Jude examined the room. It looked as if no one had been there for a long time. He opened the drawers, checked the shelves, looked in the trash bins. It had been stripped of almost everything but the rudimentary furnishings. In one corner was a pile of rubbish that included empty cardboard boxes, a small sterilizing drum missing an electrical cord, used batteries and several pairs of latex gloves. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it fully furnished and operating, tried to bring it all back, but the images remained just out of reach.
Then he heard a noise.
It came from the tunnel he had used, a small scraping sound — on second thought, it could be distant footsteps. He doused the flashlight, and when the cavern was plunged into total darkness, he saw a pinprick of light down the tunnel. It seemed to glow, stronger and then weaker, as if the wick of a lantern was being manipulated, but then he realized that it was the beam of a flashlight moving around the tunnel. He felt a tingling in his scalp, a twist in his gut. He moved to one side of the room and felt his way with his hands: there was the smooth surface of a table, then emptiness, then the rocky wall, until he came to a large cabinet. He snuck behind it and waited, still watching that little dot of light.
The sounds got louder. He realized that his pursuer, whoever he was, was negotiating the same narrow passage he had gone through. He had a split-second thought: shouldn't he run up the tunnel and catch him just as he was about to emerge? At a moment of vulnerability? But he stayed frozen where he was, in his hiding place, and he could hear grunts of exertion so close that he knew it was probably too late for that.
The light was brighter now and moving around, and Jude knew that the person was on his feet again. He flattened himself against the wall, and stood without moving, scarcely breathing, as the seconds ticked off. Then suddenly the light burst into the room like an explosion, almost blinding him before it flashed about wildly. It pointed away toward the other side, and Jude could see the round metallic edge of the flashlight and the sharp beam opening out in a V, and the dim outline of a hand clasping it.
And at that moment the person moved over to the wall on Jude's side and began slowly circling the room, holding the light before him almost like a protective shield. Jude held his breath as he came closer, until he was standing right next to him. Then Jude lunged. He grabbed him with both arms, knocking the flashlight to the ground, where it scuttled across the rock, the beam dancing wildly on the ceiling. A short sharp cry of surprise, a struggle. Jude felt an arm strike him under the chin, but he held on and dragged his pursuer down. He landed on top of him and grabbed an arm and twisted it behind with all his might until he thought it might break. The person froze. Then spoke.
"Jude, is that you?"
The voice sounded tiny, scared.
Jude reached with his other hand and found his flashlight. He turned it on, held it at arm's length and shined it down.
"Tizzie!" He almost screamed her name. "What the hell are you doing here?"
Chapter 21
Jude let Tizzie up. She checked for bruises, bending over to roll up her left pant leg, revealing a cut on her knee. Two trails of blood trickled down toward her ankle, which she wiped with her hand, rolling the pant leg down again.
She still hadn't answered his question. He asked another one, simpler.
"You all right?"
She nodded yes, then added: "Frightened more than anything else. You scared me to death."
"Sorry. I didn't know it was you."
"I hope not."
Typical, he thought, that he should end up being the one to apologize.
"You followed me?" he asked, now with a touch of hardness to his voice. He didn't know how she was going to play it out.
"Yes. At least to Jerome."
"That was your car back there — the one you rented? The blue Camaro?"
"Yes."
"And then you followed me in here?"
She hesitated. "Not exactly," she said. "I knew you were coming here."
"And you knew the way — right?"
"Right"
"Why come after me?"
"I thought you might… get hurt. I thought they might be here. Or come after you."
"I see."
He looked around the bare room, almost absentmindedly, then realized he was looking for something to sit on. It was going to be for a long while.
"The time has come for a good long talk," he said.
"Do you want to go to our special place?"
The question rocked him. He had not heard or thought about that for a quarter of a century, but when she said the words, it came back in a flash — a cave that they used to frequent, hardly bigger than a closet. They'd liked going there because the entrance was small, not made for adults.
"You remember how to get there?"
She slid her hand in his — her fingers felt small and cold, and he realized she was frightened — and led him to a back passageway he hadn't seen earlier. The tunnel was narrow, so he dropped her hand and followed behind, shining his flashlight at her feet while she aimed hers farther ahead. She squeezed past a support beam and moved on, surprisingly quickly, so that he felt the need to hurry. He brushed the beam with his shoulder. It shifted a little, sending down a small shower of rocks and dirt.
She shined the flashlight back, and he could see her face in his beam, a worried look.
"I'll be careful," he said quietly.
"Almost there," she replied.
And they were. She ducked under an overhanging rock and he did the same, and they entered the small chamber that was instantly recognizable. There were shelves in the rock, and they sat on them, low down like adults in a kindergarten class. One wall was streaked with multicolored rivulets, and he remembered the candles burning there and dripping tears of wax while the two of them sat in these very seats.
Tizzie looked Jude in the eye — the first time in a long time, he thought, that she didn't seem to turn away.
"It's tough to know where to begin," she said.
"Try the beginning," he said tartly.
"I've only started to remember a lot of things lately — and there's still a lot I can't recall. But now I expect I remember more than you do. Some of my first memories are right here, in this room, with you. We used to come here a lot and play and talk. I remember the coziness of it and how we felt safe — or at least I did — safe and secure in the knowledge that not far away in the chamber just outside, adults were working, doing things, whatever it was they did — experiments in the lab…"
"Did you remember all that when we met? Did you know who I was then?"
"No. Not at all. Please, Jude. I know how you must feel — how suspicious all this seems. I swear I'm on your side. But let me tell you the whole story. If you keep interrupting, we'll never get anywhere."
"Okay. Go ahead."
"We lived right outside, in that building that used to house the mine offices. Don't you remember? I remembered it as soon as I saw it. Things are flooding back to me. When we lived here, the mine had been closed down for years. I guess somehow the group got the title to it. When we were little, we weren't told anything. I have a vague memory that we knew somehow that our parents were scientists, that they were doing great things, and that it was all very secret because the rest of the world wouldn't understand. They would try to stop it — whatever it was.
"My parents were involved. So were yours. And there were others — I don't know how many and I can't remember them. I can't really remember any of the important details, though God knows I've been trying this past week — ever since I went home. I always thought I'd just been too young to remember the years before White Fish Bay, but that wasn't it. I'd simply blocked them out. Until this week.