Ewen managed a strangled “thanks’ as he sweated to get his grip under control.
Jenine concentrated on swinging her weight back and forth to start a pendulum-like motion. Ewen did likewise. He tried to get in phase with Jenine but the sweat coursing into eyes made it virtually impossible for him to see her. As Jenine swung towards the cliff face, Ewen swung away. To maintain the rope’s precarious equilibrium it was essential that they both let go of it and jumped for the ledge at the same moment.
“Stop! Stop!” Jenine yelled. “We’ve got to keep in sync!”
It took two minutes for them to lose their respective swings so that they hung motionless.
“Can’t hold on much longer,” Ewen gasped, his face contorted with agony.
“Start swinging when I say!” said Jenine. “I’ll match with you. One… Two… Three… Now!”
The haplessly suspended couple twisted their weight back and forth. Jenine saw Ewen’s grip on the knotted sleeves of his jacket slip. The veins started from his forearms like gnarled roots as he tightened his grip.
They swung backwards and forwards. Through her sweat-smarting eyes, Jenine saw the cliff swell towards her and then recede. Once… Twice… A third time. Each time the cliff face loomed closer. Ewen was synchronized with her; not perfectly, but near enough. On the fifth swing the ledge passed momentarily beneath their feet.
“When I give the word, let go!” Jenine yelled. “Just drop when I say drop. Do you understand!”
Ewen nodded.
“One more swing!”
Together they swung out over the rocks below, paused, and swung back towards the cliff.
“DROP!” Jenine screamed.
They both released their ends of the rope at the same moment and landed neatly and squarely on the ledge. Their accurate landing was just as well for there was no strength in their arms to compensate for any mistakes. They lay sprawled side by side, unable to move, allowing the murderous pain in their arms and wrists to fade as their circulation was restored. Ewen pushed himself up and pulled Jenine into a safer position. He untied the holdall that she had been burdened with. They propped their backs against the cliff face and breathed deeply, allowing their arms to flop at their sides while the last vestiges of pain seeped away.
“In future,” said Jenine weakly. “I shall look upon all suggestions arising from your lateral thinking as a very real threat to our survival.”
“There was no other way of getting down,” Ewen answered.
“And now we’re really stuck unless your lateral thinking can double the length of your arms.”
“What?”
Jenine pointed to the two ends of knotted clothes that were hanging before them. There was no wind; the twin tangles of their clothes were hanging down, quite still, accusing, and obviously out of reach. Ewen stood and reached out as far as he dare but the makeshift rope ends were at least two arms’ lengths away.
“I didn’t have this problem when I came down for the reconnoitre,” he remarked dejectedly. “I was able to hang onto the rope all the time.”
“Because you had twice as much to play with,” Jenine retorted.
Ewen considered and nodded. Their knotted clothes were hanging so near that it was impossible for him to accept that they were facing a disaster. He unfastened the strap from the holdall and used it in a futile attempt to catch one of the hanging ends. The strap could reach the rope, but there was no way of getting a purchase on it. He tried knocking the rope repeatedly in the hope of starting it swinging, but the effort proved useless. He rummaged in the holdall, desperately hoping that their few possessions would fuel a brilliant idea. But the bag’s contents offered no inspiration.
“Ewen! The light’s changing!”
Ewen looked at Jenine’s suddenly haggard expression and glanced up. She was right. Although the sky was still the brilliant blue of his dreams, the shadows were inexorably lengthening, which meant that it was only a matter of time before nightfall.
Jenine looked down. The smooth, sheer sides of the cliff face immediately below them were a cruel joke because the drop was less than four body lengths. From then on the remainder of the cliff was a shallow slope consisting of moraine, landslide boulders, and loose rocks that would be relatively easy to descend. Neither voiced the suggestion that they should jump; they both knew that a broken leg here could end only in death. Ewen hunkered down on naked haunches, his arms hooked around his shins, and tried to forget his thirst as he contemplated the disaster that had overtaken them. His attention turned to their narrow, precarious refuge. Unlike the rough, eroded niches and fissures in the cliff face, the surfaces of their ledge had a curious even quality. He mentioned it to Jenine and she agreed that it was strange.
“It’s as if this ledge has been deliberately machined into the rock,” she commented.
That set Ewen thinking. He thought about the way the ride car in the mysterious Tower of Dreams and Delight and Discovery had unaccountably stopped right by the tunnel that had led to the cave. Was it possible that his earlier notion was right after all? That something more than luck was directing their actions? He pushed thought aside. During every step of their adventure they had exercised freewill. No thing or being or entity had guided their footsteps. He didn’t believe in the GoD, and nor, he hoped, did Jenine. That was what they had escaped from, not to.
Jenine tried to speak but her tongue was stuck to the roof of her parched mouth. Eventually she managed to blurt out: “The light’s going faster now.”
Ewen twisted his head and looked for the sun, but it had long disappeared behind the cliff top.
She added, “And when the light goes, so does the heat. We don’t how long the night lasts here, do we? If the temperatures are as low as they were last night… Without clothes…” She spread her hands. “We don’t how our bodies will withstand extreme cold, do we, Ewen? It’s not something that’s ever concerned us, and it’s never been part of our studies.”
Ewen stared at the tantalising rope ends and their life-sustaining clothes. “We’ll have to hold each other close when the light goes. That way we reduce our overall surface area and therefore reduce our heat loss.”
Jenine saw Ewen’s expression of misery and bit back the cutting remark she had been about to utter. He was blaming himself for their predicament; she had no wish to add to his discomfort. She stroked his forearm and pressed herself against him.
“Let’s not wait for the light to go, Ewen.”
3.
Something woke Jenine.
At first she was more annoyed than frightened. Wakefulness brought back the misery of the freezing cold, the hateful darkness, and the thirst: a screaming ache in the very centre of her being that made rational thought impossible. Even in wakefulness, the long-forgotten images of childhood continued to flicker before her eyes, sometimes with a vivid clarity like lights snapped on and off in a darkened room. She lay in the crook of Ewen’s arm. The cold helped force a distinction between reality and her hallucinations. She wondered if she would ever be able to move her limbs again. Like the previous night, the inside of what she thought was a vast dome, was peppered with millions of points of light. There was the water, louder now that it returned to beat against the foot of the cliff. And there was a powerful wind that buffetted her face and moaned eerily around the cliff face. Hitherto the only times she had experienced wind was the displacement and slipstream turbulence of passenger capsules when working in the tunnels of the chord metro system.
She heard a snorting sound like an old man waking from a long sleep. Perhaps it was a part of her dreams, but the strange noise refused to go away. She looked up in the direction of the sound and saw a vague shape hanging in space, eclipsing the stars.
“Ewen!” Her numbed fingers shook and pinched him awake. “There’s something on the rope!” She forced herself into a sitting position. The wind tore through her hair and something lashed against her face. She grabbed at it.
Clothes!
; She hung on to the trousers and screamed at Ewen but he was already awake and groping frantically in the holdall. The sudden explosion of light from the discharge tube caused the thing clinging to the rope to give a loud grunt of alarm. Jenine caught a glimpse of grotesque, close-set eyes and furry, human-like arms and hands.
“Let go of the rope!” Ewen yelled. “It’ll get onto the ledge!”
But Jenine had no intention of relinquishing her hold. The rope was, literally, their lifeline. Suddenly the creature was on her. Loud, chattering squeals, fetid breath, ghastly, spidery hands reaching for her. Ewen lunged forward and thrust the light in the thing’s face. Despite being weakened by cold and thirst, he found the strength to ram his back against the cliff face and lash out with both feet. More by luck than judgement, his heels connected with the creature’s jaw and sent it reeling backwards. The thing’s fingers scrabbled wildly at the edge as it toppled. They closed around Jenine’s ankle. She screamed in terror as the monster’s weight threatened to drag her over the edge. Its eyes were red glares in the light reflected from its retinas. Without hesitation, Ewen made a rigid fork with his fingers and plunged them into the animal’s eyes. He grabbed the skull with his other hand and was surprised at how small it was - no larger than a baby’s head. He hooked, twisted and gouged, feeling the eyeballs squish in their sockets. The creature uttered a terrible howl of agony and was gone, jerking the rope from Jenine’s fingers. There was a dull thud from the darkness below. A thin cry was heard above the moaning wind and the shifting sea. Ewen held the light over the edge and caught a brief glimpse of a small brown body tumbling down the slope before it was swallowed into the shadows. He gathered Jenine into his arms and held her tightly for several minutes, making reassuring sounds and gently kissing her face, trying to stem her sobs of terror and uncontrolled trembling. The trousers that she had been clinging to slipped through her fingers and swung away into the darkness. “I let go of the rope,” she said in a low, cracked voice. “We’re dead, Ewen.”
“We’re both alive,” he replied with forced cheerfulness, wiping her tears away with his fingertips.
“We’re dead… And this is were we’ve been sent because… Because…” Her voice trailed away into silence. Ewen tightened his grip and rocked her back and forth. Then she was making little noises in her throat and he realised that she was reciting the child’s rhyme. Sometimes there were long pauses at the end of each line; sometimes she stopped altogether for several seconds as her body battled with her reason, but every word was there:
Outdoors! Outdoors!
Full of fire and fear,
Outdoors! Outdoors!
Where sinners disappear!
“There’s not much fire here,” Ewen remarked, chucking her under the chin.
But she continued, her voice a whisper:
Outdoors! Outdoors!
Hell fires burn within,
Outdoors! Outdoors!
Throw the wicked in!
Outdoors! Outdoors!
Where hungry monsters dwell,
Outdoors! Outdoors!
Another name for hell!
Despite the terrors of the night, the thought that there might be other monsters to climb down the rope, and the numbing cold, they eventually drifted into a nightmare-plagued sleep that was little different from reality. Eventually the fearsome hallucinations slipped into oblivion as their brains sought to maintain essential functions. Their sleep deepened, bringing relief from misery and deprivation. It was the calm, unhurried tiptoe sleep that preceded death. The sleep that the brain permitted to usher in sweet images of warmth, of bright days, and childhood while gradually relinquishing its control over those bodily functions that were essential for life to continue.
Little by little, second by inexorable second, they were slipping away. At one point Ewen suddenly awoke, not knowing if he had been asleep for several minutes or several hours. The strange, distant moaning sound that had woken him sighed into silence. Another sound came; a distant roar that seemed to echo across the sky. He thought he saw a strange column of fire climbing toewards the stars like a ghostly, iridescent growth. He wanted to wake Jenine but was unable to muster the will to move. He struggled through the residual fog of hallucinations and dimly perceived what was happening to them. Jenine’s breathing was shallow and irregular. He moved slightly. Her body felt cold and lifeless. He wondered who would die first and decided that it didn’t matter. Sleep claimed him again and drew him into its beguiling embrace.
In the east, light seeping into the sky stained the black with rapidly-spreading grey. With the gathering light came a strong wind that caused the hanging rope to swing and twist, but the couple didn’t stir.
4.
Jenine relished death.
What she enjoyed most was the warmth.
It spread through her body; a blissful infusion of divine ecstasy that caressed her nakedness and released heady sensations that were almost sexual in their intensity. Even the light on her eyelids imparted a soothingly warmth. She opened her eyes and promptly closed them again because the harsh explosion of burning light created a sudden pain that triggered a brutal awareness of several other pains: the rock digging into her back; the ache in her hand because her fingers were locked into a spasm of paralysis; a throbbing torture in her neck from lying at an awkward angle; a tongue that felt as if it had been permanently bonded to the roof of her mouth with the very latest in adhesives technology.
She twisted her head away from the light, opened her eyes again, and knew that she wasn’t dead. She was in the hateful place where she had been condemned to die because she had rejected the GoD. The terrible vista of sky and sea that lay before her dulled her reason so that it was some minutes before she could think properly. Ewen was slumped against her, pinning her arm against the rock. Any movement required a concentrated effort. She eased herself slowly into a sitting position and massaged her aching neck muscles.
There was no sign of the two ends of rope hanging down from above. She remembered the horror of the brief struggle with the thing and reasoned that the rope had fallen with it down the cliff. She looked at Ewen’s comatose form. She was hallucinating again because he was actually gripping the end of the rope in his near lifeless fingers. The line of taut, twisted clothes was hanging over the edge of the cliff.
She closed her eyes, and opened them again. She wasn’t imagining it.
Ewen was still gripping the rope in his sleep!
Even as she stared at the trousers, they were slipping through his fingers.
“Ewen!”
A seagull answered her croak of anguish. At first her hand refused to move. She forced her fingers to close around trousers but even their combined grip was not enough to arrest the slide. She mustered enough saliva to free her parched tongue.
“EWEN!”
He opened his eyes. Jenine was half lying across him, trying to force her other hand around the rope.
“Ewen! The rope!”
Ewen focussed his eyes on the trousers that were inching through his and Jenine’s fingers. His recovery was fast despite his poor condition. He rolled himself onto his stomach so that the rope was pinioned under his hip. It was heavy with rain that it had absorbed during the night.
“Wasn’t a dream,” he panted.
Jenine shifted her grip. “What?”
“Felt something fall against me when the wind started…” The words nearly died in his desiccated mouth. “Dreamed it was the rope.”
That he had managed to hold onto it with one hand during his sleep was a triumph of mind over matter. He rolled onto his back so that the trousers remained trapped. Together they hauled the coils up until the rope lay beside them in a pile of untidy, sodden coils. The effort left them numb with exhaustion. They stared at the prize that was lying between them. The realisation that they had won back the means of escape restored their spirits and strength. Jenine unknotted their clothes and spread them out to dry in the strengthening sun.
�
��Why is everything so wet?” she asked.
“Water came down from above,” said Ewen. “I thought I was dreaming it.”
“Well, it’s more than long enough to climb down,” she said, looking at the rope and longingly at the sea. “But how do we secure it?”
Ewen climbed unsteadily to his feet, and flexed his muscles before looking carefully around. To his dismay there was nothing within reaching distance that they could fasten the rope to. No outcrops or shrubs. There was a shallow cleft in the ledge that offered a faint possibility of an anchorage. He tied a knot in the end of the rope and wedged the rope into the cleft, using his heel to drive it home.
“Do you think it will hold?” Jenine asked anxiously.
Ewen shrugged. He tested his weight on the rope as best he could before lowering the coils over the side. They waited until their clothes had dried before changing into them. They felt less vulnerable when they were no longer naked. This gave them the confidence to begin the arduous but short climb down to the landslide debris that marked the beginning of the rocky slope to the tantalising sea. Ewen slung the holdall over his shoulder and went down the rope first while Jenine kept her foot on the knot so that her weight would prevent it slipping out of its dangerously shallow cleft. She watched Ewen anxiously as he lowered himself, well aware that the sweat starting from his scalp, chest, and seeming to spurt from the knotted veins on his aching arms, represented even more fluid loss from his dehydrated body. But it didn’t matter; soon they would be quenching their thirst in the huge, beckoning lake.
Ewen’s toes reached the boulders and took his weight. He leaned gratefully against the cliff face, not answering Jenine’s anxious call until the pain was ebbing from his arms.
“Yes - I’m okay,” he answered irritably. He wound several coils around his waist and leaned his weight against the rope to maintain its tension for Jenine’s descent. She knew that she lacked the strength to descend the rope in the normal manner so she ripped a piece of cloth from her blouse, wrapped it around the rope, and used it as a friction sleeve to protect her hands as she slid down to rejoin Ewen. It was a clever idea that also prevented the rope from swaying so that there was no danger of the knotted end being dislodged.
Mindwarp Page 26