Becker slipped suddenly, his feet flying from under him, and he landed on the stone with a squashing sound.
She knelt beside him and saw why he had fallen. In front of them, as far as the flashlight would carry, was a spreading mat of bat shit. She played the light up walls and onto the roof, where hung a writhing mass of animals, still settling in for their daylight rest. They hung everywhere she could see, like a million inverted winged mice Their teeth shone eerily white in her light as they chattered and nipped at each other, and she had the feeling she was being leered at by a madman.
The entire mass of them moved and twitched and wriggled like one huge body in torment, as if the cave itself were brought to squirming painful life. The bats were crowded so closely together that Pegeen could not distinguish one from another until an individual one would be knocked loose and it would fly in the characteristic swooping, erratic pattern until it returned to the general body, wedging itself in and vanishing into the whole.
'Holy Christ,' she breathed.
'It's bat guano,' Becker said, pulling himself to his feet.
'It's bat shit, ' she said, trailing her light from the appalling mass of bats to the equally appalling mass in front of her. The pellets were gray and shaped like grains of rice, and they looked dry and solid but Becker's slip had demonstrated otherwise.
She played the light carefully along the edge of the mat, trying to assess it. 'It must be more than three feet thick,' she said.
'Closer to four,' said Becker. He seemed remarkably unconcerned.
'How do we get around it?' Pegeen asked.
'We don't. We go through it.' Becker's flashlight picked out the two-foot-wide where something had been recently dragged across the surface of the mat. 'He did it. We can.'
'Did you know this was here?' she demanded.
'The chamber is on the chart, but Browne didn't bother to indicate what was in it. I guess this sort of thing doesn't bother him.'
'Fine, let's get him down here.'
'It's only guano,' Becker said.
I 'It's shit, ' insisted Pegeen.
'Only in your mind.' Becker stepped directly into it, following the path where Swann had dragged the loaded golf sack.
'I can't believe this,' Pegeen said, placing her foot gingerly in the track Becker had created. 'I-'m walking through shit up to my thighs.'
'Sounds like a fair description of life,' Becker said.
'Oh, Christ. Oh, Christ.'
'Hey, the FBI isn't all paperwork and investigations, you know,' Becker said cheerfully. 'We got to have some fun sometimes.'
Pegeen would gladly have pushed him face first into the goo. Just don't let me slip, she prayed silently.
The muck rose above her waist, but the footing underneath seemed dry and solid. She could not imagine the age of the pile, but knew it had to be counted in centuries.
'Oh, Christ. Oh, Christ,' she muttered with every step, unaware that her silent mantra was escaping her lips. In front of her, Becker seemed terribly amused and she thought she heard him chuckle once or twice.
'Just think how badly Swann must have wanted to get in here,' Becker said in a whisper.
And how badly you want to get in after him, Pegeen finished the thought.
Still, she was grateful that he was leading her, taking long, sweeping steps, pushing much of the guano out of her way like the prow of a ship.
The stuff didn't appear to be clinging as much as she had feared, only the surface layer was moist, the rest as dry as sunbaked pellets.
When his flashlight picked out the dimensions of a wall in front of them, Becker stopped and turned to Pegeen.
'There's a tunnel ahead of us, according to the chart,' he said, his voice hushed. 'It looks narrow, we may have to crawl. We'll do it without lights-we don't want anything shining into the main cavern.'
'Without lights?'
'You're not afraid of the dark, are you?'
'No more than most sensible people. How do we know where we're going?'
'The chart shows it to be pretty much a straight line.
Just keep going forward.'
'What if the chart is wrong?' Pegeen hissed. 'What if there's a dropoff or something in there that Browne didn't bother to put on the chart?'
'If I fall out of sight, you'll know it's time to stop.'
'You won't be in sight-we're not using lights.'
'Use your imagination, Haddad. You'll be fine.'
'Are you going to call me Haddad now? Are we back to that? If we are, would you mind if we just kept going a little further before we continue this discussion?'
'Why?'
'Because I'm standing up to my navel in bat shit and I don't want to be insulted at the same time.'
Becker shined his light directly in her face until she pushed the flashlight away.
'You mean last night?' he asked.
'Duh.'
'Last night was indescribable. You saved my sanity, I don't think I would have made it until morning.'
'Could we not talk about it right here? Could we maybe find a nice sewer to sit in first?'
Becker looked down at the guano rising to his belt as if he had forgotten it entirely.
'It's dry,' he said as if he didn't understand her objections.
Pegeen sighed. 'Just get me to the tunnel. Please.'
'When we get to the chamber, if he hears us he'll probably douse his own light. Don't use your weapon because you'll only pinpoint yourself and he may be armed.
'I won't be able to see and I won't be able to shoot.
What am I supposed to do?'
'Whatever I tell you.'
'How do we find this son of a bitch in the dark?'
'I'll find him,' Becker said.
'Great. How?'
Becker paused. When he spoke, she heard a smile in his voice. It was not a friendly smile.
'I'll find him by his fear,' Becker said.
Swann was moaning now to a methodical rhythm, interspersing little yips like a child's bleats that came with every inward breath. The sound was monotonous and metronomic and Aural wondered if it came now from some source other than pain. It was almost a genteel snore, and in the dim candlelight that illuminated him from a distance she could not see clearly if he was asleep or awake.
He hadn't moved in several minutes and both hands were still clasped upon his face. The candle had burned down several inches since he had moved across the cavern, and Aural estimated that it must have been at least an hour.
She had tried to time it at first, using the tick of her water clock, but his moans were too loud at first for her to keep track and then it didn't seem to matter anyway. Time had long since lost any meaning.
There was no way to measure the length of a torture session-each seemed to last an infinity, and minutes and seconds and hours signified nothing at all. Progress was marked by inches as he burned his way slowly across her flesh, cigarette by cigarette, and by candles that glowed and melted and shrank and guttered into darkness only to be replaced by another.
And by pain, endless pain. There was no way to measure the quantity of her agony, but still it was distinguished by a surprising variety. Some things hurt differently than others, some pains lasted so long that she could nearly ignore them and regard them as background, some were so intense she could only scream her way
