She hesitated as the distant sound of a howl carried through the arid air, followed by barking.
Bartleby let out a small meow, and his ears pricked up like radar dishes as he spun his whole body around to where the noises were coming from.
"They've got the stalkers in here," Elliott said. "Come on."
They kept on the move, filled with a sense of urgency, but Will and the others found they weren't as panicky as they might have been. For one thing, the soldiers were far enough off that it didn't feel as if they posed an immediate threat. But more significantly, the fight with the Limiter had had a profound effect on each of them. Elliott's words of reassurance to Cal back at the Sharps resonated within all three boys; it was as though they had been partially anesthetized from the constant fear and dread that they'd been living with. Elliott was right — the experience, horrible as it was, had toughened them up.
And they'd found out their opponents weren't the invincible warriors they had once thought. The could be beaten. Besides, the boys had Elliott on their side. As they tramped down the slope, Will dreamingly began to imagine her as some new kind of superhero. The incredible exploding girl, he mused, with fingers of dynamite and nitroglycerine for blood. He chuckled to himself. She always rose to the occasion with something up her sleeve to help them out of a tight corner. Long may it continue, he thought.
So it came as a surprise when, after another stop to reconnoiter the horizon, Elliott grew increasingly agitated. She was always so calm and collected that her behavior began to infect the boys, setting them on edge. She was seeing Limiters everywhere.
"This isn't good. We've got to head even farther down," she told them, making a brisk quarter turn and lifting her rifle to her shoulder for a final check before setting off on the new course.
Will didn't grasp the importance of this change in direction until they eventually came upon the Pore itself.
Water drizzled down on them in sporadic, wind-tossed showers, as Will gazed into the seemingly infinite cavity.
He whistled in astonishment.
"That's one humongous hole!" he exclaimed, immediately going to the brink and peering down.
His vertigo affecting him, Cal maintained a wide margin between himself and the edge of the enormous drop.
Will was examining the curvature of the Pore through his headset. "Man, this is big. Really big."
"Yes," Elliott said. "You could say that."
"Can't even see to the other side," Chester muttered to no one in particular.
"It's about a mile at its widest," Elliott said, taking a swig of water. "And who knows how deep it is? Nobody who's ever fallen in has come back to tell the story — except, a long time ago, they say a man hauled himself out of it."
"I heard about him. Abraham someone," Will said, recalling that Tam had talked about him.
"Many people thought he was a fraud," Elliott went on. "Either that or his brains were cooked by fever." She stared deep into the Pore. "But there's a heap of old legends about some sort of" — she hesitated, as if what she was about to say was ludicrous — "sort of place below."
"What do you mean?" Will asked, quickly turning to her. He had to know more, regardless of how Chester might react. "What place?"
"Oh, here we go again with his twenty questions," murmured Chester, right on cue. Will ignored him.
"They say there's another world, but Drake thought it was a load of old codswallop," she said, screwing on the top of her canteen.
As they passed around the edge of the Pore, there were no further signs of any more Limiters. Within a few minutes of fast marching, Will noticed the outline of some sort of regular structure. Through his lens it became clear that it wasn't a building but a massive arch.
Although crumbled and eroded, the arch had an icon on its keystone that he recognized. Carved into it were three divergent lines: the same symbol that was on the jade pendant Uncle Tam had given him just before his final showdown with the Styx Division in the Eternal City.
While pondering this coincidence, Will was distracted by the peculiar sight of papers strewn all over the ground on the far side of the arch. Chester and Elliott had already picked up a few of these pages and were examining them.
"What's all this?" Will asked as he joined them.
Chester put some pages in his hand without comment.
One glance was all it took.
"Dad!" Will exclaimed. "My Dad!"
A number of the sheets contained pictures of stones, on which were painstakingly drafted sketches of strange and complex symbols. Densely penciled notes filled the other pages. The unmistakable handwriting of his father littered the margins.
Will scanned the ground, pushing through the loose pages with his boot. He found a rather ratty pair of brown wool socks knotted together, with large holes in the toes, and then, bizarrely, a Mickey Mouse toothbrush, well used from the looks of it.
"I wondered where that had gone!" Will smiled, pushing against the grimy and worn bristles with his thumb. "Silly old Dad… he took my toothbrush with him!"
But any cheerfulness evaporated as he came across the blue-and-purple-marbled cover of a notebook. It was clear then where all the pages he come from. He snatched it up and studied the label stuck of the front, a bookplate with a bespectacled owl at the side and Ex Libras printed in swirly copperplate lettering across the top.
"Journal Three… Dr. Roger Burrows," Will read aloud
He dashed back to the arch. Passing under it, he didn't pause as he moved out onto the platform, immediately spotting a weather-worn flight of stone steps that led off from it. Reaching the last one, he stooped to peer below. He couldn't see anything. But as he raised his eyes, blinking as the rain fell on his face, something caught his attention.
Straight in front of him was his father's blue-handled geological hammer, its tip lodged in the rock. He leaned over to retrieve it. It came loose after several tugs, and he regarded it for a few seconds before renewing his efforts to try to see farther down the walls of the Pore. Even through the lens of the headset, he saw nothing there.
Deep in thought, he rejoined the others.
"What happened here?" he said, his voice brittle with apprehension.
Elliott and Chester were silent — neither of them able to give him an answer.
"My dad…?" Will said to Chester.
Chester looked into the space between them, his face expressionless and his lips tightly clamped as if he was disinclined to say anything.
"He's probably all right," Elliott said. "If we keep going, we might…"
"Yes, we might catch up with him," Will completed her sentence, grabbing at the suggestion to give himself some comfort. "I bet he just left these things behind by accident… dropped them… He's a bit forgetful sometimes… His mind churned with explanations for his father's absence as he looked back at the arch. "But… not… careless," he added slowly. "I mean… it's not as if his rucksack's here, or…"
A terrified yelp from Cal yanked him from his thoughts. The boy had been lounging against a sizable boulder a little way back from the edge of the Pore, and leaped up as if he'd been stung by a bee.
"It moved! I swear the stinking rock moved!" he shouted.
The rock had moved, and it was still moving. Like some miracle, it had risen up on jointed legs and was rotating. As it came to a stop, they all saw the huge, vacillating antennae. The machinelike mouthparts gave a single clack.
"Ohmygosh!" Chester shrieked.
"Oh, do shut up!" Elliott rebuked him. "It's only a cave cow."
The boys watched as the insect — Dr. Burrows gargantuan "dust mite" and one-time traveling companion — clacked again, and then trundled cautiously forward. Bartleby scampered around its circumference, venturing forward to sniff at it and then retreating back again, as if he didn't quite know what to make of the creature.