Bear In The Rough: Book 1: Treasure Hunt (BBW Bear Shifter Romance) (11 page)

              As we walked along I contemplated my sudden softening towards Henry. He had slept in my room the night before, though we hadn’t slept together because we were too exhausted. Instead he had curled up at the foot of my bed, at my feet. He was asleep within 10 minutes, and I fell asleep not long after that. Together we made an oddly cozy picture of domestic comfort. For the first time I found myself contemplating the possibilities of marriage. They say when you’re young you want someone you can kiss in the rain; as you get older, you just want someone with whom you can do your taxes. In Henry, I may have found both.

              “We’re almost there,” said Henry, though that depended on your definition of “almost.” Within 20 minutes we had made our way back to the four-way intersection where the tunnel broke up. The waters of the river roared and surged around us.

              “If the island legends are at all accurate,” he said, “we won’t have to wait long before we can get moving again.”

              “It amazes me that anything actually lives this far below ground,” I said.

              “We’re really not that far below ground,” he replied. “You’d be surprised: scientists have found microscopic creatures thousands of feet below the earth’s surface, amid hellish heat and ungodly pressure.”

              I set down my pack against the wall of the tunnel and knelt down in the powdery dust. Taking out my water bottle, I took a long drink. We waited.

              “Almost,” said Henry, his eyes aglow with a fierce light.

              There was no noise to herald their coming, but all at once the furthest tunnel to the right lit up like a home automation system. Both walls and the roof glowed pink. It was like stepping underneath an acid-tinged, iridescent wedding arch. For the first time in our journey I regretted having not brought my camera.

              “I think we’ve found our way,” he said with a nudge, hoisting up his pack. With a heavy sigh I gathered mine and we set off towards the glowing, worm-lined tunnel.

Chapter 11—Henry

              All around the tunnel, for hundreds of yards in front of us and in every direction, the glow-worms were glowing.

              “Look at this!” I said to Liv, motioning her to the wall where I stood, mouth wide. “You can’t even tell them apart. It’s just one solid mass of worm.”

              “How many are there?” she asked me.

              “There must be millions,” I said, “but they’re miniscule. Far, far less than a centimeter. If you wanted to isolate one from the whole and examine it properly, you’d need the assistance of a very powerful microscope. Look at them all bunched together, steadily working. It’s a marvel of natural teamsmanship.”

              “They certainly work together better than any humans I’ve ever met,” Liv remarked.

              I swept my hand along the wall, cutting a swathe about a foot long where you could see the bare brown wall. Again motioning her to come forward, I raised up my hand in the torchlight. It was covered in brightly colored microscopic creatures. I felt like we were at a party and someone was passing around glitter. My entire hand glowed pink.

              “Try it!” I said happily. “Go on and try it yourself.”

              “Can you feel them wriggling?” said Olivia distastefully. “I can’t stand the feel of bugs.”

              “You can’t feel a thing,” I said. “They’re just resting sedately.”

              “I’ll take your word for it,” she said. Laughing, I grabbed her hand and ran it along the wall. She laughed and held it up to her face. It was pink. We high-fived.

              “I wonder how many millions of glow-worms died for that high-five,” I said.

              “No telling,” said Liv, rubbing her hand along the wall again and giving me another high-five. Bare spots were appearing all up and down the wall, but there would never be enough to threaten their numbers. Within a few hours the brown patches would turn to pink again, like a sidewalk buried underneath continually falling snow.

              We kept on our way. For thousands of feet in front of us the tunnel glowed with glow-worms. The darkness that had engulfed us for the first several miles had completely vanished. It was like we were walking at noonday. Somehow this created a sense of tremendous anticipation, like we had reached the last lap of our journey and the thing we had been awaiting, had been seeking so zealously, was just around the corner.

              The tunnel had run uniformly in one direction for many miles, but the path we were on now began twisting and turning at irregular intervals, first after 10 minutes of walking and then again after another 20 minutes. Oddly, this caused us to walk faster, which tired us out more quickly. It was an irrational feeling, but we couldn’t help thinking this change in the condition of our travels precipitated a turn in our fortunes.

              “We’re almost there, I can feel it,” I said in a raspy voice, pulling Liv along by the hand.

              “Henry, something just occurred to me,” she said.

              I slowed almost to a standstill. “What’s up?”

              “If we’re on the trail of your grandfather, and he clearly went in this direction,” she said slowly, “then… I don’t know if we’re going to find him alive.”

              I stopped. This suspicion had been nagging at the back of my mind, but I hadn’t wanted to voice it. I had thought if I kept pushing it away, I might not have to confront it.

              “He could be alive,” I said. “If there’s a sea down here, then there might be God-knows-what-else. There could be food provisions, there could be—”

              “Henry, listen,” she said. “Please don’t take this as me trying to crush your dreams. I just don’t think anyone could have survived down here for over a month.”

              “You don’t know,” I said, though even I was aware how delusional I was starting to sound. “It could be just like the movies, where he’s become the ruler of some out-of-the-way kingdom.”

              “That’s not going to happen,” said Liv firmly.

              “But how do you KNOW?” I replied.

              She said nothing. In answer, she pointed with one toe to a crumpled form lying a few feet away, with a tattered bundle on its back.

              His body, what was left of it, was sprawled out, his arm reaching forward, his index finger extended in the direction we had been walking. Bits of hair still clung to his skull, but his face was virtually unrecognizable. What distinguished him, what signaled clearly that this was my grandfather and not some other unfortunate explorer in dark regions who had come to a bad end, was the ragged green polyester shirt on his back and a stone he carried around his neck, a miniature version of my own.

              Liv searched his pockets—I couldn’t bring myself to do it—and recovered his passport, which confirmed what we already know. I stared down at the figure, hardly daring to believe it was him. I remembered when I was a boy, thinking Granddad was the tallest man I had ever met. Now he was shrunken. He had lacked even the dignity of a burial, unless you counted dying miles underground as a burial. The man who in my youth had been surrounded by family had died alone with no one to help him. The man who had been the embodiment of serene health had spent his last minutes gasping for air, unable to stir himself an inch forward.

              I felt my heart sinking into the ground where my hopes were buried. He had been the aim of my search, and now that I had found him, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on. Suddenly the whole rest of the quest seemed so senseless. No matter what we uncovered in this week or the next, it was all going to end in the same way: in a casket in the ground (if we were lucky) and mourners who would gradually forget us and move on with their lives and die in their turn. It was all just a big charade, this life. I felt the emptiness in the world where Granddad had once been, where he was no longer, and knew that nothing could replace him and nothing could ever bring him back. I could search every last cave in the earth and never find his bright mind or generous spirit. We had found a body (for that I was grateful); we would never find the essential things that had made him the man he was.

              “Henry,” came Olivia’s voice, gentle and earnest. I was startled; for a moment I had forgotten I wasn’t alone in the tunnel. “I know this probably isn’t the time or place, but I think you should know that your grandfather led a good life, that he loved you, and you should be proud of him for making it so far.”

              They were the same sentimental words anyone would have spoken in the same context, not knowing what else to say. For a moment I felt angry and wanted to snap at her for saying such vapid and clichéd things, but then graciousness won out and I realized she was being kind in the only way she knew. The experience of the last few days must have softened me somehow. Where before I had been petty, spiteful, my face set against the world and the world set against me, I no longer had the energy to argue with people, to make their lives miserable for infringing on mine. Looking down at Granddad I could suddenly see the end for which we were all destined. Carrie, Devin, Olivia, Maude, we were all on a one-way journey to a country whose proportions no one knew and from which no one had ever brought report.

              “But also,” she said, when several minutes had passed and I failed to respond, “I think you should see this.”

              She crept forward, one fist clinched over a large object. She opened her fist and dropped it into my palm. I held up my torch to look at it more closely; it was a smooth, obsidian stone, black with a slightly green tinge to it. It felt oddly cool to the touch. There were markings on one side that resembled the same markings on the green stone I was wearing around my neck, though the words appeared to be different.

              “It’s the cipher stone,” I said, after turning it round and round in my palm.             

              “So the legend was right,” said Liv, her eyes wide in the torchlight.

              “It was right about this existence of this stone,” I said sharply. “That doesn’t mean all the other legends about this island are true, necessarily.”

              Liv winced slightly, as though wanting to chide me for being so condescending but realizing that I was still emotionally fragile. “Fair enough,” she said with a sigh. “But it is highly suggestive, isn’t it?”

              Instead of answering, I stood up and began pacing around. I wanted to get moving again, but we needed to translate the writing on the stone. While Liv was working on it, I pulled a prayer book from my back pocket and began speaking over Granddad the last rites of our people.

              After about 15 minutes, she appeared at my side again. “I’ve worked out what it says,” she said. “It reads, ‘Forty feet below, two million pounds lie buried.’”

              “That’s pretty self-explanatory,” I said. “I wonder if it’s true.”

              “Is it self-explanatory, though?” said Liv, her brow creased in worry. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but we’ve gone far more than 40 feet below ground at this point. We’re under the sea at this point, I’m pretty sure.”

              “You have a point,” I said. “Maybe it’s 40 feet below something else. In which case, we’ll have to keep walking until we figure out what that something else is.”

              “How much further can we walk?” said Liv. “If we keep going, we’ll end up crawling out of a manhole in California.”

              But secretly I wondered if we really
were
40 feet below ground. It seemed to me that we had been walking along at roughly the same level for the last four to five miles. The tunnel had never begun to decline, not even a little. We were still at precisely the same level we had been when we left the cave a few hours ago. Yet there were seas and even rivers billowing and swirling over our heads. The most likely explanation was that the tunnel had, in fact, begun to dip, but that it had done so so gradually and subtly that neither of us had noticed.

              I took a final, long look at my grandfather and promised myself I would come back for him. Then we continued down the path in the direction his finger had pointed, which now began to incline at a steep rate. It was like we were descending a wheelchair ramp, only it went on and on. As had happened early in our journey when we first left the cave, the walls began to enclose on us; a sense of claustrophobia took hold. The walls lowered, giving the eye no relief from the relentless crush of pink. We were descending, slowly and incrementally, deeper and deeper into the earth.

              If the walls had continued to narrow, our journey would have been at an end very quickly. We would have had no choice but to turn around and go home. Luckily they slowly opened out again, and the darkness in front of us indicated that the tunnel of glowworms was coming to an end. We were approaching a new chamber in this underground labyrinth.

              “There’s something up ahead,” said Liv. “What is it?”

              “The end of all our exploration,” I said.

              We stepped out of the tunnel into a vast, vaulted expanse. The cavernous roof arched above us like the dome of an Arabian temple. Ahead of us was a rocky shore, and beyond it stood a lake stretching in every direction as far as the eye could make out.

“Have we reached the sea?” asked Liv.

              “If this isn’t the sea,” I said, “it’s at least connected to it. I’m guessing this is why we could only have come by night. The rising tide had to fill this pool with water, otherwise there’s no way we could’ve accessed it.”

              We drifted along the shore in a dream-like state, passing rocks the size of houses. Sleepy and worn down by grief, I walked in a fugue state, wondering if I was having some colossal and unnaturally vivid hallucination. It was a measure of how surreal the scene was that when Olivia suddenly began stripping off her clothes, I didn’t even blink. It seemed like the natural thing to do in that environment. Unbuttoning her shirt, she motioned at me to do likewise and gestured towards the lake.