Effigies (28 page)

“You can see him?”

“Sometimes. But he’s here all the time. He’s very big tonight.”

Faye wasn’t in the mood to listen to people talking over her head, and she wasn’t in the mood to be nice about it, so she barked, “Who on earth are you two talking about?”

“Sinti Hollo. He’s an invisible horned serpent who lives in a cave, underwater,” Oka Hofobi began, in his best “I’ve-got-a-Ph.D.” voice.

“Well, I can see why he’d be down here in this wet cave,” Faye said in a decidedly unimpressed tone of voice, “but I don’t understand why you two are talking about seeing some invisible snake. Invisible. That means you can’t see it.”

“The people who can see him are exceptionally wise…” began Oka Hofobi-the-doctor again.

“Wise? And that counts me out, but includes you two?”

“If you’ll let me finish. Sinti Hollo appears to exceptionally wise young men.”

“Oh. Well, if he tells one of you men something important, be sure and let this little woman know. Okay?”

“Sure thing, Faye,” said Joe, who wouldn’t know sarcasm if it smacked him in the face.

“Joe?” Oka Hofobi asked. “When you said that Sinti Hollo was big tonight, did you mean that you’d seen him before?”

“Lots of times. You see plenty of things when you slow down and just look at the world. The snake don’t say much, but he makes himself understood all the same.”

Faye was mortally tired of fidgeting around, just to stay alive. She’d never really figured on spending the night between two attractive men but, if she had, this wouldn’t have been the way she pictured the experience.

Something was happening to the light. Well, there wasn’t actually any light. Something was happening to the darkness. It was pulling back into her peripheral vision. In the direct center of her field of view was…something that couldn’t possibly be there.

She couldn’t possibly see without light. Physics told her that. But she saw.

She was hallucinating. Rationality told her that. But every atom in her body told her that what she saw was real.

The snake was truly there. It was solid. It made its presence known without light as she knew it, and it spoke without sound as she understood it. Faye’s analytical mind surrendered, and she believed.

She tried to speak but nothing came out but a sigh. Joe’s hand clamped down on her shoulder, and that was the only thing that kept her rooted in the here and now.

Horns. Fangs. Sparkling scales. And a message so powerful that it didn’t have to be spoken. Within seconds, the snake was gone, and the air was black again

Faye pressed her face into Joe’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Faye. He didn’t come to hurt you.”

“I know.”

“Faye saw the snake?” Mischief entered Oka Hofobi’s voice. “But she’s just a
woman
.”

“I figure that means that he has an extra big task for Faye,” Joe said.

She rolled her head back until it rested on the wall behind her. “That’s what he said.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

When the voice sounded, Faye thought for a moment that the snake had returned.

Joe spoke again. “It’s time, Faye.”

Then it must be daylight outside. Not just dawn, but broad daylight, because Joe had said that they should wait until Neely would be certain they weren’t coming out. Faye wanted—no, needed—to be out in the sunshine.

Faye jumped off the ledge that had held her out of the water all night long. The cold shock of water didn’t even bother her. She jostled Oka Hofobi until he joined her. Feeling around for Joe, she asked, “Where to?”

There was no break in the blackness, but Faye thought that this might be a good thing. If the opening they sought were obvious, then Neely would surely have found it when she played here as a little girl. They wanted an exit hidden deep in the dark. Joe set out to find it with confidence, which buoyed Faye’s hopes.

It was hard to stay oriented in the darkness. Every few steps, Faye lurched when her foot rested on an uneven patch of floor, and her brain readjusted its opinion of which direction was up. She dragged a hand along the wall to give herself a frame of reference, and it helped a little. Regular grooves, probably tool marks, cut into the wall at irregular intervals. They supported Faye’s suspicion that someone—a lot of someones—had built this drain. Maybe they’d started from scratch, and maybe they’d simply enlarged the cave to meet their needs. Their work was crumbling, but it had stood for centuries, and maybe for millennia.

Faye was thrilled, and terrified, too. How would people with these skills have constructed an outlet for their drain? She pictured an ancient manhole cover of heavy stone, pierced with intricate carvings and held in place by a millennium’s worth of silt. They would have had to trade to get such a significant piece of stone, but their trading networks snaked out far and wide. Such an exquisite artifact would have let the water out, but it might trap Faye and her friends underground as long as they lived. Which wouldn’t be a long time, but it would sure seem like it.

Faye had recovered her equilibrium. By paying attention to her feet and hanging onto the wall with the hand that wasn’t clutching Joe, she felt pretty sure she knew which way was up. She was also pretty sure that her feet were pointed down.

Her panicking animal brain screamed,
We’re moving down! Away from the sun!
, but her rational brain rose to the occasion, reminding her that they wanted to be moving down. If the purpose of this culvert was to drain water from the creek when it got too high, then the exit had to be lower than the entrance. She was pretty sure that she could sense the faint motion in the water that Joe had been feeling all night. It was flowing in the direction they were walking. They were going the right way.

Oka Hofobi, whose hand was on her right shoulder, staggered. Her hand shot out to steady him and, bare inches from her shoulder, struck a wall. The culvert had narrowed suddenly. Poor Oka Hofobi had discovered that fact by planting his face into the wall.

“I’m okay. I don’t think my nose is broken. Keep going.”

Faye moved her face as close to Joe’s back as she could get it. Behind her own back, she felt Oka Hofobi take the same defensive position. Within twenty steps, all three of them were on their knees in the rapidly narrowing drain. Within twenty more steps, it was clear that only Faye was small enough to go on.

“It’s lighter down there, Faye,” Joe said.

She had to take his word for it, but that was okay. She already knew her eyes were nowhere as good as Joe’s. If he thought the exit was within spitting distance, she believed him.

“If it gets really tight,” Joe was saying, “you’ll have to decide whether to put your arms out in front of you, or whether to hold them by your sides. Kinda like a snake.”

Faye was still worried that the opening might be silted up, or sealed by an ancient grate. She wanted the use of her hands. “I’ll put my arms in front.”

She patted the rapidly narrowing walls. “I can do this. You gentlemen can expect a rescue party as soon as I get to a phone.”

Joe’d had the foresight to squeeze aside and let her take the lead, just before the passage grew too narrow for such a complicated maneuver. Oka Hofobi, who still brought up the rear, thrust a hand forward until it rested on her back. “Now we know why Sinti Hollo said you had a great task to do.”

Faye wished the snake god had taught her a little more about slithering on her belly.

Joe said nothing. He just slid an arm between her back and the culvert’s ceiling and squeezed her tight. She felt secure and cradled in the crook of his arm, but there was no time to linger there. It was time to move forward.

The irregular shape of the drain squeezed Faye’s body into one shape after another. Early in her passage, she felt her left side dip down at a point where the widest portion of the passageway was across the diagonal. Within a few feet, her body was level again, but it was recoiling from the pain of dragging her belly over a sharp rock. Then, at the bottom of a short, steep dip, she found herself rounding a curve in a slight backbend. This last discomfort didn’t bother her in the least, because the curve hid something precious.

Light.

“I can see it!” she called back to her companions. “It’s open, but it’s pretty small.” She oozed forward, reaching for the little hole with both hands. As she’d feared, a tidy ring of stones had held it open all these years. If her hips were wider than that circle…

She wished she could bend back and take a good look at those hips, but what would have been the point? Either she fit through the hole or she didn’t.

Not having experienced childbirth personally, Faye could only go by what she’d heard. Still, she’d found the Lamaze classes she’d attended with her friend Magda to be enormously helpful in her current situation.

Her head went through the opening easily. This was a good thing, since she didn’t have a newborn’s ability to let her head be molded into whatever shape its mother’s pelvis requires.

Her shoulders were too wide to go straight through, which wasn’t a good sign. Faye’s shoulders were almost too narrow to be fully functional. Her bra straps were forever sliding off one side or the other. Fortunately, the Lamaze lady had demonstrated how a baby exits the birth canal one shoulder at a time, twisting its body behind it. (She’d also said that, on occasion, a baby’s shoulder is broken by the birth process, but Faye chose not to dwell on that little detail.)

With both shoulders through the opening, Faye paused to rest, and to glory in the sight of the wide world. She was resting at the bottom of a grassy slope. Velvety green plants lined the damp track where water left the drain that had been her prison. If Joe and Oka Hofobi hadn’t been still trapped in the dark cold, she would have paused for a nap right there.

Grabbing at some handy saplings, Faye tugged herself forward until the rim of her pelvis caught on the drain’s opening. This was the moment. Either her hips could be dragged through, or they couldn’t. And if they couldn’t, then she, Oka Hofobi, and Joe would die.

No, they wouldn’t. Not yet. Not when Faye could scream and hope to be heard. Not when she could claw at the stones holding her in this spot. And not when she could dig in the dirt for worms that she and her friends could eat. Faye was not known for giving up.

She pulled hard again, tilting her hips in every direction she could reach, looking for a place where the opening was out-of-round. She gained an inch, then found herself stuck again. Completely stuck. She couldn’t move forward or backward. She couldn’t even swivel.

The Lamaze teacher had been big on good posture. She had taught that too many women went through life swaybacked, which was particularly damaging when they were carrying a heavy load in their uterus. At a guess, Faye would say that a swayed back took up more room than a straight one. Following the Lamaze teacher’s instructions, she tilted her pelvis in the only direction left to her—tucked under.

And she slid out onto the fresh grass, landing in a curled-up heap at the base of a mound that had once lifted up a graveyard.

“Can you guys hear me?” Faye bellowed into the drain opening. “I’m out. I’m okay. I’m going for help.”

Their responses were joyful, but unintelligible, soaked up by soil and rock and water. “Hang on,” she called to them. “You won’t believe how fast I’ll be back.”