Bed of Nails (34 page)

Tangaroa

Like a baseball runner who is caught in a hotbox between second and third, Zinc had to make up his mind which way to go, and either way, there was a hindering obstacle in his path.

To get to Petra, who might already be dead, would require a time-consuming climb down the razor-sharp wall of the sinkhole pit. Then he would somehow have to hoist her back up. To abandon Petra, if she was alive, meant she would drown in the rising waters of a well full of eels.

To get to Yvette, who might already be dead if her second cry for help was her final act in life, would require a life-or-death scramble back the way he’d come, guided by the precarious beam of a single flashlight bulb. Slip or trip, and it would be game over.

In the end, however, it was no contest. Since the death of Alex, the Mountie had been eating himself up with grief, guilt, and depression, and all of a sudden, from out of nowhere, he had a new lease on happiness in Yvette. If he were to lose this manna from heaven because he didn’t give rescuing Yvette his all, there was no question in his mind that he would fall apart.

Was Petra a killer who ran afoul of her partner? Or had she merely provided Bret with a false alibi? In either case, Petra’s index of guilt was dirtier than Yvette’s, so her rescue was going to have to wait.

Time and tide wait for no man?

Well, they’d have to.

The journey back through the tract of grottos to the beach beside the lagoon was less harrowing than it might have been, thanks to those fix-taking glances over his shoulder on the venture in, plus the trail of shoeprints impressed by his own feet and still preserved in the carpet of crushed coral and dripstone mud on the floor of the cave. The naked bulb held up until Zinc exited through the mouth in the
makatea
and staggered onto the sand, shielding his eyes from the dazzling glare of the sun.

“Yvette!” he yelled.

No reply.

“Bret!” he yelled.

No reply.

Not even a laugh.

“Wes!” he yelled.

No reply.

Zinc was alone on the beach.

The first thing he saw once his eyes adjusted was some thrashing out in the bloody water of the lagoon. A shiver of sharks, having swum in from beyond the reef, were tearing a man to bits. Miles Yeager was no longer stretched out on the beach of the
motu,
nor was there any sign out there of Yvette or Wes. Had they tried to haul the wounded man in for better first aid, relying on the fact that as a general rule throughout the islands, reef sharks stay clear of the shallows within lagoons? But every rule has its exceptions, and this was one of them. Was the meat out there just Miles Yeager’s? Or had Wes joined him on the menu?

Zinc noted that only
one
set of fresh prints dotted the sand.

The Mountie studied this trail that ran parallel to his emergence from the lagoon. Obviously Yvette. The feet of a woman, for sure. She had followed his route across the water from the
motu
and waded ashore on the same sandbar as he had done. Passing the headless body on the crest of the bloody tongue, Yvette had tracked Zinc’s prints to the gear piled in the shade near the
marae.
As she was rummaging in her bag for something—probably shoes—Bret had exited stealthily from the other Eye of Tangaroa. Catching Yvette by surprise, he had struggled with her and subdued her—God, no, did he kill her?—then he must have picked her up and carried her off, for only a single set of shoeprints vanished back into the left Eye of Tangaroa.

Reading the marks in the sand, the Mountie pictured what had happened in his mind’s eye. That Bret was the attacker was apparent from the evidence. Not only had Zinc heard him laugh from back at the mouth of the cave, but these shoeprints were the same as the ones that he had tracked into the right Eye of Tangaroa. So somewhere in the bowels of the
makatea,
the caves beyond the pair of wormholes that burrowed in from the lagoon must interconnect.

What was that?

He cocked an ear.

Was that Yvette he heard?

Nothing …

Nothing …

There it was again!

It
was
Yvette!

Crying out in pain!

Frantically, the inspector tore into the pile of gear, heaving things aside until he found another flashlight. With no time to hunt for a backup torch, he cut across Marae O Rongo to reach the other Eye, skirting past the idol of Tangaroa. A moment later, Zinc was swallowed up by the black hole of the alternative route back in.

Damned if you don’t.

And damned if you do.

This cave was unlike the cave next door. Where that network was a festoon of caverns strung in a straight line like a highway—or low way—to hell, this complex was a sponge-work resembling Swiss cheese, with a selection of mouths, tubes, and interconnecting cavities. Choosing a route to reach Yvette was like playing the lottery: chances were the one he picked would hit a dead end.

This entrance zone was another cavern fanged with stalactites and stalagmites the size of a giant’s teeth. No tongue of flowstone stretched across the rough floor—instead, walking through it was akin to a cross-country hike with hillocks to climb and boulders to scramble over. At the rear, there wasn’t a single throat beyond a uvula. Instead, the Mountie was faced with three similar holes into the dark unknown.

Eenie, meenie, miney, moe.

Catch a psycho by the toe.

If he hollers …

Another cry from Yvette!

But which hole did it come from?

This cave seemed to be an echo chamber.

Another desperate scream.

No time to dither.

Figuring that the central tunnel had
two
flanks that might interconnect with the parallel passageways, the Mountie chose the middle entry hole.

With the flashlight in one hand and the speargun in the other, Zinc had to mind his step within the confines of the tube. He had learned a painful lesson on his first quest into the razor-blade realm of the deadly
makatea,
and the edge of his palm still bled from the multiple lacerations of his brush against the coral. Ideally, a skilled caver will maintain three points of contact with the encasing rock—hands, feet, stomach, buttocks, back, arms, legs, or head—until he secures a new hold as a fourth. In the
makatea
of the Cooks, that was wishful thinking, so with only two points—his feet—that Zinc could count on, he had to plan ahead by shining the beam two or three steps in advance before testing the placement of each foot and applying his full weight. As with the sinkhole that had claimed Petra, a thin crust of calcite might overlay a deep hollow where the underlying dirt and gravel had washed away, leaving a false floor above the real floor below.

A pit in which jutting rocks might lurk like punji stakes.

One misstep, and it would all be over.

So despite the precious time that it wasted, Zinc had to watch each footfall.

To add to his growing unease, this tunnel was gradually shrinking in diameter. Since entering, he hadn’t seen a sign of human traffic: blood spots or shoeprints on the hard rock floor. Nor had he heard another wail out of Yvette. What loomed before him at the outer limits of the probing beam was a void as dark and as silent as a tomb, and with each step Zinc took toward that constricted nothingness, the ring of razors closed tighter and tighter on him. What had begun as a normal walk had turned into a stoop; the Mountie had to duck-walk to keep from cracking his head. He suddenly realized that he had lost his hat—so absorbed was he in the mounting crisis that he had failed to notice when it had slipped off. A bare head and a low ceiling combined to add yet another peril. Strike the
makatea
and he would scalp himself.

A rush of panic seized him.

It welled up into his throat like a bubble of black bile, and quelling the jitters took a titanic effort.

Bad was sinking to worse.

One of our most deeply rooted fears is the dread of being buried alive. Fear of walls closing in on you can snap the human mind. For those who share the abject terror of claustrophobia, the thought of being encased in stone until the end of consciousness foments a level of panic that rattles every bone. It was cramped in here already, and getting smaller and smaller. Zinc was down on his haunches, and he would soon be on his hands and his knees. And it wasn’t just the tunnel that had him in a squeeze, for now the flashlight beam was dimming too, the failing batteries causing the light to flicker.

Smaller and smaller waned the pool of dying light.

Within a couple of minutes, Zinc would be in the dark.

The tunnel Zinc was in pinched out to a dead end. Well, not quite dead—there was a straitjacket crawlway down near the floor, a cubbyhole barely large enough for a man to slither in, and definitely cramped enough for him to get stuck. It was probably a runoff spout from whenever this tunnel was last full of water, and maybe it connected with a parallel passage.

No way was Zinc going in.

The thought of it made him shudder.

He was already turning back when he heard the scream.

Yvette’s screech echoed in through the crawlway at Zinc’s feet, a shriek that loudly informed him that she was in torment on the other side of the right-hand wall. He stifled the urge to call out to her, for fear of prompting Bret to finish her off. Dropping onto his knees, he bent over to shine the beam into the claustrophobic hole as—
wink … wink … wink
—the flashlight died.

It seemed to the Mountie as if time had stopped. Plunged into this cocoon of darkness, what options did he have? Abandon Yvette and claw his way back through a tunnel of razors as a blind man, or squeeze into this straitjacket of a black hole and pray the elder gods would let him through?

Another scream.

“Nooooo …”

Echoing in and away.

“Nooooo …

“Nooooo …

“Nooooo …”

Into the hellhole Zinc squirmed.

At six-foot-two and 190 pounds—his broad-shouldered physique muscled from all that hard labor on the family farm through his developing years, then kept up by regular workouts during his adulthood—Zinc Chandler was too big a man for such a Hobbit hole. With no suitable pocket to store it in, he had to relinquish the flashlight, even though he knew it might be needed later as a club. Only by twisting himself into a Houdini-like contortion was he able to crawl into the bone-hugging hole. So narrow was the sphincter that seemed to tighten around his body that there was no space for his arms except stretched out in front of his head. With one hand gripping the speargun while the other scrabbled at the rock to pull him forward, the Mountie gradually wormed into the crawlway by wriggling his torso and pushing with the toes of his runners. His belly bore the brunt of the squirm along the shaft, and it was scratched by the unforgiving nubs of coral that had been dulled down from razor sharpness by flooding in the past.

Then Zinc got stuck.

The spookiest part of spelunking is the nasty squeeze, and this was a nasty squeeze that caught the Mountie around his chest just back of his shoulder bones. Instinctively, Zinc knew now was not the time to panic, because the only way out of this bind was to be as pliable as could be, and a tense, muscle-bunched body won’t “pour” through a nasty hole. Luckily, fear lubricated his skin with sweat. Luckier still, the constriction was cinched around his lungs, so by exhaling all the breath from his diaphragm, Zinc was able to shrink his chest size by an inch. Luckiest, when his free hand felt around for an effective grip, he found he could lock his fingers around the rim of the crawlway. So, shoving the speargun out into the passage ahead, he gripped both hands around the hole’s outer edge and, pulling as hard as he could, yanked himself to freedom.

To freedom
and
light
.

The tunnel into which Zinc emerged from the grim crawl of death appeared to deliver him into the fire and smoke of eternal damnation. At the far end of this passage, bronze flickers lit up whatever lurked beyond. The glow burnished the ceiling from the anus of this black bowel to the point where Zinc crouched panting and shivering in the clammy chill of the dark. What absorbed the color was moon milk gunked on the rock overhead, a whitish, putty-like flowstone that forms on an organic matrix. Smoke from whatever was burning churned toward the Mountie as the tunnel sucked it away from the bronze cavern like a chimney flue.