SOUTHERN TROPICAL CANYON
A FEW DAYS AGO
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“Hey—You guys know the case of the trapped child?”
The tinkling of the metal spike against the rocks stopped, and the echo danced in the cave.
Chris’ question had caught Kevin Anderson off guard, leaving him stiff, standing on the ladder in front of the rock wall, chisel in one hand and hammer in the other. They had been there since morning, and since no one had said a word about it before, he had formed the idea that this was how the day would end.
“Uh-uh,” he heard Gloria denying it.
“Yeah. I think I’ve heard something,” Edu Heras said, not so sure, though.
Kevin held his breath, hot and humid behind the cloth mask, and waited to hear what else his classmates had to say. A bead of sweat ran down his cheek, behind his safety goggles, and another slid under his arm, slowly, but he tolerated the tickling so as not to move and break his concentration. He needed to know how much they knew about that case.
To his dismay, the sweat finally reached his eyelashes and his eyes burned like hell. He rubbed them with the back of his gloved hand. Then, in a bad mood, adjusted his plastic goggles and helmet, made sure the light mounted on the visor was pointing in the right direction and continued chipping rocks.
The clink, clink, returned to the tunnel with more fury than before.
His calm was gone, although neither Chris’s question nor the perspiration in his eyes had taken it away. The hour had done that. Through the narrow mouth of the cave, about a hundred and fifty feet to his right, he could see that the sunlight had diminished considerably outside, announcing the end of the day. And yet, there was that huge, elongated hole he had dug in the cave, empty, sterile, with no predictions of a discovery.
Stevie Zar, who had been sitting on the ground next to one of the many lamps for a little over ten minutes, picked up a pebble and hurled it at Kevin, hitting him in the butt.
“C’mon, Model Student! Why don’t you drop that and sit here for a while?”
Gloria Murakami, who with her phone was taking pictures of some mineral fragments organized on a cloth spread on the floor, joined Stevie’s comment. “Kevin, you’ve been there since we got here, and you haven’t found anything yet. Things won’t change in the next half hour, y’know? I can give you one of my diamonds if you need it for your report.”
“Diamonds?! Ha!” Edu took off his gloves. “Isn’t it pretentious of you to call a tacky piece of quartz a diamond? Just saying.”
Chris Martin, who was picking up his tools from the ground, laughed. “Don’t listen to these fools, Kevin,” he said. “You keep digging, man. I’m sure you’ll find another trapped child.”
Chris had brought up the subject again, and for the second time Kevin stopped; this time, feeling everyone’s eyes behind him, like ice on the back of his neck.
“Huh! I see!” Stevie exclaimed. “Hey, Kevin, did you choose this damn canyon in the ass crack of the world just because of that stupid story?”
Kevin was silent.
“I think Kevin imagined tomorrow’s news would say something like, ‘Kevin Anderson, the second geology student to find the second trapped child in the Southern Tropical Canyon,’” Chris said.
Gloria shrugged. “What difference does it make if we came here or to the northern woods? We had to choose a place for our practices anyway, right?”
“Hey, so that was real?” Edu asked. “I’m talking about the trapped child. I thought it was just a myth on campus or something.”
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“Real? My ass!” Stevie barked.
Chris held up his phone. “Well, my informant here just texted me, assuring me that it was true,” he said with a mischievous smile.
“What are you talking about?” Gloria got intrigued.
“A group of ninth graders, supposedly, found the body of a child during one of their practices in this Canyon,” Edu explained.
“Uh-uh. Not the body, just his bones,” Chris corrected, reading the message on his phone.
“Holy—!” Fascinated, Gloria looked away from her phone camera. “Can you guys imagine if there is a spirit lurking in these caverns like in those haunted places?”
“‘A spirit stole it from me.’ That will be Kevin’s excuse when Professor Ramirez asks for the sample in his report,” Chris pointed out, and this time, everyone laughed. Everyone but Kevin, alright. Then they all started gathering up their tools, getting ready to go.
“The trapped child was real. I interviewed the student who found it.” Kevin’s voice sounded muffled behind the mask. They all stopped to look at him. “He did it last year, in this cave. The complete skeleton of a boy of about five years old, stuck in this very crevice, here,” he said, showing the area where he was digging. “He had been dead for decades. I’ve seen the pictures! The bones of his right arm, here, in a straight line; his skull was stuck between these two rocks”—Kevin hit both sides of the crack with the hammer. “And the remains of his legs, here, further back. It was as if… as if the boy had been making his way between these walls when he died. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”
The entire group was silent.
“Well… I dunno what to say.” Chris slumped and put his phone away. “My informant here had not delved into so many details, but… thanks, I guess?”
Stevie shot Kevin a look. “Well, if you were hoping to take home more child’s bones, better luck next time, Model Student. Don’t count on me to come back here, though,” he told him and helped Gloria with her things. “And now, you better move. We must leave this place in an hour if we wanna get to the airport on time. I’m not spending the night here.”
“Good idea. I could use some civilization,” Gloria said.
“I brought you guys here because the story interested me, Stevie. That’s true,” Kevin confessed. “But now I just want to find something on my own, anything.”
Stevie and the others ignored him. At this point, the idea of leaving there was more attractive than arguing.
“People, the generator set is in yellow,” Jorge Claremont announced, coming from outside; “We’re running out of fuel.”
Hearing that was like hearing the bells tolling, calling the day off. Kevin turned on the ladder and found that the lamps hanging on the walls and those that rested on the floor, all connected by wires to the generator that was outside, were no longer shining so brightly.
Having the fuel gauge close to red meant the generator had an hour or two of power left, tops. Two hours was enough time to gather and pack the equipment, pick up the camp stuff outside the cave, dismantle the tent, put all that in the minivan, and leave. Two hours was enough to do all those things, but all those things weren’t enough for Kevin.
He hit the inside of the hole again, but this time, he focused on a single point. He didn’t quite know why, but something told him there was something for him there. Perhaps it was his very tenacity speaking, but he chipped and chipped until some rocks gave way, revealing a small gap just above his head. He stuck the hammer in there and hit something that sounded like clink, clink, quite different from the crack, crack he’d been hearing earlier. There was something there!
But as if fate wanted to make things more difficult for him, his helmet flashlight went out. Perfect time to run out of battery, he growled. He dumped the stony debris onto the ground, along with the hammer and chisel, and reached into the hole with his arms. There was something smooth—and detached—in there. Not a rock; another human fossil, perhaps?
“Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice,” he muttered. Still, it was something big, and it was loose. He carefully removed it; the last thing he wanted was to break it.
It was a small square iron grate, a little bigger than a hand, the kind that came with the air ducts. It was so clean that it wasn’t necessary to use the brush to remove the dirt from it, in fact, it was not only clean, but it was also not rusty nor damaged—except at one edge, perhaps because of the pounding of the hammer.
How had that got there? It was possible that there was another cave parallel to this one, a grotto they hadn’t heard of and that he had just passed through. Still... what was a freaking grate doing there?
Then he perceived a current of icy air—not cold, but icy—circulating through the hole from which he had removed his strange treasure.
Kevin, you just hammered through an air duct and dislodged its grate, he joked to himself and stuck his head through the opening to peer at what was behind, to see where the draft was coming from.
And he furrowed. That was impossible. There was no pipe there, but a dark starry sky.
There’s no way he could be watching the night from there, right? They were stuck in a ravine; behind that wall, there should be another cavern or more rocks. Besides, a night this deep could only be seen in the sky in a few minutes, not now.
Although more than a starry sky, it looked more like... outer space?