Part 3 (1/2)

'Not much farther,' she said. Good news. And bad news. 'They went to find you.'

'Find me?'

'You kept calling for help. We weren't going to leave you alone.'

'But I didn't call for help.'

She patted his leg. 'All for one,' she a.s.sured him.

Ike picked up one of the coins. 'Where'd you find these?'

'Everywhere,' she said. 'More and more, the deeper we got. Isn't it wonderful?'

'I'm going for the others. Then we'll all come back for you,' Ike said. He changed the fading batteries in his headlamp while he talked, replacing them with the last of his new ones. 'Promise you won't move from here.'

'I like it here very much.'

He left Cleo in a sea of alabaster radiance.

The limestone tube sped him deeper. The decline was even, the footing uncomplicated. Ike jogged, sure he could catch them. The air took on a coppery tang, nameless, yet distantly familiar. Not much farther, Cleo had said.

The blood streaks started at 3:47 A.M.

Because they first appeared as several dozen crimson handprints upon the white stone, and because the stone was so porous that it practically inhaled the liquid, Ike mistook them for primitive art. He should have known better.

Ike slowed. The effect was lovely in its playful randomness. Ike liked his image: slap-happy cavemen.

Then his foot hit a puddle not yet absorbed into the stone. The dark liquid splashed up. It sluiced in bright streaks across the wall, red on white. Blood, he realized.

'G.o.d!' he yelled, and vaulted wide in instant evasion. A tiptoe, then the same b.l.o.o.d.y sole landed again, skidded, torqued sideways. The momentum drove him facefirst into the wall and then sent him tumbling around the bend.

His headlamp flew off. The light blinked out. He came to a halt against cold stone.

It was like being clubbed unconscious. The blackness stopped all control, all motion, all place in the world. Ike even quit breathing. As much as he wanted to hide from consciousness, he was wide awake.

Abruptly the thought of lying still became unbearable. He rolled away from the wall and let gravity guide him onto his hands and knees. Hands bare, he felt about for the headlamp in widening circles, torn between disgust and terror at the viscous curd layering the floor. He could even taste the stuff, cold upon his teeth. He pressed his lips shut, but the smell was gamy, and there was no game in here, only his people. It was a monstrous thought.

At last he snagged the headlamp by its connecting wire, rocked back onto his heels, fumbled with the switch. There was a sound, distant or near, he couldn't tell. 'Hey?' he challenged. He paused, listened, heard nothing.

Laboring against his own panic, Ike flipped the switch on and off and on. It was like trying to spark a fire with wolves closing in. The sound again. He caught it this time. Nails scratching rock? Rats? The blood scent surged. What was going on here?

He muttered a curse at the dead light. With his fingertips he stroked the lens, searching for cracks. Gently he shook it, dreading the rattle of a shattered lightbulb. Nothing.

Was blind, but now I see... The words drifted into his consciousness, and he was uncertain whether they were a song or his memory of it. The sound came more distinctly. 'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear. It washed in from far away, a woman's lush voice singing 'Amazing Grace.' Something about its brave syllables suggested less a hymn than an anthem. A last stand.

It was Kora's voice. She had never sung for him. But this was she. Singing for them all, it seemed.

Her presence, even in the far depths, steadied him. 'Kora,' he called. On his knees, eyes wide in the utter blackness, Ike disciplined himself. If it wasn't the switch or the bulb... he tried the wire. Tight at the ends, no lacerations. He opened the battery case, wiped his fingers clean and dry, and carefully removed each slender battery, counting in a whisper, 'One, two, three, four.' One at a time, he cleaned the tips against his T-s.h.i.+rt, then swabbed each contact in the case and replaced the batteries. Head up, head down, up, down. There was an order to things. He obeyed.

He snapped the plate back onto the case, drew gently at the wire, palmed the lamp. And flicked the switch.

Nothing.

The scratch-scratch noise rose louder. It seemed very close. He wanted to bolt away, any direction, any cost, just flee.

'Stick,' he instructed himself. He said it out loud. It was something like a mantra, his own, something he told himself when the walls got steep or the holds thin or the storms mean. Stick, as in hang. As in no surrender.

Ike clenched his teeth. He slowed his lungs. Again he removed the batteries. This time he replaced them with the batch of nearly dead batteries in his pocket. He flipped the switch.

Light. Sweet light.

He breathed it in.

In an abattoir of white stone.

The image of butchery lasted one instant. Then his light flickered out.

'No!' he cried in the darkness, and shook the headlamp.

The light came on again, what little there was of it. The bulb glowed rusty orange, grew weaker, then suddenly brightened, relatively speaking. It was less than a quarter-strength. More than enough. Ike took his eyes from the little bulb and dared to look around once more.

The pa.s.sageway was a horror.

In his small circle of jaundiced light, Ike stood up. He was very careful. All around, the walls were zebra-striped with crimson streaks. The bodies had been arranged in a row.

You don't spend years in Asia without seeing a fair share of the dead. Many times, Ike had sat by the burning ghats at Pashaputanath, watching the fires peel flesh from bone. And no one climbed the South Col of Everest these days without pa.s.sing a certain South African dreamer, or on the north side a French gentleman sitting silently by the trail at 28,000 feet. And then there had been that time the king's army opened fire on Social Democrats revolting in the streets of Kathmandu and Ike had gone to Bir Hospital to identify the body of a BBC cameraman and seen the corpses hastily lined side by side on the tile floor. This reminded him of that.

It rose in him again, the silence of birds. And how, for days afterward, the dogs had limped about from bits of gla.s.s broken out of windows. And above all else, how, in being dragged, a human body gets undressed.

They lay before him, his people. He had viewed them in life as fools. In death, half-naked, they were pathetic. Not foolishly so. Just terribly. The smell of opened bowels and raw meat was nearly enough to panic him.

Their wounds... Ike could not see at first without seeing past the horrible wounds. He focused on their undress. He felt ashamed for these poor people and for himself. It seemed like sin itself to see their jumble of pubic patches and lolling thighs and randomly exposed b.r.e.a.s.t.s and stomachs that could no longer be held in or chests held high. In his shock, Ike stood above them, and the details swarmed up: here a faint tattoo of a rose, there a cesarean scar, the marks of surgeries and accidents, the edges of a bikini tan scribed upon a Mexican beach. Some of this was meant to be hidden, even to lovers, some to be revealed. None of it was meant to be seen this way.

Ike made himself get on with it. There were five of them, one male, Bernard. He started to identify the women, but with a rush of fatigue he suddenly forgot their names altogether. At the moment, only one of them mattered to him, and she was not here.

The snapped ends of very white bone stood from lawnmower-like gashes. Body cavities gaped empty. Some fingers were crooked, some missing at the root. Bitten off? A woman's head had been crushed to a thick, panlike sac. Even her hair was anonymous with gore, but the pubis was blond. She was, poor creature, thank G.o.d, not Kora.

That familiarity one reaches with victims began. Ike put one hand to the ache behind his eyes, then started over again. His light was failing. The ma.s.sacre had no answer. Whatever had happened to them could happen to him.

'Stick, Crockett,' he commanded.

First things first. He counted on his fingers: six here, Cleo up the tunnel, Kora somewhere. That left Owen still at large.

Ike stepped among the bodies, searching for clues. He had little experience with such extremes of trauma, but there were a few things he could tell. Judging by the blood trails, it looked like an ambush. And it had been done without a gun. There were no bullet holes. Ordinary knives were out of the question, too. The lacerations were much too deep and ma.s.sed so strangely, here upon the upper body, there at the backs of the legs, that Ike could only imagine a pack of men with machetes. It looked more like an attack by wild animals, especially the way a thigh had been stripped to the bone.

But what animal lived miles inside a mountain? What animal collected its prey in a neat row? What animal showed this kind of savagery, then conformity? Such frenzy, then such method. The extremes were psychotic. All too human.