
His eyes kept demanding form from the formless. Shapes appeared where nothing existed. Colors flickered at the edges of his vision.
Sometimes he could see the forest again.
He knew perfectly well there was no forest in front of him.
He saw it anyway.
Eventually, the wind became so strong it almost felt like he was outside.
Then Bard saw something real.
Light.
A tiny glimmer appeared far ahead, outlining the end of the tunnel.
Bard moved faster.
The opening grew.
He would have run if the passage had allowed it.
Instead, he half-crawled, half-stumbled toward the light until the tunnel suddenly released him.
Color exploded across his vision.
Bard staggered forward.
Light. Plants. Trees.
The sensory shock was so intense that he bent over and vomited.
He remained there for several seconds, breathing hard.
Why did the colors look so vibrant?
Bard wiped his mouth and slowly looked up.
He wasn’t outside.
“Oh.”
The tunnel had opened into an enormous natural cavern.
Hundreds of feet of open space stretched in nearly every direction. Far above him, sunlight poured through several enormous openings in the ceiling, illuminating what appeared to be an entire ecosystem growing underground.
Trees.
Grass.
Flowers.
Succulents and cactus.
Small streams carved through the rock and soil. Somewhere nearby, Bard could hear running water. He followed the sound until he spotted a thin waterfall spilling down from one of the shafts of daylight high above.
Jagged rock walls rose around the cavern.
Bard turned slowly, trying to comprehend the scale of the place.
Then he noticed the figures.
High above him, along the top of a cliff face, sat six skeletons.
They appeared arranged there.
Bard stared.
“This reminds me of one of those ancient burials in the Andes.”
A strange sound interrupted him.
Humming.
No.
Buzzing.
Bard looked toward the ceiling.
The sound grew rapidly until it filled the cavern.
Thousands of bats poured through the openings above.
“Again?”
Bard ducked behind a cluster of rocks and trees.
The bats flooded through the shafts of sunlight in enormous twisting streams. Their bodies repeatedly broke the light apart, making brightness and shadow flicker across the cavern until day and darkness seemed to flow together like water.
Bard remained hidden and watched.
There had to be thousands of them.
Maybe tens of thousands.
Over the next ten minutes, the swarm gradually dispersed. Bats vanished into countless smaller caves and openings lining the cavern walls, splitting into streams and threads that seemed to travel in twenty different directions at once.
Then, almost as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone.
The cavern became quiet again.
Bard slowly stepped out from behind the rocks.
“Well. Maybe I could learn something from them.”
He looked toward the sunlight.
“And maybe I should just take a damn nap now that the sun is kind of here.”
He wandered for a while first.
The place was extraordinarily beautiful.
Tiny streams wound through the rock. Patches of earth somehow supported cactus, succulents, grass, and full-grown trees. Several brightly colored birds scattered as he approached.
It felt like a jungle inside a cave.
Eventually, Bard found a patch of grass warmed by one of the shafts of sunlight and lay down.
He wasn’t sure he could actually sleep.
His body at least needed to stop moving.
Bard closed his eyes.
He thought back over the last day.
He shouldn’t have fucked with those cops.
That much was obvious.
Maybe he should have just given them what they wanted.
He still didn’t know what their deal was. Evidently, they didn’t want him nosing around the trailer park. Didn’t want him asking questions.
But he’d already given them his camera and laptop.
Bard’s eyes opened.
He stared up into the column of sunlight.
In the tree above him, a single bat slept upside down. A tuft of white hair shone in the sunlight.
“I guess they didn’t like that it disappeared.”