“Hey, you guys know the legend of the trapped child?”

The tinkle of the chisel against the rocks stopped, and a shuddering echo was left dancing in the cave.

The question had taken Mark by surprise, just when he was about to strike the hammer against the burin again. They’ve been there since morning, and he thought none of them would bring that up.

“Uh-uh,” Gloria shook her head.

“Yeah, I think I’ve heard something,” Martin said, though not very certain.

And then, no one said anything.

To Mark’s disgrace, being distracted came at his price. The perspiration, which had covered his forehead again, slipped along with the grit and reached his eyes. He used the back of his gloved hand to dry it out, but it was late—his eyes stung like hell. Damn!

Mark growled and continued chipping rocks—the clink, clink, returned to the tunnel stronger than before. However, his concentration had already been broken. Darkness loathed over him and light from the lamps did not give enough to fight it. The dust mask was becoming a torture element squeezed to his cheeks; also, the hardness of his muscles was so persistent he couldn’t think of anything else.

He tilted his head, and his neck bones cracked like the rusty gears of a machine. No wonder; he’d been standing in the small metal ladder for hours and lifting his feet from time to time was not enough exercise to make his body believe he was on the move; his muscles knew how to say, ‘We demand a break, or else!’

He needed to lie down for a moment and rest, to take the damn mask off and smoke a cigarette—to chill for a while, just like his teammates were doing. But, just as physical discomfort was present, so was his pride.

Come on! He was twenty-two! He could put up with those muscle aches for a while longer. He had made considerable progress in his work: a huge rectangular hole in the wall, almost big enough for him to fit inside; stopping everything and leaving now would be foolish. He only needed to think about what else he could do to make something out of it.

Then, he dried the sweat with the sleeves of his dust-stained shirt, squeezed the chisel with his left hand, the hammer in his right hand, and continued to smash into that crack that looked like a deep wound in the wall.

Stevie, who had been sitting on the ground with Gloria for just over ten minutes, leaning against the cave wall, picked up a pebble from the ground and threw it at Mark, striking him in the ass.

“C’mon, model student! Why don’t you forget about that and sit here with us?”

“Mark, you’ve been there since we got here and you haven’t found anything yet,” Gloria said. “Nothing’s gonna change in the next half-hour, y’know?”

Mark rolled his eyes. Gee! Thanks, Gloria.

“I can give you one of my diamonds if you need it for your report,” she offered.

“Diamonds?! Ha!” Martin, another of the youngsters, took off his gloves. “Isn’t that pretentious of you calling diamond to a tacky piece of quartz? Just saying.”

“Well, Martin, at least my quartz looks better than yours.”

Chris, who was gathering his tools in a corner, laughed. “Mark, don’t listen to these fools. You keep digging, man,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll find another trapped child.”

Chris had brought the subject up again, and Mark felt a chill in the back of his neck.

“Oh, I see!” Stevie exclaimed, and Mark knew Chris’ comment had fulfilled its purpose: Putting him on the spot. “How come I didn’t connect the dots before?! Hey, Mark, did you choose this place just because of that stupid story?”

Mark was silent.

“I think Mark imagined tomorrow’s headlines would say something like, ‘Mark Carter, the second archaeology student to find the second trapped child in the South Tropical Canyon,’” Chris said.

Stevie shook his head, bothered.

“Are you telling me we came to the back of beyond just because you wanted to become news?” he asked. Mark was standing still on the ladder and didn’t look at him. “And even if it were true what they say, Mark, we’re in a canyon, for crying out loud! There must be thousands of caves around here; who says we’re in the same one where they supposedly found that body, huh?”

“Quit it, Stevie,” Gloria tried to calm things down. “We had to choose a place for our practices anyway, right? What difference does it make if we came here or to the northern woods?”

Stevie was about to add something, but he stopped. Mark still didn’t look at them.

“Hey, so that was real?” Martin asked. “I’m talking about the trapped kid. I thought it was nothing but an on-campus myth.”

“Real? My ass!” Stevie barked.

Chris shrugged. “I heard it was real,” he said.

“Holy smokes!” Gloria sounded more fascinated with the idea than concerned about it. “You guys think there’s a ghost going around these caverns? You think this place is haunted?”

“That will be Mark’s excuse when Professor Ramirez asks him for the sample of his report,” Chris said, and this time, everyone laughed.

Then they all started gathering their tools, getting ready to go. Everyone but Mark.

“The trapped child is real,” he said, and resumed his work. “I talked to the student who found him. He pointed me to the exact location.” Everyone stopped to stare at him. “It was one or two years ago, in this very cave. The complete skeleton of a child stuck in this crack.” He showed the crack where he was digging. “According to the investigation, the child must have been about five years old, but he had been dead for over twenty years, almost thirty. I saw pictures! The bones of his right arm were placed in a straight line; his skull was stuck between two rocks and the remnants of his legs further back. It was as if… As if the child had been making his way through the walls at the time of his death. It was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

The whole group was silent. They looked at each other, and then they kept collecting their equipment.

“Well, if you were hoping to find another kid, better luck next time. Don’t count on me to come back here, though,” Stevie said, and helped Gloria with her things, who seemed to have gotten frightened by the story. “Now, model student; you better get moving. We have to leave this place in an hour if we want to get to the airport on time. I’m not spending the night here.”

“Good idea. I could use some civilization,” Martin added.

“I brought you guys here because I was interested in the story,” Mark confessed. “But you’d be a fool if you think I had the illusion of finding something like that, Stevie. I’m not that naive. Now I just want to find something for myself; a piece of quartz, an amethyst, and that’s all!”

Steve and the others ignored him, and he went on with his self-imposed task.

He hit into the hole again. Nothing. He glanced at the others to see how they were going. Martin had already stored his tools in the plastic cases; Gloria and Stevie were ready to do the same; and Chris, who had started the awkward situation, was folding his ladder as if nothing had happened.

Pedro Villalva, the last member of the team, arrived from the outside of the cave.

“People, power generator’s marking yellow,” he announced. “We’re running out of fuel.”

Hearing that was like hearing the bells tolling, calling the day off. Mark pivoted on the ladder to check on the lamps. Indeed, their light was not as bright as before.

“Well, put some fuel in it!” Mark said. “There’s a canister in my tent.”

“There’s no use, man. We’re leaving in minutes, anyway.”

The gauge needle getting closer to the red mark meant they still had power for an hour or two, tops. Two hours was enough time to gather and pack the equipment, pick up the camp stuff outside the cave, dismantle the tent, put all that in the minivan and leave. Two hours was enough to do all those things, but all those things weren’t enough for Mark.

He hit the inside of the hole again, right in the crack, and this time, much deeper than he had already carved. And all of a sudden, the tip of his chisel struck something that sounded like clink, clink; very different from the crackle, crackle, made by the breaking rocks. His dirty face seemed to glow behind the mask. There was something there, all right!

He carved a little more, slowly.

Judging by the sound, he figured he’d finally found some mineral. He won’t go back home empty-handed after all!

The lamp no longer provided much light at this point, so he guided himself by touch. He threw the debris to the ground, tossed the chisel aside, and put his hands about fifteen inches into the hole. He touched something smooth, detached from whatever was behind the cave wall. It wasn’t a rock; it wasn’t human fossils either, that’s for sure.

Lightning doesn’t strike twice. Yes, true. Still, it was something, and it was loose enough for him to remove.

He extracted it with caution; the last thing he wanted was to break it.

Done!

It was a quadrangular-shaped thing, smaller than a forearm and with a greenish bright which seemed to be jade.

No. He frowned. It wasn’t jade. It was… ceramic?

He came down from the ladder, holding it as if it were the most precious thing ever.

“At last!” Stevie congratulated him upon seeing him with something in his hands.

“See? I knew you’d find something!” Chris said.

They all cheered on Mark, though no one came to see the find nor asked him what it was. At this point, the idea of departure was more interesting to them.

With the brush, Mark scrubbed the dry dirt off the piece and discovered that it was a green ceramic tile, the kind of tile his grandparents’ old house had on the bathroom walls. How the hell had a tile got there?

“What did you find?” Gloria asked.

Mark was so confused he didn’t know what to say. He pulled down his mask and smelled the tile—it reeked of years of confinement. He put it under the lamp to see it better, and the intensity of the light dropped so much he thought the power was about to fade away. The generator was running out of fuel, all right. But the weird thing was the sudden drop of power seemed to affect only his lamp. He got close to the next one, and the strange phenomenon happened again.

He put the tile under the other lamps in the cave; all suffered from the same energy deficiency. He took a small flashlight from a pouch on his belt, but no light came out of it.

“Guys, the power’s going away. Hurry up,” Pedro insisted.

Mark discovered a small flashlight from his belt pouches, but there was no light coming from it. Fine. If fate and artificial light taunted him, keeping him from seeing that damn tile, he would show them he wasn’t someone who gave up so easily. What he had in his hand was faithful proof of that, right?

Trying not to trip over the rocky protrusions of the floor, or tangle his feet with the wires that went from the lamps to the generator set, Mark rushed toward the exit to seek help from the natural light. He left the cave, and as soon as he walked past the small generator, the artifact made noises like a car with a dead engine and went out. The encampment lamps got blinded, the forest behind the tent went dark, and the glare that sprouted from inside the grotto, licking the edges of its entrance, vanished.

He heard the complaints of his teammates—who were still inside, now, at the mercy of the darkness. If the gauge was, in fact, marking yellow as Pedro had said, the generator should have enough fuel to keep the power on for at least fifty more minutes. Unless…

He looked at his discovery.

First the cave lamps and his flashlight, now the generator. Maybe the tile was imbued with electromagnetism for some reason, and that was causing some kind of siphon effect on electrical devices.

There was no time to think about that now, though. Pedro, Stevie, and the others would leave the cave at any moment to see what happened to the generator, and if they didn’t, he would check what was wrong with it. But first things first.

The night was falling on the horizon, and the sun had shrunk to a bloody patch of light painted on the crags. Above his head, in the sky, the purples and the oranges of the dying sunset were dyed a dark blue hue. He could see the first stars. It was more than clear that nature was also unwilling to share its light with him. If he didn’t hurry, the darkness would devour him before he could study what he had in his hands.

Angling the tile toward the remaining sunlight, he strolled around the clearing in front of the cave, near the encampment and the forest.

It was, indeed, a green tile with slightly broken edges, probably from his blows with the chisel.

What was that thing? The South Tropical Canyon was not a frequently visited location, and it was far away from any inhabited area; although perhaps some prankster explorer had left the tile in a cavern near the cave they were in, and he, by digging so deep, ended up crossing the walls and reaching the object. It may even have been left there, years ago, by some of those who came to investigate the case of the trapped child.

He touched the tile softly, so he wouldn’t tear the fabric of his glove with the sharp edges of the ceramic; he didn’t want to catch an infection.

“It won’t cause as much commotion as a body would have, but it’ll surely be a revelation,” he said to himself, happy. “Mark, you’ve got yourself your own urban legend.”

And if there had been a tile in there, it might be two or three more—or thousands! One next to the other! Who could claim there wasn’t a whole bathroom hidden inside those walls? He thought about asking the University for a group of assistants and coming back next week. Moreover, if his professors thought his discovery was worthy enough, and they were in the mood, they could come back as of tomorrow.

He would share his idea with the rest of the team, and if they were cool with it, he could arrange the—

Wait! His teammates! None of them had gone out of the cave yet, not even to see what had happened to the generator. Something was wrong.

Holding the tile as he were afraid to drop it unintentionally, he headed for the cave.

“Hey!” he shouted, and his voice broke the silence with such violence, he even startled himself.

The echoes resounded across the clearing, getting lost inside the grotto. And for a reason, those echoes in the dark brought to his mind the picture he had seen of the trapped child. Those little bones, all together, recreating the figure of a human being; a bunch of dusty remains performing a desperate act, trying to get free from the cave. Those finger bones, eager to reach something that has been already far away. That skull, trapped by the rocks.

He shook his head. Why was he thinking about that now?

Once again, the sweat was all over his face. This time, though, the cause was neither heat nor humidity, but a strange unease. Those drops running down his cheeks were drops of pure nervousness.

He reached the cave’s mouth and stopped right before entering. A hunch warned him not to go further. That blackness he had in front reminded him of the skull of the child, of the empty gaze of those eye sockets.

“Hey, Stevie! Gloria!” he called from the outside. No one responded. “Pedro! Martin! Chris!”

And suddenly, he hushed. Someone was coming out.

Mark heard footsteps, and saw a silhouette approaching, tumbling in the dark. He couldn’t differentiate who it was until he had it a few feet away. It was Stevie.

But Stevie had his shirt shredded and his face bruised and covered with blood, as if a wild animal had attacked him.

Mark screamed and almost dropped the tile. Stevie fell at his feet with a groan and never moved again.

With his eyes wide open, Mark looked down and saw Stevie’s eyes were also open, but frozen in a state of horror.

Mark felt as if the very ground disappeared under his feet. Stevie Matheson was dead.

What the hell had happened? A cave-in? Impossible; having occurred that he’d have heard something and—

Screams! He heard screams and recognized the voices; they were his teammates’.

His blood iced up. And when he was about to give a step ahead, another figure appeared in the shadowy mouth of the tunnel.

For a second, he thought it was Pedro Villalva, but the shape told him it was someone taller and sturdier than any of his mates.

Stevie had been killed, maybe the others too, and who was getting close was someone not from his group; someone who could be no other than the killer.

Mark intended to stay to see who was that man, but a bomb of fear exploded in him, like a thousand spikes piercing his skin from within; and in the blink of an eye, he found himself running with all his might towards the minivan behind the tent. The tile, tight against his chest.

He slammed his shoulder with one of the tent poles. He yanked the vehicle’s door open, jumped behind the wheel, and tried to get it started. Nothing. He moved the key, pressed the ignition button, and nothing. The engine was dead, just like the generator set.

The rifle! They had brought a rifle in case there was any situation with some wild animal. He groped blindly behind the driver’s seat, where they had left it; it was very dark, and the lights didn’t work. He lifted the blankets they had brought in case the temperature dropped, knocked down the boxes with the tools until he touched a metal rod; he removed it from the pile of things. What he had taken was the cross key, not the rifle.

Crack! Something sounded out there. He looked through the windshield; the tent was moving. Was it because he’d hit the pole, or was the killer who was coming for him?

He forgot about the rifle. He hopped off the minivan with his heart in his mouth and ran to the only place he could hide: the forest.

Mark went into the wilderness.

He screamed for help, shielding his face from the branches with one hand and holding the tile with the other—the tile that a minute ago was a source of fascination. He sprang over the tree roots that popped out of the ground and the big stones camouflaged with moss and shrubs, until he tripped over one and fell rolling down the grass, tearing up his pants and scratching his knee. He didn’t feel pain, though; he was too scared to feel it. He stood up immediately and kept running.

Crack! Tch, tch, tch! Crack! Branches, plants, long, sharp leaves; everything stood in his way.

He looked behind to see if someone was after him. No one was there.

He stopped; freaked out and short of breath. He pored over the darkness, between the trees and the brushwood, but nothing. He gulped; his throat felt scratchy.

That couldn’t be happening. Stevie couldn’t be dead. That had to be a prank. Yes, it was pretty dark back there, in the cave, and the silhouette that had shown up behind Stevie’s could have been Chris who was puffing out his chest and raising his shoulders to look brawny; Chris enjoyed playing those kinds of pranks.

He turned to the encampment. He didn’t know whether to keep running away or come back and tell his teammates the joke was over.

However, as had happened before, that something, that sixth sense that had told him not to enter the cave, now told him that was not a prank. What had happened to Gloria and the others, then? Had they been killed too? And where did the killer come from? As far as he knew there was no other entrance to the cave. Did the killer had snuck in there while he was wandering around the clearing? That made little sense; if it had been that way, he should have been the first to be murdered, right? Unless he’d been so engrossed contemplating the tile that—

The tile! He’d almost forgotten he was still clinging to his chest. He’d squeezed it so tightly, he had ripped his glove with the sharp edges of the broken ceramic, and had cut off his hand. He was bleeding. He needed the first-aid kit to prevent any infection; that would be if he could get back to camp alive.

No. He had to stay positive; he had to think he would make it. Yes. He would go back, but not to the camp; he would go straight to town. There, he would contact the authorities, so they could take care of this mess.

Now, the first thing he had to do was to find the way to the road. The South Canyon was an almost unexplored area; months could go by without someone setting foot on the nearest road, but he had nothing left but to run through it until he found the first village; and then straight to the military base at the airport.

Yes, that’s what he should do. The military would watch over him, and everything would work out fine.

But no. Mark realized he was still having trouble breathing, that he was still shuddering; that he was in the middle of the woods, dazed; that his teammates were dead, and that the killer was possibly after him. The truth was that he was alone and that the officers would come eventually, but not to defend him, but to pick up his body.

He stared at the tile that looked like the ones in his old folks’ bathroom. His mouth trembled, and he burst into tears.

He heard a creepy laugh coming in from everywhere; a laugh so distant he almost mistook it for the blowing of the wind. But no, it was a laugh. It was the laugh of a child; it was the laughter of many children.

And suddenly, a crackle in the bushes. He pivoted and saw the figure of the killer among the trees, like an evil shadow.

Mark Carter’s scream was consumed by the night and a wave of humid heat.

The wild nest, sheltered by the crags, returned to normal: silent and free of intruders.