toward those outlets. The drain cover that we found was a shiny steel grid in a sheltered space between machines. There was no nearby light to pierce the gloom below it, so I switched on my flashlight and directed the beam through the drain cover. The grid’s crosshatched shadows, which twisted and jumped each time I shifted my light, made my inspection difficult, but I saw that the vertical length of pipe went down about six feet, where the drain split into two opposing horizontal pipelines, each only slightly smaller than the vertical line that fed them.
Good enough.
I had the feeling we were running out of time. A search party had left this room not long ago, but there was no guarantee that it would not return for another look—especially if we had unwittingly left tracks of any kind in the ventilation shafts to mark our journey to this place. If searchers didn’t return, then one of the powerhouse workers was likely to blunder across us sooner or later, regardless of the caution we exercised.
Together we lifted the steel grid out of the drain opening and quietly laid it to one side, making only a brief metallic scraping sound that, considering the roar of the nearby river and the din of the laboring machines, could not have carried far. We left about one third of the cover protruding over the opening so it could be gripped and maneuvered from underneath.
We lowered our gear into the hole.
Rya dropped down and quickly shoved one of our backpacks into each branching horizontal drain at the foot of the vertical feeder line. She put the shotgun in one and the automatic rifle in the other. Finally she slid backward into the branch on the right and dragged the duffel bag in with her.
I jumped down into the now empty feeder line, reached up, gripped the edge of the drain cover, and tried to lift it into place without a sound. I failed. At the last moment it slipped in my hands and clattered into place with a hard metallic ring that surely had been heard throughout the chamber above. I just hoped each of the goblin workers thought the sound had been caused by one of the others.
I slipped backward into the branching drain on the left and discovered that it was not perfectly horizontal but slightly sloped to facilitate the flow of water. It was dry now. They had not hosed the powerhouse floor recently.
I was facing Rya across the three-foot-wide vertical feeder drain, but the darkness was so complete that I could not see her. It was enough to know she was there.
A few minutes passed uneventfully. If the clatter of the drain cover had been heard, it evidently had not created much interest.
The noise of the generators overhead and the incessant rumble of the underground river somewhere beyond Rya were transmitted through the floor in which the drains were set, and therefore into the drains themselves, making conversation impossible. We would have had to shout to hear each other, and of course we could take no such risk.
Abruptly I had the feeling that I should reach out to Rya. Upon succumbing to the urge, I found she was reaching out for me, holding forth a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich and a thermos of juice. She did not seem surprised when my questing hand found hers in the darkness. Effectively blind and deaf and mute, nevertheless we were able to communicate by virtue of the intense closeness that grew from the love we shared; there was an almost clairvoyant link between us, and from it we both drew what comfort and reassurance we could.
The luminous dial of my wristwatch showed that it was a few minutes past five o’clock, Sunday afternoon.
Darkness and waiting.
I let my mind wander to Oregon. But the loss of family was too depressing.
So I thought about Rya. About laughing with her in better times, about loving her, needing her, wanting her. But soon all thoughts of Rya led to a tumescence that was uncomfortable in my current awkward position.
So I called up memories of the carnival and of my many friends there. The Sombra Brothers outfit was my haven, my family, my home. But, damn it, we were far from the carnival, with little hope of returning to it, which was even more depressing than considerations of what I’d lost in Oregon.
So I slept.
Having slept little during the past several nights, exhausted by the day’s explorations, I did not wake for nine hours. At two in the morning I tore myself violently out of a dream, coming fully awake in an instant.
For a fraction of a second I believed the nightmare had awakened me. Then I realized there were several voices filtering down through the grate at the top of the drain: goblin voices, speaking animatedly in that ancient tongue.
I reached out from my burrow and, in the darkness, found Rya’s hand as it was reaching for mine. We held tight, listening.
Above, the voices moved away.
Out in the cavernous powerhouse there were sounds I had not heard before: much thumping, much clanging of metal.
Not quite clairvoyantly I sensed that another search of the powerhouse was under way. During the past nine hours they had gone through the complex from one end to the other, leaving no passageway unexplored. They had discovered the dead goblin we had interrogated. They had found the empty vials of pentothal and the used needles next to the corpse. Perhaps they had even uncovered traces of our journey through the ventilation ducts and knew we had left those channels in the powerhouse. Having found us nowhere else, they were giving this chamber one more toss.
Forty minutes passed. The sounds overhead did not diminish.
Several times Rya and I let go of each other, only to reach out again a minute or two later.
To my dismay I heard footsteps approaching the mouth of the drain. Again, several goblins gathered around that steel grid.
A flashlight beam stabbed down through the grate.
Rya and I instantly snatched our hands apart, and like turtles retreating into their shells, we drew silently back into the branch drains.
In front of me, slats of light revealed strips of the floor in the vertical pipe, the junction where it met the horizontal pipes in which we cowered. Not much could be seen because the crosshatched ribs of the grate cast a confusion of shadows.
The light clicked off.
Breath had gone stagnant in me. I quietly blew it out, sucked in clean air.
The voices did not fade.
A moment later there came a screech, clatter, and thump, then a scraping noise as they lifted the grate out of the mouth of the drain and slid it aside.
The flashlight winked on again. It seemed as bright as a spotlight on a stage.
Directly in front of me, only inches away, beyond the opening of the horizontal pipe in which I lay, the flashlight illuminated the floor of the vertical feeder line in almost supernatural detail. The beam seemed hot; if there had been any moisture in the pipe, I would not have been surprised to see it sizzle and vaporize in the glare. Every scratch and discoloration in the drain’s surface was vividly exposed.
I followed the probing light with breathless expectation, afraid that it would fix upon something that either Rya or I had dropped when we had reached across the darkness toward each other. Perhaps a crumb of bread from the sandwich that she had passed to me. A single white crumb, contrasted against the mottled grays of the pipe, would be our undoing.
Beyond the slowly moving beam, in the horizontal drain opposite mine, I glimpsed Rya’s face, vaguely limned by the black splash of the light. She glanced at me too; but like me, she was unable to turn her gaze away from the probing beam for more than a second, afraid of what at any moment might be revealed.
Suddenly the luminous lance stopped moving.
I strained to see what discovery had stayed the hand of the goblin with the flashlight, but I spotted nothing that could have attracted its attention or excited its suspicion.
The beam still did not move.
Overhead the goblins spoke louder, faster.
I wished I could understand their language.
Still, I thought I knew what they were discussing: They were going to come down to have a look in the branch pipes. Some anomaly had caught their attention, some wrongness, and the
y were going to descend to take a closer look.
A harp-string glissando of fear rippled through me, each note colder than the one before it.
I could envision myself retreating desperately and laboriously backward through the drain, too cramped to be able to fight, while one of the goblins slithered in headfirst to pursue me. Quick as the demons were, the beast would be able to reach out with wickedly clawed hands and tear my face away—or gouge my eyes from their sockets or rip open my throat—even as I was pulling the trigger of my gun. I’d almost surely kill it, but I would die horribly, even as I squeezed off the shot that finished my enemy.
Once it saw me, the certainty of its own death would not prevent the goblin from entering the pipe. I had seen the hivelike nature of their secret society. I knew that for the good of the community one of them would no more hesitate to sacrifice itself than an ant would hesitate to die in defense of the hill. And if I managed to shoot one or five or ten of them, they would keep coming, forcing me deeper into the drain until my gun jammed or until I took too long to reload, and then the last of them would destroy me.
The beam of the flashlight moved again. It swept slowly around the bottom of the vertical drain. Then around once more.
It froze again.
Dust motes drifted lazily in the luminous shaft.
Come on, you bastards, I thought. Come on, come on, let’s get it over with.
The light clicked off.
I tensed.
Would they come in darkness? Why?
Surprisingly they wrestled the grate back into place at the top of the drain.
They were not coming down, after all. They were going away, satisfied that we were not here.
I could hardly believe it. I lay in astonishment, as breathless with amazement as I had been with fear.
In the blackness I eased forward and reached out for Rya. She was reaching for me. Our hands gripped in the middle of the now dark vertical pipe, where the flashlight beam had probed so inquisitively only moments ago. Her hand was ice-cold, but it slowly grew warm as I held it.
I was exhilarated. Remaining quiet was difficult, for I wanted to laugh, whoop, and sing. For the first time since leaving Gibtown I felt the fog of despair lifting a little, and I sensed hope shining somewhere above.
They had searched their haven twice and had not found us. Now they probably would never find us because they would be convinced that we had escaped, and they would turn their attention elsewhere. In several hours, after giving them more time to confirm their belief that we’d fled, we could slip out of the drain and away, setting the detonators on the charges we had planted on our way in.
We were going to get out of Yontsdown after having accomplished virtually everything we had come to do. We had learned the reason for the nest that existed here. And we had done something about it—maybe not enough but something.
I knew we were going to get out unharmed, whole, and safe.
I knew, I knew. I just knew.
Sometimes my clairvoyance fails me. Sometimes there is a danger looming, a darkness descending, that I cannot see regardless of how hard I look.
chapter thirty-one
THE DEATHS OF THOSE WE LOVE
The goblins had replaced the grate over the mouth of the drain and had gone away at 2:09 Monday morning. I figured that Rya and I ought to lay low for another four hours, anyway, which would mean that we would make our way back out of the mountain twenty-four hours after we had entered it under the guidance of Horton Bluett.
I wondered if the threatened snowstorm had come and if the world aboveground was white and clean.
I wondered if Horton Bluett and Growler were at that moment asleep in their small, neat house on Apple Lane—or if they were awake, one or both of them, wondering about Rya and me.
With higher spirits than I had known in days, I found that my usual insomnia had departed me. In spite of the nine hours of solid sleep I’d already enjoyed, I dozed on and off, sometimes sleeping deeply, as if years of restless nights had suddenly caught up with me.
I did not dream. I took that as proof of a change for the better in our fortunes. I was uncharacteristically optimistic. That was part of my delusion.
When the call of nature had overwhelmed me, I had wriggled far back in the drain, around a turn, where I had done what was necessary. Most of the stench of urine was carried off, for a slight draft came down through the pipe and followed the course that water would follow as it sought the end of the drainage system. But even though a thin trace of the unpleasant odor rose to me, I did not mind it, for I was in such a good state of mind that only disaster on a cataclysmic scale could have daunted me.
Content to doze dreamlessly and, in moments of fuzzy wakefulness, to reach out and touch Rya, I did not come fully awake until seven-thirty Monday morning, an hour and a half after I intended to leave our hiding place. Then I lay for another half hour, listening to the powerhouse overhead for indications that another search was under way.
I heard nothing alarming.
At eight o’clock I reached for Rya, found her hand, squeezed it, then squirmed forward from the horizontal drain into the bottom of the six-foot-high vertical line. I squatted there long enough to explore my silencer-fitted pistol in the dark and release its safety catches.
I thought Rya whispered, “Careful, Slim,” but the roar of the underground river and the rumbling powerhouse were too loud for me to be certain she had spoken. Perhaps I’d heard the thought in her mind—Careful, Slim. By then we’d been through so much together, growing steadily closer with each shared danger and adventure, that a little mind reading—more instinct than telepathy, really—would not have surprised me.
Standing, I put my face to the underside of the steel grate and squinted through the small gaps in the grid. I could see only a very tightly proscribed circle. If crouching goblins had ringed the hole, only one foot back from the edge of it, I would not have been able to spot them. But I sensed that the way was clear. Trusting in my hunches, I put the pistol in the deep pocket of my ski suit and, with both hands, lifted the grate up and to one side, making less noise than when I had muscled it the other way fifteen hours ago.
Gripping the edges of the drain mouth, I pulled myself up, rolled out onto the powerhouse floor. I was in a shadowy area between big machines, and no goblins were to be seen.
Rya passed our gear up to me. I helped her out of the drain.
We hugged tightly, then quickly shrugged into the backpacks and picked up the shotgun and the rifle. We put on our hard hats again. Since it seemed that we had no further use for anything in the duffel bag except the candles, the matches, and one thermos of juice (which we kept), I lowered it back into the drain before replacing the grate.
We still had thirty-two kilos of plastic explosive, and we were unlikely to find a better place to use them than here, in the heart of the facility. Scurrying from shadow to shadow, not yet having given our final performance as rats, we went half the length of the enormous chamber, successfully dodging the few powerhouse workers. As we went, we quickly planted charges of plastique. Nasty rats, we were. The kind that might eat holes in a ship’s hull, then flee the sinking hulk. Except that no rat could ever take such intense pleasure from destructive labor as we took. We found service doors in the bottom of the iron housings of the two-story generators, and we slipped inside to leave small gifts of death. We planted other charges under some electric carts used by the powerhouse workers, put still others in whatever machinery we passed.
We activated the timer on each detonator before plugging it into the plastique. We set the first one for an hour, the next for fifty-nine minutes, the next two for fifty-eight minutes, the next one for fifty-six because it took us longer to find a place to stash it. We were trying to assure that the first blast would occur simultaneously with—or at least would be followed swiftly by—other explosions.
In twenty-five minutes we placed twenty-eight one-kilo charges and set the clocks ticking on them. The
n, with only four kilos left, we entered the intake ventilation duct where we had sneaked out the previous evening. We pulled the hinged grille shut behind us, and with the aid of flashlights we retraced the route by which we had arrived at the powerhouse.
We had just thirty-five minutes to get down to the fifth floor, locate the four charges we had planted yesterday, plug detonators into them, take an elevator to the level at which we had first entered, put detonators in the charges we’d left on that unfinished floor, and follow the white arrows that we had painted on the walls of the old mines until we’d gotten far enough away to escape the worst of the chain-reaction cave-ins that might be triggered by the blasts within the goblins’ haven. We had to move silently and cautiously—and fast. It was going to be a near thing, but I thought we could make it.
The journey through the ventilation ducts was easier and quicker than when we had been coming from the other direction, for we knew the system now and had no doubt about our destination. In six minutes we reached the vertical duct that was fitted with rungs, and we climbed down fifty feet to the fifth level. Four minutes later we came to the intake grille in the room that housed a lot of hydroponic farming equipment, where we had interrogated—and killed—the goblin whose human name was Tom Tarkenson.
That chamber was dark and deserted.
The corpse we’d left had been removed.
I felt horribly conspicuous behind the beam of the flashlight, as if I were making a target of myself. I kept expecting a goblin to rise up from between the empty hydroponic tanks and order us to halt. But the expectation went unfulfilled.
We ran to the door.
In twenty-five minutes the explosions would begin.
Evidently our long wait in the powerhouse drain had convinced the demonkind that we were no longer among them, that somehow we had slipped out undetected, for they seemed not to be looking for us anymore. At least not underground. (They must be frantic, wondering who the hell we were, why we had come, and how far we would spread the details of what we had seen and learned.) The corridors on the fifth floor were as deserted now as they had been when we’d entered the complex the previous day; this level was, after all, nothing more than a warehouse, already fully stocked and requiring little attention from maintenance crews.
We hurried from one long tunnel to the next, the shotgun and the automatic rifle held at the ready. We paused only to plug detonators into the four kilos of plastique that we had previously molded around sheaves of water, gas, and other pipes that crossed or paralleled some portions of the tunnels. Each time we stopped, we had to put down our weapons so I could boost Rya up and so she could fit the detonator in place, and I felt terrifyingly vulnerable, certain that guards would come upon us at just such a moment.
None did.
Though they knew intruders had breached their haven, the goblins evidently did not suspect sabotage. They would have had to undertake a painstaking search for explosives in order to find the charges we had planted, but it could have been done. Their failure to take that precaution indicated that in spite of our intrusion, they felt secure against a meaningful attack. For thousands of years they have had every reason to feel smug and superior toward us. Their attitudes regarding humankind are deeply ingrained; they see us as game animals, pathetic fools, and worse. Their certainty that we are easy prey . . . well, that was one of our advantages in the war with them.
We reached the elevators with nineteen minutes remaining until zero hour. Just eleven hundred and forty seconds, each of which my heart counted off with a double beat.
Though everything had gone smoothly to that point, I was afraid that we could not take the elevator to the unfinished floor below without drawing unwanted attention. It seemed too much to wish for. But because the old mines beneath us had not yet been converted into another wing of the goblins’ shelter, there was no ventilation duct leading down to them, and the elevators provided the only access.
We stepped into the cage, and with great trepidation I shoved the lever forward. A frightful creaking and grinding and grumbling marked our descent through the shaft of rock. If any goblins were in the chamber below, they would be alerted.
Our luck held. None of the enemy was waiting for us when we arrived in the huge domed chamber where construction supplies and equipment had been provisioned for the next phase of the shelter’s development.
Again, I put down the rifle and boosted Rya. With a swiftness that would have done credit to a demolitions expert, she plugged detonators into each of the three charges that I had shaped into depressions in the rock wall above the three elevators.
Seventeen minutes. One thousand and twenty seconds. Two thousand and forty heartbeats.
We crossed the domed chamber, pausing four times to deposit the last four kilos of plastique among the machinery.
Fourteen minutes. Eight hundred and forty seconds.
We reached the tunnel where the double row of ceiling lamps, burning under conical shades, threw a checkerboard pattern of light and shadow on the stone floor, the place where I had shot a goblin. There I had left one-kilo charges on both sides of the tunnel, near the entrance to the large room. With growing confidence we paused to set clocks ticking in those final bombs.
The next tunnel was the last with lighting. We raced to the end of it and turned right, into the first mine shaft on Horton’s map (if you read it backward, as we were now doing).
Our flashlights were not as bright as they had been, and the intensity of the beams fluctuated, a bit weak from all the use we’d put them to but not weak enough to worry us. Besides, we had spare batteries in our pockets—and candles, if it came to that.
I unstrapped my backpack and abandoned it. Rya did the same. From here on, what few supplies the packs contained were unimportant. All that mattered was speed.