Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  Suddenly he pulled away. Struggling motionless against vertigo, she waited for logic to kick in. He hadn’t fallen, so he must have moved into the shadows of the cliff face. She reached out toward the rock and there was nothing but darkness. Just as she was about to take a tentative step forward she felt a finger on her lips. It wasn’t her own. She smiled to herself.

  She heard a shuffling descend away from her, then felt a hand grasp her ankle. Strange, she thought. The hand rose to her calf and pressed firmly against her skin. She waited for logic to kick in again. She reached out and her fingers landed in a rather unkempt thatch of hair. She squeezed and pulled and she heard a muted whimper. He had crouched low, he was drawing her down, he was urging her to be silent, he was sliding his hand up her leg under her sundress as he drew her into a niche in the scarred face of the precipice wall.

  She manoeuvered around until she found herself secure, straddling his outstretched leg, which was braced to prevent them both from plummeting backward into the abyss. She could feel his breath on her face and instinctively her lips softened. Instead of kissing him she exhaled gently and edged her body over his, moving deeper into what seemed to be a wound gouged out of the volcanic rock.

  Ross pressed his open lips close against Miranda’s ear. She turned to where she imagined his face to be in the dark and said in a barely audible whisper, “There are proprieties, Mr. Ross.”

  More shuffling sounds and his fingers squeezed gently on her bare thigh. Instantly he pulled away as if her flesh were fire. A moment of absolute stillness, then he placed a hand on either side of her head and turned her so that his lips were again brushing against one ear. She stayed very quiet, holding the pose, even pressing back a little. She was apparently caught up in a fetishist version of a Jane Austen parody, but instead of the tongue she had half-expected, only a few words entered her ear.

  “We are caught, Ms. Quin, between a rock and a very hard place.”

  She felt reassured.

  “I was not joking,” he whispered, having sensed her response.

  Miranda was not disappointed. The best wit was born deep inside, that’s why it often accompanied terror and fear. He would have enjoyed Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Maybe he had read it at Eton. If he didn’t appreciate his own sense of humour at the moment, that in no way diminished its impact. He was a man to be trusted. Especially, as he had observed, since there was no alternative.

  She pressed her ear against his lips, urging him to continue, although she wasn’t sure why they hadn’t had this conversation up on the road.

  “Above us,” he whispered. “Soldiers. They are waiting for my return.”

  Miranda felt a wave of reality wash over her. She nodded acknowledgement to his warning. He released her skull from his grasp.

  “Stay close,” he whispered. “There is another way in.”

  He inched along a ledge, then crawled on his belly under a fold in the lava, and she followed close behind, the two of them squeezing through a narrowing tube deep into the heart of darkness that pushed up against them with granular edges until the air grew thick and she had to concentrate on refusing to panic. She could feel the lingering heat from his body as she moved into narrow spaces he left behind. She stopped, breathed deeply; with nothing to see, she tried to convince herself there was nothing to fear.

  Rock pressed against her shoulders, her head bumped again and again against lowering protrusions. Her shoulders jammed. She could no longer sense that Ross was ahead, she could hear the throbbing of her blood, the rasping of her breath. She tried to move backward, but the rock caught her. She worked her arms out from under her body weight, walking her hands forward on clenched fingers until her arms were fully extended, and then she squirmed in a series of painful gyrations onto her side, her ribcage and her hip bone gouging into the floor. Her breath deflected back from the rock wall. She drew her legs up until her knees jammed, then, twisting her feet against the lava, she pushed, and, repeating this action over and over, she edged forward until the walls receded into black space and she was able to rise to her knees and crawl.

  She recoiled as her fingers clawed into warm flesh. He had waited for her. She let her hand rest for a moment on his calf, then withdrew. They moved on, they seemed to squirm forward interminably; there were no cues to measure their progress. Then she reached forward and there was nothing. Gone, she thought. Not again! But when she waved her hand slowly through the fetid air, his hand grasped hers.

  “We’re here, now, love.” As they both rose to an upright posture, he let go.

  Love! An image of Ellen Ravenscroft danced in the dark before her eyes as a match suddenly flared and for a moment they were blinded, surrounded by the stench of sulphur.

  He lit a candle, then a lantern.

  “You can speak normally,” he said. “We’re deep in the bowels of the earth. They couldn’t possibly hear us. And they wouldn’t come in here even if they wanted to. Trust me.”

  “You keep saying that. Do they know we’re here?”

  “Certainly not you. You’re dead.”

  “Did they kill me on purpose.”

  “Good Lord, no. At least, not with malice. They liked you.”

  “That’s reassuring. By they, you mean Matteo and Te Ave Teao?”

  “The other men, the three in uniform, they were government. The execution was their idea. They don’t like you.”

  “Didn’t, past tense. I’m dead. How do you know there were three of them?”

  “There was a meeting last night at an abandoned farmhouse. We were picked up at the main road. The uniforms raided. All they found was a poker game. A little strange, considering we had no reason to be there. But there was nothing to charge us with. The three soldiers, they took our friends for a ride.”

  “And left you behind. That was convenient.”

  “Yes, it was. And several others. We played poker for a while, then left.”

  “And they came looking for me. Is it because of the book? They know about it, they know about me supposedly being a code-breaker. I’m assuming they don’t know for sure about Matteo and Te Ave Teao.”

  “I doubt if they care much about the book, but they know you were sent by Maria. That makes you dangerous.”

  “I came to write a book of my own. Nobody sent me,” she snapped, then looked into his eyes and smiled. “They can’t hear us, right? Because we’re inside a network of volcanic tubes? But even out there, the surf is smashing against the shore. Right? It’s deafening. Then how come you stuck your tongue in my ear?”

  “I most certainly did not.”

  “And groped my leg?”

  “And pressed my shoulder blades into your breasts?”

  “You noticed!”

  “I most assuredly did not,” he declared with insouciant authority, as if his status as gentleman was in peril.

  “They couldn’t have heard us out there if we’d shouted.”

  “If we’d shouted, they might have.” In the lamplight his face was insufferably handsome. His deep brown eyes were pools gleaming in the flickering glow. “And I was rather frightened and did not want us to be discovered and whispering at the time seemed appropriate.”

  How, she wondered, could I not be enchanted by a man who confessed to being rather frightened? “You did not want me to be discovered. They knew you were staying here.” She looked around. They were in a chamber the size of a kitchen, with shadows suggesting volcanic tubes leading off in a number of directions. There was a reed mattress, a table with a propane hotplate and some packaged foods, a number of ominously shaped wooden crates, and a tiny rivulet flowing from a crevasse near the ceiling into a crevasse in the rock floor.

  “Yes, they know I stay here sometimes. The soldiers think I’m on their side, they leave me alone. I sometimes do favours for the government. But our friends, Te Ave Teao and Matteo, they know I am always with them. It is quite precarious, to be on opposing sides.” He laughed at his own predicament, which was also, she realized,
the source of whatever power and influence he had. “But you are on neither side, it seems — that would make you a threat if you were alive. You’re better off dead. I have to leave. I’ll be back.”

  “Are you going to give it to them?”

  “The book? No.”

  “Tell them?”

  “Yes. I may tell them about it. It might give me leverage.”

  “It’s hard to tell, you know, if you’re one of the good guys.”

  “There are no good guys.”

  “What if I know the code, does that change anything?”

  “Miranda, you’re bargaining with the wrong man. If you really do, once the government people realize the power of the book, you’re done for all over again. They won’t care what it actually says, only that it must be destroyed and you along with it. As for our island friends, they are convinced their holy bloody book will fuel the insurrection. They’re almost as worried about having it fall into government hands as they are keen to have its secrets revealed. If they discover you’re still alive and have actually broken the code, they will stop at nothing to make you share what you know. Not much of a choice. Stay here, be dead. Think of death as a reprieve.”

  “Between a rock and a hard place, still and again.”

  “Do not tell anyone about the code, do not tell me. Your secret may keep us both alive.”

  “Leverage?”

  “Who knows.”

  He drew her to him and held her in a lingering embrace, and then he turned, and, sliding among the shadows, he disappeared into the rock. She stayed very still, not wanting to lose the residual warmth of his body, the sensation of where his body had pressed against hers. She wondered what his real name was. She wondered just which side he was on, or if there were sides at all, and not just a desperate idea smack up against an immoveable force.

  She lay down on the reed mattress. It rustled when she moved, but was comfortable and the cave was surprisingly warm. She wanted to take off her dress and wrap herself in the light flannel blanket that smelled vaguely of Ross. The thought of being naked made her feel vulnerable. What if Matteo and Te Ave Teao turned up? The Santiago hotel room all over again. Ross assured her that islanders wouldn’t come into the cave. She guessed it was somehow taboo. She got up and took off her underwear and rinsed it in the vertical flow of the rivulet, but put her sundress back on, lay down again, and covered herself with the blanket.

  Her last thought as she drifted into a deep sleep was to wonder why she had lied about cracking the code. The last images in her mind were of Ross on the plane, Ross bleeding in her room, Ross at the farmhouse, Ross brooding over the smouldering ruins, Ross blinded by the darkness, slipping away. So many beginnings.

  Miranda woke with a start, utterly disoriented in the pitch blackness. Bewilderment gave way to apprehension as she realized where she was and that the lantern had guttered and gone out, that she was alone, buried in the depths of a dormant volcano with no possible way to escape unless she had light. She listened and at first the only sounds she could hear were from her own hands as they moved slowly over her body, taking inventory. Reassured she was all there, she mentally followed the resonant splash of running water until she established direction. She had rarely experienced such profound darkness. She lay very still. Sounds began to take on dimension as the chamber took shape in her mind.

  Only a year before she had been locked in a cellar dungeon in the heart of Toronto. She had nearly died. The girl she ultimately took on as her ward had entombed her in a desperate struggle to bury horrors of the past, and had rescued her because it was a past they had shared. Death, then, had seemed seductive, but she had refused its entreaties and survived. Damn it, she thought, absolute darkness doesn’t mean death. He’ll come back. And if he doesn’t, if he’s captured or killed, there are no doors, I’ll crawl through tunnels until the end of time.

  She held up her left wrist with her right hand, not trusting the position of her arm without guiding it in front of her face. She squinted, trying to see the luminescent numbers on her watch. She felt for the watch. It was gone. A brief surge of panic subsided when she recalled having taken it off for her sponge bath at the farmhouse. It must have been consumed in the fire. She sat up, perhaps she could find the matches, but immediately she lost all sense of equilibrium and grasped at the mattress to allay the reeling sensation.

  Had she been asleep for minutes or hours? Surely it was daylight outside. She had only the vaguest notion of where outside actually was, where they had walked in the darkness. Somewhere on Easter Island. Isla de Pasqua. Rapa Nui. Te Pito o Te Henua. Was she inside the volcano at Poike, had they made their way inland through the tunnels, somewhere beneath the quarry at Rano Raraku, or had they wandered around to the caverns past Anakena Beach? After they had left the main road she had stopped trying to inscribe their route in her mind; it was like dropping breadcrumbs among ravens. Ross rescuing her, he took her to his lair amidst a maze of volcanic tubes deep in the earth. He was hiding her in what might have been a burial chamber or a sacred refuge. He was keeping her prisoner. She sat bolt upright. Was he keeping her prisoner?

  No, she thought. That was absurd. But nothing was absurd in such impenetrable darkness that she had to imagine who she was to be sure she was there. Thomas Edward Ross, was she his prisoner, destined to wither and die before he returned to deal with her remains and retrieve his book? Did he take it with him, she wondered? Did he bother?

  She raised herself awkwardly to her feet and turned in the direction of the flowing water, but as she took a tentative step forward in the darkness, the floor of the cavern seemed to fall away beneath her and she collapsed to her knees. She crawled slowly to the rivulet and drank deep gulps of water from her cupped hands and then crawled back toward her mattress, sweeping her hands in the darkness ahead of her until with a great sigh of relief she found it.

  Miranda lay back and composed herself as if she were a corpse laid out for viewing. She had done this before. It somehow, perversely, affirmed that she was in control. With her hands clasped across her breast, she stared open-eyed in the direction of the cavern ceiling, trying to imagine where it must be. The book! Her mind swerved to the present. Surely the revolutionaries knew as much as Miranda. But perhaps they were looking in the wrong place. They were trying to decode the handwritten marginalia, they were looking for hidden meaning in the cryptic notes. Maria had known how important the book was, but not what it meant. The book itself was the message, Miranda concluded. It was a key.

  Miranda needed to know if Ross had left it behind.

  She rolled over onto her side and slowly got up onto her hands and knees. She listened again for the running water to determine direction and then began crawling toward where she supposed the table to be, moving carefully to avoid scraping her bare knees, keeping low so as not to tip over from the vertigo that came with no reference points in the darkness. She found the book and holding it close she crawled back to the mattress where she rolled onto her back and balanced it on her stomach, feeling the reassuring pressure of its weight as she moved her hands back to the funereal position.

  The air was heavy and perfectly still. Time endured; she endured. Then the air moved a little. She could tell she was no longer alone. Suddenly a beam of light surged between the lips of a crease in the rock. Miranda lay still. The beam swung wildly against the ceiling and walls as the bearer stood upright, then straightened as the intruder walked toward her, keeping the light out of her eyes. She watched as light settled on the dusty rubble floor and a face bent down to examine her more closely. Then his arms enfolded her in a powerful embrace.

  “Matteo!” she exclaimed, pushing him violently back, trying to read his eyes in the flashing darkness as he fell from the light.

  7

  The Mysteries of Arctic Landscape

  Gloria Simmons had arranged for a Twin Otter to carry them up the east coast of Baffin as far as Broughton Island, with a quick stop in Pangnirtung to drop off cargo and me
dical supplies. In Broughton they would be met by a company helicopter flown down from Pond Inlet. Landing in Pang, as Gloria called it, was exciting. The airstrip veered through the centre of the community in a harrowing effort to squeeze between mountains and the treacherous shore.

  As the plane rolled to an abrupt stop, Morgan struggled to quell the butterflies in his stomach. Gloria Simmons emerged from the cockpit where she had spent most of the flight in the co-pilot’s seat. She sidled in beside him on the other jump seat that had been fitted amidst the crates of cargo.

  “The weather’s closing in,” she shouted over the roar of the idling engines. “We’re just dropping the med stuff and going on; they’ll come back to unload the rest. You okay back here?”

  “Yeah,” he shouted back. “You’re a pilot, too!”

  “I mess around a bit. If I’d wanted to I might have been very good.”

  Morgan looked up as the pilot emerged from the cockpit. She was younger than Gloria Simmons who had explained when they boarded that pilots in the North could manoeuvre these Twin Otters through the vilest weather and land on a gravel esker in the middle of a glacial stream without breaking a sweat. The woman exuded a jaunty confidence that seemed as much a part of her uniform as her flight jacket and bomber cap.

  But she wasn’t smiling as she bent down and shouted, “Control says Broughton’s completely socked in. We might make the takeoff, but we couldn’t land. Sorry.”

  Morgan and Gloria Simmons looked at each other. He could sense her desperation, although her facial expression remained unchanged except for a tightening around the eyes.

  The pilot straightened, then bent down again. She started to speak, then abruptly stood up and clambered back into the cockpit. Suddenly there was silence.