The Black Room (6 page)

But there were no tangles. Robert's hands moved without hesitating, weaving the strands together. Under, over, under, under, under, over. It was neat and intricate and complicated. Like the little ball of interwoven shoots that had blocked the tunnel.

That's got nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.
Tom pushed the memory out of his mind and concentrated on the movements of Robert's fingers, trying to figure out the pattern.

But he couldn't keep up. He could just see the braid taking shape as he watched. It was square and perfectly symmetrical, with four flat sides, thick and shiny at the top and narrowing slightly as it went down. Robert's fingers kept moving until they had nothing left to weave. Then he took the last elastic band out of Emma's hand and looped it around the end three times, to hold the strands together.

“You see?” Emma said. “He couldn't do that before, could he?”

Robert let the braid fall. It hung down Emma's back, smooth and even—and inexplicable. “I learned it in the cavern,” he said. “That was one of the jobs they gave me. Helping Lorn to make the ropes. This twelve-strand one is very strong.”

Tom was silent for a long time. “Who's Lorn?” he said at last. He didn't know what else to say.

“Lorn showed me the way to the cavern,” Robert said. “She saved my life.”

Tom stared at the braid. Then he looked up and saw Robert and Emma watching him. Waiting for him to say that he believed Robert's story now.

But he didn't believe it. He
didn't.
Suddenly he was so angry that he could hardly breathe. “That's just a braid!” he said loudly. “It doesn't prove anything!”

“You've got to admit—” Robert began.

“I don't have to admit anything!” Tom was shouting now. “You can keep your silly games and your precious little hole in the ground. But stop messing around with my head!”

He pushed past Robert and ran through the door and down the stairs, so fast that he could hardly keep his footing. As he wrenched open the front door, a voice was pounding on and on in his mind.
They're lying. They must be lying. It can't be true.
He banged the front door behind him and raced across the garden and out into the street. It
can't
be
true, it can't be true, it can‘t—

He was moving so fast that he nearly bumped into a man coming along the pavement. He had to catch hold of the wall to stop himself.

The man stopped, too, just for an instant, turning his head so that Tom looked straight at him. His eyes were a clear, transparent blue, as still as water in a well. As still as water that reflects the sky.

It can't be true,
said the voice in Tom's head.

But it was fading now. He could see his own face, very small, in the dark center of the still blue eyes.

It can‘t
—said the voice in his head. And then it stopped, leaving a huge, empty silence.

The man nodded gravely and stepped around him, going on down the road.

7

LORN
knew
THEY HAD TO DIG DOWN—BUT SHE HAD TO fight hard to persuade the others. Not for the first time, she wished that Cam was there. No one had ever argued with
her.
When she said,
Do this,
people jumped to obey her. They trusted her to run the cavern, even when they didn't understand what she was doing. It was different for Lorn. She had to convince them.

“I
know
it's going to be difficult,” she said fiercely. Over and over again. “I
know
there's a lot of earth to move, and we'll have to shift it all outside. And I
know
it's getting colder and colder out there. But we can't do anything else. If we want to be safe, we have to go down farther under the earth.”

In the end, after a day and a half of talking, she managed to persuade them all. At the end of the second day, they actually started to dig.

And it was very hard. Much harder than any of them expected.

The digging was exhausting, and they had to work in shifts, changing every couple of hours. Getting rid of the loose earth was even worse. They had to take it outside and scatter it—after dark, because it was safer then. The air outside was almost too cold to bear, and on the third night, Annet came back white and shaking. She huddled in front of the brazier, but it took her the rest of the night to get warm.

We've got to hurry. We've got to finish before it's too cold to go outside at all.
Lorn didn't say it aloud, because she didn't need to. It was what they were all thinking. They were already working as fast as they could.

By the morning of the fourth day, they had made a long ramp, leading down into a pit. Lorn walked to the bottom and looked up at the ring of faces staring down at her. As soon as she saw them, she knew that the pit was deep enough. Because the faces were ... the right distance away.

“That's the right level,” she called up cheerfully. “We can dig sideways now and start the new cavern. Let's get going.”

No one even smiled. For a moment, looking up at their weary faces, she thought she was asking too much. Then Bando waved a hand and shouted down to her.

“Here I come, Lorn! Don't worry. We'll get it finished soon.”

And he led the way down the ramp.

 

NOW THEY HAD TO COPE WITH DARKNESS, TOO. THE SPACE behind the brazier had always been dim and shadowy, but once their eyes had adjusted to the gloom, they could see well enough to dig. As soon as they began on the cavern itself, they found themselves working in total darkness.

Perdew tried to work out a way of using glowing logs to give some light, but they burned through too quickly and filled the small, cramped space with choking fumes. Until the space was big enough to bring the brazier down, they would have to be content with fumbling around and feeling their way.

Lorn hadn't realized they would all be so helpless.

She'd always wondered why the others were slow and clumsy when it got dark, but she'd never understood that they were completely lost without light.

The first time she and Annet had gone down to dig together, Annet paused at the bottom of the ramp and then began to shuffle forward uncertainly.

“What's the matter?” Lorn had said. “Why are you doing that?”

“I'm figuring out where to go.” Annet sounded surprised at the question. As though the answer was obvious.

Annet's voice filled the space in front of them, hitting the earth in some directions and traveling on, unobstructed, in others. The turn of her head stirred the air, setting up tiny currents that eddied around them, rebounding from the walls and carrying the smell of newly disturbed soil.

“It's this way, of course,” Lorn said, striding out into the dark.

“Wait for me!” Annet scuttled after her and caught her tunic. “I can't see a thing. How do you know where to go?”

It was a senseless question.
Because I know,
Lorn wanted to say. She struggled to explain. “Can't you hear the space? And feel it and smell it and taste it?”

“Taste
it?” Annet said. “How can you taste a space?”

How could you not taste what was there? How could you not use every message that your senses brought, to understand what was around you?
Lorn was silent because she didn't know what to say.

“Are you joking?” Annet said after a moment.

There was something wary in her voice. A kind of nervousness. Suddenly, something else that Lorn had always taken for granted seemed ... odd. Another way she was dif ferent from all the others.

“I've just got good eyes,” she said, passing it off as quickly as she could. “I don't think I need as much light as you do.”

But it wasn't that. She knew she wasn't
seeing
the space. Not with her eyes, anyway. It was another kind of seeing, built up by all her other senses, making dark, solid shapes in her mind.
But how did I learn to do it? When did I begin?

She had no way of remembering. No way of answering the questions. So she buried them deep in her mind and let the others talk about her wonderful eyesight.

 

AND THEN THE EARTH COLLAPSED.

They had been digging for almost two weeks by then, and Lorn reckoned that they had cleared half the space they would need for the new cavern. She had just finished work—digging as hard as she could for several hours—and she was so tired that she could hardly follow Annet and Dess up the ramp.

Bando should have been with them, but he'd refused to come—and she was too exhausted to argue. She left Shang to deal with him. As she crawled out of the pit, she could hear Bando bellowing and complaining.

“Why can't I stay? I'm not tired. I want to do some more work!”

“Everyone needs a rest. And there's not room for all of us to dig together.” Shang sounded irritable and impatient. “Go away, Bando, and let us get started.”

Oh, Shang,
Lorn thought wearily,
you're
asking for trouble. Bando went crazy if you tried to order him around. He had to be persuaded. Otherwise he'd just go on arguing and sulking, and no one would get any work done. She stopped and called ahead to the other two.

“Don't wait for me. I'm going back to get Bando.”

She started back down the ramp—but she wasn't fast enough. As she reached the bottom, Bando gave a loud shout of rage and frustration.

“That's stupid. I'm
going
to dig!”

There was a scuffling noise and the rough, familiar scrabble of a blade clawing at the ground. Then the steady, soft trickle of loosened earth.

“Stop it!” Shang said angrily. “Give me that blade!”

“No! ”

Bando roared and scraped at the ground again—and this time there was a new sound. Not a trickle of earth, but a great, thundering rush of earth and stones. Bando yelped and Tina started to scream.

“Shang?” Lorn called. She began to run into the darkness. “Bando? Tina?”

She could feel them moving ahead of her, churning up the air as they blundered about. They were all shouting together now, and behind that noise was another sound, going on and on and on. A faint, steady trickling.

It was the sound of falling earth, dropping crumb by crumb onto the ground. And it sounded ... wrong. Unexpected.

“Shang?” she said again. Louder this time, to make sure he heard.

There was a break in the shouting. When Shang called back, she could hear the relief in his voice. “Lorn! Can you see what's happened?”

Lorn shut her eyes, listening hard to the sound he was making. And that was wrong, too. The space around him had changed. She went on walking forward with her eyes closed, working out its new shape.

There was something bulky ahead of her, crawling along the ground.

“Bando?” she said. “Are you all right?”

There was a grunt. Then Bando's voice, sounding shaken and wretched. “I fell,” he said. “Lorn, I didn't mean—the earth just came tumbling down—”

His voice was leaking away behind him, not bouncing back from the far wall of the diggings, but disappearing into a void. As he pulled himself onto his feet, the air swirled around him, carrying a faint, disturbing smell.

Lorn began to move faster, stepping left to avoid Bando and then right as she edged past Shang. That should have taken her right up to the back wall where the diggings ended. Instead, she found herself standing in a heap of stones and loose, fallen earth.

There was no back wall. It had disappeared. Stepping over the rubble that was left, she spread her arms wide in the new space that had opened up. The air beyond the rubble was clammy and damp, and it carried the nameless scent she had smelled already. But stronger now.

“Where are you?” Shang said, still facing the ramp. “What's happened?”

“I'm behind you.”
How can he not know that
? “Where the back wall ought to be—but it's not. We've broken through into a cave or something.”

Tina caught her breath, and Shang said, “Is it ... empty?”

Their voices were too far back to be useful. Lorn started to hum softly, catching the noise as it rebounded.
No, not a cave,
she thought. It was too narrow for that. The wall that faced her was less than a dozen steps away.

She tilted her head back, still humming. Up above, the space was bigger and the roof arched high over her head, way out of reach. And when she turned from side to side, she couldn't hear any kind of wall. Her humming drifted away into the darkness, and she could feel a faint current of air moving constantly past her.

“It's a tunnel,” she said.

“How do you
know?”
She could hear that Shang didn't want to believe her. “Even you can't see that well.”

“That's right,” Tina said hopefully. “It might be just a little space. Under a stone or something.”

Lorn wasn't going to waste time arguing. “Get Perdew,” she said. “Tell him to light some logs and bring them down.”

Tina turned and stumbled toward the dim light at the bottom of the ramp. As she went up, she started to shout.

“Perdew! We need some light down here! There's been a landslide!”

There were shouts up above and the sound of Tina talking excitedly. Then a noise of feet and a faint, flickering glow that quickly grew brighter.

Lorn stood in the space beyond the heap of rubble, looking back into the new cavern. As the glow grew brighter, she could see Dess and Annet running down the ramp. Then Shang and Bando and Tina, huddled together by the break in the wall. And then Perdew arrived, holding up two heavy pieces of wood with bright, smoldering ends.