Gaby settled, not because she found his reassurance particularly comforting, but because her muscles were starting to ache from the tension of crouching in the narrow opening. The light was rapidly declining. She didn’t realize it at first because it was so bright compared to the thick blackness surrounding her, but as it dwindled she remembered that the sun had been well on its way to the horizon before she’d fallen in. It was twilight above her and before much more time passed it was going to be as black in the shaft as it was in the chamber behind her.
Total darkness engulfed her before a bright spot of light appeared above. The light was moving and she realized they must be trying to set up light to see by. A scraping sound alerted her to movement. Her heart clenched painfully before she realized the sound was coming from above not behind her.
“We’re lowering a light.”
Timely. They could have said so before they scared the shit out of her! But maybe they didn’t realize just how frightening it was to find oneself in a deep, dark hole?
She listened intently as the sound moved closer and closer and finally began to feel around for it. Relief flooded her when her hands at last closed around an object that she realized was a camp lantern. “Got it!” she announced, searching blindly for the switch.
The light blinded her for a moment. Clamping the lantern between her thighs because she was afraid it would slide away and break, she struggled with the rope they’d used to lower it until she finally untied it. The rope was narrow. “You going to pull me up with this?” she asked doubtfully.
“Just wait! I don’t think this one’s long enough.”
“I’ve got the end,” she pointed out angrily.
“But there isn’t enough left up here to tie it off.”
Tie it off to what, she wondered, casting around in her mind to remember anything that had been close enough, and solid enough, to anchor the other end of the rope? Nothing came to mind and a sinking sensation settled in her stomach.
Taking the lantern from between her thighs, she lifted it as she turned to survey the dark hole behind her. The light didn’t filter far, illuminating no more than a circle somewhere between five and six feet and not even that very well. She saw a pattern of stones on the floor that told her the floor had been lain tile-like but not much else.
“I think this one will do it,” Mark called out just as something hit the side of the shaft above her head.
Turning hopefully away from the dismal aspect behind her, Gaby peered up to see a length of rope slithering snake-like toward her. She lurched toward it, grabbing the end.
“Can you tie it around your waist?”
Gaby tugged at it. “Give it some slack.”
Silence greeted that. “There isn’t any,” Mark said finally.
“Goddamn it to hell,” Gaby muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing!” she said louder. “I’ve got enough to hold on to. Can you pull me up?”
She didn’t get the chance to tell them she did have a firm grip on it yet. Whoever had the other end snatched it from her grip, burning her palm. “Not yet, damn it! I wasn’t ready!”
From the thud she heard at the top, she deduced that whoever it was had fallen on their ass. The rope reappeared. “This time say ‘ready’ when you’re ready,” Mark called down angrily.
A hysterical urge to giggle closed over her. Gaby fought it. “Give me a minute,” she said a little unsteadily. “I have to set the lantern down somewhere.”
Scooting out of the shaft, she set the lantern to one side … just in case. If she didn’t make it out, she didn’t want to land on the damned lantern on her way back down. Without glancing around, because she really didn’t want to see what was around her at the moment, she crawled back up the shaft as far as she could, feeling blindly for the end of the rope. Her fingers brushed it. She surged upward with an effort and caught a firm hold on it. Struggling, grunting with effort, she inched upward again, trying to get enough slack to wrap the rope around one hand and grab a hold above that. “I think I’ve got a good grip,” she gasped out finally, adding, “pull slowly,” as she turned and tried to brace her back against one side and her feet against the other. The shaft was just wide enough to make it impossible to get much leverage.
Grunting with effort, trying to ignore the burn in her palms from gripping the rope and the strain against her shoulder and elbow joints, Gaby inched upward as they pulled. She’d managed to get just high enough to see the square above her when the rope abruptly went slack. The moment it did, she lost what little leverage she had with her feet against the sides. Uttering a sharp cry, she slid down the shaft and landed on her belly on the hard stone floor at the bottom.
“Are you all right?” someone yelled.
She didn’t recognize the voice—one of the students. “No, I’m not alright,” she muttered beneath her breath. Groaning, she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and crawled to the opening. “Not hurt! What happened?”
“The rope broke. Guess it’s rotted.”
“Well get another one!” she snapped.
Silence greeted that demand. She could hear a low voiced conversation above her, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then someone, Mark she thought, muttered just loudly enough she could hear it, “There isn’t another one. I think the natives took the others.”
Fear knotted in Gaby’s stomach, and anger. It didn’t seem to have occurred to anybody but her that the reason the Indians were so willing to work for the pittance they were paid was because they helped themselves to whatever supplies appealed to them whenever they pleased. It wasn’t unusual, at all, to go to get something and discover it had mysteriously vanished.
The rope that had broken had probably rotted like everything else did in the damned jungle because of the heat and humidity.
What the hell was she supposed to do now?
“Dr. LaPlante?”
“What?” she asked sullenly.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait for daylight to try again. Do you think you’ll be all right?”
Did she have a fucking choice, she thought a little hysterically? She felt like screaming and cursing them for every low down thing she could think of. It might help her feelings, but it wasn’t likely to alter her situation. “Is there an alternative?” she demanded ungraciously.
“I don’t think so.”
“I guess I’ll have to be, then, won’t I?”
“Why don’t you take the lantern and explore the area?” Dr. Oldman suggested, not unkindly. “I’ll make you feel more comfortable, I think, to assure yourself there’s nothing down there to worry about. We’ll be back in a few minutes and drop some things down to you to make you as comfortable as possible.”
A ladder was the only thing she could think of that would make her more comfortable. But she knew the ladders, even stacked end to end wouldn’t work. They were straight. The shaft was curved.
They didn’t wait for an answer. She heard the shuffle above her and the retreat of sounds that left her completely alone. She went limp, resisting the urge to cry like a child abandoned in the dark. When she’d mastered the useless urge, she shimmied down the shaft and picked up the lantern.
Lifting the light, she peered around, but she could see nothing but darkness beyond the range of the light. Giving up, she lowered the light and scanned the floor. Reassured when she saw nothing scurrying away, she moved cautiously across the stone floor, testing each two foot square with the toe of her boot before she placed her weight on it. It seemed doubtful there would be another trap within the chamber, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She was deep beneath the surface of the ground, but she could still feel air wafting through the shaft, chasing the mustiness from the stale air that had been trapped inside the temple, or whatever it was, for countless centuries. A pitiful amount of light filtered down through that shaft at the moment, only a less deep gloom from the light of the stars, but it was better than nothing �
� better than falling down another hole and breaking something.
When she paused the third time and lifted the light to look around, she froze in awe. Just at the edge of the ring of light, she saw color, shape, the dim impression of an intricate mosaic. Forgetting the possible hazard of the floor, she held the light up and moved closer.
The entire wall was covered in tiny, colored stones. As she moved closer, she lost the perspective to view the design, but she was far more interested in inspecting the stones at the moment. She saw, when she reached the wall and lifted a hand to inspect the surface with her palm and fingertips, that the stones were amazingly crafted, almost as regular as machine cut, or maybe formed tiles. The surface was as smooth as glass. They couldn’t be pottery tiles, she decided. The color was too vivid. Time would have dulled almost anything they could have thought of to use to color them, even if they’d fired the tiles. It had to be naturally colored stones, but it was still amazing that they’d processed them into neat, almost perfectly symmetrical squares, and flat, as if they’d been cut by machinery.
The feat of producing the tiles alone seemed impossibly beyond the culture that would have made them. She moved back again after a moment, slowly, until the image began to take form. She could see then that the frieze was like the one on the stone she’d found. Naked couples, entwined in various sexual acts lined the wall as the light revealed image after image. It wasn’t stick-like figures, either. The stones limited the possibility of rounded, more natural looking figures, but these didn’t look primitive, boxy, angular, or disproportionate.
Some of the positions seemed wildly improbable, but otherwise the picture seemed a determined rendering of nature in action rather than a simple effort to suggest the general idea.
She came at last to a corner. Frowning, she tried to remember how many steps she’d taken, but discovered she’d been too preoccupied by the depiction to spare a thought to counting. Her stride was approximately a yard heel to toe, she decided, maybe closer to two feet. She decided to count by twos. She’d taken ten steps when she came abruptly to a darkened alcove.
That wasn’t what halted her in her tracks, however.
The figure seated on a great stone throne sent a painful shaft knifing through her chest, as if she’d just discovered a living being in the room with her.
Carved from some dark stone that was a close enough approximation of brown skin tones to give her heart palpitations, the figure looked to be every bit of ten foot high, seated. She couldn’t see a lot more than the muscular legs and the impressive erection sprouting from his lap, however. The upper portion of the figure remained in darkness.
The mammoth erection was a blatant clue of her whereabouts, even if she’d been inclined to dismiss the depictions on the frieze.
She’d landed in the temple of some ancient fertility god.
A noise behind her jerked her attention from the colossal cock.
Whirling, she peered into the darkness. Something thudded against the stone floor.
“Gaby?”
Irritation went through her when she recognized Mark’s voice. It dawned on her abruptly that he was the asshole that had gotten her into this predicament to start with. He’d been shoving on the stone. It had to be some sort of trigger for the trap door she’d fallen through.
And now he was getting all chummy?
“Feel free to call me Dr. LaPlante!” she snapped, holding the light out and stalking toward the dim square of light she could see far into the distance as her sight adjusted. The room must be forty feet square, maybe more. No wonder she hadn’t been able to see anything from where she’d landed!
Her rush proved imprudent. She slammed into an object sprouting from the floor and nearly chest high, almost losing her grip on the lantern. Uttering an inelegant grunt as her impact forced the air from her lungs, she fell back a step. “Hold on!” she called louder.
It wasn’t a wall. By her reckoning the thing was roughly six feet wide and six to eight feet long, approximately three feet high, and flat on top.
An altar?
A shiver chased its way down her spine. Visions of live, human sacrifices danced in her head.
Deciding to ignore the thing for the moment, she moved around it, focused on the square that indicated the opening of the shaft. She nearly fell over the bundle at the bottom.
“I dropped a sleeping bag down. There’s another light, a canteen, and food wrapped inside. Did it make it all the way down?”
She’d kicked something hard inside. It was a good thing she was wearing boots!
“Yes.”
“Anything else you want or need?”
Aside from getting out? “I can’t think of anything,” she said after a moment’s thought. She wasn’t really hungry, despite the fact that she hadn’t eaten since the noon meal and it was already past the time, she was pretty sure, when they usually ate supper. She was thirsty, though. She’d been sweating like a pig while she’d struggled to get out, and panting with fear besides. Her throat and mouth felt like they’d been stuffed with cotton that had soaked up every drop of moisture.
She would’ve liked more light, just in case, but they didn’t have a lot of artificial light and they had to conserve it. It was too hard to get batteries for the handheld lights or fuel for the generator that ran everything else so deep in the jungle.
“I’ll be fine,” she said finally, hoping she would be and that they wouldn’t find her dead body the next morning. Or find her blubbering like an idiot.
“I could stay here for a little while and keep you company if you’d like.”
Surprise flickered through her. Guilty conscience, she wondered? “The mosquitoes will carry you off—or suck you dry. But thanks anyway. I think I’ll explore this room a little more now that I have more light.”
“You need to be careful with batteries,” he cautioned.
“If I have to sit in the dark, I’d like to know what, if anything, is in here with me before the lights go out,” she pointed out.
“You sure you don’t want company for a while?”
Gaby sighed. “Not unless you want to join me down here,” she muttered under her breath. She decided not to voice the comment loud enough for him to hear it, though. He might take it as a different sort of invitation. “It’s hard to talk like this, but thanks anyway.”
She didn’t wait to see if she could hear him leave. Kneeling, she untied the bundle to examine the contents. As she’d hoped, he’d tossed in the small bag of personal items she’d brought with her that included a small jar of petroleum jelly, which she used for everything from chapped lips to scrapes and minor cuts.
This was not the sort of place where one wanted to ignore even minor injuries. They were too prone to infection.
Settling on top of the bag once she’d emptied it, she examined herself carefully and discovered her pants had torn at the knee on the trip down, which explained the stinging knee. When she’d cleaned the scraped areas—chin, knee, elbow, and palms--with a moist wipe, she carefully applied a thin layer of petroleum jelly and then topped it with self-stick bandages to keep from smearing jelly everywhere. It soothed the minor discomfort at once, which brought her mind to another discomfort.
She was going to have to squat. She didn’t want to and it had nothing to do with discomfort of desecrating a holy place, pagan or not. But she’d bust a bladder if she tried to hold it till she was rescued.
Grabbing the lantern and her tissues, she moved down the wall to the corner, examined the floor and the walls and finally shucked her pants and backed into it. She began to get the prickling sensation of being watched the moment she took her pants off. She cast several glances toward the statute at the other end of the room, certain that must be what was giving her the feeling of being watched. She couldn’t see it of course. The lantern light didn’t reach even nearly that far.
It made her wonder how and why she’d gotten the sensation of being watched before. She hadn’t known the thing was the
re at that time. And it wasn’t as if it was a live person.
When she’d finished and put her panties back on, she decided against the pants. No one was coming down tonight, and it was too damned hot to wear them when she didn’t feel she needed the protection. Folding them instead, she returned to her sleeping bag.
She hadn’t seen a sign of crawlies, but she didn’t like the idea of sitting flat on the floor, or sleeping on it, and laying awake all night so that she’d know if anything crawled on her. The flashlight Mark had sent down to her, she discovered with her first touch of pleasure, was a floodlight. Setting it up, she switched it on and got her first good look at her surroundings, because this light was powerful enough to chase the shadows all the way into the corners and even the shadows weren’t dark and deep—except around the alcove where the horny god sat.
After staring at the altar—she knew that must be what it was—that was blocking a good bit of the light, she took the lantern and went to examine it more closely. It was a solid slab, she discovered when she’d waved the lantern over the top.
She didn’t see any signs of dark stains that told of a gruesome usage for the thing. Setting the lantern down on top, she went back to gather the rest of her things. When she’d carefully examined each article to make certain nothing had crawled into it, she set them all on top of the altar, then walked around the thing in search of a foot hold to climb up.
If it was an altar, she reasoned, it would have a way up.
There were several steep stairs carved into the stone on one side, she discovered.
Climbing up, she opened her ‘cosmetic’ pouch and pulled out the can of aerosol lubricant she’d brought on the advice of one of her co-workers at the museum. It wasn’t a lovely smell, but by the time she’d sprayed a narrow barrier all the way around the edges of the altar she felt secure in the knowledge that there wasn’t a crawling thing alive that could climb slick stone further slickened with oil.
She could sleep.
If she could just ignore the god staring down at her.
She tried. Climbing up again, she arranged her sleeping bag and drank a little water. The packaged food they usually ate wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either. She kept glancing toward the temple god while she ate, still feeling that peculiar sensation of being watched.
Alien's Concubine, The Page 3