he felt.
He made his way into the tunnel, and found that there was enough room to crawl comfortably. He eased forward, feeling his way in the darkness.
Behind him Elizabeth took the flashlight from its hiding place, but she didn’t turn it on. She followed along behind Jeff. Sarah followed Elizabeth.
Jeff wasn’t sure how far they had gone in the tunnel, but in the blackness it seemed like a long way. He was beginning to get frightened, and was on the verge of telling Elizabeth that he thought they had gone far enough when he felt a change around him. Though he could see nothing in the blackness, it felt as though there was more space around him than there had been. He reached out and realized that he was right. He could no longer feel the close walls of the tunnel. He wondered how large the cavern they were now in was, and crept cautiously onward. His hand felt the lip of the shaft, and he stopped. He felt around in the darkness, trying to determine how deep the drop was. He felt Elizabeth bump into him. He drew himself up and crouched in a squatting position next to the shaft.
“There’s something here,” he said. “It drops off. I can’t tell how deep it is, or how wide.”
And then he felt the push from behind him, and he grabbed wildly in the dark. But there was nothing for him to grab on to, and he felt himself falling through the darkness. He hit the bottom before he could scream, and the blackness deepened. Jeff Stevens lay still on the floor of the pit.
In the upper cavern, Elizabeth turned on the flashlight and moved to the edge of the shaft She shined the light downward. It illuminated Jeff’s inert form sprawled by the large flattish rock that she had used as a table for her tea parties. She could see nothing else in the pool of light, and after a moment she set the flashlight down and began uncoiling the rope ladder. Behind her, Sarah emerged from the tunnel and sat cross-legged, trembling, watching her sister. Elizabeth lowered the ladder into the shaft, and a moment later, the flashlight glowing dimly in her coat pocket, she disappeared down into the blackness below. Sarah crept forward and peered into the depths.
The candles still stood wedged into the cracks where she had left them, and the cigarette lighter still lay in its crevice beneath one of the candles. When she had lit the candles, Elizabeth turned off the flashlight and looked around.
Kathy Burton lay where she had fallen, her forehead badly discolored from the blow of the rock. Her eyes were open, and her face was beginning to bloat Elizabeth poked at her curiously, and when there was no movement Elizabeth tried to close the eyes. They wouldn’t close.
Jimmy Tyler lay naked, huddled against the wall of the cave. His eyes, too, were open, but they held the expression of a small and terrified creature. He was whimpering and shivering. When Elizabeth approached him he seemed not to see her, and there was no reaction when she touched him. He was clutching the torso of the dead cat to his chest, as if it were a teddy bear. The smell of death filled every corner of the cavern, and Elizabeth breathed deeply of it She smiled at the skeleton that lay against the wall.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Look, they’re all here now. Mommy and Daddy and their baby. And your father, Beth. I brought your father to visit you today. Do you want to talk to your father?”
She dragged Jeff Stevens’s unconscious body over to the skeleton and laid it out next to the fleshless bones. She moved the arms of the skeleton so that Jeff lay in its cold embrace.
Slowly Elizabeth began setting up another tea party, the last tea party. She dragged the body of Kathy Burton from the spot where it lay and wrenched it into a sitting position on one of the small stones that surrounded the table. It pitched forward and lay face down on the larger slab of rock. Then Elizabeth began working the torso of the cat loose from Jimmy Tyler’s grasp. He fought with her mindlessly, unaware of what was going on but not wanting to be disturbed in whatever place his mind had taken him to. He fought passively, his small arms trying to hold on to the body of the cat,