Three

This time we’re even.” He spat out the words. “This time we’re gonna fight my way. Everybody equal--in the dark! Douse those lights!” he commanded.

  The ring of lights went out one after the other. Only his light remained. A knife clattered onto the rock pavement in front of Joel.

  “Better take it!” shouted Roke still trapped under the net. “It’s your only chance!”

  Joel reached down and picked it up—a slim, bleached-white shaft obviously made out of bone. Now the one remaining light under Deeter’s face went out. The cave became dark. Joel heard an approving, drawn-out murmur from the circle of watchers. A sudden, whip-like move from Deeter’s knife drew blood along Joel’s arm. There was a second hum of approval from the darkness.

  “Slash at him!” yelled Roke. “It’ll keep him away from you.”

  Deeter laughed loudly. “You’ve had it, Joel. You’re gonna die.”

  Joel heard the sharp wind made by another swipe in the dark, but he managed to step back in time. He didn’t really want to hurt Deeter, but he had to fend him off. He slashed wildly around him.

  “Close, close,” laughed Deeter. “But not close enough.”

  It was close enough. Joel felt a splash on his arms of what he knew was blood. He also knew it wasn’t his blood.

  Then came a breath-stopping, unexpected turn. With a gargantuan effort Roke freed himself from the heavy net and flung it across the cave where it crashed against Deeter and Joel, flattening and trapping both of them. A moment later Roke leapt onto it and wrenched the knife out of Deeter’s hand.

  “I’m going to kill you,” he hissed. Roke spat out the words like they were knives themselves. Joel could hear the watchers around them jabbering in panic and starting to flee. One had relit his lamp but dropped it as he ran away. Its light cast a pale, one-sided gleam across the net as Roke raised the knife to plunge it into Deeter.

  “No!” screamed Joel. You can’t!”

  “He tried to kill you!”

  “But he didn’t.”

  Roke hesitated. But his hesitation lasted only seconds. “We let him off before. He’s run out of second chances, boy. It’s over.”

  In those few seconds of hesitation Deeter had managed to squirm free and was now racing out of the cavern. “No, you don’t!” screamed Roke as he leapt up and ran after him.

  It took Joel a while longer to get free of the net and follow them. Roke, he could see, was determined to destroy Deeter. He didn’t know what he could do to stop him—but he knew he had to try. He dashed out of the cavern and entered a second even larger cave. There he beheld a vast, breathtaking tableau, lit like the fairy cavern by dappling shafts of daylight from clefts in the ceiling.

  He instantly understood that this was the great secret he had been told about--undoubtedly the same secret Bryan had been hoping to find. Rising in tiers before him reaching up to the roof of the cavern was an incredible, soaring sculpture formed from giant cascades of intricately carved stalagmites. Wildly imaginative abstract forms seemed to merge and diverge into playful depictions of otherworldly beings and faces. It was an overwhelming tour de force like nothing he had ever seen.

  On the surrounding walls was a panorama of painted animals like those he had seen at the cave’s entrance. But here whole herds of deer and elk ambled among ancient, vanished meadows.

  Deeter was clambering up this sculptured fantasy heading for what Joel guessed was some kind of exit at the top to the outside world. Roke was not far below him. “Roke! Let him go!” shouted Joel. But Roke did not hear him or want to. It was as though he were being driven by something he could not hold back---the fate that Homer said commands us all.

  Deeter had almost reached the top of the giant cascade when it happened. Triggered, perhaps, by the massive extra weight of Roke scrambling up the sculptured slope just below him, the vast carving began slowly to move. Delicate filigrees of white calcite were trembling and breaking off it when suddenly the whole structure became a tremendous, roaring rush of pale, crumbling rock.

  Joel saw it catch Deeter and flip him over and over in midair as though it were some kind of ravenous cave beast. For a moment longer he was screaming helplessly and, then—it had snatched and swallowed him. The avalanche of broken rock slowed and rumbled to a halt, releasing a cloud of white, erasing dust and a profound silence.

  Joel stared in disbelief. And Roke? What had happened to him? He was desperate to know. He raced to the edge of the rubble and began clambering up it, calling loudly to his friend. In a moment he found him. He had not been engulfed like Deeter, but it was bad enough. He was encased in debris up to his armpits.

  “I can’t move, I’m trapped,” he said.

  `Joel immediately began digging at the broken rock, trying to get a grip on the huge chunks so he could toss them aside. Most were too big for him to move. It seemed impossibly difficult. Every time he managed to extricate a boulder the tide of rock slid back in on his friend.

  “It’s not going to work,” said Roke.

  “I’ll go get help,” said Joel.

  “Down here?” Roke laughed hopelessly. “Fat chance. You see those guys run when Deeter needed them?” He looked around him. “This thing isn’t through moving,” he said ominously.

  “What the hell are we going to do?” said Joel, his voice becoming a wail.

  “Not much, I’m afraid.” Roke pulled out the delicate sculpture he’d found on the floor of the cave. “I’ve got a funny hunch my dad made this. I can almost feel him in this place. He probably carved this mighty panorama here, too, that I’ve gone and wrecked. He was good enough. I can see him doing it. He probably did these, too.” Roke peered around him at the gallery of paintings. “I knew these weren’t cave paintings. They were his paintings.” Joel wondered how he could be so sure, but Roke seemed very sure.

  “What I can’t figure out is why he chose a place like this. It must have taken him years to do it. He could have escaped. Why didn’t he?”

  Joel sensed that Roke was beginning to hallucinate, imagining, perhaps, what he wanted to believe. He seemed to be sort of talking to himself. “I guess he gave up looking for me. Even gave up going back to live outside. Maybe he just hoped I’d find it all. Well, I did.” Joel could see he was in a lot of pain. “Here hang onto this.” He handed Joel the carving he had found. “A keepsake from me.”

  “What are you talking about?” Joel was getting mad. “You sound like you’re trying to sign off. We’re going to get you out of here, and that’s that.”

  “I don’t know, Joel. I think I’m hurt bad. It’s just a fact. I can feel the breakage—in my legs. My ribs.”

  Joel began to be aware that Roke’s clothes were pretty much soaked in blood. “No one can hurry us down before our time. That’s what the poet said. But, if a man’s hour is come, there’s no escape.” He was having trouble breathing and talking now.

  “You quoting that idiot Homer again?”

  “He knew the things that were and the things that would be.”

  There was an abrupt shudder in the rocks around Roke. “Get out of here, Joel. Your time isn’t yet. Go back to Bryan. Make him well. There’s an exit up there. I can smell it. Follow that stream to the road.” He grabbed Joel’s shoulder and squeezed it hard. “Be brave. Be warriors. Both of you.” He waved—almost a ghost now in the rising tide of white dust, that silly half-smile of his lingering on his face.

  Joel was starting to panic. He couldn’t just leave him--he was hurting too badly--but somehow he had to get help. Someone, anybody, who could come down here and help him free his friend. He began to clamber further up the broken slope. “Hang on, big guy,” he said. “I’m going to figure out a way to get you out.”

  “There’s a time for words---” Roke’s voice was only faintly audible as a second avalanche of shattered white rock began to tumble down. Joel barely heard his
last words. “And there’s a time for sleep.” Roke was gone. .

  Joel refused to believe he had lost him. He spent an hour, two hours searching and searching through the rubble--calling his name until his throat was raw and his fingers were bleeding. Roke had vanished utterly and completely. It was too much. He sank down on a slab of limestone and quietly wept—sorry for his wonderful friend and sorriest of all for himself.

  He got up after a while and became aware again of the majestic sweep of wall paintings all around him. He wondered if Roke’s dad had really painted them, wondered why Roke seemed so sure he had. It was possible. He was a fine painter Roke had said. Then, he noticed something that devastated him completely—but at the same time seemed to bring his friend’s great quest to find his dad to an unequivocal end. Down at the corner of one of the vast paintings on the wall were two figures standing together. A tall man and what was obviously his little son. They were holding hands. They stared at Joel---each with the same half-smile he knew so well.

  “Oh, Roke,” Joel whispered softly to himself. “You couldn’t have seen this. How could you have? And yet somehow you did. You must have.” Joel touched the head of the little boy on the wall. “Wow, I hope so.” He stayed a while longer and, then, with an aching heart headed for the portal that led to Bryan and the outside world.

  THE END

  THE RECKIE