Kevin blinked rapidly to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
Yes, in there was a compendium of nebulae floating in a vast dark space, gaseous forms with majestic colors, dotted with stars.
His eyes widened behind the plastic goggles, and his shock was so big, he had to remove his mask so that his mouth could get all the air he needed.
He pivoted to his classmates. “Hey! Come see this thing that—!”
But when he looked back through the gap, there was nothing but darkness there.
“What is it, Model Student?” Stevie scoffed. “You find something and already go crazy?”
Kevin didn’t say anything. He took off his goggles and threw them on the ground, rubbed his eyes, and checked that there, behind the cave’s wall, there was nothing but darkness. Of course! How the hell could it have occurred to him that behind those rocks was outer space? The glow from the lamp hanging next to him must have refracted off something in there and bounced off his dirty glasses, which ended up dazzling him, drawing stars on his retinas; there was no other explanation.
Putting his hallucination aside, he focused on his discovery. He put the iron grate under the lamp to see it better, but the intensity of the light dimmed so much that he thought the power was about to go out. The generator was low on fuel, but the strange thing was that the sudden drop in power had affected only his lamp. He went down the ladder, approached the other lamps, and again, the same phenomenon.
“Guys, power’s going away. Hurry up,” Jorge insisted.
Kevin tried to use his phone as a flashlight and found that the screen was dead. Apparently, the battery, as well as everything that generated light in that place, had lost power.
Trying not to trip over the rocky ledges on the ground or get his feet tangled in the wires that ran from the lamps to the generator, Kevin hurried out of the cave to find what little natural light there was outside.
“And you, where are you going?” Stevie called him up.
“To camp,” Kevin said. “I’ll go get the gas lamp.”
“Don’t expect us to put your things together for you just because you’ve found I dunno what! You hear me?”
“Sure, Stevie, whatever.”
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Kevin left the cave. Nature wasn’t very generous with her light out there, either. On the horizon, beyond the forest ahead, the sun had dwindled to a bloody patch of light painted across the treetops. The oranges and purples in the sky had darkened, bringing the night to the cliff behind him, and overhead, the first stars had begun to shine—the real stars, not the ones he’d thought he saw in that hole, of course.
He crossed the clearing in front of the cave toward the camp, but as soon as he passed the small electrical generator, the thing made noises like a car with an idling engine and shut off.
The lights of the camp got blinded; the woods behind the tent melted into shadows and twilight. He turned toward the cave; the glow that came from inside it, licking the edges of the entrance, had disappeared, and the claim of his classmates who had remained inside, now at the mercy of the darkness, reached his ears. Well, Stevie Zar and the others would have to rely on their helmet lights and phone lights to get on with their business there.
The strange thing was that the generator must have had power to produce electricity for at least another fifty minutes. Except…
His discovery. First the cave lamps and his phone, now the generator. What if the small iron grate was imbued with electromagnetism—who knows why—causing some sort of siphon effect on electrical devices? Perhaps that would explain—who knows how—the strange mirage of the stellar tapestry that he thought he had seen.
A creaking sound was coming from inside the cave, the guys’ footsteps sounding on the gravel of the floor, surely. At any moment, he would see them come out of there, so he went to receive them to explain what had happened with the generator.
But no one came out of the cave.
“Hey!” he shouted, and the echo of his voice bounced off the cliff and back at him with such violence, he jumped.
The creaks continued and, for some reason, he imagined that eerie screeching was caused by the skeleton of the trapped child now emerging from the cave, advancing toward him, dragging his little bony feet on the gravel. In his mind, those dusty remains performed an impossible act, breaking free from that prison of rocks; those arm bones reaching out to touch him; that skull shining under the night, with the gaze of its empty eye sockets focused on the grate.
He shook his head. First the image of outer space and now that. Was he losing his mind?
Clutching the grate, he stopped just before taking a step into the cave. A hunch told him not to continue.
“Hey, Stevie! Gloria!” he called from outside. None responded. “Jorge! Edu! Chris!”
And he fell silent. Someone was coming out. A figure lurching toward him in the shadows, still too blurry to make out who it was.
Until the brightness of the recent night and the remnants of sunset touched the figure and revealed its identity. It was Stevie. But Stevie’s face was battered and covered in blood; his shirt torn to shreds as if a wild animal had attacked him and… His right arm ended before the elbow in a mass of blood and scraps of cloth, there was blood everywhere, and his leg was grotesquely twisted as if someone had smashed it with a sledgehammer.
An emptiness devoured Kevin’s chest as if the very ground had disappeared beneath him. The iron grate, his little treasure, slipped from his hands and fell at his feet.
With one last groan, Stevie crumpled against the rocks of the entrance in a pool of blood and did not move again. Eyes wide, Kevin looked down. Stevie’s eyes were wide as well, but frozen in a look of horror.