What Time Devours (26 page)

“There are six miles of tunnels,” said the guide, “mostly on the same level, though some have not been reopened since the last war.”

It was, Thomas thought, something between an underground town and a great pale mine. That some parts were closed suggested structural instability, but he decided not to think about that. That was why the train made sense for tourists, he thought. It kept them contained and made the trip fun—slightly comic, even—like they were on some Disneyland ride. Without it, the great network of passages could quickly get daunting, even scary, and that was before anyone started using phrases like
structural instability
.

He was still grinning at his own insight when, without warning, the train stopped and all the lights went out.

CHAPTER 50

The panic took a few moments to blossom. For a second everyone sat there, polite tourists still, as the guide brayed calming suggestions into her dead microphone, waiting for something to happen. But when nothing did, when the darkness continued, and the silence—untouched by all the humming electronics no one had noticed till they disappeared—deepened, things got quickly out of hand.

“What’s happening?” shouted someone.

“Is this supposed to be funny?”

“Put the lights back on. I can’t sit here in the dark!”

“Why are there no emergency lamps?”

“Who touched me?”

Then they were moving, though they couldn’t see where they were going, spilling off the train as if afraid it might lurch suddenly into wild motion and kill them all. Indeed, with all the movement and feverish talking, and the guide’s shrill pleas for restraint, Thomas wasn’t sure how he knew that at least one person had left the train and moved quickly away. He sensed it, a movement that was unlike all the chaos around them: purposeful, deliberate. He thought he heard measured footsteps receding to his right, brisk, confident strides. Someone who knew where he was going.

Thomas slid out of his seat, arms spread against the darkness, and began to follow those receding footsteps, fumbling in his pocket for his flashlight. He was almost into the perpendicular tunnel when there was a flare of yellow light back at the train. Someone had struck a match. As the shadows leaped, the guide’s voice rang out.

“Stay on the train, please! Sir? Sir!”

He kept walking, snapping the flashlight on and breaking into a padding run, his ears straining for sounds of whoever it was who had left the group first. Someone saw his light and called after him, “Over here!” as if they had been at sea for weeks, waiting for rescue. He made a hard left to get out of sight and picked up the pace.

He didn’t know where he was going, and once out of sight of the train he stopped, trying to hone his senses. He shut his eyes, held his breath, and listened.

There were three levels of sound. First, and most obvious, was the garbled panic of the tourists back the way he had come. They were no more than a hundred yards or so away, but the caves bounced and distorted their indignant bluster so that it seemed to drift at him, ghostlike, from all sides. Second, lower but at least as insistent, was the throbbing of his own heart. He had to reach for the third sound, stretching out with his mind as if only imagining it would allow him to hear, but there it was: brisk footfalls. He rotated, eyes still shut, tracking the sound until he felt he had its bearing, and began to walk.

He was breathing again, but his mind was holding on to the footfalls so that the other sounds faded away, screened out by his concentration. The footsteps were hard and rang slightly on the stone, not with the
clack
of a woman’s high heel, but with the solid
thud
of hard leather soles, and something else, another sound he couldn’t place. A man, he thought, still walking, who knows where he’s going. He tried to identify the other sound, and thought it was a thin and high-pitched metallic clink that punctuated each step.

Remember that sound?
he thought.

He did, and the memory made him pick up the pace.

The flashlight was inadequate, its beam yellowish and hazy, and trying to keep up with the footsteps was making Thomas reckless. If there was a rack of bottles in the center of the tunnel, instead of in the alcoves to the side, he might run right into it before he saw it. He slowed for a second, caught the insistent stride of his quarry, and sped up again.

Each length of passage was virtually identical to the one before it, and as he moved, the limited reach of the flashlight repeated the same shapes in the pale stone arches above, the same dark alcoves and tunnel mouths to the sides. Thomas felt like he was burrowing deep into the hill, and realized that his jaws were clamped. He was also starting to sweat. Neither was from exertion or anticipation of what might happen if he ran into the man he was pursuing. It was the place itself that was starting to get to him: the tunnels, the darkness, the colossal weight of stone overhead. With each step he took away from the parts the tourists saw, the ceilings seemed to get lower, the limestone more cracked and irregular. He was running now with his head dipped, ducking still farther as the rock kicked down and in.

Keep breathing
, he told himself.

He sucked in the air, and it felt dank in his throat and lungs. The ache in his shoulder was starting to spread again. He could smell the stone that crowded in on him from all sides.

... structural instability
, he recalled.

The flashlight flickered, and he shook it, still running. It came back on full, but Thomas felt a mounting dread. If he lost the light and the power wasn’t reconnected, how long would it take him to blunder out to the elevators? If they got the tourists out and there were no voices to guide him back, he could be down in this antique labyrinth for days, weeks . . .

The footsteps seemed to have faded, but quite suddenly they grew louder, as if their owner had rounded a corner somewhere. Thomas hesitated, sure now that the rhythmic pounding of the footfalls was counterpointed by a tiny, shrill ringing like a bell.

He thought back to when he had heard that sound last time, and the memory slowed him for a second. For a moment he was back in a different darkness, on the porch in Evanston, listening to those footsteps down the side of the house, as someone crept into his yard . . .

No chance of that. And almost immediately he remembered the side buckles on the shoes of the American in the suit, the man who had claimed to be a winemaker but who talked like a studio executive.

Not for the first time on this trip, Thomas felt manipulated and abused, and he suddenly wanted to find this man in his fancy shoes and pay him back for their encounter on Sycamore Street.

The thought drove away his rising discomfort, and he made another turn toward the sound, running as quietly as he could, trying to match the other man’s strides so that their footfalls came together.

But then there was something else: another set of footfalls from over to his right. Thomas stopped and spun around. For a second he thought he had imagined it, but then, in between the jangling steps of the winemaker, he heard them again. They were cautious, stealthy.

Thomas felt his skin go cold, and the hairs on his arms bristled.

Someone else was down there with them in the dark. Someone new who didn’t want to be heard.

Thomas started to walk again, faster than ever now, trying to fasten again on those distant, jangling footfalls. He made a left, then a right, then went straight for another hundred yards, and then he heard something different and stopped, shutting off the flashlight. He felt his eyes widening, in spite of the darkness, as he tried to home in on the new sound.

Running feet. A lot of them. Coming from behind him.

CHAPTER 51

There were voices now. Not the whining and demanding voices of tourists, but terse and guttural shouts. They seemed to be coming down several passages at once, calling to each other in what Thomas took to be French, though he couldn’t catch the words in the vaulted and echoing passages. The running sounded purposeful, organized, like soldiers.

They’re hunting
, he thought.

It was a controlled and rapid sweep of the tunnels, and it sounded both urgent and brutal.

Ignoring the swelling pain in his shoulder and chest, Thomas ran. He was used to running in his lumbering buffalo fashion, but he was no forty-yard sprinter even when he was healthy. The exertion was getting to him, and even in the clammy air of the cellars he was starting to feel hot and breathless. He looked behind him, saw the strobing white splash of a halogen flashlight as it bounced through some archway, and forced himself to go faster. He could no longer hear the man he was pursuing, or those other, stealthy footfalls, but that hardly seemed important. This was no rescue party rounding up stray tourists.

He played his light off to the sides, looking for somewhere to hide, but saw only tunnels.

The voices were getting louder.

He made a right, still swinging his flashlight’s sorry glow over the walls, then stuttered to a halt. What he had taken to be a tunnel was actually a large open area filled with stacked wooden casks, the walls hung with ancient iron implements. He had no time to think. He decided.

Thomas ducked among the barrels, forcing his way through to the center, and squatted, listening. His heart was beating so hard and fast that his bullet wound ached in time with it, and his breathing was ragged and hungry. He forced himself to breathe as deeply as he could, resting his forehead against the metal-strapped timber of the barrels, trying to hear past the panic in the blood pulsing through his shoulder.

He could still hear them. They sounded like they were everywhere, their harsh voices calling from the dark mouth of every tunnel. And then there was one set of footsteps closer than the rest and slower.

It wasn’t the man in the buckled shoes. It could have been the other, the careful walker, but Thomas doubted it. This man had a slow, cautious step, but his shoes dragged slightly on the ground as he moved. It was one of the hunters, and he had a hunch that Thomas was here.

Thomas clicked the flashlight off and kept very still.

The footsteps entered the storage area from the tunnel Thomas had come down, and then they stopped. A light flared, a hard-edged white beam flashed over the tops of the casks, and then there was a new sound: a metallic
ting
, as if one of those metal implements had been taken down from the wall. It was probably something like a poker, but it scraped the stone and rang like a sword.

The man was stalking him now, his feet soundless as he crept around the perimeter. Thomas didn’t breathe. His fingers were splayed against the stone floor for balance. A trickle of sweat ran into his right eye and he blinked it away. He could hear the other man moving: not his footsteps, but the shifting of the fabric he wore. He was very close now.

There was a moment of total silence, and then, quite suddenly, he was moving away again.

Thomas stayed where he was for a full minute, counting the seconds silently to himself as he listened. Then the man was gone.

Cautiously, waking each muscle one at a time, Thomas began to move. First he straightened his neck, which had been bowed, feeling the cool air on the sweaty patch where his forehead had been pressed to the cask. Then he flexed his fingers and, when they felt suitably braced against the ground, began to straighten his elbows till his back was stiff. He could see over the barrels now. There was no light. No sign of movement. He flexed the muscles in his thighs and started to stand up. He thought the sounds of pursuit had faded some.

He looked around, risking the flashlight, trying to gauge which way he had come, which way he might still be able to get out. He was no longer sure of his bearings. He knew which tunnel had brought him to the barrels, but which direction he needed to take after that, he wasn’t sure.

He crept out of his hiding place and took a couple of silent steps up the tunnel and then froze. Someone was there. He had stepped out from a side passage, and he was carrying a flashlight in one hand and a pokerlike implement in the other.

It took a moment for Thomas to realize that the flashlight was not directed at him. It was facing the opposite end of the passage, as was the man holding it.

With excruciating slowness, Thomas stepped out of his shoes. Eyes still on the back of the man with the light, he took a step backward. Then another. The third and fourth were faster, lighter. Then he was around the corner and running again, feeling the cold stone through the soles of his socks, sure he had made it away unheard.

He kept moving, pleased with his stealth, wondering if he might go back to hunting the man in the suit.

Only when you’re sure they’ve given up looking for you,
he thought.

Back near the casks, he heard a cough, then voices and noisy footfalls. Then, unmistakably, two words bellowed like a hunting cry:

They had found his shoes.

CHAPTER 52

Thomas ran another twenty yards flat out, turned right, dashed for the next turn, threw himself around the corner, and slammed into something solid, something that shuddered and crashed in an explosion of glass and liquid.

Thomas fell hard among the shattered bottles. For a second he lay there, pain flaring in his wounded shoulder and in the knee that had made the most contact with the wooden rack, just long enough to catch the yeasty scent of the foaming champagne. Then he heard the renewed shouts of his pursuers and knew they were coming.

He seized the flashlight he had dropped and shook it, but it was lifeless. He began to clamber over the ruined bottle rack, and another bottle fell and burst. Thomas pushed through the wreckage, but then the walls leaped and shrank with the sudden blue-white of a large flashlight ahead. He turned back the way he had come, but someone was there too, a big man in overalls with a heavy mustache and a heavier pickax. There was a shifting in the shadows behind him—at least two more of them—and then they started coming toward him.