First Blood

Then the sound was gone and he was alone again. He slowed and stopped, leaning against a wall, hopeless. There had been no sound of rushing water. He had imagined it.

But it had seemed so real. He could not believe that his imagination could trick him so completely.

Then what had happened to the sound? If it was so real, where was it?

A hidden turn, he realized. In his haste to reach the sound, he had failed to check for other entrances in the rock. Go back. Look. And as he did, he heard it once more, and found the opening, on the blind side of a curve, and slipped into it, the sound louder as he went.

It was deafening now. The flames of his torch diminishing to go out, he arrived where the fissure came onto a ledge - and below him, far down, a stream was swirling through a hole in the rock, roaring down into a channel and away under a shelf. Here. This had to be where the breeze was going.

But it wasn't. The water foamed up over the shelf and there was no space for air to be sucked through. But still he felt the breeze strong here; there had to be another exit close by. His torch hissed, and he glanced around frantic to memorize the shape of the ledge, and then he was in darkness, a darkness that was more complete and solid than any he had ever stood in, made overpowering by the cascade of water below into which he might easily fall if he did not grope his way with care. He tensed, waiting to get used to the dark. He never did get used to it. He began to lose his balance, swaying, and at last he went down on his hands and knees, crawling toward a low passage at the end of the ledge that he had seen just before his light sputtered out. To go through the hole he had to slip flat on his belly. The rock there was jagged. It tore his clothes and scraped his skin and twisted his ribs until he repeatedly groaned.

Then he screamed as well. From something more than his ribs. Because as he came blind through the hole into a chamber where he had room to lift his head, he reached out his hand to claw himself forward, and fingered mush. A drop of wet muck plopped onto his neck, and something bit his thumb, and something tiny darted up his arm. He was lying in thick scum that was soaking through his two ripped shirts streaking his belly. He heard squeaking above him, and the cardboard ruffle of wings, and Jesus Christ, it was bats, he was lying in their shit, and what were by now a half-dozen tickly things scurrying over his hands, nibbling, they were beetles, the scavengers that feasted off bat dung and sick bats fallen to the floor. They could strip a carcass clean, and they were piercing the flesh of his arms, as he wriggled insanely backward through the hole, Jesus Christ, swatting them off his hands and arms, bumping his head, wrenching his side. Jesus, rabies, a third of any bat colony was rabid. If they woke and sensed him they might attack and cover him biting while he screamed. Stop it, he told himself. You'll bring them to you. Stop screaming. Already wings were flapping. Christ, he couldn't help it, screaming, wriggling back, and then he was out on the ledge, sweeping his hands and arms, rubbing, making sure and double-sure they all were off, still feeling their many-legged tickles on his skin. They might follow, he suddenly thought, scurrying back from the low entrance to the hole, disoriented in the dark, one leg toppling off the ledge, dangling. The fright of his near fall jolted him. He lurched in the opposite direction and bumped against a wall of rock and shook, hysterically wiping the mushy dung off his hands onto the rock, pawing at the slime on his shirt to get the stuff off. His shirt. Something was in there scratching on his skin. He shoved in a hand, grabbing it, snapping its brittle back so he felt its soft wet insides on his fingers as he threw it violently toward the sound of the cascade.

Bats. A pest hole. Disease. The putrid smell of the dung stinging his nose and throat. That's how the guy who worked the mine had died. Rabies. He had been bitten unknowingly, and days later the disease came driving him out of his mind; he wandered crazily through the forest, into the tunnel, out of the tunnel, in once more and down into the fissure, in and around until he crumpled and died. The poor bastard, he must have thought it was the loneliness that was getting to him. At the start anyhow. And when he became delirious, he was too far gone to help himself. Or maybe toward the end he knew he couldn't be helped and went down into the fissure where he could die without being a danger to anyone.

Maybe nothing. What in hell do you know about it? If he had rabies, then he would have hated water, even the smell of it, the idea of it, so he would never have gone down into the dampness of the fissure. You're just imagining that it'll be you who dies that way. If they don't eat you first.

What are you talking about? The bats can't eat you. Not the kind around here.

No, but the beetles.