by Cave, Hugh
Grant shrugged. "Hunger is a most effective weapon, friend. Keep that in mind." His gaze shifted bleakly to Manny. "You with the whip—you may begin now."
"Manny, no!" Peter cried out again.
This time the pig hunter did not even turn toward his voice. On the cross the young scout shut his eyes and voiced a low whimper in anticipation of pain. The whip flicked forward and stroked his waist.
He cried out. But Grant, intently watching every move, was not satisfied.
"I think you failed to give that your best effort, Williams," he coldly accused.
Manny would not look at him. "No, suh. Me hit him hard."
"Show me again."
The pig hunter braced himself. The whip straightened out behind him, then leaped forward again. This time it seared the chest of the bound boy and drew blood.
"Very well," Grant said calmly. "Continue until you are told to stop." To the man at the table he said with a scowl, "I am losing patience with this boy, Coleman. You understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"Convince him quickly."
"Yes, sir."
"Or destroy him. We have better things to do with our time." Grant's rifle nudged Peter again. "Come, Sheldon. You have seen enough of this for my purpose. Now let me show you another phase of our training before I return you to your cell and let you think about it.”
Sick at heart, Peter allowed himself one last glance at the man who for so long had been his trusted companion—the man without whose courage and cunning he would not even have found this underground hell.
On heavy feet he turned away.
28
AS PETER LEFT THE TRAINING ROOM, THE MAN AT THE table glared at Manny Williams and snarled, "You heard our leader! Get on with it now!"
His whip hand dangling, the snake coiled on the floor next to his right foot, Manny turned to face the fellow. "Me arm hurting me." His voice was a whine.
The man reached to the table for his rifle. Holding it in both hands, he halved the distance between himself and the pig hunter. "Is you trying provoke me, man? 'Cause if you is—"
"All right, all right." Manny turned back to the youth on the cross. "Who being trained here, anyway?" he muttered. "Me or him?" It was a question he had asked himself ever since being marched to this chamber at gunpoint and having the whip thrust into his hands.
"Both of you," was the snarled answer. "Now get to work!"
Manny flicked the whip out over the floor to straighten it. Both of them? The system here, insofar as he understood it, was to use the truly stubborn captives as victims. He had been one of those in the beginning, until he figured things out. Those who accepted the ways of evil early were made to work on the stubborn ones until the leader was convinced they enjoyed what they were doing. Then, as the devil's disciples, they were sent out to commit acts of evil elsewhere.
From one of his jailers he had learned, too, what had happened to Witford Cushie the day he and Witford had followed the hurt pig. Discovered resting there near the cave mouth, the lad had been taken inside.
"And what did happen then?"
"Him was rejected."
"Him was what?"
"Rejected. Mr. Grant don't have no use here for people like him, so him was let go."
"But something did done to him mind, no?"
"It was emptied, is all. So him would not remember him was here."
Emptied, Manny thought—and the easy way the fellow said it had made him want to kill the man. Granted, young Witford Cushie had not been too bright to begin with, but the lad could have got by. He could have learned farming or something and had a half-decent life. Now, because these followers of Satan had "emptied his mind," he would forever be just Witless Cushie, the village dummy.
Damn them.
But to the business at hand.
Do me look as if me enjoying this? the pig hunter asked himself. He had better, or his instructor might be annoyed enough to play rough. The fellow was a sullen brute, anyway. In sessions when Manny had been the one on the cross—before he had figured out the system and devised a desperate plan to defeat it—the same man had twice had him whipped unconscious.
As he braced himself to use the whip again, the pig hunter allowed himself a quick glance at the man. The rifle was being held horizontally across the fellow's ribs, not aimed at him. The whip came off the floor and flowed backward a foot above the stone. It hung straight and level in space. At that moment Manny spun on the bare but leather-tough sole of his backward foot and shot the lash at a new target.
He had been forced to use the whip many times since the start of his plan to beat the system. A fast learner at almost anything, he was adept with it now. It whistled straight at the man with the gun and wrapped itself around his ankles.
Manny spun to face away from him. With the snake over his left shoulder and both gnarled hands on its wooden handle, he bent low and lurched forward, jerking the gunman's feet out from under him.
The man went over backward with a howl of rage. The part of him that hit the floor first was the back of his head, and it hit with a sound like that of a slammed-down melon. His yell could not have ended more abruptly if sliced off with a machete.
Manny walked over to him and looked down. He saw the puddle of blood forming under the man's head and was satisfied. Picking up the rifle, he looked at it and said aloud, "Lord Jesus, me don't even know how to use this thing." But he hung on to it all the same as he turned to the youth on the cross.
"Now how we going get you down from there, son?" he said, shaking his head. "Nobody here have no knife."
He scowled at the ropes holding the youth—one at each wrist, a third securing both ankles. Dragging the table over to the cross, he climbed onto it and went to work on the wrists first, while the boy gazed at him in silent amazement.
"Me sorry me hurt you so much," Manny told him. "But me couldn't risk making them suspicious, sonny."
"Yes, sir." The boy's voice was barely audible.
Manny finished freeing the wrists. "Now you feet. Hang on while me untie them. But you know something, boy? Me have no idea how we going find the way out of this place, with so much tunnels. Has you?"
"Is more than one way out, sir."
"Me name Manny. What you mean, is more than one way?"
"Is the way them bring us in from Blackrock," the boy said as Manny finished freeing him and eased him to the floor, "and is a longer way that come out somewhere on the Armadale property. Me hear some of them talking about it."
Manny paused to consider. Precisely where they were at the moment he was not sure, but he had some idea. The part of this twisty underworld that he knew most about lay above them, and their chances of reaching the entrance near Blackrock were nil with people constantly using the corridors. It might be just as hopeless the other way, of course. But he favored trying for Armadale.
"Son, does you know which passage lead to Armadale?"
"Them say is the main one, Manny."
"You can show me?"
"Come."
As they left the training room, Manny glanced again at the man whose gun he carried. The fellow had not moved. With the amount of blood now pooling around his head, it seemed unlikely he would ever move again. Maybe me should make sure him won't, though, Manny thought. But no—if me do that, me no better than him. Anyway, him not likely to trouble we soon.
St. Alban had been such a peaceful place before the violence began, he reflected. Sure, there had been holdups in the capital now and then, and a few break-ins and some thieving. Probably any big city was cursed with such problems. But now when a gunman held up a shop and demanded money, you never knew if he would be content just to take the money and run. Today he might shoot the poor shopkeeper dead, along with his wife and kids if they were unlucky enough to be there.
Only a short while ago two such gunmen, perhaps two of those trained here, had held up a young woman who was to have a baby. After taking her money they had slashed her belly open with a knife, thrown the baby in
to the gutter, then cut the woman's throat and left her dead. The devil's doing, without a doubt. Or Lucifer's, to give the fiend the name favored by Linford Grant.
Manny scowled at the weapon in his hands and wished he knew how to use it. Of course, if he pointed it at someone and pulled the trigger, something most likely would happen. But what then? He had nothing to reload it with, even if he knew how. He wished he had his old shotgun, but he had not seen that since being captured.
"What you name, boy?" he asked as they left the training chamber behind.
"Cornelius Dennis, sir."
"That a mouthful. What them call you?"
"Mostly Cob."
"All right, Cob. You a brave lad to be doing this after you hurt so bad. How you feel?"
"Me body sore, sir."
"Me name Manny," the pig hunter gently reminded him.
The narrow tunnel they had been following joined a wider one now, and Cob halted. "This the main road, me think, Manny. But which way we must go?"
Manny peered right, then left. "Well now, Armadale a long way below here. So let we try go downhill to the left here, huh?"
It was the beginning of a long, long hike.
Though it was steep at times, the passage itself did not trouble Manny. But he feared being followed. Every little while he signaled his companion to stop while he listened for pursuing footsteps. He should have removed the dead man from the training room and hidden the body somewhere, he told himself. Then Grant's people wouldn't have known exactly what happened, and pursuit might have been delayed for a while.
What he liked least about the tunnel was its wetness. This whole underworld must have been a river cave once. Maybe streams still ran through some of its passages. None flowed here, but perhaps after a hard rain one would.
Please God, don't make it rain, he prayed. Anyway, the tunnel was choked with boulders, and where the now-vanished stream had formed pools, he and Cob had to find ways around them because the holes were deep. And all the while the walls dripped, and the rough ceiling kept swooping down to force them to bend low or even at times to go forward on hands and knees.
What if the roof were to come down too far and block their escape entirely?
The rifle was a nuisance. He kept having to shift it from one hand to the other when the passage presented problems. His nakedness bothered him less. As a child in Grove Path he had been given a sore bottom more than once for taking his clothes off and throwing them away, he recalled wryly. Now he was cold but otherwise indifferent.
How did his companion feel about it? Probably the only thing Cob was aware of just now was that he hurt from the whippings. His body was marked by blood that had oozed from his wounds and dried like painted-on stripes.
It was me put some of those there, Manny thought unhappily.
Suddenly the boy halted. They were about six feet apart and had been watching their bare feet as they picked their way down a cluttered slope. "Manny," Cob said in alarm, "me can't see good no more!"
"Huh?"
"Issomething wrong with me eyes, Manny! Everything gone misty here!"
Manny peered both ways along the tunnel and saw nothing but the green glow that by now seemed almost normal. To be sure, it was less bright than before, but there was no sign of any mist. "Me no see nothing, Cob."
"Manny, help me!" The youngster's voice was a scream that broke like glass against the walls. "Help me, please! Something calling me to go back and me don't want to be tied to a cross again! Help me, Manny . . . please help me!"
As he cried out, he turned and lurched back up the passage. But before he could take more than a few steps in that deadly direction, Manny Williams rushed across the rocky stream bed and caught him fiercely about the waist.
29
"REMOVE YOUR CLOTHES, PLEASE, SHELDON."
Peter was not startled by the command. Not forever could he have hoped to be the only one in this green hell, other than its director, who was not naked. Rising from his prison floor, he proceeded to obey. Linford Grant had already unlocked his leg iron.
"Where are you taking me? To one of your damned torture rooms?"
"We call them training rooms, Sheldon. And you'll see."
His clothes in a heap on the floor, Peter eyed the weapon in the leader's hand. "How did you come by that thing, Grant?"
"We have no trouble obtaining weapons."
"The marijuana planes?"
Grant's only answer was a brief smile, but Peter was sure he had hit the mark. Planes clandestinely landing on the island's noncommercial airstrips for St. Alban's Marijuana brought in all sorts of contraband, he had heard. Was Grant involved in that trade as a means of financing his operation here? The money had to come from somewhere.
"Walk ahead of me," Grant ordered, motioning with the strange-looking weapon toward the corridor. "Turn right."
To the right was away from the training room to which Peter had expected to be taken. Was there something even worse in store for him? He had already made up his mind not to follow Manny Williams's lead if handed a whip and told how to use it. They could put him on a cross, damn them, but he would not torture someone else.
For ten minutes he paced in silence up a slightly uphill passage, with Grant's boots thudding behind him over the rough stone floor. Then his captor ordered him to turn left, and a short side passage led him to a chamber he had not seen before.
It was a strange room, almost a perfect circle in shape, with walls that rose twenty feet or so to a roof nearly as smooth as its floor. In the center of the floor an iron ring had been set in the stone—an operation that must have required hours of work with a drill of some kind. To the ring was attached a short length of chain terminating in a leg iron like the one he was now so familiar with.
But—and this puzzled him—there was nothing else in the chamber. Nothing at all.
"Walk to the center, Sheldon. Then sit, and close the iron around your ankle."
In his nakedness Peter found the floor unpleasantly cold and damp. "Which ankle?"
Grant briefly smiled again. "You know, I find your sense of humor interesting. Are you really so unafraid?"
"I can't believe any of this is happening. I expect any minute to wake up and find myself in bed in the Armadale Great House."
Grant stepped forward to make sure the leg iron had locked itself when Peter closed it. "Aren't you forgetting that when you got out of that bed not long ago, you went to the Dakin boy's house with a gun?" Backing away, he leaned against the wall and for sometime gazed at Peter in silence.
Not eager to hasten whatever was about to happen, Peter, too, remained silent. Presently he became aware that the green light in this oddly shaped room appeared to be more alive than elsewhere. Even more alive than in the first training chamber, where it had been the cause of his being captured.
In fact, this room was somehow like a monstrous green eye malevolently watching him. Yes, watching him . . . even though he was chained in the center of it.
"Have you guessed where you are, Sheldon?" the director asked.
"If this underworld of yours has a center, I suppose this is it."
"Not bad for one who can't believe any of this is happening. This is the chamber I was brought to."
"What?"
"This is where it all began for me, after I became separated from my companions and found myself selected. Hebrought me here. Sorry—you dislike that word, don't you? It led me here, then. The mind that took charge of me."
"And then?"
"Now we shall find out if what happened to me will happen to you. I think it might."
"Don't bet on it, Grant. You must have been insane to begin with."
Grant shrugged. "I am in no hurry. You are important to my plans. To his plans. I could use the usual methods on you—we have some you haven't seen yet—but I think if I leave you alone here as I was left. Well, we'll see." Walking back to the entrance, he turned there. "After a while, Sheldon, you will feel the presence here."
&nb
sp; "You mean I'll be hungry, and this damned floor will get harder and colder."
"Those too. But mainly you will feel him. With me it never fails."
"You still come here, you mean?"
"Whenever I am in doubt about something. Because he is here. His power is greatest in this room. And when you leave here, you will be my most valued assistant. Never doubt it." Grant smiled. "I should tell you—if you haven't already figured it out for yourself—that I don't bring every stubborn recruit here to this room, Sheldon. I wouldn't think of bothering him with, say, people like the man you first saw on the cross. Only very special recruits come into this room, believe me. You should consider yourself privileged." Then, turning again, Grant disappeared into the passage, leaving Peter alone.
"So I'm to become a disciple of your Lucifer, am I?" Peter said defiantly to the silence. "Oh, no, you bastard—you're wrong. It isn't going to happen."
But as he sat there naked on the cold stone floor, he again had the terrifying feeling that he was chained in the center of a huge, living eye that was watching his every movement.
30
WITH THE TRAINER'S AUTOMATIC RIFLE IN HIS LEFT hand and his right arm around the waist of his naked young companion, Manny Williams swung Cob Dennis around. In the eerie light of the passage, the boy's face looked like a fright mask painted green.
"Help me, Manny!" Cob still sobbed. "Don't let them take me back!"
Manny peered up the tunnel and saw no sign of pursuit, though he guessed it was bound to come. "Let we go on, sonny," he urged fearfully.
But it was not to be that simple. Though the boy obviously did not want to return to his tormentors, he seemed determined to do so. His struggles to escape the pig hunter's grasp increased, and for his age he was stronger than Manny had suspected.
Manny could see a genuine battle developing—one that could use up much precious time. There was but one solution. Lowering the rifle, he made a fist of that hand and drove it against the youth's jaw, silencing still another plea of "Help me!"
Cob went limp in his embrace.
