12
Marjory heard thunder again, a dull rumble as if somewhere in the succession of caverns she had wandered into and couldn't get out of a ceiling had collapsed.
She had never been afraid for her life before. Even the awful night of her parents' death she had not brooded on her own mortality. But now she had lost track of Arne Horsfall, and the moth-shrouded mummy he carried laboriously through one lookalike passage after another, so totally familiar with this underground world he didn't need to look for landmarks, or else guided by some mysterious radar. He had moved slowly, an old man with unreliable legs and little stamina, but never as if he were unsure of where he meant to go.
Marjory's left knee hurt her badly. There were times when the pain almost took her breath away. She had slipped off the narrow path in a small cave and tumbled, wrenching the knee. She could barely hobble. Arne, unaware of being followed, had moved on, the radiance of luna moths fading, finally vanishing abruptly. And here she was, her worst fears doubled: not only in the dark, but hurt. Listening to thunder and shaking at the thought of pulverizing tons of rock, choking clouds of dust, entombment.
"Arne! Arne Horsfall! It's Marjory! Marjory Waller! Where are you? I need help! Pleasssse helpppp meee!"
After her third try at raising Arne, Marjory was strangling on tears and knew it wasn't any use. He was gone. She heard nothing but her own panicky breathing and the repetitious, distant thunder.
And saw, very far away in the dark, a little flicker of light, abrupt as a struck match but almost colorless. She held her breath as if a Yogalike suspension would sharpen her perceptions.
What was that?
A sound like the wind. But she'd heard it before; apparently there was a current of air flowing from outside, channeled through the many chimneys and tight corridors of the caverns. . . more thunder, and Marjory decided to breathe, slowly, massaging her bruised knee. If it actually was thunder and not a rockfall, then—
there,
thank God, that pulse of light again, in the same place as before! She hadn't imagined it. She had to be close to the surface, where a summer storm was at full power. All she needed to do was keep her eyes open, make her way toward the intermittent lightning, inching along through the dark, and if she didn't fall again and kill herself this time, maybe she'd get out of here . . .
13
"God! Duane! Oh God!
It's got me!"
Duane saw Puff trying to lunge out of the nest of spun silk she'd made for herself, reaching high with one hand, her head arched back; but she couldn't get her feet under her, or slipped, or was pulled back by something or someone, and fell more deeply into the coccoon, almost vanishing from sight despite her struggles. Screaming. He tried to run to her, but the strength of the voluminous silk resisted hurry. He lurched as if drunk, trying to get some footing, trying to get to her, the short hairs on his head frizzled by the tenor of her screaming; it was as if she were being eaten alive.
Then he stepped on something leathery and bony, lost his balance, dived awkwardly in Puffs direction and made contact with her. Her fingers dug into his left arm above the elbow. Her other hand, flailing, hit him hard enough on the side of his head to welt an ear. He grabbed Puff, got one foot down on solid floor and yanked her full upright. Her face was about six inches from his own and it was as if he'd never seen Puff before, fear had made her crazy, distorted her features.
Other than that, she didn't seem to be hurt. She was a handful, but he was a strong boy. He turned her sharply and looked at her naked back and glossy buttocks with the flashlight. He saw nothing hideous, no wounds, only a couple of yellow bruises on one hip where her skin tone was a shade lighter than elsewhere.
"Puff, stop! You're not hurt." It was kind of interesting. He'd never seen a woman flat-out hysterical before, spitting up and with the whites of her eyes showing like those of a horse that knows it has broken a leg. His own self-control was a little wobbly, she'd given him a real scare. He was powerfully aroused by her nakedness and total vulnerability. But Puff put a quick stop to that by accidentally jamming a knee close to his groin. "Oww! What's the matter with—"
He saw it then in the glance light of the flash, lying half-uncovered on the cavern floor where Puff had been thrashing around. Puff was now twitching all over and trying to climb on him, giving out little whimpered yips while spraying him with saliva. Duane pulled them both away, finding it hard to believe his eyes, and aimed the flashlight more precisely while holding Puff against him with his other arm, squeezing as hard as he could. Duane could squat-lift close to four hundred pounds, more than double his weight. Puff suddenly had no room to breathe. Her head fell laxly against his shoulder, air hissing noisily through her teeth.
His first thought was,
Dead nigger.
The severely emaciated body was black, all right, from the roots of its hair to the patent-leather toenails, with a faintly rusty sheen where the flashlight beam struck hotly. It was a nude male, one knee drawn up in a relaxed attitude, hands at its sides. The glans of the penis like a small onyx egg Duane's mother had found in a Mexican cave and given to him. He had buffed it to a high gloss in his rock polisher.
"Grabbed me—" Puff said. He could feel her heartbeat, and her teeth on his neck. He was afraid she was going to bite him. Duane said with .1 trace of scorn, although he could understand now what had touched her off so violently, "It can't hurt you. It's just a . . . like a mummy. God knows how long—"
"Duane—"
"You okay now?"
"Uh-huh. Ohhhh Duane . . . There's another one!"
"Where?"
"Don't let go!"
"Take it easy." He relaxed his grip on her.
"I'm not a sissy! I saw a soldier who was run over by a tank once. When I had my abortion I didn't cry. But that thing—those—horrible—"
Duane trained Marjory's flashlight on the other body, the one he had stepped on, not knowing what it was, as he went to Puffs rescue.
"God!" Puff said. "It's a woman! Isn't it?"
"Yeah."
"Do you see that? Around her neck? They both have something tied around their neck."
"Some kind of dried vine."
"You know what I think? They were killed and left down here. Duane?"
"What?"
"I'm not in the mood to fuck any more. Maybe later when we get out of here. I want to put my shorts on."
"Okay."
"Come with me?"
"Yeh, just a minute," Duane said, casting around with the light. He left Puff and took a few gingerly steps into the spiffy silk and bent over to part some of the strands.
"Guess what?"
Puff started to laugh. "Man, I just really don't want to know."
"Three of them." Duane straightened and looked around the cavern. "Maybe if we look hard enough—"
"You look. I'm getting out of here. In a minute. I need to find someplace to go to the bathroom first. Can I have the flashlight?"
"Sure," Duane said, preoccupied with their discoveries; he casually tossed the flashlight to her. Puff was not at all athletic. Instead of catching the flashlight she fumbled and batted it into the middle of the cocoon, where it struck something with a metallic
clunk.
Overhead there was a noiseless stirring of wings, an agitated light show rippling through the congregation of lunas.
They heard a burst of static from Puffs hidden radio.
Then the voices began.
14
Marjory crawled out of the cave into a lashing rain, and nothing had ever felt so good.
Weather.
She relished it, as someone recently entombed. Cool and dry and monotonously dark below. What death might be like: Marjory occasionally had worried about that. Despite her religious training she was reasonably sure the afterlife would not be choirs of angels in open-toed sandals singing on cloudtops somewhere. While some saint or other read out loud from a Book of Judgment with her name on it in gold. Like going to school forever; talk about monotonous. She'd prefer more of a carnival atmosphere. Wouldn't everybody have earned a joyride or two just by getting to Heaven in the first place? And if she had to be judged, then what about a funhouse filled with mirrors called
This Was Your Life?
Here I am at the age of three tarring cat's tail. There I am at thirteen—!
know I'm going to die someday, but just don't bore me.
She bit down on her lip trying to control the shakes and wondered where Duane and Puff were. Wondered where
she
was, wincing at a pitchfork of lightning tossed at some windblown trees nearby. Rain in her face mixing with the hot saline of tears; she hadn't known she was crying. Between flashes of lightning it was pretty dark, but not night yet.
The cave entrance, or exit, slanted into a low hill and was barely three feet wide at the base. There was a thick tangle of rhododendron all around. Even if you knew exactly where it was, you still might have trouble locating the seam in anything but broad daylight.
The glossy rhododendron leaves kept the worst of the rain off her as she huddled a few yards beyond the cave, gently massaging the knee she had twisted. Might as well wait it out here. She wasn't going back inside. The lightning didn't scare her. Much. Until it flashed with a jarring violence, perhaps hitting the hill behind her, revealing something that, ordinarily, she wouldn't have paid much attention to. Under the circumstances, it seemed unnervingly creepy.
It was a shoe. A man's black shoe, slowly filling up with rainwater. The style of cheap loafer Arne Horsfall had been wearing the Sunday he came to Enid and Marjory's house. For all she knew, it was Arne's shoe. If so then he had come this way, carrying—no, he would have had to drag it behind him through the laurel slick—the mummy with the fierce red eyes.
Marjory hiccuped forlornly, and a taste of something bitter rose to her tongue.
Why think about it now? She didn't care about Arne Horsfall. Or want to know what he was doing stealing radios and skulking through caverns with a nigger's body—
But that was the hard part to accept. The thing he'd been carrying couldn't be dead. Not with those eyes, which had seen, down below, what Arne couldn't see: they had seen Marjory.
Something damp and clinging swirled out of the tangle of rhododendron branches overhead and clung to her cheek. It was too delicate and papery to be a leaf; she brushed at it and saw, briefly, printed on the back of her hand like a tatoo, a drowned luna moth. Shook it off with a cold sick feeling in her stomach. She was quick, on hands and knees, to find a way out of there.
Now which way?
The sky full of lightning, not dramatic thunderbolts but a tracery, briefly luminous and as delicate as the webbing of cracks in eggshell. She wasn't afraid of it. The rain seemed to be slackening where she was, falling straight down.
She reckoned that she was still in Dante's Mill State Park. Walk in one direction and she would come to the lake shore; another, and before long she must cross a road or marked trail.
Shivering, Marjory pushed aside some drenched limbs of second-growth trees and followed a downhill course from the modest hill where she had emerged from the caverns. It wasn't hard going by the intermittent glow of the sky. Thunder kept its distance.
Marjory?
Spoken so softly, she couldn't be sure she'd heard anything. Marjory paused, on tiptoe, then her heels settled to the sodden ground. She looked around, looked behind her last with a hard shudder and saw . . . no one.
Whipped her head forward with a sudden creepy lurching of the heart, but there was nothing ahead of her except for a mild pulse of lightning in which a thick-bodied chestnut tree stood almost alone on a cresting acre against the sky, a tree right out of an illustrated children's book,
Swiss Family Robinson
or
Treasure Island:
you could climb into the gnarled but cloudlike boughs and be pleasantly lost for an afternoon's reverie. This was a tree for hiding out and secret clubs and feats of daring—how high would she dare to climb in such a tree? Marjory had plenty of time to look the tree over and speculate, because the pulse of light had become a steady glow in the sky around it, as if the tree radiated from its own source of power, contriving a mysterious but attractive aura that had (more obvious the longer she stared) a tincture of color, partly gold, also a little of the green of weathered courthouse bronzes. At least, she was sure, the huge tree must bear some sort of charm or enduring force, or else the power of storms would have torn it apart long ago in its singular, exposed location.
Yes. This way.
That was good for a start, and some large goosebumps; easy to imagine that the tree, intriguingly in motion in a renewed spate of hard rain, had a voice. The thrill of imagination: but Marjory, although she could daydream with the best, wasn't particularly creative. Talking trees? Fairy stories had never appealed to her.
Good God,
she thought,
it's dark and you're lost in the woods so don't get spooky! Just get out of—
"No, Marjory! Over here!"
This time Marjory jumped and tried to run; pain in the knee she had twisted in the caverns hobbled her and she went sprawling over a stob of a nearly buried windfall, taking some of the skin off the instep of her right foot. Fell heavily but in forest litter that cushioned the fall, with nothing sharp lying there to punch through her.
"Oh, Marjory
—
no!"
—She said mournfully, sympathetically, and with that accent that might have been Danish or something, Marjory didn't know. She only knew she was frightened, and resentful because one of her fears was she might be losing her mind and would wind up in the most dreaded place of all, Cumberland State Hospital; and she was shaken because she was floundering around and clumsy—God, how could she take a fall like that? Physically out of rhythm, no more control than a boulder rolling downhill, in a way that was more disturbing to Marjory than the Voice.
"I'm here. I'm real. I want to help you."
Marjory sat up sniveling in the dark, brushing her face, which felt spider-webbed all over.
"What do you want? Who is it?"
she yelled, and wiped ropy snot from her upper lip with a knuckle.
"The tree, Marjory. Come to the tree. I'm caught. Get me loose, then I'll help you."
The woman sounded calm, but sad. "Who—" Marjory said, then stopped, because there was a kind of pressure on her tongue, and in her mind, a sensation that speech was unimportant, even useless, in this communication.
Who are you?
That was easy, the thought just flowed; as she felt it going—somewhere—she sensed its reception and leaned back on liei hands, gazing toward the dark towering tree and the faint pulsing cloud of sea-green light.
"My name is Birka. I'm concerned about you. Are you badly hurt? Can you walk?"
"Yes, I—" Oh, forgot. No need to talk.
I'm all right. Scraped my foot. But what happened to you?
"You'll see. Hurry, please."
"Coming." I mean,
Coming.
Marjory wiped her nose again, sniffed as she started to get to her feet, but froze and was appalled. In sniffing she had smelled something: strong, almost fresh. She smelled blood.
Oh, my God! No . . . wait, I'm not hurt, I just scraped my foot, I can't be bleeding that much.
As her hands were frantically busy, searching her body, looking for wounds, for an outpouring to account for the odor. No wounds, thank—
"Marjory! What is it!"
Uh, give me a minute.
Could be menstrual blood, she could have started her period a little early. Marjory checked. Uh-uh. And usually when she was upset about something or other, she got it late, not early.
I smell blood.
"I know you do. I'm afraid that it's me, Marjory. Could you hurry now?"
A flash of concern for Birka, brighter than the lightning, and Marjory was off unthinkingly, running up the modest hill toward the standout tree, to her new friend. New? But it was as if they had known each other as intimately as soul mates in places far from here—shared every thought, loved chastely, exchanged vows of loyalty.
I will give my life for you.
Birka! Where are you? I can't see you!
Running into a wall then, her footsteps slowing. The smell of blood like a countryside hog-butchering, all this rain but the rain couldn't wash away
that
smell.
God . . . what is it?
Birka was silent, almost coldly silent. But she didn't have to speak, because by then Marjory was beneath the tree and they were almost in her face, the dangling bony feet with blackened nails, one foot bare, the other still shod in the nondescript loafer that was a twin of the one she'd seen filling up with rainwater in the laurel slick. Except for his loafer Arne Horsfall was naked and nearly skinless to his shins and dripping on her before she could draw back and try to smother the sight of his flayed corpse with the heels of her hands, grinding them into her eyes, punishing them as if her own vision was at fault for this horror, this outrage. Marjory screamed.
"Birka!"
"I'm over here," she said. Aloud this time, because they were so close; some compassion in her voice but not as much as Marjory might have wished to hear from her old, dear friend.