Cry For Tomorrow (21 page)

“Yeah, you’re the only one I can totally trust now, aren’t you?” I crooned softly to the dog as I rubbed her ears. “All you want from me is a safe place to lay your head and a good meal.” I continued stroking her silken head, thinking. This whole business had come on me so sudden and there were so many decisions,
important
decisions, to make that I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do anymore. I was so deep in thought that I nearly jumped out of my skin when I felt the pressure of an arm encircling my waist. Even Dusty jerked in surprise.

“Hey, it’ll be okay, you’ll see,” O’Malley said softly in my ear. “We just need to let this play out and see where it takes us.”

I shook my head indecisively. I didn’t pull away from him when he settled on the bench beside me with his hard muscled body touching mine. “It’s just that there is so much happening and it’s happening too fast. We don’t know anything about this so-called agent except that he’s real quick to kill when it suits his purpose. What if this whole thing is some elaborate trap?” I turned and looked up into the old man’s face.
Old? The body I felt pressing against me was as firm as any I’d ever touched—and those eyes!

“Ben?” I blinked my eyes and stared. “It
is
you, isn’t it?”

“Hey, I already told you my name is Ben O’Malley, that ain’t news little lady,” he grumbled and looked away.

“No—” I grabbed his arm and turned him to face me again, “I’m right! You
are
Ben Holiday. You were one of the old men we met at that big Victorian house!” My suspicions were immediately confirmed by the slight alterations I detected in the old man’s face-and the twinkle of those bright blue eyes. But no, surely neither the man in the city or the old man from my building had been quite this young.

“What’s going on?” I resisted when he tried to pull me closer and would have gotten to my feet if he hadn’t been holding onto me so tightly. “You’re a morph, aren’t you?” I stared at him incredulously as I picked out other little tell-tale signs.

“Shsh!” He put his finger to his lips to signal my silence. “I’ll explain everything to you later. Just, right now, you need to trust me. All I can tell you is that I’m an agent working directly for the president of our country—please don’t blow my cover yet.”

I went limp in his grip and just stared at him, trying to wrap my mind around this turn of events. Totally distracted by the man, both Dusty and I
yipped
in surprise when we were suddenly tackled by two small bodies.

“Halie! We want to go with you and Jennie,” whined Merry and Jon. “We’re afraid to go into those dark tunnels and we don’t know those people!”

“Hey, everything will be alright now,” I soothed the children. I gave Ben a nod over the tops of their heads as I gathered the little ones close. “Listen to me, it’s not safe for you to come with me and Jennie anymore. We’re going into a place that’s really dark and scary. Go with Karol, she’ll take good care of you.”

Karol arrived a moment later looking moderately flustered. “Thanks, I’ve got them now.” She took each of the little ones’ hands in hers and led them away. When she was half-way to the tunnel door, she turned her head back and called, “Take care and good luck.”

I made a quick visual scan of the room until I made eye contact with my sister. She was at the far side of the room stuffing food bars into her backpack. The look in my eyes must have been enough, for Kelly immediately shouldered the bag and started towards me.

“Hey, sis, is everything okay?” she asked with a curious glance at Ben who was still hovering nearby.

“Yeah, sure, everything’s great.” Taking my sister by the arm, I started walking toward the door the agent was crouched by. “Let’s go see if we can help Rainor get that lock open.”

Kelly threw a suspicious look over her shoulder at the old man but she didn’t resist.

Before we reached him we heard the clatter of the metal lock hitting the floor followed by the scraping of the heavy door against the concrete floor—he didn’t need my help after all.

“Gods, it smells like old socks in there!” Kelly gasped as we joined the men gathered at the doorway. Dusty wedged her body between us and growled her agreement.

“Hey Kelly, it’s not too late for you to go with the kids,” I tugged at my sister’s arm to turn her around. “If you hurry you can catch up to them.”

“No way! From now on I am going wherever you go,” she answered before jerking her arm loose. Shaking back her mop of thick auburn hair from her face, she self-consciously gathered it in a pony-tail. “Don’t happen to have something to tie this mess back with, do you, sis?”

I already had my hand in my jacket pocket, fishing for the hair-ties I usually had stashed in its depths. “Here, this should help.” I passed a bright red tie to Kelly and kept a blue one for me. I was still twisting the tie into my own hair when Ben caught up to me again.

“Brave kid,” he commented with a nod at Kelly.

“She’s had to be,” I answered without explaining. Feeling a little crowded by Ben’s constant attention, I turned away and joined my friends as they began filing into the dark passageway.

“I’ll take one of those too,” I told Rainor, who was standing at the side of the doorway, handing out flashlights from a stack on a table beside him.

“I think you’ll find that the phantoms cruising this tunnel are considerably less aggressive than what your
friend
will encounter in tunnel number thirteen.” He smiled reassuringly. “I promise.”

“Thanks.” I looked up into his pale face and tried to read the thoughts boiling around in the depths of his deep grey eyes. I was relieved when he met my gaze without flinching. Every line in his not-so-old face and the silver sparks in his eyes shouted with the conviction of his need. As far as I could tell, he completely believed in the truth of what he’d been telling us.

A flash of movement caught my eye. “What’s with the two freaks trailing you?” I nodded in the direction of the two men lurking in the shadows a few feet behind Rainor.

“Unfortunately, this happens whenever I pass back into Tereus,” he shook his head sadly. “Some of these poor souls are so desperate for relief from the nightmares that they’re willing to follow me to the under-world. They believe that a
merging
will finally give them some peace.”

“Merging? You mean they
want
to meld with one of those phantom-things?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes, I’m afraid so. Unfortunately, it really is too soon and it’s not always the right answer, but they’re just so desperate that they’d rather risk dying than to go on the way they are.” Without further explanation, he waved me into the passageway. “You should hurry on now and catch up to your friends.”

I could tell that the dog plastered against my leg was totally freaked out by the dark tunnel, but she bravely stayed with me as I walked. The walls exposed by the beam of my flashlight were comprised of blocks of ordinary looking grey stone. We both jumped when the ghostly form of a serpentine flashed through my beam of light, but it merely swooped along the wall for a few feet before merging with the stone. Curious, I ran one hand along the stone blocks at my side and found them to be cool and almost wet to the touch.

“Does this tunnel pass close to the river?” I turned my head, expecting Rainor to be behind me, but I didn’t see him. I could have sworn I heard footsteps behind me a moment ago. I flashed my light along the walls of the tunnel behind me, but when I didn’t see anything I kept walking.

We’d been walking for nearly an hour and I was beginning to get tired, but the passageway we were following seemed endless. It continued to slope downward, always widening, and now it was wide enough for us to walk abreast.

“Hey! Everybody be careful, there’s a big drop-off here.” Jake’s warning echoed from the front of our procession.

It took only a moment for us to gather beside him at the sheer edge of stone where the floor of the passageway abruptly ended. The lights we flashed over the precipice revealed that the passage continued three feet lower.

“It’s not too far for you to jump,” Rainor called from the dark, somewhere below and ahead of us, “but be careful, the slope of the floor will continue to get steeper as we go on.”

“Hey, how did you get ahead of us?” I called but he didn’t answer. I was definitely going to keep a closer eye on him from now on. It seemed that maybe my friends and I weren’t the only ones with special talents.

Jake had already jumped and I could see the beam of his flashlight flickering along the walls of the passage ahead but I wasn’t in such a big hurry. I crouched at the edge of the drop-off and flashed the beam of my light across the smooth surface of the lower floor before lowering my body. I was most definitely not just jumping anywhere that I could not see.

“What’s making the walls glow like this and what are they made of?” Kelly queried as she pushed the dog from the shelf and into my waiting arms.

“I don’t know.” I turned in a slow circle, studying the curved walls of the chamber we’d entered. It felt like we were walking through a giant bubble that had been trapped within walls of wet sand. Glowing veins of green and gold swirled through the curving walls in psychedelic patterns that lit the whole cavern with their phosphorescent light.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Rainor told us reassuringly as he suddenly appeared behind us. “We’re just getting closer to the barrier. This section of the tunnel has been formed by trails of glass globes which are emitted by creatures we call glow-worms as they tunnel through the ground.”

When he heard our concerned intakes of breath he went on, “Don’t worry, even if we were to encounter one of the worms, they’re totally harmless—in fact they’re actually quite beneficial. Basically a glow-worm is a just a big caterpillar that eats dirt and evacuates its intestinal residue in the form of phosphorescent silicate globes filled with air.”

“Great—we’re breathing worm farts!” grumbled Kelly.

“But they’re glass?” Jennie asked incredulously. “Won’t they break from the pressure?”

“No, like an egg, they are unbelievably strong under the right circumstances.” He laughed. “Now, I want you all to be aware that we’ll be leaving your world behind very soon and, unfortunately, I am not the only one using this rift to move between worlds. There is a fair amount of phantom traffic in the region, so just take it easy and don’t let anything take you by surprise. Remember, they won’t harm you.”

As if on cue, a sudden rush of wind swept into the passageway and degenerated into a dozen individual phantoms of various types. Swooping about the confined space like captured moths in a jar, they bombarded us, urgently pushing and prodding at our bodies. Rainor chanted a few short phrases and the wind died and the phantoms slowed and moved away, giving us clear passage.

Mine was not the only sigh of relief whispering in the darkness when the phantoms backed off and we were able to continue.

“Okay folks, I know things seem a bit strange now, but everything is fine,” Rainor tried to reassure us again when we reached the apparent end of the passageway. “We’re going to leave the tunnel here and will pass through the curtain into the under-world.” He placed one hand against the faintly glowing surface. “You only need to lean into this wall like this—” The pressure of his hand revealed a slight pulsing of the wall, as if it were a beating heart.

“The curtain acts like a filter and removes and destroys most of the bacteria clinging to the phantoms and maybe even to humans. I’m afraid I’ve never had the opportunity to study the effect with normal humans before, only the freaks.” In the pale light we could see his uncertain smile. “But don’t worry, I haven’t heard of it actually hurting any of the agents that have passed through to converse with the Source in the past, so it’s probably okay.”

“Now, you’re going to feel a slight pressure.” Before anyone could question him, Rainor took a step into the wall and was gone. A moment later his head and one arm reappeared. “Halie?” Reaching, he caught my hand and jerked, drawing it through with him.

For a moment I resisted, staring at the place where my arm appeared to end against the pulsing surface. Taking a deep breath, I tightened the grip of my other hand on Dusty’s collar and stepped into the wall.

A soft pressure, not unlike that you might experience when diving to the bottom of a deep pool, surrounded me. and I was gasping for breath in the cool, dusky air. The startled dog slid through on her backside and yipped in surprise. All around me, my friends began appearing, gasping just as I had.

Stepping away from the wall, I took a deep breath of the sharp sea air. The rhythmic crash of waves drew my eyes to a gap in the barrier of large purple rocks and boulders where waves of silver washed over a beach of pearl-colored sand. A gull screaming overheaddrew attention to a dusky gold sky filled with puffy lavender clouds. I wasn’t sure why, but I was pretty sure that this was what passed for daytime in this world.

Dusty walked ahead, snuffling at the bushes and other vegetation surrounding the small clearing. She
woofed
curiously at a flock of birds fluttering about in the midst of the sharp-angled limbs of a cluster of purple-leafed trees, but they totally ignored her. Not so for the small herd of six-legged phantom-animals flushed from their hiding place in the rocks. Snorting in alarm, they leaped away into a tangle of bushes. Their peach and cream spotted coats merged with the soft brown and grey of the brush and they quickly disappeared from sight.

“Well, what do you think of my world now?” whispered Rainor from behind my shoulder. “Now can you see that it is so much more than just a place of ghostly creatures and stark shadows?”

Startled by his sudden proximity, I jumped, but I didn’t move away. I was beginning to get used to his sudden appearances. “Yes, this is truly special,” I answered softly.

Taking a step away from him, I continued to study our surroundings, noting many other things that I’d failed to perceive on first look, like the pink and pearl waves of wild flowers peeking from between the rocks and the tree limbs that no longer appeared barren but were in fact covered with boughs of trumpet-shaped flowers that sparkled like frozen drops of sunshine in the golden light. When I turned back to check on our guide, the look in Rainor’s eyes told me better than any words that this man loved his world as much as I loved my own.