Your Worst Nightmare Page 5
“Okay,” Olivia said. She stepped over the guardrail at the same time as Kristi, and the two girls walked quickly to catch up to Bobby and Tim.
Somehow none of them noticed the rusty old sign swinging from one post of the guardrail.
It read, simply, KEEP OUT.
“Do you think we’re going to get in trouble?” Olivia asked nervously. “What if Ms. Pierce or Mr. Tanaka notices that we left the tour?”
“So what?” Tim said, flashing a smile at her. “We’ll just say we got separated and mixed up, and then we couldn’t find the group. They probably won’t even notice that we’re gone. I bet this maze ends at the same place as the tour. That’s how it usually works.”
“What are you, some kind of maze expert?” Kristi joked.
“Yeah, practically,” Tim said with a laugh. “I visit my aunt and uncle in the country every October, and they grow this sick maze out of cornstalks every year. Kids come from miles around to go through it. Now that is an awesome maze. I have a really good sense of direction. That’s why I never get lost.”
“Oh, then I guess we’d better stick with you if we ever find ourselves trapped in a cornfield,” cracked Olivia.
Soon they had walked far enough that they could no longer hear the echoes of their classmates’ voices.
“Are we sure this maze even goes anywhere?” Olivia asked doubtfully. “Maybe we’re just walking . . . for no reason.”
“You guys want to wait here a second?” Bobby asked. “I can go ahead and see. If it’s just one long tunnel, we turn back now.”
“If you don’t mind . . . ,” Kristi began.
“No way, it’s cool,” replied Bobby. Then he hurried down the tunnel, disappearing around the bend.
“I wonder how long he’ll be gone,” Olivia said, just to fill the silence. When no one replied, she grew quiet too.
A few minutes later Bobby returned, practically jumping around with excitement. “This maze is going to be really cool,” he said. “Just up ahead, it splits up into four different tunnels. We can each take a different one!”
Tim immediately started messing with his cell phone. “Let’s make it a race. I’ll set the timer on my phone so we can clock everybody’s times.”
“No way,” Kristi spoke up. “The last thing I’m gonna do is race through this cave. I know it’s a maze and all, but it could still be dangerous.”
“Yeah. I’m not sure we should split up,” Olivia added. “Let’s just stick together and pick one tunnel to explore.”
“Here’s the problem, though,” Tim said importantly. “What if three of the tunnels are dead ends? It could take us, like, a long time to find the right one. But if three of us end up back here because our tunnels didn’t lead anywhere, we’ll know that the fourth person’s tunnel is the way out.”
“That’s actually a good point,” Kristi said. “Okay, I’m in. But I’m still not gonna race.”
“Fine.” Tim sighed. “I’ll just time myself then.”
“So, we’re going to take separate tunnels, right?” Bobby asked, looking at each one of the kids.
Tim nodded.
Kristi nodded.
Finally, Olivia nodded too.
The kids didn’t talk much as they followed Bobby to the four tunnels.
“Here they are,” he said. “See you on the other side.”
And then, one by one, they slipped into separate tunnels, disappearing down the narrow, twisting paths.
CHAPTER 7
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Olivia thought to herself as she walked through the lighted tunnel, kicking at the pebbles in her path. We never should have left the rest of the class. We never should have gone into this stupid maze. And we never should have split up. Why did I agree to this?
She had been walking for fifteen minutes now—or was it twenty?—on a downward slope through this unchanging rocky channel, and now she was at the point where she had to decide whether she should keep going . . . or turn back. And Olivia didn’t have a clue which decision was the right one. If she was really just a few feet from the end of the maze, it would be so pointless to turn back now. And yet, if she was already lost—if continuing to walk would make her even more lost—
How long have I been in here? she wondered.
If she did turn back, Olivia reasoned, it would be another fifteen minutes (twenty?) back through this tunnel, then another ten minutes back to Crystal Lake, and then—what would she do? Retrace her steps back to the entrance of the cave and hope she could meet up with the group again? Olivia shuddered to think of walking back through the bat chamber all by herself, but she had no interest in going deeper into the caves, either.
So stupid, she thought again. What were we thinking? Mr. Tanaka is going to be so mad at us. But what if the others already got back to the group? What if I’m the only one still stuck in the tunnel?
What if they leave without me?
Olivia shook her head hard. That’s not going to happen, she told herself. They have a checklist of everybody who came on the trip. And Kristi wouldn’t let them leave without me. She would never let them do that. No, I’ll probably just get detention . . . for the rest of my life. And my parents will kill me.
When the tunnel took a sharp turn to the right, Olivia kept walking. It seemed better to keep moving forward than to give up and turn back. She noticed that the tunnel was narrowing a bit and wondered if it would soon become a dead end. I guess that would make the decision for me, Olivia thought. Then, for the first time since she separated from the others, Olivia stopped.
What was that? she wondered. It sounded like . . . some sort of groaning noise—not quite human, but close. Olivia strained her ears, trying to hear it again, but all she could hear was:
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Olivia looked up and gasped in surprise. The ceiling above her was studded with the most astonishing crystal stalactites, glittering in the low light. Some of the stalactites were at least three or four feet long, narrowing into a razor-sharp point that could cause some serious damage to any unlucky person who stood beneath it at the exact moment it fell. Olivia suddenly remembered Mrs. Hallett’s warnings about rock slides and the importance of being quiet. She vowed to walk even more carefully. The entire chamber was beautiful in a terrifying way, breathtaking and haunting, the sort of place that Olivia would have appreciated more in pictures than in person. Then she heard the groaning noise again, and . . .
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
There it was again.
Olivia looked around with her eyes narrowed, wondering where the sound of water was coming from. Suddenly, her foot felt wet. She looked down and saw that she was standing in a puddle—and she had been standing in it long enough for the icy water to seep right through her sneaker. Olivia jumped to the side and shook her foot. Gross, she thought as she brushed against the cave wall—and felt more icy water soak into her sleeve. That’s when she noticed the rivulets of water streaming down the cave walls. One or two rivulets—well, Olivia knew that would have been no big deal. But the amount of water flowing around her didn’t seem normal, and for one horrible moment Olivia wondered if her tunnel had taken her directly under the Crystal Lake. She glanced suspiciously at the chamber ceiling. Was the rock above her thick enough to hold back millions of gallons of water? Or was it starting to crumble from millennia of erosion? Could the Crystal Lake be a little acidic—like the rainwater that had formed the Ravensburg Caverns? Would those lethal-looking stalactites come tumbling down in a rush of flooding water?
No way, Olivia told herself. Remember what Mrs. Hallett said about the lights. They wouldn’t have this section all lit up if it wasn’t safe. But she started to walk a little faster, just in case.
She felt something fall onto her head, a drop of water, probably, like the billions that had formed those stalactites over the years. Olivia shook her head, and then she felt another tiny tap, and then another. What if this
whole ceiling is about to cave in? she worried, absentmindedly running her fingers through her hair to brush away the drops of water.
What she felt in her hair wasn’t wetness though. There was something else perched up there. Something that was alive, and it wasn’t drip, drip that Olivia felt on her head. It was tap, tap.
With a frantic hand Olivia slapped at her scalp and the living thing tumbled over her forehead, down the bridge of her nose, and landed at her feet, twitching. It was twitching because it was alive, though not entirely. She knelt down to look in fascinated horror at the thing that had been hanging out in her hair, tapping her head with its hairy legs.
It was a fat moth, thick in the body, with sharply pointed wings. Long antennae reverberated as the nasty thing tried to figure out where it was, and what had happened to it. Its frantic flailing made Olivia realize that the moth was blind, with empty hollows in the sockets where its eyeballs should have been. One of its wings was torn, but the moth didn’t seem to realize that. Its useless wing flopped as the moth tried to turn itself over, but it was all in vain: Water was seeping into those fragile wings, dissolving them into a fine white dust that swirled on some strange current in the shallow puddle. A current, Olivia realized in disgust, that the moth was causing with its desperate, dying struggle.
She was rooted to the spot, looking at this miserable thing, with its bright-white wings and its body covered in thin, clear skin. Olivia didn’t know how much blood would be in a moth’s body—somehow the topic had never come up in her life science class—but it couldn’t be more than a few drops. And yet it was enough blood for her to watch those drops flowing just under the moth’s transparent skin, through an intricate network of tiny veins and capillaries, flowing slower . . . and slower . . . and slower . . . as the moth’s life slipped away. Cold pinpricks of sweat broke out on her forehead and on the back of her neck. Olivia squeezed her eyes shut against the miserable, sick, swaying feeling she sometimes got right before she threw up. But Olivia would not throw up, she would get out of here, out of this horrible cave, away from this horrible thing. She had never meant to kill it, but there was nothing she could do now. Nothing but get away.
Olivia started moving faster, making more noise, completely forgetting Mrs. Hallett’s warnings and her own worries. Again and again Olivia wiped her hand on her sweatshirt in case there was any powder from the moth’s wings still on her skin. She felt a funny tickle on her hand. It was probably a loose thread trailing down from her sleeve, Olivia rationalized. Yes. That was it. A loose thread.
Except it wasn’t.
Another horrible pale moth had landed on her skin, tapping . . . tapping . . . tapping with its hairy feet. She flung it off, and this time Olivia didn’t stop to see if she had killed it or not. She didn’t have time, because just a second later there was yet another moth—bigger than the others—nestled into a fold of her sweatshirt.
She slapped at the moth, but it wouldn’t move, as if its feet were somehow stuck in the fabric. So when the next moth landed on her, that made two, and then there were three. Four. Five. A dozen. Moths too many to count, on her hands, on her shirt, on her jeans, on her neck, in her hair, in her ears—
Where are they all coming from?
What do they want with me?
For as long as she could remember, Olivia had hated moths. She was too young to fully recall sitting in her stroller at a summer picnic—but her mother had told her about that day so many years ago, when a large, hairy moth had landed on the side of her nose. It had stared at her with these glittery black eyes, and little baby Olivia couldn’t get it off her face. She had started to cry. The memory came back to her now in hazy fragments; she almost didn’t believe in it except it was so clear, so real, those bulging eyes—
That’s when a new thought struck Olivia, one so horrible she almost screamed—but of course, she couldn’t scream; she would end up with moths in her mouth. Already they were covering her eyes, making it hard to see; covering her nose, making it hard to breathe. But no matter what, Olivia would not open her mouth, which was why she couldn’t scream when she realized that these moths, the ones bombarding her, didn’t have eyes.
If none of them had eyes, then they couldn’t see her. That meant they were finding her some other way.
Olivia was running now, but she couldn’t outrun the moths. After all, they had wings. They could fly. They could follow her anywhere. They would never leave her alone. Even if she somehow managed to escape, Olivia already knew that the moths would be with her forever, in the memory of their crawly legs on her skin and their fluttery wings in her hair. The moths—were they really moths? Olivia wasn’t sure anymore. What was it Bobby had said about radioactive mutants? Because surely regular moths couldn’t get so big. Taller than Olivia. Taller than her father, even. So big that Olivia could see the grasping pincers in their mouths, the long hollow tongues flicking at her. And, Olivia soon realized in horror, the biggest ones hadn’t completely lost their eyes yet. They were still blind, though; those hollow eyeballs filled with thick red blood that sloshed against the thin membrane. What did they want with her? Maybe these creatures were hungry. Maybe it had been a long time since fresh meat had stumbled into their chamber. Maybe that chain was strung up across the entrance to the maze for a reason, and Olivia had been too stupid to realize it.
Not here, Olivia vowed. Not now. Not like this.
Her arms windmilled wildly as she tried to cut a path through the horde of moths, not caring—not even noticing—all the little bits of moth bodies that got stuck under her fingernails: fragments of wings, whole antennae, hairy legs, and clumps of sticky powder.
She was almost there, almost across the chamber with its terrifying ceiling of treacherous stalactites, when Olivia realized that she had to make a choice. There were two parallel tunnels—one that looked bright and safe, with more lightbulbs burning than any other part of the cave she had seen so far. The other tunnel, though, was dark—so dark that Olivia couldn’t tell if it was big or small, a true passageway or a just cramped room. For all she knew, the dark tunnel was nothing more than the precipice of a thousand-foot drop.
But Olivia knew one thing for sure: Moths love the light. If she looked closely at the bright tunnel, she thought—she was almost certain—that she could see the flickering shadows of fluttering wings. There could be hundreds, thousands, millions of moths congregating in that bright room. That made the decision so much easier. Maybe it wasn’t a smart choice, but it was her choice to make.
And Olivia chose the dark.
CHAPTER 8
Tim didn’t check the time on his cell phone. What was the point? It would only slow him down. Besides, it was so quiet in his tunnel. It wasn’t like the corn maze, where the rustle of papery cornstalks was ever present, a quiet rattle underneath the shrieks and laughter of other kids. But deep within the Ravensburg Caverns, there was no way for Tim to know if his friends had already made it through the maze. The only thing Tim would gain from checking the time would be a little extra motivation to move faster—and he had plenty of motivation already. Tim wasn’t sure why it was always so important to him to be first. It just was.
Besides, he had enough to focus on just getting through the tunnel. The wide pathway for the guided tour had been worn smooth by thousands of feet traipsing over it for decades. This narrow corridor, however, was completely different. Jagged rocks jutted up from the floor; sometimes Tim had to jump or even climb over them, being careful not to scrape his hands on the rough walls of the tunnel. But Tim was sure-footed and swift as he sped through the maze; all those afternoons jumping hurdles and sprinting along the track were paying off. He felt good, confident. Of course he’d be the first one to get through the maze.
Then again, Tim had never expected to fall. How could he have guessed that one of those large, pointed rocks was precariously balanced on the ones below it? It looked like all the others, permanently embedded in the path. But when Tim tried to climb over it, the rock
wobbled—then tipped—then toppled over, dumping him in a heap on the cold stone floor. It caused a small rock slide around him too—insignificant pebbles, sharp little stones, and a cloud of dust that got into his mouth and made him cough.
Only after the dust cleared did Tim realize that his ankle was throbbing. He must’ve twisted it, wrenched it in the socket as he stumbled off the cascading rocks. Tim winced ruefully as he rubbed his ankle, which was already starting to swell. Not so smart, big guy, he thought. You’ll be sitting out next week’s track meet for sure.
But Tim had bigger things to worry about now . . . like getting out of this maze on a busted-up foot. Well, so much for being the first one through the maze. At least it wouldn’t matter if he came in last—not like in track.
Tim started rubbing his ankle more vigorously, hoping to increase the blood circulating through it. He thought he remembered Coach saying something about getting the blood flowing, back when Jason Morris messed up his foot during the first track meet of the season. Tim was about to get up and test his weight on his sore ankle when he thought he saw something move out of the corner of his eye.
More curious than afraid, Tim turned his head to get a better look. He thought those troglobites were pretty cool and, to be honest, he wouldn’t mind seeing another one. Like some creepy blind lizard or something. But he soon realized that the thing that moved wasn’t an animal. It wasn’t even alive. It was just the last rock tumbling down from the pile.
But not a rock; at least, not like the others. Because this one glittered—glowed, almost—a deep crimson red. Red like fire. Red like blood. Tim didn’t know much about precious gems, but he suspected it might be a ruby . . . a ruby the size of a quarter. Even Tim knew that it had to be worth a lot of money. His fingers clenched, imagining the cool weight of the ruby in his hand. It would be so easy to slip it into his pocket. It had obviously been buried for a long time. Maybe for all time. The ruby didn’t do anyone any good stuck here underground. Surely no one would miss it, whereas Tim could get a lot for it. He could take it to that pawn shop a few blocks from school. And then—oh, the stuff he would buy! Those fancy new running shoes that claimed to boost your performance by 15 percent. A laptop for his big sister, so she wouldn’t have to practically live at the library just to get her homework done. Something cool for his little brother, Jamie. And maybe he would shove a big stack of cash into an envelope and leave it in the mailbox for his mom. Maybe then she could quit her second job, the waitressing one that made her so tired all the time. When Tim saw her sprawled on the couch in her orange uniform that always smelled like salad dressing, asleep before she could even take her shoes off, it made him so mad. It didn’t matter how many lawns he mowed or how many cars he washed; he could never earn enough money to really help her out. But maybe with a ruby that big, he could.