She was like Jonah in the belly of the whale, although if this had been a leviathan, it would have lived hundreds of millions of years ago in a sea that had receded, its massive corpus fossilized, its endless bowels turned to stone.
They had taken half an hour to descend from the stairhead, but ascent would take longer. She hoped that by moving faster than might seem prudent, she would not only put distance between herself and Hendrickson in his blind pursuit, but also make her way to the surface in as little as forty minutes.
She found herself holding her breath when she didn’t intend to hold it, and her mouth repeatedly filled with saliva, perhaps ruled by a subconscious fear that the sound of swallowing would be enough to bring him down on her.
In the first room of skulls with their lethal pikes of chert and obsidian, with their fanged and yawning eyes, the deep stillness behind Jane suddenly meant to her not that Hendrickson was creeping cat-quiet, but that he was no longer following in her wake. Not that he was shot and dead. Not that he was incapacitated by injury. Not that he had descended into some madness in which he could not function. He was no longer following her because he was taking another route known only to him and would be waiting for her someplace ahead.
She halted with hundreds of eyeless sockets gazing at her from their ledges, with hundreds of humorless smiles turned upon her. No. Bite on the fear. She knew what to do. There was death everywhere in this place, yes, but there was death everywhere in the world above, as well. Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the shadow. Even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, keep moving. Plan the action and commit. Hesitation was lethal.
18
On this bright Sunday afternoon, in rural Borrego Valley, the white clapboard church with the white shingled steeple seems luminous in the fierce desert sun, as if it takes the hard light into itself and softens it and gives it back in a form that is easier on the eyes. It reminds Carter Jergen of those carefully detailed, miniature buildings that people use to create precious little villages in Christmas displays through which scale-model electric trains go clickity-clickity-clickity in tedious circles.
A couple dozen vehicles are parked in front of the place, and newly arrived people are going not into the church, but around the side of it, to join others gathering in a bosk of trees under which stand maybe a dozen long picnic tables.
Dubose pulls the VelociRaptor to the side of the road and studies the scene for a moment. “What’s all this about?”
“It’s Sunday,” says Jergen.
“But it’s not Sunday morning.”
“Some of the new arrivals are carrying baskets.”
“Baskets of what?”
“Maybe food,” Jergen suggests. “Maybe later they’re going to have Sunday supper together.”
After consideration, Dubose says, “I don’t think I like this.”
Jergen agrees. “Dull as bingo night at an old folks’ home. But we can show the Honda photo to a lot of people in a few minutes.”
Dubose glowers in thought. “All right. But let’s get the hell in and out.” He drives into the church lot and parks.
As they’re walking across the blacktop, Jergen glances back at the VelociRaptor. It looks like some magnificent machine predator, that, when no one is looking, will become animate and eat all the crappy little vehicles surrounding it.
As they reach the corner of the church, the gleeful squeals of children rise in a raucous chorus, and Dubose halts. “Oh, shit.”
Kids tend to want to climb in the giant’s lap and pull his ears and make a honking noise when they pinch his nose. He’s like a big shaggy dog to them.
“Ten minutes,” Jergen promises.
They follow a brick walkway through a landscape of pebbles and cactuses and silver-dollar plants and various weird succulents, to the cluster of nine big trees that shade the picnic area.
None of the younger children are in the bosk, where the adults are mingling. A separate rubber-floored playground features a jungle gym, a tube slide, swings, and other attractions that Jergen thought had gone extinct with the invention of the Game Boy. Screaming kids are running, jumping, sliding, swinging, and slashing at one another with foam-rubber swords.
“Sonofabitch,” Dubose mutters, but he doesn’t bolt.
Jergen asks a woman in a flowered muumuu if the minister is in attendance, and she points to a man of about thirty who is standing two trees away from them, chatting with parishioners. “Pastor Milo,” she says.
Pastor Milo has a shaved head and an athletic physique. He wears sneakers, white jeans, a blue Hawaiian shirt, and an earring that is a dangling cross.
Remembering Reverend Gordon M. Gordon of the Mission of Light Church, Jergen whispers to Dubose, “Try not to shoot this one.”
19
The tote slung over her left shoulder, the flashlight in her left hand now, two fingers still over the lens to allow only the minimum of necessary light, the Heckler & Koch in her right hand, no hope of doing this with a two-hand grip…
All five senses enhanced by adrenaline and fear. Hyperacute. The darkness layered with moving shadows, moving not because something living shared the immediate space, moving because the light she carried briefly enlivened phantoms as she progressed. The whisper of her breathing. Otherwise no sounds except the slow dripping of water at sundry places in the gloom, ticking like clocks that had marked the years in their millions. The scent of wet stone, of her own fear sweat.
How very like a dream it often was, these minutes before a final accounting, when it came down to kill or be killed, and this time more than ever dreamlike. Caverns flowing for the most part in soft folds, as if the walls continuously melt and re-form around her. The massive tusks and skulls of mastodons materializing like some gene-stored memory of another incarnation many lives before this one. Here again the regiments of skeletal hands in bony gesture, once sheathed in flesh and occupied with work, with play, with making love, with making war. And in every dream, somewhere a beast prowled, human or not, the human kind more terrifying than others. Only the human monster knew beauty and rejected it, knew truth and disdained it, knew peace and did not prefer it, unlike the tiger and the wolf who knew not.
This time it was a boy, a lost boy in spite of the almost five decades he’d lived and sought his way, now crawling this underworld, more confident in the blinding dark than in the light. If he would kill her because he’d been told to kill her, he might kill her with particular savagery also because in his dementia he confused her with the hated mother who had molded him from boy into beast.
When Jane reached the end of the display of hands, she paused in a kind of vestibule between caverns. Just before the terminus of this small connecting chamber lay a generous passageway to the right and a narrower one to the left, and directly forward a room awaited without grisly ornamentation. She was only a couple levels below the stairhead.
Easing forward, she lifted the two shading fingers from the lens, and the light lanced the wide corridor to the right: steps zigzagging down, walls dissolving away into the dark. The narrower passage to the left led straight away, without steps and continuing beyond the reach of the beam.
She covered the lens again and stood listening. From the cavern directly ahead came not the drip of water but a drizzling sound. She recalled a flue to one side of that room, from which water issued in a thin ribbon. She strove to hear through the drizzle, which was a white noise that might mask a sound more meaningful, but otherwise there was only stillness.