I have not lost heart. I will find the fount, and it will be worth the sacrifice.
Yours truly,
V. Pennyrile
Elias read the letter a second time. The lines about getting sicker, about the new boy, those he understood, but the other parts became no clearer with the second reading.
Following the slaves? Why?
And finding the fount? What on earth was that about?
Bedivere warbled in his sleep, the good wing twitching. Elias read the letter a third time.
He ought to show it to someone. It was too odd and too worrisome to keep to himself. But who? Dr. Croghan? He wouldn’t be by until morning. And Elias felt funny about letting it keep. Plus, he’d probably get sideways with Elias for reading the note in the first place, and maybe not even do anything about it.
He emerged from his hut. Lillian was humming softly to herself as she banked up the coals.
“Hey,” Elias whispered.
Lillian jumped, hand on her chest. “Lord, Elias. You sure do sneak up on a girl.”
“Beg pardon.” He glanced at Pennyrile’s door. “He sleeping?”
“Gave himself enough of that stuff to sleep to Sunday,” she said. “What about you? Why ain’t you sleeping? I just sent Stephen off when he came looking—”
Stephen! That’s who he should have thought of first. It might even be about him, what with that line about following the slaves.
“Stephen was just here?”
Lillian yawned. “Five, ten minutes ago.”
“Where was he going?”
Lillian narrowed her eyes. “Up Black Snake way. Thought you might want to come along but you was dead to the world—”
Elias grabbed the spare lamp sitting by the fire. “I’ll see if I can catch him.”
Lillian’s hand on his arm stopped him, her fingers pinching harder than a blue crab. “You will not!”
“He’s only a few minutes ahead, you said yourself,” Elias begged.
“You never gone off by yourself but that one time and it didn’t go so good.”
“Please,” Elias begged. The longer he stayed here, the farther Stephen got from him, and the further he’d be from showing him the letter. “I been out there loads more since then. If I don’t catch him up in a few minutes, I’ll come back directly. And I won’t take a single path I haven’t been down before.”
“Cain’t you wait?”
He couldn’t. He was sure Stephen would understand Pennyrile’s letter, and now that he was sure, he couldn’t wait a minute longer.
“I’ll be careful, Lillian,” he said, adding, “I promise. Doc likes me exercising, anyway.”
Lillian’s grip eased. “You sure you know the way? And where to turn off main cave up by Giant’s Coffin?”
Giant’s Coffin? He wasn’t sure of that one, but he took a guess. “Before you come to the Star Chamber?”
“He should be real close to there, but if he’s gone, you promise me you’ll turn around?”
“I can catch him up,” Elias said. “Promise.”
Lillian released him. “Don’t you dare go past the Camel, or else don’t bother coming back at all, y’hear?”
The Camel? Where was that? But it didn’t matter. Lillian was letting him go. Elias flew down the slope, the oil in his lamp swishing with every step.
Hurrying as fast as he could while still keeping the flame on his lamp burning, he checked off landmarks as he went.
And then he saw it. The Coffin. How could he have missed it before? As big as a double-masted schooner, but shaped perfectly for its name. Wider near the top, narrowing at the feet, sides like they’d been planed down smooth. He wondered why Stephen or the others hadn’t pointed it out, all the times he’d been past it. Maybe they hadn’t wanted him thinking about coffins, about how the cave itself might as well be one giant coffin for some of them who had come in to heal up. No! He wasn’t going to think about that.
He walked on a little farther, picking out landmarks. Just as he started second-guessing himself and his sense of direction, he saw the glow of lamplight from around the bend that told him Stephen was near. And a moment later, there was Stephen.
He was laid out on his belly, reaching under an eave of rock.
Elias hesitated. What was he doing?
Stephen pulled something from the hole and placed it in his knapsack. Then he went back to the hole, reached in, and grabbed something else and loaded that, too, in his pack. He repeated this until his pack was so full that Elias wasn’t sure he could even close it. But he still drew more items from the wall, depositing those in an old grain sack.
What in the world?
Now Stephen was struggling into the heavy pack.
Elias recalled those primers he’d glimpsed in Stephen’s pack the other night, how quick Stephen had made up a reason he couldn’t take Elias out with him any farther.
And now he was getting—what? More books? And going where?
He let Stephen get a little ahead and then began to follow. Then Stephen did something stranger still. He began to sing.
Wade in the water,
Wade in the wa-a-a-ter, children
Wade in the water,
God’s a-gonna trouble the water.
Plenty of the folk whistled in the dark—even Doctor Croghan—to fill up the loneliness. But this was different. Stephen was singing deep and bold, like he was in church.
It made Elias more curious.
And it made Stephen even easier to follow at a distance.
So Elias did.
Chapter Eleven
TURLE KNOT
Stephen’s song continued, better than a bread crumb trail.
Who’s that yonder dressed in red?
The Lord’s gonna trouble the water.
Must be the children that Moses led,
God’s a-gonna trouble the water.
Elias followed Stephen through a tunnel and onto a broader avenue he didn’t recognize. Then the path dropped sharply as a bigger chamber opened beyond. A narrow track lay at his feet, switchbacking into the darkness. Where was Stephen?
Elias stole a moment to check his bearings. Beside him a curtain of rock spanned from the floor where he stood to the low ceiling overhead. The rock draped and looped, leaving open spaces. The shape looked enough like a camel—all legs and neck and hump—to confirm he’d found the place Lillian had warned him about.
Don’t go past the Camel.
But Stephen was there. Lillian would have meant not to go past it alone. So he continued.
Elias took one last look at the Camel, committed the shape of the thing to memory, in case he might need it later, then scrambled after Stephen, shale skittering under his boots. The way leveled off, cut to the left and through a wide seam in the cave wall. Elias followed, noting how the path began to rise again. He looked above him briefly to make sure he would not bump his head, and when he looked back down he found his light had cast a wicked-looking shadow in the path before him.
Only it wasn’t a shadow.
It was a pit.
His mind slipped instantly back to standing at the edge of Bottomless Pit when Stephen tried to warn him about running around in the cave. He recalled how dizzy he’d felt standing on that rickety wooden bridge.
Only this one . . . didn’t have a bridge.
It wasn’t as wide as Bottomless, but it ran clear up to the walls on either side, offering no way past but over.
Still, that wasn’t the worst of it.
The shape was what set the blood in Elias’s veins to ice.
The gash in the floor made the perfect crescent of a smile, gaping like it might gulp up all the light from his lantern, like it might gulp up all the light in the world.
Elias squatted down, grabbed a rock off the floor, and tossed it gently in.
One Mississippi.
Two Mississippi.
Three Mississippi.
He gave up somewhere between his sixth and seventh Mississippis. An
d when he’d figured it might never hit bottom at all, he heard a faint clatter from somewhere impossibly deep.
While he’d counted, Stephen’s song had begun to fade. He must have leaped over it!
Elias pushed down his fear, tried not to think too hard on what he was about to do. He took a few steps back. It was maybe five feet across. He told himself it would be like jumping the creek behind his house in Norfolk.
Only when he fell in the creek, he could swim out. If he fell here . . .
Nothing for it. If Stephen had jumped it, carrying that huge load, Elias figured he surely could. All the same, he tightened his grip on the lamp’s handle and whispered a Hail Mary. He checked to make sure he still had the little scroll, then ran. Because of the narrowness of the tunnel and the unevenness of the floor, he didn’t have much space to get up to speed, but he did what he could, planted a foot about eight inches before the pit, and leaped. It seemed to Elias that he hurtled through the air forever before landing on the other side.
Luckily, the lamp stayed lit. Elias staggered forward and kept on, not even looking back to see how close he’d been when he landed.
Soon he could hear Stephen again.
If you don’t believe I’ve been redeemed
God’s a-gonna trouble the water
Just follow me down to the Jordan’s stream
God’s a-gonna trouble the water.
A moment later Elias was in another room, two tunnels forking off in different directions. Stephen’s lamplight led him left, brighter than it had been before.
And then suddenly Stephen’s song broke off.
Now he was talking to someone.
Elias couldn’t quite place the other voice. It wasn’t Nick or Mat, he was sure.
The voices kept on talking but were moving farther into the tunnel.
Elias pressed on, led as steadily by the need to figure out what Stephen was up to as he was by his need to show him that mysterious note. Soon he emerged in a perfect dome-shaped chamber bisected by a shallow stream. Something about the room made it seem like the kind of place to meet a body.
He ducked down under a low arch—the only way out of the chamber—and continued his pursuit.
The way began to twist on itself, like a maze. When his father had first taught him to tie knots—simple ones like a square or a figure eight—he’d told him to imagine he was as small as an ant, riding the tip of the rope through the twists, trying to find his way out. Elias always liked the notion but hadn’t understood the feeling of it until now.
Finally the maze began to open, and Elias found sand beneath his feet.
Sand?
Now he was in a chamber about as big as the Rotunda up in the main cave. And across the sea of sand he saw Stephen’s lamp.
He walked side by side with another man who had taken the grain sack. Elias hung back, shielding his light behind him, and watched them disappear into a wide crack in the wall. He waited a few seconds, then, unable to hear Stephen talking or see his light, he dashed across. The path was straightforward, even though the ceiling was low, angling sharply down on both sides and forcing him to hold his head sideways.
It seemed to dead end in a great pile of rock. Elias blinked. What? Had he missed something? He raised his light and saw the pile didn’t go all the way to the ceiling. Near the ceiling was a gap of about three or four feet.
Elias put the lamp down. He found the rock easy enough to climb, almost like a ladder, almost like the rocks had been arranged to make it easy to find the way over. A second more and he was peeking over the top.
Another vast chamber, big enough to hold half a dozen triple-masted schooners, Elias judged, appeared before him, full of big lights—No! Cook fires! Burning all over the room. With people—people!—huddled around them, moving between them like shadows.
Lots of people! Dozens! More?
Elias gaped, hardly believing what he was seeing. What were they all doing here? Who were they?
He wanted to get closer. But as soon as he swung a leg over the top, something grabbed him from behind.
Something giant and strong and smelling of smoke and sweat.
Elias yelped.
“Lights-out!” roared a voice as Elias bucked against the arms that held him.
The fires began to go out with alarming speed, and the chamber was plunged into deeper shadow, and then total darkness.
Chapter Twelve
CAT’ S PAW
Hey!” Elias bit and kicked and thrashed against arms that surrounded him like clamps. “Lemme go!” But no matter how hard he fought, he couldn’t shake loose. Then he heard another voice, one that made him freeze.
“Elias?” It was Stephen. “Elias, is that you?”
“Stephen!” Stephen! “Somebody’s got ahold of me—”
“Oh, Lord,” Stephen whispered, then said louder, “Elias, what are you doing down here?” He sounded defeated, not panicked like Elias would have thought.
“Make ’em let me go!” Elias begged. “Put the lanterns back on!”
But the lanterns weren’t relit. Whoever held him clamped down tighter. Elias could hear Stephen whispering to someone, though he could not make out the words. Other whispers started up around him.
And the darkness! Ever since he’d come to the cave, he’d never been in full darkness, black as complete as this. Always there was light from somewhere to break it up, but this was different. The blackness made Elias feel somehow disconnected, like his limbs weren’t in accord with the rest of him. It all felt tighter and closer, like the big room he’d glimpsed had been drawing in around them, those whispers edging nearer and nearer. . . .
“Elias,” Stephen said carefully, “what did you see?”
What did he see? Why was Stephen asking such a thing when someone big enough to snap his spine was holding him prisoner?
“See?”
“Elias,” Stephen went on. “What did you see?”
Elias thought. “You. I was looking for you. . . . I needed to show you something . . . and I seen you loading up your pack at that hidey-hole, so I followed you. Then I heard you talking with somebody. Then I came here and seen all those cook fires and a whole bunch of people—”
“Enough.” Stephen sounded almost done in. There was more whispering, then Stephen asked. “Why’d you follow me?”
“I . . . I found a dead pigeon, one of Pennyrile’s. It had a letter Pennryile must have meant to send out. I—” He hesitated, embarrassed to admit what he’d done. “I read it. And it seemed sort of funny to me, like there was something wrong in it, and I couldn’t think of no one else to ask about it except you, so I went out to show you but then I got curious.”
“We in it now,” a new voice said.
“Who was that?” Elias asked.
Stephen didn’t answer right away, sighing. Then he said, “Put him down, Davie.”
Suddenly Elias’s feet were back on the ground. A tinderbox slid open and soon the lamp was burning again. Stephen held up the light.
“You shouldn’t have followed me.” But Elias, looking around, was too stunned to reply. So many faces, not one of them familiar, gazed at him. Some were as dark as Nick’s; others lighter like Stephen’s, but it was plain enough to see now what he had missed when they were all shadowed by the cook fires: they were all Negroes. And not a one looked happy to see him.
Beyond the little circle other lamps flared and the cook fires began to burn again. More people. So many more. Elias saw that near the edges of the chamber, sheets and tarps had been strung up for privacy. They were living down here, Elias marveled. And they were all colored. And if those two things were true . . .
“Runaways,” Elias whispered.
“You done it now, Stephen!” another voice called, sounding desperate.
Stephen ignored him. “Give me Pennyrile’s letter, Elias.”
Elias didn’t move, just tried to take it all in. “Runaways!” he repeated. Then he looked sharp at Stephen. “How many are ther
e? How long they been here?”
“Elias, give me the letter.” Stephen dropped his chin. There was something pleading in the tone, so Elias handed it over.
Stephen took it, then addressed the one who’d been holding Elias. “Keep an eye on him, Davie.” And to Elias he said, “Stay right here, understand?”
“Where you going?”
Stephen gestured toward one of the cook fires. “Just over there. To talk to somebody.”
“But—”
“Elias, you’ve put me in a bind here, so the least you can do is listen to me and wait a minute.”
“But—”
“No!” Stephen said, his temper flaring white-hot before he reined it back in. He waved over a boy who was standing nearby, watching silently. “Stay with him.”
The boy was a few inches taller than Elias, though wider and stronger by more than that margin. His hair stuck out in wiry little twists all over his head.
“Whatev’ you say, Stephen,” the boy said, and Elias instantly recognized the voice.
Jonah!
“You,” Elias managed, staring at Jonah.
Jonah took a step nearer Elias and sat down on the sand. Elias did the same, keeping his gaze on Jonah, half afraid that if he blinked, Jonah would disappear.
“You can settle down, Davie,” Jonah said to the big man. “He won’t go nowhere.”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Davie rumbled, his voice rich and deep. “I seen him coming over the wall and I just—”
“You did right, Davie,” Jonah said. “This all is partly my fault anyhow. I helped Stephen fetch in them supplies. If I’d a stayed my post, Elias wouldn’t have got so far.”
“Post?” Elias asked. The more he heard, the more confused he felt.
Jonah nodded. “Back up the way, we got a spot we keep watch. Enough room to slip ahead and warn ev’body if someone ain’t one of us wanders down.”
“Somebody like me,” Elias guessed.
“Yep,” Jonah said.
All Elias’s questions seemed to jockey for position, demanding to be asked first. How many are here? How long have they been hiding? Who knows about it? Nick? Mat? Lillian or the others? How do they get by? But he settled on one he thought might catch him the most information. “What is this place?”
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