by Cave, Hugh
No, not quite similar. This one consisted of the same mountain grass and pine boughs, but they were laid within a frame of heavy pine-tree trunks that made the bed nearly immovable. Ropes were attached to the frame's four corners.
Were they going to lay him on it and torture him? What would that tell them except the extent of his Capacity to endure pain?
He turned to Grant just in time to see the leader motion to two men near the entrance. On bare feet the pair padded from the chamber like animals on a hunt.
Peter gazed at those left against the walls. They were all animals, he decided. He looked down at his own naked body. Was he one, too? He had not been allowed to bathe since coming here. Had not once been given even a bucket of water to wash away some of the grime and sweat. He felt filthy. Was that part of the indoctrination—to reduce a man's self-respect to absolute zero?
He turned back to the bed, aware that it was the center of attraction for the men against the walls. Then, hearing sounds behind him, he twisted himself about and crouched in a posture of self-defense, expecting the worst.
Into the chamber came the two who had left, and this time Edith Craig walked between them with their hands gripping her arms. More alert than when she had been dragged into the Eye room, she looked at Peter and faintly spoke his name. Her once lovely brown hair was a tangle. Her khaki shirt and slacks were as soiled as Peter's body.
He took a step toward her, but rifles were instantly leveled at him, one in the hands of the leader.
"I would not advise it, Sheldon," Grant said coldly. "She would die with you." With his weapon he motioned Peter back. "Remember, her only value to us is in helping us convert you."
Peter heard his own voice shouting in fury, "Let her go, God damn you! I'll do what you want!"
"Of course you will. The master attended to that in the Eye room."
"Then let her go! Now!"
"But we need her for what you will do next, Sheldon." Grant's voice was so matter-of-fact it was hypnotic. "Just be patient, please."
The rifle in his hands motioned Peter away from the bed, and the two men led Edith to it. The room seemed to hold its breath as they unbuttoned her shirt and removed it. The green light played over her bared breasts, and rigid in her terror, she became a statue of Aphrodite. They pulled down her khaki slacks and white brief, forcing her to step out of them, and in Peter's eyes she became the central figure in The Birth of Venus, Botticelli's paint still wet.
Forcing her onto the bed, face up, the men secured her wrists and ankles to its corners. Then the man in the brown scout uniform stepped forward to look down at her.
"Very nice," Grant said. "This should be a pleasure."
Dropping to one knee, he extended a hand. His fingertips caressed the victim's body, and she moaned. They moved to the insides of her thighs and she strained against her bonds, arching herself in violent protest.
The rifles in the hands of the watchers kept Peter at bay, though he was close to a kind of madness that could easily make him defy them.
"Yes, very nice," Grant said, rising to face him. "Enjoy yourself, Sheldon."
"What?"
"As I told you, rape is one of our most effective tools. Prove to me you enjoy it, and I'll know better what to do with you."
35
WITH THE ROAR OF THE WATERFALL IN HIS EARS, Manny Williams stopped at the pool's edge and frowned at his two companions. Why, he asked himself again, had Mother Jarrett insisted on bringing Gerald along? How in the world could a mere boy—a sick one, at that—be anything but a burden to them?
He thought again of what Mother had said: that if everything else went well, Gerald could be a big help in persuading Georgie to come out with them. But, in his opinion, nothing Gerald might say to his twin brother would do any good. It was too late for that. Georgie belonged to the devil now.
The truth was, having Gerald along with them would only increase the danger of their being discovered.
"Mother, you sure you want this boy along?" Manny turned at the pool's edge to shake his head at the tall black woman beside him. "It going to be bad enough in there for just you and me, Mother. If him is along with us and do something stupid. . ." He had to shout the words to be heard above the thunder of the falling water.
"Manny, please," Mother said.
Now that was strange, Manny thought. She had certainly not yelled the way he had. Her lips had scarcely moved. Yet the words had found their way into his head somehow.
"Well, all right. Follow behind me in a single file so you don't step in any holes." With the automatic rifle in a sling on his back, he lowered himself to a sitting position, slid down into the water, and started for the tunnel behind the cascade.
But when he looked back after taking a few steps, he saw that Mother Jarrett and Gerald were not following him. They still stood there at the pool's edge, facing each other now with the woman's hands on the boy's shoulders. Again he could see no movement of Mother's lips, yet Gerald seemed to be listening to something she was saying to him, and after a while the boy nodded. Only then did the two turn to the pool.
Strange, Manny thought. But then, without further hesitation, they followed him across the pool and into the cave.
Manny did not speak again until the roar of the waterfall was behind them. Then in the tunnel where he had used the rifle to hold his pursuers at bay while he and the boy named Cob had made their escape, he stopped and spoke in a whisper.
"Mother, you has got to warn this boy here not to make no noise now. Every little noise in here sound like a conch-shell trumpet in the mountains."
The tall woman turned to Bronzie Dakin's boy and said in a whisper, "Did you hear that, Gerald?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"And him must stay close to us," Manny warned.
"Do you understand what Manny is saying, Gerald?"
Wide-eyed, Bronzie Dakin's son turned to look behind them at the route they had followed from the cascade, then swung about to peer into the greenish glow ahead. Inthe cavern's damp silence, the chattering of his teeth was louder than the words he uttered. "Y-yes, Mother Jarrett," he managed. "M-me will stay real close and not say nothing."
"So come along, then," the pig hunter said with a shake of his head. "Come quiet, so when we reach the part of this place where people is, we will hear them before them hear us. Otherwise we dead."
As before, the green haze showed them where to put their feet as they groped forward, and there were sounds of water dripping. And Manny had to admit to himself that he was scared.
What chance, he thought, did the three of them—an old, ignorant pig hunter, a woman, and a boy who was not right in the head—have of getting Georgie Dakin and Squire and those two people from England out of this place? How in the name of Jesus could they ever do it? But Mother believed they could, and who was he to argue with a woman who had studied in far-off countries and could heal people just by putting her hands on them? Was he supposed to tell such a woman she was wrong? Lord, have mercy.
Stop thinking about that part of it, he told himself. It only taking you mind off more important things like being real quiet and listening for sounds of danger.
Behind him, either Gerald Dakin or Mother Jarrett kicked a stone and sent it chattering into a wall. Manny froze, feeling his heart stop beating and thinking it might not start up again. But the silence returned and so did the thudding in his chest.
He swung around and could tell by the look of guilt on Gerald Dakin's face that the boy was the one responsible. "Mother," Manny whispered, "him must be more careful! We is getting close to where things happen here!"
"He is trying, Manny. It was an accident."
"Him must try harder!"
"Of course. I'll warn him." And again Manny noticed that her lips did not move as she answered him.
She turned to Gerald then. Manny did not hear any words spoken, but when she walked back down the tunnel a few yards, the boy followed her. There she put her hands on his shoulders, the wa
y she had at the pool, and seemed to talk to him, though again her lips did not move. The boy's did as he answered her, but Manny could not hear what he was saying. They talked longer than before—if talk was the word for it—and when they returned to Manny, young Gerald seemed different. It was as if he had grown older in those few minutes.
"You needn't worry about this one anymore, Manny," Mother Jarrett said with confidence. "He's a very special boy, you know. You've seen how he is able to receive his brother Georgie's thoughts."
Manny looked closely at the boy. Something had happened while Gerald and Mother were talking, he decided. Gerald might still be frightened—who wouldn't be, in a place like this?—but seemed to have his feelings under control now. Maybe he would not do anything stupid, after all.
"We can go on now, Mother?"
"Yes, Manny, we can go on."
And again Manny wondered how she could speak to him—when she wanted to—without moving her lips.
Puzzled about that, he went on again even more slowly now because he was certain they had come far enough in from the waterfall to be in real danger of being discovered. They had passed a number of side tunnels that seemed familiar. Not far ahead, he was sure, was the room where he had been forced to whip young Cob.
And now his nose, that could smell pig droppings in the forest or even fresh-turned earth where a wild pig had been rooting, detected a familiar odor.
Porridge. The thin, half-sour gruel he had been forced to eat in the room they called the dormitory. Someone nearby was cooking it, yes. Holding up a hand in warning, he stopped in his tracks, then turned around and stepped close to Mother Jarrett and put his lips next to her ear.
"Someone fixing the food them feed these people, Mother," he whispered. "Let I sneak on alone and see what we up against, whilst you and Gerald wait here."
A frown took hold of that handsome face, and Manny saw Mother Jarrett's nostrils quiver as she sought to confirm what he had said. "Yes, I smell something, Manny. Go on. But be careful."
And again her lips had not moved.
With the rifle at his hip, ready if he should need it, Manny went on with great care, one slow step at a time. The smell became more noticeable, and the green glow in the tunnel was brighter now. He recognized another side passage. The dormitory chamber was ahead on his right.
Georgie Dakin had seemed to spend most of his time in that room, Manny remembered. If by some piece of extra-good luck he was there now, alone, and Mother could talk to him. . .
He stopped to look back, and did not like what he saw. He had left Mother and Gerald together. Now they were no longer so. In her eagerness, the tall woman had left the boy and forged ahead on her own. It was not possible to judge distance in this green haze, but she seemed to be about midway between Gerald and himself. She must have told Gerald to wait.
Manny hesitated, not knowing whether to go on or not. Removing one hand from the rifle, he raised it in a gesture he hoped would tell the woman she should go back. But if she saw the movement, she ignored it.
Reluctantly he went on, around a bend in the passage that brought him to the dormitory chamber. Approaching its entrance with the same caution he would have used in stepping to the cliff's edge at the John Crow's Nest, he looked in.
Two men. One, with his back to the entrance, stood by a small cook fire, stirring a pot of the porridge. The other, seated on one of the grass beds, was busy cleaning and reassembling a rifle.
That one was Georgie.
With a nod of satisfaction, Manny turned away. He would tell Mother how things stood so she would not blunder into this and put the two on their guard. Then he would come back here. With luck he should be able to sneak up on the man at the cook pot and attend to him without having to use his gun. Georgie he would take back to Mother so she could talk to him.
But when he rounded the bend in the tunnel, the green haze between him and the distant figure of Gerald Dakin was empty. Mother had disappeared.
Disappeared how? Where? He had passed only the one side passage after leaving her and Gerald. Why would she have turned along that?
Scared, with some kind of sixth sense warning him of danger, Manny ghosted back down the tunnel to the passage in question and looked along it. Nothing. It curved, though, a short way in, and if Mother had gone that way, she could be beyond the curve now and out of sight. What should he do? Try to find out if she had done that, or go back to Gerald?
Gerald, he decided. Because if left alone much longer in a place like this, the boy might do something foolish.
Swiftly but silently Manny returned to the boy, to find Gerald with his back pressed against the tunnel wall and a look of panic on his face.
"What happen?" the pig hunter demanded in a whisper. "Where Mother Jarrett is?"
"She gone, Manny!"
"Gone where?"
"She did tell me stay here whilst she go see what you doing. But some naked men did jump out of a tunnel up there and grab her! Manny, that not what she did tell me would happen!"
Manny let go the boy's arm and turned to look back toward the tunnel he had thought of investigating. His voice now more a groan than a whisper, he asked, "How many of them?"
"Me couldn't tell from here, Manny. Three, maybe four. It happen too fast."
"She didn't cry out?"
"Uh-uh. It look like them did knock her down before she could yell."
"All right." Manny shook himself like a rained-on dog, and in the process seemed to overcome his shock and get his thoughts together. "All right. Now listen me. You is to stay right here, sonny, whilst me try find out what did happen to her. It could take me quite a while, but you is not to move from here, you understand? Don't make no noise. Don't do nothing foolish. Just . . . What?"
Gerald scowled at him. "What you mean, what?"
"What you did say just then?"
"Me never say nothing, Manny."
Manny turned to look along the tunnel, and remained in that position, twisted at the hips, so long that his companion's scowl became a look of alarm. "What you doing, Manny?" Gerald said.
"Ssh. "
"But—"
"Shh!" the pig hunter repeated. Then the look of intense concentration left his face and he nodded. "All right, boy," he said. "Me know what to do now, me think. So come!"
36
LIKEA MAN FACING A FIRING SQUAD, PETER GAZED AT the guns. Then he looked at Grant.
The scout leader said calmly, "I've already warned you that I'm not a very patient man, Sheldon. Not even where you are concerned. And, if I have to put you on a cross for lesser trainees to work on, she will only be raped by others. So why tempt me?"
His voice had shed its bantering tone and was dark with threat now. Peter sensed the time for games was over.
Aware that his mouth had gone dry and his body was soaked with sweat, he stepped toward the bed. The womanbound there looked up at him. Her lips moved slowly, as though with great effort.
"Don't let them hurt you," she said almost inaudibly—certainly not loud enough for those against the walls to hear. "Do as he says, Peter."
Gazing down at her, he shook his head. "My God, I can't." Nor could he. To rape a woman you had to have an erection. In his state of mental anguish it was simply not possible.
"Lean over me," she said.
He knelt by her side instead.
"Lie on me," she whispered. "Pretend." This time not even Grant, closer than the others, could have heard her.
Peter shook his head again.
Studying his face, her eyes were thoughtful. "Peter." She barely breathed the name. "They will rape me themselves, so how can it matter? Please. Don't let them torture you for nothing."
He could not answer.
"Obey them," she begged. "Please, Peter. . . don't give up while there's a chance!"
She was right, probably, about being given to others if he refused. They would never waste such an opportunity. After he satisfied them they might let others have her anyway. But could
he postpone it, perhaps? If they came no closer than they were now—if they did not stand right over him—could he fake it with her? If she helped?
"We're waiting, Sheldon," Grant warned.
Rising from his knees, Peter turned his head to look at the man. In the room's green haze the leader's face, though still handsome, was contorted with impatience strained to the snapping point. There was no time left.
Peter looked again at the guns along the walls. If Grant became angry enough and decided to end the game altogether, a signal from him would cause them to fill the room with thunder, no?
He turned away from them. Kneeling again, this time between Edith's legs, he bent himself to lie on her.
"Forgive me," he whispered. No one could have heard. Perhaps not even she.
He had to kiss her, he supposed. They would expect that. Before feigning fierceness to satisfy them, he brushed her mouth with his lips in a gentle caress to let her know his true feelings. To his surprise her own lips responded with a message of affection even while she moaned in apparent terror and her body seemingly writhed to escape his assault.
"Dear Peter!" She breathed the words into his mouth. "Pretend!"
He could have an erection, he realized. He actually could go into her and make it real. In fact it was happening, and the warm body under him was responding.
Responding, for God's sake? At a moment like this?
But suddenly he became aware that the room had filled with loud, excited voices. Pushing himself up, he turned to see what was happening.
In the entrance, flanked by two men who held her arms, stood a tall black woman in a white, robe-like garment. And Linford Grant, no longer even slightly interested in watching Peter Sheldon commit rape, was striding toward her.
With a glance at the woman he had not raped but had made love to, Peter rose to his feet.
