Jason

Becca screamed hoarse from behind us.

She sounded scared enough that her voice broke.

The canyon turned into a hellish funhouse of voices.

My name, shouted from above, from below, right in my ear.

Matt's voice calling for Dylan from somewhere to my left, where there was only solid stone.

My mother's voice, I swear to God, saying, Jay, honey, where are you?

In the tone she used when she lost me in the grocery store as a kid.

Aaron's voice saying, come back, low and pleading.

Becca's hysterical laughter bouncing off the walls.

Dylan's pissed off bark of hurry the hell up from six places at once.

"'Eyes forward!'

Aaron screamed, and the sound of her real voice was like a rope thrown to a drowning person.

"'Don't stop!

Don't answer!

Just go!'

I don't remember the next ten minutes in any coherent way.

I remember slipping and jamming my knee into rock so hard I tasted blood.'

i remember looking down and seeing handprints in the wet sand beside my boots that were longer than mine the fingers too thin i remember something cold and dry brushing the back of my neck like a hand that had forgotten how to be flesh

I remember looking up and seeing a face peering down at us from the slot's rim, twenty feet above.

A dog's face stretched into something almost human, eyes too bright, teeth too many, skin hanging wrong on bone.