Hand me that light up here.
What’s the trouble?
Shit.
What is it?
Ballard!
Ballard’s name faded in a diminishing series of shunted echoes down the hole where he had gone.
What is it, Tommy?
That little son of a bitch.
Where is he?
He’s by god gone.
Well let’s get after him.
I cain’t get through the hole.
Well kiss my ass.
Who’s the smallest?
Ed is, I reckon.
Come up here, Ed.
They boosted the next man up and he tried to wedge his way into the hole but he would not fit.
Can you see his light or anything?
Shit no, not a goddamn thing.
Somebody go get Jimmy. He can get through here.
They looked about at one another assembled there in the pale and sparring beams of their torches.
Well shit.
You thinkin what I am?
I sure as hell am. Does anybody remember how we came?
Oh fuck.
We better stick together.
You reckon there’s another entrance to this hole he’s in?
I don’t know. You reckon we ought to leave somebody to watch here?
We might never find em again.
There’s a lot of truth in that.
We could leave a light just around the corner here where it would look like somebody was a waitin.
Well.
Ballard!
Little son of a bitch.
Fuck that. Let’s go.
Who wants to lead the way?
I think I can find it.
Well go ahead.
Goddamn if that little bastard ain’t played us for a bunch of fools.
I guess he played em the way he seen em. I cain’t wait to tell these boys outside what’s happened.
Maybe we better odd man out to see who gets the fun of tellin em.
Watch your all’s head.
You know what we’ve done don’t ye?
Yeah. I know what we’ve done. We’ve rescued the little fucker from jail and turned him loose where he can murder folks again. That’s what we’ve done.
That’s exactly right.
We’ll get him.
He may of got us. You remember this here?
I don’t remember none of it. I’m just follerin the man in front of me.
FOR THREE DAYS BALLARD explored the cave he’d entered in an attempt to find another exit. He thought it was a week and was amazed at how the batteries in the flashlight kept. He fell into the custom of napping and waking and going on again. He could find nothing but stone to sleep upon and his naps were brief.
Toward the end he would tap the flashlight against his leg to warm the dull orange glow of it. He took the batteries out and put them in again the hind one fore. Once he heard voices somewhere behind him and once he thought he saw a light. He made his way toward it in darkness lest it be the lights of his enemies but he found nothing. He knelt and drank from a dripping pool. He rested, drank again. He watched in the bore of his flashbeam tiny translucent fish whose bones in shadow through their frail mica sheathing traversed the shallow stonefloored pool. When he rose the water swung in his wasted paunch.
He scrabbled like a rat up a long slick mudslide and entered a long room filled with bones. Ballard circled this ancient ossuary kicking at the ruins. The brown and pitted armatures of bison, elk. A jaguar’s skull whose one remaining eyetooth he pried out and secured in the bib pocket of his overalls. That same day he came to a sheer drop and when he tried his failing beam it fell down a damp wall to terminate in nothingness and night. He found a stone and dropped it over the edge. It fell silently. Fell. In silence. Ballard had already turned to reach for another to drop when he heard far below the tiny spungg of the stone in water like a pebble down a well.
In the end he came to a small room with a thin shaft of actual daylight leaning in from the ceiling. It occurred to him only now that he might have passed other apertures to the upper world in the nighttime and not known it. He put his hand up into the crevice. He pried. He scratched at the dirt.
When he woke it was dark. He felt around and came up with the flashlight and pushed the button. A pale red wire lit within the bulb and slowly died. Ballard lay listening in the dark but the only sound he heard was his heart.
In the morning when the light in the fissure dimly marked him out this drowsing captive looked so inculpate in the fastness of his hollow stone you might have said he was half right who thought himself so grievous a case against the gods.
He worked all day, scratching at the hole with a piece of stone or with his bare hand. He’d sleep and work and sleep again. Or sort among the dusty relics of a nest seeking a whole hickory nut among the bone-hard hulls with their volute channels cleanly unmeated by woodmice, teeth precise and curved as sailmakers needles. He could find none, nor was he hungry. He slept again.
In the night he heard hounds and called to them but the enormous echo of his voice in the cavern filled him with fear and he would not call again. He heard the mice scurry in the dark. Perhaps they’d nest in his skull, spawn their tiny bald and mewling whelps in the lobed caverns where his brains had been. His bones polished clean as eggshells, centipedes sleeping in their marrowed flutes, his ribs curling slender and whitely like a bone flower in the dark stone bowl. He’d cause to wish and he did wish for some brute midwife to spald him from his rocky keep.
In the morning there was a spiderweb between himself and the sky. He seized a clawful of rubble and hurled it up the shaft. And again, until the web was gone every trace. He pulled himself up and began to dig.
He’d wake with his head against the wall and the stone tool still in his hand and dig again. Late that day he loosed a thin slab of stone and let it clatter down into the hole. In wrenching it loose he’d laid his finger open and he sat with it in his mouth, the earth’s musty taste mingled with the ironrust tincture of blood. Dry dirt sifted down from the hole. He could see treelimbs against the sky.
Climbing up again he set to work, hammering now at actual stone, stratified layers of it that flaked off, Ballard using the larger chunks to pry and dig with. Before dark fell he raised his head up through the earth and looked out.
The first thing he saw was a cow. It was about a hundred feet away in a field beyond the wood in which he’d risen and beyond the cow was a barn and beyond that a house. He watched the house for signs of life but saw none. He lowered himself back into his hole and rested.
It was hours past dark and a black night when he finally emerged from the earth. Down at the house there were lights. He cast about among the stars for some kind of guidance but the heavens wore a different look that Ballard did not trust. He crossed through the woods and climbed a fence and crossed a field until he came to a road. It was no place he’d ever stood in before. Seeing that uphill it led toward the mountains he took the other way and soon was hobbling along weak but able, the night being as fine as you could wish and a faint bloom of honeysuckle already on the air. At this time he had not eaten for five days.
He’d not gone far before a churchbus hove into sight behind him. Ballard scuttled into the roadside weeds and crouched there watching. The bus clattered past. It was all lit up and the faces within passed each in their pane of glass, each in profile. At the last seat in the rear a small boy was looking out the window, his nose puttied against the glass. There was nothing out there to see but he was looking anyway. As he went by he looked at Ballard and Ballard looked back. Then the bus rounded the curve and clattered from sight. Ballard climbed into the road and went on. He was trying to fix in his mind where he’d seen the boy when it came to him that the boy looked like himself. This gave him the fidgets and though he tried to shake the image of the face in the glass it would not go.