Angel Fall (10 page)

Grabbing the baby, Amanda sat up. Suddenly she was trembling so hard that her teeth chattered. The sound continued for a moment. Then came a deep whisper:
“Who…are you
?”

Utterly terrified, she huddled against the wall.

The whisper came again: “
Who…are you
?”

Amanda thought she was going to be ill. She didn’t know what to do. Should she run? She couldn’t run. Whatever it was was right out there in the tunnel.

The voice spoke with great gentleness.
“You’re a child…and you’re afraid. I can feel your heartbeat. Child, it is no accident that you have come here. Tell me your name. Who…are you?”

There was such calm in the words that Amanda stopped shaking. Gulping hard, she mumbled, “I’m…I’m Amanda Lancaster. Who are
you?
”

“A friend to those who travel to the Mountain.”

“That’s where we’re going.”

“Then, come, child…and talk to me.”

“I’m talking to you right now.”

“No, come to where I am.”

“Where’s that?”

“Follow the tunnel.”

“But…it’s dark and I don’t have a flashlight.” Her voice was trembling.

“There is nothing that will hurt you. Walk with your fingers against the wall.”

“How do I know…
you
won’t hurt us?”

“You don’t know. But you must have faith.”

“Have you ever heard of…Bellwind?”

The answer came with such loving emotion that Amanda was surprised.
“Heard of her? Oh, yes. Long ago, I knew her well. So very long ago. Is she, then…still living?”

“We were just with her.”

Now the great voice was trembling: “
Come to me, child. Walk to the end of the tunnel…and don’t be afraid.
”

Slowly Amanda got up. Hugging the baby, she stepped from the alcove. As she did so, she whispered, “I hope I’m not doing something really dumb.” With one hand against the wall she began groping down the stone corridor. Everything was pitch black. “I don’t see you. Where are you?”

“Keep walking. It isn’t much farther.”

Suddenly ahead she saw a patch of moonlight. As she moved toward it, it grew large. Finally Amanda emerged from the tunnel into the open.

And what she saw lying on the ground took her breath away.

G
ooeyness.

That was the first sensation.

When he awoke, Alex discovered that he had forgotten to take the remaining fruit out of his shirt and his stomach was covered with slime. His second discovery was equally unpleasant. He was alone. Crawling from the cave, he looked around. A few shafts of pale sunlight fell through the trees giving the forest the appearance of late autumn, and everything was deathly still.

The dog was gone.

For a few minutes he wandered around calling, but finally he had to accept it. The dog had deserted him. As he stared into the silent forest, Alex felt like a lost child. As aggravating as the animal had been, he was all he had. Suddenly he was furious with himself. What kind of stupid idiot follows a strange dog off into nowhere? Anybody that dumb deserves whatever happens to him.

But as he raged, there came a cold awareness. He’d better figure out what he was going to do or he would die out here. Okay, one step at a time, he told himself. Even though he wasn’t hungry, the first thing to do was eat. Picking up a piece of the squashed fruit, he stared at it. It looked like a handful of brown rot, but he forced himself to take a bite. Not nearly as good as yesterday, but better than nothing. While Alex ate, he considered his options. This was easy because he didn’t have any. He wasn’t going back to the city, which meant that wherever the road led, that’s where he was headed. He wondered how long it would take to find civilization. How many miles would he have to walk? Hundreds? Thousands? It couldn’t be thousands.

When he was done eating, he found a little stream, and there he washed the fruit slime off his body. When he was finished, he remembered that he still had two pieces of squashed fruit left—probably his only food for the day. And the only way to carry them was in his shirt. So much for washing. With a grimace he tucked the slick lumps against his skin and headed toward the road.

It occurred to him that it might be good to have a weapon—the thought came mostly because he felt like beating something up. It didn’t take long to find a thick branch that made a good solid club. He almost wished something would run out of the forest and attack him so he could beat on it. Swinging the club made him feel better; he actually started to hum as he walked but soon stopped because it sounded weird in the deadness.

As the morning passed, the forest changed. The trees around him became much taller, and by the middle of the day they were gigantic. Alex remembered one summer just before his parents divorced; his family had traveled to Yosemite National Park and he had walked among the sequoias. The monsters on either side of him now would make the redwoods of Yosemite look like sticks.

It was late in the afternoon when the road began to climb. Gradually the paving stones disappeared and all that was left was a weed-covered path. The trees were thinning out; patches of sunlight became visible. This cheered him, but now fatigue was setting in and he was very thirsty. He had just decided to stop and rest when he came to a fork. To his relief, beside it ran a little spring. After a drink he slumped against a tree and ate the last of his squashed provisions.

Okay, which direction should he take?

What he wanted was to find people, and for that, one way might be as good as another. Which was the same as saying no good at all. Alex stood up and brushed himself off—there was only one way to get foolproof guidance: use the system that had never failed him…
eeny, meeny, miney, moe…

And so it was decided. It would be the right-hand path. The gods had spoken.

He began to walk, but he hadn’t gone more than a hundred feet when he rounded a bend and discovered that this path led back down into the forest. Darkness would come much earlier there. He hated the thought of spending a night in the woods without any shelter. Okay, maybe the gods
hadn’t
spoken. He was about to retrace his steps when he heard barking coming from up ahead; he knew that bark. Instantly Alex was both relieved and immensely irritated. So, the mutt had returned, and now it expected him to follow.
Come. I am the master, you are the slave. Run and stumble and fall while I drag you along
. It was disgusting. Well, no way—if the mutt wanted him to chase it down this path, then he would do the exact opposite. The bark came again. Somehow, it was different, urgent. But still Alex thought: screw that.

As he hurried back to the fork, he yelled, “Bark all you want. I’m not coming. You can follow me for a change.” Instantly there was silence.

No question about it, the left-hand path was much more to his liking. Though it was steeper, the sunlight was brighter. Definitely the right choice. As he walked, he kept looking back to see if the dog was following, and apparently he wasn’t. Alex felt a strange kind of hurt, but there was something else. The farther he walked up the left-hand path, the more an odd fear crept over him. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d gone the
wrong way
…that he should turn back immediately. Several times he stopped and was about to do it, but each time, a voice in his head whispered,
Don’t be an idiot; there’s nothing wrong with this road. You’re just giving up. If you go back it’ll prove you’re pitiful; you can’t go anywhere by yourself.

Instead of turning back, Alex walked faster, swinging his club, telling himself that the sunlight was wonderful. Much better than the gloom of the forest. Going this direction, he felt good. In charge of his life. No more running and stumbling. No more being dragged around by a stupid animal.

Soon the trees gave way to a rocky landscape pocked with tall scraggly bushes that kept him from seeing much of anything. And the path was steeper. As he climbed, Alex tried to whistle. It was a pathetic attempt because he’d never really learned to whistle. It was hard to whistle with earbuds stuck in your head, which is the way he’d spent most of his life. So, the puffy squeak that came from his lips didn’t exactly brighten his spirits.

It was almost evening when the road took a sharp turn, the bushes disappeared, and he was in the open. Alex stopped. He was much higher up than he had imagined. Ahead, the crumbling path wound off into the distance, snaking toward an eerie mountain of tremendous size. Although it was only a foothill compared to the Great Peak that he’d seen from the ocean, there was so much haze above it that no other mountain was visible. So this was where the road was taking him. He didn’t like the look of it. Just beneath the summit stretched a sheer rock face that must have been thousands of feet tall, and while the rest of the mountain was gray, the cliffs near the peak were streaked with red as though giant claws had raked the stone and drawn blood.

Maybe he
had
gone the wrong way. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. The only choice was to push on and hope for the best. There were still several hours of daylight. Maybe up there in the rocks he could find a cave.

It wasn’t long before the path disintegrated into a narrow track that took him higher and higher. As the sun began to set, the air grew cold. Shivering, Alex zipped his jacket. He tried to console himself with the thought that the path must lead somewhere. Someone had built it for a reason. Though it was narrow and dangerous now, maybe long ago it had been wider. People had traveled on it and travelers needed shelter.

Yeah, right, he thought. A
thousand years
ago travelers had needed shelter, and it looked as though the “path” hadn’t been used since then.

Darkness came, and with it a piercing wind. The moon hadn’t risen yet, so he could barely make out where he was going. As he groped along, he stumbled on a rock and fell to his knees. Groaning and swearing, he decided his only choice was to stop and wait for the moon. While Alex crouched, he took the opportunity to curse everyone and everything that had brought him to this place…his mother, his father, his father’s bimbo, his father’s baby, the storm, the plane, the ocean, the city, the road, and especially…
the dog
.

Finally the moon appeared and he could see a little. What he saw made him tremble. Next to him a sheer drop vanished into yawning darkness. If he had fallen that direction he’d be a grease spot at the bottom of the mountain. Struggling to his feet, Alex began climbing again. He had to keep going until he found shelter. It was just too cold to sleep outside.

Another hour passed and he was so exhausted that he could barely walk. Not a single cave had appeared and the wind was blowing harder. He had to keep moving because if he didn’t, he’d freeze.

The red sickle moon was at its zenith when he gave up. He was shivering so badly that it was hard to breathe and his legs just wouldn’t go any farther. Huddling and hugging himself, he stared into the darkness. How high up was he? He had no idea. He’d been climbing for a long time straight into the wind. It tore through his clothes, but strangely he didn’t feel it. All he wanted to do was sleep. He had read that freezing to death was like falling asleep—maybe this was hypothermia. Well, there was nothing he could do about it; there was nothing he wanted to do about it. Alex’s head began to nod.

Suddenly he lurched awake. At first he thought he’d dreamed it. Then it came again.

A moan.

He tried to tell himself that it was the wind. But he knew it wasn’t. Shaking, he prayed for silence. A moment later it came a third time, rising higher and higher into an awful wail. A dozen times the wrenching spasm echoed across the mountain.

In the stillness that followed Alex heard a woman screaming. Between the screams he heard:
“Help! Help me! Somebody help me.”

He thought he was going to be ill. He tried to plug his ears, but he could still hear it. How much he had wanted to find another person, but not this way. Horrible images flashed through his mind. She must have been walking on the road ahead of him. Probably somebody else from the crash. Maybe the thing that had been moaning had caught her and now it was tearing her to pieces. So what was he supposed to do? He couldn’t fight a monster. If he tried to help, it would just mean two people dead instead of one. He had to run. He had to escape. But a mocking voice whispered,
Sure, run, you little coward. You wanted to be a hero, well, here’s your chance
. Then it laughed at him. Alex groaned. As much as he wanted to run, he couldn’t leave her. He would never be able to live with himself. Grabbing the stick, he jumped to his feet and rushed up the path. It looped in a hairpin turn around a jagged ridge.

When he reached the other side, he stopped in amazement. In front of him stretched a narrow gorge, and what was left of the path had crumbled into a narrow ledge, inches wide, that clung to one of the walls. There was nothing to hold on to. To warn of the danger, a burning torch had been placed at the entrance, but as terrifying as all of this was, there was something worse: the gorge was choked with transparent strands that glistened in the moonlight like masses of crimson hair. He sucked in his breath. He knew what that was; it was a spider web. Shimmering between the walls hung a web larger than he had ever imagined possible.

The woman screamed again. Her voice was coming from beyond the gorge. Squinting to see through the web, his mouth dropped open. Beyond the walls loomed the rock face that he had seen from down below. Jagged cliffs towered thousands of feet above him, but it was what stood at the bottom of those cliffs that almost made Alex stop breathing. Before him lay an insane nightmare carved in stone; hundreds of spires and flying buttresses sheered upward, reaching like broken fingers from walls that twisted and turned as though writhing in agony. He was at one end of a vast ancient building that was so huge, the other end was lost in darkness across the mountain.

A castle? Could that be what it was? He couldn’t tell; the whole structure was covered with the same shimmering web that choked the gorge—billions of strands draped over every spire, pinnacle, and parapet, like the body of a dead giant wrapped in a delicate shroud. As he stared at the web, Alex knew that all the spiders in the world couldn’t weave anything so gigantic.

Then he saw the spider’s tunnel—twisting down from high above was a corridor of crystal laced through the web. It was huge.

Suddenly the voice shrieked again, “
Help…Help me!
”

“Where are you? I can’t see you.” Alex peered through the shimmering strands.

“I’m over here.”

Beyond the gorge a dim figure stepped from the shadows. It was a girl with long black hair, dressed in a flowing gown. Perhaps it was because he was looking through the web, but somehow she didn’t appear quite real. Around her drifted an aura of moonlight.

“I see you. What’s the matter?”

“I’m trapped. I can’t get back inside and the spider’s coming. Please, help me.”

Alex shivered. He had always hated spiders, and the thought of the one that had made this web was too horrible to imagine.

“Where is it? I don’t see it.”

The girl didn’t answer. She just started screaming again. Not knowing what else to do, Alex lifted his stick and struck the web. Not a single strand broke, but something else happened. The instant the stick made contact with the strands there was music…a thousand exquisite notes rippled through the air as though he had struck a giant harp.

The girl was even more terrified.
“Why did you do that? Now, you’ve called it!”

Suddenly the whole mountain was filled with soft melodies, as though unseen fingers were sweeping across a million strings. The girl stood transfixed, staring upward.

“Tell me what to do,” Alex yelled.

No answer.

Then he saw it.

Creeping down through the moonlit tunnel was a spider. In his wildest nightmares he had never imagined that such a monster could exist. Not only was it
huge
, it was completely transparent, as though made of glass. A hundred legs, so delicate that they seemed on the verge of breaking, touched the strands, and with each touch, the air was filled with trembling melodies, a thousand songs within songs woven with harmonies so complex that no harpist on any world could have played them. If only Alex could have closed his eyes, he would have heard music of such wistful loveliness that it would have washed away his terror. But he couldn’t close his eyes. The terror wouldn’t let him. As he stared up at the thing, his skin crawled. And somehow the music made it even more hideous.