Chapter 4: The Stranger's Wrist
The grip on my wrist was dry and warm, and it was not the hand. I got my eyes open.
He crouched over me with his knees on the wet stone; charcoal shirt, sun-bleached hair, grey eyes fixed on my face like he was reading a map. A single silver carabiner hung off his belt and caught the violet light in a bright sliver. He let go of my wrist as soon as I looked at him.
"You swung on me," he said. "Fine swing. Wrong guy."
I sat up. My palms were scraped raw from the duff and the root, both of them, and the sting was real. My feet were bare and cold against rock that hummed. The walls stood all around us, glowing at the seams, and every one of them pulsed in time with the beat I could feel coming up through the floor into my hips.
"Who are you," I said.
"Russell Marsh." He said it flat and quick, like a man filling out a form. "I was on the ridge behind you. Five miles behind you. Same trail."
"Nobody's on that trail. There's no blaze past the second pitch."
"I follow the ground, not the paint." He rocked back onto his heels and looked at the walls. "I saw you turn off at the deer path. Figured you knew something I didn't. Then the air got cold and I came in after you, and the mouth closed behind me."
I looked where he looked. The passage we came through was gone. Just wall, dimpled and wet, breathing light.
"How long have you been here?"
He thought about it, and the thinking took a while. "My watch says twenty minutes. My water bottle says longer. I've drunk two-thirds of it and I don't remember drinking it." He turned his wrist so I could see the face. The hands hadn't moved since he checked the last time, and I could tell from his mouth that he knew it.
I put my hand up in front of my face. Nineteen years old. Smooth knuckles. No scar webbing across the base of the thumb where the chainsaw bit me in 1996. The skin was tight and undamaged and somebody else's.
"You look like you're gonna be sick," Marsh said.
"I'm fifty-five."
He didn't laugh. He looked at my hands and then at my face for a long second, and something went out of his shoulders, like a man deciding the map is wrong.
"Shirt's too big on you," he said. "Sleeves are past your wrists."
The hum dropped a note. It went down through my teeth and into the bones behind my ears, and the walls lit up brighter along one seam so the reflections on the floor slid sideways. Wet stone, that metallic taste, like the smell of the air before a thunderstorm.
Then, out of the floor and the ceiling at once, came the voice, so deep it wasn't really sound, more a weight set on the inside of my chest. It said our names the way you'd read them off a plaque. Frank. Russell.
Marsh got to his feet. He didn't run. I'll give him that.
"What is this," he said.
Something moved at the far end of the chamber, past the light. The hand. It came out of the dark with its six long fingers curled loose, no arm behind it, no shoulder, nothing, just the palm a man could lie down in, black as wet slate with violet running under the surface like veins in a leaf. It hovered there and did not come closer. It smelled of crushed rock.
"One of you leaves," the voice said. "One of you stays and feeds the dark."
The words sat in my sternum for a while. Marsh and I looked at each other. His throat worked.
"That's not a choice," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected, which surprised me more than the cave. "That's arithmetic. You want me to pick a number and pretend it's a decision."
The hum pulsed. Twice.
"Years were taken from you," the voice said. "They can be returned. Thirty-six of them, Frank. From your skin. From your back. From the eyes that no longer read small print."
Marsh made a small sound. When I looked at him he was staring at me, not at the hand, and his face had changed. He is thirty-two. I could see him doing the sums of the years.
"Give me one reason I should believe you," I said.
"You stood in the mouth of this place and called hello." A pause, and the light in the seams turned over slow, like something rolling in its sleep. "And I answered you by name, Frank.
Marsh took a step toward me and put his hand on my shoulder. It was a heavy hand and it stayed there.
"I was behind you for five miles," Russell said. "I never saw you. You never called out until the end. "
He paused. "I was keeping pace, it's a habit of mine."
"A bad one."
"Yeah." He looked at the hand floating in the dark. "Maybe."
The floor pulsed, and the light ran up the wall behind the hand, and I felt something in my jaw go loose. I put two fingers to my cheek and found the crease by my eye gone, the one that had been there since I quit smoking at forty. Gone. My hairline itched. I did not touch it.
The voice spoke again, slower.
"One walks out with more years to spend. One stays. There is no third road, and the Hand does not bargain. Choose. Or I will choose, and the choosing is worse."
The Hand uncurled all six fingers, one after another, like a man opening a fist to show he's holding nothing.
Marsh took his hand off my shoulder. He stepped back one pace, then another, and put his back against a wall that was glowing. I didn't blame him. If I were thirty-two and someone told me I could walk out of here with thirty-six years of another man's life in my pocket, I would have stepped back too.
I picked up the wedge of limestone I had dragged in with me. It was still in my fist, I realized, and it had gone warm.
"Tell me what happens to the one who feeds it," I said. "No lies. What happens."
The hand smiled. Frank felt it.
I