38
Ted Lufford rappeled down the shaft beneath the Dante's Mill parsonage and Wingo County Deputy Wayne Buck Vedders followed him. Ranger Tilghman had opened the mercantile store for them, and they were well equipped, although the rope which the store had stocked in 1906, the year the people of Dante's Mill vanished overnight, was too thick and heavy for efficiently exploring caves. The best thing they had was two cans of fluorescent spray paint from the trunk of Tilghman's car, and a dozen flares to augment their flashlights. Between them they carried axes, a pickax, and shovels. Both men had brought their revolvers.
"What now?" Vedders said, when his feet were on solid ground. He'd had a rough descent, twisting and banging against the sides of the shaft. He didn't like heights. He wasn't crazy about caves, either. When he was eight years old a friend of his had been bitten by a bat, necessitating a painful course of rabies vaccine.
"We'll try to keep up with their tracks. You blaze a trail with those aerosol cans so we don't wind up enjoying our old age down here."
"Lufford!"
"What?"
Vedders had his nickel-finish Smith in his hand, hammer cocked. "Saw something fluttering around over there. Man, I have to tell you, I can't tolerate bats. I'll take a nigger with a razor any day."
"Doesn't smell like a bat cave to me."
"You mean you can smell em?"
"You can smell batshit. There's none on the walls or floor here. Look, that's where they went. Heel marks, from hard shoes."
"Jesus Christ."
"What now?"
"It's some kind of big moth up close to the ceiling! Now there's two of 'em. Hell, they're near big as string kites."
Ted checked with his own flashlight. "Yeh."
"Look how the light makes them glow. You ever see anything like that?"
"No," Ted said disinterestedly. "Want to spray an arrow on the wall there, and we'll get going."
39
The dark cave chute was as slick and cold as ice, and although Duane held the flashlight with its feeble batteries tightly in both hands they couldn't see much except jagged stalactites flashing by, some only inches overhead. Marjory had begun their lightning descent with her legs in a tight scissors around Duane's waist; but after the first slippery bend in the chute they were only in precarious contact with each other, and totally out of control. Marjory screamed all the way down. Duane, leading, flung from side to side by velocity and with his hands unusable, was scared of the glowing stalactites in the chute: if he ran into one at the speed they were falling he could crush his knees or lose half his head. But there wasn't time for thinking, or regrets; they just
went,
helplessly, through that jagged toothy maze, drenched by waterfalls, as if they were being sucked down the long throat of something that was swallowing them alive. Duane was riding mostly on one cheek of his behind, feet up, hands and elbows high, one of Marjory's feet in an armpit, her other bare foot loose, the heel hitting him painfully on his left ear.
The chute seemed, momentarily, to be leveling off; Duane was thrust back on his shoulders and then propelled, with a dizzying torque that turned him nearly on his stomach, sprawled helplessly and flying. Two seconds went by before he realized there was nothing more beneath him, he'd been launched and was beginning to drop, with Marjory almost right on top of him. He had a glimpse of her in the beamed-up light, mouth wide, screaming, but faintly, like a scream from the other side of the world. Wherever they were, the heights were beyond the reach of the flashlight. He heard water cascading into water, a torrent, and then he was in and under himself, shocked nearly senseless by the cold. He felt a stabbing pain on the side where he'd hit the water. His face went numb, as if slapped by a plank. Then Marjory crash-dived, hitting him in the chest and hands, bearing him down in a flurry of bubbles momentarily visible by flashlight. That's when he lost his grip and the flashlight turned over slowly, a vague smear of light, and sank out of reach while his instincts sent him flailing and kicking toward the surface marked by an ascending trail of ghostly, illuminated bubbles.
40
"We're in danger," Theron said, the first words he was able to speak to Birka.
The seventh child of Adam and Eve looked slowly around the cocoon, pained by the voices in his head: the demanding voices of the still-entombed, the shrouded mummy-litter, for whom he could do nothing.
Resurrected from the Black Sleep, his skin tone by luna-light was gray but his eyes were clearing as mucous dripped from the corners. His eyes, widely set in his face, were as blue as Birka's but had pronounced epicanthus folds. His limbs, sadly twisted and shrunken in the Sleep, now were long and stronger-looking, though unable to support him yet. He had a deep chest. The build of an ancient foraging man, the smooth hairless surfaces of childhood. She covered, in a few moments of communion and tenderness, the crown of his head with both of her hands. The thorn where her little finger had been twitched like a dark vein overlapping his damp wattled skin. Theron had been lifeless pitch, and now he was excitable clay.
Alastor came skipping through a passage and rolled in the tufty cocoon and said, unconcernedly, "They're in the pool. If’n they don't know how to swim, reckon they're goners."
"The water's too cold for them anyway," Birka said glumly. "I think I should have let you turn them."
Alastor's head popped up. "But what if they went and spoilt after I done that? You said—"
"Well, it doesn't matter now."
"We're in danger," Theron repeated, as if it were all he could say.
"I suppose," Birka conceded, "others will come, looking for Marjory and the boy. I was virtually all alone and in a hurry, and I had to use the parsonage entrance. But there are three of us now, and if I can just fetch Marjory back, we will soon be a hundred."
"Who is Marjory?" Theron said, wincing.
"Someone I just met, outside, and whom I became very fond of. She was so afraid of death; but we all were, once."
"You were . . . outside?"
"Yes, thanks to Arne."
"Your son?"
"Yes. He was very old. I did him a kindness."
"After what he did to us."
"That was his father's influence. Does it matter now? We're back."
"But we—"
"Let them come. Anyone. Let them all stumble around, lost, in the dark, trying to find us. In our place,
our
home. You'll be safe here, for a little while. I'd better try to recover Marjory."
"I'll bet she drownded already," Alastor said, with a note of glee.
"Why don't you just shut up?" Birka said impatiently. "And look after Theron while I'm gone. Don't nod your head and pull a long face. It's 'Yes, ma'am,' and 'No, ma'am,' from now on when you speak to me, is that understood?"
"Yes, ma'am," Alastor said, but he wasn't paying close attention to her. He had lifted his head and was listening to what Birka had also overheard. Sound traveled amazingly well through the passages.
Voices.
"Followed you," Theron said, placing a hand on her forearm. He had huge hands. His thorn was nearly five inches long. Birka trembled slightly at the memory of his power.
"That changes things."
"Then we have to . . . protect ourselves."
"Yes. Can you—?"
She helped him. He stood up, leaning this way and that, erratic, unbalanced. He was more than a head taller than Birka. Gaining in strength slowly, but perhaps not fast enough. For the first time since Theron's resurrection Birka felt worried.
"I can fight em!" Alastor said. "I'm a good fighter."
"Yes," Birka said, allowing him a smile. "You come, too."
"You gonna get Marjory out of the pool first?"
"No, there's no time now. She will just have to die where she is."
"Good," said Alastor.
41
In total darkness Duane and Marjory floundered and choked and clung to each other in the cave pool.
"Get me out here! Get me out of here!"
"Marjory!" Their voices came back to them, hollowed and reverberating, above the steady downpour of the waterfall, and the part of Duane's mind that wasn't concerned with panic and drowning noted that this cavern was far larger than any he'd come across so far.
"Get me out of here!"
He couldn't see her but she had a grip on his belt underwater, and she was close enough to be choking and spouting in his face.
"Marj . . . shut up . . . stay afloat . . . we'll be all right!" But he didn't believe it himself. He took in water and his own throat locked. He was most afraid of both of them going down and losing their sense of direction-swimming, fighting to regain the surface but going deeper, disoriented, swimming down instead of up until their lungs burst.
"Geh . . . me . . ."
"Marjory. Just. Tread water. Relax."
"Dark." But she was listening to him, not so frantic, her instincts as a fine swimmer taking over. Face to face, they bumped knees. He put an arm around her. His face grazed hers.
"Stay. Like this. A minute. Don't talk."
". . . see."
"I know . . . you can't see."
"God. Oh God."
"No, don't. Be okay. Promise." She was gasping in his face. He wanted to keep her like that, almost nose to nose. It wasn't so difficult for Marjory to stay afloat. She was well endowed for that. He put his free hand on one of her bobbing breasts.
"Good. We've got. Life raft."
"Duane. You asshole. No joke."
Her knuckles were digging painfully into his stomach where she had a grip on his belt. Now that they had stopped thrashing so frantically Duane could tell they weren't in a current, being slowly pulled along somewhere they might not want to go.
"Why . . . you make me do that? Run away. Now look."
"Marjory. Did they . . . did one of them . . . do something to you?"
"Mean?"
"Like . . . stick you in the back of the neck?"
"Stick me?"
"Your hair's . . . not falling out. Is it?"
"Gone crazy?"
"No. I guess you're. Okay."
"Okay?
Huh-uh. Wet. Cold. We're . . . Duane . . . oh. Ohhhh!"
"No. We're going to be. We'll. Get out of here. Didn't I. Promise?"
"How?"
"Don't know. Yet. Tired of. Treading water. Swim?"
"Where?" When he didn't answer right away she said sharply, "Duane!"
"Was looking around. I think I see . . . I don't know." Duane touched his glasses, which had stayed on even while he was submerged. Then he placed his hand on her cheek. "Turn. This way. See anything?"
"No. Uh. Maybe."
"What?"
"Like . . . something sparkling. High up. Comes. And goes."
"That's what I—”
"There. Wait. Maybe two of them. Like stars. Stars?"
"I see it, too. Geodes. I think."
"How high?"
"I don't know. Come on. Swim that way."
"Duane, I'm."
"Uh-huh. Me, too. We have to swim. You know you're. Better than me. Just do it."
"I don't want to die!"
"Then swim, Marj. Swim to the stars."
42
"Wait a minute," Ted Lufford said, going down on one knee, casting his light along two diverging umbilical passages, the walls of which looked sheared; they glittered hotly in places like animal eyes by the side of a rural road.
"What is all that stuff?" Wayne Buck Vedders said.
"Quartz crystal, most likely. My daddy and uncle and me used to go looking up around Cordell Hull for geodes. You ever see a geode?"
"Sure, I had me a couple when I was a kid. Jackson County? Fished up that way now and again. There's a little cafe on the south side of the courthouse square in Gainesboro has the best buttermilk pie I ever put in my mouth."
"I know the one. Crawford's."
"Yeah, ol' Smiley Crawford. Long gone now, I hear. One-armed, he was still the best short-order cook around the lake." Vedders moved out from under an almost invisible drip of water from the roof of the passage and said uneasily to Ted's back, "What happened, we lose 'em?"
"I don't know yet. Listen."
Both men were quiet. They heard the far-off sound of falling water. And something else, perhaps a voice: thin, unidentifiable.
Vedders shivered. Ted rose slowly, handed back the flashlight, which gave Vedders two of them to hold, and cupped his hands to his mouth.
"Marjory!"
His voice wailed down seemingly limitless spaces in the earth, echoing dimly a couple of times.
"Jesus," Vedders whispered, spooked. They waited to hear something back. "How big you reckon this cave is?"
"No telling. It's probably a whole lot of caves, strung together for miles." Ted felt a pinching in his stomach, concern for the fate of the girl. No telling who she was with, or what they had in mind. He held out his hand for the flashlight and sprayed the walls again, then the rough floor. "I don't know," he mumbled. "I don't know."
"Just pick one, I reckon," Vedders said.
"Marjory!" Ted hollered again, frustrated; he took a couple of deep breaths.
"I know where she's at," a childish voice said, and there was the sound of a muffled giggle.
Ted and Wayne Buck Vedders looked different directions at once, because there was no clear indication where the voice had come from. The beams from their flashlights crossed each other's startled face.
"But she's drownded already."
Ted swore under his breath and took a couple of steps down the left-hand passage, to the delight of the unseen boy.
"Where are you?"
Silence.
"What's your name?"
"Pudd'n and tame," Alastor sang. "Ask me again, I'll tell you the same!"
Vedders charged a little way down the other passage with his flashlight and stopped suddenly.
"Lufford," he called, in a strangled voice.
Alastor giggled again.
Ted ran into Vedders as he was backing out.
"What's the matter?"
"Jesus. I don't believe it. He's. . . I don't know what it is. Have a look."
Ted aimed his flashlight along the passage, lighting up a display of crystal studding both walls.
"No. I mean—up there." Vedders used his own flashlight. There was Alastor, clinging upside down on the roof, between clusters of glistening stalactites. Fifteen feet up.
"Fuck is
that?"
Vedders said, breathing heavily.
"You talk?" Ted said to the naked, hairless boy.
Alastor did a couple of bird calls instead: his hooded warbler wasn't bad, Ted thought. The hairs on the back of his neck still felt as if caterpillars were crawling there.
"Tell me something, how'd you get yourself up there thataway?"
"Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies."
"Smart kid, huh? Ain't you afraid you're gonna fall and hurt yourself, Big 'un?"
"Don't get hurt," Alastor said unconcernedly.
"That so?"
"Watch me," Alastor said with a grin, and suddenly sprang from his perch to the wall closest to Ted, sticking there just out of reach. A wave of cold air came off him and Ted instinctively backed up a step, treading on Vedders's toes.
Ted swallowed and forced himself to smile. "Hey, real good. Like to know how you do that."
"You can't anyway."
"I sure don't intend to try, Big 'un."
"'Cause you got to be dead first."
"Oh," Ted said, unable to remember when he'd felt so cold. The tip of his nose, his lips tingled.
"Jesus fucking Christ," Vedders groaned behind Ted's back.
"Listen Big 'un, you can pull my leg all you want, uh, but I need for you to tell me something—"
"What's
your
name?" Alastor said with his wide gap-toothed smile. "Funky butt?" he snickered.
"No, it's . . . Ted. What I want to know from you is, do you . . . live down here?"
"What's it to you?"
Ted exhaled, seeing his breath. But he couldn't see Alastor's breath. He felt something picking at his mind,
chink, chink,
and looked into the strange boy's bright unholy eyes, knowing it was him. Rummaging as idly in Ted's mind as if it were a mailbox. A sensation he'd never experienced before, but unmistakable. He put a hand on the checkered butt of his holstered police Special and Alastor's eyes flicked nonchalantly, taking in the movement.
"I'll show you where I live," he said unexpectedly, and failed to laugh.
Ted thought,
Afraid of the gun.
Then he thought,
No, he's not afraid of anything.
Wayne Buck Vedders said, his own breath puffing out, "Partner, I just got me a bad feeling. Let's us get out of here. Right now."
"No. I want Marjory."
"Can I see your gun?" Alastor said. "Is it a six-shooter?"
"Yeah, it's a six-shooter. Yeah, I guess you can see it. But I want you to tell me—"
"Already told you about Marjory! She and him probably drownded in the pool."
"It's
probably
now? That mean you saw her? What pool?"
Ted drew his revolver and swung the cylinder out, dropping .38 cartridges into his other, cupped hand, holding on to the flashlight by his fingertips and thumb. He closed the gate and held out the emptied revolver to Alastor, tempting him with it. All boys, even dead boys, liked guns, lie thought. A muscle twitched in his throat, another in his face. His extended hand felt almost numb, as if he'd dipped it into a pool of ether. Alastor looked solemnly at the blue-steel revolver, and at Ted. Trying to make up his mind about him, but not trusting him.
"Go ahead, Big 'un," Ted urged. "Look it over, son."
Alastor let go of the wall with his right hand, which Ted noticed looked deformed, but he was calculating other matters. As soon as his chance was apparent he let the flashlight drop from his left hand and snatched Alastor's wrist, yanking him away from his perpendicular perch on the rugged crystal wall face, stepping to one side and slinging Alastor like a dangerous breed of cat to the rocky floor.
The cold shocked him again, numbing his palm and fingers as if he'd grabbed onto a live wire. He wasn't prepared for Alastor's resilience and powers of recovery, the boy just bounced off the floor undamaged and turned on Ted, slashing with the hooked little finger of his right hand, cutting through Ted's pants below the knee. Ted let go of Alastor and the boy leaped away from him to a crystal rock face, clinging there, making a keening noise only a little more audible than a dog whistle.
That's when Vedders took aim with his revolver and cut loose, missing with the first shot, taking off part of the side of Alastor's head, including all of one ear, with the second shot. The roar and reverberation in the passage nearly collapsed Ted's eardrums; he grabbed his own head in pain. He was spattered with bits of skull and a mucilagenous mess cold as sleet but Alastor scarcely seemed aware of the gunshot as he scampered away on the wall, on all fours, and grabbed the ceiling. Vedders, shouting something, fired again, drilling Alastor cleanly through the side but barely slowing him down, and in another instant he was beyond the reach of the erratic flashlight in Vedders's other hand.
"Jesus! Christ! Stop it! Firing your piece down here, you crazy or something, we could catch a goddamn bullet coming back!"
"I hit him! Know I hit him twice!"
"Saw what good it did!" Ted glanced at the rip in the khaki below his knee, a small stain of blood. He was dazed by the action, the ferocity of Alastor's counterattack. His ears rang; if he didn't have permanent damage it would be a miracle, he thought. Vedders, smoking gun in hand, pushed past Ted, wild of eye, whisking the beam of his light around. The passage was stinking from condiee.
"Gonna tell me I didn't kill him? He's dead already, let's go get the little—”
Ted grabbed him from behind. "Listen!" He pressed a hand hard against his left ear, released it. "You hear that?"
"Hell, I'm half-deaf!"
"No. I heard it. Kids."
"Talk louder!"
"I said
kids!
Yelling. It was Marjory. She's not dead!"
"Where?"
"The hell would I know? Down there. Where Big 'un went."
Vedders was staring at the front of Ted's jacket. He reached out tentatively with the hand that held the Smith and picked up a fingerload of slushy jelly, which he promptly slung away.
"That blood? That what he was made of?"
"I don't know."
Vedders stared at Ted, his eyes perfectly round. Unexpectedly his teeth began to chatter.
"Partner? What's d-down here?"
"I don't know that either."
"If there's m-more of them, we have done g-got ourselves in a real mess." Vedders wheeled suddenly, crouching, hearing a rock fall somewhere in the passage. He looked both ways with the flashlight, brooming the walls. Ted unloaded the knapsack he was carrying and opened it. He took out a flare and popped it with a twist of his hands, planted it in a crevice. The flare sizzled and broadcast harsh pink light.
"Feel better?" he asked the other deputy.
"H-hell no. What was it? You g-got any idea what it was?"
"Yeah. I think it was a vampire. Kind of. I don't care. I want Marjory. You have anything to stuff your ears with?"
"I don't know." Vedders searched his pockets and came up with a crumpled pack of Marlboros. "Filtertips might help. We gonna go down there shooting?"
"Not going anywhere." Ted took the cigarettes from him and twisted off filters. "Plug your ears and get down low, I'm gonna let off another round."
"What for?"
"I'm trying to locate where it was they were hollering from."
"Doesn't make any sense. You don't expect me to believe in vampires, that's kid stuff."
"Explain it any way you want, Vedders. You shot his head half off, and he went right on with what he was doing. Hug the floor."
Ted plugged his ears, reloaded his revolver and got down, looked along the uneven passage with his flashlight and hoped he wouldn't get lead back between his teeth. Then he pulled the trigger.