by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER TWELVE
Escapade
Joe Fflowers is right. Even though the Greenlander lair is devastated by the loss of its tea and salt, they have not taken their disappointment out on him. Instead, in the two days since his supposed fall, he has been treated kindly by almost everyone in the den. They offer him salve for his knee, wash his clothes, and give him larger portions of food than they themselves take.
What Joe especially appreciates most is that they talk to him. By having conversations with varying members, each of whom is willing to share something that maybe they shouldn’t, Jack learns that there are seven ways out of the lair. The path that he and Blesonus had taken is one of the most difficult. It is the one used when the den has guests. Three other exits leave the den midway down three different sides of the mountain—north, west and south. The last three passages are supposedly long torturous bolt holes. One ends in the valley on the mountain’s west side. Another exits on the south side behind a waterfall several hundred feet above an abandoned logging road. The third also opens behind a waterfall, which, after pitching through four cascades, becomes a stream that flows to the Hudson River.
Joe figures that if he can make his way to the Hudson, then his boating skills, developed during summer vacations on the narrow scythe of Cape Cod Island, will provide him with a means of escape. He is sure that he can find some kind of boat that will get him downstream to Albany. From Albany, he can make his way back north to Montreal, which has always been his goal…or…or, some other place that can be decided later.
The morning after their failed mission, Blesonus leads Joe further down into the mountain along a steep-pitched tunnel until they came to a series of four caverns, each of which has a pool of the “fish,’ which are the source of the Greenlanders bio-luminescent paint. The animals look like giant tadpoles. When Joe pleads, a skeptical Blesonus hands him a small pot of the paint.
That night, instead of sleeping, Joe goes wandering into the bowels of the mountain. He takes the pot of paint with him, and every time there is an intersection in the tunnels, he marks his way with a thumbprint. Each time there is a choice, he opts for the way that seems to lead deeper into the mountain. Even after several hours of searching, while yawning from lack of sleep and fighting the growls in his stomach and the throbbing in his knee, the frustrated boy still has not discovered the exit he is seeking.
Joe is a hundred meters down a corridor when he stops dead. He can’t remember marking the last intersection. The panicky adolescent whirls around in the tunnel and rushes to retrace his steps. Standing before the intersection, which indeed has no marking, he tries to remember whether he had turned in from the right or left. His heart is beating so fast that he has trouble concentrating. He turns left, takes a step in that direction, then, wavers. His body begins to quake. He tells himself to slow down, that the quaking is less from fear than from low blood sugar from the Greenlanders’ meager diet. The panicky boy slumps against the cold of the wall and consciously slows his breathing. After several moments, it dawns on him that it doesn’t make any difference which way he turns. If he goes to the left to the next intersection and there is no mark, then he will know that he must turn around, walk past where he presently is and go to the next opening, which will be marked.
Joe pushes himself up from the floor, plays his hunch and turns left. When he comes to the intersection and sees no glowing thumbprint, he retraces his steps. He is so confident as he walks back that when he comes to the other opening and finds no thumbprint, it takes him a moment to realize the full implications. It stuns him to realize that he has forgotten to mark at least two junctions.
The magnitude of his stupidity literally floors Joe. He sits in the dark, with his thighs and calves spasming as he stares each way at the unbroken line of phosphorescence and ponders his next move.
From what Blesonus and the others have told him, there is a spiderweb of tunnels, some natural, some left from the mining operations, but most constructed during the heyday of the Greenlanders, winding throughout the mountain and even into adjoining mountains. Back when novices joined the Kin in droves and visitors came to see the life extolled in news programs and two documentary films, the trails had been well-marked. But, after the lair was repeatedly attacked by anti-greens and Last Boyz, the cave dwellers removed most of the markers to make things more difficult for any intruders. Despite the fact that that over the decades most of the world has forgotten that the Greenlanders, like the Shakers before them, even exist, the majority of passages remain unmarked and, even worse for Joe, unused.
Joe rolls his head against the hard cold stone as he tries to figure out the mathematics of his situation—one mistake gives two possible paths, two mistakes makes four possibilities, and if he has forgotten to paint three entrances, he will have eight possible trails to backtrack. The longer Joe sits, the more he feels how exhausted he is. The air around him thickens. It feels heavy enough to wrap himself in it. He doesn’t want to move. Suddenly, his panic triples as the idea comes that what he is feeling is like the stories of lost hikers going to sleep in a snow storm. Completely agitated, he jumps to his feet and starts to run down the tunnel. It is only as he comes to an intersection and the decision that implies that he gets enough hold on himself to consider that, as unnerved as he is, if he continues, he may only compound his troubles.
The cold, frightened boy holds back a sob as he slides his back down the damp rock wall. He removes the monocle from his eye and rubs the skin and muscles around the socket contemplatively. After a few minutes of getting himself calm, Joe rolls onto his side, draws up his knees and, just before he falls deeply asleep, assures himself that he is too agitated to do more than take a quick cat-nap.
