Descent Into The Dark (© Biswapriya Purkayastha)
Page 2 He’d said nothing for a long moment, and then, slowly,
reluctantly, he’d nodded. "Good." She’d sat down and looked across the table at him,
anger draining away and sorrow creeping in. "That still doesn’t solve our
problem," she’d said at last. "We still have to find a way to stop the Change,
at least for the present." Instead of control, he’d been going the opposite way, she
thought as she looked for a convenient spot to fix pitons in the rock before
they descended the chimney. He had begun Changing unpredictably, whenever
stressed, and this was becoming a major source of worry to her. He’d eventually
obtain control, she was sure, when his surging hormones settled. But until then
the only thing she could do was find ways to defeat the Change, even if it took
effort, or danger. She didn’t hide the truth from herself: what they were
attempting was dangerous, and in normal circumstances she’d have called it
insanely so. But, of course, these weren’t normal circumstances, and in her own
mind she thought it akin to an emergency. There was the very real possibility that someone had
detected them, for instance. Her instincts screamed at her to drop everything
and run, to relocate to some far off town at the other end of the country. But
of course that wasn’t a solution. In the current economic climate she couldn’t
ever depend on picking up a job elsewhere, not to speak of the dangers of
Changing in a place she didn’t know and couldn’t predict. And then there was
the Boy. Sometimes, to herself, always late at night, she did resent
him. She resented the fact that she needed him, to keep off the loneliness, to
satisfy her maternal instincts, or for other, deeper subconscious urges she
didn’t care to think about. She resented the increasing worry he put her
through. But, above all, she knew that she needed him, and would not, could
not, let him come to harm. Before starting the descent, she silently checked the rope
attachment to his harness belt, and then hers. She had caved before, though her
experience was rather less than she’d let on to the Boy, and she thought the piton
was secured well enough. She began to pay out the tough nylon rope. "I’ll go down first," she said. "When I’m at the bottom,
I’ll light the way for you to come down. Wait here." The chimney was narrow; not so narrow that it was a squeeze
to get down, but narrow enough that she cold brace her shoulders and feet
easily on either side and get down without difficulty. She only had to drop the
last bit of the way, hardly two metres, and landed lightly, taking up the
impact on her bent knees. When she looked up, she could just see the pale blob
of his face. "Come down," she called. "Press your back against one side
and your feet against the other, and you’ll be fine." As he worked his way down the chimney, tiny pieces of
friable rock heralding his descent, she took a quick look around in the light
of her helmet lamp. The chimney had brought her to a roughly circular chamber,
the floor of which was covered with spurs and humps of rock. On the far side of
the chamber were two openings, one of which was very narrow and started a
little way off the floor, and the other rather larger and going downwards. The Boy landed beside her in a heap of limbs. "Whoof!" "Are you hurt?" She reached out to help him to his feet, but
he was already scrambling up. "No, I’m all right. How do we get up again?" "That." She pointed up at the dangling rope, and then turned
towards the larger of the two openings, the one headed down into Stygian
blackness. "Let’s go down," she said.
The
idea of spending the full moon night deep underground to see whether it slowed
down the Change wasn’t new to her. She’d thought of it first several years ago,
and it was because she’d been toying around with the idea that she’d joined a
caving club and acquired some desultory experience underground. Not that she
actually liked caves; she felt vaguely claustrophobic in them, closed
in, trapped, as though she could feel the thousands of tons of rock overhead.
Each time she’d gone down, she’d told herself that it didn’t really matter,
because she would never have to do this for real. [ Continue to page 3 ] |