Twilight Eyes (67 page)

I crawled across the stone floor, making my way around the dead shape-changers, feeling blindly with both hands, searching for one of the flashlights but finding only a lot of vaguely warm blood.

A power failure in Hell is an especially nasty business, I thought crazily.

I almost laughed at that. But it would have been a strange shrill laugh, too strange, so I choked it down.

Then I remembered the candles and matches in one of my inner jacket pockets. I brought them forth with trembling hands.

The sputtering tongue of candle flame licked back the darkness, though not enough to allow me to examine Rya as closely as I needed to do. With the candle, however, I located both flashlights, popped the batteries out of them, and inserted fresh ones.

After blowing out the candle and pocketing it, I went to Rya and knelt beside her. I put the flashlights on the floor, aiming their bright beams so they crossed over her.

“Rya?”

She did not answer me.

“Please, Rya.”

Still. She lay very still.

The word
pale
had been coined for her condition.

Her face felt cold. Too cold.

I saw a just darkening bruise that covered the right half of her forehead and followed the curve of her temple and went all the way down past her cheekbone. Blood glistened at the corner of her mouth.

Weeping, I peeled back one of her eyelids, but I did not know what the hell I was looking for, so I tried to feel her breath with a hand against her nostrils, but my hand was shaking so badly that I could not tell if breath escaped her. Finally I did what I was loath to do: I took hold of one of her hands and lifted it, slipped two fingers under her wrist, feeling for her pulse, which I could not find, could not find, dear God, could not find. Then I realized that I could
see
her pulse, that it was beating weakly in her temples, a barely perceptible throb but beating, and when I carefully turned her head to one side, I saw the pulse in her throat as well. Alive. Maybe not by much. Maybe not for long. But alive.

With renewed hope I examined her, looking for wounds. Her ski suit was slashed, and the goblin's claws had penetrated to her left hip, drawing some blood, though not much. I was afraid to check for the source of the blood at the corner of her lips, for it might be from internal bleeding; her mouth might be full of blood. But it wasn't. Her lip was cut; nothing worse. In fact, except for the bruises on her forehead and face, she seemed unharmed.

“Rya?”

Nothing.

I had to get her out of the mines, aboveground, before another series of cave-ins began or before another party of goblins came looking for us—or before she died for want of medical treatment.

I switched one flashlight off and slipped it into the deep utility pocket in my pant leg, where I had previously kept the pistol. I would not be needing the weapon anymore, for if I was confronted by goblins again, I would surely be brought down before I could destroy all of them, regardless of how many guns I possessed.

Since she could not walk, I carried her. My right calf bore three gouge marks from a goblin's claws. Five punctures in my sides—three on the left, two on the right—oozed blood. I was battered, skinned, host to a hundred aches and pains, but somehow I carried Rya.

We do not always gain strength and courage from adversity; sometimes we are destroyed by it. We do not always experience an adrenaline surge and superhuman powers in times of crisis, either, but it happens often enough to have become a part of our folklore.

In those subterranean corridors it happened to me. It wasn't a sudden adrenaline flood of the sort that enables a husband to lift an entire wrecked automobile off his pinned wife as if hefting nothing more than a suitcase, not the
storm
of adrenaline that gives a mother the power to tear a locked door off its hinges and walk through a burning room to rescue her child without feeling the heat. Instead I guess it was something like a steady drip-drip-drip of adrenaline, an amazingly prolonged flow in precisely the amount that I required to keep going.

All things considered, when the human heart is fully explored and basic motivations understood, it is not the prospect of your own death that scares you most, that fills you to bursting with fear. Really, it's not. Think about it. What frightens us more, what reduces us to blubbering terror, are the deaths of those we love. The prospect of your own death, while not welcome, can be borne, for there is no suffering and pain once death has come. But when you lose the ones you love, your suffering lives on until you descend into your own grave. Mothers, fathers, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, friends—they are taken from you all your life, and the pain of loss and loneliness that their passing leaves within you is a more profound suffering than the brief flare of pain and the fear of the unknown that accompanies your own death.

Fear of losing Rya drove me through those tunnels with greater determination than I would have possessed if I had been concerned only about my own survival. For the next few hours I ceased to be aware of pain, sore muscles, and exhaustion. Although my mind and heart blazed with emotions, my body was a cool machine, moving tirelessly forward, sometimes humming along in well-oiled precision, sometimes clanking and thumping and grinding forward, but always moving without complaint, without feeling. I carried her in my arms as I might have carried a small child, and her weight seemed less than that of the child's doll. When I came to a vertical shaft, I wasted no time pondering how to raise her to the next level of the maze. I simply stripped off my ski jacket and hers; then, with a strength that would have tested a
real
machine, I tore those sturdy garments along all their tightly sewn seams, tore them even where they did not have seams, until I had reduced them to strips of tough, quilted fabric. Knotting those strips together, I fashioned a sling that fitted under her arms and through her crotch, plus a double-strand fourteen-foot-long towline looped at the upper end. As I climbed the shaft I hauled her after me. I ascended at a slant, my feet against the rungs on one side, my back against the opposite wall. The loop of the double towline was over my chest, and my arms were straight down, with one hand pulling on each of the lines to keep from taking all the weight of her on my breastbone. I was careful not to bump her head against the walls or against the corrupted iron rungs, gentling her along, easy, easy. That was a feat of strength, balance, and coordination that later seemed phenomenal but, at the time, was achieved with no thought of its difficulty.

We had taken seven hours to make the journey into the mines, but that had been when we were both fit. Going back out was certain to require a day or more, perhaps two days.

We had no food, but that would be okay. We could live a day or two without eating.

(I did not give a single thought to how my energy level would be sustained without food. My lack of concern did not arise from a conviction that my adrenaline-pumped body would not fail me. No, I simply was
unable
to think of such things, for my mind was churning with emotions—fear, love—and had no time for practicalities. The practicalities were being taken care of by the machine-body, which was programmed, an automaton, and which required no thinking to perform its duties.)

However, in time I did think about water, for the body cannot function without water as easily as without food. Water is the oil of the human machine, and without it, breakdowns quickly ensue. The thermos of orange juice had fallen from Rya's grasp when the goblin had leapt on her from the wall of the mine, and later I had shaken it to see if it had broken; the rattling of the shattered glass liner had made it unnecessary for me to open the container and look inside. Now all we had to drink was the water puddled shallowly in some of the tunnels. It was often scum-covered, and it probably tasted of coal and mold and worse, but I could no more taste it than I could feel pain. From time to time I put Rya down long enough to crouch at some stagnant pool, skim the slime off the surface, and scoop up a drink with my hands. Sometimes I held Rya, pulled her mouth open, and fed her water out of one cupped hand. She did not stir, but as the water trickled down her throat I was encouraged to see those muscles contract and relax again with involuntary swallowing.

A miracle is an event measured in moments: a fleeting glimpse of God manifested in some mundane aspect of the physical world, a brief flow of blood from the stigmata of a statue of Christ, a tear or three spilling from the sightless eyes of an image of the Virgin Mary, the whirling sky at Fatima. My miracle of strength endured for
hours
, but it could not last forever. I remember falling to my knees, getting up, going on, falling again, nearly dropping Rya that time, deciding I should take a rest for her sake if not my own, just a short rest to gather my strength—and then I slept.

When I awoke, I was feverish.

And Rya was as motionless and silent as before.

The tide of her breath still ebbed and flowed. Her heart still beat, though I thought her pulse seemed weaker than it had been.

I had left the flashlight on when I had dozed off. Now it was dim, dying.

Cursing my stupidity, I withdrew the spare light from the long utility pocket in my pant leg, switched it on, and put the dead flash in the pocket.

According to my wristwatch, it was seven o'clock, and I assumed that was seven o'clock Monday night. However, for all I knew, it might have been Tuesday morning. I had no way of judging how long I had struggled through the mines with Rya or how long I had slept.

I found water for us.

I picked her up again. After that intermission I
willed
the miracle to continue, and it did. However, the power that flowed into me was so much less than before that I thought God had gone elsewhere, leaving my support to one of His lesser angels whose sinews were not nearly as impressive as those of his Master. My ability to block out pain and weariness was diminished. I lumbered along in an admirably robotic indifference for considerable distance, but from time to time I became aware of pains so severe that I made a thin whining sound and even, on a couple of occasions, screamed. Now and then, the aching in my tortured muscles and bones became apparent to me, and I had to block that awareness. Rya no longer always seemed as light as a doll, and sometimes I could have sworn she weighed a thousand pounds.

I passed the skeleton of the dog. I kept looking back at it uneasily because my fevered mind was filled with images of being pursued by that pile of canine bones.

Phasing in and out of consciousness as if I were a moth darting from flame to darkness to flame again, I frequently found myself in conditions and positions that scared the hell out of me. More than once I rose out of my inner blackness and discovered that I was kneeling over Rya, weeping uncontrollably. Each time I thought her dead, but each time I found a pulse—thready, perhaps, but a pulse. Spluttering and choking, I awoke facedown in a puddle of water from which I had been drinking. Sometimes I returned to awareness and found that I had kept walking with her in my arms but had gone past one of the white arrows, a couple of hundred feet or more into the wrong passageway; whereupon, I had to turn and find my way back to the correct path in the maze.

I was hot. Burning up. It was a dry, parching heat, and I felt the way Slick Eddy had looked back in Gibtown: like ancient parchment, like Egyptian sands, crisp and juiceless.

For a while I looked at my watch regularly, but eventually I did not bother with it anymore. It was of no use and no comfort to me. I could not tell what portion of the day the watch referred to; I didn't know if it was morning or evening, night or perhaps mid-afternoon. I didn't know which day it was, either, although I assumed it must be late Monday or early Tuesday.

I staggered past the rust-welded heap of long abandoned mining equipment that, by chance, formed a crude, alien figure with horned head, spiked chest, and bladed spine. I was more than half convinced that its corroded head had turned as I moved by, that its iron mouth had slipped open farther, that one hand had moved. Much later, in other tunnels, I imagined I could hear it coming after me, clanking and scraping along with great patience, not able to match my pace but convinced that it would catch me by sheer perseverance, which it probably would because my own pace was declining steadily.

I was not always sure when I was awake and when I was dreaming. Sometimes, carrying or lifting or cautiously pulling Rya along the crumbling passageways, I thought I was in a nightmare and that all would be well in a moment when I woke. But, of course, I was already awake and
living
the nightmare.

From the flame of consciousness to the darkness of insensibility, swooping mothlike between the two, I grew inexorably weaker, fuzzy-headed, and very much hotter. I woke and was sitting against the rock wall of a tunnel, holding Rya in my arms, soaked with sweat. My hair was plastered to my head, and my eyes stung from the salty rivulets that streamed off my forehead and temples. Perspiration dripped from my brow, from my nose, ears, chin, and jawline. I seemed to have gone for a swim in my clothes. I was hotter than I'd ever been while lying on the beach in Florida, yet the heat came entirely from within me; I had a furnace in me, a blazing sun trapped within my rib cage.