The Regulators - Stephen King [124]
'What did you think you were doing?' his father asks him. He was shouting but it wasn't really much of a scold even so, because he gave the boy a kiss practically between every word. 'Your mother is scared to death! Why did you do it? Why in God's name did you come in here?'
What he replied was the last real talking he did, and I remember it well. 'Colonel Henry and Major Pike told me to,' he said. 'They told me I could see the Ponderosa. In there.' He pointed at the crack running down the middle of the slide. 'But I couldn't. Ponderosa all gone.' Then he laid his head down on his father's shoulder and closed his eyes, like he was all tuckered out.
'Let's go back,' I said. 'I'll walk behind you and to your right, so I can shine the light on your footing. Don't linger, but don't run, either. And for Christ's sake try not to bump any of the jack-straws holding this place up.'
Once we actually had the boy, that groaning in the ground seemed louder than ever. I fancied I could even hear the timbers creaking. I'm not usually an imaginative sort, but it sounded to me like they were trying to talk. Telling us to get out while we still could.
I couldn't resist shining my light into that crack once before we went, though. When I bent down I could feel air rushing out, so it wasn't just a crack in the slide; there was some sort of rift on the other side of it. Maybe a cave. The air coming out was as hot as air coming out of a furnace grate, and it stank something fierce. One whiff and I held my breath so I wouldn't vomit. It was the old-campfire smell, but a thousand times heavier. I've racked my brains trying to think of how something that deep underground could smell so bad, and keep coming up empty. Fresh air is the only thing that makes things stink like that, and that means some sort of vent, but Deep Earth has been burrowing in these parts ever since 1957, and if there had been a vent big enough to manufacture a stench like that, surely it would've been found and either plugged or followed to see where it went.
The crack looked like a zigzag S or a lightning-bolt, and there didn't seem like there was anything much in it to see, just a thickness of rock — at least two feet, maybe three. But I did get the sense of space opening out on the other side, and there was that hot air whooshing out, too. I thought I maybe saw a bunch of red specks like embers dancing in there, but that must have been my imagination, because when I blinked, they were gone.
I turned back to Garin and told him to move.
'In a second, just give me a second,' he says. He'd taken the boy's little black cowboy boot out of his shirt and was sliding it on his foot. It was the tenderest thing. All you'd ever need to know about a father's love was in the way he did that. 'Okay,' he says when he had it right. 'Let's go.'
'Right,' I says. 'Just try to keep your footing.'
We went as quick as we could, but it still seemed to take forever. In the dreams I mentioned, I always see the little circle of my Penlite sliding over skulls. There weren't that many that I saw when we were actually in there, and some of those had fallen apart, but in my dreams it seems like there are thousands, wall to wall skulls sticking up round like eggs in a carton, and they are all grinning just like the little one was grinning when his Dad picked him up, and in their eyesockets I see little red flecks dancing around, like embers rising from a wildfire.
It was a pretty awful walk, all in all. I kept looking ahead for daylight, and for the longest time I didn't see it. Then, when I finally did (just a little tiny square I could have covered with the ball of my thumb at first), it seemed like the sound of the hornfels was louder