through them.
Aural shivered and huddled her arms against her chest.
It was the first time in days that she had had the leisure to notice the cold. Her legs seemed ablaze but her torso was chilled. She had been shaking with the cold for several minutes and hadn't even noticed.
Another way to die, she thought. I could freeze to death before he kills me.
The rhythm of his breathing changed and she realized that he was actually falling asleep. When she was sure he was out, she would make her move. She would need at least several minutes to make her way to the tunnel, moving backwards on her hands and heels. Once in the tunnel she had no idea how far or fast she could go, but at least she would be trying. It would be something she could do for herself One hand slipped off his face and into his lap, then moments later, the other hand fell away. His head moved back slightly in reaction to finding itself unsupported, then stopped in position. After another few moments the head drooped lower, bounced back up, drooped lower still, bounced again as he nodded deeper and deeper into sleep.
Aural waited for his head to come to rest on his chest.
One more drop, maybe two.
Swann's head slumped all the way to his chest, then sprang back violently and he woke up crying out in pain as if the final fall had reactivated his injury.
'My eye!' he called, as if he expected someone to respond, as if he expected her to help him. 'Please, Jesus, please! '
And then Aural realized that she could help and she smiled to herself because she felt for the first time. as if she had a real weapon.
Despite her pain and her condition and her shackles, she realized that he had given her power.
She waited until he was momentarily quiet, and then she spoke to him, keeping her voice low but intense.
'I can help you,' she said.
It brought him to silence. He listened for a moment as if he expected her to repeat it.
'What did you say?'
'I can help you,' Aural repeated.
She could see him peering at her through the cracks between his fingers.
'How?' he asked cautiously.
'You know how.'
He brought his hands to his lap and grasped the knife, suspecting a trick.
'How?' he repeated.
'I can heal you,' Aural said. She hoped it was her stage voice but it sounded cracked and wounded to her ear.
Again he was quiet, studying her for deception, then a shiver of pain coursed through him again and he tilted his head and gave a moan like a whinnying horse.
When his spasm passed, Aural said, 'You know I can do it. You have seen me heal. You have seen the divine power of Jesus Christ move through me.
I have the power.'
'Yes,' he said. 'I've seen you do it.'
'God be praised,' she said, trying to project strength which she did not feel.
'Amen.
'He works through me.' She lifted her hands, already forced into a prayerful attitude by the cuffs, and held them in the air, fingertips touching. 'He has given me the hands to do his work.'
'I hurt so much,' he said.
'Jesus never gives us more than we can bear,' she said.
She smiled at him, summoning up the smile of beatitude, the smile that stiffed hearts and eased consciences and made miracles seem not only possible but within the order of things. She smiled at Swann her own sweet promise of love and forgiveness, of redemption and deliverance. It was the reason he had chosen her in the first place-the sign of virginal divinity that he always looked for and then somehow forgot in the vileness of his actions when the beast that dwelled in his chest stiffed and took him within its tentacles. But that was not the true Swann, it was the beast. The true Swann loved God and his holy son and yearned for goodness and yearned now most of all for release from his pain.
'Would you do that for me?' he said.
'Only I can do it for you. Jesus has not answered your prayers, but he will answer mine on your behalf.'
'But I've been-bad-to you,' he said.
'It is not for humans to judge,' Aural said. She extended her hands toward him, palms up. 'Jesus forgave his persecutors, we must do the same.'
She had him, she thought, he believed her, he wanted desperately to believe her, and that was always the necessary prerequisite. Their pain, their illness, their unhappiness had to drive them to you, then you had to make them welcome and pull them in the rest of the way. She smiled again, that radiant smile, trying her best to light the cavern with her own illumination. The effort took a lot out of her; she did not know how much longer she could keep it up; she wanted nothing more than to lie back and rest; she needed rest so badly, if only her pain would allow it.
He had risen slowly to his knees, but still he hesitated, cowering back in the shadows so far away.
I've reached them from farther away than this, Aural told herself, I've brought them from the back of the tent when they didn't want to come and didn't even know they needed me; I've summoned up the love of God, the trust of my healing power in souls dark and dead and shut off, those who had come to gape and those who had come to scoff and I've pulled them to me and I can pull this asshole to me, too.
She began to sing, her voice rising with lyric sweetness in the hypnotic melody of 'Amazing Grace.' She sang it straight to him, straight to his heart, pouring into her voice every ounce of fraud and deceit and practiced cunning that she possessed, transforming it by her art into the irresistible musical locution of the angels.
As her voice filled the cavern with haunting reverberations of the timeless hymn, it was as if she were joined by a heavenly chorus.
Holding one hand to his eye, gripping the knife with the other, Swann rose to his feet and crossed the chamber towards her outstretched arms as she sang to him with her face aglow in serenity and her eyes closed with the intensity of her love.
As she heard his faltering step on the stone and saw the glint of the approaching knife blade under her squinted eyelids, Aural thought, Try this one, Tommy R. Walker.
You couldn't pull this one off if your life depended on it.
And she — remembered that hers did and she sang all the sweeter.
The bat chamber was so configured that the guano gave out well before the enclosing wall was reached, and the trail that Becker and Pegeen had followed vanished on the hard stone. They searched for the tunnel indicated on Browne's chart for several minutes, playing their flashlights on the surface where the floor met the vertical wall.
When she found it, Pegeen was not certain it was the right trail, the hole seemed so small.
'Could this be it?' she whispered. She knelt in front of the opening, resisting the urge to shine her light directly into the tunnel. She would have to crawl into it on her knees and elbows-there was no other way to fit her body through.
'Must be,' said Becker in a voice that made her look at him sharply. She lifted her light so that it spilled from the wall onto his face. Becker wore an expression she had never seen on his features. If she didn't know better, she would say he was frightened.
'It's so small,' she said. He nodded with a look on his face that suggested he did not trust himself to speak.
Pegeen noticed beads of moisture on his forehead. Sweating in the coolness of the cave seemed so unlikely that she thought he was ill.
She asked if he was sick and Becker shook his head, forcing a very unconvincing grin.
'What's wrong?' she persisted, reaching to touch his forehead. He jerked away angrily.
'You keep asking why I wanted you on this case,' Becker said.
