These High, Green Hills (29 page)

Something like light flickered at the periphery of his vision.

“Light!” he said. “I saw light.”

“Where? Thank God!”

He blinked. Then blinked again. But it wasn’t light at all. He realized his nervous system was generating neural impulses that resulted in the strange, luminous flickers.

“Wrong,” he said. “Something’s going on with our vision. It’s still adjusting.”

“Poop!” she said with feeling.

The sound of dripping water was random, but constant, and now he realized it was dripping nearby.

Were they standing in a puddle they had stepped through before without noticing, or something they had walked around and missed entirely? “Wait here,” he said. “I’m going to see if this stuff gets deeper.”

“Don’t leave me!”

“I’ll be only inches away. Let me check it out.”

“I’ll come with you.” She dug both hands under his belt and hung on.

The water definitely got deeper as they stepped forward. Then the wall on either side ended, and his hands were suddenly groping thin air. He sensed they might be entering a large chamber at the end of the passage.

“We’re turning back,” he said evenly.

“We keep turning back—and turning around! I’m so confused.”

“Hang on.” Dear God, what was a complete turn when you could see nothing? Had he been misjudging their turns? Had he been making half turns that sent them off along some other route? Why hadn’t they crashed into something?

They turned slowly, as one, and began walking. He kept his hands out, feeling for the wall that had been within reach only moments ago.

There! He felt the sweat pour from his body, followed by a stinging chill as it met the cool air of the cave.

“Keep your left hand in my belt and put your right hand on the wall, and don’t take it off, even for a moment. We’ll come back to the light, I promise. There’s no way we can’t.” His voice was about to gear down into the croaking mode, and he mustn’t let her hear that. In him, croaking was a sure sign of depression, anger, or fear, and she knew it.

They hadn’t been in here long enough for Larry Johnson to be worried. Knowing Larry, he probably thought the newlyweds were off doing a little hand holding, and he’d give them plenty of time to enjoy it.

“I’m thirsty,” she said. “Stop and let me take the day pack off. I think I’ve got a bottle of water.”

They stood with their backs to the damp wall, and she found the bottle and shook it. “There’s not much left. The flashlight ... the water. I can’t do anything right.”

“So, what did I come off with? Nothing. You get extra points.”

She unscrewed the cap and reached for his hand and gave him the bottle.

“No,” he said. “You first.”

“I think you should be first. You’re the leader.”

“Drink,” he said. She took the bottle and drank, and passed it back to him. There wasn’t much left, but he drained the bottle and felt revived.

“Why don’t I scream for help?”

“Not yet. We can find our way out.” Who would hear them if they yelled their heads off?

“I forgot you’re one of those men who won’t stop at a service station and ask directions.”

“There are no service stations anymore,” he said unreasonably. “Just places to buy hot dogs and T-shirts and pump your own.”

“We should be screaming our heads off. Someone will be looking for us, Timothy. They’ll hear us.”

He stuffed the empty bottle into her pack. “Save your breath. We’ve only been in here ten minutes.” Had it been ten minutes? Twenty? An hour? He couldn’t see his watch. He had never bought a watch with an illuminated dial, thinking it an unnecessary expense. After all, who needed to know what time it was in the dark, except when one was in bed? For that, there was the illuminated face of the clock on his nightstand.

“I hate this,” she said, whispering. “It’s horrid. We’re sopping wet all over.”

His unspoken prayers had been scrambled, frantic. He needed to stop, take a deep breath, and state it plainly. He put his arms around her and she instantly recognized the meaning of his touch and bowed her head against his.

“Father, Your children have stumbled into a bit of trouble here, and we’re confused. You know the way out. Please show it to us. In Jesus’ name.

“Amen!” she said, squeezing his arm.

“That’s the ticket.”

He wanted to stand there for a moment, collect his thoughts, get a real sense of the place. Maybe that would help, maybe that would give them some idea of what to do next. They had raced into this place, after all, like two heedless children, then panicked and gotten wildly confused.

Stop. Slow down. That was definitely the answer.

He drew a deep breath. “Actually, this is the way a lot of people live their lives.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never knowing, in the dark, constantly guessing. It’s the guessing that’s the worst.”

“Always working, dearest.”

“Sermons are everywhere,” he said.

“Speaking of guessing—you’ve been guessing, haven’t you, about the way to get back to the entrance?”

Why lie? “Yes.”

She was silent for a time. “We can’t possibly be far. It seemed so simple when we came in, just a long room with that vault thing and the urn.”

“Right,” he said. “We can’t be more than a few yards from the entrance. If it were a snake, it would bite us.”

“Did we turn right or left at that vault thing?”

“Right. We went around the corner, and there were the dinosaur ribs....”

“The dinosaur ribs came before the vault.”

He made a conscious effort not to sigh, and put his arm around her shoulders. “Let’s chill to the next episode, dude.”

“What kind of talk is that?”

“That’s Dooley’s new foreign language, in addition to French. Let’s take a couple of deep breaths and go from there.”

“I feel as if every crawling thing ever created is lurking in here.”

“Anything lurking in here is blind—if that’s any comfort.”

“Blind?”

“All creatures who live in caves are blind.”

“That makes sense, I suppose. I mean, what good would it do them to see?”

“I learned that in the seventh grade when we went on a bus trip to a local cave. I wanted to hold Justine Ivory’s hand while we were standing by the blind trout pool, but I didn’t have the guts.”

“In the seventh grade, you wanted to hold hands?”

“Didn’t you?”

“Absolutely not. I fell in love with Russell Lowell in the fifth grade, got my heart broken, and didn’t even think of boys again until high school.”

“Different strokes ...”

He visualized Larry running this way right now, with the entire pack at his heels. Hadn’t Bo said the cave was scary? And big? And the opening half-covered by brush? That wouldn’t sound good to Larry Johnson, who was pretty savvy about things of the woods.

On the other hand, what if the boys couldn’t find their way back to the cave?

“Oh, Lord, Timothy! Gross! Vile! Get it off me!”

“What?” he said, his heart thundering.

“Something fell on my head, oh, please, oh, no, it’s running down my neck, oh, get it off ... !”

“Water,” he said stoically, feeling a large drop crash onto his own head and roll down his back.

“Are you sure? Run your hand down my back.”

It had hit with such force, it must have come from a great distance. “Water,” he said again, smoothing her damp shirt.

“Timothy, we’ve got to get out of here. We can’t just stand around talking about the seventh grade!”

“Did you say you have candy bars in your day pack?”

“Snickers. Two.” She turned her back to him and he reached into the pack and felt around among the colored pencils and the sketchbook and the dead flashlight and socks, and found them rolled up in her underwear.

He didn’t know why it swam to the surface at just that moment, but he remembered Miss Sadie’s story of falling in the well, of the darkness and her terrible fear, and the long night when no one seemed destined to find her because of the rain. The rain had destroyed the scent for the bloodhounds. What if it were raining out there again, erasing their scent?

But he was making mountains out of molehills. Good Lord, they’d been fumbling around in here for only ten or fifteen minutes, and already he was calling in the bloodhounds.

His adrenaline had stopped pumping, and he felt exhausted, as if he wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep. He ate two bites of the candy, wondering at its astonishing sweetness, its texture and form, the intricate crackle of the paper, and the way the smell of chocolate intensified in the darkness.

“Please don’t eat the whole thing.” She had seen him in a diabetic coma once, which had been once too often.

He put the rest of the bar in her day pack, realizing he felt completely befuddled. He didn’t want to press on until the sugar hit his bloodstream.

“I’m going to start walking,” she said impatiently.

“Which way?”

“To my right. That’s the way we were going when we stopped to reflect on our early love interests.”

“We were going to your left. I was ahead of you, remember?”

“I thought I was ahead of you. No, wait. That was before.”

“Trust me. We go this way. Grab my belt and hold on.”

“I think it’s time to scream. In fact, I think we should scream now and walk ten paces and scream again, and so on until someone comes or we see the light.”

“Have at it,” he said tersely.

She swallowed the last bite of her Snickers, then bellowed out a sound that would have shattered the crystal in their own cabinets, forty miles distant.

“How was that?” she wanted to know.

“You definitely get the job of screaming, if further screaming is required.”

“Every ten paces,” she said, feeling encouraged. “You pray and I’ll scream.

“A fair division of labor.” He was feeling the numbing cold, now, and the dampness of his clothes. Didn’t the French keep wine in caves because of a mean temperature in the fifties? This felt like thirty degrees and dropping.

“Five, six, seven ...” said Cynthia.

His foot met thin air. He pitched wildly to the left, banging his head on a sharp object, and fell sprawling.

Was it blood, or mud, or the moisture that covered everything in this blasted place?

Blood. Definitely. He felt the sharp sting as he rubbed his fingers over the gash.

“Are you all right?” He heard the fear in her voice.

“I’m OK. Just a knock on the head.” He was struggling to find the breath that had failed him.

“Let me help.”

“Don’t move!”

Her voice seemed to come from somewhere above him. He reached up, feeling nothing but air, then touched a flat rock. He inched his hand along the edge, and found the tip of her shoe. “You’re standing on some kind of ledge. Back up a little, and take it easy.”

“Timothy ...”

“Don’t panic. I’m fine. I’m telling you, we’ve got to be right at the entrance. We’ll be out of here in no time. Stay calm.”

“Let me give you a hand.”

“Back up and stay put.”

He grabbed the ledge and hauled himself up. He had fallen only a couple of feet, thanks be to God.

Lord, You know I’m completely in the dark, in more ways than one. I don’t have a clue where we are or what to do. I know You’re there, I know You’ll answer, give me some supernatural understanding here
....

He stood up and leaned against the wall, and reached for her, and found her sleeve and took her hand. He had lost all sense of time.
A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night
.... Was he being introduced to something like God’s own sense of time?

“I’m going to scream again.”

“Don’t,” he said, meaning it.

“Why not, Timothy? People will be looking for us. We’ll never get out of here.”

“Turn around.”

“Turn around? Again? We’re so turned around now we can’t think straight. We’ve turned around and turned around, ‘til we’re fairly churned to butter!”

“Clearly, this is not the way. It vanishes into thin air.”

He stepped around Cynthia, and she tucked her hands into his belt.

The sugar was beginning to work. He felt suddenly victorious as he moved along the wall, his wife attached to his belt like a boxcar to an engine.

He walked more quickly now, his hands never leaving the wet surfaces on either side. There. That felt better. His adrenaline was definitely up and pumping.

“We’re out of here!” he whooped. He reached up and brushed away the blood that was running into his left eye. A handkerchief. In his pocket. He took it out, still walking, and patted it to his forehead.

When he put it in his pocket and reached for the wall on his left, he groped air.