The black pool was black no longer, and in it must have lolled a dozen human heads. Dead eyes like boiled eggs sat in fish-nibbled skulls. Dark hair wafted over slack jaws and silver or gold hoops glinted in the pale rubbery ears of some of the women.
I stared in disbelief at Malkin for a moment. He wore a very strange, intense expression. Not triumph, exactly, but something like it. I had the feeling he was as curious about us as we were about him. He wanted to see and feel what we did, to live through our shock and grief by observing our reactions.
“I would grieve with thee, but grief is not in my mix. It would not work, just as spreading sugar upon a stone would not make it taste sweet.”
I drew my saber and slashed at him in one smooth motion. He seemed only mildly surprised and bounded away to splash down upon another head. As I stumbled into the pool after him, I found it was less than a foot deep. I slashed and cut the air where he had just been. He leapt about like a maddened frog and long before I could catch up he had bounded to the spot where we had first entered the cavern.
“My trophies are not of those I’ve slain myself, but merely collected. Elfkin are neither your friends nor you foes, children. But beware the Hag.”
Monika squeezed off a shot at him, missing by a foot or two. The booming report was deafening in the enclosed space. He waggled a finger at her, then leapt up the chimney we’d come down in a single great bound. He was gone.
I looked at the heads in the black pool. I wondered how they had gotten here, and how we had avoided their fate. Perhaps it was as the Doctor said: perhaps we were the last and the strongest, most resistant ones. I thought of gathering the heads and taking them back up for a proper burial and a service. Instead, I mumbled a few words over the dead, and prayed they would not be forgotten, even though I knew they would be.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Monika in a husky voice.
We worked our way deeper into the cave and an odd feeling came over me. It was as if something pressed against my face and hands, and entire body. I leaned into it, like a stiff wind. But there was no wind, there was nothing you could see. Still the barrier was there.
“I feel something, Gannon,” said Monika behind me. She was frightened.
The tunnel narrowed as it went upward. Soon we were reduced to crawling. Side passages went off in every direction, but I kept heading in the direction of a faint puff of fresh air I could feel. It was cold moist air, and I could tell it was from the surface.
Malkin’s voice came to us again, from behind us somewhere in the dark. There was no way to tell where he was, he could have been in any of these side passages.
“You have not melted. You are very young and very strong,” he said.
I crawled forward, reaching back my hand and half-dragging Monika after me. The barrier I felt but could not see slipped away and I managed another ten feet of progress before I felt it again, stronger this time. It was as if a huge plastic ball of water rolled up against me, crushing me softly down.
I pressed against it. Monika was a dead weight behind me, but I clung to her hand. I kept moving forward, one inch at a time. I knew now what we faced. This must be the shiftline. This was what it felt like to cross one.
“You intrigue me,” came Malkin’s voice again. “I shall let you pass.”
Suddenly the barrier was gone. I fell forward and my chin dug into loose debris at the bottom of the tunnel.
Monika cried quietly, but she needed no further urging. Grim-faced and barely speaking, we found our way to the far end of the cavern. Sometime later, tired and panting, we wriggled our way out into the fresh breeze again, like two fugitives from the grave.
Twenty-Five
We made it to the surface and beat the gray dust out of our hair. The sky had turned cloudy and the morning sunshine was gone. There should have been plenty of hours before sunset still, I was sure of it. We’d only been down in that cave for maybe two hours, probably less. But still, my feeling from the skies around us was that it was nearing dusk.
“I didn’t like it,” said Monika suddenly.
I looked at her, “What?”
“I didn’t like the cave. You asked me before.”
Her face was so pitiful then. She looked young and lost. She was so far from home. I put my arm around her and kissed her dusty forehead. “Well, I was glad to have you with me,” I told her.
We headed up the hill toward the Reverend John Thomas’ cabin. I hoped, that after all this, he would be there. It could still be a very bad day if we found him torn apart, or if he had shifted. I also wondered vaguely what the Captain was up to. I thought he would make it, and would probably beat us up here.
We made it to the cabin without further mishap. We stood in the cover of the trees, looking out over the bald hilltop, listening. Nothing seemed wrong. Nothing stirred at all. There were a few crows on the eaves, no doubt attracted by the makeshift graveyard with crosses made of wooden sticks. I counted thirteen graves there, two more than the last time I’d been up here. It seemed like a lot of the wandering, lost ones were attracted to this spot.
“What do we wait for?” whispered Monika.
“I don’t see anyone, but the Captain might be waiting and watching too.”
After twenty minutes of watching a quiet scene, I finally decided the hell with it, and walked out into the open, approaching the cabin. The crows lifted off only when I was in spitting distance and lazily flapped away, cawing at me reproachfully. I tapped at the door, which stood ajar. There was no response, so I entered.
There were no bodies or other horrors inside. I breathed out a sigh of relief. There were, however, two notes. Each was held down by a stone on the desktop. The first one I read was from the Captain. It said:
I waited a full day. I doubt you have survived, but in case, I’m writing this. I think he’s right. I’m going to investigate the strange phenomenon he mentions in the note. Possibly, I’ll even find him there.
— Captain Ryerson
I stared at the note for a bit and chewed my lip. One thing about it kept beating in my head, pulsating in my brain: I waited a full day. I knew just by looking around that he had sat right here. I counted sixteen cigarettes butts lined up on the desktop, each smoked down to the yellow filter. The Preacher never smoked. I didn’t know how it had happened, but we had spent a long time down in that cave. Had we been under some kind of spell down there? Had we been inside a shiftline, where perhaps, time ran differently? I didn’t know, but the implications made me feel queasy.
“That thing,” said Monika, reading the note carefully. “That thing in the cave did something. It was a skritek. An elf.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes, they make you think a day was an hour. Or that a century was a year. My grandparents believed in them. Perhaps there were some still around, when they were children.”
“Yes,” I said, realizing with a mild shock that I now believed something I’d thought impossible only this morning. Why I would still place anything in that rarified category of impossible after what I had seen over these past weeks defied logic, of course. But one must cling to physical laws as one clings to sanity itself.