“Wait! Mr. Sullivan!” she called out. “Please wait.”
She went on, blindly, her hands before her, her whole body shrinking from an inevitable crash against solid stone. Then the light returned, blessed light, showing Maribel’s figure beside the battered Mr. Sullivan. “Who is it?” he snarled, raising the lantern into the air.
“It’s me. Miss Parker.”
Maribel tugged her hand free of Mr. Sullivan’s, though he made a futile grab to recapture it. “Cousin Edith,” Maribel said, running up to her. “I get to look at the cave by myself! Louise will be so mad!”
In her relief and joy, Edith knelt down on the gritty floor. She embraced the little girl, who wiggled free at once, impatiently. “You want to come too?”
Edith raised her head to look at Mr. Sullivan. From his pocket, he withdrew a knife, the yellow light dancing along the edge. “Yes,” he said with a smile. “Miss Parker would like to come on a private tour too, wouldn’t you. Miss Parker?”
“I would. But Maribel . . . did you ask permission from your father before you left the tent?”
Though the light was behind Maribel, Edith felt the girl’s shoulders slump. “No,” she admitted.
“Don’t you think you’d better?”
“Now wait a minute. . . .” Mr. Sullivan approached.
“Let her go ask her father,” Edith said, crouching at his feet, but not looking up. “I’ll go with you, instead.”
“I don’t want you . . .”
“I’m going to m-a-r-r-y Jeff Dane.” Maybe if she spelled key words, Maribel wouldn’t become alarmed. “And it won’t help you to show her that k-n-i-f-e. You’ll only f-r-i-g-h-t-e-n her.”
Maribel said on a note of grievance, “You don’t have to spell stuff. I know what you’re saying. Daddy’s going to be mad at me, isn’t he?” She sniffed. “I just wanted to see the cave before everybody else.”
“No, your daddy won’t be mad, honey,” Edith said, rising to her feet, Maribel’s hand in hers. She looked Sullivan in the eyes. “Let her go ask him. You’ll be able to show me some of the chambers while we wait.”
His gaze shifted between Edith and the child. “All right. But no tricks or . . .” He patted the pocket where he’d concealed the knife.
Edith touched the child’s cheek with her free hand to tilt her face up. “Now listen to me, Maribel. You’ve got to walk very slowly and head straight for the exit up there. You’ll be able to see your way out without any problem. Then you sit and wait for your ... for someone to come. There’ll be somebody along soon to get the ice cream. Don’t go back to the fair. Just sit and wait. All right?”
“All right.” Maribel’s white face turned from Edith to Sullivan, a look of doubt narrowing her eyes.
“Can you see the way out?”
“Sure.” Still the child hesitated. Edith prayed that Maribel wouldn’t say anything about the tension between the two grown-ups. It was like the silence before a mighty thunderstorm, when even the earth seemed to cower down.
“Go on then,” Edith said.
“Okay.” Maribel turned and began walking up the slope toward the exit, her little legs carrying her along with surprising speed. About ten yards away, she suddenly turned and yelled, “But it’s not fair!”
Edith studied Mr. Sullivan as the echoes of Maribel’s running footsteps surrounded them. One of his eyes was swollen nearly shut and his mouth was bruised and sore looking. He took care to speak out of the other side.
“You think you’re smart, huh?”
“Not really. But whatever you’re going to do, better I should suffer it than a child, don’t you think?”
He stepped suddenly closer and grabbed her upper arm in fingers that bit her to the bone. He twisted. Edith cried out, trying to turn out of his grasp. “That’s right,” he said in her ear, his voice pleased. “Be scared of me. Be real scared.”
He let her go, almost throwing her aside. Edith rubbed her arm, her skin burning from the friction.
“Let me ... let me get the other lantern,” she said, trying to keep her voice from wavering. “We might need it.”
“Okay. But I won’t light it. Better for me that way.”
After they’d been walking for some time, Edith was glad she’d worn her own shoes. The ones Mrs. Waters had bought for her were always a little too big or too small. Mr. Sullivan set a rapid pace and the footing was very uneven. She kept close behind him. Though she tried to take notice of landmarks, she was soon confused.
Sullivan noticed her looking around. “You might as well enjoy yourself. You wouldn’t have gotten this much of a look if you’d gone with your boyfriend.”
“You seem very familiar with this cave, Mr. Sullivan. Are you from Richey, somehow?”
“Hell no. I was born in Pennsylvania.”
“But you don’t seem to have any difficulty down here. I’m . . .” She rubbed her arms, the eternal sunless chill penetrating to her bones. “I already don’t know which way we came or where we’re going.”
He laughed pridefully. “No cave can mess me up. I was sent to the mines when I was nine years old. Spent five years of my life underground, slaving away at the bottom of a coal shaft. There’s nothing I don’t know about caves and such.”
He held the light to illuminate the ceiling. “See those? We called them Devils’ Teeth.”
Projecting down from the roof were huge, pointed icicles of sweating stone. Edith saw a single drop of water hanging at the end of the one closest to her. She held out her hand to touch it. The coldness stung even through her cotton glove.
“That drop could have been forming for a year. Shows you how long it takes for something like that to grow. And I’ve seen ‘em big around as a man. Seen ‘em fall too, right through the chest of some guy too slow to get out of the way.” He grinned. “Pinned him like a bug on a card. Never saw so much blood.”
“Horrible!”
They passed through great vaulted chambers that seemed decorated with delicate plasterwork. Edith stopped for breath in a stone garden, with curious pieces of rock petaled like roses. Tiny castles sprouted on mounds of stone at the bottom of stalactites, like models of European strongholds. Though she saw great wonders, all the colors were the same, a ghostly yellow-white in the lantern’s glow. And overlaying everything was the smell of a vast cellar and the ceaseless rushing of water somewhere in the depths.
Edith asked, “Where is all that water I can hear?”
Sullivan’s mood seemed to have changed since he told her about the Devils’ Teeth. “Shut up, can’t you? That’s all women are good for. Jabber, jabber, jabber.”
Edith’s mouth was dry. She felt as though a hundred years had passed since she’d sipped lemonade at the Methodists’ tent. Though they slopped over a rise that water raced down, slurried with mud, Edith saw nothing to drink. The sound of the water became taunting, for it surrounded her, yet the only moisture she saw was the faint sheen on the walls in the lantern’s glow.
How long they’d been traveling, with their only light the yellow circle of the lantern, she couldn’t say. Time had little meaning here, where such things were measured by a slowly swelling drop of water and the passage of centuries. She remembered squeezing through a passage sideways, afraid every instant of becoming stuck. She walked along a narrow ledge, clinging to the slick stone as best she could.
Sullivan abruptly stopped and swore when Edith bumped into him.
“Give me that other lantern.” He snatched it. Her fingers were so cold she’d forgotten she was holding it until the weight was taken away.
“Sit down,” he ordered. “Over there.” He flashed his lantern at a large stone slab, tilted out over a mess of small chips like a drawbridge over a gravel pit. The small stones spurted out from beneath Edith’s feet so that she had to spread her arms wide to keep her balance. She reached the big slab and hoisted herself up on it, thanking mercy that she had a small bustle to use as padding.
Sullivan put the second lantern down at his feet. “Now you listen, girlie. I haven’t brought you all this way for your health. Not at all. I’ m going to go back up there. If your boyfriend does what I say, I’ll tell him how to find you. If not . . . I’ll think of you down here, when I’m someplace sunny.”
“I feel confident you will one day find yourself where it is always very warm.”
He gave her a half-grin, as though pleased by her good wishes. Then, figuring it out, he snarled, “Be nice. That’s the sort of thing that might make me make a mistake in telling your boyfriend where to find you. Maybe you didn’t notice but there’s a whole lot of passages running through these caves. A lot of ‘em are dead ends. This will be one for you if you’re not careful.”
His quip seemed to restore his good humor. “I’m a kind-hearted fella, so I’ll leave you this lantern. I guess it’s got about three hours’ worth of oil in it. If Dane sees reason, he’ll find you long before the light goes out. If he tries any rough stuff or calls in the law . . . Are you afraid of the dark?”
Still laughing, he went to the entrance of the chamber. “You stay put, girlie. Don’t get any smart ideas about finding your way out on your own. They’d never even find your bones if you tried
that.
Be a good girl,” he said, his voice a horrible parody of the tone she’d taken with Maribel.
“Mr. Sullivan?” Edith asked, just before his light faded.
He stuck the lantern back through, the shadows leaping weirdly across the ceiling. “You want to beg?”
“No. I want to know . . . did no one ever love you, sir?”
“What the hell kind of question is that?” He
marched away. She could hear him grumbling for a long time, the echoes bouncing down the passages.
Edith wriggled on the stone but soon gave up trying to find a more comfortable position. In the lantern light, she saw no more comfortable perch than the one she now occupied. At least up here the draft was not so noticeable. She considered getting down and going for the lantern but was afraid that if she slipped on the large stones coming back, she’d break it.
As a rule the dark did not frighten her. But she realized here that what she’d thought of as dark was really always lit by star, moon, or the ambient glow that is in the sky itself. Here
there was only the feeble light of a lantern and the ear-breaking silence. Edith shivered, but not from the cold. What if she were to hear a noise? Who knew that primordial terrors might lurk in the impenetrable darkness just beyond the circle of light?
Edith began to regret having an imagination. It could not create a fire to warm her, or compel Jeff to find her any more quickly. It could only pull up nameless fears to torment her. She could almost see a huge shape detach itself from the murk, the slaver dripping from . . .
Edith crossed her arms to hug herself, to calm the shivers that wracked her. A slight crunch, in the utter silence as loud as a breaking branch, came from her pocket. Puzzled, Edith touched a rough surface. With a smile, she pulled out one of the gingersnaps she’d been taking to Maribel. There had been five or six in the folded calico packet, but now the packet and the other cookies were gone, fallen somewhere on their twisted trail.
Edith nibbled the edge of the remaining cookie. Somehow, the warm flavor of the spices drove back the dark. And, after all, she had, as a rule, found an imagination to be a comfort in times of trouble.
Lady Jessica studied the man before her, determined to wipe the triumphant smirk from his rubbery lips. “You think I will submit to you to save my life? It will never be. I shall shout defiance with my final breath. “
“Brave words, my lady,” Lord Ivor lisped. He rubbed his ringed hands in delicious anticipation of her surrender. “But you will sing another tune, I fancy, when the choice is marriage with me or death for your lover. Bring in Jeffrey the Dane!”
The guards exchanged a look as the tumult outside the door reached their ears. “But, my lord . . . there is some disturbance! “
“All the better. Let him struggle. His exertion will not last long.” When he was not instantly obeyed, the corpulent lord half-rose from his seat. “Obey me! Let the Dane come in.”
The guards lifted the bar across the massive door to Lord Ivor’s Great Hall. Lady Jessica cast down her eyes, unable to shame the Dane by seeing his downfall. But the yelps of the guards made her turn.
Cries and shouts and the thunderous clanging of swords and shields penetrated the chamber. With a mighty crack, the doors burst inward and the battle surged to the very foot of the dais. Greatest among the warriors, Jeffrey the Dane towered above the rest, doing great damage with his long sword, Diavoio. But before he could reach Lord Ivor’s falcon seat, the evil lord snatched a poniard from his jeweled belt and held the razor point against the swanlike neck of the fair Jessica.
Chapter 24
Jeff left the organizing of the search to his father and Paul Tyler. Alone, he leaped up the hillside, Grouchy intent behind him.
At the sandy entrance to the cave, Jeff stared down into the dim first chamber. The dog, on the other hand, went sniffing along the ground to the ice cream boxes just inside.
Glancing at the dog, Jeff saw the whip-like tail lashing and the sound of a slurping tongue. “Get by, dog,” he said. “Come out of it.”
In no humor for kindness, Jeff went to haul the animal bodily away from the sweet delicacy. He saw, with a jolt of horror that twisted his heart, the body of his daughter, laid out behind the boxes. Grouchy licked the child’s hands and looked around at Jeff’s exclamation.
Then Jeff saw Maribel’s beslobbered hand move as she pushed the dog away. “Yuck! Grouchy!” Sitting up, she wiped her hand on her skirt.
“Daddy!” she protested as he swept her high into the air. He cuddled her close, leaning his head on hers, unable to believe for a moment that she was alive and apparently unharmed.
“My God,” he said, his voice trembling in thanks. “My God.”
Maribel turned to look up into his face. “You’re not mad at me? For going away with that nice man. Miss Edith said . . .”
“Edith? Where is she?”
“In there. With the nice man.” Maribel pointed down the throat of the cave. “She said I should wait ‘til somebody comes. But I got sleepy.”
Jeff glared at the darkness over the threshold, then embraced his daughter again. “I’m just glad you’re okay. I was worried when I couldn’t find you.”