Because when she reached the second number, reversed the dial, and felt the telltale click at the third, she pulled on the handle — and was nearly pushed from the ledge as the door swung. She grabbed at a handle as the stone slipped from under her feet.
She was hanging five feet out in the air over the sacred groin fifty feet below.
The first thing she tried, after closing her eyes and mumbling a few laws of motion, was to swing the door to. When she swung out, however, the door swung closed; and when she swung in, the door swung open. After a while she just hung. She gave small thanks that she had dried her hands. When her arms began to ache, she wished that she hadn’t, because then it would be over by now. She went over what she knew about taking judo falls. After closing her eyes, she perfunctorily attempted to reconstruct what she could of an ancient poem, about a young lady who had ended in a similar position, with the refrain “Curfew must not ring tonight….”
Then the door swung closed, and someone grabbed her around the waist. She didn’t open her eyes but felt her body pressed against the tilting stone. Her arms dropped, tingling, to her sides. The ligaments flamed with pain. Then pain dulled to throbbing, and she opened her eyes. “How the hell did you get down here?” she asked Snake. Snake helped her stagger through the open door. She stopped to rub her arms. “How did he know about the ladder?”
They stood at the bottom of the shaft. The ladder beside them rose into the darkness.
He looked at her with a puzzled expression.
“What is it?” she asked. “Oh, I’ll be able to climb up there, never you worry. Hey, can you speak?”
Snake shook his head.
“Oh,” she said. Something started at the edge of her mind again, something unpleasant. Snake had started up the ladder, which he had come down so quickly a minute ago. She glanced out the door, saw that the Temple was empty, pulled the door to, and followed.
They ascended into darkness. Time somehow got lost, and she was not sure if she had been climbing for ten minutes or two or twenty. Once she reached for a rung and her hand fell on nothing. The shock in the rhythm started her heart beating. Her arms were beginning to ache again, just slightly. She reached up for the next rung and found it in its proper place. Then the next. And then again the next.
She started counting steps again, and when seventy-four, seventy-five, and seventy-six dropped below her, there was another missing rung. She reached above it, but there was none. She ran her hand up the edge of the ladder and found that it suddenly curved, depressingly enough, into the wall. “Hey, you!” she whispered in the darkness.
Something touched her waist. “Gnnnnnggggg,” she said. “Don’t do that.” It touched her on the leg, took hold of her ankle, and pulled. “Watch out,” she said.
It pulled again. She raised her foot, and it was tugged sideways a good half meter and set on solid flooring. Then a hand (her foot was not released) took her arm, and another held her waist, and tugged. She stiffened for one instant before she remembered the number of limbs her companion had. She stepped off the ladder, sideways into the dark, afraid to put her other foot down lest she go headlong into the seventy-five-foot-plus shaft.
Holding her arm now, he led her along the tunnel. We should be going through the shoulder, she figured, remembering the plan.
They reached a steep incline. Now down the upper arm, she recalled. The slope, without visual orientation, made her a little dizzy. She put her hand out and ran her fingers along the wall. That helped some.
“I feel like Euridice,” she said aloud.
You…funny…an echoing sounded in her skull.
“Hey,” she said. “What was that?” But the voice was silent. The wall turned abruptly and the floor leveled out. They were in a section of the passage now that corresponded roughly to the statue’s radial artery. At the wrist, there was a light. They mounted a stairway, came out a trapdoor, and found themselves high in the Temple. Below them the great hall spread, vast, deep, and empty. Beside them, the stems of the bronze wheat stalks rose up through the fist on which they were standing and spired another fifty feet before breaking into clusters of grain. Beyond the dark, gargantuan chest, in the statue’s other hand, the giant scythe leaned into shadow.
“Look,” she said. “You follow me now.” She started back along the top of the forearm and climbed over the rippling biceps. They reached the shoulder and crossed the hollow above the collarbone until they stood just below the scooping shell of the ear.
“You still have the string?” she asked him.
Snake handed it to her.
“I guess my bag is heavy enough.” She took the paper bag she had stuffed into her belt, tied one end of the string around the neck. Then, holding the other, she heaved the cord up and over the ear. She got the other end of the string, knotted it as high as she could reach, and gave it a tug.
“I hope this works,” she said. “I had it all figured out yesterday. The tensile strength of this stuff is about two hundred and fifty pounds, which ought to do for you and me.” She planted her foot on the swell of the neck tendon, and in seven leaps she made it to the lobe of the ear. She swung around using the frontal wing as a pivot. Crouching in the trumpet, she looked down at Snake. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.”
Snake joined her a moment later.
The ear was hollow too. It led back into a cylindrical chamber that went up through the head of the god. The architect who had designed the statue had conveniently left the god’s lid flipped. They climbed the ladder at the side of the passage and emerged amid the tangle of pipes representing hair. Where the forehead began to slope dangerously forward, they could see the foreshortened nose and the brow of the statue’s middle eye above that. There wasn’t much of anything after that for the next hundred feet until the base of the altar. “Now you really can be some help,” she told him. “Hold on to my wrist and let me down. Slowly now. I’ll get the jewel.”
They grabbed wrists, and Snake’s other three hands, as well as the joints of his knees, locked around the base of five pipes that sprouted around them.
Slowly she slid forward until her free hand slipped on the stone and she dropped the length of their two arms and swung just above the statue’s nose. The eye opened in front of her. The lid arched above her, and the white of the eye on either side of the ebony iris shone faintly in the half darkness. At this distance, all the features of the statue lost their recognizable human character, and she was staring into concaved darkness. At the center of the iris, in a small hollow, sitting on the top of a metal support, was the jewel.
She reached her free hand toward it as she swung.
Somewhere a gong sounded. Light flooded over her. Looking up, she saw white sockets of light shining down into her own eyes. Panicking, she almost released Snake’s wrist. But a voice in her head (hers or someone else’s, she couldn’t tell) rang out:
Hold…on…damn…it…
She grabbed the jewel. The metal shaft in which the jewel had sat was not steady, and tilted as her hand came away. The tilting must have set off some clockwork mechanism, because the great lid above was slowly lowering over the ivory and ebony eye. She swung again at the end of the rope of bone and flesh; half blinded by the lights above her, she looked over her shoulder, down into the Temple. She heard singing, the beginning of a processional hymn.