Have you ever walked into a dark room and suddenly felt the sticky strands of an unseen spider’s web across your face? Well, that is just how those words, words that only I seemed able to hear, felt to me. I felt like a little fly, its futile wings becoming more entangled no matter how hard it struggles, waiting for a hungry predator’s poison-dripping pincers to bite down and suck out its life.

“Mr. Patel,” I said in my softest voice.

Mr. Patel didn’t answer. His attention was riveted on his flashlight beam. It had picked out something in the softer earth farther along the cave floor. Something that looked like the indistinct tracks of large, shuffling feet.

“He’s here,” I said, turning to Roger and poking him with my elbow. “Roger, I know he’s here.”

I clutched the little cylinder I’d picked up so hard that I thought the metal would crush like a soda can.

Mr. Patel held up his left hand, still slowly moving the light of the flashlight farther along the wall. “Hush, hush,” he said. “There.”

The beam of light picked out the shape of something creeping across the floor. Then, as it moved farther into the light, that something became a human hand. The moving torch found an arm connected to that hand, a shoulder, and then the shape of a person crawling on the dirt floor of the cave, a person who made a soft moaning sound as she weakly tried to pull herself forward. My heart leaped in my chest.

“Aunt Lyssa!”

The three of us reached her at the same time. She was only half conscious. As Mr. Patel helped her sit up, Roger put down his own flashlight and pulled out his handkerchief to wipe the dirt from her face. I was so stiff with shock that all I could do was stare down at her.

“Aunt Lyssa,” I said, “Aunt Lyssa.”

I couldn’t think of anything else to say, just those two words. I’d been so certain she was dead that it was just as much a surprise finding her alive. She opened her eyes and looked up at me.

“Madeline,” she said weakly, a little smile coming over her face, her eyes squinting from the light of the torch. “Where am I?”

I didn’t know how to answer her. It was as if I suddenly had too many words to say, but none of them seemed adequate. I mean, how do you tell a grown-up used to the common-sense, everyday world that they’ve just been knocked unconscious and then dragged underground by a midnight monster out of some Indian legend who wants to drink their niece’s blood? I took a deep breath, knowing that I had to try.

But I never got the chance.