Hide and Seek (18 page)

The knives were all rusty and useless. We decided to go with what we had.

We stood there looking ready.

We weren't ready.

I knew what he wanted to say to me because I had the same thing to say to him: are you sure about this?

Neither of us uttered it.

There was no way to feel good about it, no way at all, but jesus, it was Casey in there, the girl I'd made love to and listened to and watched with growing pleasure for a long time now. The woman who'd told me, finally, some of the reasons for what she was, who saw me as friend and lover. Sothatthehookwassunkdeep. Iwasn't about to abandon her.

As for Steve, I suppose he had his reasons too.

I know he did.

I'm trying to explain this now.

Because it wasn't very smart, what we did.

When you're whole and unharmed, no matter how scared you are there's always thefeelingthat nobody's going to touch you, really. It's only when the pain begins that you realize you're vulnerable. By then it's too late. By then it's a matter of getting out alive, that's all. But before that you jerk yourself off a little. Your mind does a little survey and there you are, strong, intact. So what's to worry? Your body gets insulted: have I ever let you down in a pinch? Guess not.

And, knees knocking, you plunge right in. Thrilled. Invulnerable. To get strafed by the firepower of your worst nightmares.

People are idiots, basically.

HYoung people worst of all.

Because kids don't believe in death. They have to be taught in order to believe-and the teacher is always disease or gaping holes in the flesh. Wounds. Pain. That usually comes later in life, but it comes eventually.

All the heroes are children.

So we two, playing with makeshift bats and sharp objects, went inside.

Just a little at first. In that first passageway there was only room to go one at a time, so I led the way, pitchfork always leading me a little, flashlight in my other hand. I could always feel Steven right behind me, crawling up over my ankles half the time, in fact, keeping contact. It felt really good having him there too.

When we turned the corner the passage opened up a bit. But there still wasn't room to gu two abreast. So when he started to move up on me I waved him back again. I didn't want to feel cramped in there any more than I had to.

Casey's flashlight was up ahead. I knew when Steven saw it because I heard him groan a little. It sounded very loud in there.

The wind was colder but not so forceful as before. The stink was still bad, though. I wondered what Steve was thinking, encountering it full blast for the first time. I wondered if it was making him sick. You think weird things at times like that, irrelevant things really, as though your concentration can't handle the sudden strain. I found myself wondering how his whites were holding up. Actually thinking about laundry. It was stunning to me.

one

kne mis; awa

I put my flashlight down and tried Casey's. It was dead. I put it in front of my own beam and saw that the clear plastic head was broken, splintered with tiny webbings. Just behind the plastic the aluminum backing was deeply dented in two places roughly opposite one another.

As though gripped by a powerful hand or pair of jaws.

I handed it back to Steve. There wasn't any need to speak. I knew he'd find the same things I had-the dents were impossible to miss. So was their meaning. Somebody had taken the flashlight away from her.

And they did not do it gently.

I heard him put it down beside him. I picked up my flashlight and started to move on. Just ahead a seam of lighter-colored rock

caught my eye. Most of what we were crawling through was a grayish black. But this was white. Sandstone or something. Flecked with red.

Tiny dots of red no bigger than the head of a pin.

Glistening.

I put my finger to it and it scraped away. It was thick and moist and cold. Blood. I looked closer at the area directly ahead of and to the sides of me.

The wall was sprayed with it. A fine dusting of Casey's blood. Of the life in her.

On the ground, about an inch from my left hand, I saw a small pool of it the size of a quarter.

From now on, I thought, we'd have a trail to follow. We'd be crawling through Casey's blood. Abstract it.

Get it away from you. That's it. Let only the coldness in, the anger.

"What is it?" "Blood here." "Oh my god."

"Only a little. Not too bad."

I wouldn't have bought it myself. And neither did he.

"We'll get him, Steve. I'm going to put this pitchfork right up his ass."

We weren't careless. We moved slowly along those fifteen feet or so to that second blind turning, slowly and carefully, under control.

I kept wondering why none of us had heard her scream. It must have happened very quickly. Either that or for some reason it had been impossible to scream. But there should have been something, some warning. I scanned the walls, looking for more blood. There hadn't been enough of it to indicate a neck wound. So what had silenced her?

Why did you come here, Casey? You must have smelled the death inside.

I did. How could you have done this to yourself, to me, to all of us?

Nothing you've told me can explain this thing to me. No rape, no seduction, no death, no guilt. You must have known. Suspected at least. Why fling your life around like a pocketful of change? It

makes no sense. It never has. It must run very deep, as deep as blood and bone, much deeper than even you knew.

We watched and listened. Even tasted the air I think for some scent of him. But I didn't think I'd be taken unawares. There had been too much connection between us before. In that black war of nerves I had absorbed too deep a sense of him. I'd know when he was near. And this time he'd know I'd come to kill him.

Still I was careful. I knew enough not to trust sixth senses. I was trusting to care and brains and muscle-and sharp contact. And to Steven too, my backup. Moving along with a will for it behind me.

Look out, I thought.

You've made both of us damned unhappy.

I refused to look for more blood along that track. I tried to push back all thoughts of Casey. I didn't want them weakening me.

I thought I was being very strong and clever.

By the time we reached the end of that section the palms of my hands were dappled red.

The walls opened up into a cavern.

The room was circular, roughly, about twelve feet in diameter. Its walls were high, at least fifteen feet or more. In its center lay a wide pool of stagnant water, gray, cloudy-looking. Water bled off the ceiling and dripped back into ita steady, sharp echo.

The floor was strewn with bones.

Hundreds of them, many cracked and broken.

There were so many it made them hard to identify. Piles, scattered everywhere. I saw fish heads, crab shells, the thin delicate skulls of birds. Others were a whole lot larger. Dogs? Maybe. I remembered that day long ago when we'd peered into the house and watched the carcasses come out one by one. It was possible they were dogs.

It was also possible they were bigger game.

"What is all this?" whispered Steven.

"I don't know."

We stepped carefully into the room. It was a relief to be able to stand upright. A dozen bluebottle flies rose up to greet us. We swatted at them.

I bent down for a closer look. I picked up one of the bigger bones.

Something had been at them. There were teeth marks. Something

I broke one in my hands. It was old and brittle. I felt a measure of relief at that. It was easy to hope they all went back to the days before Ben and Mary abandoned the house-some sort of burial

ground for their animals. I didn't want to have to link them with Casey too closely.

We prowled around for a moment or two. The flies got worse. I was looking for traces of blood. There was something odd near the wall to our right. A pile of sticks and twigs pressed flat, covered with a ratty old moth-eaten tartan blanket, half of that cove red with dried seaweed and scattered with bones. To me it looked planned. Some sort of browse-bed. So there went my burial-ground idea.

Steven was looking at the bones.

"I recognize this one," he said. "It's a cat."

"How do you know?"

"College biology. And there are birds her too, big ones. Gulls maybe."

"See any dogs?"

My feet crushed tiny bones.

"Maybe. We never took any of those apart. No skulls that I can see.

No jawbones."

He sifted through a pile of them near the pool of water. They rattled like pairs of dowels struck together.

"This could be a dog's. Femur. Could very well be."

"See any people?"

In my flashlight beam his face was ashen.

"No people."

"I was thinking Ben and Mary."

"No. No people. Thank god."

I found a thin line of fresh blood beside the pool opposite him, and then a few more drops a couple of feet away. Smeared, as though she'd been dragging. She was bleeding slowly and steadily.

In the cave this deep the flies were not just bluebottles anymore.

They were biting. I felt as harp sting on my cheek, another on my neck. I batted at them to no effect, except to nearly drop the flash light while its beam jittered wildly across the wet gray ceiling and plunged the area just ahead into the darkness.

That sea red me. didn't want to break any more flashlights.

I controlled myself after that. I put the beam to the walls of the cavern, following the direction of her blood. Then I saw what I was after. Another hole in the wall, just like the one we'd come through.

Steven was slapping at them too by now. They were diving at us both like tiny kamikaze pilots, hitting hard. I slapped at one and felt it smear across my forehead. There was the urge to start swinging with both hands, to drop the pitchfork and run. But that was the edge of panic. And it could kill you.

"Let's get out of here. This way."

Just beyond the entrance the tunnel opened up to roughly the size of a mine shaft. It was good to be able to stand up, even if you had to stoop a little. A whole lot better than crawling.

Good also to be able to go two abreast, to feel the security of another body by your side. To know it sported an axe handle that could bring a man down.

We made good time through there. It was just one long passage with nothing in the distance but rock and more rock as far as you could see.

It amazed me, this much tunnel. I guessed it started in the seawall and eroded inward. I wondered how many others there were along the coast just like this, maybe even deeper and more extensive.

You could hide forever in a place like this, if you could stand the cold of winter and found some way to scrounge up food and water.

It would never grow warm in here. The rock itself would keep it cool throughout the worst of August, and winter would be pure hell. Whoever had Casey was a thick-skinned sonovabitch, if this was the

As I say, it was easy going for a while, with only one direction to go in, but then things got more complicated. The section of tunnel split in two. You could go left or right, and they were about the same in shape and size.

We looked for traces of blood on the floor. There weren't any not in either direction. There was no way of telling what that meant for Casey. Maybe the bleeding had stopped because the wound

Jwasn't that bad. On the other hand, dead people stopped bleeding too.

It was bad for us, though. It left us with a choice.

, mm

In that place you didn't want choices.

I thought about it for a while.

"Listen, "I said. "It seems to me that we've been running parallel to the coastline so far, maybe moving a little inland. That sound right to you?"

"I think so."

"Then I think we should take the right. Seems to me that access to the beachfront would be important to whoever the hell is in here. That hole in the basement can't be his only exit. I'm thinking a hole in the seawall, something like that."

"Some way to collect food and water." "Right."

"Let's try it."

"I just hope to hell we don't find six more of these. You could get pretty lost in here."

We had lost the flies by now but we still had the stink. As we moved on, though, I started to feel I had it right, because the air seemed fresher, more redolent of the sea.

We were moving through short lengths of passageway-five steps in this direction, ten in the next but I had the sense that we were basically moving outward toward the rock face. Inside me all the troops were on red alert, armed and watchful. So were Steven's.

Both of us amazed me.

Walking two abreast like that you could feel the pull of tension between us; a strong, supple feeling. Strange. As though we shared the same nervous system, he and I, impulses tugging two sets of muscles, two structures of bone. I hardly knew him, really. But I knew him then. And you could see why friendships are so easy to come by in combat situations, why the loyalties are fierce ones and why you avoid them if you can, because the trauma runs so deep when shell or bullet shatters them forever. I didn't worry for Steven. I worried for us.