From somewhere behind and below them came a brief squall of rock, followed by a barely perceptible thud that went through their feet. It reminded Ralph of how even solid ice could sometimes shift. Holly looked at him, wide-eyed.
“I think we’re okay. This old cave’s been talking to itself for a long time.”
“Yes, but I bet the conversation’s been livelier since the ground-shaker Lovie told us about. The one that happened in ’07.”
“You can always—”
“Don’t ask me again. I have to see this through.”
He supposed she did.
They went down the incline, holding the railing but being careful to avoid the handprints left by the one who had gone before them. At the bottom there was a sign:
Beyond the Slide, the passage widened still more. There was another of those arched entryways, but part of the wooden facing had fallen away, disclosing what nature had left here: nothing but a ragged maw.
Holly cupped her hands around her mouth and called softly, “Hello?”
Her voice came back to them perfectly, in a series of overlapping echoes: Hello… ello… ello…
“I thought so,” she said. “It’s the Chamber of Sound. It’s the big one that Lovie—”
“Hello.”
Ello… lo… lo…
Spoken quietly, but stopping Ralph in the middle of drawing a breath. He felt Holly seize his forearm with a hand that felt like a claw.
“Now that you’re here…”
You’re… you… here… ere…
“…and gone to so much trouble to find me, why don’t you come in?”
21
They stepped through the arch side by side, Holly holding onto Ralph’s arm like a bride with stage fright. She had the light; Ralph had his Glock, and intended to use it as soon as he had a target. One shot. Only there was no target, not at first.
Beyond the arch was a jutting lip of stone that made a sort of balcony seventy feet above the main cave’s floor. A metal stairway spiraled down. Holly glanced up and felt dizzy. The stairs rose another two hundred feet or more, past an opening that had probably been the main entrance, all the way to the stalactite-hung roof. She realized the entire bluff was hollow, like a fake bakery shop cake. Going down, the stairway looked okay. Above them, part of it had come loose from the fist-sized bolts that held it, and hung drunkenly over the drop.
Waiting for them at the bottom, in the light of an ordinary standing lamp—the kind you might see in any reasonably well-appointed living room—was the outsider. The lamp’s cord snaked away to a softly humming red box with HONDA printed on the side. At the extreme outer edge of the circle of radiance was a cot with a blanket bunched at the bottom.
Ralph had caught up with many fugitives in his time, and the thing they had come looking for could have been any of them: hollow-eyed, too thin, used hard. He was wearing jeans, a rawhide vest over a dirty white shirt, and scuffed cowboy boots. He appeared unarmed. He was looking up at them with Claude Bolton’s face: the black hair, the high cheekbones suggesting some Native American blood a few generations back, the goatee. Ralph couldn’t see the ink on his fingers from where he was, but he knew it was there.
Tat-Man, Hoskins had called him.
“If you really mean to talk to me, you’ll have to chance the stairs. They held me, but I have to tell you the truth—they’re not all that steady.” His words, although spoken in a conversational voice, overlapped each other, doubling and tripling, as if there were not just one outsider but many, a cabal of them hiding in the shadows and the fissures where the light of that single floor lamp could not reach.
Holly started for the stairs. Ralph stopped her. “I’ll go first.”
“I should. I’m lighter.”
“I’ll go first,” he repeated. “When I get down—if I get down—you come.” He spoke quietly, but guessed that, given the acoustics, the outsider could hear every word. At least I hope so, Ralph thought. “But stop at least a dozen steps up. I have to talk to him.”
He was looking at her as he said this, and looking hard. She glanced at the Glock, and he gave the barest nod. No, there would be no talking, no long-winded Q-and-A. All that was over. One shot to the head, and then they were out of here. Assuming the roof didn’t fall in on them, that was.
“All right,” she said. “Be careful.”
There was no way to do that—either the old spiral staircase would hold or it wouldn’t—but he tried to think himself lighter as he went down. The stairs groaned and squalled and shuddered.
“Doing well so far,” the outsider said. “Walk close to the wall, that might be safest.”
Afest… est… est…
Ralph reached the bottom. The outsider stood motionless near his strangely domestic lamp. Had he bought it—and the generator, and the cot—at the Home Depot in Tippit? Ralph thought it likely. It seemed to be the go-to place in this godforsaken part of the Lone Star State. Not that it mattered. Behind him, the stairs began to squall and groan again as Holly descended.
Now that Ralph was on the same level, he stared at the outsider with what was almost scientific curiosity. He looked human, but was oddly hard to grasp, even so. It was like looking at a picture with your eyes slightly crossed. You knew what it was you were seeing, but everything was skewed and slightly out of true. It was Claude Bolton’s face, but the chin was wrong, not rounded but square, and slightly cleft. The jawline on the right was longer than the one on the left, giving the face as a whole a slanted aspect that stopped just short of grotesque. The hair was Claude’s, as black and shiny as a crow’s wing, but there were streaks of a lighter reddish-brown shade. Most striking of all were the eyes. One was brown, as Claude’s were brown, but the other was blue.
Ralph knew the cleft chin, the long jaw, the reddish-brown hair. And the blue eye, that most of all. He had seen the light go out of it as Terry Maitland died in the street on a hot July morning not long ago.
“You’re still changing, aren’t you? The projection my wife saw may have looked exactly like Claude, but the real you hasn’t caught up yet. Has it? You’re not quite there.”
He meant these to be the last words the outsider would hear. The protesting groans from the stairs had stopped, which meant Holly was standing high up enough to be safe. He raised the Glock, gripping his right wrist in his left hand.
The outsider lifted his arms to either side, presenting himself. “Kill me if you want, Detective, but you’ll be killing yourself and your lady friend, too. I don’t have access to your thoughts, as I do Claude’s, but I have a good idea of what’s in your mind, just the same: you’re thinking that one shot is an acceptable risk. Am I right?”
Ralph said nothing.
“I’m sure I am, and I must tell you it would be a great risk.” He raised his voice and shouted, “CLAUDE BOLTON IS MY NAME!”
The echoes seemed even louder than the shout. Holly gave a cry of surprise as a piece of stalactite high above, perhaps cracked almost through already, detached from the ceiling and fell like a rock dagger. It posed no danger to any of them, hitting bottom well outside the feeble circle of lamplight, but Ralph took the point.
“Since you knew enough to find me here, you may already know this,” the outsider said, lowering his arms, “but in case you don’t, two boys were lost in the caves and passages below this one, and when a rescue party tried to find them—”