With a wordless understanding, everyone took their seats and gripped the gunwales.
As if an unspoken contest had begun, the rowers in both teams put their backs into it almost simultaneously, easing their boats away from the shore and gliding heavily onto the lake, each heading in a different direction.
The other boat blurred and vanished into the thick fog, and the sound of its oars cutting through the water disappeared as well.
Their relations had never been particularly good, but the sense of isolation was still deeply unsettling. It was as though their only link to human society had been severed, leaving them adrift like a broken fishing float in an unpredictable, uncanny realm.
Behind them, the Lighthouse shrank to the size of a hole, then rose higher as the boat lost its place in the water, swaying blindly from side to side.
When even the light guiding their way back had dwindled to a flickering speck, the last landmark they could use to judge their position vanished. They began to feel as though they were rowing in place.
They kept churning the water, yet the boat seemed stuck, no closer to the silhouettes in the lake and no farther from the Lighthouse's pinpoint of light.
Green stopped the rowers, who had unconsciously begun to speed up, and pointed to the clear, dark water. They had better not draw attention to themselves.
Even the mournful slap of waves had faded from their senses along with the shore. All that remained was the faint swirl of oars, and the occasional hollow sound from far away—perhaps a loose stalactite falling from the cave roof, or something dropping into the water.
They also kept their lighting to a strict minimum. Before setting out, they had extinguished every flame except for one oil