When Nic and her friends were teenagers, the caverns had been their domain. They’d sneak in at dark, leaving their flashlights off until they got too scared and needed the light for comfort. 

A generation before, the caverns had brought tourists to Cooley Ridge. Tours were given, until someone died. A man and a woman had gotten lost and were unable to see. The woman fell, and the man crawled around trying to find her, until his screams were heard. The next day, she was “found in a puddle of her own blood and him not twenty yards away” (124). The tours halted and the caverns were closed, locked up, and abandoned. 

After Corinne disappeared, this was one of the first places the cops searched—Jackson told them to. They found nothing but a ring peppered with blood. Anyone who knew Corinne knew it wasn’t hers, though the cops continued to try to force the narrative that she’d had a secret life, one hidden from the people in the town. The gates were re-locked on that day and the caverns have gone unvisited since. Nic yells for Annaleise quietly in the darkness, but she leaves when a group of teenagers camping nearby hears her.