He came upon a glory hole, a huge, unlikely void within the mountain. His light beam withered in the depths and towering height of it.
Even worn down, he was awed. Great columns of buttery limestone dangled from the arched ceiling. A huge Om had been carved into one wall. And dozens, maybe hundreds, of suits of ancient Mongolian armor hung from rawhide thongs knotted to knobs and outcrops. It looked like an entire army of ghosts. A vanquished army.
The wheat-colored stone was gorgeous in his headlamp. The armor twisted in a slight breeze and fractured the light into a million points.
Ike admired the soft leather thangka paintings pinned to the walls, then lifted a fringed corner and discovered that the fringe was made of human fingers. He dropped it, horrified. The leather was flayed human skins. He backed away, counting the
thangkas. Fifty at least. Could they have belonged to the Mongolian horde?
He looked down. His boots had tracked halfway across yet another mandala, this one twenty feet across and made of colored sand. He'd seen some of these in Tibetan monasteries before, but never so large. Like the one beside Isaac in the cave chamber, it held details that looked less architectural than like organic worms. His were not the only footprints spoiling the artwork. Others had trampled it, and recently. Kora and the gang had come this way.
At one junction he ran out of signs altogether. Ike faced the branching tunnels and, from somewhere in his childhood, remembered the answer to all labyrinths: consistency. Go to your left or to your right, but always stay true. This being Tibet – the land of clockwise circumambulation around sacred temples and mountains – he chose left. It was the correct choice. He found the first of them ten minutes later.
Ike had entered a stratum of limestone so pure and slick it practically swallowed the shadows. The walls curved without angles. There were no cracks or ledging in the rock, only rugosities and gentle waves. Nothing caught at the light, nothing cast darkness. The result was unadulterated light. Wherever Ike turned his lamp beam, he was surrounded by radiance the color of milk.
Cleopatra was there. Ike rounded the wing and her light joined with his. She was sitting in a lotus position in the center of the luminous passage. With ten gold coins spread before her, she could have been a beggar.
'Are you hurt?' Ike asked her.
'Just my ankle,' Cleo replied, smiling. Her eyes had that holy gleam they all aspired to, part wisdom, part soul. Ike wasn't fooled.
'Let's go,' he ordered.
'You go ahead,' Cleo breathed with her angel voice. 'I'll stay a bit longer.'
Some people can handle solitude. Most just think they can. Ike had seen its victims in the mountains and monasteries, and once in a jail. Sometimes it was the isolation that undid them. Sometimes it was the cold or famine or even amateur meditation. With Cleo it was a little of all of the above.
Ike checked his watch: 3:00 A.M. 'What about the rest of you? Where did they go?'
'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 assured 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.
'God!' he yelled, and vaulted wide in instant evasion. A tiptoe, then the same bloody 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-shirt, 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
