He walked past Grey and stepped through the ragged hole in the wall. Grey lingered for a long moment, feeling an icy chill on his spine and a fiery burn in his gut. Then he, too, turned, stepped through the destroyed wall and began his journey into darkness.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Grey caught up with Looks Away, who had walked fifty feet along the slime-covered corridor. The Sioux stood without a lantern, awash in shadows. Grey carried the only remaining light and as before it cast capering shadows onto the walls.
“This is madness,” said Looks Away without preamble.
“This is not normal,” agreed Grey with a tone that was ten tons lighter than the weight on his heart.
“What are we doing? After all, we don’t even know if this tunnel will lead us to Deray.”
Grey looked at him. “Sure we do. Where else would it lead?”
“Bedlam?”
“Where?”
“Oh, never mind,” groused Looks Away. Then he cut a sharp look at Grey. “What was all that about Mircalla? You dodged me before when I asked.”
Grey did not want to tell him because it would open the door to more questions and to things he never wanted to share with anyone. However that kind of privacy no longer seemed to matter. He began walking and Looks Away fell into step beside him. Their path sloped down and curved away into unknown territory.
As they walked, Grey told him about what had happened at the brothel and his dream about that tarot card reading by Mircalla.
“The martyr card?” mused Looks Away. “Hardly what I’d call an apt description.”
“Why not? I’m down here risking my ass, aren’t I?”
“Sure but—.”
“And don’t think it’s just because you hired me. Give me a little more credit than that.”
“I do, actually,” said Looks Away, looking amused. “And I wasn’t casting aspersions on your valor, old chap. It’s just that martyrs sacrifice themselves and you’re a fighter, Grey. I believe you’d fight them all the way to the bitter end.”
Grey thought about it, and shrugged. “Guess I don’t have a whole lot of ‘give up’ in me. If I did you’d be down here alone.”
Looks Away nodded, his face serious. “I wonder if maybe I should be down here alone. After all this isn’t really your fight.”
“You’re paying me to make it my fight.”
“Oh, come now, old chap, I hardly think my offer of employment extends to fighting demons in an underground anteroom to Hell itself.”
“I still took your coin.”
“It was a token. You can give it back and no hard feelings.”
Grey dug into his pocket and realized that it was the one that had been torn by the dinosaur’s claw. “I guess I can’t.”
“But—”
“So I guess you’re stuck with me.”
The Sioux shook his head. “I don’t know which of us is more daft.”
“You’re doing this for love and I’m doing it for—.”
“Love?” asked Looks Away. “No, don’t try and look so innocent. Do you think I did not hear you two downstairs?”
Grey said nothing and he felt his face burn.
“Jenny’s a fine and decent woman,” he said.
“Yes,” Looks Away agreed, “she is. As was Veronica Chesterfield. They are the ladies of our heroic little tale and I suppose that makes us the knights errant.”
“Oh, please.”
“Who knows… maybe we’ll even get to slay a dragon.”
Grey shook his head. “You need to shut the fuck up.”
They kept going, deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
They walked for miles down there in the dark.
For the first hour the tunnel was featureless except for the dripping slime on the walls and strange footprints that fit no creature they had ever seen. Several times Grey caught Looks Away pausing to study those walls.
“You seeing something I should know about?”
The Sioux nodded, looking worried.
“There are certain kinds of worms that secrete acids through their skin that allow them to essentially burn their way through the soil. Mind you, we’re talking about tiny creatures. Two or three inches long.”
“So?” began Grey, then he stopped and reappraised the slick, unnaturally smooth walls. “Oh… shit.”
“Yes,” agreed Looks Away.
“Is that even possible? Something this big?”
Looks Away turned and gave him a withering stare. “After all that’s happened you can ask that question with a straight face?”
Grey sighed. “I guess I keep hoping we’ve seen the worst of what Deray has up his sleeve.”
“I wish,” muttered the Sioux.
They pressed on, and soon turned a sharper corner and found themselves in a vast cavern. They stood gaping in wonder at the things they saw.
The cavern stretched out in all directions and gnarled pillars of sandstone rose to support a roof that was lost in the darkness far above. They did not need the lantern to see because there was a light that seemed to come from blue fungi that clung to all the walls. The ground was broken, but there were pathways formed of natural sand runoff. Water dripped from the points of massive spears of quartz crystal that had been thrust outward from the walls by some titanic force. They looked too old to have been the result of the Great Quake, and Grey decided that this cavern, unlike the slimy tunnel they had just traversed, had been here for maybe a million years and only opened by the quake. Fantastic mushrooms sprouted from the ground to their right and rose in staggered ranks to cover one entire wall. The stems were as big around as oak trees and the caps of even the smallest would have covered an entire stagecoach. Bats clustered beneath the hoods, wriggling in their leathery thousands, and below them, insects writhed through the piles of guano. The stink of ammonia rolled at them in waves, but to their left was a different sight, and it brought with it a different and more powerful smell. The landscape sloped downward toward the rock-strewn shore of an underground sea. Waves broke upon the shore and cast broken shells and bizarre bones onto the sand. With each breaking wave a fresh stench of spoiled fish assaulted them.
The sea stretched on for miles, the wave tops glimmering with more of the eerie blue luminescence, but in the misty distance it faded into a uniform blackness.
Looks Away softly murmured some lines of poetry, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree, where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.”
Grey gave him a sharp look. “Wait, you know this place?”
“No, old boy,” said Looks Away, his eyes alight with wonder, “that is an old poem. Coleridge, and it was written about a mythical place far, far away. It’s just that it seems to fit, does it not?”
“I guess… but I wish it had stayed in a poem.”
Looks Away walked over to the closest rock pillar and bent to peer at the glowing fungi. He sniffed at it. “Grey… come here and see this.”
With great reluctance, Grey joined him. The fungi looked like tiny cabbage leaves, but it rippled like sea anemones.
“This is so strange,” said Looks Away. “This is some form of panellus stipticus—what most people call ‘bitter oyster.’ But bioluminescent fungi emit a green light. This is blue.”
“And it’s a pretty damn familiar blue,” said Grey.
“Indeed it is. The fungi must pick up trace amounts of ghost rock. Not enough to react to the flame of our lanterns, but enough to change the color of the bioluminescent glow.”
“That’s not much of a comfort. And, damn, but it’s hot as hell in here,” said Grey. “Could there be a volcano down here?”