The mounds became steadily larger, more tightly packed, and the hollows between them grew shallower. Inevitably, after ten or fifteen or twenty minutes, I reached the end of the line-a solid blockage sloping upward from floor to ceiling.
Not as much oxygen here, the air still clogged with particles of dust; the burning sensation was back in my chest, and the feeling of giddiness had returned to make my thoughts sluggish-but that helped to keep the panic at bay. I struck a new match and held it up. Most of the ceiling had collapsed here. Not even a chink of daylight showed through.
Think, remember. How far had I been from the entrance when the cave-in forced me off my feet? Less than ten yards maybe, and I had crawled another two or three. How far had I come from that place where I had lain? Difficult to judge, but it might have been as much as fifteen feet. That left… what? A minimum of five feet to the outside? Five feet of compressed earth and rock and all I had to dig with was my hands and as soon as I started to do that the rest of the ceiling might give way No. I'm going to get out of here.
I am going to get out of here.
I clenched the matchbook between my teeth and pulled myself up the slope on knees and hooked fingers. Earth slid away beneath me, a dislodged rock thumped down against my thigh and brought a stinging slash of pain. When one of my hands touched the edge of a timber, I anchored my body and managed to get a match free and flaming. Near the top, now, the ceiling was a foot over my head, scarred by a deep trough. The timber was edged at an angle into the trough, half-buried in the rubble, and on top of it was a huge oblong of broken limestone.
I eased away from there, laterally to my right, and used another match-not many left now, have to ration them. Just rock and earth here, no shattered supports within a three-foot radius of what looked to be the sealed juncture of ceiling and debris. Dig at this spot, then-hurry! Air running out, time running out…
I scraped at the earth, dug rocks loose and let them slide down past my body. Dust misted around me, and the dizziness got worse, and my thoughts seemed to break up into disjointed fragments; I could feel myself slipping back again into that timeless emptiness, conscious of little but the movement of my hands and the overwhelming need to get free.
Depression opening up, widening into a kind of tunnel-tunnel within a tunnel. Use a match. No air for a match. And my hands digging, digging, body wiggling forward, if the ceiling is going to collapse, let it be now or let me get out, shifting earth, rocks thumping, can't breathe, oh God please don't let me black out Light.
I heaved a rock out of the way and there was a blinding dusty ray of it two feet beyond my head.
The illusion of timelessness vanished in a flood of wild relief, each of my senses heightened, I heard myself begin whimpering like a child just starting to awaken from a nightmare. My hands tore at the earth in a kind of controlled frenzy, and the light grew larger, larger, I could smell clean air, I could breathe, and my head came out into the air and the light, I wedged my shoulders free, and then I lunged and scrabbled the rest of my body through the opening and down the outside wall of the slide, felt it shift and grumble under my skidding weight, and lost my balance and rolled over twice amid a clattering of rock and finally came up on my hands and knees at the edge of the slope.
Inside the mine there was a low-pitched rumbling; dust spewed out through the hole I had made, cut off again as the hole disappeared under a cascade of rock. The rumbling went on for ten seconds-and it was quiet again, I was wrapped in silence and heat and light and sweet fresh air.
A little awed, I thought: I did it, I got out.
I knelt there with the sun hot on my back, breath rasping in my throat. Then I pulled back on my knees, saw the torn and filthy fronts of my shirt and trousers, a thin cut on my left forearm matted with dirt and dried blood, the broken-nailed, bruised fingers on both hands. Reaction set in; tremors shook my body, left me weak and nauseated. The ordeal in the mine shaft seemed to recede in my memory, as if it were a surreal dream, as if it had happened only within the spaces in my mind.
What if he's still out here somewhere?
The thought came with alarming suddenness, cementing reality. I pulled my head around and pawed at the sweat blurring my eyes, got them focused on my surroundings. But there was nobody in sight; the flat and the crumbling outbuildings were still shrouded in heavy stillness, my car gleamed with bright reflections where I had parked it.
Gone, long gone.
Who, damn it? Who?
Anger seeped into me, a good sharp purging fury that enabled me to move, to function. I got to my feet, swaying, but I was going to be able to walk all right, I would not fall down again. I went down the slope, feeding on the rage, using it to pull my thoughts into logical patterns. The sunlight faded, disappeared altogether for a moment as I crossed the flat in a stumbling run; the clouds I had seen massing above the high peaks had started to flow westward.
I dragged the car door open, slid onto the sun-heated Naugahyde. And sat there fidgeting, going over it, going over it, while I stared sightlessly through the windshield. It began to come together, as I had known inside the mine it would-slowly at first and then rapidly, all of it clicking into place like bits of colored tile in a mosaic.
I knew who he was then.
Oh God yes, I Knew who he was.
The back of my neck prickled; urgency made me reach out immediately to twist the key in the ignition. Into The Pines to call Cloudman? No, it had to be the camp, I had to know if he was there now. And if he was, I had to get Harry to help me put him under citizen's arrest. Not because it had become a personal thing, I could not let myself think that way; because he had killed two men and almost made me number three, and he was capable of anything at any minute-any damned thing at all. There was just no time to waste taking myself out of it and letting the authorities handle him.
I jammed the gear lever into drive, not looking at myself in the rear-view mirror, because I did not want to see what I looked like just yet, and spun the car into a turn and took it bouncing down the wagon trail to the county road.
Eighteen
The need for urgency made me drive too fast, and my arms began to ache from fighting the wheel in and out of turns. I did not have much strength left. Far back in my mind was the thought that once I stopped functioning on tension, all the little hurts and the weakened condition of my lungs might lead to a serious collapse; but I held it away, kept my attention hard on the road and on what lay ahead.
When I came finally out of the trees on the last long incline, to where I had a clear look at the gravel circle, I saw that all the cars were parked within it- all of them. There was something else drawn up there too, off on one side: a covered U-Haul trailer. So that's how he planned to get the Daghestan out, I thought. Wait until the time was right, make sure there was nobody around, and then carry it from its hiding place to the U-Haul…
Somebody was walking along the beach toward the pier-Harry, it looked like-and he broke into a trot as soon as he saw me. I brought the car skidding into the circle, jerked on the emergency brake, and swung out before it quit rocking. Harry came running up; he stopped abruptly when he got a good look at me. His eyes widened into an incredulous stare.
“Good God,” he said, “what happened to you?”
“Never mind that now. Where's Jerrold?”
“But you look-”
“Come on, Harry, where the hell is Jerrold?”
“I don't know. At his cabin, maybe. He just came back twenty minutes ago with that U-Haul trailer, and I've been on edge ever since; he looked in pretty bad shape-”
“He's in bad shape, all right,” I said grimly. “He's killed two people in the past three days.”