The Ruins (13 page)

 Eric
nodded. It sounded so simple, so straightforward, and he was trying to
believe that it would be like that, wanting to believe it, but not
quite accomplishing it. He felt the urge to pace again, and only
managed to hold himself still through a jaw-tightening act of will.

 Pablo
stopped screaming. One breath, two breaths, three breaths, then he
started up again.

 "Talk
to him, Amy," Jeff said.

 Amy
looked frightened by this prospect. "Talk to him?"
she asked.

 Jeff
motioned her toward the hole. "Just stick your head over the
side. Let him see you. Let him know we haven't abandoned
him."

 "What
should I say?" Amy asked, still looking scared.

 "Anything—soothing
things. He can't understand you anyway. It's just
the sound of your voice."

 Amy
moved to the hole. She dropped to her hands and knees, leaned forward
over the shaft. "Pablo?" she called. "We're coming to get you. We're fixing
the rope, and then Eric's coming to get you."

 She
kept going on like this, describing how it would happen, step by step,
how they'd help him into the sling and pull him back up to
the surface, and after awhile Pablo stopped screaming. Jeff and Mathias
were almost done; they'd reached the last section of rope.
Jeff tied the final knot, then pulled on one end while Mathias held on
to the other, the two of them using all their weight, a momentary
tug-of-war, tightening the knot, testing its strength. There were five
splices on the rope now. The knots didn't look very strong,
but Eric tried not to notice this. It felt good to be the one going,
the one doing, and if he thought too long about the knots, about their
apparent tenuousness, he knew he might end up changing his mind.

 Mathias
was winding the rope back onto the windlass, double-checking it for
burned spots as he went. He threaded the end of it back over the
sawhorse's little metal wheel. Then Jeff fashioned a sling
for Eric, helped him slide it over his head, tucking it snugly under
his armpits.

 "It's
going to be all right, Pablo," Amy was yelling. "He's coming. He's almost
there."

 Stacy
crouched to light the second oil lamp, then handed it to Eric, its
flame flickering weakly in the tiny glass globe.

 Eric
was standing beside the hole now, staring into the darkness. Mathias
and Jeff positioned themselves behind the crank, leaning against its
handle. The rope went taut; they were ready. The hardest part was the
step into open air, wondering if the rope would hold, and for an
instant Eric wasn't certain he had the courage for it. But
then he realized it wasn't possible not to: the moment
he'd pulled the sling over his head, he'd set
something into motion, and now there was no way he could stop it. He
stepped off the edge of the shaft, dangling beneath the sawhorse, the
rope biting into his armpits, and then—the windlass creaking
and trembling with every turn—they began to lower him.

 Before
he was ten feet down, the temperature started to drop, chilling the
sweat on his skin—chilling his spirits, too. He
didn't want to go any farther, and yet was dropping foot by
foot even as he admitted this to himself, that he was scared, that he
wished he'd let Jeff be the one to go. There were wooden
supports hammered into the walls of the shaft, haphazardly, at odd
angles, buttressing the dirt. They looked like old railroad ties,
soaked in creosote, and Eric could detect no apparent plan in their
positioning. Twenty feet from the surface, he was astonished to glimpse
a passage opening up into the wall before him, a shaft running
perpendicular to the one he was descending. He lifted the oil lamp to
get a better view. There were two iron rails running down its center,
dull with rust. A dented bucket lay against one of the rails, at the
far limit of his lamp's illumination. The shaft curved
leftward, out of sight, into the earth. A steady stream of cold air
spilled out of it, thick-feeling, moist, and it made the flame in the
lamp rise suddenly, then flicker, almost going out.

 "There's
another shaft," he called up to the others, but there was no
response, just the steady creak of the windlass unwinding him into the
darkness. There were skull-size stones embedded in the walls of the
shaft: smooth, dull gray, almost glassy in appearance. The vine had
even gained a foothold here, clinging to some of the wooden supports,
its leaves and flowers much paler than on the hillside above, almost
translucent. When he looked up, he could see Stacy and Amy peering down
at him, framed by the rectangle of sky, everything growing a little
smaller with each shuddering foot he descended. The rope had begun to
swing slightly,
pendulumlike
,
and the lamp swayed, too, its shifting light making the walls of the
shaft seem to rock vertiginously. Eric felt a lurch of nausea, had to
stare down at his feet to calm it. He could hear Pablo moaning
somewhere beneath him, but for a long time the Greek remained lost in
darkness. Eric was having difficulty guessing how far he'd
dropped—fifty feet, he guessed—and then, just as
the bottom came into view, still shadowed, a deeper darkness, upon
which Pablo's crumpled form—his white tennis shoes,
his pale blue T-shirt—was coming into focus, the rope jerked
to a halt.

 Eric
hung there, swaying back and forth. He lifted his eyes, peered up
toward that small rectangle of sky above him. He could see
Stacy's and Amy's faces, and then Jeff's,
too.

 "Eric?"
Jeff called.

 "What?"

 "It's
the end of the rope."

 "I'm
not at the bottom."

 "Can
you see him?"

 "Pretty
much."

 "Is
he okay?"

 "I
can't tell."

 "How
far are you above him?"

 Eric
looked down, tried to estimate the distance between himself and the
bottom. He wasn't very good at this sort of thing; all he
could do was pull a number out of the air. It was pointless, like
guessing how many pennies someone had in his pocket. If he were right,
it would simply be a matter of chance. "Twenty
feet?" he said.

 "Is
he moving?"

 Eric
stared down again toward the Greek's dim figure. The longer
he looked, the more he could make out, not just the shoes and T-shirt
but Pablo's arms, too, his face and neck, looking oddly pale
in the darkness. Eric's lamp picked up bits of broken glass
around the Greek's body, pieces of its shattered cousin. "No," Eric called. "He's just
lying there."

 There
was no response. Eric looked up, and the faces had disappeared from the
hole. He could hear them talking, not the words, just the murmur of
their voices, which had a back-and-forth feel to them, discursive,
strangely unhurried. They sounded even farther away than they actually
were, and Eric felt a brief wobble of panic. Maybe they were walking
off; maybe they were going to leave him here….

 He
glanced down just in time to see Pablo lift his hand, hold it out
toward him, a slow, underwater gesture, as if even this slight movement
were difficult to accomplish.

 "He
lifted his hand," he called.

 "What?"
It was Jeff's voice; his head reappeared over the hole.
Stacy's did, too, and Amy's, and
Mathias's. No one was holding the windlass. No one had to,
Eric
realized.
I'm
at the end of my rope,
he thought. He couldn't help
it: The words were just there inside his head. A joke, but mirthless.

 "He
lifted his hand," he shouted again.

 "We're
pulling you up," Jeff called. And all four heads vanished
from the hole.

 "Wait!"
Eric shouted.

 Jeff's
face reappeared, then Stacy's, then Amy's. They
were so tiny, silhouetted against the sky. He couldn't make
out their features, but somehow he knew who was who. "We have
to figure out a way to make the rope longer," Jeff called.

 Eric
shook his head. "I want to stay with him. I'm
gonna
jump."

 There
was that murmur of voices once more, a consultation far above him. Then
Jeff's voice echoed down the shaft. "No—we'll pull you up."

 "Why?"

 "We
might not be able to make it longer. You'd be trapped down
there."

 Eric
couldn't think of anything to say to that. Pablo was already
down there. If they couldn't make the rope
longer…well, that meant…He glimpsed what
followed, shied away from it.

 "Eric?"
Jeff called.

 "What?"

 "We're
pulling you up."

 The
heads disappeared once more, and then, a second later, the rope gave a
jerk as they began to turn the windlass. Eric looked down. His lamp was
swaying again, so it was hard to tell, but it seemed as if Pablo was
staring up at him. His hand was no longer raised. Eric started to yank
at the sling, kicking his legs. He wasn't thinking; he was
being stupid, and he knew it. But he couldn't leave Pablo
there. Not alone, not hurt, not in that darkness. He lifted his left
arm toward the sky, the sling scraping his skin as it slid upward, over
his head. He was still hooked under his other arm, rising slowly, the
bottom of the shaft slipping into darkness, and he had to switch the
oil lamp from one hand to the other. Then he let go of the rope and
dropped into the open air, the flame fluttering out as he fell.

 It
was farther to the bottom than he'd imagined, yet the bottom
seemed to come too soon, materializing out of the darkness, slamming up
into him before he had a chance to prepare himself, his legs
collapsing, jarring the air from his lungs. He landed to
Pablo's left—he'd had the presence of
mind to aim for this spot before the lamp blew out—but he
wasn't able to hold his balance once he'd hit the
bottom. He fell, bounced back off the wall of the shaft, landed on the
Greek's chest. Pablo bucked beneath him, began to scream
again. Eric struggled to push himself up and away, but it was difficult
in the darkness to find his bearings. Nothing was where it seemed it
ought to be; he kept reaching out with his hands, expecting to find the
ground or one of the walls but hitting open air instead. "I'm sorry," he said. "Oh,
Jesus, Jesus Christ, I'm so sorry." Pablo was
screaming beneath him, flailing with one arm, while the lower half of
his body remained perfectly still. It frightened Eric, this stillness;
he could guess what it meant.

 He
managed to rise to his knees, then pull back into a crouch. There was a
wall behind him, and one to his left and another to his right, but
across from him, on the far side of Pablo, he could sense open space:
another shaft, cutting its way into the earth beneath the hill. Once
again, there was a current of cold air pouring forth from it, but
something more, too, some sense of pressure, of a presence: watching.
Eric spent a moment straining to peer into the darkness, to make out
whatever shape or form might be lurking within it, but there was
nothing there, of course, just his terror fashioning phantoms, and
finally he managed to convince himself of this.

 Eric
heard Jeff yell something, and he tilted his head back, looking up
toward the mouth of the hole. It was far above him now, a tiny window
of sky. The rope was swinging gently back and forth in the intervening
space, and Jeff was shouting again, but Eric couldn't hear
his words, not over Pablo's screaming, which echoed off the
shaft's dirt walls, doubling and tripling, until it began to
seem as if there were more than one of him lying there, as if Eric were
trapped in a cave full of shrieking men.

 "I'm
okay!" he yelled upward, doubting if they could hear him.

 And
was he okay? He spent a moment assessing this, tallying up the various
pains his body was beginning to announce. He must've banged
his chin, because it felt as if he'd been punched there, and
his lower back had definitely registered the fall. But it was his right
leg that called out most aggressively for attention, a tight, tearing
sensation just beneath his kneecap, accompanied by an odd feeling of
dampness. Eric groped with his hand, found a large piece of glass
embedded there. It was about the size of a playing
card—petal-shaped, gently concave—and had sliced
neatly through his jeans, burying itself half an inch into his flesh.
Eric assumed it was from Pablo's shattered lamp; he
must've landed on it when he fell. He girded himself now,
clenching his teeth, then pulled the glass free. He could feel blood
seeping down his shin, strangely cool—a lot of blood,
too—his sock growing spongy with it.

 "I
cut my leg," he shouted, then waited, listening, but he
couldn't tell if there was a response.

 It
doesn't
matter,
he
thought.
I'll
be all right
. It was the sort of empty reassurance
only a child would find comforting, and Eric knew this, yet he kept
repeating it to himself nonetheless. It was so dark, and there was that
cold air pouring across him from the shaft, that watchful presence, and
his right shoe was slowly filling with blood, and Pablo's
screaming wouldn't
stop.
I'm
at the end of my rope,
Eric thought. And then,
again:
It
doesn't matter. I'll be all right.
Just
words, his head was full of words.

 He
was still holding the lamp in his left hand; somehow, he'd
managed to keep it from breaking. He set it on the ground beside him,
reached out, found the Greek's wrist, grasped it. Then he
crouched there in the darkness, saying, "
Shh
, now,
shh
. I'm here,
I'm right here" as he waited for Pablo to stop
screaming.

T
hey could hear Eric shouting,
but they couldn't make out his words over Pablo's
screaming. Jeff knew that the Greek would stop eventually,
though—that he'd tire and fall silent—and
then they'd be able to find out what had happened down there,
whether Eric had jumped or fallen, and if he, too, was hurt now. For
the time being, it didn't really matter. What mattered was
the rope. Until they figured out how to lengthen it, there was nothing
they could do for either of them.