The Devil's Breath (27 page)

The bow and arrows were proving difficult, getting in the way when he tried to wedge his back into the crevices. He swore. He should have left them with !Koga. No matter. Another hour—tops—at this rate, and he’d be able to swing into that entrance. But now he was stuck. He couldn’t turn from his back to his front, allowing a swing across the rock to grab another hold. The bow, jutting above his shoulder, was snagging. He had to get rid of it. His wrist burned as the skin was forced to tolerate more torsion with him twisting around so that he faced the rock wall. His cheekbone pressed hard against the stone; he gulped air, his free arm reached over his shoulder, grabbed the slender bow and eased it, like a contortionist, over his head and shoulder.

A small triumph, and much as he cherished the handmade weapon, he reached out into space to let it drop. As his weight shifted slightly, the crevice that held his hand crumbled. Loose, wet, shinglelike stone gave way and he fell.

He had barely time to shout. Reflexes shot into high gear and a zillion mental calculations made his arm shoot out to slam his hand, which held the bow, against the rocks. The bow string hooked over a rock and stopped his fall.

He hung, suspended from the wall, crunching his back against the boulders. Pain shafted through him and for a moment he thought he was going to fall again. The sinew on
the bow flexed and the shaft bent, the supple wild raisin wood allowing a lot of give. He had to trust that the bow would hold his weight for a few more seconds. Grabbing it with both hands, he pulled himself in to the rock face. He’d definitely pulled a muscle, or maybe even bruised or cracked a rib; the pain knifed into him and took his breath away. Hanging on as best he could, he gave one last pull on the bow to help gain a foothold, and as the bow finally yielded and snapped, he managed to hold on. He could feel his nerve slipping away as quickly as the bow falling into the silent void. He clung desperately, eyes tightly shut, willing himself to carry on. No flippant humor now; no kidding with the terrified voice in his mind. This felt like the end of the world and he was frozen. Rigid.

The fall had taken him to within ten meters of the tunnel entrance. A battle raged in his head, demanding that he think. He must have dropped about five meters, no, probably more, but he had suffered no serious injuries—plenty of pain, but he was alive.
Hold on. Almost there. Take encouragement and keep going. Keep your eyes open. Open them!

Someone was calling, a distant whisper that his ears refused to hear.
Concentrate on the voice. Listen to the voice. The voice
. Whose? !Koga’s. His dimming consciousness was like a dark cloud settling over him. If he blacked out now, he was finished. He was in shadow, and cool air momentarily helped keep him awake. What was !Koga shouting? Why was he stamping the ground so hard?

!Koga
, he shouted, but no sound came out of his mouth.

!Koga, who had watched him fall almost out of sight into the black shadows, screamed his name. A slow-motion acrobat act showed Max twisting and turning, grabbing for support, falling further and further, whipping an arm out, the bow string catching, the sudden jolt, the snap of the bow, and Max hugging his grazed and bleeding body to the rock face. But !Koga’s screams went unheard. And it was not Max’s struggle to stay conscious that was the cause, it was the quaking tremble of the ground and the roar of air coming up from the devil’s lair.

!Koga peered over the edge, down into the face of evil. A malignant stench and the first spray of water and vapor barreled upwards, concealing the huge tide of water charging behind it.

The mist billowed towards him; a few more seconds and the fog would envelop Max and the water would swallow him. Panic blinded !Koga to his own danger. His friend was hurt; in a moment he would die, and he couldn’t help him. He screamed Max’s name, but his cry was swallowed up in the roar from below; the cloud was almost on him.

In horror he saw Max’s hands slip off the wet rock, saw him tumble backwards into space, arms wide, spread-eagled, looking up, straight into !Koga’s eyes.

And then Max vanished into the storm below.

For a moment, Max was floating, suspended on a cushion of air. He watched !Koga vanish, felt rather than heard the water pressure roaring below him, and then he plummeted into a gray soup of spume and fog. Darker and darker the funnel grew as a bizarre jumble of thoughts and panic confused his mind.

They had gone to the big swimming baths in town and the fifteen-meter board was a test of nerve. There were a couple of boys who could dive from up there, but most found an excuse to not even climb the three-story platform. Except that Max could not turn away from a dare, particularly when it came from Baskins and Hoggart. It was sheer bravado, and he swore he wasn’t ever going to do it again. If they did it, he’d do it, he had responded to Hoggart’s challenge.

As it was, Baskins was nursing a bruised shoulder from a
rugby game, which let him off the hook. So Max and Hoggart had made their way up to the top. Max was surprised when he got up there to find just how high fifteen meters was. It didn’t look that bad from poolside, but now that he stood on the two-meter-wide board, gripping the handrail—God, it was a long way down. A hell of a long drop. Further than he’d imagined. His knees felt a bit wonky and his knuckles whitened. He could see that Hoggart was probably more scared than he was, because his jaw had slackened and his eyes were screwed up, as if trying to shut out the distance. Thankfully Max had kept his fear under control.

These two senior boys were always going to give him a hard time, it was in their nature, so by taking this leap of faith, literally, Max reasoned he would get them off his back once and for all.

He let go of the rail and turned to Hoggart. He remembered saying, “Last one down’s a sissy!” And without allowing himself to think any more about it, he stepped into space.

His arms flailed, his feet pedaled, and he kept falling and falling, his stomach lurching over and over again until he hit….

The water sucked him under. The Devil’s Breath was now a seething turmoil. He fell through the surface and kept going down. He remembered seeing the entrance to the tunnel and even more rock face below that, so he must have fallen twenty meters or more, but his descent was stopped by the upwards surge.

Instinctively he had held his breath the moment he sensed the fingers of water reaching at him, but the sucking
water seemed to go in different directions and the pressure was crushing him.

Fragments of light from above splattered across his vision as he was tossed this way and that, as if by a giant washing machine; after a few seconds his brain told him that there was no way he could fight this kind of underwater turmoil. He had to let the water take him. He had to stop fighting. The more he struggled, the less his chance of survival.

What survival? Already his lungs were bursting, his ears hurt like hell from the pressure and he was being tossed around like a rat savaged by a terrier. He curled up in a ball, hoping that might reduce the thrashing from the water, but it only made matters worse; by trying to hug his knees he squeezed his chest and there was precious little air left in his lungs. Clamping his jaws even tighter, he tried to swallow, simulating a breath, but that was a momentary distraction from the pain in his chest. This was the end now. He could swim the length of an Olympic-sized pool underwater by taking time to build up the amount of air in his lungs and then taking a strong dive for momentum. That was right on the edge of his endurance. This was like being smashed, time and again, by a tidal wave. The pounding water was pulling him this way and that. His legs felt as though they were being wrenched out of their sockets and his arms were stretched like a contortionist’s.

Blackness. His mind or the pit? He didn’t know. His last fragments of consciousness called on God, his mother, his father, and settled finally on a desperate internal cry for help to anyone who was listening—as long as they helped him. And behind it all was the glimmer of thought that tried to
make him fly. As he had before. If he could just burst through the surface and fly, he would be free. He could breathe again.

But the power was not there.

He had to open his mouth and suck in the water. He would choke and vomit, and he would die but he had no choice, his burning lungs were going to explode anyway.

The sensation altered. There were flecks of foam close to his face—that meant there was air. It was almost completely dark, but now there was some gray light above his face and he reached out through the frothy water. He was sure he felt cold air. Kicking and twisting, he arched his back, forcing his head upwards. His head broke the surface, his ears thundered with the sound of something like a waterfall, and he was barreling along, but his face was clear of the water. He gulped, the pain in his ribs eased, but his lungs felt raw. Time and time again, he kept gulping.

As he gobbled up the air, he could see he was being pushed along as if he were on a water slide. He was inside a vaulted cave, half-filled with the water that forced him along. Paper-thin beams of light, deflected from fissures in the roof, gave just enough illumination to see by. He was traveling fast on a white-water ride, and if he could keep his body in a fairly stable position he might be able to keep himself from being pulled under again. How fast and how far he had gone he couldn’t even guess, but the white water reflected what little light there was, enough for him to see a couple of hundred meters ahead.

The roar of the water, magnified by the tunnel’s walls, dulled his thoughts, but his mind was clearing sufficiently
for him to realize what had happened and where he was. The surge had taken him into the very entrance he was trying to climb down to. Pushed up by the water into the fluted walls, he was being washed along the channel that would eventually smash into the churning blades of a generator. Even if he had not fallen and had clambered down here, the unexpected surge of water would have caught him. In fact, he would probably have been crushed by the sheer weight and power of the water as it forced its way into the tunnel. By falling into the upwards surge, he had become part of the mass, and that had cushioned him.

As quickly as possible he took in as much of his surroundings as he could. Vaulted cave—possibly twenty-odd meters high to the first rocks? Then broken layers that kept going up and up—slabs of uneven rock that became cracks and slits for the deflected light from somewhere way, way above. The walls were smooth because of the thousands of years’ worth of water traveling through them, and he hadn’t felt anything like a riverbed beneath his feet yet, so the water was probably pretty deep. Must be, to have this power.

He was being pushed past a cave system. Cathedral-sized chambers went off to the left and right, but they only sipped away the overspill from the main flood that carried Max along. This wasn’t a sightseeing trip. As amazing and awe-inspiring as these underground caves were, he was still fighting to stay alive. His brain was back in gear, so he tried to alter the course of his journey. By dropping a leg down he could steer his body slightly, and if he combined that with an arm-dragging movement he could almost spin himself around in the water. More confident now that he had at
least some control over this pell-mell ride, he peered forward into the half-light.

Sooner or later he would have to make a life-saving decision, because wherever this water went and whatever it went into, he would have only a hundred meters or so before he saw it. And judging by the smooth walls, there seemed little chance of clambering out of this underground river, especially at this rate of knots.

He tested the strength in his arms and legs, each one in turn. Sore and strained but still working OK. Nothing broken, nothing torn. Aching muscles he could deal with. He had been lucky.

The roar of the water had diminished, the deeper underground he had gone, and he realized he was not traveling in any kind of downwards direction, so it was the sheer weight and volume of water that carried him along. It still ran deep—no bottom to reach down and touch. His breathing had steadied, the giddiness was gone. He was alert, but he gulped more air when the river took him into a black spot, where no light penetrated from above. That was scary, until the opaque glow picked up the rocks and white-flecked water again.

There was a different sound now: a hum—a deep, low resonance that intruded on the water’s gurgling. Max peered ahead anxiously. The walls obviously were throwing the sound, so it was impossible to tell how close he was to the source of the hum. But he knew the generator had to be at the end of this tunnel, and hydroelectric blades spinning at the rate needed to generate enough power for Skeleton
Rock were going to be the equivalent of him going through a juice extractor.

A bend ahead in the tunnel’s wall, like a fast curve on a race track, swept the water in and around, changing its direction completely. Max went with the water, trying to keep himself above the surface as the speed churned the torrent over itself. Now he faced a black tunnel—a green-hued light in the distance. A blinking eye. The water reflected no light from above; the green tinge barely registered at the end of the tunnel, and the sound was now a deep-chested hum. This was it. That fast-approaching green light must be from the machinery. He had to get off this ride in the next thirty seconds.