Into The Fire jb-4

by David Wiltse

  But if you start to crawl around, you could end up anywhere, pointed in the wrong direction and lost forever with no hope at all. Anchor yourself here in some way.

  You're not really lost right now, you're just not where you want to be quite yet, but you're not lost if you stay anchored. You need the best way to search the most territory without leaving this spot. Don't be a baby, don't be any more of an idiot than you already have. Think. The farthest you can go in any direction and still stay in place is the length of your body. She lay down on the rock, stretched her hands as far as they would go. There was a particular depression at her fingertips, a hollowed dip that felt like a saucer. She ran her fingers around the saucer, then around the rock immediately surrounding it, trying to establish a context. Her toes were pressed against a slight ridge. Like all the other surfaces, it was smooth and rounded, but it rose up from the floor by several inches.

  When your toes are there and your fingers are in the saucer, you're back where you started, she said to herself Now slowly, carefully. Keep your feet against the ridge and roll. Moving one careful revolution at a time, Aural began to roll in a circle with her toes at the center. Face down, face up, she counted the turns, praying all the while for contact with a boot. Toes against the ridge, heels against the ridge. A slight shift of the body to keep the feet in contact, then roll again. After each half-revolution she probed with her fingers, seeking the saucer.

  After sixteen rolls her fingers found the familiar depression. She had done a complete circle. But no boots.

  She sat up, trying to remember her high school geometry.

  Something about pi, but what did that tell her? Nothing, which was what she already knew. She remembered protractors and compasses and drawing circles, which she had just done with her body. All right, she had the time, let's continue the geometry lesson. Draw another circle, this time using her hands as the center. With her body as the diameter of the circle-or was it the radius? — she would still come back to this same point with her feet on the ridge and the saucer at her hands. She would not get lost and she would cover more ground. She tried to envision how much more, knowing that some of it would be overlap. Half a circle?

  Less, more? She couldn't see it clearly in her mind, but she didn't know what difference it made. She had no other plan.

  Aural began to roll again, this time keeping her hands always in touch with the saucer-like depression. She counted her revolutions, knowing that sixteen should put her feet back in contact with the ridge, and became so concentrated on finding the ridge again that she almost forgot what her real purpose was. She nearly rolled over the boots with her hips without realizing what they were.

  "Oh, you sweet things," she said, hugging the boots to her. "Don't you ever run away from me like that again."

  She reached for the niche in the rock and located the knife quickly and easily. She replaced the knife in its secret crevasse, then tried to put her boots on again. It was very difficult to slip the leather uppers beneath the ankle irons and finally she gave it up. She had better use for the boots off than on, anyway, and if he realized she had taken them off, so what? What did it tell him?

  Feeling proud of herself for having accomplished something rather than just allowing herself to descend into self-pity, Aural seated herself back against a cushion of rock and began to think of how she was going to deal with her captor. After a moment of silence, she could detect the steady tick of her water clock counting the minutes. Coming from the other direction, the liquid sound of water washing against the rock was soothing.

  For the first time, she realized that she had not slept in a long time, not since being rousted out of bed by Harold Kershaw's arrival.

  Blessedly, she fell asleep.

  Aural awoke from a dream of bright sunlight to find herself still in utter darkness. The "brook" still burbled gently in the distance, the water clock ticked on and on, and nothing had changed. And then she heard an alien noise and immediately realized that it was probably what had awakened her. It was a sound of something muted striking stone, a dull thud followed by a scrape, and it came on slowly, very slowly. At first her mind conjured up an image of a large serpent hauling itself dreadfully towards her, its giant tail banging against the rock. It took a while for her to realize it was something being dragged over the rock as she herself had been dragged in the leather golf sack. This time there was something more resonant in the sack than her head and bones, and it sounded clearly if dully from a distance. Whatever he had with him now, he was a long time coming with it. From the moment when she first detected the scrapes that preceded the thuds, Aural noticed long pauses between movements, as if he were resting every few feet. Whatever he was dragging must be very heavy, she thought, or else he's very tired. it took five ticks of her water clock, fifteen minutes, before she saw the first faint light. It wobbled as if the headlight were planted atop a shaky stalk. Was his head moving that much? She thought he must have palsy to be shaking so badly.

  With a slowness that became more frustratingly painful to her the closer it came, the beam of light advanced.

  Aural realized that as much as she didn't want him to come, she also needed him, and now that he was here, she wanted him to get on with it.

  She could do nothing by herself, she required his presence, his light, if she were ever to get out of here.

  The light was coming from a hole in the wall and very low to the floor.

  It was a narrowly focused beam, as if shining in a tunnel, and as it made its tedious way towards her, Aural could finally see the outlines of the exit he had used. It must have been the same way she was brought in. There was an opening in the vertical rock no bigger than a man's body-and a small man at that. She wondered if he was crawling through the tunnel-it didn't look big enough to negotiate in any other way.

  As the beam moved closer she could hear the man himself. He was panting and moaning. He would advance a short ways-she could hear his boots on the stone now, the tumble of something muted against a hard surface then the scraping sound of his progress would stop and she would hear his breath, hard and labored. Just before he'd start again he would groan, as if the effort cost him in pain.

  Finally the light, wavering, slumping downwards as he rested, wavering again as he crawled forward, reached the opening of the tunnel, and he came into the chamber, moving on his belly with infinite slowness but determination, like a giant garden snail. Trailing behind him, his own sluglike path of mucus, was the leather golf sack, connected by a rope tied around his waist.

  When he and the sack were completely clear of the tunnel, he collapsed, his face falling onto the rock.

  "Well, numbnuts," Aural said, "you took your own sweet time about it.

  You think I got nothing better to do than hang around waiting for you?"

  He didn't stir. His body was stretched to its full length on the rock, the light on his helmet pointing down at an angle onto the floor. In the diffused beam that shone off the floor, Aural took her first, oriented look at her surroundings. As she had already determined, she was in a cave, a huge chamber hollowed from the rock by the water flow of millennia. The ceiling was so high above her that she could barely make it out in the gloom. The wall from which the man had just crawled was at least thirty yards away from her and appeared to be solid except for the hole which he had just cleared before collapsing. She had thought she was leaning against a wall herself, but now she saw that it was only an outcropping of rock little more than waist high, and the true wall was at least another thirty yards beyond it. To her left, still farther away than the other walls, a narrow trench split the floor and then vanished completely as it hit the rock face behind her. It was probably the source of the running water she had heard, she thought. Whatever underwater river had formed the lake that had once filled this chamber had continued to flow until it worked its way still deeper into the rock and then through the wall, draining the lake with it on its way still farther underground.

  To her right
Aural could see a series of darker shapes along the wall that looked like waves at their crest, just bending over before crashing back upon themselves, the kind of waves under which photographers loved to capture surfers, surging just below the crest as the top of the wave curled over them-but these waves were rock, and they ran vertically from the floor, some all the way to the ceiling, frozen in time and space when the lake vanished beneath them. The rock appeared to have bent back on itself, as if shaped when molten, and formed scalloped edges reminiscent of the niche where she had stored the knife, only greatly larger, extending towards the roof.

  Interspersed oddly along walls were those pointed mounds that Aural knew were stalagtites or stalagmites, she was never certain which was which.

  As she studied the huge room that encased her, the light began to move, bouncing crazily off the walls. She looked and saw the man stirring on the floor, trying to lift his head, then falling back to the rock again as if his neck could not support the weight. Again he was still and Aural could hear his hoarse breath gasping from his throat as if even the effort of lifting his head were a great labor.

  He rolled over onto his back and the light and shadows went crazy again, leaping about until they settled in a new configuration. The beam now pointed straight up and Aural could see the ceiling of her cage, a huge dome of rock at least three stories above her. If the space stretched that far up and still didn't break through the earth over their heads, how far underground must they be? She was not only buried, she thought with renewed alarm, she was entombed, tucked away as neatly and as far from the living as a pharaoh in his pyramid vault.

  "Come here," the man said, and the light wobbled when he spoke, drawing forth new shadows on the ceiling and walls.

  Aural watched him without moving, trying to judge the degree of his weariness. She could take the knife with her now, use it on him as he lay there-assuming he obliged her by staying exactly where he was. But if he turned to look at her, there was no way she could hide the knife with her hands cuffed together, Thirty yards was a long distance to cover with the baby steps her leg irons required, and she could betray the existence of her only weapon every step of the way.

  "Come here," he repeated. His voice was hoarse and weak. "I need you," he said. And then, bizarrely, he added, "Please."

  Aural walked to him slowly, trying to learn as much as she could about the cave as she did so. It was hard to make out anything in detail because each slight move of his head sent shadows winging and lurching about, swallowing each other up as new ones were born to replace them.

  Nothing ever looked exactly the same way twice because each breath he took caused the cave itself to move in and out of the light as if it had a pulse to match his own.

  As she got close to him she realized that she could have brought the knife after all. He had not turned to look at her yet, and she was now within lunging distance, and now closer, now she stood next to him, looking down.

  She could have cut his throat while he lay there, his eyes closed. For a moment she wondered if he was asleep. She was close to the hole now but the light was pointing up and away from it and she could make out nothing beyond a greater darkness in the rock.

  She had seen no other exit. If she were to get out, she would have to go into that hole of blackness. Had she not seen him emerge from it, she wouldn't have thought there was room enough for her shoulders to fit in.

  The very idea of crawling into such a place filled her with dread.

  She would sooner have forced herself into a hole in the ground, knowing there was a snake at the other end, but she also knew she had no choice.

  She would do what she had to, when she had to do it. And if that included slicing his throat open, she would do it. She thought. She hoped.

  Gazing down at him now as he lay still, breathing shallowly like a dreamer in a troubled sleep, it was hard to hate him enough to kill him.

  And then she realized the condition of his face. He looked as if someone had been kicking his head around with cowboy boots. Aural had seen more than one of her boyfriends return from a night in the bar looking that way.

  One eye was swollen nearly shut; his nose and both cheekbones were puffed and as dark with broken blood vessels as if he had been painting his face with charcoal.

  Traces of dried blood still clung to his nose and upper lip, and overall he had the look of a man tenuously clinging to health.

  He opened his eyes and looked up at her and she realized he had not been asleep, but quietly waiting. Conserving his strength and perhaps waiting to see what she would do.

  "Hey, slick, you're looking good," Aural said.

  "Where are your boots?"

  "I took them off. You go partying with friends?"

  "I met a friend of yours," Swann said.

  "You should have brought him home."

  "Get the lantern," he said. His voice was little more than a whisper, even in the resonating chamber of the cave. Moaning slightly, he rolled to his side, resting his head on his arm so that the light on his hat shone in the direction of the golf sack. Every movement seemed to cost him a great effort. Aural was amazed that he had managed to crawl back through the tunnel. When men administered a beating like the one he had taken, they didn't limit them selves to the face. Not the men she knew.

  She did not know how long a trip it was, but she knew that it had taken a long time for her to be brought to the cave once she was forced into the sack in the first place. He must have wanted to get back to me very badly, Aural thought, and the thought frightened her.

  She unzipped the sack and found that it was crammed with groceries and supplies. What bothered her most was the quantity of canned food. It must have been the cans that caused the thudding noise, she realized, and there were dozens of them, beans and peaches and spinach and baby peas, and dried apricots, too, and dried sausage and a plastic bag full of hard rolls. Four plastic quart bottles of water, two containers of paraffin oil for the lamp. And three cartons of cigarettes. He was planning a long stay, Aural realized with a sinking feeling. There was enough food for weeks.

  The lantern was wedged between pillows and wrapped inside a sleeping bag. There was a pack of dinner candles, red and white and blue, and extra bulbs and batteries for the headlamp. Lighter fluid and flints and even extra wicks. He was taking no chances about running short. But there were no matches. Later, when she had time to think about it, that detail frightened Aural most of all. There were no matches despite all the other flammables, she realized, because in the high humidity of the cave, matches would soon become sodden and useless. He knew this from experience. He had been in this situation before.

  The terrifying deduction from that was that he had not only done this with another girl, but he had gotten away with it or he wouldn't be free now. He had done it@ he had learned, he had perfected his method, eliminated his mistakes.

  He ignited the lantern with a cigarette lighter which he returned to his front pocket, then placed the lantern in her hand. She thought of swinging it into his face, but his eyes were on her the whole time and she decided to wait.

  She had to have either her feet or her hands free before she tried to get away; she had no chance without the use of one or the other, even with him as injured as he was.

  If he could drag the sack all the way, he still had a great deal of strength left in him.

  "Take it to a flat spot," he said. "Then come back and get the bag."

  When she had the lantern in her hands he turned off his headlamp.

  Aural carried the lantern back towards her hiding place, studying the details that now sprang up in the increased light. The vertical waves on the wall remained dark, but the rest of the rock took life in a fantastical way. The whole cavern seemed to be tinted a dull yellow, as if it were carved from pure gold. Everywhere she looked, wars, ceiling, or floor, the light reflected back to her with an aureate hue, so that the very light itself seemed composed of the finest translucent golden dust. Under different circumstan
ces it would have seemed a fairy cave rather than a dragon's lair.

  "Pretty, isn't it?" he asked, as if reading her mind.

  "If you like this kind of thing " she said.

  "It's sulfur oxide," he said. "And pyrite, too. Fool's gold."

  "Figures. I finally land in a gold mine and it's a fake," she said.

  "That's far enough," he said. "Put the lantern down."

  Aural continued until she was close to her boots before setting the lantern on the rock floor.

  "Now come back."

  She hesitated.

  With an effort, he rose to one knee.

  "Oh, you don't want to make me come after you," he said. "That wouldn't be smart at all."

  Leaving the lantern by her boots, Aural returned to the man.

  "What friend of mine did you run into?" she asked.

  "He didn't tell me his name," he said. "I didn't ask.

  People like that don't need names, anyway. They're all just the same."

  "I wonder if you couldn't say the same for men in general," she said.

  "Oh, not me," he said. "I'm not like other men at all.

  I'm what they would want to be if they had the courage, but they don't.

  You'll find that I'm quite special." He sounded convinced and proud.

  "Not that I've noticed so far."

  "But we haven't really gotten to know each other very well yet. You'll think I'm special, I promise you."

  "You guys all think you're different."

  "I like your courage," he said. "I like that you think you can talk back to me and get away with it. You'll change your mind, but it's nice for now."

  He rose to his feet as she approached him. He was unsteady on his legs, as if his balance were off, but Aural realized that she had already waited too long. His strength was returning rapidly. She should have hit him with the lantern when she had the chance; she should have followed her first instinct and gone after him with the knife when he was still supine and had his eyes closed.

  "Pull the bag over there," he said, pointing towards the lantern.