Steve drew the rifle back, meaning to swing it, and the butt cracked against the wall. There wasn't room. He jabbed it forward instead, like a lance. The eagle turned its gimlet gaze on him, talons shifting their grip on Ralph. Its wings were soft thunder in the closed space. Johnny saw Ralph's finger jutting from the side of its beak. Steve jabbed forward again, this time catching the eagle squarely and knocking the finger out of the beak. Its head was driven back against the wall. Its talons flexed. One drove deeper into Ralph's face. The other lifted, plunged into his neck, and ripped it open. The bird screamed, perhaps in rage, perhaps in triumph. Mary screamed with it.
"GOD, NO!" David howled, his voice cracking. "OH GOD, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP HURTING MY DADDY!"
This is hell, Johnny thought calmly, stepping forward and then kneeling. He seized the talon buried in Ralph's throat. It was like grabbing some exotically ugly curio which had been upholstered in alligator-hide. He twisted it as hard as he could and heard a brittle tearing sound. Above him, Steve drove forward with the stock of the .30-.06 again, slamming the eagle's head against the rock side of the shaft. There was a crunch.
A wing battered down on Johnny's head. It was like the buzzard in the parking lot all over again. Back to the future, he thought, let go of the talon in favor of the wing, and yanked. The bird came toward him, squalling its ugly, ear-splitting cry, and Ralph came with it, pulled by the talon still buried in his cheek, temple, and orbit of his left eye. Johnny thought Ralph was either unconscious or already dead. He hoped he was already dead.
David crawled out from under, face dazed, his shirt soaked with his father's blood. In a moment he would seize the flashlight and plunge deeper into the mine, if they weren't quick.
"Steve!" Johnny shouted, reaching blindly over his head and encircling the eagle's back. It plunged and twisted in his hold like the spine of a bucking bronco. "Steve, finish it! Finish it!"
Steve drove the stock of the rifle into the bird's gullet, tilting its shadowy head toward the ceiling. At that moment Mary darted forward. She seized the eagle's neck and wrung it with bitter efficiency. There was a muffled crack, and suddenly the talon buried in Ralph's face relaxed. David's father fell to the floor of the mine, his forehead striking a ribcage and powdering it to dust.
David turned, saw his father lying motionless and face-down. His eyes cleared. He even nodded, as if to say Pretty much what I expected, then bent to pick up the flashlight. It was only when Johnny grabbed him around the waist that his calm broke and he began to struggle.
"Let go! he screamed. "It's my job! MINE!"
"No, David," Johnny said, holding on for dear life. "It's not." He tightened his grip across David's chest with his left hand, wincing as the boy's heels printed fresh pain on his shins, and let his right hand slide down to the boy's hip. From there it moved with a good pickpocket's unobtrusive speed. Johnny took from David what he had been instructed to take ... and left something, too.
"He can't take them all and then not let me finish! He can't do that! He can't!"
Johnny winced as one of David's feet connected with his left kneecap. "Steve!"
Steve was staring with horrified fascination at the eagle, which was still twitching and slowly fanning one wing. Its talons were red.
"Steve, goddammit!"
He looked up, as if startled out of a dream. Cynthia was kneeling beside Ralph, feeling for a pulse and crying loudly.
"Steve, come here!" Johnny shouted. "Help me!"
Steve came over and grabbed David, who began to struggle even harder.
"No!" David whipped his head from side to side in a frenzy. "No, it's my job! It's mine! He can't take them all and leave me! Do you hear? HE CAN'T TAKE THEM ALL AND--"
"David! Quit it!"
David stopped struggling and merely hung in Steve's arms like a puppet with its strings cut. His eyes were red and raw. Johnny thought he had never seen such desolation and loss in a human face.
The motorcycle helmet was lying where Johnny had dropped it when the eagle attacked. He bent, picked it up, and looked at the boy in Steve's arms. Steve looked the way Johnny felt--sick, lost, bewildered.
"David--" he began.
"Is God in you?" David asked. "Can you feel him in there, Johnny? Like a hand? Or a fire?"
"Yes," Johnny said.
"Then you won't take this wrong." David spit into his face. It was warm on the skin below Johnny's eyes, like tears.
Johnny made no effort to wipe away the boy's spittle. "Listen to me, David. I'm going to tell you something you didn't learn from your minister or your Bible. For all I know it's a message from God himself. Are you listening?"
David only looked at him, saying nothing.
"You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold.' You knew, but you didn't understand." He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy's cold cheeks. "Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?"
David waited, saying nothing. Maybe listening, maybe not. Johnny couldn't tell.
"Sometimes he makes us live."
Johnny turned, scooped up the flashlight, started down the drift, then turned back once again. "Go to your friend Brian, David. Go to your friend and make him your brother. Then start telling yourself there was an accident out on the highway, a bad one, a no-brain drunk crossed the centerline, the RV you were in rolled over and only you survived. It happens all the time. Just read the paper."
"But that's not the truth!"
"It might as well be. And when you get back to Ohio or Indiana or wherever it is you hang your hat, pray for God to get you over this. To make you well again. As for now, you're excused."
"I'll never say another ... what? What did you say?"
"I said you're excused." Johnny was looking at him fixedly. "Excused early." He turned his head. "Get him out of here, Steven. Get them all out of here."
"Boss, what--"
"The tour's over, Tex. Get them into the truck and up the road. If you want to be safe, I'd get going right now."
Johnny turned and went jogging down into China Shaft, the light bobbing ahead of him into the black. Soon that was gone, too.
5
He tripped over something in spite of the flashlight, almost went sprawling, and slowed to a walk. The Chinese miners had dropped what stuff they had in their frantic, useless rush to escape, and in the end they had dropped themselves, as well. He walked over a littered landscape of bones, powdering them to dust, and moved the light in a steady triangte--left to right, down to the floor, up to the left again--to keep the landscape clear and current in his mind. He saw that the walls fairly jostled with Chinese characters, as if the survivors of the cave-in had succumbed to a sort of writing mania as death first approached and then overtook them.
In addition to the bones, he saw tin cups, ancient picks with rusty heads and funny short handles, small rusty boxes on straps (what David had called 'seners, he imagined), rotted clothes, deerskin slippers (they were tiny, slippers for infants, one might have thought), and at least three pairs of wooden shoes. One of these held the stub of a candle that might have been dipped the year before Abe Lincoln was elected president.
And everywhere, everywhere scattered among the remains, were can tahs: coyotes with spider-tongues, spiders with weird albino ratlings poking from their mouths, spread-winged bats with obscene baby-tongues (the babies were leering, gnomish). Some depicted nightmarish creatures that had never existed on earth, halfling freaks that made Johnny's eyes hurt. He could feel the can tahs calling to him, pulling him as the moon pulls at salt water. He had sometimes been pulled in that same way by a sudden craving to take a drink or to gobble a sweet dessert or to lick along the smooth velvet lining of a woman's mouth with his tongue. The can tahs spoke in tones of madness which he recognized from his own past life: sweetly reasonable voices proposing unspeakable acts. But the can tahs would have no power over him unless he stopped and bent and touched them. If
he could avoid that--avoid despair that would come disguised as curiosity--he reckoned he would be all right.
Had Steve gotten them out yet? He'd have to hope so, and hope that Steve could manage to get them a good distance away in his trusty truck before the end came. A hell of a bang was coming. He only had the two bags of ANFO hung around his neck on the knotted drawstrings, but that would be plenty, all they had ever needed. It had seemed wiser not to tell the others that, though. Safer.
Now he could hear the soft groaning sound of which David had spoken: the squall and shift of hornfels, as if the very earth were speaking. Protesting his intrusion. And now he could see a dim zigzag of red light up ahead. Hard to tell how far away in the dark. The smell was stronger, too, and clearer: cold ashes. To his left, a skeleton--probably not Chinese, judging by its size--knelt against the wall as if it had died praying. Abruptly it turned its head and favored Johnny Marinville with its dead, toothy grin.
--Get out while there's still time. Tak ah wan. Tak ah lah..
Johnny punted the skull as if it were a football. It disintegrated (almost vaporized) into bone-fragments and he hurried on toward the red light, which was coming through a rift in the wall. The hole looked just big enough for him to squeeze through.
He stood outside it, looking into the light, not able to see much from the drift side, hearing David's voice in his head almost as a trance-subject must hear the voice of the hypnotist who has put him under: At ten minutes past one on the afternoon of September twenty-first, the guys at the face broke through into what they at first thought was a cave...
Johnny tossed the flashlight aside--he wouldn't need it anymore--and squeezed through the gap. As he passed into the an tak, that murmuring elevator-sound they had heard at the entrance to the drift seemed to fill his head with whispering voices ... enticing, cajoling, forbidding. All around him, turning the an tak chamber into a fantastic hollow column lit in dim scarlet tones, were carved stone faces: wolf and coyote, hawk and eagle, rat and scorpion. From the mouth of each protruded not another animal but an amorphous, reptilian shape Johnny could barely bring himself to look at ... and could not really see, in any case. Was it Tak? The Tak at the bottom of the ini? Did it matter?
How had it gotten Ripton?
If it was stuck down there, exactly how had it gotten Ripton?
He suddenly realized he was crossing the an tak, walking toward the ini. He tried to stop his legs and discovered he couldn't. He tried to imagine Cary Ripton making the same discovery and found it was easy.
Easy.
The long bags of ANFO swung back and forth against his chest. Images danced crazily in his mind: Terry grabbing his belt-loops and yanking him tight to her belly as he began to come, the best orgasm of his life and it had gone nowhere but into his pants, tell that one to Ernest Hemingway; coming out of the pool at the Bel-Air, laughing, hair plastered to his forehead, holding up the beer-bottle as the cameras flashed; Bill Harris telling him that going across country on his motorcycle might change his life and his whole career ... if he was really up to it, that was. Last of all he saw the cop's empty gray eyes staring at him in the rearview mirror, the cop saying he thought Johnny would shortly come to understand a great deal more about pneuma, soma, and sarx than he had previously.
About that he had been right.
"God, protect me long enough to get this done," he said, and allowed himself to be drawn toward the ini. Could he stop even if he tried? Best not to know, maybe.
There were dead animals lying in a rotting ring around the hole in the floor--David Carver's well of the worlds. Coyotes and buzzards, mostly, but he also saw spiders and a few scorpions. He had an idea that these last protectors had died when the eagle had died. Some withdrawing force had hammered the life out of them just as the life had been hammered from Audrey Wyler almost as soon as Steve had slapped the can tahs out of her hand.
Now smoke began to rise out of the ini ... except it wasn't smoke at all, not really. It was some sort of greasy brown-black muck, arid as it began to curl toward him, Johnny saw it was alive. It looked like clutching three-fingered hands on the ends of scrawny arms. They were not ectoplasmic, those arms, but neither were they strictly physical. Like the carved shapes looming above and all around him, looking at them made Johnny's head hurt, the way a kid's head hurt when he staggered off some viciously swerving amusement park ride. It was the stuff that had crazed the miners, of course. The stuff that had changed Ripton. The glassless windows of the pirin moh leered at him, telling him ... what, exactly? He could almost hear--
(cay de mun)
Open your mouth.
And yes, his mouth was open, wide open, like when you go to the dentist. Please open wide, Mr. Marinville, open wide, you lousy contemptible excuse for a writer, you make me furious, you make me sick with rage, but go on, open wide, cay de mun, you fucking grayhaired pretentious motherfucker, we'll fix you up, make you good as new, better than new, open wide open wide cay de mun OPEN WIDE--
The smoke. Muck. Whatever it was. Those were no longer hands on the ends of the arms but tubes. No ... not tubes...
Holes.
Yes, that was it. Holes like eyes. Three of them. Maybe more, but three he could see clearly. A triangle of holes, two on top and one underneath, holes like whispering eyes, like blast-holes--
That's right, David said. That's right, Johnny. To blast Tak right into you, the way it blasted itself into Cary Ripton, the only way it has to get out of the hole it's in down there, the hole that's too small for anything but this stuff, this jizz, two for your nose and one for your mouth.
The brownish-black muck twisted toward him, both horrible and enticing, holes that were mouths, mouths that were eyes. Eyes that whispered. Promised. He realized he had an erection. Not exactly a great time for one, but when had that ever stopped him?
Now ... sucking... he could feel them sucking the air out of his mouth ... his throat...
He snapped his mouth shut and yanked the motorcycle helmet down over his head. He was just in time. A moment later the brownish ribbons encountered the plexi face-shield and spread over it with an unpleasant wet smooching sound. For a moment he could see spreading suckers like kissing lips, and then they were gone, lost in filthy smears of brown particulate matter.
Johnny reached out, seized the brown stuff floating before him, and twisted it in opposite directions, as if he were wringing out a facecloth. There was a needling sensation in his palms and fingers, and the flesh went numb ... but the brown stuff tore away, some of it drawing back toward the ini, some dripping to the chamber's floor.
He reached the edge of the hole, standing between a heap of feathers that had been a buzzard and a coyote lying dead on its side. He looked down, reaching up to touch the hanging bags of ANFO as he did, caressing them with tingling, half-numb hands.
Do you know how to set this shit off without dyno or blasting caps? Steve had asked. You do, don't you? Or you think you do.
"I hope I do," Johnny said. His voice was flat and strange inside the helmet. "I hope I--"
"THEN COME ON!" a mad voice cried out from below him. Johnny recoiled in terror and surprise. It was the voice of the cop. Of Collie Entragian. "COME ON! TAK AH
LAH, PIRIN MOH! COME ON, YOU ROTTEN COCKSUCKER! LET'S SEE HOW BRAVE YOU ARE! TAK! "
He tried to take a step backward, maybe think this over, but tendrils of muck curled around his ankles like hands and jerked his feet out from under him. He went into the well in a graceless feet-first dive, hammering the back of his head against the edge as he fell. If not for the helmet, his skull would likely have been crushed in. He curled the bags of ANFO protectively against his chest, making breasts of them.
Then the pain came, first biting, then searing, then seeming to eat him alive. The ini was funnel-shaped, but the descending, narrowing circle was lined with crystal outcrops of quartz and cracked hornfels. Johnny slid down this like a kid down a slide that has grown crooked glass thorns. His legs were protected to so
me degree by the leather chaps and his head was protected by the motorcycle helmet, but his back and buttocks were shredded in moments. He put down his forearms in an effort to brake his slide. Needles of stone tore through them. He saw his shirt-sleeves turn red; an instant later they were in ribbons.
"YOU LIKE THAT?" the voice from the bottom of the ini gibed, and now it was Ellen Carver's voice. "TAK AH LAH, YOU INTERFERING BASTARD! EN TOW! TEN AH LAK! Raving. Cursing him in two languages.
Insane in any dimension, Johnny thought, and laughed in his agony. He lurched forward, meaning to somersault or die trying. Time to tenderize the other side, he thought, and laughed harder than ever. He could feel blood pouring into his boots like warm water.
The brown-black vapor was all around him, whispering and smearing gaping sucker-mouths across the helmet's faceplate. They appeared, disappeared, then appeared again, rubbing and making those low, suggestive smooching sounds. He couldn't get off his back the way he wanted to, couldn't somersault. The angle of descent was too steep. He turned over on his side instead, clutching at the crystal outcrops that were tearing him open, slashing his hands and not caring, needing to stop himself before he was literally cut to ribbons.
Then, suddenly, it was over.
He lay folded at the bottom of the funnel, bleeding everywhere, it felt like, his slit nerves trying to drown out all rational thought with their mindless screaming. He looked up and saw a wide swath of blood marking his path down the inclined, curving wall. Strips of cloth and leather--his shirt, his Levi's, his chaps--hung from some of the jutting crystals.
Smoke curling up between his legs, coming from the hole at the bottom of the funnel and trying to seize his crotch.
"Let go," he said. "My God commands it."
The brownish-black smoke fell back, curling around his thighs in filthy banners.
"I can let you live," a voice said. It was no wonder, Johnny thought, that Tak was caught on the other side of the funnel. The hole to which it narrowed was stringent, no more than an inch across. Red light pulsed in it like a wink. "I can heal you, make you well, let you live."