Slowly, I made my way along the wall, reading name after name after name. Toward the back of the cave the years got older and older. 1921, 1915, 1906, 1899. Some looked hastily painted, in thick white paint. Others seemed to be written in chalk, probably the only instrument they could find in those days. I couldn’t imagine that some of the people I’d seen on the street had been here for almost two hundred years. How was that even possible? How was that survivable?
I squinted in the darkness, trying to make out the words that had faded with time, holding my breath as I waited for my light to find the name I was looking for. When it finally did, I was at the innermost point of the cave. And there, etched into the stone at eye-level, was Tristan’s name.
TRISTAN SEVARDES (PARRISH) 1766.
I inhaled sharply. He’d been alive before the U.S. was even a country. Had, in fact, died before the Revolutionary War. He was over two hundred years old.
There was a noise, like a scraping, near the mouth of the cave, and I dropped my flashlight. When I grabbed for it, it slipped through my fingers and hit my toe. Cursing under my breath, I picked it up again and shone the light near the opening. The fire still smoldered.
“Hello?” I said, my voice sounding weak and scared. My toe throbbed angrily. I cleared my throat, tried to sound more authoritative. “Who’s there?”
No reply. I took two tentative steps forward.
“Come on, you guys. This isn’t funny,” I said.
I listened hard for the sound to come again, but it didn’t. All I could hear was the deafening rasp of my own breathing, and the faint echo of the surf crashing outside.
I looked at Tristan’s name again. 1766.
Suddenly, my whole body started to shake. The manic scribble on the walls closed in. I tried to take a breath, but my throat squeezed shut. I had to get out. I had to breathe. I pressed one hand against the cold wall and lurched for the exit. That was when a crackling sound stopped me cold.
“Hello?” I called again.
I took a tentative step forward. Another crackle. Something in the corner of my vision flashed. There was a piece of white paper stuck to the bottom of my sneaker.
Nice. Way to be paranoid, Rory. I reached down and plucked the page from my sole, then kept moving.
Outside, the rain had reduced to a light drizzle. I took a deep breath of the cool night air and tipped my face toward the sky, letting the rain soothe my face. After a while, the rhythm of my breath returned to normal. I leaned back against the rock wall and trained my light on the paper. It was a small, rectangular sheet torn from a standard notepad, the kind reporters scrawled on in old movies. Someone had drawn a line down the center and made hash marks on either side, each set of four slashed through with a long mark—the old method of counting by fives. In one column there were thirteen slashes. In the other, only nine.
Someone was keeping score, but of what?
“What’ve you got there?”
I was so startled by the voice, I staggered backward and tripped, slamming my head into the sharp rock wall. Suddenly three flashlights flicked on, and Nadia, Pete, and Cori appeared as if from nowhere, dark hoods pulled over their hair. Before I had time to move, Pete stepped forward and snatched the page from my fingers.
“Wait!” I yelled.
Nadia shone her light on the paper. Her black eyes widened. “Holy crap. Is that what I think it is?” She turned the light on my face, effectively blinding me. I threw up my arms and squinted, but all I could see were a dozen purple dots and three looming shadows. “Are you actually keeping a log of all the people you damn to hell?”
“What? No! I just found that in the cave!” I protested. “It got stuck to my sneaker. Look, you can see the tread marks.”
I lunged forward to grab it back, but Pete pulled it up and out of my reach.
“Nice try,” he said with a sneer. “You think I’m gonna let you destroy the evidence?”
The three of them stared me down. Even Cori’s normally friendly face had gone taut and tense. I glanced back at the solid wall behind me. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to run.
“We know it’s you,” Nadia sneered. “It all started when you got here.”
“It’s the only explanation,” Cori said coldly, crossing her arms over her chest as Pete stared down his nose at me.
“It’s not,” I told them, trying to keep my voice from quavering. The skies opened up again, heavy raindrops pelting me. “I swear to you. It’s not me.”
“Yeah? Well, we’ll see what the mayor has to say about that,” Nadia spat, grasping my wrist, pinching the skin between her thumb and fingers.
Suddenly someone jumped down from the slope and squatted right next to me. I dropped my flashlight. Cori screamed, but Nadia’s grip only tightened.
“Get off her,” Joaquin growled, pushing his black hood off his face. Nadia instantly dropped my hand and backed up three feet, stepping right into the beam of my fallen flashlight. I stopped breathing.