Stop it, stop it. She pressed the retract button and heard the hiss of the tape as it smoothly ran back in. She stood there, holding the tape, knowing she was afraid to feed it out again. What was the point?
No, no, that was stupid. She had to. She had no choice. She fed out the tape again, smoothly and quickly. But even as she worked it out to its maximum twenty-five feet, she knew in her gut it wouldn’t touch anything. Still, she crawled the distance, then stopped, looked. She was nowhere, surrounded by black; she was being pressed in by black. No, no, stop it.
She thought she’d crawled in a straight line, but it was obvious now that she hadn’t; it was the only explanation. She’d veered off to the left or right. But still, shouldn’t the tape measure hit a wall? Of course it should, but you’re not near a wall, are you? You’re not near anything at all.
Ruth began to move in a circle, keeping the measuring tape fully extended. No wall, nothing.
She was losing it, her brain was twisted up, gone squirrelly. At a wave of dizziness and nausea, she sat on the floor, barely breathing now. She felt cold, raw fear skitter through her, a deadly fear that made the hair on her arms stir. Her heart pounded, her mouth was dry.
And she thought, I’m in the middle of a void and there’s no way out because I’m trapped in a black hole larger than anything I can imagine.
That thought, fully blown and as clear as bright headlights in her brain, shook her to the core. Where had it come from? She couldn’t seem to draw a deep breath, couldn’t seem to focus her brain. This was ridiculous. She had to think her way out of this. There was an answer, there was always an answer. It was time to get her brain working again. All right then. She was in a cave chamber. She’d simply crawled in farther than she’d thought, the ridiculous chamber was much larger than on the map—
She heard the noise again, a soft, sibilant sound that seemed to be all around her, but there were no visual reference points, like a snake slithering through sand, a snake so heavy it made a dragging sound as it pulled itself along. It was a snake that was coming toward her but she couldn’t see it, couldn’t get out of the way, couldn’t hide. Maybe it was one of those South American boas, thick as a tree trunk, heavy and sinuous, probably twenty feet long, dragging itself toward her; it would wrap its huge body around her and squeeze—She jerked the compass out of her pocket and hurled it as far away from her as she could. She heard it thud lightly against the cave floor.
The sound stopped. Once again the silence was absolute.
She had to get a grip. Her imagination was having a hoedown.
Stop it, just stop it, you’re in a damned squiggly hole deep in the side of a mountain, nothing more than a maze.
Maybe now she was at the center of the maze—bad things could happen at the center of a maze, things you didn’t expect, things that could crush your head, smash it into pulp, things . . . She was lost in the silence, she would die here.
Ruth tried to concentrate on breathing slowly and deeply, drawing in the blessed fresh air, and that strange sweet smell, on cutting off the absurd images that wanted to crash into her brain to terrify her, but she couldn’t seem to. She couldn’t find anything solid, anything real, to latch on to. The fear danced through her. She yelled into the darkness, “Stop being like your father, stop it!” To her relief, the sound of her own voice calmed her. She managed to clamp down on the panic. All she had to do was follow the straight line of the tape measure. It was metal, it couldn’t turn into a circle, for heaven’s sake. She’d follow it and end up somewhere, because there had to be a somewhere. Her heart slowed its mad hammering, her breathing became smoother. She leaned down and spread the map on the floor, held the flashlight close.
The only crazy thing here was the damned lying map. After all, the arch wasn’t where the map showed it to be. The arch, that was it, she’d gone through the wrong arch. Maybe, just beyond where she’d stopped looking, she would have found the arch the map showed and crawled into the right chamber. Or maybe the map was a trap.
But the fresh air, where was it coming from?
Where was a damned wall?
Ruth felt her head begin to pound, felt saliva fill her dry mouth, felt a scream bursting from deep in her gut. She knew in that instant she was going to die. She stood up, weaved a bit, and listened for the noise. She wanted that noise. She would go toward it; there had to be something alive, and she wanted to find it. It wasn’t a huge serpent—no, that was ridiculous. Oh God, her head was going to explode. The pain nearly sent her to her knees. She grabbed her head with her hands. Her fingers sank into her head, into her brain, mixed with the gray matter, and it was sticky and pulsing, and she screamed. The screams didn’t stop, just kept spurting out of her, louder and louder, echoing back into her head, through her wet brains oozing between her fingers. It took all her strength to pull her fingers out of her head, but they felt wet and she frantically rubbed them on her jeans, trying to wipe them clean, but they wouldn’t come clean. She was crying, screams blocking her throat, then bursting out, so loud, filling the silence. Please, God, she didn’t want to die. She started to run, stumbling, falling, but she scrambled up again, didn’t care if she slammed into a wall. She wanted to hit a wall.