Twilight Eyes (66 page)

I could do none of that until I was sure about the fourth goblin.

Crouching protectively over Rya, I faced out into the lightless tunnel,

cocked my head, and listened.

The mountain had grown quiet and seemed, at least temporarily, to be finished closing up its wounds. If portions of tunnel ceilings and walls were still falling back where we had come from, they were small failures that did not produce enough noise to reach us.

The darkness was deeper than that you see behind your closed eyelids. Smooth, featureless, unrelieved.

I entered into an unwanted dialogue with myself, pessimist confronting optimist:

—Is she dead?

—Don’t even
think
it.

—Do you hear her breathing?

—Christ, if she’s unconscious, her breathing would be shallow. She could be fine, just unconscious, breathing so shallowly that it can’t be heard. All right?
All right?

—Is she dead?

—Concentrate on the enemy, damn it.

If another goblin existed, it might come from any direction. With its talent for walking on walls, it had a big advantage. It could even drop on me from the ceiling, straight down on my head and shoulders.

—Is she dead?

—Shut up!

—Because if she’s dead, what does it matter whether you kill the fourth goblin? What does it matter if you ever get out of here?

—We’re
both
going to get out of here.

—If you’ve got to go home alone, what’s the point in going home at all? If this is her grave, then it might as well be yours too.

—Quiet. Listen, listen . . .

Silence.

The darkness was so perfect, so thick, so heavy that it seemed to have substance. I felt as if I could reach out and seize damp handsful of darkness, wring the blackness out of the air until light was able to shine through from somewhere.

As I listened for the soft click and scrape of demon talons on stone, I wondered what the goblins had been doing when we blundered into them. Maybe they were following our white arrows to see how we had entered their haven. Until now I hadn’t realized that our signposts were as handy for them as for us. Yes, of course, they had searched every inch of their haven more than once, and after concluding that we had escaped, they had probably turned their attention, in part, to learning
how
we had escaped. Maybe these searchers had traced our route all the way out of the mountain and were returning when we encountered them. Or perhaps they had only set out to follow that trail shortly before we came rushing along behind them. Although they had taken us by surprise, they appeared to have had just a few seconds of warning that we were approaching. With more time to prepare for us, they would have killed us both—or taken us captive.

—Is she dead?

—No.

—She’s so silent.

—Unconscious.

—So still.

—Shut up.

There. A scrape, a click.

I craned my neck, turned my head.

Nothing more.

Imagination?

I tried to remember how many cartridges were in the pistol’s clip. It held ten rounds when fully loaded. I’d used two on the goblin that I’d shot on Sunday in the tunnel with the checkerboard lighting. Two more on the one I’d shot here. Six left. That would be plenty. Maybe I wouldn’t kill the remaining enemy—if there was another one—with six shots, but that surely would be the most I’d have a chance to fire before the damn thing was all over me.

A soft slithering sound.

Straining my eyes was pointless. I strained them, anyway.

Blackness as deep as that in the bottom of God’s boot.

Silence.

But . . .
there
. Another click.

And an odd smell. The sour smell of goblin breath.

Where?

Overhead.

I fell onto my back, atop Rya, squeezed off three shots into the ceiling, heard one ricochet off stone, heard an inhuman scream, and did not have time to fire the final three rounds because the badly wounded goblin crashed to the floor beside me. Sensing me, it howled and lashed out, got one of its strangely jointed but monstrously strong arms around my head, pulled me against it, and sank its teeth into my shoulder. It probably thought it was going for my neck, for a quick kill, but the darkness and its own pain had disoriented it. As it tore its teeth free of me, taking some meat with it, I had just enough strength and presence of mind remaining to thrust the pistol under its chin, tight against the base of its throat, and pull off the last three shots in the pistol, blowing its brains out the top of its skull.

The dark tunnel began to spin.

I was going to pass out.

That was no good. There might be a fifth goblin. If I passed out, I might never wake up again.

And I had to tend to Rya. She was hurt. She needed me.

I shook my head.

I bit my tongue.

I took deep, cleansing breaths, and I squeezed my eyes shut very hard to make the tunnel stop spinning.

I said aloud, “I will
not
pass out.”

Then I passed out.

Though I’d not had the leisure to consult my watch at the precise moment that I’d fainted and therefore had to rely on instinct, I did not think I had been out cold for very long. A minute or two at most.

When I regained consciousness, I lay for a moment, listening for the dry-leaf-windblown scuttle of a goblin. Then I realized that even a minute in a faint would have been the end of me if another of the demonkind had been in the tunnel.

I crawled across the stone floor, making my way around the dead shape-changers, feeling blindly with both hands, searching for one of the flashlights but finding only a lot of vaguely warm blood.

A power failure in Hell is an especially nasty business, I thought crazily.

I almost laughed at that. But it would have been a strange shrill laugh, too strange, so I choked it down.

Then I remembered the candles and matches in one of my inner jacket pockets. I brought them forth with trembling hands.

The sputtering tongue of candle flame licked back the darkness, though not enough to allow me to examine Rya as closely as I needed to do. With the candle, however, I located both flashlights, popped the batteries out of them, and inserted fresh ones.

After blowing out the candle and pocketing it, I went to Rya and knelt beside her. I put the flashlights on the floor, aiming their bright beams so they crossed over her.

“Rya?”

She did not answer me.

“Please, Rya.”

Still. She lay very still.

The word
pale
had been coined for her condition.

Her face felt cold. Too cold.

I saw a just darkening bruise that covered the right half of her forehead and followed the curve of her temple and went all the way down past her cheekbone. Blood glistened at the corner of her mouth.

Weeping, I peeled back one of her eyelids, but I did not know what the hell I was looking for, so I tried to feel her breath with a hand against her nostrils, but my hand was shaking so badly that I could not tell if breath escaped her. Finally I did what I was loath to do: I took hold of one of her hands and lifted it, slipped two fingers under her wrist, feeling for her pulse, which I could not find, could not find, dear God, could not find. Then I realized that I could
see
her pulse, that it was beating weakly in her temples, a barely perceptible throb but beating, and when I carefully turned her head to one side, I saw the pulse in her throat as well. Alive. Maybe not by much. Maybe not for long. But alive.

With renewed hope I examined her, looking for wounds. Her ski suit was slashed, and the goblin’s claws had penetrated to her left hip, drawing some blood, though not much. I was afraid to check for the source of the blood at the corner of her lips, for it might be from internal bleeding; her mouth might be full of blood. But it wasn’t. Her lip was cut; nothing worse. In fact, except for the bruises on her forehead and face, she seemed unharmed.

“Rya?”

Nothing.

I had to get her out of the mines, aboveground, before another series of cave-ins began or before another party of goblins came looking for us—or before she died for want of medical treatment.

I switched one flashlight off and slipped it into the deep utility pocket in my pant leg, where I had previously kept the pistol. I would not be needing the weapon anymore, for if I was confronted by goblins again, I would surely be brought down before I could destroy all of them, regardless of how many guns I possessed.

Since she could not walk, I carried her. My right calf bore three gouge marks from a goblin’s claws. Five punctures in my sides—three on the left, two on the right—oozed blood. I was battered, skinned, host to a hundred aches and pains, but somehow I carried Rya.

We do not always gain strength and courage from adversity; sometimes we are destroyed by it. We do not always experience an adrenaline surge and superhuman powers in times of crisis, either, but it happens often enough to have become a part of our folklore.

In those subterranean corridors it happened to me. It wasn’t a sudden adrenaline flood of the sort that enables a husband to lift an entire wrecked automobile off his pinned wife as if hefting nothing more than a suitcase, not the
storm
of adrenaline that gives a mother the power to tear a locked door off its hinges and walk through a burning room to rescue her child without feeling the heat. Instead I guess it was something like a steady drip-drip-drip of adrenaline, an amazingly prolonged flow in precisely the amount that I required to keep going.

All things considered, when the human heart is fully explored and basic motivations understood, it is not the prospect of your own death that scares you most, that fills you to bursting with fear. Really, it’s not. Think about it. What frightens us more, what reduces us to blubbering terror, are the deaths of those we love. The prospect of your own death, while not welcome, can be borne, for there is no suffering and pain once death has come. But when you lose the ones you love, your suffering lives on until you descend into your own grave. Mothers, fathers, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, friends—they are taken from you all your life, and the pain of loss and loneliness that their passing leaves within you is a more profound suffering than the brief flare of pain and the fear of the unknown that accompanies your own death.

Fear of losing Rya drove me through those tunnels with greater determination than I would have possessed if I had been concerned only about my own survival. For the next few hours I ceased to be aware of pain, sore muscles, and exhaustion. Although my mind and heart blazed with emotions, my body was a cool machine, moving tirelessly forward, sometimes humming along in well-oiled precision, sometimes clanking and thumping and grinding forward, but always moving without complaint, without feeling. I carried her in my arms as I might have carried a small child, and her weight seemed less than that of the child’s doll. When I came to a vertical shaft, I wasted no time pondering how to raise her to the next level of the maze. I simply stripped off my ski jacket and hers; then, with a strength that would have tested a
real
machine, I tore those sturdy garments along all their tightly sewn seams, tore them even where they did not have seams, until I had reduced them to strips of tough, quilted fabric. Knotting those strips together, I fashioned a sling that fitted under her arms and through her crotch, plus a double-strand fourteen-foot-long towline looped at the upper end. As I climbed the shaft I hauled her after me. I ascended at a slant, my feet against the rungs on one side, my back against the opposite wall. The loop of the double towline was over my chest, and my arms were straight down, with one hand pulling on each of the lines to keep from taking all the weight of her on my breastbone. I was careful not to bump her head against the walls or against the corrupted iron rungs, gentling her along, easy, easy. That was a feat of strength, balance, and coordination that later seemed phenomenal but, at the time, was achieved with no thought of its difficulty.

We had taken seven hours to make the journey into the mines, but that had been when we were both fit. Going back out was certain to require a day or more, perhaps two days.

We had no food, but that would be okay. We could live a day or two without eating.

(I did not give a single thought to how my energy level would be sustained without food. My lack of concern did not arise from a conviction that my adrenaline-pumped body would not fail me. No, I simply was
unable
to think of such things, for my mind was churning with emotions—fear, love—and had no time for practicalities. The practicalities were being taken care of by the machine-body, which was programmed, an automaton, and which required no thinking to perform its duties.)