“Wait until I tell you. So they’ve sent you?” Holl asked eagerly, inadvertently ignoring his escort, who stayed close by, listening.
“Not exactly sent,” the girl said, glancing sideways at Michaels. “I came along with him.” She gestured by tilting her head at the gate door through which a short man was entering.
The second passenger had red hair and a silky red beard. Michaels was taken aback by the cool, summing glance that the small man gave him through a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. Those cold blue eyes had considerable intelligence and determination behind them. This must be the spymaster.
“Diane, this is my friend,” Holl said, fluttering a hand toward Michaels, and then realized he didn’t know the man’s name.
“Michaels,” the agent supplied, extending a hand to the man and girl in turn. “How do you do?”
“Well, this is my … uncle Friedrich,” Diane said. There was something about this man she didn’t like, even if Holl did seem to trust him. “My name’s Diane Londen. I’m … I’m Holl’s sister.”
“A pleasure, Miss Londen. I’m no more than a Good Samaritan, encountered upon the road. I’m helping the lad here to find his cousin.” Michaels realized that he really towered over the red-haired man. He started to say something, but Diane interrupted him, and dragged him to one side.
“He’s very sensitive about his height, you know. Please don’t mention it.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” Michaels promised her. “Is he, er, Keith’s father? I couldn’t help but notice the, er, similarity of coloring.”
Diane raised her eyebrows at him curiously, but smiled winningly. “No, he’s our uncle. Cousin Keith takes after his mother. She’s really tall.” Diane sketched a ridiculous distance above the ground with one hand.
“Friedrich Alfheim. How do you do?” the small man demanded in a Teutonic accent, shaking Michaels’s hand.
“Alfheim?” Michaels asked, appealing to Diane. “I thought you said he was a Doyle, too?”
“He writes books, you know,” Diane whispered, thinking fast. “It’s his pen name. Shh. We don’t want his fans to know he’s here.”
“How did you come so soon?” Holl demanded, taking Diane’s bag. Michaels relieved the older man of his suitcase, and led the way out to the car park.
“We came standby,” Diane explained. “We just caught the jet; they held it for us while we ran for the gate. It didn’t make us very popular, but we made it. If your call had been ten minutes later, we would have missed it completely. As it is, we’ve been on four planes in the last twenty-four hours, and I’m pooped. What exactly happened to Keith?”
“I’m not sure.” Reluctant to mention anything to do with magic in front of a stranger, Holl gave them a bowdlerized version of Keith’s disappearance. “There’s been a lot of earthmoving in the area, and Keith might have fallen into a pit where there was a lot of subsidence. As we discovered in our searches yesterday, there are thousands of places where things may be concealed. This island is made up of geological odds and ends, with a high water table, where the peat has it stored up like sponge.”
Once again, Michaels was impressed by the midget playing the part of Holland Doyle, and wondered if he had been wrong thinking that he was a kid. He sounded too intelligent to be a youngster, but you never know with young ones these days. He was concerned what could have happened to Danny O’Day? Left the boy here to hold the bag while he headed for greener pastures? But this older one, now he was something to watch. A formidable old bastard. He reminded Michaels of his fifth form master.
***
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Of a’ the scunnersome, junting fuils to interrupt a ca’m evening with a nasty licht like tha’,” the mocking voice, as brown black as mascara, echoed in Keith’s head, as the skinny figure wrestled with him. “A curse on ye, then. A curse!” It was amazingly strong, and hard to get a grip on. His hands always seemed to miss the hold he aimed for.
Keith had already dropped the camera somewhere in the grass. A tiny, unoccupied part of his mind hoped it was all right. The rest of him was involved actively in wishing he could get away from this angry thing, but it was a lot stronger than he was.
Both of them had been surprised when the mysterious figure popped right out of the ground next to the stone and reached for the milk. Keith was amazed that anyone had really come for the offering, but the bodach, if that’s what it was, appeared completely thunderstruck that anything should be there waiting for him.
Keith had unwound like a spring, bounding astonished to his feet. He realized he should have been expecting an entrance like that. You could hardly expect a mystical household guardian to use a gate. The reality stunned him. By comparison, discovering the Little Folk in the bottom of Gillington Library was ordinary. They used doors. The Little Folk were a heck of a lot more friendly to strangers than this creature was. It sure didn’t look like the illustration in his guidebook. There was nothing benign or playful about this creature. He wondered what they would call it. The being’s coloration seemed to blend with the landscape, so Keith couldn’t get a very clear idea of what it actually looked like. It didn’t resemble the picture in the book, or the old man that some of the fairy tales referred to. It was creepy looking, and wasn’t at all pleased to see him. Their eyes met in the shadowy light, the stranger’s round and dark, with hidden lights like obsidian. Before it could move again, possibly disappearing through the ground again, Keith had raised his waiting camera, and snapped its picture. The figure was flooded with the hot, white light. It threw up a limb, a skinny arm, in front of its eyes, and then lunged for Keith, shouting. Keith tried to hold the being off at arm’s length, but it let him have it with all four limbs, kicking and scratching with long nails like talons. He pushed it away, but it sprang back to him like a yo-yo. They grappled all around the end of the garden, and then something hit Keith solidly on the side of the head.
He cried out. The landscape around him, the house, the garden, the sea and the stone, faded away into darkness. As he felt himself losing consciousness, the angry voice muttered in his ears. “No speech ye shall have ever in your life of three of the pleasures: women, wine, nor gold. I curse yer tongue as so ye’ve cursed my een!” The voice grew into a wail, and died away.
When he came to, Keith was lying on his side in a shallow puddle of water. His head felt like he’d spent the night drinking rotgut, or maybe cider, but he couldn’t remember a day in the last month when he’d had more than a beer, two at the most. He pried his eyes open. That was no help. It was just as dark outside as it was under his eyelids. The summer sun hadn’t left any part of Scotland in absolute darkness for the last month. So where was he? Or was he blind? He held up a hand in front of his nose. Nothing. Not even a shadow. Groaning, he started to sit up.
Suddenly, his invisible whiskers broadcast an alert to his brain: Don’t move any further to the right! Keith raised a tentative hand toward his right shoulder. A quarter inch beyond it was a rough stone wall, damp and slimy. Ech. Keith’s fingers recoiled. So he was inside something, he thought. Well, that’s progress. Nothing’s wrong with my eyes. Where is this place? And what?
Using hands and whiskers, he explored his new environment. The invisible wiry hairs spread forward as well as to the side, keeping him from smashing his nose into the stone walls. It was a tiny chamber, roughly round like a flattened sphere, almost four feet high, and about five feet in diameter, too small for him either to stand up or lie down in any comfort. The slimy stuff smelled fresh and green, like moss, so he stopped flinching from its touch. Two feet up in the middle of one side was an irregular hole as wide as his shoulders and approximately the shape of an inverted triangle. Apart from several smaller holes on the opposite side of the floor, it was the only thing which suggested an exit from the bubble of rock. He was alone, but that, he reflected, depended on whom you’re alone from. Holl was nowhere nearby, which was bad, but then neither was the bodach, which was good.
&nbs
p; “Oh well, I had no idea the little guy would get so mad. I must be right under the hill,” he reasoned, turning his head upward to gaze blindly into the darkness. He wondered how long he had been down there. A good deep yawn summoned up no sensation of fatigue, suggesting that he had slept at least a few hours. It was probably near dawn outside. He felt for his watch. It was gone. For a wild moment, he considered pounding on the ceiling of his chamber and shouting for help. “Nope, I’m probably halfway to Australia. No one would hear a thing. I’ve got to get out of here on my own.”
It was cool in the chamber, but not too oppressively so. Keith had read somewhere that the constant temperature underground was 57° Fahrenheit. The scientists who had discovered that never accounted for the subjective reaction to damp, which made it feel more chilly. Keith was glad of his tweed jacket and woolly hat, but suspected that those garments were going to make it difficult for him to wriggle through the passageway. If he only knew how far the passage extended, or what it looked like. It could be a long narrow tube, or it might drop off suddenly if this was a small bubble on the side of a larger cavern. He wished he hadn’t dropped the electric torch. It would be so comforting right now to see.
What he needed was some alternate form of illumination. He wondered if Enoch’s lessons in magic extended to providing light in slimy, moss-covered underground caverns. Keith stuck his head through the opening, and felt a tiny breeze of cool air. There was no source of light anywhere nearby, but he wasn’t imagining it: the air was moving. He raised two fingers to feel its strength and source of direction. “Great!” he said out loud. “This opens out into the upper air someplace. I’ll just follow it. Ow!”
Keith pulled back, clutching his jaw. It felt like something had just socked him on both sides of his face. One of his teeth had just suffered a stabbing pain in the cold air. It hurt abominably. He probed it with his tongue. The top surface of the tooth felt rough, and his tongue dipped into a depression that hadn’t been there earlier. “I think my filling fell out when I hit my head,” Keith moaned. “Great. Here I am being Darby O’Gill, or maybe Rip Van Winkle in the depths of the Scottish mountains, and I’ve got dental problems.” On further investigation, he discovered that every one of his silver fillings were gone. They couldn’t all have fallen out. There had to be another reason, maybe a magical one. Keith grimaced. The bodach, teaching him another lesson. That was probably where his watch had gone, too. Well, fixing his mouth would have to wait until he got the mouth, and the rest of his body, out of this cavern and back in civilization.
“No offense!” he said hopefully to the air, wondering if the bodach was listening. “Sorry I spooked you! I was just being curious.” No answer. He sighed. It was probably long gone, sulking in a hole somewhere. He wished Holl or Enoch was with him. He thought of Diane, too, and wondered if he’d ever see her again. Well, there was no use being morbid. Either he would get himself out of here, or he wouldn’t. It wasn’t hopeless, he told his twisting stomach. He had a lot of resources he hadn’t even used yet. So with that firm resolution, why did he feel like he wanted to cry? Light, that’s what he needed. It would lift his mood if he could see.
To make light, he needed something that had natural tendencies toward giving off light. Crystals of some kinds did, when you crushed them. Unfortunately, if the rock around him was of the same type as the stuff on the surface, and he had no reason to believe it wasn’t, the matrix was too flimsy to have very productive crystals, and he had nothing with which he could crush it. It ought to be granite or quartz, not shale. So what else was there with him?
He shifted to get out of the puddle, which was getting deeper—probably because he was sitting on one of its drainage holes—and moved closer to one of the moss-covered walls. There was a soft gurgle as the water ran out. Keith sat idly playing with the clumps of moss. Didn’t decaying vegetation have light-emitting qualities? Unless this chamber flooded completely at times, washing away all the dead stuff, there should be plenty here to make a light.
Nervously, he stroked a bit of moss and thought about how to construct the magical process around it. This was the first time he had tried to do anything serious without supervision. On the outer surface, the moss was like damp fur, but it got more fibrous inside where it hung on to the rock face. Keith tried to think of the dead fibers and bulb filaments. Reaching down deep inside himself, he worked at knowing that it was right for moss to glow in the dark, that it did it all the time, and shaped his energies to fit that thought.
He opened his eyes. It was still dark. He sank back, feeling defeated. Doing magic took a lot out of him. Well, there was no point in waiting for the cross-town bus. He’d have to make his way out in the dark. Keith started to feel his way toward the opening, and then realized he could just see it, as a blacker darkness at the other side of the bubble. There was the faintest, spooky glimmer everywhere in the chamber, just on the edge of vision, like fluorescent lines in a haunted house. It wasn’t a dramatic difference, but it was good enough. He had light! Now, to get out of here.
Once he could distinguish the shape of the triangular passage, it occurred to him how uncomfortable it would be to crawl through. He’d have to keep one knee on each of the sloping faces, and hope he didn’t get stuck anywhere. His own weight would press him into the trench like peanut butter in a celery stalk. It was a wonder to him how the bodach had gotten him in there. Never mind; he was leaving.
An absurd litany sang itself in his head, “You’d better go before you go.” Feeling a little foolish, he relieved himself over one of the drainage holes. The simple, natural action took part of the urgency off his need to get moving, and gave him one fewer concern to think about.
“Okay, here goes.” Expelling a deep breath, Keith crawled into the passage and, with an effort of will, dragged the spell in after him. The faint glow touched the walls of the narrow tunnel wherever there was moss. It extended the full length of his body behind, but only a couple of feet in front of him. He convinced the glow to move further forward, illumining more of the passage ahead. His legs and back could take of themselves. There was so little room he could hardly turn his head to look back over his shoulder.
He found as he went along that he could see better as he became accustomed to the fairy light of the moss. The light didn’t extend far enough to give him much view ahead, so Keith let his whiskers guide him through the zigzagging tube. His hands and knees shifted and slipped on the slick stone. Several times his supports shot out from under him, dropping him painfully onto his stomach in the narrow crevice between the rocks. Below him in the angle of the slabs, a trickle of water flowed back toward the way he had come. “At least I can tell I’m going uphill,” he reasoned.
Sometimes the tunnel was so tight that his nose was only an inch from the streaks of mosslight. The layers of rock were neither smooth nor evenly laid. The upthrust which had exposed this interstice through which he was crawling had also splintered pieces which shifted suddenly under his hands. More than once, Keith had to catch himself to keep from sliding back toward the round chamber. He edged forward, concentrating on keeping the fairy light in sight. Suddenly, he found a place where the glow was interrupted, and resumed a few feet further along the tunnel.
He lowered himself and crept up to the dark spot on his belly, and peered over the edge. Perhaps it was just a dip in the path, and he could drop into it on his feet, and hoist himself up on the other side. There was no light beneath him. He felt the stone with his fingers, and discovered that the slab he was on ended. His fingers walked downward until his whole arm was extended into the abyss. Nothing at all lay within reach. He called down into it, but no echo came back. With his thumb, he loosened a pebble and dropped it into the gap. A long, long interval went by before he heard the faint plop as it struck, but it was so far away he couldn’t tell if it had hit water or more stone. That was deep. He squinted up at the mosslight on the other side of the gap. It would take almost a running start to get over it, and he was al
ready traveling uphill. Once committed to crossing, he would be unable to pull himself back again.
Keith rose to his knees. He was thankful that he couldn’t see the sheer drop into the pit. It would only frighten him to know that what he was about to do was impossible. He pushed back half a pace, and then with all his strength, flung himself across.
He landed on the other side, and hastily scrabbled up onto the new slab, bracing his knees against the side to keep from falling backwards. His legs slipped partway into the gap, and he flailed his arms for anything to grab onto.
A long splinter of stone protruding from the right side of the tunnel met his grasp. He battened onto it like a sea urchin clinging for dear life to its ship. Just as he slipped past his waist into the pit, he got his arms around the stone, and hauled himself upward. The stone wrenched partway out of its socket, but by then Keith was sitting on the far side of the gap.
He sat on the edge of the pit panting. His heart was beating so loudly it was pounding in his ears. He had to go on.
Crawling over one of the gigantic splinters, he found that the passage had leveled out. The stream issued from beneath a new slab in a different direction, which had only a hand-span’s clearance. He could no longer follow the flow of the water.
“Last oasis for twenty miles,” he told himself. This junction was the largest opening in which he had been, with just enough room to stretch. He wiggled his shoulders, feeling the cramp relax slightly. Twisting and maneuvering in the narrow tunnel with difficulty, he reversed his position so his head was hanging over the edge of the slab just above the source of the stream. With a cupped hand, he scooped up water. It was cold, and except for being mineral heavy, tasted pure. It was probably rainwater, precipitating down through the porous construction of the rock.
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