Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia

Author:Lena Valencia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books

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WHEN HOLLY HAD FIRST PULLED her mother aside to tell her that Max was missing, her mother had told her the cave was no place for goofing off. They’d paid good money for this tour. She demanded that Holly go get her sister and tell her that since the girls had been so horrible all day, fighting over Holly’s silly sweatshirt, and now this, there would be no ice cream, no souvenirs from the gift shop on the way out.

“Mom,” Holly said in a trembling whisper, “I’m serious.”

Something wild lit her mother’s eyes. She called out Max’s name, running deeper into the cave. The tour guide stopped her lecture on cave geology and followed her mother, lips pressed to her walkie-talkie, shouting code. Her father went next, chasing after their bouncing head lamp beams. Holly stayed put, the confused voices of the tour group around her echoing off the walls.

No one knew how Max had gotten so far away from the group. She was found all those days later a dozen miles from where she’d run off, in a part of the cave that was closed even to park staff. The hypothesis was that she’d floated down the underground stream. It was a miracle she had survived.

How was what Holly wanted to know. But her parents had warned her not to ask Max questions about the cave, that she’d tell them in her own time. Holly had read up on Forrester’s Caverns during those days alone in the vacation rental. She knew about how the cave had been discovered by uranium miners, that the bats that lived there were called trogloxenes because they left the cave to feed, that cave fish had no eyes and were called troglobites since they lived only in the cave and never left. There were weirder things about the cave, too—conspiracy theories. UFO sightings near Mount Vista. A two-headed rabbit skeleton found at the entrance. Rumors of a thirty-foot-long snake seen slithering through the Hall of Echoes.

The websites that made these claims looked like they’d been built in the nineties, filled with capital letters and long-winded screeds. Most of them focused on creatures called mudmen: humans who’d gotten lost in the underground maze and become mutants who lived on raw flesh. It was the uranium-tinged water that was responsible for the mutation, apparently.

It was nonsense, Holly knew, but what if it wasn’t? Then what?

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