9
A fter our adventures of the night before, I slept late. By the time I woke up, Denton was already down in the mine, clearing rubble like a man obsessed.
Kent delivered this information to me, then poured the coffee with his lips pressed tightly together. Even someone as oblivious as I am could detect the signs that Kent was worried about his employer.
“He’s working himself awfully hard,” I offered, tossing the words out like bait.
“Too hard,” said Kent savagely. “It isn’t healthy. And he’s not as young as he used to be.” He stopped there, sniffed, and said, in a slightly more controlled voice, “Of course, he is a doctor, and I’m sure he knows what he’s about.”
“Oh, certainly. Though I’m told that doctors often make the worst patients.”
Kent exhaled through his nostrils in a sound that was just this side of a snort. “Indeed,” he said, and retired to the other side of our camp to wash dishes.
If Kent was willing to break the code of the gentleman’s gentleman enough to express concern, Denton must be acting more erratically than I realized. But then again, what did I know? I’d only seen him under dire circumstances, after all.
I sat on a rock outside the mine entrance, soaking up the sun. The cacophony of night creatures had been replaced by the ripple of wind through the trees. Each ripple sent leaves spinning down to the ground. It was cool, despite the sun.
It was going to be a lot cooler underground. I picked up my headlamp, collected Angus, and strolled down into the mine.
“Alex!” Denton looked up at me with apparent delight. “We’ve just now opened the way through. You’re just in time.”
“Excellent,” I lied.
Denton was the first one through the new-made gap in the rockfall. Ingold gestured at me to go next, and I scrambled through. It was a much longer crawl than I’d expected, a good dozen feet through loose rubble. My knees cursed me with every step.
On the far side, Denton was practically dancing with impatience. As soon as Angus was through, he set off into the dark.
The tunnel turned sharply to the left, still sloping downward, and we followed, while I listened desperately for sounds of the glowing thing I’d seen before.
I heard nothing but our own footsteps. Perhaps it didn’t come this way at all , I thought hopefully, and then we turned the corner and confronted a wall.
The beam of Denton’s headlamp swung from side to side as he looked for a way past. I stepped back, torn between disappointment and relief that maybe we could leave this place before encountering another cave-in.
But it was not to be. Denton crowed with triumph and rushed forward to a dark hole at the base of the wall. “Down here,” he said. “There’s a way down.”
I took a step forward and my boot hit something that went clink instead of thunk . It was an empty tin can. I turned it over and saw the remains of a shredded label for stew pasted to the side.
“Like Oscar described in his letter,” Denton said excitedly. “This must be the place he was talking about. Which means that the chamber should be at the bottom of this tunnel.”
Ingold leaned over the tunnel and looked down. His expression was well past dubious and picking up speed. “... Um,” he said.
Denton was already on his hands and knees, his head vanishing inside.
I joined Ingold at the edge of the hole and my stomach did not so much clench as reach up and grab my esophagus while screaming obscenities.
If someone had designed my own personal hell, the entryway would probably look like that.
It was less a tunnel than a crawl space, going downward in a tight curve, like a spiral staircase designed for badgers. Anyone entering would have to go on their hands and knees, with no way to turn around unless the crawl space opened up somewhere out of sight.
“Denton—” Ingold began.
The doctor was already crawling inside. “It keeps going,” he called back. “I’ll just—”
“Denton .”
Ingold’s voice cracked like a whip. Denton jerked in surprise and his helmet knocked against the ceiling. He backed out of the crawl space and sat back on his heels. “What’s wrong?”
“Listen to me,” said Ingold. “If you go down, you’re going alone.
We can’t— I can’t—That crawl space is a death trap .
” He reached out a hand as if to catch Denton’s, then pulled it back.
“If you hit a pocket of gas, even if someone went with you, they couldn’t pull you back out before it got to them, too.
Which means if something happens to you, we won’t be able to rescue you. ”
“I understand,” Denton said. “It’s fine. I know the risks.”
“Do you?” Had Ingold gone pale under the smears of soot, or was that an artifact of the light? “Denton, if you break a leg or somehow get trapped under rubble, you’ll die down there. Of shock if you’re lucky. Thirst if you’re not. Are you really sure you want to do this?”
“If Oscar came this way, then there’s a way through,” he said stubbornly.
“Denton ...” I reached out and gripped his shoulder. Probably it was a time for tact, but that’s never been a skill of mine. I settled for bald honesty. “Denton, Oscar has to be dead by now. You don’t have to do this.”
He shook his head. “Yes, I do. He saved my life when I was seven. I broke through the ice on the lake behind the house and went under. He went under the ice after me, even though he could have died, too. I owe it to him to try.”
Ingold’s throat worked, and then he simply said, “I don’t want you to go.”
“I know.” Denton bowed his head, and I remembered that he and I had seen the dead get up and walk two years ago. I don’t know if he was thinking that Oscar might still be down there, dead but still moving. Maybe he had to know for sure.
“Fine,” said Ingold wearily, when the moment had stretched out past all bearing. “Do what you have to do. If you’re not back in a few hours, we’ll assume you’re dead.”
“Fair,” said Denton, and began crawling back down into the twisting hole in the floor. I watched until the light had vanished and prayed to the God I only half believed in that I’d see the doctor again.
***
It was a nightmarish wait. We could have just gone back up, I suppose, but leaving felt like consigning Denton to the ranks of the dead.
Ingold kept pulling out his pocket watch and staring at it, then putting it back, only to pull it out again a minute later, as if he’d already forgotten what it said.
Angus disassembled his pistol and began carefully cleaning each part.
The mine sighed and whispered around us.
I sat against the wall, watching back the way we had come for any sign of red light.
Though the creature seemed to be able to turn it off at will, so perhaps I wouldn’t see it coming.
Maybe it would just appear, rushing out of the dark, a wave of flesh that would crash over us and . ..
My imagination failed at that point, but I was certain it wouldn’t be anything good.
“Hey, Angus?”
“Aye?”
“If you thought my body was at the bottom of a mine shaft, would you crawl down to get it?”
“Are you serious?” asked my dearest friend. “I’d throw a bottle of livrit down after you, toast your memory, and be on the next boat back to Gallacia.” He considered for a moment, then added, “I might find a convent and ask them to pray for your soul. That’s as far as I go.”
“Oh, thank God.” I closed my eyes. The idea of anyone putting themselves in danger to retrieve my body was horrifying. Maybe that was the difference between me and Denton. Surgeons see the bodies that get brought back, so maybe they don’t all learn to give up on the ones that are never coming back.
“He was very scarred by what you faced in Ruravia,” Ingold said abruptly.
I looked up, startled. “We all were,” I said finally. “It was ... not a good thing to experience.”
“It brought many memories back for him, of the war.”
I nodded. Angus grunted.
The war had receded for me in recent months, thanks mostly to time and a very wise young man named Bors, but I understood. The immediate aftermath of our experience with Usher’s lake had left me sleepless and afraid. I wasn’t surprised that it had taken Denton the same way.
“Now he’s convinced that what’s happening here is akin to what happened there , and it’s driving him recklessly.” Ingold stared down into the hole in the floor and added, half under his breath, “I should not have let him go.”
“You’d have had a hard time stopping him,” Angus said, beginning to reassemble his gun. “Unless you wanted us to hold him down and sit on him.”
I suspected that Ingold would have been happier if we’d tried, but before he could say anything, we heard the scuffle of something ascending the crawlspace from below.
The light that emerged was the actinic white of a headlamp, not the bloody red of .
.. whatever the hell it was ... which is the only reason that I didn’t turn tail and run like a rabbit.
A moment later, Denton’s head popped up out of the hole, and he looked at us all with a broad grin.
“It’s a long crawl down, sort of spiral shaped, but it opens up at the bottom.
And you won’t believe what’s down there. ”
***
Crawling down the spiral shaft was worse than I had imagined.
My shoulder pressed against the outer wall and my helmet kept scraping against the ceiling.
Even though Denton said that it opened up below, I was having a hard time believing it.
It seemed more likely that it would just keep going, narrowing farther, until I had to choose between going forward or going back.
And Angus was behind me, so I couldn’t go back.
He’d have to back all the way out, and then I would, and what if he got stuck like a cork in a wine bottle and then I would have no way out and we would both be trapped and we’d die in here and no one would ever find our bodies.