Deepest, Darkest by William Ritter

Author:William Ritter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

Cole, Annie, and Old Jim followed Tommy through one narrow passage after another. “What does the symbol mean?” asked Cole for the dozenth time.

“You’ll see for yourself,” Tommy answered patiently. “It’s not far now.”

“Why a tree?” Cole pressed. “Is it a nature thing?”

“Tree?” Tommy glanced back to Cole. He narrowed his eyes. “Not a tree.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s . . . the world.”

“How is it the world?”

Tommy walked a few more paces before he turned and faced Cole. He held up his own sigil and ran a slim finger along the curve at the top. “Your home,” he said. “Above.” He pointed toward the middle of the symbol—to what Cole had considered the branches. “Us. Now.” He pointed at the bottom—to what Cole had seen as the base of the trunk. “The pillar.”

Cole stared at the etching. “Oh! So the lines sticking out are like tunnels, and there’s one big tunnel going right down to the bottom?”

“Not exactly,” said Tommy, continuing through the underground pathway again. “Those lines aren’t the empty bits, they’re the solid bits. Support columns.”

“You’re saying the surface world—where we live—is like a shell resting on a big, empty earth?” said Cole. “And the whole thing is held up by just one column?”

Tommy nodded. “More or less,” he said.

“That’s nonsense,” said Annie. “The earth isn’t hollow.”

“Not the whole earth,” said Tommy. “Just our bit. Almost there.”

“Miners dig down all the time,” said Annie. “We would know if the ground beneath us was hollow.”

Tommy chuckled. “Delvers dig. Miners scratch. We listen to them scratch, scratch, scratching, all the time. Do you know how deep the deepest tunnels at your Echo Point run?”

“Hundreds of feet down,” said Annie. “My husband worked in those mines.”

Tommy smirked. “Mm. Exactly. Hundreds of feet. Maybe a whole mile? Hm? Your husband scratched a little deeper than a few hundred feet.” He rounded a corner, and light began to filter along the corridor. “Wanna see what he found?”

They followed Tommy around the bend, and the space suddenly yawned open before them.

“Whoa,” breathed Cole.

Annie put a hand on his shoulder, unable to find words for what she was seeing.

“Sweet sassy molasses,” Old Jim mumbled.

Cole had only ever seen the Grand Canyon in photographs at school, but he imagined standing on its ledge would feel a lot like looking down into these mind- boggling depths. The entire town of Endsborough could have fit between them and the far side of the cave—a distance Cole could only barely make out, thanks to a faint reddish glow lighting the fog that appeared to be thousands of feet beneath them. It was anyone’s guess how far below the fog the pit continued to descend. Cole glanced up. The cave continued upward another thousand feet at least. It hurt his eyes to try to make out any details in the dim distance.

In the center of it all, running from the shadowy heights of the vaulted ceiling to the fathomless depths of the cloudy floor, was a thick column of deep gray stone.

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