He goes down.
The cellar is empty. Wings isn’t anywhere. He shines his caretaker’s flashlight in every corner and underneath all the shelves and into empty niches in Great-grandfather’s wine rack, but there is no sign. It takes him all morning to be absolutely certain, hours in which the housekeeper trots around the kitchen overhead making his breakfast, putting his coffee cup and the steaming carafe, his orange juice and cinnamon toast—and a rose, because roses are in season—on his breakfast tray. He times the woman’s trips back and forth to the library where he eats, her visit to his bedroom where she will change his sheets without remarking, because she does it every day; he waits for her to finish, punch in the code, and leave by the kitchen door. Then he waits another hour.
When he’s sure the house is empty, Weston goes back upstairs for the klieg lights his folks bought for a home tour the year they died.
Bright as they are, they don’t show him much. There are cartons of books in this old cellar, bundles of love letters that he’s afraid to read. His parents’ skis, the ice skates they bought him the Christmas he turned four, the sled—all remnants of his long-lost past. This is the sad but ordinary basement of an ordinary man who has gone through life with his upper lip stiffer than is normal and his elbows clamped to his sides. It makes him sigh.
Maybe he imagined Wings Germaine.
Then, when he’s just about to write her off as a figment of his imagination, and the missing pieces, up to and including the Brancusi, as the work of his housekeeper or the guy who installed the alarms, he sees that the floor in front of the wine rack is uneven and that there are fingerprints on one stone.
Very well. He could be Speke, starting out after Burton, or Livingstone, heading up the Zambezi. The shell Weston has built around himself hardens so that only he will hear his heart crack as he finishes: Alone.
When she comes back too long after midnight, he is waiting: provisioned this time, equipped with pick and miner’s light—because he thinks he knows where Wings is going—handcuffs, and a length of rope. He will follow her down. Never mind what Weston thinks in the hours while he crouches in his own basement like a sneak thief, waiting; don’t try to parse the many heartbroken, reproachful, angry escalating to furious, ultimately threatening speeches he writes and then discards.
The minute that stone moves, he’ll lunge. If he’s fast enough, he can grab her as she comes out; if she’s faster and drops back into the hole, then like a jungle cat, he will plunge in after her and bring her down. Then he’ll kneel on the woman’s chest and pin her wrists and keep her there until she explains. He already knows that eventually he’ll soften and give her one more chance, but it will be on his terms.
She’ll have to pack up her stuff and move into his handsome house and settle down in his daytime life, because he is probably in love with her. Then he’ll have every beautiful thing that he cares about secured in the last safe place.
And, by God, she’ll bring all his stuff back. She will!
He’s been staring at the stone for so long that he almost forgets to douse the light when it moves. He manages it just as the stone scrapes aside like a manhole cover and her head pops up.
“Oh,” she cries, although he has no idea how she knows he is crouching here in the dark. “Oh, fuck.”
It’s a long way to the bottom. The fall is harder than he thought. By the time he hits the muddy floor of the tunnel underneath his house, Wings Germaine is gone.
He is alone in the narrow tunnel, riveted by the possibility that it’s a dead end and there’s no way out.
He’s even more terrified because a faint glow tells him that there is. To follow Wings, he has to crawl on and out, into the unknown.
Weston goes along on mud-caked hands and slimy knees for what seems like forever before he comes to a place big enough to stand up in. It’s a lot like the hole where the runaway tourist stampeded him, but it is nothing like it. The man-made grotto is wired and strung with dim lights; the air is as foul as it was in the hole where Ted Bishop disappeared, but this one is deserted. He is at a rude crossroads. Access tunnels snake out in five directions, and he has to wonder which one she took and how far they go.
Stupid bastard, he calls, “Wings?”
There is life down here, Weston knows it; she is down here, but he has no idea which way she went or where she is hiding or, in fact, whether she is hiding from him. A man in his right mind, even a heartbroken lover, would go back the way he came, haul himself up and station his caretaker by the opening with a shotgun to prevent incursions until he could mix enough concrete to fill the place and cement the stone lid down so no matter what else happened in his house, she would never get back inside.
Instead he cries, “Wings. Oh, Wings!”
He knows better than to wait. If anything is going to happen here, he has to make it happen.
The idea terrifies him. Worse. There are others here.
For the first time in his well-ordered life, careful Weston, who vowed never to lose anybody or anything he cared about, is lost.
The chamber is empty for the moment, but there is life going on just out of sight; he hears the unknown stirring in hidden grottoes, moving through tunnels like arteries—approaching, for all he knows. The knowledge is suffocating. The man who needs to be alone understands that other lives are unfolding down here; untold masses are deep in their caverns doing God knows what. A born solitary, he is staggered by the pressure of all those unchecked lives raging out of sight and beyond the law or any of the usual agencies of control.
Encroaching. God!
Trembling, he tries, “Wings?”
As if she cares enough to answer.
The tunnels give back nothing. He wants to run after her but he doesn’t know where. Worse, she may see him not as a lover in pursuit but a giant rat scuttling after food. He should search but he’s afraid of what he will find. Much as he misses his things, he’s afraid to find out what Wings has done with them and who she is doing it with.