Blood Beast (9 page)
“You’ve got to be joking!” Loch snorts.
“What?” Bill-E frowns. “You’re not coming with me?”
“We can’t go down there,” I mutter, taking Loch’s side. “Not without good climbing boots, ropes, those metal pegs with the loops that climbers use. . . all that sort of gear.”
“It doesn’t look so difficult,” Bill-E argues. “I say we try it and go as far as we can. If we run into difficulties, we’ll come back later with climbing equipment.”
“Why risk it?” I press. “Let’s wait until the weekend, stock up, then —”
“You ever used any of that stuff before?” Loch asks. “Boots, ropes, and so on?”
“Well, no, but —”
“Me neither,” he interrupts. “Spleenio?” Bill-E shakes his head. “If we’re going to do that, we need to practice,” Loch says slowly.
“So we practice. It means a delay, but —”
“What if someone comes along in the meanwhile, finds this, and claims it for their own?” Loch cuts in.
I glare at him. “I hate the way you start out on one side of an argument, then talk your way completely around to the other side.”
Loch laughs. “You’re too conservative, Grubbs. I share your concerns for our safety, but the Spleenster’s right. If we take it easy, go cautiously, stop if we feel it would be dangerous to go on. . . ”
“What if the batteries in the flashlights die while we’re down there?” I ask stiffly, fighting a losing battle but determined not to give in gracefully.
“I replaced them last night,” Bill-E says. “They’re all fresh.”
“Genius,” Loch murmurs, then grins at me. “It can’t be
that
deep — old Sheftree needed to be able to get up and down with his cases of treasure. The angle’s not too steep. And there are loads of toe- and fingerholds.”
“Let’s try, Grubbs,” Bill-E whispers. “We won’t do anything foolish. You can call it off if you think things look dicey. We’ll follow your lead. Promise.”
I hesitate and check the time. Glance up to where the moon will soon be appearing. I place my right hand on the rocky floor, feeling for vibrations, but there aren’t any. I think of all the dangers — then of the treasure, if it’s there. If I’m wrong, if this isn’t a place of magic, if I’ve been imagining hidden perils.
A deep breath. A snap decision. I grab the big flashlight from Bill-E. “Let’s go.”
D
ESCENDING slowly, testing each foothold firmly before setting my weight on it. Coming down three abreast, me in the middle, Loch on the left, Bill-E on the right. Loch complains several times about not having a light of his own, but Bill-E refuses to relinquish either of his. I’ve been to his house. I know that Ma and Pa Spleen keep several flash-lights around the place, ever fearful of power outages, determined never to be left stranded in the dark. He could have easily brought another one for Loch. A mistake or intentional oversight? I don’t ask.
It’s stuffy down here, warmer than I imagined. The air’s not so bad though. I thought it would be stale and thin, but there’s a good supply of it. Easy to breathe.
Part of me knows this is crazy. It screams from the back of my head, reminding me of what happened last night, the face, the whispers, the throbbing today. It wants me to assert myself, demand we make for the surface, tell Dervish, leave all this for experienced spelunkers to explore.
But a larger part thinks it’s thrilling. We’re the first humans to come down here in decades. In fact, if the others are wrong, and this wasn’t used by Lord Sheftree, maybe we’re the first people to
ever
find it. Maybe it will turn out to be an amazing geographical feature and we’ll get to name it and be on the news. Reni would really dig being a celebrity’s girlfriend.
You’re an idiot,
the cautious part of me huffs with disgust.
“Put a sock in it,” I grunt back.
I lose track of time pretty quickly. Have we been down here ten minutes? Twenty? The hands of my watch are luminous, so I could check. But I’m not going to start fiddling around in the dark, rolling up my sleeves, leaning forward to squint. I’m keeping both hands on the rock face and all my senses focused on the climb.
I go carefully, one hold at a time. Foot-hand-foot-hand-foot-hand-foot. Bill-E and Loch are the same. We don’t speak. My flashlight hangs from my right wrist by a strap. The light bounces off the rocks. I’d have to stop, turn around, lean back, and point the light down to get a clear view of what lies beneath. But I’m not going to do that. I’m taking no chances. The thought of slipping. . . sliding. . . tumbling into the unknown. . .
Foot-hand-foot-hand-foot-hand-foot-ha —
I touch ground. Or a very large overhanging rock. Can’t tell yet. “Wait,” I call softly to the others, who are slightly higher than me. “Let me feel around a bit. I think . . .” I extend my foot outwards. More rock. I tap it — solid. Gently lower my other foot, still holding tight to the wall. Gradually letting my full weight shift to my feet, I release my grip and stand unsupported. The ground holds and my stomach settles.
Bringing up my flashlight, I shine it around and gasp.
A cave. Not the largest I’ve ever been in, but a reasonable size. Lots of stalactites and stalagmites. A waterfall to my right. I should have heard the noise before now, except my breath and heartbeat were heavy, muffling my hearing.
“Grubbs,” Loch hisses. “Are you OK? What is it?”
“I’m fine,” I whisper, then raise my voice. “It’s a cave.” I shine the light on the floor around my feet, making sure I’ve truly struck bottom. I spot the shovel that Bill-E dropped. “It’s OK,” I tell my friends. “You can come down.”
They detach themselves from the wall and stand beside me. The light from Bill-E’s hat mingles and crosses with mine, and we gaze around in awed wonder.
The formations are beautiful, some of the most incredible I’ve ever seen. Water drips slowly from the tips of many stalactites, so this is an active cave, still growing. I recall lectures from a couple of class trips to caves. It can take thousands of years for spikes to form. Thousands more for them to alter. If I lived to be a hundred and came back here just before my death, this cave would probably look no different than it does right now.
“It’s amazing.” I sigh, taking a step forward, head tilted back, looking up to where the roof stretches high above us. “How can this have been here all this time. . . hidden away. . . nobody knowing?”
“The world’s full of places like this,” Bill-E answers even though I wasn’t really asking him. “We only see a fraction of what’s there. People find new caves, mountains, rivers, all the time.”
“OK,” Loch says loudly, shattering the mood. “It’s a lovely cave, beautiful, glorious, la-dee-da-dee-dum. But I don’t see any treasure.”
“Moron!” Bill-E snarls. “
This
is the treasure. You couldn’t buy a cave like this, not with all the gold and diamonds in the world.”
“I don’t want to,” Loch says sourly. “What good’s a damp, dirty cave? I’ll settle for the gold and jewels.” He looks around and spits. “If there
are
any.”
Bill-E turns, temper fraying. I speak up quickly. “He’s right, Bill-E. Not about the cave not being worth anything — it’s amazing, beyond any price. But we came looking for a different sort of treasure. We should check to see if it’s here. If it isn’t, that doesn’t matter — we’ll still have found the cave. But if there’s treasure too, all the better.”
Bill-E relaxes. “Yeah, let’s look. The cave isn’t that big. If there’s treasure, it shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
We move forward, three explorers in wonderland. Even Loch looks impressed, although he isn’t blown away by the cave’s beauty in the same way as Bill-E and me. We touch the rising pillars, fingers coming away damp. In certain places the stalactites and stalagmites have grown together to form giant, solid structures that join the floor and ceiling. One is wider than the three of us put together, a monster resembling a couple of massive chimneys.
“I’ve never been down a cave without a guide, or in such a small group,” Bill-E says after a while. “It’s strange. Quiet. Peaceful.”
“Hey,” Loch grins. “You know my favorite part when I’m in a cave? It’s when they turn the lights out, so you can see what it looks like pitch-black.”
“No way!” I say quickly.
“Uh-uh!” Bill-E chimes in.
“What’s the matter, ladies?” Loch laughs. “Scared of the dark?”
Bill-E and I share a look. Neither of us wants to switch the flashlights off. But Loch’s smirking goadingly. If we don’t meet his challenge, we’ll never hear the end of it.
“Go on,” I mutter to Bill-E. “You first.”
He gulps and turns one light out, then the other.
The cave feels much smaller now, more threatening. It’s probably my imagination but I believe I can sense shapes in the shadows, waiting to form fully in the darkness, so they can leap forward and pounce on us unseen. My finger hovers over the switch on my flashlight. I’m torn between not wanting to look like a coward and not wanting to fall prey to forces of magical malevolence.
Before I can make a decision, Loch does it for me. “What a sissy,” he crows, then reaches over, jams my finger down hard, and jerks it backwards, quenching the light.
My heart races. My breath stops. The walls seem to grind shut around me. In a panic I try to turn the flashlight on, but my finger’s numb from where Loch pressed down on it. I can’t find the switch! I can’t turn the light on! The shapes are coming! In a second or two they’ll be upon us, all claws, sharp teeth, and. . .
Bill-E switches one of his flashlights on. He’s chuckling weakly. “That was cool.”
I look around — nothing. The cave looks exactly the same as it did before. I was imagining the danger. I force a short laugh and switch my light on, then press ahead with Bill-E and Loch. We continue exploring.
After half an hour I don’t feel too hot. It’s nothing to do with the temperature of the cave — it’s warmer down here than it was on the surface — but with the time. I check my watch to confirm what I already know — it’s night. High above, hidden from sight by the layers of rock and earth, the moon’s rising, and tonight it’s as full as it’s ever going to be.
I get the same sick feeling as last night and the night before, only stronger, relentless. In horror movies, people sometimes don’t change into werewolves unless they see the moon — if it’s hidden by clouds or they’re locked away it doesn’t affect them. But that’s crap. The moon’s a powerful mistress. She can reach through any wall or covering and work her wicked charms.
Bill-E and Loch are bickering about the treasure and whether or not it’s here. Loch doesn’t think it is — we’ve been around the cave a few times and found nothing — but Bill-E still insists it could be.
“You don’t think Lord Sheftree would have left it lying on the floor for anyone to stumble across and walk off with, do you?” he argues. “He’d have thought about somebody finding the cave, either by digging down like we have, or maybe through some other entrance he didn’t know about. He’d have hidden the treasure, stuck it out of sight, so that even if strangers wandered in by accident, they wouldn’t find it, not unless they actively searched for it.”
“So where do you think it is, geni
ass?
” Loch sneers. “We’ve looked everywhere. Unless it’s invisible treasure, I don’t think —”
“We’ve looked nowhere,” Bill-E shouts, and his voice echoes tinnily back at us. “Some of the larger stalagmites might be hollow,” he says, quieter this time. “The treasure might be buried in one of them.”
“There’s an awful lot of stalagmites,” Loch says dubiously.
“We have time,” Bill-E smiles. “And maybe it’s not down here at all.” He points up at the walls. “There are ledges, holes, and tunnels, maybe smaller caves — or, for all we know,
bigger
caves. This could be nothing more than the entrance to a system of huge, interlinked caverns. We still have lots of exploring to do. We’ve only scratched the surface.”
“Let’s do it another time,” I mutter, head pounding, feeling as though I’m surrounded by a layer of fire. “It’s night. Time to go home.”
“Not yet,” Loch snaps. “I don’t have to be home for a few more hours.”
“Bill-E . . .” I groan.
“Well, Gran and Grandad will be expecting me back soon,” he says. “But it’s not like I’ve never been late before. I’ll tell them I was with you, that we lost track of time — which isn’t a total lie.”
I want to scream at them. The fools! Can’t they feel it? Even through my sickness, with a brain that’s being hammered to a pulp by a searing headache, I can sense danger. The throbbing’s back, stronger than ever. We need to get out now, quick, before. . .
Or am I imagining the danger, like I imagined the monsters in the dark? Maybe it’s just my sickness that we have to fear, and this is only a beautiful, eerie cave.
Even so, if I turn into a werewolf here, that’s more than enough for any pair of humans to worry about. Trapped underground with a supernaturally strong wolfen beast, Bill-E and Loch wouldn’t last five minutes.
“Look,” I snap, “we have to go. We’ll come back tomorrow and explore some more. But it’s dark up top — it’s night. We said we’d go when the moon rose.” I stop, gather my thoughts, and try a different approach. “We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. If we come home late, caked in mud and dirt, what will everyone think? If they start asking questions. . . ”
“He’s got a point,” Bill-E concedes. “Gran and Grandad put Sherlock Holmes and Watson to shame. We should play it safe, act normally, especially if we’re going to be coming here a lot.”
“OK,” Loch sighs. “But one more search before we leave.” He points to the top of the waterfall, where it comes gushing out of the sheer rock wall fifty feet above the cave floor. “Up there, those large holes. We can climb up pretty easily. I want to have a peek at them. Then we can go.”
“I dunno,” Bill-E says. “They’re fairly high, and that wall’s steeper than the one we climbed down.”
“What’s a wall to three hardy explorers like us?” Loch laughs. “It won’t take long. And if the treasure’s there, we can go home on a total, triumphant high.”
“Grubbs?” Bill-E asks.
I shake my head violently. I think I’m going to throw up. I’m trembling helplessly. Climbing’s the last thing on my mind.