Unclouded Day

  Chapter Nine

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Brian muttered under his breath. He was no caver, and he hated small enclosed spaces. Especially ones where you couldn’t see where you were going or what might be down there with you.

  “Have you ever been in a cave before?” she asked him, her eyes fixed on the hole.

  “Yeah, a long time ago when I was little. Papaw took me somewhere that had a guided tour of one; I’m not sure where it was. All I remember is that it was dark and creepy and it scared me. I’ve hated them ever since,” he said.

  “Well, we’ve got a flashlight, as long as the batteries hold out. We haven’t used it much so far,” she said hopefully.

  “That’s a really cheerful thought, Raych,” he said, laughing grimly, and she couldn’t help smiling.

  “I didn’t mean it like that. But seriously, all we can do is try, you know. It’s either that or turn back,” she pointed out.

  “I know,” he sighed.

  “Surely we won’t be down there long enough to run the batteries dry,” she said, trying to cheer him up, and maybe herself too.

  “Yeah, I guess it’ll be okay,” he agreed grudgingly.

  There was nothing else to be said, so they plucked up their courage and crawled headfirst into the hole, hoping it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

  The hole quickly led them into a small chamber about the size of a car, with a bit of leaf litter scattered on the floor. It was packed down in places, like something big and heavy had been sleeping on it. Brian had a vivid image of a bear hibernating there, right where his feet stood. Did bears sleep in their dens during the summer? He wasn’t sure, but he glanced nervously at the opening and felt a strong desire to crawl right back outside.

  “Scared?” Rachel asked, watching him.

  “Yeah, a little. Don’t want to run into a bear down here,” he admitted.

  “Me neither. Maybe we should hurry and get deeper inside, just in case,” she agreed.

  So Brian choked down his fear and consulted the amulet again, to see which way they needed to go. There were two passages that led deeper into the ground from the bear’s den. One of them was big enough for a man to walk through, and the other one was so small and narrow that he seriously doubted if they could squeeze through it at all.

  Naturally, that was the one the amulet wanted them to take. Brian shook his head and wondered why nothing could ever be easy once in a while.

  Still, he got down flat on his belly and wormed his way into the hole as best he could, holding the flashlight between his teeth so he could see where he was going. It was a tight fit, and it didn’t seem to get any better further ahead. As soon as he got far enough inside, Rachel followed him.

  Brian’s fear of bears was now replaced by the fear of getting stuck in this narrow crack in the ground until they died of hunger and thirst. It was almost certain that no one would find them in time to save them, if that happened. Would some casual explorer stumble across their skeletons years and years from now, and wonder what on earth they’d been doing down there?

  It did him no good at all to think of such things, so he tried to focus on the Fountain instead, or Brandon, or anything at all except how narrow and tight the passage was. He squirmed and wriggled and inched his way along for what seemed like a week, until eventually the wormhole started to widen out again.

  In a way, at least. He emerged into a place where the walls completely disappeared on both sides, but the floor and ceiling stayed uncomfortably close together. It felt like there was an enormous block of stone floating above his head with nothing to hold it up, and he kept imagining that it was about to fall at any second to crush him like a bug under a boot heel.

  “Are you okay back there?” he called to Rachel, stopping to wait for her to come out of the passage he’d just left.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, emerging beside him.

  They stopped to rest for a few minutes and give Brian time to check the amulet again. There hadn’t been any need for directions while they crawled through the wormhole, but now they could go ahead almost any which way they pleased.

  “Which way?” she asked, after he looked.

  “That way,” he said, nodding straight ahead and somewhat to the right.

  “I’m sure glad we’ve got that pointer with us. We’d be lost for sure without it,” she commented nervously, and he agreed wholeheartedly.

  “Ready to head out?” he asked her.

  “Yeah, let’s go. This place is creepy,” she told him. He couldn’t have agreed more.

  They passed through dozens of randomly shaped chambers and tunnels which meandered any which way, with no rhyme or reason that Brian could tell. The whole mountain seemed to be honeycombed with passages, most of them rough and wet and cold. Whenever they came to a fork in the way, Brian stopped to check the amulet. It never showed the slightest hesitation about which way they should go, but he was reminded every time of how completely dependent on it they really were. As Rachel had said earlier, they would have been totally lost without it.

  Some of the passages were so tight he actually had to knock pieces of stone loose with his hammer before they could squeeze through, and others were so huge that they couldn’t see the walls or the ceiling even with the flashlight. In a way Brian hated these places even worse than the tight ones, for there were absolutely no landmarks at all. It felt more like being lost in outer space than underground.

  In one of these large chambers they came across a rushing stream that blocked the path, and the amulet showed in no uncertain terms that they were supposed to cross it. The current looked swift even in the weak glow of the flashlight. And deep, and cold, and therefore dangerous, too.

  “Have we got to cross that?” Rachel whispered, wide eyed. Brian liked it no better than she did, but there was no hiding the truth.

  “Yeah, it looks like it,” he told her, reluctantly. He hesitated, and played the flashlight beam across the water to try and make out the farther shore.

  It was there, but it was hard to make out any details except for a strip of sandy beach. The inky, pitch blackness had a way of playing tricks with your eyes if you weren’t careful, and it seemed to soak up the light like a beach towel.

  “I think it’s about thirty yards to the other side,” he told her, peering as hard as he could into the darkness as if that could help him see better.

  “That’s pretty far to swim, with a current like that,” she said.

  “Hmm. . . Let’s see what it feels like, just in case,” he said, sitting down on the floor to take off his shoes and socks. He dipped one foot in the water before quickly jerking it back.

  “Cold as ice,” he muttered.

  “Is it really?” she asked.

  “Well, no, maybe not quite that bad. But probably cold enough to take your breath away if you jumped in, and maybe freeze us to death if we stayed in there too long. Current’s really strong, too,” he told her, seriously.

  “Let’s look and see if there’s any other way across it, then,” she suggested.

  They explored the stream bank for a while, trying to find a better place to cross. There didn’t seem to be any, for at one end of the chamber the stream gushed out of the solid rock over a low waterfall just as swiftly as ever, and at the other end it formed a kind of pool backed up against the wall of the cavern. But that end was even worse, because Brian knew the water had to be escaping somewhere, probably through an opening below the surface. It would have to be one big monster of a hole to swallow a river as full and as fast as that one was, too. The surface of the pool was covered in swirling eddies and upwellings that seemed to confirm his guess.

  Brian suppressed a shudder; what if they got sucked under by the whirlpool and carried off into some cavern where the water extended all the way to the ceiling? No, they dared not risk that at all. But the waterfall wasn’t much better, and that left them with a problem. They had to g
et across, but how?

  He looked again at the place where the stream gushed out from the wall, and after thinking about it for a few minutes he had an idea. The stream flooded out over a lip of stone, and the limestone below it was undercut slightly by the backsplash of the water. This formed a small space between the falling water itself and the rock behind it, and there at least the water was fairly calm.

  It’d still be unbelievably cold and there was dangerously little room to maneuver, but he thought if they kept hold of projecting rocks and were very, very careful, and extremely lucky, they might just possibly make it across.

  On the other hand, he didn’t even want to think about what might happen if either one of them slipped. The falling water would snatch them under almost instantly, and they might be carried a long way downstream very quickly. Maybe even all the way into the whirlpool at the bottom of the cavern. Brian knew what that would mean, and he shivered at the thought. But there was no other way.

  “I think maybe we could pick our way along that shelf behind the waterfall,” he finally said, reluctantly.

  “I knew you’d say that,” she sighed.

  “You did?” he asked, surprised.

  “Yeah. Anybody can see it’s the only way where there’s any chance at all to make it across,” she told him.

  “So why didn’t you say something, then?” he asked, confused.

  “Well, you looked like you were thinking pretty hard over there, you know. I figured you’d probably come to the same conclusion yourself in a minute if I left you alone. Which you did,” she added hastily, and in spite of his fear he laughed.

  “So you thought I might like to figure it out by myself, is that it?” he asked.

  “Sometimes people do,” she shrugged.

  “I don’t think this is the time to worry about being proud, Raych. If you’ve got an idea from now on, just spill it,” he told her, and she smiled.

  “Okay, then. I’ll try to remember that,” she agreed, and then there was a pause while they both tried to think of something else to say, to put off the moment when they actually had to get started. Neither of them wanted to set foot in the water, but finally Brian sighed.

  “I guess we might as well get going,” he said, pointing out the obvious.

  “Yeah, I guess,” she agreed unenthusiastically.

  He put the amulet in his pocket and zipped it up to keep from losing it, and peered across the river again to find a place where the other shore seemed closest. Then he tucked his socks into his shoes and threw them as hard as he could across the river. He didn’t dare keep them on while he crossed, just in case he did fall in and had to swim. He couldn’t afford to have anything dragging his feet down.

  They landed somewhere on the gravel (he thought), and then he threw Rachel’s shoes across, too. Then he picked up the backpack and hesitated.

  “I don’t think I can throw this all the way across, Raych. It’s too heavy,” he told her.

  “Could you take some of the pears out and throw them across one at a time, and then throw the pack across when it’s lighter?” she suggested.

  “I can try,” he agreed doubtfully.

  He started lobbing pears across the river like baseballs, suddenly glad for all those years he’d spent rock throwing. He couldn’t tell where they landed, but he didn’t hear any splashes. He left about half of them in the pack, just enough to give it a little weight, and then he zipped it up and threw it with all his strength.

  The pack sailed far out across the water, and then landed in the river with a huge splash, barely short of the far shore. The swift current carried it off in an instant, and Brian knew there wasn’t a prayer of getting it back. He cursed out loud and kicked the ground in frustration. That was half their food and all their clothes and other stuff, gone in the blink of an eye. They had nothing left except the flashlight, the amulet, the money, and however many pears had made it across to the far bank.

  “It’s all right, Mad Dog. We’ll make do without it,” Rachel told him, doing her best to sound cheerful.

  “I guess we’ll have to,” he admitted with clenched teeth.

  “It’ll be all right, I promise,” she repeated.

  “What makes you so sure? It looks pretty bad to me,” he said, staring at the spot where the pack had landed.

  “I don’t think we made it all this way just to have it end like this, because we couldn’t cross a stupid river,” she said, and he couldn’t help smiling a little.

  “Maybe so. Sorry for losing my temper,” he said.

  “No problem. Happens to the best of us sometimes,” she told him.

  There was nothing else to wait for, so Brian looked at the river again and took a deep breath to steady himself before he waded out. The first few steps were stinging cold against his bare feet, and he was already shivering when the water was no more than knee deep. By the time he reached the edge of the waterfall he was in up to his chest, but most of him was too numb to feel much by then. The river was leaching the heat out of him, fast, and he knew there was no time to waste. With no more hesitation, he crawled in behind the curve of the waterfall.

  It was worse than he’d thought. There was no more than two or three feet of space between the rock and the water. He could touch bottom with his feet, but he could also feel the edge of a drop-off. The roar of the falling water so near was loud enough to deafen both of them and make speech impossible, and even the slackwater they were wading through was full of cross-currents and surges of bubbles coming up from below.

  Brian ignored all this and crept along as steadily and surely as he could toward the far shore, although it was rather like trying to ignore a rattlesnake in his bed. He dared not do more than glance back now and then to see how Rachel was doing, but she seemed to be getting along about as well as he was.

  It was slow, scary business, but they did make progress, and after a while they made it perhaps three quarters of the way across, as best Brian could judge without being able to see past the curtain of water in front of him. Then they met a problem.

  A boulder blocked the way forward, and there was absolutely no way around it except to plunge into the waterfall itself. Brian halted, appalled.

  He’d barely been able to hold back his fear as it was, and the thought of swimming the raging torrent terrified him. The cross-currents swirling around his legs were just a feeble reminder of what the main flood would be like. His body was already so cold that he doubted he could swim very far, even with no current at all. True, there shouldn’t be that much farther to go before they reached the other bank, but what if the river pulled them right back out to mid-stream? They’d drown, that’s what. He didn’t have a shred of doubt about that.

  But there was no other way, unless they decided to turn back. And if they did that, then Rachel would most certainly die. So might Brandon, and even Brian for that matter, because the amulet offered them no help at all in finding a way back out of the cave system. All it did was point to the Fountain.

  Brian had never been more frightened in his entire life than he was at that moment, not even on that awful night when Mama put the bullet hole in his bedroom wall. Any choice he might make seemed terrible.

  He took deep breaths to calm his pounding heart. They’d have to swim and hope for the best; that was the only option. Anything was better than wandering the endless caverns until they starved to death alone in the darkness.

  As gingerly as possible, he turned to face Rachel, who couldn’t see past him to tell why he’d stopped. There was no way he could make her hear him over the roar of the falls, but he got as close as he could and put his mouth to her ear.

  “There’s a boulder up ahead, we can’t get by this way!” he said, yelling so his words were loud enough for her to understand.

  She grasped the situation instantly.

  “Can you swim?” she asked, putting her mouth up to his ear. In this way they were able to t
alk, somewhat.

  “Yeah, can you?” he asked.

  “Yeah. How much farther is it?” she asked.

  “I can’t tell. I don’t think very far,” he said.

  “Then we have to swim. It’s no use going back,” she said.

  “Yeah, I was afraid you’d say that,” he said, and for a second he thought she actually smiled at him.

  “You better put the flashlight in your pocket and zip it up so we won’t lose it,” she reminded him, and he nodded. He switched off the light, plunging them into utter darkness, and quickly put the flashlight in his pocket with the amulet.

  “Listen, the water will push us under when we jump into the falls, maybe a long way. Hold my hand, and before long we ought to pop back up top again. Then swim, hard, the same direction I do. Okay?” he asked.

  “Okay,” she agreed. She reached out to clasp his hand, and he was glad to feel some strength in her grip. He gripped right back. They took a deep breath together, and then jumped.

  The river snatched them at once, and the weight of the falling water pushed them far under the surface. They plunged so deep that Brian felt his knee scrape against the bare rock bottom. He was dragged helplessly along for a short while, and then found himself caught in the upwelling below the falls. After that, he was launched quickly back to the surface. His head suddenly popped free into open air, and he took a deep gasping breath, fighting panic. He still had a grip on Rachel’s hand, but that was the only point of contact he had with anything. He couldn’t see a thing in the pitch black darkness, although he was conscious of being carried along at a rapid pace.

  He knew he had to swim at right angles to the current to reach shore, but which way? He was too disoriented to remember. One of the banks was probably nearby, and the other one impossibly far. A wrong choice would probably be fatal, and he had only seconds to make up his mind. In desperation, he swam left.

  It seemed like forever, but really it couldn’t have been more than a minute before his hand struck bottom. Scant seconds after that he was crawling out onto a gravelly beach, but it was anybody’s guess which side it might be. He wouldn’t know for sure till he was able to get out the flashlight and look.

  But for a while he lacked the strength to do even that much. He lay there and shivered violently, and then threw up what felt like a gallon of river water that he must have swallowed at some point, although he couldn’t remember doing it. His head spun, and if he hadn’t already been lying down he might have fallen. He felt someone patting his back and vaguely realized it must have been Rachel, but he was too far gone to care. The river had almost killed them both.

  He could feel her body shaking violently from the cold, just as his was, and he quickly decided this was no time for modesty.

  “We’ve got to get warm,” he told her, between chattering teeth, and when she didn’t answer he put his arms around her and pressed his body as close up against hers as he could. She didn’t object, and they lay there together sharing body heat as best they could.

  After a while, they both recovered enough strength to sit up and take stock. Brian unzipped his pocket to get the flashlight, and when he switched it on the first thing he discovered was that it didn’t work.

  “Just give it a little time to dry out. It’ll be all right,” Rachel reminded him, still shivering.

  He did, and presently when he tried it again he was rewarded with a weak glow. The first thing he noticed was that they were dangerously far downstream, almost at the very lip of the whirlpool. Another ten seconds and they would both have been lost.

  That scared him all over again, but he reminded himself sternly that they were safe now, and he needed to get a grip. The next thing he saw was his left shoe, and not long after that, his right one. They’d made it to the far bank after all.

  They took a little while to wring some of the water out of their clothes and to rub some warmth back into their arms and legs, and when they felt halfway human again, Brian consulted the amulet to see which way they needed to go. Both of them were anxious to leave the underground river far behind as soon as possible. Brian had never been so close to death before, and he hoped he never would be again.

  They found only seven of the pears that he’d thrown across the water, and they stuffed these into their pockets glumly. It wasn’t enough food to last more than a day or two at the most.

  But there was worse to come. It wasn’t long after they left the river behind that Rachel put a hand on his shoulder and stopped him.

  “What is it, Raych?” he asked, turning to look at her.

  “My medicine bottle is gone, Brian. I guess I must have lost it when we crossed the river; I just now noticed it was missing,” she told him, sounding scared.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m sure. It was in my shirt pocket and I thought I had it buttoned shut, but it must have come open,” she told him.

  “Can you go without it for a while?” he asked.

  “Maybe a few hours. Not very long, though. I’ll start having seizures,” she said.

  “What should I do, if you have one?” he asked grimly.

  “Just leave me alone. There’s nothing you can do except wait for it to be over. I’ll probably chew my tongue to pieces and I’ll have to rest for a few hours before I can walk again, but I’ll be okay,” she told him.

  “We’ll just have to do the best we can, then,” he said, hiding his own fear.

  Again they went on for what seemed like days, although in reality it couldn’t have been more than a few hours at the most. Sometimes they talked quietly, but more often than not they were both silent.

  Then they came to the bat colony.

  “What’s that sound?” Rachel whispered, grabbing his arm again. Brian hadn’t noticed anything, but when he stopped and listened carefully he could hear faint skittering noises above his head. It reminded him of rats.

  He didn’t like this at all, and quickly shone the light up above them. The ceiling was alive with bats, packed together in clumps like sardines in a can. Brian took the light off them immediately, but it had been there long enough to disturb a few of them already. These dropped from their perches and flew around the cavern noisily, until they finally disappeared somewhere.

  “Cover up the light so maybe they’ll settle down,” Rachel whispered.

  “Yeah, but then we can’t see which way to go,” he pointed out, also whispering.

  They finally decided to cover the flashlight with one hand, and pick their way through the bat cave by the faint red light that welled up between their fingers.

  This wasn’t easy, because the floor of the cavern was piled deep with bat droppings, slick and greasy and fouler than Brian would ever have imagined it was possible for anything to be. It reminded him of wading through thick, sticky mud. At every step they sank in, sometimes thigh-deep, and more than once they slipped and fell. It was a slow and disgusting business to make their way across.

  The filth was bad enough, but even worse was the thought of the bats swooping down to attack them. Didn’t they carry rabies? Brian was almost sure he remembered reading or hearing that, somewhere. He could just imagine a long series of rabies shots if one of them bit him.

  But that didn’t happen, and just when he thought he couldn’t possibly survive a single more step through bat crap, they reached the end of the colony and passed into a new tunnel.

  Several hours later, still filthy and stinking, they sat down to rest for a while in one of the drier and sandier caves they’d come across. They had no way of telling what time it might have been in the world outside, but judging from how sleepy they both were it must have been late.

  “All this sand gives me an idea about how to clean up a little, if you want to give it a try,” Rachel said presently.

  “What is it?” he asked, curious.

  “We can take a sand bath. Take some of this sand and rub it all over the dirt
y spots. It’ll help a little,” she suggested.

  “Yeah, I think I’ve heard of that somewhere before, now that you mention it,” he agreed. Nothing but soap and water would get them completely clean, of course, but anything was better than smelling like a sewer all night. So they tried it, and found that it was slightly better than nothing. But not by much.

  After the sand bath they both ate a pear, and Brian tried to ignore the fact that he was still gnawingly hungry even afterward. But they dared not eat any more. Five pears was all they had left to last them however much longer they had to stay underground, and who knew how long that might be? The caves seemed to go on forever, and Brian had kicked himself more times than he could count for overlooking the food problem. He’d assumed the Fountain was close, stupid as that was. He didn’t know how much longer they could go on, if it didn’t turn up soon.

  He glanced longingly at the pears, unsatisfying as they were, and then he lay down on the sandy floor with a still-growling stomach. But nevertheless, he was so exhausted that even hunger couldn’t keep him awake for long, and he was asleep almost before he could shut his eyes.