Mythology Abroad (18 page)

“Last oasis for twenty miles,” he told himself. This junction was the largest opening in which he had been, with just enough room to stretch. He wiggled his shoulders, feeling the cramp relax slightly. Twisting and maneuvering in the narrow tunnel with difficulty, he reversed his position so his head was hanging over the edge of the slab just above the source of the stream. With a cupped hand, he scooped up water. It was cold, and except for being mineral heavy, tasted pure. It was probably rainwater, precipitating down through the porous construction of the rock.

He became conscious of a panting, gasping noise echoing around him, and felt hot sweat break out on his forehead in fear. Was there something following him? Was the
bodach
there right behind him? Keith felt a wash of terror break over him. He held his breath to listen, and the sound ceased. Keith expelled air in a gasp that turned into relieved, nearly hysterical laughter, and heard the gasping start again. “It’s me.”

It was his own breathing, magnified by the enveloping walls. The
bodach
was certainly seeing to it that he was sufficiently punished for disturbing it. He had nearly scared himself to death.

At the top of the next slab, he came to a dead end. Keith was forced to snake his way downhill slightly and to the right, where he had seen the blackness of a new passageway. His sodden jacket caught on a projection. Keith stopped to pull it loose. It didn’t want to come. He yanked. The fabric came free suddenly, sending him sliding quickly down the tube on the mass of wet wool as if he had been greased.

“Help!”

Keith tried to stop his fall by sticking out his hands and feet into the tunnel’s narrow sides, but that only got them bruised. At last, with an effort, he rose to his knees, bracing his back against the top of the sloping tunnel. He knelt there panting for a moment, before cautiously beginning the climb back to his turnoff. He was getting tired, and, he hated to admit, hungry. He had been too excited to eat much dinner. How long ago was that? A few hours or a few days?

The passage to the right led him to a perfectly level T-junction. Keith waited for a moment, feeling for the air currents before he decided which way to go. The only clue he had for leaving this labyrinth was the wind from the outside world. He put his chin down on his folded arms to rest.

It was only the faintest hint, but the breeze felt stronger against his left cheek and whisker than his right. In a moment, Keith picked himself up and rubbed his palms together. They were raw and hurt, and he knew that if he could see them, they’d be red. He thought about taking his socks off his feet and putting them on his hands.

“So long as I’m walking on them, that is. I’m not up to crawling like this anymore,” Keith admitted to himself. “It’s just not a habit that stays with you.” He decided against it only because he needed the sensitivity of his fingers to help guide him through this labyrinth. Somehow, he’d make it up to his shredded palms later.

There seemed to be more moss wedged into the crevices of the stones. Some of it dangled in his way like ghostly spider webs. The glow had increased to where Keith could distinguish the outline of his own hands and arms. Realizing that he couldn’t go on indefinitely without food, he decided to try and alter the spell. If the spelled light could follow him so easily, maybe a ring of the glow could go up toward the sunshine outside, and come back toward him, over and over again, like a neon sign arrow in reverse. He could follow that out. Of course, there were dangers in an idea like that, if the end of the line terminated in a hole too small for him to crawl through, or over a sheer cliff face. Or maybe he was so far underground it would take forever for the light to get back to him. But if the idea worked, Keith felt it was worth the risk. He concentrated, and the glow diminished around him to total darkness.

He waited. Nothing happened for a long time, and Keith felt his hopeful mood start to ebb. “I didn’t know when I was well off,” he groaned, and started to reverse the spell.

A tiny light appeared just out of the edge of vision, and crept toward him. It was no more than a bit of spidery tracing on the floor, but Keith stared at it with growing joy. “It worked!” he crowed. He crawled energetically along it, as it faded out beneath his hands.

Periodically, his neon sign would disappear completely. Keith took these opportunities to stop and rest until the sun-line renewed itself again. He was making progress steadily upward. Without a regular source of light, he had to rely more heavily than before on his whiskers. He blessed Holl for giving them to him as last year’s Christmas gift. At the time, they had been a kind of running family joke. Now, they were saving him.

“I wish Holl was here. No, that’s rotten. I wish I was with Holl. He’s probably drinking tea and playing with Mrs. Mackenzie’s cats.” The discomfort in his hands and knees was increasing, but he ignored it. He had to.

As Keith had feared, the next turnoff ended in a T-junction at a solid stone wall with a hand-sized hole in it. The light, instead of following either of the available paths, came through the wall. In dismay, Keith slapped at the rock. His palm stung, and he winced.

“Now what? Hey, spell, this doesn’t help!”

The mosslight continued to glow dispassionately through the hole in the wall. Apparently, this was all the aid his spell could muster. Keith put his eye to the opening and squinted through.

There seemed to be a passageway on the other side, because the light followed the thickness of the wall and then dropped off. He could see a thinner line reappear at some distance way, but that was all. Flipping a mental coin, he chose to turn right. The fine yellow glow died away again as he crept away from the T-junction, leaving him in the dark.

This path turned unexpectedly again and again, growing smaller all the while. Keith had to pay close attention to his whiskers to avoid bashing his head on the irregular ceiling. The tunnel had narrowed to barely a foot in diameter. In the end, he was reduced to creeping forward on his belly like a snake. He had to crawl with one arm extended forward to keep from getting his shoulders wedged.

“I feel like I’m being swallowed by the mountain,” he thought. He put his head down and scrabbled his way out of the tight spot. Without the light breeze playing constantly on his face, he knew he would go out of his mind with fear. He had to keep from thinking about the tons of rock, poised above him only by a fluke of nature. If they did any more blasting nearby, the strata could come down on him and squash him flat, and no one would ever know.

The passage led him steadily around in a loop that went in the general direction of his mosslight. Any minute, he expected to see the burning yellow-white line. That hope was almost all that kept him pushing forward through the stone tube.

Keith crept over a slight bump in the passage floor, and down again. As soon as his hands touched down, he realized he had found the steam once more. There was two inches of water pooling in the worn floor of the tunnel, only this time, it was flowing in the direction he was going. Miserably, he plowed through it, feeling the water soak in through his clothes to his chafed and chilled skin.

He came to a Y-shaped intersection. The left-hand side of the
Y
leveled off, and its ceiling rose to nearly three feet in height. Keith measured it with a tentative hand following the wall in the darkness. It was a much more inviting tunnel than the right turning. Keith blinked. There was a tiny spark of light down toward the left. That was the way back to his mosslight. Happily, he rose to his hands and knees, and crawled as fast as he could toward the light.

The golden glow grew much faster than he thought it would. I must be a lot closer to the way out, Keith thought cheerfully. Hot bath and food soon! He was able to urge greater efforts from his hands and knees by promising them that their ordeal would be over very shortly. Head bent to take the strain off his back, Keith made his way along the tunnel. Strangely, the air was heavy and damp here, instead of fresh, as it had been all along the way the mosslight took before.

A sudden roar shook the passage under Keith’s knees, like the sound of thunder. His eyes flew up in horror. There was a golden glow only a few feet before him, but it wasn’t his little line of spelled moss. It was two points of light like eyes, and the rest of the fearsome face was coalescing around them as he watched. There was a brief suggestion of fangs, then horns, then a loose and stringy mane. He had blundered into something’s lair. What was it? The creature roared again, right in his face.

Keith let out a yell and turned almost double on himself to get away from the wide open maw. He backpedaled in the tunnel, flipped over like a cat in a box, and fled back up the passage. The apparition pursued him, its roar causing the whole mountain to vibrate. Pebbles worked loose from the ceiling and fell on him as he scrabbled toward the lower tunnel.

Maybe it’s too big to follow me, he prayed. He couldn’t make any speed in the low tunnel, not on his elbows and toes, not in the water. All too soon, his whiskers signaled that there was an obstruction in his way. He ducked, and squirmed into the low passage, huddling his body into the smallest knot he could.

The bellowing face was almost on top of him now, bearing down on him like an approaching express train. Keith had nowhere to retreat. The yellow fangs clashed against one another like a boar’s tusks, and the hot strings of the mane whipped like summer lightning in the utter blackness of the tunnel, leaving burning afterimages. Terrified, Keith threw his arms over his head and waited for the inevitable. He was going to die.

In his ears, the roaring grew and grew, buffeting his ears with sound. Keith imagined the fangs lowering toward his back. His skin tautened, waiting for the first points to tear through the cloth, and then his flesh.

Nothing touched him. His whiskers didn’t so much as twitch. The beast’s noise died away suddenly, leaving silence in its wake. Keith looked up. The beast was nowhere in sight. It had vanished.

If something that big was heading straight at him, and it didn’t pass him, and it didn’t have room to turn around, A) it must have been an illusion, or B) it went right into one of the stone sides of the tunnel without using a door. Keith was pulling for option A with all his might. In any case, he recognized it as a warning. He’d have to follow the right fork, water, low ceiling and all. The next time, those fangs probably wouldn’t be illusionary.

He wondered briefly if other magical things affected each other. Could passing through another magic field possibly have taken off the spell that the
bodach
laid on him? It was worth an experiment. He felt in his mouth for his fillings. Nothing. His teeth were still hollow and aching in the cold. He tried bucking the terms of the curse. “Say, mister, can you give me change for a d—, d—, doh—” He attempted heroically to force the word “dollar” out of his mouth, and his teeth still ached horribly whenever the cold air hit the open cavities. “No way,” he said unhappily. “I need expert help.”

The right passage bore a striking resemblance to household plumbing. Keith found himself snaking through smoother tunnels than before, thought they were low and narrow. His jacket and trousers were no longer catching on the stone.

Something clicked as he put his hand down on it in the water. It felt like a flat stick. It was too knobby to ease his way over, so he elected to push it along in front of him in the extended hand. As he crept downhill, the flow of the water started to become stronger. Little trickles joined the main tunnel from small cataracts that rained down on Keith as he passed. Now there was a genuine stream gurgling around him.

Keith’s whiskers broadcast an emergency message as soon as his hands touched a ring of rock ahead of him. This was going to be a really tight fit. Gently, Keith eased forward, trying to ignore the water building up behind him. First one shoulder passed through, then the other. He pushed all of air out of his ribcage, and got his chest through next. Everything was going fine until he tried to get his hips into the hole, and remembered too late about his Pocket Scots Dictionary. It stuck up like a deadbolt in his rear jeans pockets, holding him pinned head down under the lip of the rock. Keith’s heart started pounding. He bit his tongue. His legs were now awash in stream water. He kicked.

Bracing his elbows on the other side of the ring, Keith took a deep breath and shoved
down
. There was a rip as his jeans pocket tore loose. He was free! With nothing left to hold him in place, Keith tumbled over the lip of the rock and down, followed by a cataract of water.

He landed with a splash in a fast-flowing pond several feet deep, which swirled him around and then dragged him into a broader stream leading further into the bowels of the mountain. Keith banged into rocks and projections sticking out into the water. Gasping, he fought to stay at the surface, but not too high, fearing there might be a low ceiling above him.

His mind started composing epitaphs for an empty tomb in his family cemetery back in Illinois: “Keith Doyle, Died Aged 20. He Rediscovered the Little Folk.” “Keith Doyle, Died Aged 20. He Duked it out with a Bogey and Lost.” “Keith Doyle, Died Aged 20, Drowned …”

Boy, am I morbid, he thought. At that moment, the stream turned and deposited him, along with a lot of other debris, in a small hollow. Gratefully, he crawled onto the small bank and held tightly to an outcropping of coarse rock as a shower of small pebbles cascaded down on him from higher up. Every square inch of his body felt as if it had been bruised. I wonder if I should be talking about muchnesses or something, like Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole. He coughed up stream water and gasped, tossing his wet hair out of his eyes.

He remembered the voice of the
bodach
as it threw the curse on him, which would prevent him from talking about liquor, money, or women ever again.
I can live with it
, Keith vowed. All he could think of were longing visions of food, warmth, and not being wet any more.
Maybe Holl can find a way to take the curse off before I have to deal with it in public.