Chapter 11
They made a descent along what seemed to be a naturally formed staircase of white stone . . . and in the beam of the hi-thrower,
the walls flashed and gleamed, as if speckled with gems or silver. The ceiling was a vault of pink quartz, a profusion of
luminescent ruby spears.
“These might be Arthur’s Stairs,” Arthur said. “A local legend. They say after Arthur cut down Mordred—his own son—he carried
him here. Mordred’s blood didn’t fall, but dripped upward, staining the ceiling to make this blaze of quartz.”
“How he cried,” Finger said. “Boo-hoo. The great king wept so hard for the little murderer, you can sometimes still hear the
echo of it. He should’ve wept for himself. He didn’t survive his wounds. He suffered oh so much from them. They stank and
blackened until even his woman couldn’t approach him without gagging.”
Colin’s ear stung where it had been bitten. His wrist throbbed, his knee was swollen and stiffening up, and his back felt
ragged and sore. The battering of the last hour had soured his mood, threatened to undermine what had mostly been, up to now,
a great lark with an old friend. Arthur had been bitten just as badly, but it didn’t seem to have shaken him at all, and a
moment later he picked up their conversational thread as if nothing had happened.
“See how Svangur dwells on disgust and human failure?” Arthur observed.
“That’s always his trump card. That peril, suffering, and fear prove life is a squalid struggle with no point, since it always ends in loss.
He thinks—and you’ve said so too, Colin—that it proves if there is a God, he’s a sadistic war criminal, a bystander who watches while children drown.
But that’s not what it proves. What it proves is that acts of love and sacrifice have real value—that they’re the only currency that matters. ”
It might’ve been the spider bites, but Colin wasn’t in the mood to fence with Arthur about theology anymore.
“Love, Arthur, is just evolution’s way of making sure we look after the carriers of our DNA. That’s all. You should read Richard
Dawkins. Could be real eye-opening for you.”
“I’ve read him and I know the type. The evangelical atheists. The way they obsess over a God that doesn’t exist, endlessly
returning to His many failings, again and again, is itself, of course, a kind of devotion. Like the man who can’t stop talking
about a woman he claims to despise . . . at a certain point, one begins to suspect the issue is really quite the opposite.”
“Word games,” Colin said. “Why am I playing word games with you? Down here, in this hole? You always dance around in circles.”
“You love it,” Arthur said. “Music to your ears.”
“Music to our ears! Hah hah!” Finger said. “You’ll make some pretty music soon if you don’t step lively now. There is the
most astoniching echo in this next chamber, and if you slip on the ledge, we will still hear you screaming long after you’re
dead. Choose where you put your feet most wery careful here.”
They had reached the bottom of the steps. The tunnel opened and widened . . . to reveal a great drop into darkness. It was
a well, of sorts, beneath a vast unlit chandelier of rose quartz. The chasm was ten feet wide, ten yards long, and roughly
ten thousand miles deep. A stone lip wrapped around either side, but each was rarely more than two feet wide, often much less.
Water trickled down the wall in glistening runnels that made the white, rounded stone slick. Finger wasn’t concerned in the
slightest. He traipsed along the ledge to the right, humming to himself and leaping along without seeming to pay any attention
to where he placed his boots.
“It was dark, dark, dark,” Finger sang and his voice rang back at them from the depths of the hole. The well repeated dark, dark, dark at least a dozen times. “In da park, park, park . . .”
Colin leaned over the well and shone his light down into the chasm. When he glanced up at Arthur, he saw the other man had closed his eyes and was rubbing two fingers against the center of his forehead.
“You all right?”
“Heights make me dizzy. Of course there was going to be an endless drop. You don’t understand. You fly jets. I get woozy when I climb a ladder to clean out
the gutters. Which side do you want?”
“I don’t care,” Colin said, “but you’re taking the other one. If you get wobbly, the worst thing you could do is grab me to
steady yourself. If you’re wobbly on your own, you’ll naturally flatten against the wall, or sink to a knee. Whereas if we’re
together you could pull us both over the edge.”
“Any tips?”
“Don’t fall.”
Colin played his light along one ledge, then the other. There was more of that frescoing above the ledges, at eye level, a
series of Gothic skeletons holding hands, boogieing in a line with people in shrouds. The danse macabre, Colin thought.
He stepped onto the right-hand ledge. Arthur took the left. Colin turned inward to face the wall and spread out his arms,
flattening himself against the rock. He began to shuffle forward, with the well at his back. After a few steps, he was aware
of his heels sticking out over the edge. He looked over his shoulder and saw Arthur advancing toe to heel—a terrible way to
cross the ledge—with his eyes shut—even worse. Colin wanted to call instructions to him but didn’t want to add to his disorientation,
and the chamber was echoey enough as it was.
Finger was almost to the end of the ledge and the broad avenue that waited on the other side, a great downward sloping passage.
Colin thought he saw a dim, aqueous glow somewhere farther down that passageway. The troll sang on:
“When I heard a talk, an’ a creepin’ walk, an’ I look around frightfully, I seen I was in da center of a cemetery.”
His voice was somehow amplified by the chasm, returned to them with a new aural shimmer, a jangle and rattle that almost brought to mind percussion.
Or maybe that was the bars of quartz above, resonating to his voice.
Or—no—Colin caught himself, listening. Those were marimbas, he was almost sure of it.
And, a thousand miles away, the sudden blat of a horn.
“I nearly bus’ my head,” Colin heard Arthur singing across the chasm, his voice low, breathless with fear. “Ah running from the dead.”
A song was playing down there . . . a jazzy calypso, steel drums and upright bass, so far below, it could only barely be heard over
the echo of their breath. Colin had started to shuffle on, but now he realized, with a stroke of giddy fear, that his whole
body was beginning to sway, to ripple along to the music. He almost laughed. Instead he whirled, spun suddenly around on the tiny ledge, throwing his
arms up over his head and rolling his hips. It was involuntary movement, as uncontrollable as a convulsion. His bad knee almost
folded up on him and he only stayed upright through a furious act of will. He swayed, sickeningly, and opened his mouth to
cry out—
And instead found himself singing, “I fall down inside the tomb, an’ get up with a zoom-zoom-zoom, Arthur, what the fuck is happening?” Colin had never heard the song they were singing, didn’t recognize the melody echoing
up from the well, yet the lyrics were there, pushing their way out of him, demanding to be sung.
“St. Vitus’s dance,” Arthur panted. “It’s a compulsion. I’m not going to fall. I’m going to jump to my death. The song is going to make me.”
“No. That’s not happening.”
“It is, it will, I—” And as he spoke, his voice unsteady with alarm, Arthur hopped, spun, landed, and pinwheeled his arms
desperately. “I can’t stay still!”
“If you have to fall,” Colin shouted, “fall toward me, okay?”
“But I thought you said don’t—”
“Never mind what I said,” Colin cried. He had a thought, wild, irrational, and almost exuberant: it was a dance (or was that
danse?) and you couldn’t dance without a partner. If he didn’t dance with Arthur, he would go for a waltz with death instead, would do a merry pirouette in the arms of the laughing skeleton, down into the pit, screaming all the way.
Arthur nodded, but he was singing again . . . and as he sang, Colin heard, quite distinctly, the uncanny echo of horns, answering
his lyrics with a cheerful blast of trumpets. “And what has me sad—even really mad—is I was jus’ about to start—a romance with meh sweet’art!”
And Arthur leapt again, threw his hands in the air, and then dived, throwing himself straight toward the hole. Colin was directly across from him, and he pitched toward Arthur at the same
moment. He threw his arms out and Arthur’s hands struck his, as if they had decided to slap one another ten over the hole.
The force of their palms smacking together drove them both back and upright, safely onto their ledges.
Colin jumped, skipped, and took two ridiculous steps backward, was impelled backward by the steps of the dance. He felt an urge coming over him to dip sideways over the hole.
“Arthur!” he shouted.
Colin dropped sideways into the hole, one hand stuck straight out. Arthur fell toward him at the same time. Their hands met
again with a fleshy whack, and for one instant their fingers enlaced. Arthur nodded. They shoved off one another and came
upright again, Colin feeling something twang in his bruised lower back.
“Finger!” Colin roared. “Do something, you motherfucker!” He was furious. He was giddy. The line between rage and delight
could be very fine sometimes.
Finger stood at the far end of the hole, clapping his hands—they were much larger than a man’s hands now—along to the song,
and laughing with his wet, malformed mouth open. Yes: there were a pair of bony tusks rising from his jaw now, protruding
over his upper lip. “We are, we are! We are keeping time!”
Arthur dropped to a squat, popped upright, jumped, landed on the ledge. Water was trickling over the stone and his heels smacked
down and threw spray, like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain.
One foot shot out and Arthur fell and flailed with both hands.
Colin didn’t think. He reached over the hole, caught him, twisted, and flung him toward the far end of the chasm, only a few yards off now.
Arthur hit the stone rim on his stomach, his legs hanging over the side.
His colorful Nepalese smoking cap whirled off and disappeared into the darkness below.
Colin tottered, overbalanced, and threw himself across the well in desperation. His bad knee wobbled and this time he couldn’t
stay upright, couldn’t keep it from collapsing on him. He lunged as he dropped off the side of the ledge and caught the waist
of Arthur’s cargo pants. A button flew and the pants were yanked straight down to his ankles. Colin dropped like a stone clutching
the bunched-up rope of Arthur’s trousers in both hands. His insides did a slow, lazy roll and his head went deliciously light.
“Arthur!” he cried, his voice thin, hardly recognizable as his own.
The danse macabre had followed them from one end of the chasm to the other, but here at the far side of the hole, they had
suddenly left it behind. The song ended with a last flatulent squall of a trumpet and an outburst of distant, dirty laughter
and applause. Perhaps if he let go, he’d fall all the way down to some nightclub located in the outer precincts of Hell, where
you knew they had to have a heck of a band. Kurt Cobain would be performing with Michael Hutchence all evening.
Above them, Stu Finger moved forward. He wasn’t chortling now. Colin saw his shadow fall across them and knew in the next
moment Finger was going to plant the heel of one boot in Arthur’s face and shove him off—shove them both off.
But Arthur had the Cree hi-thrower, hanging from his wrist by the strap. He flicked his hand and it leapt into his fist. He
stabbed the button and shone the disc of light into the troll’s face. Finger was no more. He was entirely Svangur now: Colin
glimpsed the dark, smooth, almost glossy head, the color of a deep bruise, the bulbous nose, and the great misshapen cavern
of a mouth, bristling with lumpish teeth, each like a Stone Age arrowhead.
“You’re going to pull both of us up now, Stu,” Arthur said.
It amazed Colin, the steadiness with which Arthur spoke, hardly a tremor in it.
It was inspirational. “Or you’re going to spend the next ten thousand years as a column of rock standing over this pit.
All I have to do is poke the button again, to switch it to the highest setting, the daylight setting.
Don’t think of it as saving us. Think of it as saving yourself. ”
Colin felt a wave of faintness roll over him and forced it aside. If he blacked out—even for an instant—it would be the end
of him. He felt a hysterical impulse to shout with laughter. He had done lines of nearly pure cocaine, had taken enough ecstasy
to feel he was walking weightless on the moon, and it was all nothing compared to the exhilaration he felt now.
Svangur grunted, bent, and gripped Arthur’s left hand. He took three steps back and reeled them in, as easily as a man pulling
a hooked sunfish out of a pond. Colin collapsed across Arthur’s bare brown legs, his head on the inside of his friend’s thigh.
“Arthur,” Colin panted. “I have sometimes accused you of having your head up your own ass. I want to take a moment to apologize
in full. If anyone has come close to putting his head up your ass, it’s me, and I couldn’t be happier about it.”
“I’m glad for both of us I put on clean underwear this morning,” Arthur said.