a look at some mangy dog, well, go right ahead.' Almost choking on the words, he got them out somehow. Damn it to hell - the idea was supposed to be that they didn't get split up.' He hoped she knew what she was doing. There again, she'd been in this game longer than he had. And that pissed Jake more than a little, too: the fact that Liz was in effect the boss here.'Torch,' said the old boy, taking a heavy rubber-jacketed flashlight from the shelf and handing it to Liz. 'Yer'11 need it. I keeps 'im in out o' the sun, which would surely fry 'is eyes. But it's dark in the back o' the shack there. And this time o' evenin' even darker in 'is cage.' When she looked uncertain, didn't move, he cocked his head on one side and said, 'Er, yer just follers the signs, is all.'
Liz looked at him, hefted the torch, said, 'You want me to go alone?'
'Can't very well get lost!' he said. But then, grumblingly, he hobbled out from behind the makeshift bar. 'It's these old pins o' mine,' he said. 'See, they don't much like ter go. But yer right - can't let a little lady go wanderin' about in the dark on 'er own. So just you foller me, miss. Just you foller old Bruce.' And then they were gone.Jake took a small pager out of his pocket and switched it on. Now if Liz got in trouble she only had to press the button on her own beeper and he would know it... and vice versa. For in this game it was just as likely that he would be the one to make a wrong move.Those were his thoughts as he stepped silently behind the bar, and passed through a second bead curtain hanging from the timbered ceiling to the floor. And as easily and as quickly as that he was into a horizontal mineshaft, and almost as quickly into something far less mundane ...Liz had followed the old man (Bruce? Hell of a lot of Australians called Bruce, she thought. There had to \>e at least as many as there were Johns in London) along the foot of the knoll to the lesser shack that leaned into an almost sheer cliff face.
It was quite dark now, and the torch he'd given her wasn't nearly working on full charge. The batteries must be just about dead. Of course, knowing the place as he did, that wouldn't much concern the old boy, but it concerned Liz. And despite that she followed slowly and carefully in old Bruce's footsteps - mainly to give Jake the time he needed to look the place over - still she stumbled once or twice over large rocks or into this, that, or the other pothole. But, in truth, much of her stumbling was a ploy, too, so that it was perhaps a good thing after all that the torch was almost spent. She thought so at the outset, anyway.
Until eventually: 'Here we are,' the old man said, turning a key in a squealing lock and opening an exterior screen door. Beyond that a second door stood ajar; and as old Bruce, if that really was his name, reached out an incredibly long arm to one side of Liz to push it fully open - at the same time managing to bundle her inside - so she recognized the smell of a lair.It was a primal thing, something that lies deep in the ancestral memories of every human being: to be able to recognize the habitat of a dangerous animal or animals. The musty, feral smell of a cavern where something dwells - or perhaps an attic where bats have hibernated for untold years - or maybe the reptile house in a zoo.But there are smells and smells, and this wasn't like anything Liz had ever come across before; or perhaps it was simply the tainted, composite smell of all of them. Until suddenly she realized that it wasn't just a smell - wasn't simply a smell - but her talent coming into play, and that the stench wasn't in her nostrils alone but also in her mind.'And then she had to wonder about its origin, the focus or point of emanation of this alien taint. Was it the shack - or the steel-barred, wall-to-wall