Dean Koontz - (1985)

by Twilight Eyes(Lit)

  31 The Deaths of Those We Love The goblins had replaced the grate over the mouth of the drain and had gone away at 2:09 Monday morning. I figured that Rya and I ought to lay low for another four hours, anyway, which would mean that we would make our way back out of the mountain twenty-four hours after we had entered it under the guidance of Horton Bluett. I wondered if the threatened snowstorm had come and if the world above ground was white and clean. I wondered if Horton Bluett and Growler were at that moment asleep in their smidl, neat house on Apple Lane-or if they were awake, one or both of them, wondering about Rya and me. With higher spirits than I had known in days, I found that my usual insomnia had departed me. In spite of the nine hours of solid sleep I'd already enjoyed, I dozed on and off, sometimes sleeping deeply, as if years of restless nights had suddenly caught up with me. I did not dream. I took that as proof of a change for the better in our fortunes. I was uncharacteristically optimistic. That was part of my delusion. When the call of nature had overwhelmed me, I had wriggled far back in the drain, around a turn, where I had done what was necessary. Most of the stench of urine was carried off, for a slight draft came down through the pipe and followed the course that water would follow as it.sought the end of the drainage system. But even though a thin trace of the unpleasant odor rose to me, I did not mind it, for I was in such a good state of mind that only disaster on a cataclysmic scale could have daunted me. Content to doze dreamlessly and, in moments of fuzzy wakefulness, to reach out and touch Rya, I did not come fully awake until seven-thirty Monday morning, an hour and a half after I intended to leave our hiding place. Then I lay for another half hour, listening to the powerhouse overhead for indications that another search was under way. I heard nothing alarming. At eight o'clock I reached for Rya, found her hand, squeezed it, then squirmed forward from the horizontal drain into the bottom of the six-foot-high vertical line. I squatted there long enough to explore my silencer-fitted pistol in the dark and release its safety catches. I thought Rya whispered, "Careful, Slim," but the roar of the underground river and the rumbling powerhouse were too loud for me to be certain she had spoken. Perhaps I'd heard the thought in her mind-Careful, Slim. By then we'd been through so much together, growing steadily closer with each shared danger and adventure, that a little mind reading-more instinct than telepathy, really-would not have surprised me. Standing, I put my face to the underside of the steel grate and squinted through the small gaps in the grid. I could see only a very tightly proscribed circle. If crouching goblins had ringed the hole, only one foot back from the edge of it, I would not have been able to spot them. But I sensed that the way was clear. Trusting in my hunches, I put the pistol in the deep pocket of my ski suit and, with both hands, lifted the grate up and to one side, making less noise than when I had muscled it the other way fifteen hours ago. Gripping the edges of the drain mouth, I pulled myself up, rolled out onto the powerhouse floor. I was in a shadowy area between big machines, and no goblins were to be seen. Rya passed our gear up to me. I helped her out of the drain. We hugged tightly, then quickly shrugged into the backpacks and picked up the shotgun and the rifle. We put on our hard hats again. Since it seemed that we had no further use for anything in the duffel bag except the candles, the matches, and one thermos of juice (which we kept), I lowered it back into the drain before replacing the grate. We still had thirty-two kilos of plastic explosive, and we were unlikely to find a better place to use them than here, in the heart of the facility. Scurrying from shadow to shadow, not yet having given our final performance as rats, we went half the length of the enormous chamber, successfully dodging the few powerhouse workers. As 'we went, we quickly planted charges of plastique. Nasty rats, we were. The kind that might eat holes in a ship's hull, then flee the sinking hulk. Except that no rat could ever take such intense pleasure from destructive labor as we took. We found service doors in the bottom of the iron housings of the two-story generators, and we slipped inside to leave small gifts of death. We planted other charges under some electric carts used by the powerhouse workers, put still others in whatever machinery we passed. We activated the timer on each detonator before plugging it into the plastique. We set the first one for an hour, the next for fifty-nine minutes, the next two for fifty-eight minutes, the next one for fifty-six because it took us longer to find a place to stash it. We were trying to assure that the first blast would occur simultaneously with-or at least would be followed swiftly by-other explosions..In twenty-five minutes we placed twenty-eight one-kilo charges and set the clocks ticking on them. Then, with only four kilos left, we entered the intake ventilation duct where we had sneaked out the previous evening. We pulled the hinged grille shut behind us, and with the aid of flashlights we retraced the route by which we had arrived at the powerhouse. We had just thirty-five minutes to get down to the fifth floor, locate the four charges we had pla nted yesterday, plug detonators into them, take an elevator to the level at which we had first entered, put detonators in the charges we'd left on that unfinished floor, and follow the white arrows that we had painted on the walls of the old mines until we'd gotten far enough away to escape the worst of the chain-reaction caveins that might be triggered by the blasts within the goblins' haven. We had to move silently and cautiously-and fast. It was going to be a near thing, but I thought we could make it. The journey through the ventilation ducts was easier and quicker than when we had been coming from the other direction, for we knew the system now and had no doubt about our destination. In six minutes we reached the vertical duct that was fitted with rungs, and we climbed down fifty feet to the fifth level. Four minutes later we came to the intake grille in the room that housed a lot of hydroponic farming equipment, where we had interrogated--and killed the goblin whose human name was Tom Tarkenson. That chamber was dark and deserted. The corpse we'd left had been removed. I felt horribly conspicuous behind the beam of the flashlight, as if I were making a target of myself. I kept expecting a goblin to rise up from between the empty hydroponic tanks and order us to halt. But the expectation went unfulfilled. We ran to the door. In twenty-five minutes the explosions would begin. Evidently our long wait in the powerhouse drain had convinced the demonkind that we were no longer among them, that somehow we had slipped out undetected, for they seemed not to be looking for us any more. At least not underground. (They must be frantic, wondering who the hell we were, why we had come, and how far we would spread the details of what we had seen and learned.) The corridors on the fifth floor were as deserted now as they had been when we'd entered the complex the previous day; this level was, after all, nothing more than a warehouse, already fully stocked and requiring little attention from maintenance crews. We hurried from one long tunnel to the next, the shotgun and the automatic rifle held at the ready. We paused only to plug detonators into the four kilos of plastique that we had previously molded around sheaves of water, gas, and other pipes that crossed or paralleled some portions of the tunnels. Each time we stopped, we had to put down our weapons so I could boost Rya up and so she could fit the detonator in place, and I felt terrifyingly vulnerable, certain that guards would come upon us at just such a moment. None did. Though they knew intruders had breached their haven, the goblins evidently did not suspect sabotage. They would have had to undertake a painstaking search for explosives in order to find the charges we had planted, but it could have been done. Their failure to take that precaution indicated that in spite of our intrusion, they felt secure against a meaningful attack. For thousands of years they have had.every reason to feel smug and superior toward us. Their attitudes regarding humankind are deeply ingrained; they see us as game animals, pathetic fools, and worse. Their certainty that we are easy prey . . . well, that was one of our advantages in the war with them. We reached the elevators with nineteen minutes remaining until zero hour. Just eleven hundred and forty seconds, each of which my heart counted off with a double beat. Though everything had gone smoothly to that point, I was afraid that we could not take the elevator to the unfinished floor below witho
ut drawing unwanted attention. It seemed too much to wish for. But because the old mines beneath us had not yet been converted into another wing of the goblins' shelter, there was no ventilation duct leading down to them, and the elevators provided the only access. We stepped into the cage, and with great trepidation I shoved the lever forward. A frightful creaking and grinding and grumbling marked our descent through the shaft of rock. If any goblins were in the chamber below, they would be alerted. Our luck held. None of the enemy was waiting for us when we arrived in the huge domed chamber where construction supplies and equipment had been provisioned for the next phase of the shelter's development. Again, I put down the rifle and boosted Rya. With a swiftness that would have done credit to a demolitions expert, she plugged detonators into each of the three charges that I had shaped into depressions in the rock wall above the three elevators. Seventeen minutes. One thousand and twenty seconds. Two thousand and forty heartbeats. We crossed the domed chamber, pausing four times to deposit the last four kilos of plastique among the machinery. Fourteen minutes. Eight hundred and forty seconds. We reached the tunnel where the double row of ceiling lamps, burning under conical shades, threw a checkerboard pattern of light and shadow on the stone floor, the place where I had shot a goblin. Them I had left one-kilo charges on both sides of the tunnel, near the entrance to the large room. With growing confidence we paused to set clocks ticking in those final bombs. The next tunnel was the last with lighting. We raced to the end of it and turned right, into the first mine shaft on Horton's map (if you read it backward, as we were now doing). Our flashlights were not as bright as they had been, and the intensity of the beams fluctuated, a bit weak from all the use we'd put them to but not weak enough to worry us. Besides, we had spare batteries in our pockets-and candles, if it came to that. I unstrapped my backpack and abandoned it. Rya did the same. From here on, what few supplies the packs contained were unimportant. All that mattered was speed. I slung the rifle over my shoulder by its strap, and Rya did the same with the shotgun. We stashed the pistols in the holster-deep pockets in our pants. Carrying only flashlights and Horton's map and a thermos of orange juice, we tried to put as much distance between ourselves and the Lightning Coal Company's property as we possibly could before all hell broke loose. Nine and a half minutes. I felt as if we had broken into a castle occupied by vampires, had crept into the dungeons where the undying slept in I earth-filled coffins, had managed to drive stakes through the hearts of only a few of them, and now had to flee for our lives as sunset arrived and brought the first stirrings of life to the blood-hungry multitudes.behind us. In fact, given the goblins' consuming need to feed on our pain, the analogy was closer to the truth than I liked to consider. From the meticulously designed and constructed and maintained underworld of the goblins, we advanced into the chaos of man and nature, into - the old mines that man had bored and that nature was sullenly determined to refill piece by piece. I Following the white arrows we had painted during our inward journey, we ran along musty tunnels. We crawled through narrow passageways where walls had partially caved in. We clambered up a cramped vertical shaft where a couple of corroded iron rungs snapped under our feet. A repulsive light-shunning fungus grew on one wall. It burst as we brushed against it, spewing a stench like rotten eggs, smearing our ski suits with slime. Three minutes. With our flashlight beams fading, we rushed down another musty tunnel, turned right at the marked intersection, and splashed through a puddle of scum-filmed water. Two minutes. About three hundred and forty heartbeats at the current rate of exchange. The journey in had taken seven hours, so most of the return trip would still lie ahead of us after the last charge of plastique blew, but every foot we put between us and the goblins' haven improved-I hoped-our chances of escaping the zone of associated cave-ins. We were not equipped to dig our way back to the surface. The steadily weakening flashlights, bobbling wildly in our hands as we ran, threw leaping dervish shadows along the walls and ceiling-a herd of ghosts, a pride of spirits, a pack of frenzied specters that pursued us, now chased at our sides, now flew ahead, now fell back once more to nip at our heels. Maybe a minute and a half. Menacing black-cloaked figures, some bigger than men, appeared to be springing up from the floor in front of us, though none reached out to seize us; we flashed through some of them as through columns of smoke, and others melted back as we raced at them, and still others shrank and flew up to the ceiling as if they had changed into bats. One minute. The usual sepulchral silence of the earth had been filled @ a multitude of rhythmic sounds: our slamming footsteps; Rya's hard-drawn breath; my raging breath, even louder than hers; echoes of all those bouncing back and forth between the rock walls; a cacophony of syncopation. I thought we had the better part of a minute left, but the first explosion put an early end to my countdown. It was distant, a solid thump that I felt more than heard, but I had no doubt what it was. We came to another vertical shaft. Rya tucked her flashlight into her waistband, the beam pointing up, and climbed into the dark bore. I followed. Another thump, immediately followed by a third. In the shaft one of the badly rusted iron rungs broke in my hand. I slipped and fell twelve or fourteen feet, back into the tunnel below. "Slim!" "I'm all right," I said, though I had landed on my tailbone, jarring my spine. The pain came and went in a flash, leaving only a dull throbbing. I was lucky that one of my legs hadn't twisted under me as I'd fallen. It would have broken. Climbing into the shaft again, I scrambled up with the sureness and quickness of a monkey, which wasn't easy given the throbbing in my.back. But I didn't want Rya to worry about me, about anything, except getting out of those tunnels. Fourth, fifth, and sixth explosions shook the subterranean installation that we had recently departed, and the sixth was much louder and more powerful than those before it. The walls of the mine shook around us, and the floor leapt twice, nearly pitching us off our feet. Dust, bits of earth, and a veritable rain of stone chips fell around us. My flashlight had virtually given out. I did not want to stop to replace the batteries, not yet. I swapped lights with Rya and led the way with her fading flash as a chain of explosions-six or eight more, at least-rocked the labyrinth. Overhead, I saw a crack open in an ancient ceiling beam, and I no sooner hurried under it than it crashed to the floor behind me. A cry of terror and dread flew from me, and I whirled around in expectation of the worst, but Rya had also gotten through unharmed. My hunch that our luck would hold grew stronger, and I knew we were going to make it without getting seriously hurt. Though I had once been acutely aware that it was always brightest just before the dark, I had for a moment forgotten that truism and would, in a moment more, regret my forgetfulness. A ton of rock had come down atop the falling beam. More was going to give way in a moment-the rock face was buckling as if it were soft earth wet with rain-so we ran again, side by side because the tunnel was wide. Behind us the sounds of the cave-in grew louder, louder, until I was afraid the entire corridor was going to collapse. The remaining charges of plastique were detonating in a single tremendous barrage, of which we heard steadily less even as we felt more. Damn, the whole mountain seemed to be quaking, its foundations shaken by massively violent tremors that could not have been induced by the plastique alone. Of course, half the mountain was honeycombed by more than a century of industrious coal mining and was therefore weakened. And maybe the plastique had triggered other explosions of fuel oil and gas within the goblins' haven. Nevertheless it seemed as if Armageddon had befallen us ahead of schedule, and my confidence was shaken with each massive shock wave that passed through the rock. We were coughing now because the air was filled with choking dust. Some of it sifted down from overhead, but most of it burst upon us in thick, rolling clouds carried on gusts of air from cave-ins to our rear. If we could not soon escape the ring of influence of the collapsing subterranean city, if we could not get to unshaken tunnels and clean air in the next minute or two, we would suffocate in the dust, a death that was not among the many that I had contemplated. Furthermore, the waning flashlight-beam was less able to pierce the dust mist. The yellow
light was reflected and refracted by the fog of particles. More than once I became disoriented and nearly ran head-on into a wall. The last of the explosions passed, but a dynamic process had been set in motion, and the Mountainside was seeking a new order that would release long accumulated tensions and pressures, that would fill all unnatural cavities. On both sides and overhead, the mighty rock began to crack and pop in the most astonishing manner, not with the one-note rumble that you might expect but with an unharmonious symphony of queer sounds like balloons being punctured and walnuts cracked and heavy pottery smashed and bones splintered and skulls fractured; it thudded and clattered like bowling pins scattered by a ball, crackled like cellophane, clanged and crashed and boomed like a hundred husky.blacksmiths wielding a hundred big hammers against a hundred iron anvils-and frequently there was even a pure, sweet ringing sound followed by an almost musical tinkling reminiscent of fine crystal being struck, being shattered. Flakes of stone, then chips, then pebbles began raining over our heads and shoulders. Rya was screaming. I grabbed her hand, pulled her after me through the stone sleet. Larger chunks of the treacherous ceiling began to fall, some as big as baseballs, clattering onto the floor around us. A fist-sized rock hit my right shoulder, and another hit my right arm, and I nearly dropped the flashlight. A couple of sizable missiles hit Rya too. They hurt, all right, but we kept going; we could do nothing else. I blessed Horton Bluett for having provided us with hard hats, though that protection would be insufficient if the whole place fell in on our heads. The mountain was imploding Re a Krakatoa in reverse, but at least most of it was falling in our wake. Suddenly the tremors subsided, which was such a welcome change that at first I thought I was imagining it. But in another ten steps it was clear that the worst was past us. We reached the leading edge of the dust cloud and ran out into relatively clean air, spluttering and wheezing to clear our lungs. My eyes were watering from the dust, and I slowed a little to blink them clear. The yellow beam of the flash pulsed and flickered constantly as the last power in the batteries was sucked away, but I saw one of our white arrows ahead. With Rya running at my side again, we followed the sign we had left for ourselves, turned a corner into a new tunnel-where one of the demonkind leapt off the wall to which it had been clinging, and took Rya down onto the floor with a shrill cry of triumph and a murderous slashing of claws. I dropped the fading flashlight, which blinked but did not go out, and I threw myself at Rya's attacker, instinctively drawing my knife rather than my pistol as I fell upon the creature. I put the blade deep into the small of its back and dragged it off her as it shrieked in agony and anger. It reached back for me and sank the claws of one hand through the leg of my ski suit, shredding the insulated fabric. Hot pain blazed up my right calf. I knew that it had torn my flesh as well as the pants. I slipped one arm around its neck, pulled up on its chin, ripped my blade out of its back, and slashed its throat-a series of swift actions that seemed like ballet movements and could have occupied no more than two seconds. As blood spurted from the savaged throat of my enemy and as the thing began to seek its human form, I sensed, rather than heard, another goblin coming off a wall or ceiling behind me. I rolled away from the bleeding demon even as I withdrew my knife from it, and the second attacker crashed down on top of its dying companion instead of on me. The pistol had fallen out of the pocket in which I'd holstered it, but it was beyond arm's reach, between me and the demon that had just leapt off the wall. That creature swung to face me, all blazing eyes and teeth and claws and prehistoric fury. I saw its powerful haunches flex, and I barely had time to throw the knife as it launched itself at me. The blade tumbled just twice and sank into its throat. Spitting blood, blowing thick clots of blood out of its piglike snout, it fell upon me..Although the impact of the fall drove the knife all the way through its throat, the goblin managed to sink its claws through my insulated jacket and into my sides just above my hips, not deep but more than deep enough. I heaved the dying beast off me, unable to stifle a cry of pain as its claws tore free of my flesh. The flashlight was almost dead, but in the moon-pale glow that remained, I saw a third goblin rushing me on all fours, providing as low a profile and as narrow a target as it could manage. It had been farther away, perhaps almost at the end of this tunnel, which gave me just enough time, in spite of its speed, to dive for the pistol, raise the gun, and fire twice. The first shot missed. The second smashed into the hateful porcine face, blasting out one of its scarlet eyes. It pitched to one side, slammed against the wall, and was convulsed by death tremors. Just when the flashlight throbbed and winked out, I thought I saw a fourth goblin creeping roachlike along the far wall. Before I could be sure of what I'd seen, we were cast into perfect blackness. With pain bubbling like an acid in my slashed leg and burning in my punctured sides, I could not move gracefully. I dared not remain where I had been when the light had gone out, for if there was a fourth goblin, it would be moving stealthily toward the place where it had seen me last. I eased over one corpse, then climbed across another, until I found Rya. She lay facedown on the floor. Very still. As far as I was aware, she had not moved or made a sound since the goblin had exploded off the wall and driven her to the floor. I wanted to turn her gently onto her back and feel for a pulse, speak her name, hear her respond. I could do none of that until I was sure about the fourth goblin. Crouching protectively over Rya, I faced out into the lightless tunnel, cocked my head, and listened. The mountain had grown quiet and seemed, at least temporarily, to be finished closing up its wounds. If portions of tunnel ceilings and walls were still falling back where we had come from, they were small failures that did not produce enough noise to reach us. The darkness was deeper than that you see behind your closed eyelids. Smooth, featureless, unrelieved. I entered into an unwanted dialogue with myself, pessimist confronting optimist: -Is she dead? -Don't even think it. -Do you hear her breathing? -Christ, if she's unconscious, her breathing would be shallow. She could be fine, just unconscious, breathing so shallowly that it can't be heard. All right? All right? -Is she dead? -Concentrate on the enemy, damn it. If another goblin existed, it might come from any direction. With its talent for walking on walls, it had a big advantage. It could even drop on me from the ceiling, straight down on my head and shoulders. -Is she dead? -Shut up!.-Because if she's dead, what does it matter whether you kill the fourth goblin? What does it ma tter if you ever get out of here? -We're both going to get out of here. -If you've got to go home alone, what's the point in going home at all? If this is her grave, then it might as well be yours too. quiet. Listen, listen ... Silence. The darkness was so perfect, so thick, so heavy that it seemed to have substance. I felt as if I could reach out and seize damp handsful of darkness, wring the blackness out of the air until light was able to shine through from somewhere. As I listened for the soft click and scrape of demon talons on stone, I wondered what the goblins had been doing when we blundered into them. Maybe they were following our white arrows to see how we had entered their haven. Until now I hadn't realized that our signposts were as handy for them as for us. Yes, of course, they had searched every inch of their haven more than once, and after concluding that we had escaped, they had probably turned their attention, in part, to learning how we had escaped. Maybe these searchers had traced our route all the way out of the mountain and were returning when we encountered them. Or perhaps they had only set out to follow that trail shortly before we came rushing along behind them. Although they had taken us by surprise, they appeared to have had just a few seconds of warning that we were approaching. With more time to prepare for us, they would have killed us both-or taken us captive. -Is she dead? -No. she's so silent. -Unconscious. -So still. -Shut up. There. A scrape, a click. I craned my neck, turned my head. Nothing more. Imagination? I tried to remember how many cartridges were in the pistol's clip. It held ten rounds when fully loaded. I'd used two on the goblin that I'd shot on Sunday in the tunnel with the checkerboard lighting. Two more on the one I'd shot here. Six left. That would be plenty. Maybe I wouldn't kill the rem
aining enemy-if there was another one-with six shots, but that surely would be the most I'd have a chance to fire before the damn thing was all over me. A soft slithering sound. Straining my eyes was pointless. I strained them, anyway. Blackness as deep as that in the bottom of God's boot. Silence. But . . . there. Another click. And an odd smell. The sour smell of goblin breath. Tick. Where? Tick. Overhead. I fell onto my back, atop Rya, squeezed off three shots into the ceiling, heard one ricochet off stone, heard an inhuman scream, and did not have time to fire the final three rounds because the badly wounded goblin crashed to the floor beside me. Sensing me, it howled and lashed out, got one of its strangely jointed but monstrously strong.arms around my head, pulled me against it, and sank its teeth into my shoulder. It probably thought it was going for my neck, for a quick kill, but the darkness and its own pain had disoriented it. As it tore its teeth free of me, taking some meat with it, I had just enough strength and presence of mind remaining to thrust the pistol under its chin, tight against the base of its throat, and pull off the last three shots in the pistol, blowing its brains out the top of its skull. The dark tunnel began to spin. I was going to pass out. That was no good. There might be a fifth goblin. If I passed out, I might never wake up again. And I had to tend to Rya. She was hurt. She needed me. I shook my head. I bit my tongue. I took deep, cleansing breaths, and I squeezed my eyes shut very hard to make the tunnel stop spinning. I said aloud, "I will not pass out." Then I passed out. Though I'd not had the leisure to consult my watch at the precise moment that I'd fainted and therefore had to rely on instinct, I did not think I had been out cold for very long. A minute or two at most. When I regained consciousness, I lay for a moment, listening for the dry-leaf-windblown scuttle of a goblin. Then I realized that even a minute in a faint would have been the end of me if another of the demonkind had been in the tunnel. I crawled across the stone floor, making my way around the dead shape-changers, feeling blindly with both hands searching for one of the flashlights but finding only a lot of vaguely warm blood. A power failure in Hell is an especially nasty business, I thought crazily. I almost laughed at that. But it would have been a strange shrill laugh, too strange, so I choked it down. Then I remembered the candles and matches in one of my inner jacket pockets. I brought them forth with trembling hands. The sputtering tongue of candle flame licked back the darkness, though not enough to allow me to examine Rya as closely as I needed to do. With the candle, however, I located both flashlights, popped the batteries out of them, and inserted fresh ones. After blowing out the candle and pocketing it, I went to Rya and knelt beside her. I put the flashlights on the floor, aiming their bright beams so they crossed over her. "Rya?" She did not answer me. "Please, Rya." Still. She lay very still. The word pale had been coined for her condition. Her face felt cold. Too cold. I saw a just darkening bruise that covered the right half of her forehead and followed the curve of her temple and went all the way down past her cheekbone. Blood glistened at the corner of her mouth. Weeping, I peeled back one of her eyelids, but I did not know what the hell I was looking for, so I tried to feel her breath with a hand against her nostrils, but my hand was shaking so badly that I could not tell if breath escaped her. Finally I did what I was loath to do: I took hold of one of her hands and lifted it, slipped two fingers under her wrist, feeling for her pulse, which I could not find, could not find, dear God, could not find. Then I realized that I could see her pulse, that it was beating weakly in her temples, a barely perceptible throb but beating, and when.I carefully turned her head to one side, I saw the pulse in her throat as well. Alive. Maybe not by much. Maybe not for long. But alive. With renewed hope I examined her, looking for wounds. Her ski suit was slashed, and the goblin's claws had penetrated to her left hip, drawing some blood, though not much. I was afraid to check for the source of the blood at the corner of her lips, for it might be from internal bleeding; her mouth might be full of blood. But it wasn't. Her lip was cut; nothing worse. In fact, except for the bruises on her forehead and face, she seemed unharmed. "Rya?" Nothing. I had to get her out of the mines, above ground, before another series of cave-ins began or before another party of goblins came looking for us-or before she died for want of medical treatment. I switched one flashlight off and slipped it into the deep utility pocket in my pant leg, where I had previously kept the pistol. I would not be needing the weapon anymore, for if I was confronted by goblins again, I would surely be brought down before I could destroy all of them, regardless of how many guns I possessed. Since she could not walk, I carried her. My right calf bore three gouge marks from a goblin's claws. Five punctures in my side-three on the left, two on the right-red blood. I was battered, skinned, host to a hundred aches and pains, but somehow I carried Rya. We do not always gain strength and courage from adversity; sometimes we are destroyed by it. We do not always experience an adrenaline surge and superhuman powers in times of crisis, either, but it happens often enough to have become a part of our folklore. In those subterranean corridors it happened to me. It wasn't a sudden adrenaline flood of the sort that enables a husband to lift an entire wrecked automobile off his pinned wife as if hefting nothing more than a suitcase, not the storm of adrenaline that gives a mother the power to tear a locked door off its hinges and walk through a burning room to rescue her child without feeling the heat. Instead I guess it was something like a steady drip-drip-drip of adrenaline, an amazingly prolonged flow in precisely the amount that I required to keep going. All things considered, when the human heart is fully explored and basic motivations understood, it is not the prospect of your own death that scares you most, that fills you to bursting with fear. Really, it's not. Think about it. What frightens us more, what reduces us to blubbering terror, are the deaths of those we love. The prospect of your own death, while not welcome, can be home, for there is no suffering and pain once death has come. But when you lose the ones you love, your suffering lives on until you descend into your own grave. Mothers, fathers, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, friends-they are taken from you all your life, and the pain of loss and loneliness that their passing leaves within you is a more profound suffering than the brief flare of pain and the fear of the unknown that accompanies your own death. Fear of losing Rya drove me through those tunnels with greater determination than I would have possessed if I had been concerned only about my own survival. For the next few hours I ceased to be aware of pain, sore muscles, and exhaustion. Although my mind and heart blazed with emotions, my body was a cool machine, moving tirelessly forward, sometimes humming along in well-oiled precision, sometimes clanking and thumping and grinding forward, but always moving without complaint, without feeling. I carried her in my arms as I might have carried a small child, and her weight seemed less than that of the child's doll..When I came to a vertical shaft, I wasted no time pondering how to raise her to the next level of the maze. I simply stripped off my ski jacket and hers; then, with a strength that would have tested a real machine, I tore those sturdy garments along all their tightly sewn seams, tore them even where they did not have seams, until I had reduced them to strips o f tough, quilted fabric. Knotting those strips together, I fashioned a sling that fitted under her arms and through her crotch,-plus a double-strand fourteen-foot-long towline looped at the upper end. As I climbed the shaft I hauled her after me. I ascended at a slant, my feet against the rungs on one side, my back against the opposite wall. The loop of the double towline was over my chest, and my arms were straight down, with one hand pulling on each of the lines to keep from taking all the weight of her on my breastbone. I was careful not to bump her head against the walls or against the corrupted iron rungs, gentling her along, easy, easy. that was a feat of strength, balance, and coordination that later seemed phenomenal but, at the time, was achieved with no thought of its difficulty. We had taken seven hours to make the journey into the mines, but that had been when we were both fit. Going back out was certain to require a day or more, perhaps two days. We had no food, but that would be okay. We could live a day or two
without eating. (I did not give a single thought to how my energy level would be sustained without food. My lack of concern did not arise from a conviction that my adrenaline-pumped body would not fail me. No, I simply was unable to think of such things, for my mind was churning with emotions-fear, love and had no time for practicalities. The practicalities were being taken care of by the machine-body, which was programmed, an automaton, and which required no thinking to perform its duties.) However, in time I did think about water, for the body cannot function without water as easily as without food. Water is the oil of the human machine, and without it, breakdowns quickly ensue. The thermos of orange juice had fallen from Rya's grasp when the goblin had leapt on her from the wall of the mine, and later I had shaken it to see if it had broken; the rattling of the shattered glass liner had made it unnecessary for me to open the container and look inside. Now all we had to drink was the water puddled shallowly in some of the tunnels. It was often scum-covered, and it probably tasted of coal and mold and worse, but I could no more taste it than I could feel pain. From time to time I put Rya down long enough to crouch at some stagnant pool, skim the slime off the surface, and scoop up a drink with my hands. Sometimes I held Rya, pulled her mouth open, and fed her water out of one cupped hand. She did not stir, but as the water trickled down her throat I was encouraged to see those muscles contract and relax again with involuntary swallowing. A miracle is an event measured in moments: a fleeting glimpse of God manifested in some mundane aspect of the physical world, a brief flow of blood from the stigmata of a statue of Christ, a tear or three spilling from the sightless eyes of an image of the Virgin Mary, the whirling sky at Fatima. My miracle of strength endured for hours, but it could not last forever. I remember falling to my knees, getting up, going on, falling again, nearly dropping Rya that time, deciding I should take a rest for her sake if not my own, just a short rest to gather my strength-and.then I slept. When I awoke, I was feverish. And Rya was as motionless and silent as before. The tide of her breath still ebbed and flowed. Her heart still beat, though I thought her pulse seemed weaker than it had been. I had left the flashlight on when I had dozed off. Now it was dim, dying. Cursing my stupidity, I withdrew the spare light from the long utility pocket in my pant leg, switched it on, and put the dead flash in the pocket. According to my wristwatch, it was seven o'clock, and I assumed that was seven o'clock Monday night. However, for all I knew, it might have been Tuesday morning. I had no way of judging how long I had struggled through the mines with Rya or how long I had slept. I found water for us. I picked her up again. After that intermission I willed the miracle to continue, and it did. However, the power that flowed into me was so much less than before that I thought God had gone elsewhere, leaving my support to one of His lesser angels whose sinews were not nearly as impressive as those of his Master. My ability to block out pain and weariness was diminished. I lumbered along in an admirably robotic indifference for considerable distance, but from time to time I became aware of pains so severe that I made a thin whining sound and even, on a couple of occasions, screamed. Now and then, the aching in my tortured muscles and bones became apparent to me, and I had to block that awareness. Rya no longer always seemed as light as a doll, and sometimes I could have sworn she weighed a thousand pounds. I passed the skeleton of the dog. I kept looking back at it uneasily because my fevered mind was filled with images of being pursued by that pile of canine bones. Phasing in and out of consciousness as if I were a moth darting from flame to darkness to flame again, I frequently found myself in conditions and positions that scared the hell out of me. More than once I rose out of my inner blackness and discovered that I was kneeling over Rya, weeping uncontrollably. Each time I thought her dead, but each time I found a pulse-thready, perhaps, but a pulse. Spluttering and choking, I awoke facedown in a puddle of water from which I had been drinking. Sometimes I returned to awareness and found that I had kept walking with her in my arms but had gone past one of the white arrows, a couple of hundred feet or more into the wrong passageway; whereupon, I had to turn and find my way back to the correct path in the maze. I was hot. Burning up. It was a dry, parching heat, and I felt the way Slick Eddy had looked back in Gibtown: like ancient parchment, like Egyptian sands, crisp and juiceless. For a while I looked at my watch regularly, but eventually I did not bother with it anymore. It was of no use and no comfort to me. I could not tell what portion of the day the watch referred to; I didn't know if it was morning or evening, night or perhaps midafternoon. I didn't know which day it was, either, although I assumed it must be late Monday or early Tuesday. I staggered past the rust-welded heap of long abandoned mining equipment that, by chance, formed a crude, alien figure with homed head, spiked chest, and bladed spine. I was more than half convinced that its corroded head had turned as I moved by, that its iron mouth had slipped open farther, that one hand had moved. Much later, in other tunnels, I imagined I could hear it coming after me, clanking and.scraping along with great patience, not able to match my pace but convinced that it would catch me by sheer perseverance, which it probably would because my own pace was declining steadily. I was not always sure when I was awake and when I was dreaming. Sometimes, carrying or lifting or cautiously pulling Rya along the crumbling passageways, I thought I was in a nightmare and that all would be well in a moment when I woke. But, of course, I was already awake and living the nightmare. From the flame of consciousness to the darkness of insensibility, swooping mothlike between the two, I grew inexorably weaker, fuzzy-headed, and very much hotter. I woke and was sitting against the rock wall of a tunnel, holding Rya in my arms, soaked with sweat. My hair was plastered to my head, and my eyes stung from the salty rivulets that streamed off my forehead and temples. Perspiration dripped from my brow, from my nos&, ears, chin, and jawline. I seemed to have gone for a swim in my clothes. I was hotter than I'd ever been while lying on the beach in Florida, yet the heat came entirely from within me; I had a furnace in me, a blazing sun trapped within my rib cage. When next I regained consciousness, I was still hot, fiercely hot, yet I was shivering uncontrollably, hot and cold at the same time. The sweat was near the boiling point when it burst from me, but then it seemed instantly to freeze on my skin. I @ to turn my mind away from my own misery, @ to focus on Rya and regain the miraculous strength and stamina that I had lost. Examining her, I could no longer find a pulse in her temples, throat, or wrist. Her skin seemed colder than before. When I frantically lifted one of her eyelids, I thought something was different about the eye beneath, a terrible emptiness. "Oh no," I said, and I felt for the pulse again-"No, no, Rya, please, no"-but still I could not find any heartbeat. "Goddamn it, no!" I held her against me, held her tighter, as if I could prevent Death from prying her out of my embrace. I rocked her like a baby, and I crooned to her, and I told her she would be fine, just fine, that we would lie on beaches again, that we would make love again and laugh, that we would be together for a long, long time. I thought of my mother's subtle but paranormal ability to blend various herbs into healing brews and poultices. The same herbs had no medicinal value when others blended them. The healing power was in my mom, not in the powdered leaves and bark and berries and roots and flowers with which she worked. All of us in the Stanfeuss family had some special gift, some chromosomes welded here and there in the genetic chain. If my mother could heal, why couldn't I, damn it? Why was I cursed with Twilight Eyes when God could have blessed me as easily with healing hands? Why was I doomed only to see goblins and oncoming disaster, visions of death and disaster? If my mother could heal, why couldn't I? And since I was unquestionably the most gifted of anyone in the Stanfeuss family, why couldn't I heal the sick even better than my mom could? Holding Rya's body tightly, rocking her as one might rock a baby, I willed her to live. I insisted that Death depart. I argued with that dark specter, tried hu moring him, cajoling him, then did my best with reason and logic, then begged, but begging soon turned to bitter argument; finally I was threatening him, as if there was anything with which Death co
uld be threatened. Crazy. I was crazy. Out of my mind with fever, yes, but also insane with grief. Through my hands and arms I attempted to convey the life within me into her, strove to pour it.out of me and into her as I might pour water from a pitcher to a glass. In my mind I formed an image of her alive and smiling, then gritted my teeth and clenched my jaws and held my breath and willed that mental image to become a reality, strained so hard at the bizarre task that I passed out again. Thereafter, fever and grief and exhaustion conspired to carry me deeper into the kingdom of incoherence where I reigned. Sometimes I found myself trying to heal her, and sometimes I was singing softly to her-mostly old Buddy Holly tunes, the lyrics strangely twisted by delirium. Sometimes I babbled out lines of dialogue from the old Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy, which we both liked so much, and sometimes the dialogue was remembered bits and pieces of things we had said to each other in moments of tenderness, in love. I alternately raged at God- and blessed Him, bitterly accused Him of cosmic sadism one moment and, seconds later, weepingly reminded Him of His reputation for mercy. I ranted and raved, keened and cooed, prayed and cursed, sweated and shivered, but mostly I wept. I recall thinking that my tears might heal her and bring her back. Madness. Considering the copious flow of tears and sweat, it seemed only a matter of time until I shriveled up, turned to dust, and blew away. But at that moment such an end was immensely appealing. Just turn to dust and blow away, disperse, as if I had never existed. I was unable to get up and move any farther, though I traveled in the many dreams that came to me when I dozed. In Oregon I sat in the kitchen of the Stanfeuss house and ate a slice of my mother's home-baked apple pie while she smiled down at me and while my sisters told me how good it was to have me back and how happy I would be to see my father again when-very soon now-I joined him in the peace of the hereafter. On a carnival midway, under a blue sky, I went to the high-striker to introduce myself to Miss Rya Raines and ask for a job, but the woman who owned the high-striker was someone else, someone I had never seen before, and she said she had never heard of Rya Raines, that such a person as Rya Raines had never existed, that I must be confused, and in fear and panic I hunted around the carnival from one concession to another, looking for Rya, but no one had ever heard of her, no one, no one. And in Gibtown I sat in a kitchen, drinking beer with Joel and Laura Tuck, and there were other carnies crowded around, including Jelly Jordan, who was no longer dead, and when I leapt up and put my arms around him and hugged him with sheer joy, the fat man told me that I should not be surprised, that dying was not the end, that I should look over there by the sink, and when I looked I saw my father and my cousin Kerry sipping apple cider and grinning at me, and they both said, "Hello, Carl, you're looking good, kid," and Joel Tuck said "Good Christ, boy, how did you even get this far? Look at that shoulder wound." "Looks like a bite," Horton Bluett said, leaning in close with a flashlight. "Blood on his sides here," Joel Tuck said worriedly. And Horton said, "This here leg of his pants is soaked with blood too." Somehow the dream had shifted to the mine shaft in which I sat, Rya in my arms. All the other dream people had vanished except for Joel and Horton. And Luke Bendingo. He appeared between Joel and Horton. "H-Hang on, S-S-Slim. We'll g-g-get you home. Just you hang in th-th-there." They tried to take Rya out of my arms, and that was intolerable even if it was just a dream, so I fought them. But I did not have much.strength and could not resist them for long. They took her from me. With the sweet burden of her removed, I was without purpose, and I slumped, rag-limp, weeping. "It's okay, Slim," Horton said. "We'll take over now. You just lay back and let us do what we need to do." "Fuck you," I said. Joel Tuck laughed and said, "That's the spirit, boy. That's the survivor spirit." I don't remember much more. Fragments. I recall being carried through dark tunnels where flashlight beams swept back and forth and were, in my delirium, sometimes transformed into searchlights carving slices out of a night sky. The final vertical shaft. The last two tunnels. Someone lifting my eyelid . . . Joel Tuck looking at me with concern . . . his nightmare face as welcome as anything I had ever seen. Then I was outside, in the open air, where the hard, gray clouds that seemed always to hang over Yontsdown County were hanging again, clotted and dark. There was a great deal of new snow on the ground, perhaps two feet of it or more. I thought back to the storm that had been pending on Sunday morning, when Horton had taken us into the mines, and that was when I began to realize I was not dreaming. The storm had come and gone, and the mountains were buried under a blanket of fresh snow. Sleds. They had two long bobsleds, the kind with wide, ski-type runners and a seat with a back on it. And blankets. Lots and lots of blankets. They strapped me into one sled and wrapped me up in a couple of warm wool covers. They put Rya's body on the other sled. Joel crouched beside me. "I don't think you're altogether with us, Carl Slim, but I hope some of what I say will sink into you. We came here overland, by a roundabout route, cause the goblins have been keeping a tight watch on all the mountain roads and trails ever since you blew the hell out of the Lightning Coal Company. We've got a long, hard way to go, and we've got to go it as quiet as we can. Do you read me?" "I saw a dog's bones down in Hell," I told him, amazed to hear those words coming out of me, "and I think Lucifer probably wants to grow hydroponic tomatoes because then he can fry up souls and have club sandwiches." "Delirious," Horton Bluett said. Joel put a hand on my face, as if by that touch he could focus my fragmented attention for a moment. "Listen good and hard, my young friend. If you start wailing like you were wailing down there in the ground, if you start babbling or sobbing, we'll have to put a gag on you, which I sure don't want to do because you're having some trouble getting your breath now and then. But we can't risk drawing attention to ourselves. Do you hear me?" "We'll play the rat game again," I said, "like in the powerhouse, all quick and silent, creeping down the drains." That must have sounded like more nonsense to him, but it was as close as I seemed able to come to expressing an understanding of what he was telling me. Fragments. I recall being hauled on the bobsled by Joel. Luke Bendingo pulled Rya's body. Now and then, for short spells, the indomitable Horton Bluett relieved Luke and Joel, bull-strong in spite of his age. Deer paths in the forest. Overhanging evergreens forming a canopy-green needles, some sheathed in ice. A frozen stream used for a highway..An open field. Staying close to the gloom of the forest's edge. A rest stop. Hot broth poured into me from a thermos bottle. A darkening sky. Wind. Night. By nightfall I knew I would live. I was going home. But home would not be home without Rya. And what was the point of living if I had to live without her?