The Hollow

18

The dark was nearly complete.

She felt it pushing in against her skin, through her dress. Cold radiated below her bare feet, but there was no wind. She was indoors, no...

There was light from far above, muted, reflected, pale. She spun on the spot to find it and let her eyes adjust.

Where was she now?

There a hollow sound of water dripping, several drippings, echoing deep. The air was humid, stale, but no, there was something else...smoke. There was a low light near her feet, and Mahala inhaled through her nose. It had been a fire, but only embers were left. Somehow she expected to feel pine needles under feet, but it was only stone, smoothed by water eons ago.

Her eyes adjusted to the light of the embers, and slowly she saw it was been a good sized fire, set in a low pit, nearly burnt out. There was a stack of wood nearby, and Mahala moved, crawling toward it. There was even a charred stick to use as a poker, and Mahala used it to stoke the fire and warm herself.

She was cold, but not so cold as nights before.

Mahala realized she had walked in her sleep again, but to where, she was unsure. She stoked and waited, fed the fire and waited until slowly she realized where she was.

It was the cave, deep inside, in a larger chamber. She knew the cavern, she knew where she was for the bit of moonlight reflecting down the hole in the roof, a hole that was near the top of the mountain, a dangerous pit that had claimed many animals through the centuries. A large oak grew near the hole, the roots now the only safety animals and men had from falling eighty feet down into the cave.

Mahala looked around in the firelight, confused as to how or why there came to be a fire in the room, a room she and Adam had always called the Chapel. There were several formations along the walls, columns of stone that made the space seem like a chapel. There was a flowstone in the near center of the room, a formation they called the Pulpit. The exit to the room was on the other side of the Pulpit. It was not the largest room, that was beyond, through a low passage of rubble. The Chapel was a dry room, the water having long found a better way to flow through the mountain. But, Mahala remembered, the Chapel was high in the cave, dry, and hidden if one did not know of it specifically.

She pulled her knees up under her chin and warmed herself by the fire, glancing up to the hole in the roof, knowing it was still night.

The foreign sound of metal clanking startled her then, and Mahala felt a panic rise up into her chest...which, for the first time in some time, did not ache.

Mahala stood and looked into the dark around her. Whoever had laid the fire had returned.

Adam knew the cave, as did Harrison, her father, and maybe others, but Mahala was unsure. She never ventured into the cave alone, it was a cardinal rule. Her father had always warned her and Adam about playing in the cave or venturing in without a lantern, and yet, she had ventured deep into the cave alone, with no light.

The clinking and clanking became louder, and there was a low chuffing sound. The Chapel echoed dully, but Mahala could not locate the sound. A flashing caught her eye then, to her far left, and she moved around the fire, closer to the source of the flash. She gripped the charred stick, sliding her feet over the smoothed cave floor.

Behind the columns that held up the high ceiling there were smaller niches and spaces, and when she realized what she was seeing and hearing, it was too late.

The clanking had been the chain, the thick silvery chain she had seen a week before, the one that called to her to touch and know. It had been wrapped and locked around the thickest column of stone, but at the other end...