The Girl Below(107)

The stairs seemed to go on forever, though I’d been too frightened to count them, and when I finally reached the bottom my leg jarred as it tried to continue down another step. I was standing in a puddle an inch or two deep; ice-cold water sluiced the soft skin between my toes.

The child, or whoever it was, was sobbing again, a wretched whine that would curdle milk. It sounded like a girl, and I thought she must be somewhere in front of me. I stepped in what I thought was her direction then stopped. If I went any farther, I wasn’t sure how I would find my way back to the foot of the stairs. I could only hope that once I was really in the pit of the chamber, the stairs, dipped in that faint wash of moonlight, would appear fractionally less dark than their surroundings.

I took another step forward, and another, until I hit a hard lump that gave way under my foot and made a sickening squelching sound. I hoped it was nothing more than a beetle or a snail, but remembered the grisly textures that had been in the bottom of the bunker when my hand had closed around the shoe. My breathing quickened to a shallow rasp, and I moved forward another ten or so steps before stopping abruptly. I could see no boundaries, had no idea of the bunker’s dimensions, and I felt suddenly disoriented, as though I were standing on a tiny fragment of rock in some deep undersea cavern. No sounds issued from the chamber, and I wondered if the child had been nothing more than a decoy to lure me down here. But who would play such a joke? Was some malevolent force really out to get me, or was this all my own creation—an elaborate manifestation of the list?

I’d read somewhere once that if you died in a dream you died in real life too, and I wondered if that was what was happening to me now. All the visions, hallucinations, whatever they were, of a decaying body in a watery hole had been leading to this: my own grave. I had been the one buried here, the one who did not get out alive.

In perfect despair, I dropped to my hands and knees and felt myself give in to the self-destructive thoughts I had tried for so long to resist. Released from its bindings, the list unfurled with violent force. I was stuck inside a dream that wasn’t a dream, but there was no exit and no way to wake up. For several minutes I crouched there in the muck, lacking the courage even to turn around and crawl for the stairs. But then something kicked in, not self-preservation exactly, but the threat of a terror more prolonged than any other I had known. I did not want to become the diabolical soup of hair and teeth, to rot in a place where no one would find me.

I meant only to turn around, to search for a haze of light, but in so doing, my hand swept forward and hit human skin so warm it burned my fingers. My hand closed around a slender ankle, perhaps a wrist, and traveled up to find a swatch of fabric, a cotton dress, sopping wet. Enfolded in the dress was a girl, motionless. She was all arms and legs, a spidery tangle of limbs, but I managed to feel my way toward her head. Her hair was wet, with blood or water I could not tell. Nor did I stop to check if she was breathing—her warmth was enough. Moving fast, I linked my arms behind her slim waist and pulled her to me in a loose bear hug. She was heavier than I expected—roughly half my size—but the fact that I had found her, and that she was alive, boosted my strength. I was no longer alone in this dungeon and, feeling my spirits soar, I hauled us both to our feet.

As I’d hoped, the darkness was less concentrated at the other end of the bunker. With the girl hoisted under one arm and bolstered by the other, I made my way toward the grayish haze. Halfway across the flooded chamber, one of my flip-flops got hooked on something under the water and came off, but I wasn’t about to waste time trying to find it. Instead I limped on with one bare foot, trying not to slip in the soft, buttery mulch.

At the foot of the stairs, I leaned on the wall to rest for a few moments. In my arms, the girl stirred, and coughed once or twice. Even though she felt hot to the touch, she was also shivering, and I guessed she had some kind of fever. Pulling her closer to my body, I began the ascent, each step slow and torturous. The girl’s head lolled at an impossible angle, hiding her face from me, and I worried that her skull might scrape against the narrow stairway, or worse, that I would drop her.

But I didn’t drop her, at least not until we had climbed out of the bunker and I had stumbled a few feet across the grass. My arms literally gave way then, and she slid down the length of my body and landed in a pile at my feet. The jolt must have roused her, because she started to cough again—a little more violently this time—and I crouched next to her and rubbed her back. She was turned away from me, and long strings of wet hair covered her face, but I finally had enough of my wits about me to notice what she was wearing: a simple dress, made from a cotton printed with strawberries. The dress was soaked and stained, but I recognized it immediately. It had been my favorite, a dress made for me by my mother. I had been wearing it the day after the party.