I was half-asleep when I heard something hit my bedroom window. I jerked up, looking around confusedly for a second before my gaze settled on the window that looked out into our back yard. A moment later another pebble hit the window. I knew who it had to be, as Everett was the only one that had ever done that, and even he had not done it for a couple of years or more. Still, I had already decided that I wasn’t going to talk to either of them. I wouldn’t cave in now.
Another pebble, tap-thump, as it hit the glass and then bounced away down the shingles below. I looked at the clock. 1:53a.m. Something wasn’t right. Even if Everett wanted to pour out his heart about Sara, he wouldn’t come this late to do it. He was too terrified of his parents catching him out that late. Cursing myself, I threw back the covers and went to the window, opening it just before he hurled another rock from the yard below. One look at him and I knew that something bad had happened.
I whisper-hissed, “I’ll be right down,” and closed the window back. My stomach churning, I pulled on my jeans and shoes, sneaking quietly down to the kitchen’s back door and finding Everett waiting there. Even in the weak illumination of the moonlight I could tell that he was pale and terrified. When he spoke I could hear he had been crying as well.
“What is it? What’s going on?”
He shook his head. “I…I need to show you. Come on.” Gone was the weak, placating tone of this afternoon. For the moment, something had grown so large in Everett’s vision that our little melodrama had dropped from view. “I’ve got my car. I’ll drive.”
I just nodded and followed him, already getting caught up in the state of dead panic that seemed to be baking off of Everett like a fever. We drove fast going back to his house, faster than usual for him, and never spoke during the ride. When we got out, Everett looked at me, his eyes still too wide and glassy as he beckoned me to follow. We went around to the back of the house, carefully easing open the fence gate to get into the back yard. I closed it softly behind me, and when I turned back around I saw Sandy for the first time.
The dog lay fifteen feet away, her body half on and half off of a brick patio that led out from the house’s living room glass sliding doors. She had been gutted, although that seems like far too clean and precise a term for what had been done to her. I had gone deer hunting with my uncle the previous fall, and I had seen him field dress a deer once, using a long, sharp knife to cut a narrow slit up the animal’s belly. This was different. I had a flash of a game show I had watched once where a family had to dig around in a pie until they found the key to their new car. They had plunged their hands through the crust over and over, bringing out fistfuls of blackberries every time before digging in again. I stifled a gag, realizing for the first time that Everett was talking.
“….so I came out to see if she was feeling better, and that’s when I found her like this.”
I tore my eyes away from the dog’s remains to stare at Everett. I didn’t know what to say. Then a dark thought bubbled to the surface. Did he think that I did it? I felt anger warring with fear as I tried to think of a response. Just then, he spoke again, his voice trembling.
“I…I was going to bury her. I didn’t want to wake anybody up, and I didn’t want anybody seeing her like this.” He swallowed, taking a breath before continuing. “But then I found that stuffed into her mouth.”
He pointed as he spoke, and I felt lightheaded when I turned to see the rock a few feet away on a clean portion of the patio. Without asking for explanation, I stumbled over to it, lifting up the rock and picking up the note and the tangle of string that lay below. I glanced at Everett before opening the note to read a single word written in the same spidery handwriting that belonged to the cave:
Tribute.
I read it at least ten times, as if eventually it would make more sense than it had the previous times. Finally I sat it back down as I had found it, slowly backing away before turning to Everett.
“What does it mean?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe Sandy was a tribute, a payment, for the answers we’ve gotten? Maybe killing Sandy was supposed to be some bizarre tribute to us? Who knows?”
“I…I don’t know. Fuck. This doesn’t make any sense.” I looked around, my skin crawling at the idea that whatever did this could be watching us, leaping out of the dark when we weren’t expecting it. “Have you told Sara?”
Everett shook his head again. “I came straight to you. I don’t know if we should tell her, either. It’ll just scare her for no reason.”
Letting out a long breath, I scrubbed my face with my hands and tried to clear my head. “I’m not sure….I don’t know what’s best right now. But we can’t leave this out like this. We have to bury her before anyone finds her, or there’ll be a lot more questions.”
With that we set to work. We gingerly placed the dog into an oversized lawn bag and put her in the back of Everett’s car. After grabbing a shovel from his garage, we headed south past the city limits before stopping at the edge of an apple orchard to bury her. It took nearly two hours to dig the hole deep enough, the two of us taking turns at the shovel. As I dug, I reflected on the fact that we never even considered telling our families or the police about what had happened. It wasn’t even an option anymore. We might tell ourselves it was because we didn’t want to get into trouble or have people thinking we were crazy or on drugs, but that wasn’t the truth. The truth was that good or bad, the cave and its Mystery were ours. Our secret and our treasure.
Even with this, we weren’t willing to give that up. So we buried Sandy in the dark, crying a little as we did it, both for her and for ourselves. When we were finished, Everett thanked me and we hugged. He dropped me back off at my house and I crept back upstairs, dirty, exhausted, and wondering if I’d even be able to sleep.
As I opened the door to my bedroom, the details of the room were fuzzy in the bluish glow of early morning that pressed against my window. Yet it only took a second for me to see the rock sitting on my pillow, the paper tied to it burning like a brand in the gloom.
My breath caught in my chest, I crept softly to the bed and picked up the rock, pulling loose the string’s bow with one tug. The paper fluttered to my bedspread, but I caught it as it landed. Opening it, I read the word written in that same, familiar handwriting:
Tribute.
“So what does it mean?” Sara’s voice trembled as she spoke, her hands clasped in front of her knees to keep from fidgeting. She had found the same message we had when she woke up this morning. That had scared her enough on its own, but once we told her about finding Sandy the night before and my own note when I returned home, we were all struggling to not give in to total panic.
I tried to think of something smart to say, or if not smart, at least reassuring. I had noted with more than a little satisfaction that she had directed the question towards me instead of Everett, and I had the sudden, insane conviction that I could somehow prove myself the better man if only I could find the right answer.
“It means that it wants payment for its services, that’s what it means.” Everett had barely spoken since we finished catching Sara up, and when he spoke now, his voice didn’t waver. I looked at him and saw anger mixing with the fear in his eyes. “It means that whatever the fuck is in that damn cave thinks we owe it something for it doling out a few answers to some stupid kids’ questions.”
I nodded uncertainly. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s just trying to scare us for some crazy reason. Hell, it could be some kid we go to school with that is playing a stupid prank on us.”
Everett’s eyes locked on mine. “Do you honestly think anybody we go to school with, shit, anybody we know could do what was done to Sandy? Even if they could, why the fuck would they? She was…she was a good dog.” He looked away, his jaw muscles jumping as he wiped at his eyes. Sara broke in again.
“He’s right. Who could have gotten into both our houses and killed Sandy? And why would they? No, it was whatever that’s in that cave. It has to be.”
“Okay, then. Let’s say it is whatever that’s in the cave that’s doing it. What does that mean exactly? Last time I checked, none of us had a fucking clue what was in that damn cave.”
“Don’t yell at her, man. It’s not her fault.” Everett’s tone was softer, but I felt anger rushing through me.
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do, how about that?”
He held up his hands as though to ward me off. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything. We just have to all stay calm, right?” He looked down at the ground. “We just need to figure out what to do.”
“We should’ve never used the cave.” Sara paused before adding. “At least not without knowing what was inside.”
I almost laughed. “Oh really? Well that’s a brilliant fucking insight now, isn’t it? Where were you three years ago when we started doing it? Oh, that’s right. Right fucking beside us, leaving your own notes for the cave.”
“Dude, cool it, seriously. There’s no point in us blaming each other n…”
I pointed my finger at Everett like a dagger, stabbing it at the air as my voice grew louder. “So help me, if you don’t shut the fuck up defending your fucking girlfriend, I will…” Just then I heard Sara crying. I looked to see her cradling her face in her hands, her body shaking with every sob.
I couldn’t take anymore. Standing up, I started to walk away. I heard Everett stand up behind me, and I hoped that he would try to stop me so I could hit him. But then I heard him softly comforting Sara, and I walked on, quickening my pace until I couldn’t hear either of them any longer.
I spent most of the day in my room, trying to sleep and failing. I finally went outside to lay in the hammock, and it was there that they found me. I expected Everett to start in with some lame apology, but it was Sara that spoke, her face still puffy from crying.
“Dylan, we have to talk.” Her voice was steady and serious now, her face composed.
“Don’t see as how we have anything to talk about at the moment. Apparently, even though I’ve done nothing wrong, I’m getting painted the asshole in this little drama, so you’ll just have to count me out.”
Sara poked me hard in the side. “Damnit, you know it’s not like that. And if you don’t, then you’re an idiot. But I’m not talking about what’s going on between the three of us. We can deal with that later.”
“Later? Why not now? Why…”
Sara broke in. “Because if we don’t deal with the cave, we might all be dead before we have a chance to talk about anything. That getting through to you?”
I stopped, feeling the breath seep out of me. She was right. It was something that we’d all known, but none of us had been willing to really face it up to that point. We didn’t know what we were facing or how it would all turn out, and I was dragging us into a bunch of melodramatic bullshit that wouldn’t count for anything if we were all dead. I thought about apologizing, but instead I asked another question.
“What should we do then?”
Sara swallowed before answering, and I could tell by Everett’s expression that he knew what she was going to say. “We have to go to the cave and confront whatever lives there.”
I sat up in the hammock, nearly pitching myself to the ground in the process. “Confront it? What if it does to us what it did to that dog?”
Sara sighed. “I don’t know. But do you have a better idea? Maybe we can reason with whatever it is. Or maybe we can even kill it if it can’t or won’t listen to reason. Whatever the case, I don’t plan on sitting around looking over my shoulder until this thing decides to do to me what it did to Sandy.”
I nodded, my head feeling heavy, bobbing on a spring. “Yeah, I guess.”
“So we go confront it?”
I stood up, looking at both of them. “Yeah. We do what we can.”
We went in my car, making it to the edge of the trail in less than fifteen minutes. Everett had offered to drive, but I had insisted, and Sara agreed.
The conversation heading into the woods was bizarre in its normalcy. We told jokes, talked about a movie we all wanted to see the next weekend, and generally just chattered. Our voices were steady most of the time, even light, but anyone that knew us as well we knew each other could have heard the taut cord of tension buried in all of our words. Talking kept back the silence and helped us not to focus on where we were heading, but it also made it seem that we arrived far too soon.
The clearing was unchanged from when we had last left it, undisturbed by other message rocks or signs that anyone else had been there. I wasn’t surprised. As far as I knew, no one else had come there for years. We all looked around the clearing, as if expecting some monster to leap out from behind a bush and rush us. Standing in a tight, sweaty line with me in the middle, we gripped hands and walked towards the drop-off that led to the cave below.
As we grew nearer, I found myself wanting to look anywhere but the black pit that was Mystery Cave, my eyes roaming the trees and bushes before moving to the ground beneath us—grass slowly fading into granite as we neared the edge. It was then that I noticed something strange that meant nothing to me at the time. A series of small lines in the rock and dirt, cut hard and straight into the earth. They weren’t deep, but their precision made them stand out, and as we walked, I realized something else. The lines continued in alternating sets of diagonal lines, first one way and then the other, so that if they were long enough to connect, a set of four might make a large X in the dirt. I was about to mention them when Sara started screaming.
Later, Sara would swear that she had been looking right at the spot where the thing appeared. She said that it wasn’t that it had blended in or magically faded into view, but that it was more like it was suddenly just there. All I know is that everything happened fast. Even as I was turning to look at Sara, I felt Everett’s hand being ripped out of mine, and when I saw that Sara was looking in his direction, I looked back to see his head springing back up from where it had hit the side of the basin, his eyes rolling back in his head as he slid into the grasp of the thing that had yanked his feet out from under him.
The next moment, the next heartbeat in this nightmare we had stumbled into, I looked at the monster that had my best friend.
My descriptions won’t be accurate. Even now I can’t say what I saw then for sure, as ridiculous as that sounds to me. There are elements of it…there aren’t words, or if there are, I don’t know them. But this is as close as I can come.
Its head was skeletal, a human skull that was not human, its cheeks too protruding and its nostrils too long. The teeth were the most shocking feature at first—long and translucent, they jutted out at an impossible angle to intersect like the clasped jaws of an anglerfish. Again, I’m doing a poor job of describing it. It wasn’t a skeleton, that’s just what it reminded me of. It had skin, and tissue. Semi-clear and swimming with ever shifting blobs of black and blue color, it’s skin was the thin membrane of a jellyfish stretched taut across an unnatural skull before sliding down to mottled shoulders and arms that ended in powerful-looking hands whose nail-less fingertips were peppered with what looked to be tiny protruding bits of black rock or bone. Its torso was like that of a man, yet instead of trailing down to a waist and legs, it ended in tattered bits of pale, ragged meat. I saw a war movie years later that showed a soldier crawling toward a radio, oblivious to the fact that his lower half had been blown away. I was immediately reminded of this monster, yet this creature’s tattered flesh was not wet or wounded, but was instead coated in a thin rime of rock dust and old, dried mud.
All of this was the impression of an instant—a desperate glimpse as my hands sought and found Everett’s arms. Sara was making terrible squealing sounds beside me, but she had grabbed his left arm as well, so I let go of it to focus on his right. As we began working to pull him free, it felt as though he had been half-buried in a concrete wall, our efforts starting and ending with the flexibility of Everett’s own limbs as his lower half remained motionless in the thing’s grip.
Sara was crying softly now, desperately tugging at Everett’s arm as his eyes fluttered open. It only took a moment for him to look down. “Wha….oh Jesus oh God oh no, oh help help oh help….” I saw the dark stain spreading along the crotch of his shorts, and I was about to renew my efforts to pull him to safety when my eyes met those of the pale, ghastly thing below.
I had been wrong in thinking its eyes were empty sockets. Deep within their recesses, a small, cold blue light burned like twin distant stars, malevolence and dispassion living in those fires and terrifying me. Yet even then, staring into the face of the monster, I kept my grip on Everett. It turned to look at Sara and then back to me, back and forth as it began to speak.
Once, when we were around eight, Sara and I had been playing near a large ditch drain pipe when I heard a sound. We had gone to the edge of the cylinder of corrugated steel, curious as to what could be making the sound, getting swept up in the mystery of it. Peering into the darkness, we were captivated for several moments before I realized what it was. A hurt animal, far down in the dark pipe and wailing out in pain, its screams alien and hollow from where we stood. This was the voice we heard when the monster spoke. Inhuman and unintelligible, it was only one word spoken again and again, and yet we somehow understood it perfectly.
Mystery repeated it again, giving Everett another powerful tug. “Tribute.”
Sara’s eyes widened and she cried out as realization struck her, almost losing her grip on Everett’s left arm. For his part, Everett had come to enough to understand what was being said, but he did not scream or cry out. Instead, his cries cut off and he remained silent for the next several seconds aside from the regular raspy huff of his panicked breaths.
Those seconds stretched on forever, our desperate tugging doing little to dislodge Mystery’s grip on him. My arms and shoulders were already burning with the effort, but I pushed myself to not give up or let go. Then Everett spoke.
“Let me go.”
Sara sucked in a rasping breath. “What? No….We’re going to get….get you free…”
I found myself shaking my head. “No way.” I wanted to yell at Mystery, but I was too afraid, imagining the monster dropping Everett only to leap upon me. I turned back to Everett. “We’re going to get you out of this.”
Everett squinted his eyes as he looked at us, his teeth gritted. “No, you have to let…oh God, it hurts…you have to let me do this. Let me be the tribute. It’ll leave you alone then.”
Mystery had silenced its terrible voice as soon as Everett had first told us to let him go, its grip firm as it slowly and teasingly slid him further down a little at the time, pulling us closer to the ledge every time. Sara was silent as well, not even seeming to react when Everett let go of our arms, his dirty face lined with tear tracks as he screamed for us to let him go.
“No, man….”
“It’s the only way, Dylan. Do….just do it.”
I looked at Sara, expecting her to be crying or hysterical. To my surprise, she was looking back at me. A look passed between us, and then we let Everett go. We immediately turned and began running for the edge of the clearing and the trail beyond, the scrabble of rock and Everett’s screams growing distant as he was drug down into the cave. I looked back once for a second, just in time to see the last of Everett, his hand, disappear into the darkness. After that we kept running.
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Credits
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