Alien's Concubine, The (4 page)

“
We’re lowering a
light.”

Timely. They could have said so before
they scared the shit out of her! But maybe they didn’t realize just
how frightening it was to find oneself in a deep, dark
hole?

She listened intently as the sound
moved closer and closer and finally began to feel around for it.
Relief flooded her when her hands at last closed around an object
that she realized was a camp lantern. “Got it!” she announced,
searching blindly for the switch.

The light blinded her for a moment.
Clamping the lantern between her thighs because she was afraid it
would slide away and break, she struggled with the rope they’d used
to lower it until she finally untied it. The rope was narrow. “You
going to pull me up with this?” she asked doubtfully.

“
Just wait! I don’t think
this one’s long enough.”

“
I’ve got the end,” she
pointed out angrily.

“
But there isn’t enough
left up here to tie it off.”

Tie it off to what, she wondered,
casting around in her mind to remember anything that had been close
enough, and solid enough, to anchor the other end of the rope?
Nothing came to mind and a sinking sensation settled in her
stomach.

Taking the lantern from between her
thighs, she lifted it as she turned to survey the dark hole behind
her. The light didn’t filter far, illuminating no more than a
circle somewhere between five and six feet and not even that very
well. She saw a pattern of stones on the floor that told her the
floor had been lain tile-like but not much else.

“
I think this one will do
it,” Mark called out just as something hit the side of the shaft
above her head.

Turning hopefully away from the dismal
aspect behind her, Gaby peered up to see a length of rope
slithering snake-like toward her. She lurched toward it, grabbing
the end.

“
Can you tie it around
your waist?”

Gaby tugged at it. “Give it some
slack.”

Silence greeted that. “There isn’t
any,” Mark said finally.

“
Goddamn it to hell,” Gaby
muttered.

“
What was
that?”

“
Nothing!” she said
louder. “I’ve got enough to hold on to. Can you pull me
up?”

She didn’t get the chance to tell them
she did have a firm grip on it yet. Whoever had the other end
snatched it from her grip, burning her palm. “Not yet, damn it! I
wasn’t ready!”

From the thud she heard at the top,
she deduced that whoever it was had fallen on their ass. The rope
reappeared. “This time say ‘ready’ when you’re ready,” Mark called
down angrily.

A hysterical urge to giggle closed
over her. Gaby fought it. “Give me a minute,” she said a little
unsteadily. “I have to set the lantern down somewhere.”

Scooting out of the shaft, she set the
lantern to one side … just in case. If she didn’t make it out, she
didn’t want to land on the damned lantern on her way back down.
Without glancing around, because she really didn’t want to see what
was around her at the moment, she crawled back up the shaft as far
as she could, feeling blindly for the end of the rope. Her fingers
brushed it. She surged upward with an effort and caught a firm hold
on it. Struggling, grunting with effort, she inched upward again,
trying to get enough slack to wrap the rope around one hand and
grab a hold above that. “I think I’ve got a good grip,” she gasped
out finally, adding, “pull slowly,” as she turned and tried to
brace her back against one side and her feet against the other. The
shaft was just wide enough to make it impossible to get much
leverage.

Grunting with effort, trying to ignore
the burn in her palms from gripping the rope and the strain against
her shoulder and elbow joints, Gaby inched upward as they pulled.
She’d managed to get just high enough to see the square above her
when the rope abruptly went slack. The moment it did, she lost what
little leverage she had with her feet against the sides. Uttering a
sharp cry, she slid down the shaft and landed on her belly on the
hard stone floor at the bottom.

“
Are you all right?”
someone yelled.

She didn’t recognize the voice—one of
the students. “No, I’m not alright,” she muttered beneath her
breath. Groaning, she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees
and crawled to the opening. “Not hurt! What happened?”

“
The rope broke. Guess
it’s rotted.”

“
Well get another one!”
she snapped.

Silence greeted that demand. She could
hear a low voiced conversation above her, but she couldn’t make out
what they were saying. Then someone, Mark she thought, muttered
just loudly enough she could hear it, “There isn’t another one. I
think the natives took the others.”

Fear knotted in Gaby’s stomach, and
anger. It didn’t seem to have occurred to anybody but her that the
reason the Indians were so willing to work for the pittance they
were paid was because they helped themselves to whatever supplies
appealed to them whenever they pleased. It wasn’t unusual, at all,
to go to get something and discover it had mysteriously
vanished.

The rope that had broken had probably
rotted like everything else did in the damned jungle because of the
heat and humidity.

What the hell was she supposed to do
now?

“
Dr. LaPlante?”

“
What?” she asked
sullenly.

“
I’m afraid we’re going to
have to wait for daylight to try again. Do you think you’ll be all
right?”

Did she have a fucking choice, she
thought a little hysterically? She felt like screaming and cursing
them for every low down thing she could think of. It might help her
feelings, but it wasn’t likely to alter her situation. “Is there an
alternative?” she demanded ungraciously.

“
I don’t think
so.”

“
I guess I’ll have to be,
then, won’t I?”

“
Why don’t you take the
lantern and explore the area?” Dr. Oldman suggested, not unkindly.
“I’ll make you feel more comfortable, I think, to assure yourself
there’s nothing down there to worry about. We’ll be back in a few
minutes and drop some things down to you to make you as comfortable
as possible.”

A ladder was the only thing she could
think of that would make her more comfortable. But she knew the
ladders, even stacked end to end wouldn’t work. They were straight.
The shaft was curved.

They didn’t wait for an answer. She
heard the shuffle above her and the retreat of sounds that left her
completely alone. She went limp, resisting the urge to cry like a
child abandoned in the dark. When she’d mastered the useless urge,
she shimmied down the shaft and picked up the lantern.

Lifting the light, she peered around,
but she could see nothing but darkness beyond the range of the
light. Giving up, she lowered the light and scanned the floor.
Reassured when she saw nothing scurrying away, she moved cautiously
across the stone floor, testing each two foot square with the toe
of her boot before she placed her weight on it. It seemed doubtful
there would be another trap within the chamber, but she wasn’t
taking any chances. She was deep beneath the surface of the ground,
but she could still feel air wafting through the shaft, chasing the
mustiness from the stale air that had been trapped inside the
temple, or whatever it was, for countless centuries. A pitiful
amount of light filtered down through that shaft at the moment,
only a less deep gloom from the light of the stars, but it was
better than nothing … better than falling down another hole and
breaking something.

When she paused the third time and
lifted the light to look around, she froze in awe. Just at the edge
of the ring of light, she saw color, shape, the dim impression of
an intricate mosaic. Forgetting the possible hazard of the floor,
she held the light up and moved closer.

The entire wall was covered in tiny,
colored stones. As she moved closer, she lost the perspective to
view the design, but she was far more interested in inspecting the
stones at the moment. She saw, when she reached the wall and lifted
a hand to inspect the surface with her palm and fingertips, that
the stones were amazingly crafted, almost as regular as machine
cut, or maybe formed tiles. The surface was as smooth as glass.
They couldn’t be pottery tiles, she decided. The color was too
vivid. Time would have dulled almost anything they could have
thought of to use to color them, even if they’d fired the tiles. It
had to be naturally colored stones, but it was still amazing that
they’d processed them into neat, almost perfectly symmetrical
squares, and flat, as if they’d been cut by machinery.

The feat of producing the tiles alone
seemed impossibly beyond the culture that would have made them. She
moved back again after a moment, slowly, until the image began to
take form. She could see then that the frieze was like the one on
the stone she’d found. Naked couples, entwined in various sexual
acts lined the wall as the light revealed image after image. It
wasn’t stick-like figures, either. The stones limited the
possibility of rounded, more natural looking figures, but these
didn’t look primitive, boxy, angular, or
disproportionate.

Some of the positions seemed wildly
improbable, but otherwise the picture seemed a determined rendering
of nature in action rather than a simple effort to suggest the
general idea.

She came at last to a corner.
Frowning, she tried to remember how many steps she’d taken, but
discovered she’d been too preoccupied by the depiction to spare a
thought to counting. Her stride was approximately a yard heel to
toe, she decided, maybe closer to two feet. She decided to count by
twos. She’d taken ten steps when she came abruptly to a darkened
alcove.

That wasn’t what halted her in her
tracks, however.

The figure seated on a great stone
throne sent a painful shaft knifing through her chest, as if she’d
just discovered a living being in the room with her.

Carved from some dark stone that was a
close enough approximation of brown skin tones to give her heart
palpitations, the figure looked to be every bit of ten foot high,
seated. She couldn’t see a lot more than the muscular legs and the
impressive erection sprouting from his lap, however. The upper
portion of the figure remained in darkness.

The mammoth erection was a blatant
clue of her whereabouts, even if she’d been inclined to dismiss the
depictions on the frieze.

She’d landed in the temple of some
ancient fertility god.

A noise behind her jerked her
attention from the colossal cock.

Whirling, she peered into the
darkness. Something thudded against the stone floor.

“
Gaby?”

Irritation went through her when she
recognized Mark’s voice. It dawned on her abruptly that he was the
asshole that had gotten her into this predicament to start with.
He’d been shoving on the stone. It had to be some sort of trigger
for the trap door she’d fallen through.

And now he was getting all
chummy?

“
Feel free to call me Dr.
LaPlante!” she snapped, holding the light out and stalking toward
the dim square of light she could see far into the distance as her
sight adjusted. The room must be forty feet square, maybe more. No
wonder she hadn’t been able to see anything from where she’d
landed!

Her rush proved imprudent. She slammed
into an object sprouting from the floor and nearly chest high,
almost losing her grip on the lantern. Uttering an inelegant grunt
as her impact forced the air from her lungs, she fell back a step.
“Hold on!” she called louder.

It wasn’t a wall. By her reckoning the
thing was roughly six feet wide and six to eight feet long,
approximately three feet high, and flat on top.

An altar?

A shiver chased its way down her
spine. Visions of live, human sacrifices danced in her
head.

Deciding to ignore the thing for the
moment, she moved around it, focused on the square that indicated
the opening of the shaft. She nearly fell over the bundle at the
bottom.

“
I dropped a sleeping bag
down. There’s another light, a canteen, and food wrapped inside.
Did it make it all the way down?”

She’d kicked something hard inside. It
was a good thing she was wearing boots!

“
Yes.”

“
Anything else you want or
need?”

Aside from getting out? “I can’t think
of anything,” she said after a moment’s thought. She wasn’t really
hungry, despite the fact that she hadn’t eaten since the noon meal
and it was already past the time, she was pretty sure, when they
usually ate supper. She was thirsty, though. She’d been sweating
like a pig while she’d struggled to get out, and panting with fear
besides. Her throat and mouth felt like they’d been stuffed with
cotton that had soaked up every drop of moisture.

She would’ve liked more light, just in
case, but they didn’t have a lot of artificial light and they had
to conserve it. It was too hard to get batteries for the handheld
lights or fuel for the generator that ran everything else so deep
in the jungle.