“I don’t know,” said Elsie. “But we need to go after my sister. She’s kind of scared of dogs.”
The two girls took up the chase. It was fairly easy to stay on the dogs’ trail; their wake in the snow resembled the path of a frenzied pack of football fans looking for a fast-food joint. The dogs’ paws, in their plurality, laid flat every plant in their path. Not far along, they heard a quiet whimpering; they found Rachel, petrified with fear, clinging to the lower branches of a maple tree.
“You okay, Rach?” called Elsie.
“I think they’re gone now,” suggested Martha.
“Oh my God,” said Rachel, lowering herself from her branch. “Tell me what just happened.”
“We got stampeded by dogs,” answered Elsie.
“Seriously,” added Martha.
Rachel, now on the ground, brushed some moss from her coat. Her face was streaked with dirt, and the hem of her jacket was dappled in mud. She held her nose to the air. “Is that smoke?” she asked.
Sure enough, Elsie caught a whiff of it too. It smelled like the tailings of a wood fire, like the smell of a late fall day in a country neighborhood. It seemed to be coming from the direction that the dogs had traveled. Without speaking, the three girls began following the smell; it led them along the wide swath in the vegetation blazed by the pack of dogs. As they came closer to the source of the smoke, they could see evidence of habitation. Trees had been felled and sawed; a stack of freshly chopped wood lay in a pile by a large chopping block. They also began to hear voices: children’s voices. The three girls, silent in their approach, crested a small hillock and found themselves looking down into the trough of a narrow vale, where lay nestled a quaint wooden cottage. A thin stream of white smoke drifted from its chimney.
A group of perhaps fifteen children, of all ages, milled about several large garden plots in front of the cottage. They seemed to range in age from eight to eighteen and were intent on a variety of different activities: some were playing games, while others seemed to be engaged in more domestic chores like hanging clothing on a drying line and chopping wood. Several tended to the garden beds, weeding and pruning the winter greens. There was one thing, however, that Elsie, Martha, and Rachel noticed was the same about all the children: They each had little yellow tags hanging from the lobes of their ears.
CHAPTER 14
Icy Water, Water Everywhere
It would seem that fortune smiled on Prue McKeel and Curtis Mehlberg that day, the day that they both plummeted from the broken rope bridge into the fathomless depths of the Long Gap. Not only smiled, but also moved in to plant a wet, lazy kiss on their respective foreheads.
The cliff wall on the side of the chasm they fell toward when the bridge was rent in two was not entirely vertical; rather, it sloped away from the cliff’s edge at a slight diagonal, which became more pronounced as it descended. This meant that the two children didn’t necessarily plummet or fall but rather slid at a very fast pace down this sloping slab of rock.
Callista, the Kitsune who’d fallen on the same side of the Gap as they had, did not fare so well. In falling nearer the center of the ravine, by the time she made contact with the slope of the cliff wall, it was too late. The evidence of her demise was laid bare to Curtis, who, upon waking from a brief bout of unconsciousness, saw her still body lying lifeless some ten feet from where he’d landed. In the throes of death, she’d shape-shifted back to her original form. It was a dead black fox he saw when he woke.
As for Septimus the rat, it was too soon to tell. For all Curtis knew, he was the only faller to have survived. He gave his cheeks a quick pat to make sure this was the case; his hands felt chalky and badly scraped, but they made a satisfying contact with his face. He felt nothing if not alive.
“Prue?” he rasped. The darkness of the ravine was all-consuming. The smallest sliver of light could be seen above, like a plane’s vapor trail, but the distance to the surface seemed unimaginable. The ride to where he lay, while not being deadly, had not been smooth in the slightest. The slope of the rock had acted like a very fast slide, one that went perfectly vertical at certain stages, making for several moments during the fall where Curtis was certain that he would die a very painful, bone-crushing death. The last of these drops had deposited him, bones intact (as far as he knew), on this little shelf of dirt and rock, some ways down the shaft of the ravine.
“Prue! Septimus!” he called, louder. He heard a pained grunting coming from some distance away. Not bothering to lift himself to his feet (he still wasn’t sure if he hadn’t somehow broken every bone in his body), he crawled along the narrow floor of the shelf, away from the fox’s bent frame, toward the noise. He arrived at the edge and said again, “Prue! Is that you?”
“Yeah,” replied his friend. “It’s me.”
It was too dark to see where she was. “Are you okay?”
“I think I messed up my ankle. Again. Same one from last time.” By last time, she meant the fall she’d taken, some months ago, when the coyote soldiers had shot down the eagle she’d been riding. Curtis grimaced.
“How bad?” he asked.
There came a pause as Curtis imagined Prue applying weight to the sore spot. “I think it’s okay,” she said. “Is Septimus with you?”
He looked about him; the darkness was pervasive. “No,” he said, before shouting, “SEPTIMUS!” No answer. Curtis cursed under his breath. The rat was small and lithe, he told himself. Maybe he was still clinging to the rope above them. Maybe he’d made it to safety.
“Are you all right?” called Prue.
“I think so. That other fox is dead. She didn’t survive the fall.”
“What about Darla?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t really see what happened.” He paused. “No Septimus, though.”
“But you’re okay?”
Curtis, girding himself, began testing his individual muscles and joints, surveying the damage wrought by the fall. Miraculously, aside from a few bruises, he seemed to have avoided any major injury. “I think I’m all right,” he said.
A scraping noise, inscrutable in the deep dark, sounded. Cloth against cloth. Another grunt. A buckle undone. Then the distinct sound of a match head scraping against the striking surface; a small yellow light sparked. Curtis looked over the edge of the rock shelf and saw Prue, kneeling, hold the match to a camping lantern—she must’ve packed a small one in her knapsack. She waited for it to take; she waved the flame of the match out and flicked it away. A globe of light extended from the source, illuminating their surroundings.
“Where are we?” said Curtis. The lantern light barely made a scratch on the surrounding blackness, but it was enough for them to see that a pair of boulders, the size of small houses, had created the rock shelves that had saved their lives. He saw that he was separated from Prue by only a drop of ten feet or so. The chasm narrowed substantially here, and the twin walls of the ravine were barely five feet apart. It occurred to Curtis that they’d slid into some remote crevice of the gap; there was no telling how far down they were. One thing was clear: There was no going up. He cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled again, “SEPTIMUS!”
Prue was silent as she stood and, gingerly putting weight on her bad ankle, began to hobble around her small perch and take in their surroundings. It didn’t take long; she’d barely the space of a department-store changing room to explore. “Curtis,” she said, craning her neck to look upward at the faraway glint of daylight, a thin string of white in their dark heaven, “I don’t know about this.”
“Hold on,” said Curtis. He eased himself over the lip of the shelf and dropped the several feet to where Prue stood. He smacked some white dust off her jacket’s shoulder. “Let me see your ankle,” he said.
Together, they eased her boot from her foot. It was red and swollen, though Prue said it didn’t hurt enough to be sprained. “You can walk on it okay?” he asked.
Prue nodded. There was a look of resigned quiet on her face. A mounting sadn
ess.
“We’re going to get out of here,” he said. “We are.”
“How?” asked Prue.
Curtis eyed the rock wall. “I suppose we climb.” Even he knew this was hopeless. It was as if he’d said it in order to give it to the air, this idea. As if by saying it, he’d whispered a necessary incantation, one that dissipated into smoke as soon as it was breathed alive.
Prue just shook her head.
They both hunkered down on the rocky floor of the shelf. “Nothing over there?” she asked, nodding to the place where Curtis had landed; where the dead fox lay.
“No,” he said. “Just a drop on the other side.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Prue. “I mean, we survive the fall just to die slowly at the bottom of this shaft?”
“Someone’s got a cruel sense of humor, that’s for sure,” said Curtis. “You know, God or whatever.”
There came a quiet between the two of them; Prue began to cry. “Oh, I screwed all of this up,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” consoled Curtis. He placed his hand between her shoulder blades.
“This,” said Prue. “The whole plan. What about what the tree said? That we need to reanimate the true heir, before the others do. Whoever the others are. But how are we going to do that stuck in this … this … hole? I bet ‘the others’ are halfway to rebuilding him by now.”
“So? Maybe that’s for the best. Maybe that’s what the tree wanted. Just someone to build him. Maybe Alexei’s a great person deep down, even if he is a kind of robot. Maybe he’ll still restore peace, whoever reanimates him.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Prue. “Why else would the tree have said that? No, it was supposed to be us. And we screwed it up.” She grew silent, her hand to her mouth, and remained deep in thought.
“Don’t beat yourself up. Maybe there are some bandits who’ll come back; maybe if we scream loud enough, they’ll hear us.” Curtis glared up at the little daylight they could see; it seemed improbable.
“Not likely,” said Prue.
“No, I guess not.”
Curtis puffed up his cheeks and blew out a breath through his puckered lips. “Well, I said, ‘This is it,’ up there.” He pointed to the crack of light above. “But I guess I was wrong. I suppose this is it. Kind of funny, in a way. Not often a guy gets to think ‘this is it’ twice in the span of a few minutes. Or maybe that always happens. Maybe death is just a series of ‘this is it’ thoughts until you finally—”
“HELP!” came a voice, interrupting Curtis from his macabre musings. It issued from the dark space beneath the shelf, just beyond the lip of the rock. “I’ve been blinded! Struck blind!”
It was undeniably the voice of Septimus the rat, pitched high with fear. Curtis rolled onto his belly and inched to the very edge of the shelf. He gestured to Prue, who handed him the lantern. Waving it into the darkness, he saw movement some thirty feet below them, on yet another boulder lodged in this narrowing of the twin cliffs.
“Oh,” said Septimus, blinking up at the swinging lantern in Curtis’s hand. “Never mind. I can see. That was an overreaction. On my part.”
Curtis smiled. “Are you okay?”
“It would appear that way. How about you?”
“We’re all right. Prue hurt her ankle. Otherwise, okay. Kind of miraculous.”
“What about that woman? The fox-woman?”
Prue frowned and answered, “We don’t know. The other fox is dead, though. The one she called Callista. The third one might still be up there.”
“Should we try to get down to you?” called Curtis.
“I don’t think so. There’s nothing really here. Hold on. Can you drop that light a little more?” asked the rat.
A length of cord was retrieved from Prue’s bag; by tying it to the handle of the lantern, they were able to lower the light to where the rat was caught. In the glimmer, the rat shook himself, and the small chasm became filled with a talcum of dust. The shelf was slightly longer than the one on which Prue and Curtis were perched; darkness filled the margins.
“There’s a drop-off. On either side. There might be another rock below this one.” The two kids watched as the rat scampered to the edge of his shelf and knocked a pebble into the depths. A tidy pap informed a small drop to the next boulder. “Yep,” said the rat. “Only way is down.”
Curtis swore and looked longingly back toward the sliver of light above them. “We’re stuck. Done for. Bones. Skeletons-to-be.”
“Unless,” interrupted Prue. She was staring down into the void.
“Unless what?”
“Well, there was something else that the tree said, that the tree said through that little boy.”
“What?”
She called down to Septimus. “Think we could make it down to that other rock, the one below you?”
“Yeah,” said the rat. “Though in this instance, I’m thinking we should focus on going up.”
Prue smiled. “That’s the thing. That’s what the boy told me.”
“What?” asked Curtis.
“Sometimes, you have to go under to get above.”
Curtis held his hand to his mouth, as if in disbelief. “You want us to go … deeper?”
“I think it’s pretty clear, don’t you?”
Eyebrow raised, Curtis said, “That was a little boy who said that to you. Speaking for a tree.” He repeated, “A tree.”
“Like we have a choice,” said Prue, gesturing to the precipice of cliff surrounding them.
“We should wait. Maybe there are survivors. Someone would hear us down here.”
“Curtis, we’re too far down. It’s a miracle we even survived. There was no one in the camp. The whole place was empty—even if there were stragglers, how would they hear us? How would they get us out? On top of all that, Darla might be up there, just waiting for us to make a move. She might have more of those … those things with her.”
“I don’t know, Prue. I mean, we have no idea what’s down there. Right?” He soon realized that his objections were still doggedly anchored to the belief that the bandits were still alive; that they hadn’t been completely routed by the assassins.
Without answering, Prue swooped up the lantern and undid the cord attached to the handle. She threw one end of the rope to Curtis and tied the other end to her midsection. “Hold tight,” she instructed before slowly lowering her body over the edge of the rock. Curtis strained under the weight, gritting his teeth and wedging his feet inside the recess between the boulder and the cliff wall. Finally, the weight abated, and Prue gave the rope a few tugs. He found he had no more energy to fight. Breathing a quiet oath, he looped the rope around a tooth of rock on the far side of the shelf. He then lowered himself down with Prue anchoring from below.
“Welcome,” announced Septimus when they’d both arrived.
They continued on that way, slowly moving themselves downward from rock to rock. Each time they tested the depth of the darkness below them by dropping stones and judging the time that passed before they heard the noise of its landing, like a boat sounding the depths. With each passable drop, they marveled at their good fortune. They wondered, inwardly, when that fortune would run its course.
Finally, after perhaps ten such descents, they found themselves on a small niche of rock where the two sides of the ravine wall came together in a V shape. In front of them was a jumble of stones that had fallen and become lodged in the V. Prue inspected the pile and, finding a loose stone, began to pry it away. Curtis helped. When the stone had been cleared of remnant rock, they were both able to peel it back from the pile to reveal a small, angular hole. He wasn’t sure whether it was his imagination, but Curtis thought he felt the whiff of a breeze emerge from the hole when they’d removed the rock.
They stared into the blankness of the opening.
“What do you suppose is down there?” said Curtis.
“I don’t know,” said Prue. Then: “What did Brendan say about this place? So
mething about people living down here? A long time ago?”
“Cliff people, yeah,” said Curtis. “Sign of it. I guess they found, like, paintings and things. But that was a lot farther up. As far as I know, no one’s been down this deep.”
Prue’s eyes moved from Curtis’s face to the rat that was sitting on his shoulder. “Septimus,” she said, “this is where you could really come in handy.”
“Let me guess. You want me. To go in there.” He smoothed back his whiskers nervously.
“Please,” she said.
“Come on, Septimus,” said Curtis. “We need you.”
Prue held up the lantern; its illumination cast a glow into the hole.
Septimus grumbled. He then hopped from Curtis’s shoulder to his elbow and from there to the hard floor of the chasm’s bottom. He paused for a moment at the opening, sniffing at the ground suspiciously.
“It’s what a true bandit would do,” prompted Curtis.
“I’m no sworn bandit,” said the rat. “I’m a free agent. And I choose to go in there on my own terms.” With that, he disappeared into the hole.
Prue and Curtis waited patiently. The minutes ticked away. The chill of the cavern’s air needled at Curtis’s skin below his torn and dirtied officer’s coat. Finally, there came the unmistakable noise of Septimus’s claws against stone. The rat reappeared at the mouth of the hole, now coated in a fresh layer of gray dust. He held his paw out in front of him, his face puckered and flinching.
“What did you see?” asked Curtis, alarmed.
The rat continued to hold out his hand. He waved it frantically; his eyes were tightly closed, and he shook his snout back and forth as if he were trying to cast something from his mind.
“Septimus!” yelled Prue.
And then he stopped. Opening his mouth wide, he batted at his nose with his thin fingers. “Sorry,” he said. “Thought I was going to sneeze there.”
Prue and Curtis, together, released a breath of relief.
Once the rat had recovered, he continued, “There’s a tunnel in there. And I think it’s big enough for all of us.”