Down: Pinhole (33 page)

And yet, he was definitely a project.

He drank too much, way too much. He had an emotional closet stuffed with baggage and she could tell by his restless, sometimes violently disturbed sleep that there were demons lurking he wouldn’t talk about. And if past was prologue, then his history of one-night stands and wrecked relationships was going to bring her grief at some point. She supposed that point had come when she walked in on him together with the long-legged Darlene. Now, so far away from him that the distance couldn’t be calculated in rational units of time or space, she wished she had given him another chance, at least the opportunity to explain himself and try to convince her he still loved her.

Where was he now? What was he thinking? What was he doing? Was he pounding the table in rage? Did he hold Henry Quint responsible? Was he pushing the lab to find a way to get her back? Or had he stuffed the memory of her into his emotional closet and moved on?

She gasped with air hunger and realized a hand was across her mouth.

“Shhh,” JoJo whispered.

“What?” she whispered back.

“You were talking in your sleep.”

“What was I saying?”

“Where are you, where are you—shit like that.”

“I was dreaming.”

“About who?”

“A man.”

“I have those dreams too.”

The driver stopped several times during the day to urinate but he seemed to always do it too near the cart for them to even think about jumping out. In the late afternoon, JoJo was so hungry she broke down and bit into a raw turnip she found in one of the sacks but Emily declined the offer to share. Finally there was a light at the end of the tunnel when the driver informed his ox that they were almost there.

She peeked out again. They were in a wood near a stream. If they waited until they were in the city their chances of being caught by the driver unhitching his wagon or by a passerby was too great, so she whispered to JoJo that they should think about jumping off.

They readied themselves. The cart was going slowly and Emily slipped off the back first, darting behind a bush when she was clear. JoJo followed a few yards later and the two of them huddled until they could no longer see or hear the cart.

Emily reckoned there were only a couple of hours before nightfall. She didn’t relish the idea of trekking through this wood at night so they would need to find shelter and food before setting off in the morning. Her plan was bare-bones simple and lacking in crucial detail: head due west until they reached the coast. From there, somehow she would need to find a boat to take her to the east coast of Brittania and then, make it south to Dartford where she prayed there would be a portal back to her time and place.

The permanent cloud cover meant she couldn’t get her bearings using the sun. Instead she fell back on her childhood time in a Girl Guide troop and checked the trees for moss. It wasn’t a slam-dunk, perhaps because the sun never shone here, but there seemed to be a predominance favoring one side.

“That’s north,” she declared with a feigned confidence, “so that way’s west.”

The stream was meandering in a presumed westerly direction so they followed it. The water was clear and cool and eminently drinkable and fish shimmered by. They talked about stopping to try and catch one by hand or with a pointed stick but it began to drizzle and they decided to keep going. Emily quickly gathered a pile of dry moss and twigs and put them inside her shirt. The opposite bank of the stream had a limestone ledge and Emily kept her eyes peeled for some kind of outcrop to give them protection from the elements. The rain came down more steadily and their clothes were soon soaked. The light began to fade and they openly fretted about the hard, wet night ahead. She bent over again when she spied a good piece of flint, then a piece of limestone.

With the light almost gone, Emily pointed and said triumphantly, “There!” at a black void in the limestone. It was the mouth of a cave.

They made their way through the knee-deep water to the opposite bank and cautiously entered. It was completely dark inside, and several degrees cooler, but it was dry. It seemed there was some depth to the cave but neither of them was keen to blindly explore.

“Do you think there are bears?” JoJo asked.

“God, I hope not. Let’s see if I can’t make us a nice fire.”

“I know, I know, Girl Guides,” JoJo said with a smirk.

“Why don’t you make yourself useful and pick up some driftwood along the bank? The drier the better.”

Emily stooped and made a small mound of shredded moss and twigs on the ground and started striking the flint and limestone against one another, unintentionally knapping off flakes rather than making decent sparks. The flakes had razor-sharp edges so if they ever managed to catch a fish, they’d be able to clean it. She adjusted the angle of strike and produced a better spark, and then another and another until a trickle of smoke rose from the tinder. She gently blew at it until it caught. Squealing in delight, she added more kindling and when JoJo came back with an armful of wood she laughed and said she never doubted Emily’s chances. The damp driftwood took some time to catch but before long they had a hot fire going and they busied themselves drying out their clothes and shoes as best as possible.

JoJo proudly produced her turnip with a few bite marks and put it into the fire. Minutes later they divided it with a flake and ate, what Emily claimed to be, the best spud she’d ever had.

Donning her shoes, Emily plucked a burning piece of wood from the fire and began to tentatively explore their shelter. JoJo didn’t want to go with her, nor did she want to be left alone, so she got her own makeshift torch and reluctantly tagged close behind.

After a few yards Emily said, “I don’t want to go too far but I’ll sleep better if we know we’re not sharing this with anything with large sharp teeth.”

The floor of the cave was fairly even and level. A few more paces and they were in an expanded chamber, its outer dimensions obscured by darkness.

Emily saw something and stopped so abruptly that JoJo bumped into her. “Look!”

She raised her burning branch and held it up to the limestone.

Cave art.

On a flat surface, just above eye level, was a panel of stencils of human hands done in red paint. Left hands and right hands, limestone-yellow centers with red ochre outlines. And near them, a single drawing in black, a simple and primitively drawn horse’s head.

“Cave men were here,” Emily said.

JoJo gripped Emily’s arm in fear. “How do you know they’re still not here?”

“This was probably made thousands, tens of thousands of years ago.”

“Maybe that’s what you’d expect on Earth, but, honey, we’re not on Earth anymore.”

Emily was about to try and put JoJo’s fears at rest when she kicked something with her foot and bent down to see what it was.

“Christ,” she said.

“What is it?”

She straightened and showed JoJo a stone bowl filled with ochre paint. She dipped a finger into it. “It’s still wet.”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” JoJo said, but it was too late.

They both heard it.

Voices. Throaty and guttural, coming into the cave. The voices took on the quality of alarm and though Emily couldn’t make out any words, certainly not Germanic ones, she was certain the fresh fire had spooked the cave dwellers.

She dragged JoJo further into the darkness.

The voices came closer and now, with the cave dwellers between them and the fire, shadows, black and hulking, crept over the limestone walls.

Unless they ran headlong into the abyss of the cave they’d be caught in a few moments. The only weapons they had were their burning sticks that were also the beacons that were going to lead the cave dwellers straight to them.

JoJo was softly sobbing. This wasn’t going to end well.

Suddenly, there was a full-throated shriek, more like an animal’s cry of pain than a man’s.

A stocky figure staggered into the larger chamber and fell forward, a few feet from the women, an arrow lodged in his back through the smock-like covering of animal hide.

Emily held out her burning stick to see his face. The man had tangled hair and a thick beard with full lips that silently moved. But what struck her most was his prominent brow crowned by bushy eyebrows. It hit her like a lightning bolt.

Neanderthals
.

Other voices filled the night. Women’s voices, high-pitched, battle-like, in German mostly but Emily swore she made out some French and English too.

At the mouth of the cave, Emily could hear thuds and groans. An arrow whistled past, missing them narrowly before clattering against stone. The battle raged for a few minutes then the guttural voices receded, replaced entirely by modern tongues.

A woman called out in German, “Hello? Are you there? You can come out now. It is safe.”

Emily and JoJo stepped around the wounded Neanderthal, whose hand was still making small, clutching motions, and walked toward the cave mouth where a group of women with bows and arrows and spears were standing around a second fallen Neanderthal.

By the light of the fire, Emily saw they were a motley bunch, ranging from young to middle-aged, all with dirty, ragged clothes, animal-skin boots, and tied-back hair. The youngest one, perhaps in her twenties, had decorated her hair with feathers and wore a necklace of dried berries. She was the one who had called out in German.

“Were you hurt?” she asked.

“We’re all right,” Emily said.

Another woman, short with a tough-as-nails demeanor, said in French, “You’re not German, are you?”

“I’m Scottish,” Emily said.

“I’m an American,” a tall woman said. Her arm was bleeding but she didn’t seem to take notice of it.

JoJo stepped from behind Emily and told everyone she was French. A woman named Sylvie, sparked with excitement and said she was French too.

“What’s with you?” the feather woman said to Emily, coming closer and sniffing her like a dog.

“I don’t seem to be, well, dead.”

“You don’t see
that
every day of the week,” the American said. “I’m Ann.”

“Emily.”

They went around the circle, giving their names. The German woman was Gertie. She told them they had been watching Emily and JoJo from the time they jumped off the ox cart to the time they entered the cave.

“You picked the wrong cave,” a woman named Ingrid, said in German. “The ancient ones live here.”

“So I see,” Emily said.

Gertie was their leader. “We should not stay here,” she said. “They will come back. You wish to come with us?”

Emily was quick to answer, “Yes, we’d like that very much, thank you.”

There were nine women in the group. They protectively tucked Emily and JoJo into the middle of their column and forged the stream. They seemed to be able to see in the dark because, without any torches, Gertie led them on a half-hour march through a thick wood. It was all Emily could do to keep up with Ann in front of her. JoJo, behind her, groused about having to go so fast.

When the column stopped, Emily and JoJo stood still in place while their rescuers busied themselves starting fires and lighting torches. When this was done Emily saw they were in a clearing in the forest near a large circular dwelling which had a pitched, conical roof, very much resembling the yurt Emily had built many summers past at a team-building retreat in Cumbria for the nascent MAAC project. Soon smoke began to rise through the opening in the roof and skins were parted to welcome her and JoJo inside.

It was basic and communal with hides and matted rushes on the floor and simple beds around the circumference, each one piled with fur bedding. There was a rig for a large iron cooking pot over the fire and a neat stack of wooden bowls and spoons laid out on a simple picnic-style table with benches.

“This is our house,” Gertie said. “Are you hungry?”

“We are very hungry,” Emily said. “Might we also have some water?”

Skins of water were produced and one of their hosts, a Dutch woman, Lia, who seemed to be the chief cook, began reheating a rabbit stew. The lovely smell of meat and root vegetables began to fill the house. Sylvie, the French woman, showed Emily and JoJo the beds they would have, and in response to Emily’s question about there being more beds than people, said sadly that their numbers had diminished of late.

When the stew was ready, all of them squeezed onto the benches and Emily and JoJo ate with wild abandon, stirring up laughter from the others.

“Extremely hungry,” Emily mumbled between bites. “This is so good.”

“We eat well enough,” Gertie said.

When her stomach was full, Emily was able to start asking all the questions she’d been saving. Who were they? How did they come to live together? Why were there no men in a land where men outnumbered women so dramatically?

The women left it to Gertie to answer. She explained that all of them were escapees. She had been the first one to come to these woods, escaping over a hundred years ago from the house of a nobleman from Köln. She had grown desperate from two centuries of rape and beatings and would have thrown herself from a window if that would have eased her suffering. One day she slipped her shackles because she had become that thin from starvation and managed to flee the walled estate. She foraged on her own for many years before she found Ann wandering in the woods. One became two, and then two became four when Lia the Dutch woman and Ingrid, another German found them one day. The four of them learned to make weapons to protect themselves from the band of cavemen who shared the woods, and to hunt for food. Some forty years earlier, they watched as a wagon train passing through the woods stopped to fetch water from the stream. To their amazement the cargo was nine chained women, the property of a northern German slaver on his way to King Frederick’s castle in Marksburg. Gertie’s troop attacked with arrows and spears, released the women and tied the wounded men to trees where their flesh would be eaten by wild animals. The freed women still visited their piles of bones and sinews, watering them with urine, confident they were still experiencing some kind of eternal suffering.