The Call - Michael Grant [43]
Grimluk said, “I feel like we just invented this new number twelve, and now we’re using it for everything.”
“Progress,” Drupe said doubtfully.
“And if we fail?” Grimluk asked.
“Then there may be another future for you,” Drupe said cautiously. “It would be a long, very long, but terribly lonely life.”
“What could I ever be but lonely?” Grimluk whispered.
“In the secret places of the earth, in the ancient habitations of the Most Ancient Ones, death comes but slowly.”
“I don’t understand,” Grimluk said.
“You would find such a place. And there you would live alone, cut off. You would be a sentinel. A lone watcher. You would live and wait and watch.”
“Watch for what?”
“For the possibility that the Pale Queen may rise again.”
Twenty-four
Mack woke too early. It was the high whine of the winch that penetrated his conscious mind.
He opened his eyes and saw…nothing.
“Wha…?” he said.
He was aware that he was still tied up. And aware that he was facedown. On something hard. That was moving.
In a downward direction.
In the dark.
“No,” he whispered.
“Be cool, now,” Stefan said. His voice was from somewhere very close. Mack could feel something that might be Stefan’s elbow jammed against his ear.
The truth hit him all at once. They were in the shaft. And dropping.
“Aaaahhhhh,” Mack moaned.
“Dude. Relax.”
“Aaaaaahhhhhh aaaaahhhhhh aaaaaahhhhh!”
See, the thing with phobias is that they aren’t just regular everyday fears. They aren’t even slightly more intense versions of regular fears. Phobias are like wild beasts that crouch, waiting inside your brain until something wakes them up. And once they are awake, they go crazy. Imagine a gorilla losing its mind inside a cage, beating on the bars until its paws are bloody, trying to bite through the metal until its teeth crack, slamming itself in sheer panic against walls that will break its bones.
That’s a full-blown, out-of-control phobia.
And of all Mack’s phobias, none was more like a crazed, penned-up gorilla than claustrophobia.
In school Mack had been required to read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” It was the story of a man walled up and left to die. Not a happy story for anyone, but for Mack it had been agony.
And now, he was to be walled up, buried alive. So he screamed and screamed as the bucket descended. Screamed at blank, invisible stone pressing in all around him.
He was wet with sweat and hoarse by the time the lift reached the bottom of the shaft. Karri and Jarrah had already managed to free themselves from their ropes using some of the objects lying around: a pickax, the sharp edge of an open can of sardines, and a rock shaped like a wedge of cheese. Cheddar. Not that that matters.
A small flashlight waved eerily in the dark and came to focus on Mack. He felt hands busily untying the knots of his ropes. His hands and feet fell free.
He had stopped screaming but only because now the screams themselves had become frightening to him.
“So, definitely claustrophobic,” Karri said with the unmistakable Aussie dryness of tone that Mack might have appreciated had he not been on the verge of vomiting.
Jarrah peered up the shaft. “No, I can’t see any stars. They’ve blocked it.”
“And the winch control is dead,” Karri said calmly. “But I should be able to find some lights.”
Mack saw the flashlight jerk here and there and finally settle on a bank of switches. A second later there was a click, the sound of a generator put-put-putting to life, and then glaring bright light.
Mack was still shaking from the effects of his panicky meltdown. The fear was far from gone. But at least now he had a distraction to occupy some part of his brain.
The four of them were at one end of a cave so large it was impossible to see the far end, even though a row of lights had been strung from the arched roof. It was as long as a football field and