“Go!” he bellowed. “It’s our only chance.”
Looks Away staggered to the edge, then half turned. “You’re insane!”
Before Grey could answer, the cat screamed again. And they saw it break free of the tunnel. The creature’s head and shoulders were ablaze, the hairs withering to black wires, the skin retracting to pull its lips back into a permanent scream.
Perhaps the fire would ultimately kill or cripple it, but the beast was determined to take them first. It came forward, slowly at first and then, driven by rage and pain, faster and faster.
“Go—go—go!” shouted Grey as he gave Looks Away another shove.
The Sioux leaped up onto the broken shaft, staggered for a moment with flailing arms, steadied himself and ran.
The cat jumped into the air, slashing toward them with the massive claws on its front paws.
Grey flung himself sideways. As he fell, he saw Looks Away race along the length of the spear and then leap high into the air, his legs continuing to pump as if he was trying to run across the air itself. His arms reached toward the far side of the chasm, fingers clawing. He hit the edge and bounced backward.
And down.
Down, down, down.
Into darkness.
“Nooooo!” cried Grey, but then the cat swiped at him and he had to dive away to save his face from being torn away. He landed hard and rolled badly, then frog-hopped forward to evade a second slash. The whole back of his vest tore away and he felt the tips of two claws trace burning lines across the skin over his kidneys.
He flattened out and rolled sideways like a log until he was under the broken crystal shaft that leaned over the drop-off. The cat reached after him, slashing at the ground, shredding the last of Grey’s vest and tearing away most of his shirt. But Grey kept rolling until he was on the other side of the spear. Then he was up onto fingers and toes, running like a dog for ten feet until he could get to his feet again.
He looked wildly around, but there was still no other choice. The only possible way out was the same suicidal route that had claimed Looks Away. Either he got to the other side of the chasm, or he died right there and then.
The cat was still trying to find him under the spear and Grey knew that as soon as it realized that its prey was not there, the cat would simply climb over and that would be it.
Grey steeled himself and scrambled up the side of the spike. The smell of burning cat filled his nostrils. He marveled that it could still come after him even as the burning oil was consuming its flesh.
Then he remembered the chunk of ghost rock imbedded in its skin. Could that be driving it? Was that why there was such a dangerous intelligence in the monster’s eyes? Grey was certain of it.
He got to his feet and, as Looks Away had only seconds ago, he had to fight for balance. The top was not a flat walkway but rather a lumpy, cracked and distressingly rounded surface. The cat either heard or sensed that its prey was about to escape. It pulled sharply back from the spear and raised its burning head. For a moment it stared through flames right into Grey’s eyes.
That’s when he heard the sound. Not the scream of the cat, but a scream nonetheless.
It was the ghost rock.
It was burning.
And the demons within it were screaming.
Screaming.
Screaming.
The sound tore at Grey’s mind.
Then he was running along the shaft. His path to safety ended too soon. With a howl of desperation, Grey Torrance flung himself toward the far side of hope. And, like Looks Away had before him, Grey hit the edge of the cliff. And, like Looks Away, he fell.
Down.
Into darkness.
Chapter Sixty-Two
He slid down the side of the chasm.
Down and down. He scrabbled for purchase and found none. He kicked at the sheer wall and could find not the slightest toehold. Grey went down deeper and deeper, and in his panic he thought he could hear a chorus of ghostly voices crying his name. Even as he fell he knew that this was no fantasy. He knew that the ghosts who followed him saw him about to escape into an ignoble death in a forgotten hole, and they cried out in joy.
Was Annabelle’s voice among them? Would she—even she—delight at the thought of his bones lying here at the bottom of the Maze for all eternity? Could his betrayal of her have truly turned her to such cruelty? The mind is quick and ruthless at such times. Grey thought he could see her there, at the top of the chasm, leaning over to stare down at him as he fell.
And he did fall.
Down, down, down.
But …
But not …
But not faster and faster.
His gunbelt and hands scraped down the side of the cleft as he dropped, but he felt his body slowing.
Slowing.
Then the toes of his boot met a new angle of the wall and he felt his legs moving outward. Then his whole body bent backward until it was his belly and then his chest that was pressed hardest against the wall. He slowed more and more … until he stopped.
Just like that.
The world and all of its madness spun down like a windup toy that had clicked on its last cog. Grey lay facedown on a curved slope of rock. Panting, sweating. Bleeding. Nearly weeping.
Alive.
Far, far above him the screams of the living dead saber tooth were changing. He heard the hiss of frustration turn into a long wail of agony. He listened to it. He heard the demon inside the cat’s shrieks.
He heard them both die.
Or, maybe it was only the cat that died. Maybe the demon was cast back into Hell.
Grey had no idea which fate was worse. Burning to death or living to burn.
It took a long time to realize what had happened.
The chasm was not a sheer drop after all. Its sides were slopped like the inside of a bowl and the deeper he went the more the bowl curved inward.
His heart lurched as he realized that had he not leaped all the way to the edge of the bowl, then he would have plummeted straight down. Providence turned a failed escape into the only possible pathway to survival.
Grey lay there and pressed his forehead against the ground, closed his eyes, and thanked whatever gods there might be for dealing him a lucky card.
Lucky.
Looks Away.
Oh god.
“Are you dead, white man?” asked a familiar voice.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Grey rolled over. Slowly, painfully.
He saw Looks Away sitting with his back to a boulder. The bioluminescent fungi burned on the walls all around him and the eerie glow made him appear like a ghost from some ancient tale. Jagged lines of fresh blood were painted blackly against the Sioux’s skin.
“Jesus Christ,” breathed Grey.
“Not even close.”
He extended a hand and pulled Grey up as far as a hunched sitting position. It was the best they could each manage. Grey craned his neck to see if a ghost-pale face still looked down at him, but all there was at the top of the chasm was the dying flicker of fire from the burning monster. He hung his head and put his face in his palms.
“Well,” said Looks Away with weary sarcasm, “aren’t we a pair?”
“We’re alive,” said Grey.
“Oh, jolly good, then. All’s right with the world and we can skip tra-la.”
“Fuck you.”
“Well, there’s that. And a cogent argument you make.”
Grey scrubbed his face with his callused hands, and then got to his feet. His whole body trembled from exertion and injury. The slash on his hip felt like a hot poker driven all the way to the bone. His hands, toes, belly, and chest tingled with friction burns. And he doubted that, even should they escape from this hellhole, he would ever sleep soundly again.
“We have to find a way back up,” he said.
“Thank you for that shockingly obvious observation.”
Looks Away also got up, looking every bit as bad as Grey felt. They
turned and studied their surroundings. The walls of the chasm rose steeply on either side, and even though there was a slope to each, it would be impossible to climb up the way they’d come down. The sides were far too smooth. No handholds, nothing to give them a chance of getting out. The bottom of the chasm was narrow but mostly flat, and it stretched away to either side of them. The left-hand path wended its way through chunks of fallen quartz and stone. The blue fungi allowed them to see everything as clearly as if a full winter moon hung over them.
“Which direction?” asked Looks Away.
“Hell if I know,” said Grey. “Pick one.”
“Well, I think we more or less came from that way,” said Looks Away, nodding to their right. “Maybe if we make our way along the bottom we’ll find a way up. Not a good plan, I grant you, but it’s—.”
“—better than no plan,” finished Grey. They took a moment to check their weapons. Grey reloaded his Colt and Looks Away slapped his pockets for more shells. And slapped and slapped.
“Oh, bugger that,” he growled as he found a ragged hole in his trousers. “I’ve lost the bleeding shells.”
They did a quick search of the debris at the bottom of the drop and only found one cartridge, but it was crushed and the buckshot spilled out as Looks Away picked it up. There were no other shells in sight. Looks Away considered the shotgun, sighed, and slid it back into its holster. “I feel like tossing this thing as far as I can, but it’s been useful and we might get lucky.”
Grey wasn’t sure what kind of luck his friend was referring to. The only other shells for the weapon were in Queenie’s saddlebags, but he made no comment. It was easier to find ammunition than it was to acquire a new gun.
“What about the doohickey?” he said, nodding to the Kingdom rifle.
After a quick examination, Looks Away nodded. “Seems sound. A trifle dented but the mechanism works and we still have a few rounds left. Let’s hope we don’t need them, what?”
“Sure,” said Grey, “let’s hope.”
“I have a bit of a concern about using it down here, though.”
“Why?”
“Well, the explosive force released when it obliterates the ghost rock in encounters is rather dramatic and we are, after all, in a cavern formed by an earthquake. I don’t know how much we can trust to the stability of the ceiling. A blast of unexpected size in the wrong part of this place could bring the roof down and bury all of us under a billion tons of rock.”
“Jesus. And now you tell me?” demanded Grey.
“Be fair, old boy. It’s not like I had any experience with this, and I’m sure Doctor Saint never tested it under these conditions.”
“So, we can’t use our best weapon, is that it?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s just that we should exercise prudence.”
Grey closed his eyes. “Jesus H. Christ, Esquire.”
With their expectations running low and their fears bubbling over, they set off along the path, but after three hundred yards of twists and turns the way became impossible. A massive tumble of granite and marble had toppled from the upper walls of the cleft and filled the entire chasm to a height of eighty or ninety feet.
“Maybe we can climb it,” said Grey, stepping back to look upward. The rocks were haphazardly stacked but there were many obvious hand- and footholds.
However Looks Away shook his head. “Not a chance, old sport. See there? And there? Those rocks are held in place by loose dirt and some quartz splinters. It’s all as fragile as a house of cards.” To emphasize his point he picked up a fist-sized rock and walked backward, guiding Grey with him by an outstretched arm. “Stand back.”
He tossed the rock to a midpoint on the pile. He didn’t throw it very hard, but the rock struck one of the crystal splinters and suddenly the whole wall began to vibrate. Chunks of broken stone ground together and a dozen boulders as big as cooking pots bounced down toward them. Both men dove for cover as the whole gully shook and grumbled. Dust belched out from between clefts in the stone. They waited until it subsided before they stood up again.
“Damn,” murmured Grey. “You’ve got a good eye.”
“For rocks, at least,” said Looks Away with a shrug. He turned away from the blocked trail and looked back the way they had come. “Well … there’s nothing for it. Come on, dear fellow, quick march.”
With that he set off down the left-hand trail. Grey followed. They reached the point where they’d fallen and Grey glanced covertly up, still looking for that pale face. Now, though, even the firelight was gone. He wasn’t sure if that was a comfort or not.
The left-hand trail wormed its way through the shattered landscape for miles. Grey figured they walked two or maybe three miles down there in the fractured gully. He was exhausted and the walk seemed to be draining what little reserves he had left. There was almost nothing left in the canteen, and neither man wanted to drink from the infrequent lines of water running down through mossy cracks in the wall. The water smelled of rot and sickness.
Then, with a start, Grey realized that one of the reasons the journey seemed so tiring is that they were no longer walking along a flat bottom. The ground had begun to tilt upward. Looks Away nodded when Grey pointed this out, clearly having reached that conclusion already.
Within minutes the incline became more pronounced and within another quarter mile was rising sharply. It was slow and ponderous work to climb that hill, and they had to press their palms against the nearly smooth sides of the cliff to steady themselves and push their weary bodies upward.
Time seemed to lose all meaning.
The blue fungi grew thicker and its light intensified until it was as bright as a cloudy afternoon. Grey could have read by that glow. It made it easier to pick out their trail and to find what few handholds were available, but Grey was sure he would have preferred less light. The glow revealed one of the terrible secrets of this cavern.
The path was littered with bones. Many of them. Some were clearly ancient and had withered to dry, cracked relics; others were far too fresh for comfort and still glistened with scraps of meat and strings of tendon. Some of the bones were those of animals. Grey saw fish skeletons and the skull of a horse. They walked between the curved ribs of some vast thing that must have been as tall as a house and as long as a locomotive.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded, slapping his hand against one of the huge ribs. “I’ve seen elephants and this is ten times bigger.”
Looks Away shook his head. “I’ve seen drawings of bones like these,” he said, “but I don’t recall the name. Look, see there? That line of vertebrae? Lord above what a neck it had. And there, the skull? How delicate for so ponderous a beast.”
Grey saw where he was pointing and shook his head. “No way a brute like that had a head this small.”
But the skull lay there as if to mock him, positioned in perfect alignment to the remnants of its spine. Worse still were the marks on both skull and neck bones. Deep groves that could only have come from some savage claw. Not even the hulking saber tooth could have made cuts that deep.
Clutching their weapons, they hurried on. Then the path whipsawed through a series of switchbacks, and in the third section there were many small boulders that had tumbled down from some quake. They appeared haphazard at first, but as the men approached it became immediately obvious that this was far from the case.
“Look,” whispered Grey, “those are stairs.”
Stairs they were indeed.
Although rough-hewn and covered with moss, they were far too orderly to have been the work of anything but a deliberate hand. The steps led upward for a hundred feet and then vanished around a sharp turn.
“You’re a rock expert,” whispered Grey, bending to examine the rocks, “how old are these stairs? Is this some ancient passage, maybe cut by Spanish missionaries or—?”
“No,” said Looks Away decisively. He ran his fingers along one edge and the moss peeled off easily. “Not a bit of it. This is mo
stly marble and it’s cut from the living rock. See there? The chisel marks haven’t had time to completely oxidize. No, old boy, I’d say these steps are less than ten years old.”
“Ten years, eh,” mused Grey. “And how long has it been since Aleksander Deray and Nolan Chesterfield set up shop hereabouts?”
Looks Away grunted, and then grinned. “Eleven years,” he said. “Give or take.”
“Give or take.”
They straightened and Grey put a booted foot on the bottom step. “Don’t know if you’re a gambling man, Looks, but I’ll give you twenty-to-one odds that I know who lives at the top of these steps.”
“That, my friend, is what I believe they call a sucker’s bet.”
“It is.”
They smiled at each other.
“Shall we pay our respects?” asked the Sioux.
“I believe we should,” agreed Grey. “It would be the neighborly thing to do.”
Without a further word they began climbing the stairs.
PART THREE
A Man of Wealth and Taste
Fear not death for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Chapter Sixty-Four
They went slowly, taking time because neither of them wanted to arrive at Deray’s door out of breath and unable to fight.
But the steps did not lead directly to a door.
It led instead to a gate.
They emerged from the stairway on a flat plane that Grey presumed was on the same level as the underground sea. The roof here was not as high, however, suggesting that they had reached one end of the massive cavern. The stalactites reached down like fangs above their heads, and stalagmites rose around them to complete the disturbing illusion. There was a rough natural wall of some dark stone that ran all the way across this end of the cavern, broken only in one spot. This gap, clearly the result of the same earthquake that had destroyed most of California, was bridged by a stout wall of blocks fitted neatly together and fixed with lines of cement. In the middle of the blocks a gate made from tall crystal spikes stood on end and was bound, turn and turn around, by massive iron bands set with huge rivets.
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