walls were high, at least fifteen feet or more. In its center lay a
wide pool of stagnant water, gray, cloudy-looking. Water bled off the
ceiling and dripped back into ita steady, sharp echo.
The floor was strewn with bones.
Hundreds of them, many cracked and broken.
There were so many it made them hard to identify. Piles, scattered
everywhere. I saw fish heads, crab shells, the thin delicate skulls of
birds. Others were a whole lot larger. Dogs? Maybe. I remembered
that day long ago when we'd peered into the house and watched the
carcasses come out one by one. It was possible they were dogs.
It was also possible they were bigger game.
'What is all this?' whispered Steven.
'I don't know.'
We stepped carefully into the room. It was a relief to be able to
stand upright. A dozen bluebottle flies rose up to greet us. We
swatted at them.
I bent down for a closer look. I picked up one of the bigger bones.
Something had been at them. There were teeth marks. Something
I broke one in my hands. It was old and brittle. I felt a measure of
relief at that. It was easy to hope they all went back to the days
before Ben and Mary abandoned the house- some sort of burial
ground for their animals. I didn't want to have to link them with
Casey too closely.
We prowled around for a moment or two. The flies got worse. I was
looking for traces of blood. There was something odd near the wall to
our right. A pile of sticks and twigs pressed flat, covered with a
ratty old moth-eaten tartan blanket, half of that cove red with dried
seaweed and scattered with bones. To me it looked planned. Some sort
of browse-bed. So there went my burial-ground idea.
Steven was looking at the bones.
'I recognize this one,' he said. 'It's a cat.'
'How do you know?'
'College biology. And there are birds her too, big ones. Gulls
maybe.'
'See any dogs?'
My feet crushed tiny bones.
'Maybe. We never took any of those apart. No skulls that I can see.
No jawbones.'
He sifted through a pile of them near the pool of water. They rattled
like pairs of dowels struck together.
'This could be a dog's. Femur. Could very well be.'
'See any people?'
In my flashlight beam his face was ashen.
'No people.'
'I was thinking Ben and Mary.'
'No. No people. Thank god.'
I found a thin line of fresh blood beside the pool opposite him, and
then a few more drops a couple of feet away. Smeared, as though she'd
been dragging. She was bleeding slowly and steadily.
In the cave this deep the flies were not just blue-bottles anymore.
They were biting. I felt as harp sting on my cheek, another on my
neck. I batted at them to no effect, except to nearly drop the flash
light while its beam jittered wildly across the wet gray ceiling and
plunged the area just ahead into the darkness.
That sea red me. didn't want to break any more flashlights.
I controlled myself after that. I put the beam to the walls of the
cavern, following the direction of her blood. Then I saw what I was
after. Another hole in the wall, just like the one we'd come
through.
Steven was slapping at them too by now. They were diving at us both
like tiny kamikaze pilots, hitting hard. I slapped at one and felt it
smear across my forehead. There was the urge to start swinging with
both hands, to drop the pitchfork and run. But that was the edge of
panic. And it could kill you.
'Let's get out of here. This way.'
Just beyond the entrance the tunnel opened up to roughly the size of a
mine shaft. It was good to be able to stand up, even if you had to
stoop a little. A whole lot better than crawling.
Good also to be able to go two abreast, to feel the security of another
body by your side. To know it sported an axe handle that could bring a
man down.
We made good time through there. It was just one long passage with
nothing in the distance but rock and more rock as far as you could see.
It amazed me, this much tunnel. I guessed it started in the seawall
and eroded inward. I wondered how many others there were along the
coast just like this, maybe even deeper and more extensive.
You could hide forever in a place like this, if you could stand the
cold of winter and found some way to scrounge up food and water.
It would never grow warm in here. The rock itself would keep it cool
throughout the worst of August, and winter would be pure hell. Whoever
had Casey was a thick-skinned sonovabitch, if this was the
As I say, it was easy going for a while, with only one direction to go
in, but then things got more complicated. The section of tunnel split
in two. You could go left or right, and they were about the same in
shape and size.
We looked for traces of blood on the floor. There weren't any not in
either direction. There was no way of telling what that meant for
Casey. Maybe the bleeding had stopped because the wound
Jwasn't that bad. On the other hand, dead people stopped bleeding
too.
It was bad for us, though. It left us with a choice.
, mm
In that place you didn't want choices.
