Dark Water (Cooper M. Reid Book 1) (20 page)

He wasn’t sure how long he had been walking when he came to the fourth large area along the passage, but he was sure it had been at least a half a mile. This large opening was bigger than the one at the end of the tour trail with the final historical marker. To the right, the floor seemed to slant down and then drop away. To the left, there were two huge openings, one big enough to drive a bulldozer through.

Cooper carefully approached the drop off to the right and looked down. At first, he saw only darkness below. But when he focused, he could just barely make out faint glimmers of light. He watched the murky movements and realized that he was seeing the faint reflections of the flashlight beam off of a body of water. He was sure it was an inaccurate guess, but the water was
at least
twenty feet below.

The water gave off a stench that seemed to climb the walls of the drop-off and stand directly beside him. It smelled like rotting fish and stagnant salt water. He continued to look down, not sure what he was looking for. He was certainly looking into
dark water
but he felt instantly that this was not where he needed to be.

He then walked over to the two openings. The larger one revealed a rock ceiling that came down at a harsh angle and almost immediately closed the space off. There was another small opening to the right before the tiny room ended. It was a bit larger than the entrance that Cooper had been forced to crawl through earlier.

He aimed his light into it and saw another small room. In the corner, he saw an unexpected shade of white that made him jump back slightly, dropping the flashlight. He watched the light dance around for a moment before picking it up and once again pointed it into the small room.

There was a skeleton lying against the farthest wall, its tilted slightly towards him. Tattered moth-eaten clothes clung to its form. It was missing several teeth and its right arm was draped across its chest.

Cooper crawled into the opening and, sure that he would regret it, held a shaky hand out and rested it on the fabric of the shirt. He felt the ribcage beneath and shuddered. He did his best to focus, trying to see if contact with it would summon a vision as he had managed to do at the Blackstock’s door and the boarded entrance to Pickman’s Caverns.

It came easily, as if the skeleton had been holding it under its ragged clothes for countless years, ready to give its secrets to anyone that cared.

Cooper saw a man with long black hair crawling through the large opening outside of this small room. He had a gunshot wound in the stomach and he was screaming as blood cascaded down his legs. Someone else stood behind him, running away and firing a gun that flashed blindingly in the darkness.

Cooper tried to hone in on the man’s thoughts but all he could sense was pain and fury. The pain made the connection that Cooper had gathered tenuous, almost like television static in his mind.

He removed his hand from the skeleton when the pain became too prominent and blocked out the vision. Besides, he didn’t need to know anymore. The little bit of information he had gathered was enough.

These were not Pickman’s remains.

Cooper supposed it might have been one of the locals that had come in searching for Pickman and got a bullet to the stomach for his troubles. Knowing that there was no way to get back to the forests through the caverns with such a wound, the man had apparently elected to hole up in this small opening within the cavern wall to die.

Cooper backed out of the small opening and walked back into the larger chamber. If there was a way further into the caverns, it was in the second opening along the left side of the chamber. He pointed his flashlight into it and found more of the same. He took a step towards it and then stopped suddenly.

He’d heard something up ahead.

It had been brief and barely there, but he was certain he had heard it. A low grumble, like a man grunting or clearing his throat. It came whispering through the opening ahead of him, just barely more noticeable than the sound a breeze would make.

Was it a warning? An invitation?

Or was it just the sound of the earth groaning, complaining about the weight and age it carried?

Cooper didn’t know. But he wanted to find out.

With the flashlight beam slicing through the darkness ahead of him, Cooper entered the cavern.

Ahead of him, barely audible but definitely there, he could just make out the low pulsing roar of the ocean.

27

Cooper had been in the new passage for less than two minutes when he realized that he was now gripping the shovel handle anxiously. His muscles were tense, as if waiting to drop the flashlight and use the shovel like a baseball bat if he had to. There was nothing particularly frightening about this passage, but it did
feel
different.

Upon entering the passage, he had heard the distant drone of the ocean right away. After hearing it, it became all that he was aware of. Underground, it sounded different. It was more mellow and rhythmic than it was in the open air. Cooper wondered if this was what a heartbeat sounded like to a baby in the womb.

He walked towards the sound, unsure of how far he had left to go or where he was even going. The sound of the ocean lured him on and he started to wonder.

He wondered if he was under the highways yet. He wondered how much longer he had to walk. He wondered if he was losing his damned mind for deciding to go exploring these unchartered caverns all by himself.

He stopped long enough to take another sip of water and to check the clock on his phone. It was 8:07…still relatively early, but he had no real sense of where the last two hours had gone. He aimed the flashlight forward and walked on.

Several minutes passed and he realized that the sound of the ocean was incredibly loud now. He could actually hear the crisp and defined sounds of waves breaking along the shore. As the tide was pulled out, the sound within the cavern walls was like some large beast taking a huge breath underground.

The passage started to descend slightly and then rather dramatically. Cooper nearly lost his footing on two occasions, sparing a spill on his ass the last time only because he was able to use the shovel as a brace against the floor.

He walked down the descending passage and thought he heard someone speaking. It came to him like a whisper and when he stopped to concentrate on it, he was pretty sure it was just some random ambient noise caused by the vast underground spaces and the ocean.

However, less than a minute after hearing the voice-like noises, he felt a slight cramping in his lungs. Slowly, it was getting harder to breathe. The air felt thicker than ever now and he could smell the acrid stench of the ocean. He paused, taking in a few deep breaths as he swept the flashlight beam around the passage.

He took several more steps, now keeping the shovel to the floor in order to support himself, and came to the end of the passage. Instantly, he saw that the rock wall to the right meandered away into the darkness and angled down farther into the earth. He aimed the flashlight down and saw water churning several feet below. Further out, just beyond the reach of the flashlight beam, the water followed the course of a small tunnel that, Cooper assumed, led towards the ocean.

He looked ahead and saw that he was in another chamber, only this one looked different somehow. Everything had a soft golden cast of light to it that didn’t need the assistance of the flashlight. Also, there was another absolute ending several yards in front him, barely illuminated by the flashlight beam. To his left, the rock wall curved upwards and to the left before angling back to the right to create a solid wall in front of him.

He looked up and saw that the ceiling here was fairly high—perhaps thirty feet. He trained his beam of light along the ground in front of him and caught a silver glint in the light just a few steps ahead of him. He walked over to the object on the ground and knelt down to get a closer look.

When he picked the object up, he was rocked by surprise and the sense of having come full circle in some odd way.

It was the flashlight battery that he had dropped down through hole in the side of the black rock two nights ago.

He gripped it tightly in his hand, as if making sure it was real.

He was here. The end of the line. He could go nowhere else from here except back the way he had come.

He swept the flashlight beam upwards and then saw why everything in the chamber had a golden cast to it. Halfway across the chamber, positioned almost at the very top of the ceiling, was a hole that was roughly the size of a soccer ball. Murky rays of sunlight trickled in through it. Cooper imagined that during high tide, ocean water would also come in through it, adding to the collected water that filled the drop-off to his right.

Cooper looked back to the right, getting down on his hands and knees to look into the water. There was debris and foam collected along the top of most of it. The space between the firm rock on which Cooper was crouched and the wall across from him was roughly twelve feet. Water lapped gently against the far wall, tipped with gritty foam. Cooper could see the wall gently angling down into the water.

But he also saw something else that made his heart freeze.

He saw three bones scattered along the edge of the wall. The last of the group, he was sad to see, was a skull. It was hard to tell from the darkness and the limits of the flashlight’s power, but he thought he saw others further back into the opening that lead back out to the ocean.

He trained the beam of light in that direction and focused. He counted what was
certainly
at least eight more bones, one of which was a nearly complete right arm connected to a shoulder.

He traced the area slowly with the flashlight beam, coming back towards the lapping water directly across from him. He looked to the first three bones he had spotted and noticed that one of them was clearly a portion of spine. Beneath this broken spine, a fragment of cloth hung, trapped forever to the vertebrae along the curve of spine.

The cloth was blue in color and although the cloth was faded and slightly decayed by time, Cooper could clearly see what it was.

A pair of swim trunks. From Cooper’s vantage point, he could only see a portion of a cartoon shark giving a thumbs-up.

Henry Blackstock.

“Oh my God,” Cooper breathed.

He stood up, looking quickly around the room. He glanced around at the water, the light darting back and forth as he searched.

Then he saw something else, but only for a moment. Pressed against the portion of ground that he was standing on, ebbing up and down to the pulse of the water, he saw a body. It wasn’t small, per se, but not big, either. It was the body of a pre-teen or teen. Its flesh was bloated and white but showed no signs of decay.

Kevin Owens.

Cooper used his shovel to reach out, intending to push the body away from the side of the cavern floor.

From behind him, something grunted.

Cooper wheeled around, nearly losing his balance and falling into the dark water behind him. The cavern grew ice cold and even the ocean seemed to hold its breath as he found himself staring face to face with the thing that he had seen on the black rocks two nights ago.

This time, it was somehow more terrifying now that Cooper knew its name.

Douglass Pickman.

28

Even in the face of absolute terror, Cooper was able to draw everything he knew about the supernatural quickly to the center of his mind. There were many facts that instantly came to him, but one was more important than all of the others.

In his current ethereal form, Pickman could not kill him.

If he was powerful enough, he could possibly strike Cooper, perhaps pushing him into the water. Depending on the kind of entity Pickman had become, he could maybe even
possess
Cooper.

It was this knowledge that allowed Cooper to block the first attack that Pickman attempted. It was predictable and, thankfully, weak. As he had done in the Blackstock’s living room, Pickman tried to force himself into and through Cooper, hoping to either suck some of his energy out or to push him back into the dark water that had claimed so many lives.

But Cooper had been ready for it and, as a result, Pickman’s form went sailing harmlessly through him. All Cooper felt was a brief sense of being cold, and nothing more. He
felt
rather than heard a slight roar of frustration from Pickman as his spirit began to dwindle. In the glow of the flashlight, it was easily one of the best examples Cooper had ever seen of a full bodied apparition disappearing before his eyes.

Why now? Why did he wait to try to attack me now?

With this thought, Cooper dropped the shovel. He slung his backpack around to his chest and opened the front pouch. He took out the item he had been uneasy about form the moment he had picked it up from the grocery aisles. Now that he had it in the darkness with him, Cooper thought that it might actually save him from further attacks while also getting rid of Douglass Pickman.

He had no idea if his plan would work or not, but it all came down to the blue box he was removing from his book bag.

A box of table salt.

As he fumbled with the lid while also trying to hold the flashlight steady, Cooper scanned the remainder of the chamber. Ahead of him, the ground dipped a bit and narrowed. It was literally like a walkway leading out into more of the dark water as the walls pressed outward, allowing more room for the water to collect.

He quickly walked in that direction, well aware that Pickman could choose any moment to draw all of his power together and attack. Even something as slight as a budge in the wrong direction could send Cooper into the water. And while he had no problem swimming (even in water where the remains of countless children resided) he didn’t think his plan would work if the salt got wet.