8 Gone is the Witch (33 page)

I remember balling up in
to a fetal position and covering my head from the raining debris. Then Carlos threw himself over me, sheltering me with his own body and taking the brunt of the fallout over his back, shoulders and head.

As the dust
settled, he let out a groan and slowly rolled off me. I sat up and slipped my hand behind his head, cradling it against the jagged shards of selenite littering the ground. He blinked up at the gaping hole above and the black sky beyond.

“Lilith?”

I leaned in close. His voice sounded painfully weak and empty. “Yes, Carlos?”

“
Are Ursula and Jerome all right?”

I looked across the cavern.
The two were together, holding hands in the archway of one of the tunnels. “Yes. They’re fine.”

“Would you ask
Jerome to come over here?”

“
Of course.” I looked back over my shoulder and waved for Jerome to come. I saw him look up at Ursula. He seemed hesitant, perhaps fearful of what he might find once by my side.

He let go of Ursula’s hand and started across the room, his tail stiff and dragging in the dirt behind him as he approached.

“Jerome?” Carlos fixed his gaze on the open sky above. He reached up blindly. Jerome took his hand and wrapped his suction-cupped fingers around it.

“
Amigo?”

“Jerome, is that you?”

“Jerome here, amigo.”

“J
-man.” Carlos’ voice grew weaker. “There’s something you need to hear.”

I interrupted. “Carlos, please
. Save your strength.”

“No
, Lilith. I want him to hear this. Jerome?”

“Amigo.”

“Are you listening?”

“
Jerome listen.”

“This is for you, amigo.”

I’m sure I expected a heartfelt expression of undying friendship, maybe even a declaration of an eternal bond forged in brotherhood, something he’d have told Tony if only he were there, too.

Instead, what
Jerome heard, what I heard, and no doubt even Ursula heard from the other side of the cavern, was a colossal, wall-crumbling, ground-rumbling fart. The noise alone would have plowed us into the wall if the smell hadn’t.

“Carlos!” I barked. “
You son-of-a... What the hell was that?”

He rolled over on his side, laughing and clutching his stomach, all the while
sputtering and putt-putting a gastric barrage sufficient to stir up another cloud of selenite dust.

“I’m sorry,” he said, after
stopping both the laughing and the farting. He stood and brushed the dust from his robe. “I don’t know what came over me. Man, that felt good, though. I think that’s been building up in me ever since we ate that treklapod.”

Jerome, obviously immune to the unpleasant aroma of
treklapod after burn, went to Carlos and hugged him around the thighs. “Amigo! You no die.”

“No,” said Carlos. “I no die.” He looked
about the cave. “At least not yet.” We all looked up at the hole in the selenite roof.

“Forget it,” I said. “That’s at least
twenty feet up. We’re not getting out that way.”

We then
assessed the three tunnels running off in roughly thirty-degree angles from one another. Carlos said, “Well, looks like we take one of the tunnels. Any guess which one?”

“They all likely end up at the same place, a river, stream, another lake.”

“Or an underground chasm a hundred miles deep.”

“
Maybe.”

I looked at Ursula. “Got a gut feeling either way?”

She regarded the three tunnels indifferently. “What choice hath thee? `Tis the belly of the beast what matters.”

“
What do you mean?”

“Thou doth present but
three heads of the same serpent. Where one goes, the others surely follow.” She pointed at the larger of the openings. “That one.”

“
The one in the middle. Why?”

“Why not?”

“Good enough for me,” said Carlos. He took a couple of steps into the tunnel and backed out again. “It’s dark in there.”

“
Yeah, tunnels are like that.” I pushed him aside. “Let me in.”

I thought I’d be cool and roll a flame up
in my hand to use as a torch, but when I tried to exercise the spell, it wouldn’t work.

“What’s wrong?”

I looked at my hand as if I might find the answer floating on the tips of my fingers. “I don’t know. My fire spell isn’t working. Ursula, do you know the dark sight spell?”

“Aye, `tis a level one to be sure.”

“Good. You’re gonna need it. Jerome, you can see well in the dark, can’t you?”

Jerome’s eyes widened on demand. “Jerome see good. All the time see in dark.”

“Okay then.”

“Hey, wait,” said Carlos. “I can’t see in the dark. What am I supposed to do?”

“You have two choices. Stay here or put your hand on my shoulder and follow at arm’s length. Your call.”

“How will that help me see?”

“It won’t. Probably just as well, though. Isn’t anything in the tunnel you’ll want to see anyway. Now come on. Let’s get moving.”

Chapter Eighteen

We formed a mini conga line
and headed into the tunnel. I led. Carlos followed, keeping his hand on my shoulder. Ursula kept her hand on his and Jerome latched on to Ursula’s shirttail.

The first ten or fifteen steps weren’t bad. As I mentioned earlier, the ES seems to generate its own light source from within. Everything, including trees, rocks and even dirt
, displays a quality of auto-luminescence that defies logic. I suspect phosphorus or some other polymorphic anomaly is the reason.

The interesting thing about
it, is that places of absolute mono-essence, that is where one material and no other exists, remains dark. It’s as if the light emitting elements within objects require a mutual exchange of light emitting elements from dissimilar objects in order to maintain luminescence.

In sh
ort, the cave was pitch black.

Ursula’s ability and mine to exercise the dark sight spell work
s in a manner similar to the way night vision scopes work. The spell enables us to take advantage of whatever light is at hand, no matter how minuscule, and magnify it hundreds of times. In our case, the light emitting from our own bodies allowed the spell to work so that we could see nearly as plain as day.

I told Carlos
before we entered that he probably wouldn’t want to see what the tunnel had to offer. I was right. The moment my eyes adjusted to the dark sight spell, I saw a world of living organisms surprisingly diverse, some small and innocuous, some not so.

“Keep your free hand by your side
and don’t touch anything,” I told him, not wanting him to reach out and accidentally touch one of the many crawly things on the walls.

“Why not,” he asked.

“Just don’t.”

I’m sure Ursula and Jerome saw what I saw. A few times, I even heard Ursula gasp. I suspect it was for the furry spider-like
creatures that occasionally dropped from the ceiling in front of us and then made a mad dash deeper into the tunnel. That they were obviously trying to get away from us made me happy. I wished I could say the same for the rat-sized roaches that shadowed us from a spitting distance.

“What was that?” Carlos asked, after hearing Ursula’s fourth audible gasp.

“She’s claustrophobic,” I said, hoping it would satisfy him. “Now shut up and keep it moving.”

F
ifty yards further into the tunnel, we came to a T-intersection. I stopped, and the conga line domino bumped me another step forward.

“Strange,”
I said, turning to face the others.

“What is
?” asked Carlos.

“We’re at an intersection.”

“What’s strange about that?”

“It’s a T.”

“Yeah, so?”

“
Water doesn’t generally carve out tunnels in a T-shape. It carves them out in a Y.”

“
Meaning?”

“
Meaning water didn’t carve these tunnels.”

“
What did?”

“Well, considering the engineering
involved; the near perfect round shape, the logistics of removing thousands of metric tons of soil and rock, I’d have to say they’re manmade.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, either that or some really big ass––”

“Worm
,” said Jerome.

“Yeah, okay
worm. I was going to say mole, gopher, groundhog or––”

“Worm!”

“All right, worm. Whatever. Geez, don’t get your tail tied up in knots.”

Ursula
tapped me on the shoulder. “Methinks worm, too.” She pointed behind me.

I turned
around and saw the absolute biggest, fattest, dare I say juiciest, grotesque earthworm I could ever possibly imagine in my life. The thing was gigantic, a supertanker among night crawlers. It passed only inches from my reach, crossing before us and encompassing my entire field of view.

I
ts massive, pulpy, blood-filled body expanded and contracted in accordion fashion, dragging itself effortlessly through the intersection. Carlos tilted his head to the sound of flesh scraping the walls as the creature crawled by.

“
What’s that I hear?”

“
Nothing. Just a little mudslide.” I held my finger to my lips to shush the others. Carlos seemed to buy it. Once the goliath annelid had passed, I gave the word to move out again. We started down the right side of the T when Carlos pulled me back by the shoulder.

“Wait.
” He turned his nose up and sniffed. “Are you sure we’re going the right way?”

“What does it matter?”

“I think I detect a breeze coming from the other direction. Might be a way out.”

“Yeah, but that way
...” I looked at Ursula. She was shaking her head no.

“That way what?” asked Carlos.

What could I say? “Nothing. That way seems just as good as any. We’ll just worm our way through it, I guess.”

Ursula laughed at that. Jerome did, too,
though his monkey chatter laugh creeped me out even more than the thought of running into the ass end of a bus-sized earthworm.

I
turned back and headed us down the left side tunnel, paying particular attention not to step in the worm poop splattered along the path. Ursula and Jerome did a good job avoiding it as well, but Carlos was on his own. I figured what the hell? His path, his poop. Let him deal with it.

After a while, I
noticed how the path had begun a gradual incline, indicating we were heading back to the surface. I liked that. More importantly, I liked that I could finally smell the fresh air Carlos detected earlier.

“Hey
!” I pointed up ahead. “I see an opening. It’s a way out!”

Carlos
saw it, too. He scooped Jerome up into his arms and began running for the exit.

“
Blessed be!” cried Ursula, as she took my hand and practically dragged me out with her.

I never thought I would be so happy to find myself standing in the middle of nowhere again, but I was. We
had come out in the woods behind the boulders just outside Yammer’s campsite. Carlos recognized the surroundings immediately, having emerged from the portal earlier in that same vicinity.

“We made a complete circle,” he said. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

“What do you mean?”

He look
ed around, bewildered. “No matter how big this place appears; it seems we always find ourselves going in circles, like it’s really very small. You know?”

“
No, I don’t. This place seems plenty big enough to me.”

“Maybe, but it doesn’t seem logical that Doctor Lowell went through all
of this bullshit to bring Leona back with him.”

“
Oh? You think he’s still back in that hellhole of a town?

“I don’t know, but
for as long as we’ve been out here, why is it we’ve seen no clues that he’s been here, too?”

“That’s because he hasn’t
,” came a voice from behind the boulders.

Carlos drew his bolo and ushered Ursula and me back. “Who goes there?”

“Relax,” said Tony, stepping out from behind the rocks.

“Tony?”
I gasped. I almost didn’t recognize him for the growth of facial hair.

He walked up
and kissed me hard on the lips. “What took you so long?”