Dr. Burrows thought of chopsticks, many gigantic chopsticks, tearing his body apart, rending him limb from limb.
"Shoo! Go away! Shoo! Be off with you!" he screamed over his shoulder, the same words he'd often used to scare off the neighbor's cat from the back lawn in Highfield. His hands were sopping with perspiration and cramping horribly. What could he do? He glanced up to make sure there wasn't anything he could grab on to and hoist himself higher. As he did so, across the ceiling of the temple he saw a fluxing collage of serrated arachnid body parts, massed and overlapping silhouettes thrown up by the flickering light of the fire on the altar below. They were close now. It was the stuff of horror movies.
"Help!" he exhaled in sheer desperation.
He felt his left hand begin to slither off the ledge as the dust on top of it absorbed his sweat and turned to a slippery paste. He slid his fingers to a fresh position, simultaneously trying to heave himself a little farther up.
Something began to happen.
A low rumble shook his whole body.
Holy smokes holy smokes holy smokes!
He looked around frantically, his light swinging freely from his neck.
"Oh no! What now!" he screamed, an even deeper wave of dread sweeping through him.
He had the strangest sensation that he was moving. But his hands, now almost completely numb, still retained some measure of grip, and his foot was still securely anchored. No, he wasn't sliding down the panel to the ravenous arachnids below.
The juddering stopped, and he again attempted to hoist himself farther up the panel.
Immediately the rumbling resumed, more violently this time.
His first thought was that it was an underground tremor, some type of subterranean earthquake. But it was he who was moving, not his surroundings.
The middle panel of the triptych, which he was hanging on to for dear life, was slowly tipping over. Under his weight, it was swinging forward, into the wall of the temple.
"Help me!" he wailed.
Everything became a blur. He immediately assumed that the panel had broken loose from its fixings and was falling. What he couldn't see was that the panel was pivoting halfway down its length, just below his foothold.
And like it or not, he was going with it.
The panel continued to rotate, with him still clinging doggedly on until he found himself horizontal, effectively lying on top of it. It rotated to its limit and came to a sudden halt with a jaw-rattling thud of stone against stone.
Dr. Burrows was catapulted forward, haphazardly flipping head over heels through the darkness. The flight ended almost as soon as it began. He landed flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him. Gulping and coughing, he tried to catch his breath as his hands clutched at the soft sand beneath him. He'd been lucky — it had cushioned his fall.
There was a loud thud behind him and a spray of something wet across his face, accompanied by a sharp hissing sound.
"What the—" Dr. Burrows heaved himself into a sitting position and turned to see what was there, fully expecting the arachnid hordes to be bearing down on him. But his spectacles had been knocked off in the fall, and without them he couldn't discern anything at all in the near-darkness. He felt around in the sand until he found them, and quickly replaced them on his head.
He heard a scrabbling by his side and whipped his head in its direction. It was a jointed leg from one of the dust mites, as big as a horse's, severed at what was probably its equivalent of a shoulder. He watched as it suddenly snapped open and shut again, with such force that it flipped itself over in the sand. It was moving as though it had a mind of its own — and for all Dr. Burrows knew, it probably did.
He backed away from the limb and got to his feet, swaying groggily and still wheezing and coughing as his breathing slowly returned to normal. At any moment the arachnids would swarm over him.
But there was no sign of the giant dust mites, or, indeed, the interior of the temple; just an unbroken silence, and darkness, and plain stone walls.
It was as though he'd been transported to a completely different place.
"Now where am I?" he muttered, resting his hands on his legs. After a few moment he began to feel better and straightened up to inspect his new surroundings. Within several seconds he'd pieced it all together. Realizing how incredibly fortunate he'd been, he began to babble.
"Oh, thank you, thank you." He joined his hands together in a brief prayer, weeping tears of gratitude.
Another spray of warm fluid filled the air. It reeked, a bitter stench that made him choke. He cast about to see where it was coming from.
Six feet or so above the ground, the shiny and mangled remains of a dust mite protruded from the wall. It had been trapped by the swinging panel as it slammed shut again. A bluish transparent fluid oozed and pumped from several sheared-off tubes, some the diameter of drainpipes, in the midst of the smashed wreckage. As he looked on, another shower of fluid spurted out, making him jump back in alarm. It was as though the valves of some bizarre machine were opening to release the pressure and flush themselves out.
It struck him that the decapitated head of the dust mite might not be very far away, most likely with an active set of mandibles, if the severed limb that was still snapping open and shut was anything to go by.
He wasn't about to stick around to find out.
"You silly old fool, you nearly cashed in your chips back there," he told himself as he stumbled hurriedly away from the scene. He mopped his face with his sleeve and, still a little dazed, saw that sweeping down through an arched corridor were wide steps… many steps, which he now began to follow, still muttering incoherent prayers of gratitude.
41
Sarah was sitting dejectedly on the beach, her knees drawn up to her chin as she hugged her legs. She'd abandoned any attempt at concealing herself: The lantern was on full beam and, with Bartleby at her side, the two of them gazed at the rolling waves as they broke on the shore.
She'd done as the Limiters ordered and followed the shoreline, but she'd have been kidding herself if she thought it was anything more than a tactic to get her out of the way. There was no possible reason for her to be here.
As they'd been walking, she'd noted that the spring had gone from Bartleby's step now that there was no scent trail to sniff out. She couldn't remain angry with him for the way he'd behaved; there was something touching about the tenacity he'd shown in tracking his master. She kept reminding herself that this Hunter had been Cal's companion — the truth was that the animal had spent more time with her son than she had, and she was Cal's mother!
With a rush of affection, she'd watched Bartleby's huge shoulder blades rising and falling hypnotically, first one side, then the other, as he slunk along. They stuck out at the best of times under his loose-fitting and hairless skin, but they were even more prominent now with his head hanging low. The aimless way he was carrying himself spoke volumes — he looked exactly the way she felt.
And now, as they sat on the beach, she couldn't contain her frustration.
"Wild-goose chase," she grumbled to the cat. He was scratching his ear with a paw. "Ever tried goose?" she asked, and he stopped, his hind leg still poised in the air, regarding her with his huge shining eyes. "Oh, I don't know what I'm saying!" she admitted, and lay back against the white sand as Bartleby resumed his scratching. "Or doing," she confessed to the stone roof far above, invisible in the darkness.