The Slab (36 page)

“Let’s go, then,” Penny said.

“Slow, though,” Ken warned. “When we get closer I want to stop again, see if there’s any footprints around the outside besides yours and the boy’s.”

“His name’s Mick, and he’s no boy.”

“Mick, then. Whatever. I just don’t want to be surprised if they found the cave and are waiting inside.” He started down the hill, and Penny, thankful to be almost to the shade, went right behind him. Hal followed her, beaming as if this were some great adventure.

True to his word, Ken slowed again when they were able to make out the disturbed dirt at the cave’s mouth. Her footprints going away were clearly evident, and there were scuffled marks that could have been the two of them going in the first time. Just the night before, she realized. Eighteen hours or so, maybe. Lifetimes.

“Looks okay,” Ken announced. “I got to tell you though, I don’t much care for tunnels and caves and such.”

“Think how I feel about it,” Penny said. “At least you haven’t killed anybody in there.”

“No, that’s true. But when you’ve been in law enforcement for long enough, you look at every situation as a possible ambush. Once we go inside that cave there’s no back door that we know of, no escape route. Anything’s laying for us in there, we’ll be walking right into it.”

She had the sense that there was something he was leaving unsaid. But then he pulled a mini-Mag flashlight from a pouch on his leather belt, switched it on, ducked his head and went into the cave opening. Penny clicked on her own flashlight and followed. She had told Ken and Hal about the mushrooms, the writing on the walls, the whole story. It sounded unbelievable coming out of her mouth, but she knew that when three people had shared an experience that most other people on earth would find just as outlandish, their tendency to trust one another’s perceptions was raised quite a bit. Having experienced the magic for themselves, each was more open than the average person to new experiences and the not-quite-explicable. Hell, she thought, Martians could land now and we’d just take it in stride.

Inside, the air was considerably cooler than out in the merciless desert sun. But the goosebumps that rose on Penny’s flesh as they made their way through, away and down from the opening on a course that seemed as if it might lead ultimately to the Slab or the Salton, weren’t just attributable to the drop in temperature. She was nervous about what they would find. Ken’s ambush theory hadn’t helped.

Worse, she couldn’t “see” anything—not even the mushrooms she had keyed into before. The cave looked vaguely familiar, but she didn’t know for sure what was around the next corner.

Or the one after that.

“We ought to be getting close,” she said after a while. They had passed the spot where Mick’s backpack was abandoned on the ground, and the cave walls continued to narrow, closing in like some kind of trap. Lieutenant Butler had to walk with his head bowed to keep from scraping it on the ceiling. His hat was held in his left hand, his flashlight in his right.

“I was thinking that too,” the Lieutenant said. “Then I thought I must be wrong, because I haven’t been here before.”

“It’s the connection between us,” Hal observed. “Haven’t you noticed that we don’t even need to be touching anymore? Just proximity is good enough to link us up.”

Penny thought the old man was right. It wasn’t like mind-reading—or what she thought mind-reading must be like. More like sharing, she believed, shared perceptions—again, like three people might experience if they had been together for a long time, and constantly, so that they looked at the world from very similar viewpoints.

This was a day for new experiences, she guessed.

Notwithstanding that, she wasn’t prepared for what she saw when they finally rounded the bend and came into the stretch where she’d left Mick’s body.

It wasn’t there.

“He’s gone,” she said, surprised and not a little scared. She pointed at the base of the wall, amidst the glowing mushrooms. “He was there.”

“What do you mean, gone? You think he wasn’t really dead?”

“He was dead. When I checked him my finger slipped inside his skull. I think I felt brain. He was definitely dead, trust me.”

“Then where is he?” Ken toed through the mushrooms and shining his flashlight’s beam down. “I don’t even see any blood here.”

“I don’t know,” Penny replied. The same sense of panic that had attacked her when she first realized Mick had died threatened to return. “He was there, that’s all I know.”

Then she looked again at Ken’s boot pushing the mushrooms around, and a ghastly realization came to her. She tried to blink it away but it wouldn’t let go. “But…but there are more mushrooms now,” she said. “A lot more.”

“More mushrooms?” Hal echoed.

“Yeah, like four or five times more.” They had been confined to the wall before, she remembered. Now they had spread to the cave’s floor, and grew thicker, closer together. In fact, their pattern of growth seemed to follow the same basic line as Mick’s body, filling in the space where she’d left him. The obvious thought came to her. “They were just up on the wall before, not down here, where his body was. Not on the floor. It’s almost like they’ve replaced him.

“Or like they’ve been fed.”

Ken made a face at that idea. “Well, he’s not here now,” Ken said. “So what do we do? Keep looking? Give up?”

“Ken, I killed somebody.”

“So you tell me, Penny. I don’t have a body, I don’t have anybody claiming that someone’s missing. There’s some blood on your clothes, but that’s the only evidence I see. Not a drop of it in this cave.”

She shrugged. She had played her light across the opposite wall and saw the writing again, and remembered the argument with Mick that had preceded his attack. “Do you see that?” she asked. “The writing there?”

“Sure,” Hal said. “Plain as the nose on your face.”

“He couldn’t see it. Mick.”

“It’s there,” Ken put in.

“Yeah,” Penny said. She began to read it again, as if compelled by some force she couldn’t resist. Her world narrowed to the width of her flashlight’s beam. She started right where she had left off, and the words flowed effortlessly, seemingly moving from the wall to her brain without having to even pass through her eyes. She had earlier nearly exhausted the writing she could see from this spot, so she moved around a bend in the cave wall and continued reading.

As she moved farther back in the cave, the writing was older and older. What she was seeing was no longer in English, but that didn’t slow her down for a second. She saw it and understood it, and then the words—drawings, really, scratched on the stone with primitive edged tools, marked with sharp-edged rocks—that formed the bottom layer, over which all the rest was written, swam into focus. Circles and squiggles and lines no human had seen for centuries, and she understood all those as well.

“Penny? Penny…”

Voices from far away called her name but she didn’t respond. She couldn’t respond. She was no longer in the cave, but had been sucked into the world of the people who had first marked on these walls. Another time, long, long ago. She knew it was all in her head, that she was stooped over in the dank cave looking at indecipherable markings, but the markings played a scene in her mind like a silent movie on a screen, and she was helpless to do anything but watch.

Tall, bronze-skinned people, naked but painted and tattooed—here a man’s leg was all black with a row of red dots up the back, here a woman’s face and left breast were aqua, there red and yellow stripes encircled a man’s barrel-shaped torso—moved before her on a desert hillside. The sky overhead was dark and tormented, with angry clouds piled one on top of another like stones marking a trail. Powerful winds swept up the slope of desert, raising whitecaps on a flat body of water that lapped just below their position on the hill.

At the center of the painted people was a strange looking man, taller than the rest by half, which would have made him almost nine feet tall, she thought. His muscular arms and legs were scarred, and his skin, though it didn’t seem to be painted, was as gray as the ash of a day-old fire. He turned, slowly, trying to keep all the others in sight, even though they surrounded him like hunters around prey. This impression was furthered by the weapons in their hands—crude axes, knives, spears with stone points. The man in the center was unarmed, except for the nails of his hands, long and claw-like, and the clubs of his fists, and the gnashing teeth he bared at them, spittle flying in the stiff wind.

One man made his move, lunging with a spear. The gray man sidestepped and caught the weapon, using it to tug the other off-balance. The attacker fell to one knee and the gray man swiped a hand at him, as casually as a grizzly might, and sharp claws ripped through the man’s flesh, trailing blood. The man collapsed, bleeding out onto the packed earth, as his comrades watched. Penny had the impression that this stalemate had gone on for some time.

Then her field of vision changed, and she saw the same scene but from a different angle. Now she could see more people, women and children as well as the men. And more—what at first glance she took to be some kind of forest, she realized, was dozens of the bronze men raised off the earth, skewered on poles that ran red from their grisly decorations. Women and a few men sat beneath these poles, weeping and wailing, though Penny could only see their faces and not hear their cries. But watching, she understood that, while the gray man was ultimately responsible for this scene, he was not the one who had impaled these people and raised them for all to see. The painted people had done this to their own kind. Persuaded or compelled by the gray man, to be sure, but his hands were not soiled by these crimes—the only blood under his horned nails was that spilled in self-defense against the angry mob surrounding him.

The angle changed again, each change a vertiginous swirl that made her stomach lurch, and she saw yet another painted man, older than most of the others, squatting close to the ground. Tattoos covered almost every inch of his nude body, and jewelry encircled his neck, wrists, and ankles. He held a sharp, hard rock, and made markings with it on a flat shard of stone that must have measured eight feet long and four across. Observing him, she realized that he was a shaman or medicine man of some kind, and that the marks he made functioned as the casting of some kind of spell. And he was very nearly finished; his marks, each made with the sure swiftness of a well-practiced hand, closed on the bottom of the slab of rock.

Beyond him—and he kept an eye on this scene, as well, as if he knew what was at stake—the warriors continued to try to bring down the gray man. But more of them had fallen; their bodies littered the ground around him now, and the sand was red and wet. Finally, as Penny watched him, the shaman finished his spell, and the gray man suddenly stopped, his arms dropping to his sides, head lowering to his chest, as if he’d been a puppet and his strings had been cut. She could see his eyes, red and glaring with defiance, but his muscles were no longer under his control. Now the men were able to reach him and they did so, cutting and scoring his flesh—which, she noticed, did not bleed—then throwing aside their weapons and closing their hands around him, picking him up and bringing him to the shaman’s side.

For the first time, Penny noticed the pit next to where he worked. It almost matched the dimensions of the stone on which he marked, and was rimmed with low stone walls, like a well. The warriors threw the gray man into the pit, then spat at his still form, pissed on him, kicked rocks and dirt down onto him. The shaman watched this for a while and then spoke up, and the warriors came to him, helped him lift the heavy slab of stone and place it on top of the rock walls. The gray man was sealed inside.

And the water, until now just a lake in the distance, spilled onto the shelf of land on which they stood, and kept rising, covering the people’s feet, their ankles. They shouted and laughed and moved up the side of the hill, seeking higher ground, even as the water covered the inscribed slab of rock and the poles bearing their impaled brothers.

And the water kept rising and rising, drowning the world.

***

Ken and Hal looked at each other. Penny had left the building, Ken thought. Her eyes were open, the flashlight in her hand still shone on the cave walls, and her feet moved her along as if she were really reading the hieroglyphics there. But he had waved a hand right in front of her eyes, snapped his fingers next to her ears, called her name, and she had not responded.

“Can’t just leave her here,” Hal pointed out.

“Whatever she’s doing, it must be important,” Ken suggested. He knew how absurd that sounded—she might as well have slipped into a coma, how could that be important? But he knew it was true. Any man whose had accepted magic into his life had to be willing to let intuition triumph over reason from time to time. “We can wait a few minutes.” Not that he wanted to spend any more time than necessary here—he’d had enough of tunnels and caves to last a lifetime.

Sure enough, after a couple of minutes, she returned from wherever she’d been. She blinked and blew out a ragged breath, and her rigid body relaxed. Ken moved to catch her in case she fell, but she put a hand out and steadied herself against the wall. “Wow,” she said. “What was that?” Her tone was strange, as if she were in a cathedral, filled with awe at the glory of God.

“I don’t know,” Ken said. “But we should probably get—damn.”

His radio crackled—not broken after all, unless it had fixed itself. “Ken?” He recognized Clara Bishop’s voice, from down in El Centro.

“Yeah, Clara. What is it?”

“I’ve had a call from Lamont Hardy at the Shop-R Mart up there,” Clara said. “He says Mindy Sesno hasn’t shown up for work. He went by her place, and her car’s there but the doors are locked. He’s worried about her. He asked for you, said he thought you were friends with her.”

Before Ken could even answer, the radio crackled again as Billy Cobb broke in. “I don’t know where you are, Ken, but I could go down and have a look, you want me to.”

“No, Billy. You stay where you are. I’m on my way.” He turned to the others. “I have to go. Now. You two can stay here if you want or come with, but I’m going to be moving fast. You come, you have to keep up.”