“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s get you the hell out of here.”
Placing a trembling hand on Paul’s shoulder to steady himself, Josh stepped carefully down and allowed himself to be led to where his backpack still lay. Once there, Paul unrigged himself and quickly and expertly tied a bowline knot in the end of the rope and clipped the carabiner on Josh’s harness through the loop.
“All right, then,” he said, giving the line a slight tug. “Josh, I’m going to haul you up, but you’re going to have to help even though you’ve got a busted paw. Here’s how it will work: Using your good hand, you pull with me each time I say ‘Heave.’ In between, release while I hold down here, and reach up for another handful for the next heave. Got it?”
“Yeah,” Josh answered uncertainly. “But what about you?”
“Once you are up top, drop your end back down to me; I’ll tie myself off and haul myself back up the same way I came down. Nothing to it.”
Josh looked dubious. “You think this is going to be easy?”
“No,” Paul answered truthfully. “No, I don’t.”
“Who’s to say I won’t just walk off and leave you, once I get out? You’d deserve it.”
“Here are my car keys so you don’t have to walk all the way back to town,” Paul said, fishing them from his pocket and making to hand them to the other man. “You can just tell Vanda we got separated down here and you couldn’t find me. That should make you both happy.”
Josh studied Paul for several moments, then roughly folded Paul’s fingers around the keys with his good hand. “Just get us out of here before those snakes get curious again; I’ll straighten your sorry ass out when we get up top.”
Paul pocketed the keys, then took a good two-handed grip on the rope. Josh did the same with his left hand. “Ready?” Paul asked. Josh nodded. “Heave!” Josh rose several inches into the air. “Ready... heave!” Another few inches were attained. Inch by straining inch Josh began to ascend. With sweat running freely into his eyes and down his ribs, Paul wondered if he was truly up to this task; even if he was able to get Josh to the surface, he now doubted he would have the strength remaining to haul himself out afterwards.
He needn’t have worried, for when Josh was only about ten feet from his starting point, they both became aware of a new sound that now seemed to have entered the snake lair. Josh noticed it first and called down, “What’s that? You hear something, Paul?”
Paul, grateful for a chance to rest, belayed the rope and listened. In the echoing silence there was something — a faint, repetitious ping, the sound of a pipe expanding with the heat or contracting with the cold. Paul threw his head back and peered upwards. “Josh,” he began, then was cut off by the squeal of fatigued metal unwillingly assuming new form. With a great clang of alarm the tripod surrendered its only useful shape, tossing Josh back into the darkness in rebuke. The cavern floor received him with even less ceremony, driving the wind from his lungs with its unyielding soil, while from behind them the dry agitated hum of shifting scales filled the darkness once more.
After graduation, the three of them had simply returned home to the small city nestled in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains where they had all grown up. Paul had found it remarkable, and somewhat mysterious in a pleasant kind of way, that Vanda and he had never crossed paths during those early years. She had attended public schools, he had attended the parochial schools of his diocese; she had lived in a blue-collar enclave surrounding the now defunct mills, he had been brought up in an old, leafy, upscale suburb; she had spent her first two years of advanced schooling at a community college, out of financial necessity, he, and Josh, of course, had gone straight to university out of high school; whereas he had been thoroughly indoctrinated in his Catholic faith, she was vague on the subject of religion and checked “No affiliation” on the few forms that requested such information. Everything about her, in his eyes, was spontaneous and her own; as unlike the carefully prepared Paul as he could want. She was the wildness that he unconsciously sought on his and Josh’s many journeys into the great forests and mountains yet could never release within his own soul.
It amused and pleased him that she had, for his parents’ sake, agreed to be married within the Catholic faith, which required out of religious necessity that she be baptized in the same. Even the months of instruction that preceded this sacrament drew not one word of complaint. If anything, she had appeared to devote to it the same studious inquiry as she had her primitive-cultures courses, though with a bemused tolerance that was sometimes coupled with astonishment at some of the more esoteric “mysteries” of the Church. Yet, for Paul’s sake, and more importantly his parents’, she had submitted cheerfully enough. Her only rebellion had been her insistence that the wedding Mass be celebrated out of doors, and in her choice of colors in bridal wear. These expressions of herself had delighted Paul, and he didn’t care a penny that her conversion was less than genuine.
However, as to her father’s absence on the day of their wedding, and indeed, as to his disappearance from her family altogether, her candor disappeared. It was the only subject that Paul could not draw her out on. Though in Paul’s eyes Vanda was often mysterious, as all natural creatures are, it was only in the matter of her father that he glimpsed a furtive side of her personality, and it troubled him as a limp in a pet might worry its owner — the suffering animal cannot speak and explain the source of its pain, therefore the loving master must carefully knead its muscles and bones and probe its paws until the source of discomfort is discovered and relieved. He did so with wine one night.
It was after dinner, towards the end of their first year of marriage, as they lay curled together on the living room sofa. The night air was soft, as it sometimes is in early spring, laden with the scent of honeysuckle and the warming earth, and playing over their naked bodies as it billowed the curtains gently to and fro. They were on their third glass of wine, celebrating the end of a work day for no other reason than they were young and still in the first blush of their love. Paul lay snug against his young bride’s backside, his arms wrapped tightly round her. “Do you ever miss your old man?” he had asked softly.
He was answered with an immediate tension in Vanda’s body, and silence. He could feel her withdrawing from him and regretted the question but could not call it back. Then, after what seemed a very long time, she had replied in a quiet, level voice, “Of course I do, Paul, he’s my father. Every girl needs a father.”
“Yeah,” he had said just as quietly, desperately thinking of how to continue the exchange he had encouraged.
But she had slid from his arms like mercury and padded across the bare wooden floors towards the bathroom, supremely indifferent to her nakedness and all the more magnificent to Paul because of it. Then she had turned and faced him, her only adornments her ever-present bangles, necklaces, and jangling earrings, and said, “He wanted to be more than just a father, Paul.”
“Oh,” was all he could think to reply, as he did not understand her meaning; and with that she had withdrawn into the shower.
He awoke in the small hours of that night with his heart beating like something caged and furious within his chest, and turned to his wife. The shadows of branches outside their window played restlessly across her glowing skin in the moonlight and Paul had reached out a hand to touch her, then held it back in pity. He had not wished to wake her and have her see his face, for he had come upon the meaning of her earlier statement in the black depths of a dreamless sleep and would not have her see the horror and pity he feared might be mirrored there. Instead, he had lain back on his pillow once more and waited for his heart to slow its pace, and knew that he loved Vanda all the more for having the strength to create herself into the lovely, free-spirited woman that he so adored, in spite of her father’s unnatural attentions and the stain of darkness that must surely dwell within her as a result.