Twilight Eyes (63 page)

I also had an opportunity to study the well-clawed feet of many goblins close up. Too close. Others were far enough away for me to see that they were carrying weapons and were searching between the enormous machines.

Whatever the source of the noise and vibration, it was not coal mining, as we had thought, for there was no smell of coal here, no dust. Furthermore, there were no grinding or drilling sounds. The quality of the rumble was essentially the same close up as it had been at a distance, though much louder.

I did not know why Rya had stopped there. However, she was very clever and quick-witted, and I knew her well enough to sense that she had not paused out of mere curiosity. She had an idea, maybe even a plan. I was ready to follow her lead because her plan was certainly better than mine. Had to be better. I didn’t
have
a plan.

In a few minutes the search party had probed into every obvious hiding place in the room beyond the grille. The goblins moved on; their disagreeable voices faded.

They had not thought to look into the ventilation ducts. Soon, however, they would correct that oversight.

In fact, goblins might already be inside the intake half of the system, slithering from shaft to shaft in search of us—close behind.

The same thought must have occurred to Rya, for she clearly had decided that the time had come to escape from the ductwork. She put her shoulder to the grille and pressed outward. The pressure-clamp latch popped open, and the grille swung on its hinges.

It was a risky move. If a single member of the search party had lingered, or if there were goblin workmen in the chamber, the enemy might be near enough to see us creeping out of the wall.

We were lucky. We exited the duct, pulling backpacks and guns and the duffel bag after us, and closed the grille without being seen.

Because we would have had to raise our voices to be heard above the din of the laboring machinery, we had not debated Rya’s decision to depart the ventilation system. Now we continued to act without consulting each other. In spite of this lack of communication, we moved in concert, scurrying toward the cover of a huge machine.

We had not gone far before I realized where we were. This was the powerhouse of the complex, where the electricity was generated. In part, the rumbling was the sound of scores of enormous turbines turning under the influence of water or perhaps steam.

The cavernous chamber was impressive, more than five hundred feet long and at least two hundred feet wide, with a ceiling that must have soared six or eight stories. Encased in cast-iron housings that had been painted battleship-gray, five generators as big as two-story houses were lined up one after the other down the center of the room. Attendant equipment, most of it on a similarly gigantic scale, was clustered around the bases of the generators.

Always seeking the concealment of shadows, we made our way across the room by dodging from one large piece of machinery to the next, from crates full of spare parts to a row of electric carts that the workers evidently used to get around the facility.

High along both walls and directly overhead, steel catwalks were provided for maintenance and inspection.

Also overhead, a mammoth red crane was suspended from rails that were embedded in the ceiling; it looked capable of moving from one end of the chamber to the other, providing service to any of the five generators that required heavy repairwork. It was not in use now.

As Rya and I dashed from one bit of cover to the next, we not only studied the lower reaches of the powerhouse but frequently looked closely at the catwalks. We saw a goblin worker, then a pair of them, on the floor. Both times they were a couple of hundred feet away, absorbed by their jobs, monitoring the plant, and they never noticed us as we scurried rat-quick from shadow to shadow. Fortunately we saw none of the enemy on the overhead walkways; from up there they would have spotted us more easily than from the floor, for down at our level the plentitude of equipment and supplies made a long view difficult.

Near the middle of the chamber, we came to a thirty-foot-deep, thirty-foot-wide channel that ran next to the generators, scoring the entire length of the room. It was bordered by safety railings. Laid in the channel was a pipe approximately twenty-four feet in diameter, large enough to drive trucks through; in fact, the noise rising from the pipe seemed to indicate that entire convoys of Peterbilts and Macks and other eighteen-wheelers were roaring past right now.

For a moment I was puzzled, but then I realized that the electric power for the entire complex was generated by an underground river that had been channeled through this pipe and harnessed to turn a series of massive turbines. We were hearing millions of gallons of water rushing downstream on a course that evidently went even deeper into the mountain. Looking along the line of house-sized generators with newfound respect, I suddenly wondered why the goblins needed so
much
power. They were generating sufficient electricity to supply a city a hundred times larger than the one they were building.

Bridges spanned the channel. One of them was only ten yards from us. However, I thought we’d be terribly exposed and vulnerable while crossing. Rya must have agreed, for as one we turned away from the channel and gingerly made our way down the center of the powerhouse, alert for goblins and for anything we could use to our advantage.

What we found was an acceptable hiding place.

The only way we were going to get out of this so-called haven was to lay low for so long that the enemy would think we had already escaped. Then they would stop looking for us here, would turn their attention toward the world aboveground in search of us, and would concentrate on preventive measures to assure that no one else got into the facility as we had done.

That hiding place: The concrete floor was very gently contoured toward three-foot-round drains widely spaced across the chamber. They probably cleaned the floor by hosing it down from time to time, and the dirty water gravitated toward those outlets. The drain cover that we found was a shiny steel grid in a sheltered space between machines. There was no nearby light to pierce the gloom below it, so I switched on my flashlight and directed the beam through the drain cover. The grid’s crosshatched shadows, which twisted and jumped each time I shifted my light, made my inspection difficult, but I saw that the vertical length of pipe went down about six feet, where the drain split into two opposing horizontal pipelines, each only slightly smaller than the vertical line that fed them.

Good enough.

I had the feeling we were running out of time. A search party had left this room not long ago, but there was no guarantee that it would not return for another look—especially if we had unwittingly left tracks of any kind in the ventilation shafts to mark our journey to this place. If searchers didn’t return, then one of the powerhouse workers was likely to blunder across us sooner or later, regardless of the caution we exercised.

Together we lifted the steel grid out of the drain opening and quietly laid it to one side, making only a brief metallic scraping sound that, considering the roar of the nearby river and the din of the laboring machines, could not have carried far. We left about one third of the cover protruding over the opening so it could be gripped and maneuvered from underneath.

We lowered our gear into the hole.

Rya dropped down and quickly shoved one of our backpacks into each branching horizontal drain at the foot of the vertical feeder line. She put the shotgun in one and the automatic rifle in the other. Finally she slid backward into the branch on the right and dragged the duffel bag in with her.

I jumped down into the now empty feeder line, reached up, gripped the edge of the drain cover, and tried to lift it into place without a sound. I failed. At the last moment it slipped in my hands and clattered into place with a hard metallic ring that surely had been heard throughout the chamber above. I just hoped each of the goblin workers thought the sound had been caused by one of the others.

I slipped backward into the branching drain on the left and discovered that it was not perfectly horizontal but slightly sloped to facilitate the flow of water. It was dry now. They had not hosed the powerhouse floor recently.

I was facing Rya across the three-foot-wide vertical feeder drain, but the darkness was so complete that I could not see her. It was enough to know she was there.

A few minutes passed uneventfully. If the clatter of the drain cover had been heard, it evidently had not created much interest.

The noise of the generators overhead and the incessant rumble of the underground river somewhere beyond Rya were transmitted through the floor in which the drains were set, and therefore into the drains themselves, making conversation impossible. We would have had to shout to hear each other, and of course we could take no such risk.

Abruptly I had the feeling that I should reach out to Rya. Upon succumbing to the urge, I found
she
was reaching out for
me,
holding forth a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich and a thermos of juice. She did not seem surprised when my questing hand found hers in the darkness. Effectively blind and deaf and mute, nevertheless we were able to communicate by virtue of the intense closeness that grew from the love we shared; there was an almost clairvoyant link between us, and from it we both drew what comfort and reassurance we could.

The luminous dial of my wristwatch showed that it was a few minutes past five o’clock, Sunday afternoon.

Darkness and waiting.

I let my mind wander to Oregon. But the loss of family was too depressing.

So I thought about Rya. About laughing with her in better times, about loving her, needing her, wanting her. But soon all thoughts of Rya led to a tumescence that was uncomfortable in my current awkward position.

So I called up memories of the carnival and of my many friends there. The Sombra Brothers outfit was
my
haven, my family, my home. But, damn it, we were far from the carnival, with little hope of returning to it, which was even more depressing than considerations of what I’d lost in Oregon.

So I slept.

Having slept little during the past several nights, exhausted by the day’s explorations, I did not wake for nine hours. At two in the morning I tore myself violently out of a dream, coming fully awake in an instant.

For a fraction of a second I believed the nightmare had awakened me. Then I realized there were several voices filtering down through the grate at the top of the drain: goblin voices, speaking animatedly in that ancient tongue.

I reached out from my burrow and, in the darkness, found Rya’s hand as it was reaching for mine. We held tight, listening.

Above, the voices moved away.

Out in the cavernous powerhouse there were sounds I had not heard before: much thumping, much clanging of metal.

Not quite clairvoyantly I sensed that another search of the powerhouse was under way. During the past nine hours they had gone through the complex from one end to the other, leaving no passageway unexplored. They had discovered the dead goblin we had interrogated. They had found the empty vials of pentothal and the used needles next to the corpse. Perhaps they had even uncovered traces of our journey through the ventilation ducts and knew we had left those channels in the powerhouse. Having found us nowhere else, they were giving this chamber one more toss.

Forty minutes passed. The sounds overhead did not diminish.

Several times Rya and I let go of each other, only to reach out again a minute or two later.

To my dismay I heard footsteps approaching the mouth of the drain. Again, several goblins gathered around that steel grid.

A flashlight beam stabbed down through the grate.

Rya and I instantly snatched our hands apart, and like turtles retreating into their shells, we drew silently back into the branch drains.

In front of me, slats of light revealed strips of the floor in the vertical pipe, the junction where it met the horizontal pipes in which we cowered. Not much could be seen because the crosshatched ribs of the grate cast a confusion of shadows.

The light clicked off.

Breath had gone stagnant in me. I quietly blew it out, sucked in clean air.

The voices did not fade.

A moment later there came a screech, clatter, and thump, then a scraping noise as they lifted the grate out of the mouth of the drain and slid it aside.

The flashlight winked on again. It seemed as bright as a spotlight on a stage.

Directly in front of me, only inches away, beyond the opening of the horizontal pipe in which I lay, the flashlight illuminated the floor of the vertical feeder line in almost supernatural detail. The beam seemed hot; if there had been any moisture in the pipe, I would not have been surprised to see it sizzle and vaporize in the glare. Every scratch and discoloration in the drain’s surface was vividly exposed.