Into the Out

Letter 3-1

Letter 3

Shit! s**t, s**t, s**t, s**t, s**t!

We are screwed. Totally, royally screwed. I might almost say “raped,” but rape might at least have some element of the personal about it. This is just cold, implacable fate.

We’re all going to die here, unknown and alone except for the eleven of us. And it’s all my fault. And these aren’t even the people I’d have chosen to die with.

Okay, Tamara, calm down. Breathe a little bit. Focus. This isn’t the time or the place to panic. Even though it truly is, like, the perfect time and the perfect place.

Damn. I just tried to edit that stuff out, and I can’t. What kind of crappy software did they put in this recorder, that doesn’t have, like, an edit function?

Yeah, I know, it was supposed to be an alpha test. Doesn’t make me feel any better about it. Maybe it does have an edit feature, but I sure as hell can’t find it.

Okay, so I’ll just sit here and dictate this letter into my recorder. If the Voices let me. It beats screaming, or tearing my hair out. Or crying. God knows, no crying. How would it look to posterity if I spend my last hours, or days, crying?

Posterity? What posterity? Posterity will never even know I existed. I’ll be just one of eleven high school kids who vanished on a field trip. Period. Not even a footnote to history.

Breathe some more, Tamara. Calm down. You might as well do this report the way you decided to write it, before everything went to s**t. I may die, but I’ll die doing what I promised myself I would. Be true to yourself, girl.

Hi Bianca,

This morning began beautifully, sun shining brightly in a clear blue sky. Perfect weather for a catastrophe.

(Stop it, Tamara! In order. Keep things in order.)

So anyway, we reached Stanyan Hill. Lesser gods, indeed. Turns out to be, like, a big mound of dirt and scrub in the desert, surrounded by flatter land with even more dirt and scrub. Its base is maybe two hundred yards at its widest point, and I’d guess it’s two, maybe three hundred feet high, with a rounded, weathered top that makes it look almost ashamed of itself for sticking out of the ground so conspicuously. If it were much bigger, geologists might have explored it more thoroughly as some kind of desert anomaly, but as it is, I guess it’s mostly fit for high school kids to climb around on.

I spread some sun screen on my arms and face as I listened to Mr. North cough his way through a canned safety lecture on how to behave ourselves. Stay in groups, good ol’ buddy system. He was finally facing up to how sick he was, and he wouldn’t leave the bus to come along with us. He and the driver would stay back here while the rest of the club went out unsupervised to climb over the face of the hill on our own.

Warren asked if I’d be his buddy, and looking over the other prospects I figured he was as good a bet as any. Most of the other people seemed to already have grouped themselves in some arrangement or another, probably echoing patterns from previous trips. Without any formal discussion—or any discussion at all, really—Jennifer Penney tagged along after Warren and me. She was never exactly “with” us, but she moved in the same direction and was never out of our sight. Every so often she’d stop and scribble in her notebook, as though some monumental insight suddenly struck her. Then she’d finish her thought and catch up with where we were going.

As to that—Warren asked if there was any specific formation or site I wanted to see, and I just shrugged. I know nothing about this place other than lesser gods seem to claim it, so everywhere was just as new as everywhere else. He said there was one spot he liked from previous trips, sort of a ledge about halfway up the eastern side of the hill, and it had a beautiful view of the desert spread out in front of you. That worried me for a second, because “ledge” sort of implies a cliff face, which in turn implies rock climbing. I don’t do rock climbing. But Warren assured me it was a fairly gentle slope up, and this ledge was just a level place before the rise started again. I said why not, so he began leading me up the hill.

Okay, so the nursery rhyme about Jack and Jill went through my head, except the scansion doesn’t work at all when you substitute “Warren” and “Tamara.” I tried not to think about the part where Warren fell down and broke his crown and Tamara came tumbling after.

And Jennifer Penney came up right along with us.

Okay, so by now you’ve probably guessed I’m not the rugged outdoorswoman type. We passed scruffy-looking plants and bushes, but I have no idea what they were. We walked past boulders and outcroppings, and I had no idea what they were, either. We could have been passing untold mineral wealth, ours for the taking. If so, someone else would get rich off it, not me.

It did make me realize how pathetic this report was going to be. I’d have no specifics about what I was seeing. Maybe the good thing is it made me decide that, if I go on any further explorations, I’ll try to learn more about biology and geology, so I can comment more intelligently next time.

Yeah, next time. Right. Fat lot of next times there’s going to be.

So anyway, we made it up to Warren’s ledge. Maybe the slope of the hill was a little steeper than I estimated, because it took us over an hour. I keep myself in reasonably good shape—not a gymnast, maybe, but I bike a lot—but I was definitely winded when I got up there. I was also feeling a little weird in a way I couldn’t identify. Not headache-y, not dizzy, not nausea. I’d almost say it was like double vision, but things had a single distinct edge. Just eerie. I tried not to let anything show.

Warren waved at the panorama laid out before us. The desert did look nice, and we were around on the other side of the hill so we didn’t have the sight of the bright yellow school bus to remind us of mundane things. I saw why he liked this spot.

A couple minutes later, Jennifer Penney joined us on this lookout point. She wasn’t breathing hard at all. I hated her for that. She didn’t even spend much time looking over the landscape. She just sat down, cross-legged on the ground, took a notebook out of her backpack, and began scribbling in it without a word to us.

Whatever.

It had been a long time since breakfast and the climb made me hungry, so I twisted around to get one of the sandwiches out of my backpack. As my head moved, I thought I saw a movement in the wall of hill behind us. I’m afraid I made a little surprised squeak—very embarrassing for someone as sophisticated as I am—and called Warren’s attention to the area. At first he didn’t see anything, and I was starting to think my mind was playing tricks on me. Then he aid, “What the hell is that?” and took a step closer.

There was an opening in the hill, and as Warren and I both stepped closer to look at it, he said, “It’s a cave. I don’t remember that being there.” So it wasn’t just my imagination.

I don’t remember seeing any movement, but Jennifer Penney was there, too. Standing right beside us. She was looking at the cave, too, not saying a word, then raising her notebook and scribbling frantically into it.

Warren took out his phone and showed me pictures of the way the ledge looked last time he was here. No cave that I could see. Then he put his hands around his mouth and called out, “Hey, everybody, I think we found something.”

I was barely paying attention. The back of my neck itched. Only it wasn’t the neck itself, it was more like inside my skull. And I could remember seeing the cave open up, like a door sliding silently to the left, like someone said “Open sesame” or something. And now the itch. And Jennifer Penney was scribbling even more frantically.

A couple other ExClub members shouted back, wondering what we’d found, and Warren gave a brief description of the cave. Within minutes, everyone was headed our way. I guess this was the most exciting thing people could imagine on Stanyan Hill. Given how bored everybody sounded yesterday, they all reacted like we’d offered them free ice cream cones. Their choice of flavor.

To distract myself while we waited for people to show up, I had one of my PBJs and some sips of my juice pack. Warren took out his phone and snapped a picture of the opening, then unpacked a sandwich from his own pack—looked and smelled like chicken salad. Jennifer just scribbled.

I just finished my sandwich as the first kids arrived, and naturally it was Linda Wu, Burke Hastings, and Julia Layton. Behind them were other kids, too, and pretty soon the whole club was standing there, looking at the cave mouth and gobbling like turkeys at the sight. The ledge hadn’t seemed particularly small when I first got there, but it was getting pretty crowded now.

I hadn’t realized it, but one of the unwritten duties of junior class v.p. was being boss of the ExClub excursion. Or maybe it was being in charge of caves and other unexplained phenomena. Whatever, she was almost instantly leading the discussion.

Was Warren really sure the cave hadn’t been there before? He was, and he happily showed her the photos, before and now, to prove it.

Had the cave mouth previously been blocked by some kind of boulder that rolled away in, oh, maybe an earthquake or something? Well, there was no boulder on the ledge with us, and a quick look down the hill showed nothing in that direction, either, that could have covered the opening. Wu didn’t bother with the hypothesis that the boulder might have rolled up the hill.

I didn’t mention my suspicion that I’d seen the cave slide open. I was already the new kid, and Wu didn’t like me anyway. No point making myself out to be a raving loony this early in the excursion. After all, the day was still young.

Meanwhile, my neck was really starting to bother me. You know how a fly will suddenly go crazy and start buzzing hopelessly against a window pane? It was like that, except down the neck of my blouse. Except this was inside the back of my skull, and the fly, like, really, really wanted to get out.

I hadn’t even realized I’d moved close to the opening until Wu sharply told me to get away from there, and I saw that my feet were almost inside the cave mouth. I heard my own voice saying, “It’s silly for us to argue here when we can just go inside and see for ourselves.”

Did I really say that? I always thought I was more level-headed.

We argued a little, with the other kids just watching us. Then she tried the ultimate argument, resorting to a Higher Authority. She pulled out her phone and tried calling Mr. North. (Of course she had his number programmed in.) But there was no answer.

She was making all the arguments I should have been making. The arguments I would have been making if there wasn’t the buzzing in my skull. Some part of me knew she was right. Why wasn’t I listening to her? Was it just because she tried to change my name to a diminutive?

Instead, I took a step closer to the cave mouth.

She told me not to be stupid, that it was dark in that cave. In answer, I just shrugged one shoulder out of my backpack and moved it around in front of me, fumbled inside, and took out my flashlight. I held it up in triumph, then slipped the pack back around my shoulders and stepped forward into the darkness of the cave.

That one step nearly made me turn back. The cave suddenly felt very dark very fast. Some light filtered in from the cave mouth, but it seemed almost like I’d crossed into the nether world. The day was still warm, even in the cave’s antechamber, but I shivered.

Then Warren stepped in beside me. He had a flashlight, too… only he bothered to turn his on instead of just waving it around like a stick, the way I had.