That snow ended two or three steps into the cave. There was nothing but bare ice underfoot from there on in. The cave floor was nearly level though, and we got up onto that as soon as we could. It was ice, too, but the ice was dark and gritty with dirt that had been tracked in over the years. Village people—I could picture them—carrying in their dead on stretchers made of old spars and sailcloth.
I asked Dr. Fevre when we would see bodies, and he pointed back toward the entrance. “You’ll see them as soon as the sunlight’s gone, more bodies than you’ll like.”
For a minute it seemed to me that we could not possibly see them without daylight. Then it soaked through to me that there had to be some kind of lighting in there, or else that he had some.
It was the second one. When it was almost too dark for me to see him, he reached into a coat pocket and pulled out light sticks. I had heard of those, but I had never seen them before. You activate them and they put out plenty of light, a kind of pale white light that bleeds out colors. All light in every direction. No heat. Pretty cool, right?
Yeah, sure. Only before long I would have given my watch for some heat. The doctor had gloves, and so did Adah and Chandra. Not Audrey and not me. It wasn’t long before we turned off our light sticks and stuck them—and our hands—into our pockets.
Dr. Fevre cleared his throat. “The bodies nearest the entrance are the oldest. Most of them have suffered a good deal of damage over the years. You will laugh at me if I say they are the most dead, and yet I say it.”
Nobody laughed.
“I estimate their age at approximately nine hundred years. Many were originally interred with armor and weapons, or so I believe. Those were pillaged long ago.”
Adah Fevre murmured, “What a pity!”
“It is. As we go deeper into the caves, the caves themselves become lovely, and the dead more recent. To touch them without purpose would be discourteous to their descendants, the living islanders. Please do not.”
Audrey whispered, “I hadn’t planned on it.”
I nodded.
Dr. Fevre had started off. Audrey had her light stick out again and going, and it gave more than enough light for the two of us. Adah and Chandra brought up the rear, both with their sticks shining.
Here’s one of the things that are hard for me to describe. The cave kept getting bigger and bigger as we went in deeper and deeper, not steadily—there was nothing gradual about it—but by jumps. Think of it as a series of rooms, each bigger than the last, and each with a big open arch leading into the next. Maybe nobody would ever build a thing like that; but freezing cold and seeping water had, and it was impressive and inhuman.
Sheets of hard, clear ice hung from the ceiling in most of the caves, and the ceilings got higher and higher and the ice sheets bigger and bigger. Stalactites of ice hung from the ceilings, some of them way up there and some nearly reaching the pillars right under them on the floor; some of those pillars were towering columns of crystal-clear ice that looked as if they were holding up the ceiling.
All that, and all around us lay or sat or stood the dead. Some lay on couches carved from ice. Others stood in niches cut into the ice. Still others lay flat on the floor, just off the path—or two strides off the path, or fifty strides away from the path. Some lay with open eyes that stared at nothing, but most of them looked as though they were asleep.
So now you have some kind of a feel for what it was like for us to be in there. Listen up, this is important. There were side caves branching off from the caves we were going through. Some of those looked small, but some looked like they might be bigger than the one they branched from. The path got smaller and rougher all the time, and in places it branched off into what Dr. Fevre seemed to think were side caves. In a place like that, the worst thing that could happen to you was to get separated from the one guy who knew his way around. So I should have been really careful to keep that from happening—only it did.
Audrey went to look at one body that was way off to the side. It looked a lot like her, and she thought it might be an early copy.
“Have you noticed her profile, Ern? Most people don’t know what their own profile looks like, but I know how mine looks, and this is it. The exact same profile.”
I admitted it was close, but I pointed out that the corpse’s hair was lighter colored. Audrey’s was auburn; this was a pale red.
“It could have faded in here after death. Hair doesn’t stay the same when you’re dead. It loses color.”
I said, “How the hell do you know that?”
She started talking about some primitives she had run into once who shrunk the heads of their enemies and tied them to their belts by the hair. Like anyone would, I pointed out that the color of that hair did not mean a thing. For one thing, it might have been bleached by the shrinking process. And so on.
Audrey interrupted, “How did she die, anyway? She looks as healthy as I am.”
Knowing what Audrey herself was like, I said, “By violence, I imagine.”
“I don’t see any sign of that. No wounds, no neck bruises or anything. You’re way too used to assuming that every death is a murder.”
“No, I’m not. It’s just that I know that the people who prepared her to go in here would have fixed anything like that. Take off that wimple and you might find she’d been stabbed through the heart, or—”
Something touched my elbow, and I turned and stared.
Audrey was already staring. A tall man with washed-out gray eyes was standing there with a flat green box that he held like a tray, silent and expressionless. He had come out of the dark without making a sound. That hit me hard, and a minute later something else hit me quite a bit harder.
There was no one in sight save Audrey and this newcomer. The three of us stood in the circle of light from Audrey’s light stick. That lit up a quarter, maybe, of the cavern. The rest was blackness. No doctor, no patron, no Chandra. No one but Audrey and me, and this tall, silent man with his small, flat box.
“We’ve gotta go!” I was pulling Audrey’s arm.
“Which way did they go, Ern?”
The tall man pushed his flat, not quite square, metal box into my hands. At first I didn’t want to take it, but he pushed harder. Then I tried to turn it on edge so I could carry it under my arm.
Big mistake.
Everything started to change. Audrey disappeared. The ice pillars were almost trees, and there were small dark things swarming over the roof of the cave. I put the box level again and Audrey was back. She stared at me and rubbed her eyes.
The tall man had started off. He walked slowly, but he took long steps. I said, “Maybe he knows,” and started after him, holding his box the way he had.
Audrey said, “The air in here must be bad. I feel sort of dizzy.”
“Maybe he’s going outside.”
“I hope so!” Audrey took my arm then, and it was quite a while before she let go. I was carrying the metal box or whatever it was flat, like a little tray. It was just heavy enough to be inconvenient.
After I don’t know how long, ten minutes or half an hour, I said, “See anything you recognize?”
Instead of answering, Audrey pointed. Away off, a tiny beam of white light was darting here and there. I nodded and told Audrey, “That’s a flashlight. It’s got to be.”