'You've got to be joking.'
'Well, I'd better lead the way.' He lowered the head of the pickaxe into the water and propped its haft against the slope of the embankment.
Chris gave the lantern to him.
He climbed the bank. Chris lifted the pickaxe, swung it over one shoulder, and followed him. When he looked back, he said, 'I thought we'd leave that behind.'
'We might not want to search for it,' she told him. 'Besides…'
'What?'
'I just think we should hang onto it. You never know.'
'Want me to carry it?'
'And the lantern?'
'Well, we could trade.'
'I'd rather have you go first. I'm all right with this thing.'
Hank shrugged, and resumed walking. Chris stayed close behind him. They took a winding route, skirting rock formations that rose from the cavern floor to block their way. The area of pale light grew. Chris saw that it did come from an opening in the wall of the cavern.
Hank stopped at the opening. As he leaned forward and swung the lantern through it, Chris peered over his shoulder.
The chamber in front of them appeared to be about twenty feet around. Its floor was heaped with clothing: dresses, blouses, sweaters, undergarments, slacks, nightgowns and robes, even a few jackets and coats. All seemed to be women's clothes. Near one wall, Darcy saw a pile of grooming articles: hair-driers, brushes and combs, curlers, tubes of toothpaste and brushes, sanitary napkins. An open suitcase to the side of the pile was filled with glittering jewellery like a pirate's treasure chest.
'Must be stuff that belonged to his victims,' Hank whispered. 'Makes sense. He'd have to do something with it. Wouldn't want those things lying around the hotel if anyone came snooping.'
He stepped into the chamber. Chris followed. Her feet sank into the heaped clothes.
The clothes of dead people.
She shivered.
Hank's head tilted back. Chris, too, looked up.
The daylight came from above, drifting down like a pale mist through a chimney-like orifice in the ceiling of the chamber. Standing directly beneath the hole, Chris couldn't see the sky. Though the tunnel obviously led to the surface, she guessed that it must curve along the way.
The ceiling of the chamber was at least twice Hank's height.
'You might get in and out this way,' he said, 'but you'd need a rope. Won't do us much good.'
'Do you think this is Mordock's secret opening?'
He shrugged. 'Could be. Maybe if he had a rope ladder.'
'Let's go back to the stream, okay? This place gives me the creeps.'
Hank said, 'Okay,' and stepped backward as if trying to get a better angle on the ceiling hole - and stumbled.
Chris gasped, fearing the lantern might ignite the thick layer of garments on the chamber floor, but Hank landed on his rump and kept the lantern high. 'You all right?' she asked.
He nodded. 'Come here.'
She waded through the clothes.
'Hold this.'
She took the lantern from him. 'What?' she asked.
'Want to see what I tripped on.' He got to his knees and began digging, flinging aside skirts, bathrobes, pantyhose.
'Maybe you'd better not,' Chris said.
He snatched up a wadded blouse, exposing a bare foot and ankle. Chris stiffened. Shivers squirmed like cold worms over her skin.
More bodies,
she thought.
Bodies under us. I might be standing on one!
Hank touched the ankle, then jerked his hand back fast. He looked up at Chris. His eyes were wide, his mouth hanging open.
'Let's get out of here,' she whispered.
His head shook slowly from side to side, and he began to toss more clothes out of the way. He uncovered another foot. Shins. The legs of the body were side by side, but slightly apart. He exposed the knees.
'Hank. Please. I don't want to see it.'
'This one's alive,' he said.
And it bolted upright through a cascade of clothes, shrieking.
A girl with wild blonde hair. Eyes squeezed shut. Lips curled back, baring pointed teeth. Chris shouted a warning. Even as the word
'Look'
burst from her throat, she saw the girl swing a white blade-studded stick at Hank's face, saw his open hand whip sideways at her face, heard a thud and a clash of slamming teeth as the edge of his hand drove beneath the girl's chin. The blow snapped her head back. The scream stopped. Chris's voice, yelling
'Out!'
resounded through the silence. She finished her warning while the girl flopped towards the mat of clothes. Hank rammed an open hand against the girl's chest and jerked his other arm up close to his side as if about to blast his knuckles through her throat.
He didn't deliver the blow.
He knelt there, poised for it, and didn't move.
The girl lay motionless.
'Hank?'
He took a deep breath, then reached over the sprawled body and picked up the weapon. He held it up, inspecting it.
Not a stick, Chris realized. A bone. Maybe an arm bone. Its upper half bristled with razor blades that appeared to be imbedded in grooves.
Hank hurled the weapon away. It clattered against a wall of the chamber, and dropped silently onto the floor of clothes. Then, he looked down at the girl. 'What was she doing here?' he muttered. 'And with a thing like that?'
'Maybe…' Chris realized she was panting for air. Her heart was slamming. 'We… could ask her.'
Hank didn't answer. He began tossing aside more clothes to uncover the girl.
She wore a blue satin negligee with spaghetti straps. One of the straps had fallen, and the white, blue-veined mound of a breast was exposed.
The negligee was taut against her rounded belly.
'Pregnant,' Chris whispered.
The girl looked no older than fourteen or fifteen.
Chris stepped over her and lowered the lantern close to her face. Her eyes were open, but rolled up so that only the whites showed. Her mouth was shut.
Hank opened the girl's mouth and fingered down her lower lip. Her pointed teeth were scarlet with blood from her broken gums. 'Do you believe those teeth?' Hank said.
'I… feel like I'm going crazy.'
'We had this thing figured out wrong. There's a lot more to it than Mordock bringing his victims down here for fun and games. Those teeth… she's pregnant…'
'I don't get it.'
'Neither do I. Let's get going.'
'We can't just leave her. Shouldn't we try to wake her up and…?'
Hank gave the girl's chin a small push. Her head flopped toward Chris. Her ear was bathed with blood.
'What?'
'She's dead,' he explained.
Chris felt herself go numb. She heard her voice, distant and strange, say, 'No. She can't be. All you did was hit her once, and…'
'Sometimes, it only takes once.'
'But…'
'I'm sorry, Chris. I'm sorry you had to see it.' He stood up and faced her. 'She was just a kid, and pregnant, but she was coming at me with a weapon. You don't fool around when that happens. You get just as dead from a kid. Come on, let's get out of here.'
She stood there, staring down at the body.
At the girl's distended belly.
'I killed her, okay? I murdered her and her baby. Those are the breaks. She shouldn't have tried…' He suddenly rushed past Chris and the quickness of his movement broke through her daze of shock and regret and she wondered if he'd seen someone else rising out of the piled clothes. She twisted around.
Hank, near the wall, snatched up the girl's weapon. He raced back with it, kicking up blouses and skirts.
'What are you…?'
'Keep an eye out. God knows, there might be more of them.'
He dropped to his knees between the girl's legs. Clamping the bone in his teeth, he gripped the hem of the negligee and tugged. The fabric split up the middle, baring the dead girl's pubis and belly.
'What are you doing?'
He took the bone from his teeth. As he plucked out one of the razor blades, he muttered, 'I don't know what I'm doing.' Then he slashed the girl open. Coils of guts spilled out, steaming as they met the chilly air. Hank lifted them out in heaps and dumped them aside.
Chris staggered backward. The pickaxe fell off her shoulder.
She knew, now, what Hank was trying.
No killer.
Wonderful.
And she also knew that her head was spinning and the light from the lantern was dim and she was seeing a blue aura around Hank as he disembowelled the girl and slashed with the razor. She carefully (wobbling) set the lantern down on the soft clothes and stumbled backward away from it before sliding down into darkness.
***
'Wake up. Come on.'
She opened her eyes.
Hank was kneeling beside her, a bundle in his arm. 'It's a boy,' he said. 'Seems to be all right. She must've been pretty close to…'
'You got it out?'
'All yours.' He set the bundle down between her breasts. Chris felt its warmth. It was moving. She parted the sweater that was wrapped around it and saw a pudgy face with half open eyes.
'God,' she whispered.
'You're not much of a midwife,' Hank said, 'but at least you didn't set the place on fire.'
Chris put her arms gently around the baby.
'Come on,' Hank said. 'Let's get going.'
***
'Lemme ha' s'more,' Kyle said, slurring his words as if he were drunk. Paula pressed the bottle against his belly. He took it, raised it to his mouth and upended it. Whisky sloshed against his pinched lips. He made swallowing sounds, then sighed, said, 'Goo' stuff,' and gave the bottle back to her.
'Through the teeth 'n over the gums, watch out, stomach, here it comes.' He heard Paula drink. 'Good for what ails you,' she said. 'That's what my dad says, "Good for what ails you." '
'Your dad drink a lot?'
'Yaaah, he's not a boozer. That what you mean? He's not a boozer, but he drinks. Has a couple 'fore dinner, but just on weekends. Used to be a boozer. Cause of Vietnam, Mom said. Then he smashed up the car with me 'n Mom in it. That was the last time he ever got slicko.'
'I'zat when your Mom got killed?' Kyle asked.
'Naw. Nobody got hurt. I was like two years old. Even remember the crash. Mom, she had a urinism.'
'A what?'
'A uri… aneurysm. A blood vessel in her brain. It just blew and she keeled over.'
'Gcez.' Kyle put a hand on her knee. She was sitting beside him on the sleeping bag with her legs crossed. Earlier, he had unzipped the sleeping bag, spread it open and brought its end up to cover their legs. Paula's knee was warm. He slid his hand to the hem of her kilt, and patted her thigh.
He heard Paula take another drink. 'Leas.'
'It was quick, y'know? Better'n cancer or shit like that. Or AIDs. Jesus. Freaks me out, start thinking about shit like AIDs. 'Nough to make you stay a virgin.'
'Me, too. It's too damn dangerous.' He realized he had forgotten to slur his speech, but decided it didn't matter. Paula was sounding pretty smashed - probably too smashed to notice. He'd taken a few swallows, at first, but had only pretended to drink once he realized the control he would have over Paula if he could get her sloshed.
'You never… did it?' she asked.
'Nope.'
Amy Lawson,
he thought, and suddenly felt hot and squirmy inside.
What if Amy Lawson had it?
'How'd your mother die?' Paula asked.
'She didn't. She ran off with some guy.'
'Oh yeah, tha's right. Ran off.'
'Bitch.'
'She visit?'
'She doesn't visit, doesn't even send me a fuckin' Christmas card.'
'Tha'sa pits.'
'Haven't heard shit since the day she ran off. Four years. Didn't even say goodbye. Just left a note in the typewriter saying she was sick of wasting her life in "Hotel Boondocks" and she was going away with some rich guy who'd checked in the day before. Said that never saw me or Dad again, it'd be too soon. Milch. Hope she got an aneurysm.'
'Oh, Kyle. I'm sorry.'
'Yeah, Well. So much for mothers.'
He heard the bottle clink softly. Then Paula twisted herself towards him, her knee nudging the side of his leg. He slid his hand farther up her thigh, and she didn't protest. He felt the softness of her breast against his upper arm. Her hand found his face and stroked it. The way she leaned on him, he couldn't have stayed sitting if he'd wanted to. He didn't want to. He let himself drop backward onto the sleeping bag and felt her smooth skin slide under his hand as she straightened out her legs. He felt her other thigh on the back of his hand. Felt the slick fabric of her panties. Heat.
I didn't even do this myself,
he thought.
Just an accident. She did it stretching out like that.
God.
A delicious current seemed to surge from her body into his hand and up his arm - sizzling through his whole body, stealing his breath away, making his heart race, swelling his penis to a stout rod.
Then her fingers gently wrapped his wrist and pulled his hand away from the silken fabric, away from the heat, and guided it out from under her skirt.
Okay,
he thought.
Okay, don't want to spook her.
He put that arm under her head and rolled onto his side. Paula kissed him, but there seemed to be no passion in it. More like a goodnight kiss she might give her lather. Then she lay still except for a hand slowly caressing his back.