leaned forward, touched the second pocket-and there was something rectangular in there, crinkling sound, cigarette package? I dragged it out with shaking fingers. Cigarette package, yes, Bascomb had been a smoker.
Tucked inside the cellophane wrapping was a booklet of paper matches.
I fished it free, opened the cover. Three-quarters full. I held it tightly in clenched fingers, slid around away from the corpse and crawled back through the turn and sat down on the rail again. Sweat streamed on my body, slick and gritty like oil mixed with dirt. A sudden spasm of coughing left me panting; I tried not to think of what that dust was doing to my lungs, to the lesion that might already be malignant.
How long before the dust settled?
Ten minutes? Fifteen?
I held my left wrist up to my ear and listened to my watch and heard it ticking; somehow it had escaped damage in the cave-in. When I looked at the luminescent hands I saw that they read twelve-fifteen. I put the arm behind me, to keep from staring at the watch, and tried to make myself concentrate on the things I knew that would identify the son of a bitch who had murdered Terzian and Bascomb and sealed me in here. Bascomb's sketch, the wrench, the bloody towels, the Daghestan carpet-all of those things, yes, but how did they fit together? Other things too, dancing out of reach. Round and round, round and round, but none of them quite joining with each other to make a whole or part of a whole…
I had to give it up finally. The tension was too intense, the edge of panic too close to the surface of feeling; learning the name of the man would not matter at all unless I got out of here. I looked at the watch then, and nine minutes had passed. I used a forefinger to clean grit out of my nostrils, wiped away sweat, made an effort to work up saliva to rid my mouth of dust and dryness.
Another three minutes gone.
I stood and stared into the blackness, trying to tell if the air along the shaft was any less clogged with powder, trying to make out a ray or glimmer of light. There was nothing but dark up there, but if I could trust my senses the air did not seem to be as dusty, as abrasive in my throat and lungs.
I could not wait any longer, I had reached the limit of passive endurance. I started to walk along the rail, willing myself to go slowly and cautiously, and when I came up to the mound of rubble beyond the ore cart I opened the matchbook and struck the first match. The flare of light half blinded me; I had to look away and then back before I was able to see anything. In the eerie flickering glow, the walls and ceiling had a pocked look where the rock had given way; most of the support timbers were still holding. Five feet ahead I could just make out the hanging timber I had run into during my retreat.
When the heat of the match flame touched my fingertips, I shook it out and went ahead five paces, ducked down and walked another couple of steps until I was certain I had gone beyond the suspended beam. Then I lit a second match. The amount of rubble was greater now, and the holes in the tunnel walls looked larger, the wood latticework less stable. Sections of wood jutted up from the floor at odd angles, like broken bones. Another half- dozen steps. Match. Half-dozen steps. Match. The poisonous clouds of dust had finally dissipated, but the air was still thick, stifling; I began to have trouble breathing again. Six paces. Match. And I was back near the place where I had lain-I could see marks on the floor and among the debris.
But I still could not see any sign of daylight ahead.
Eight feet farther on, the jumble of rock and wood and earth rose as high as three and four feet across the width of the tunnel. I held another match up over my head so I could judge the condition of the ceiling. Still intact, not too deeply pitted, half the supports holding in place; most of the rubble seemed to have come from the walls. But I had no way of telling yet how bad it would be near the entrance. I leaned down into one of the mounds and started to inch my way along, pulling larger rocks and lengths of wood aside gingerly with both hands-aware all the while of the danger of new slides, of upsetting the balance of the mass around me and getting myself buried as a result. Every yard or so I stopped to check my position and the configuration of debris by matchlight. I could hear myself wheezing in a kind of constant counterpoint to the rattling of rocks, the small sounds of movement; I was soaked with sweat. Panic stayed close to the surface, and now I had a growing sense of claustrophobia. The urge to scream was strong inside me: tension, fear and tension.
I'm going to get out, I thought. I'm not going to die in here, not in here, I'm going to get out.
The mounds became steadily larger, more tightly packed, and the hollows between them grew shallower. Inevitably, after ten or fifteen or twenty minutes, I reached the end of the line-a solid blockage sloping upward from floor to ceiling.
Not as much oxygen here, the air still clogged with particles of dust; the burning sensation was back in my chest, and the feeling of giddiness had returned to make my thoughts sluggish-but that helped to keep the panic at bay. I struck a new match and held it up. Most of the ceiling had collapsed here. Not even a chink of daylight showed through.
Think, remember. How far had I been from the entrance when the cave-in forced me off my feet? Less than ten yards maybe, and I had crawled another two or three. How far had I come from that place where I had lain? Difficult to judge, but it might have been as much as fifteen feet. That left… what? A minimum of five feet to the outside? Five feet of compressed earth and rock and all I had to dig with was my hands and as soon as I started to do that the rest of the ceiling might give way No. I'm going to get out of here.
I am going to get out of here.
I clenched the matchbook between my teeth and pulled myself up the slope on knees and hooked fingers. Earth slid away beneath me, a dislodged rock thumped down against my thigh and brought a stinging slash of pain. When one of my hands touched the edge of a timber, I anchored my body and managed to get a match free and flaming. Near the top, now, the ceiling was a foot over my head, scarred by a deep trough. The timber was edged at an angle into the trough, half-buried in the rubble, and on top of it was a huge oblong of broken limestone.
I eased away from there, laterally to my right, and used another match-not many left now, have to ration them. Just rock and earth here, no shattered supports within a three-foot radius of what looked to be the sealed juncture of ceiling and debris. Dig at this spot, then-hurry! Air running out, time running out…
I scraped at the earth, dug rocks loose and let them slide down past my body. Dust misted around me, and the dizziness got worse, and my thoughts seemed to break up into disjointed fragments; I could feel myself slipping back again into that timeless emptiness, conscious of little but the movement of my hands and the overwhelming need to get free.
Depression opening up, widening into a kind of tunnel-tunnel within a tunnel. Use a match. No air for a match. And my hands digging, digging, body wiggling forward, if the ceiling is going to collapse, let it be now or let me get out, shifting earth, rocks thumping, can't breathe, oh God please don't let me black out Light.
I heaved a rock out of the way and there was a blinding dusty ray of it two feet beyond my head.
The illusion of timelessness vanished in a flood of wild relief, each of my senses heightened, I heard myself begin whimpering like a child just starting to awaken from a nightmare. My hands tore at the earth in a kind of controlled frenzy, and the light grew larger, larger, I could smell clean air, I could breathe, and my head came out into the air and the light, I wedged my shoulders free, and then I lunged and scrabbled the rest of my body through the opening and down the outside wall of the slide, felt it shift and grumble under my skidding weight, and lost my balance and rolled over twice amid a clattering of rock and finally came up on my hands and knees at the edge of the slope.
Inside the mine there was a low-pitched rumbling; dust spewed out through the hole I had made, cut off again as the hole disappeared under a cascade of rock. The rumbling went on for ten seconds-and it was quiet again, I was wrapped in silence and heat and light and sweet fresh air.
A little awed, I thought: I did it, I got out.
I knelt there with the sun hot on my back, breath rasping in my throat. Then I pulled back on my knees, saw the torn and filthy fronts of my shirt and trousers, a thin cut on my left forearm matted with dirt and dried blood, the broken-nailed, bruised fingers on both hands. Reaction set in; tremors shook my body, left me weak and nauseated. The ordeal in the mine shaft seemed to recede in my memory, as if it were a surreal dream, as if it had happened only within the spaces in my mind.
What if he's still out here somewhere?
The thought came with alarming suddenness, cementing reality. I pulled my head around and pawed at the sweat blurring my eyes, got them focused on my surroundings. But there was nobody in sight; the flat and the crumbling outbuildings were still shrouded in heavy stillness, my car gleamed with bright reflections where I had parked it.
