Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,67

aware of its darker shape an instant before he blundered into it. He rested against its cool solidity for a moment, his knees rubbery, head swimming after the exertion. When he felt stronger once again, he began to inch his way along the rock face, fumbling for an opening in the wall of the pit.

There—a patch of darkness less intense opened out of the stone. He dared not even consider the possibility that this might not be the shaft that was hidden behind the cairn. Brandon fought back unconsciousness as it surged over him once more, forced his muscles to respond. Once through this passage, Olin would be able to find him. He stopped to crawl into the tunnel, and the rock was coated with a musty stickiness.

Brandon wriggled forward across the moist stone. The sensation was already too familiar, when his out-thrust fingers clawed against a man’s boot. Kenlaw’s boot. Kenlaw’s body. In the shaft ahead of him.

Brandon was too stunned to feel terror. His tortured mind struggled to comprehend. Kenlaw’s body lay in the farther chamber, beyond the other passage by which he had returned. And Brandon knew a dead man when he came upon one. Had he circled the cavern, gone back the way he had come? Or was he delirious, his injured brain tormented by a recurring nightmare?

He clutched the lifeless feet and started to haul them back, as he had done before, or thought he had done. The boots were abruptly dragged out of his grasp.

Brandon slumped forward on his face, pressing against the stone to hold back the waves of vertigo and growing fear. Kenlaw’s body disappeared into the blackness of the tunnel. How serious was his head injury? Had he imagined that Kenlaw was dead? Or was it Kenlaw ahead of him now in this narrow passage?

Brandon smothered a cackling laugh. It must not be Kenlaw. Kenlaw was dead, after all. It was Olin Reynolds, or someone else, come to search for him.

“Here I am!” Brandon managed to shout. “In here!”

His lips tasted of blood, and Brandon remembered the wetness he had pressed his face against a moment gone. It was too late to call back his outcry.

New movement scurried in the tunnel, from either end. Then his night vision became no blessing, for enough consciousness remained for Brandon to know that the faces that peered at him from the shaft ahead were not human faces.

•VII•

Olin Reynolds was a patient man. Age and Atlanta had taught him that. When the sun was high, he opened a tin of Vienna sausages and a pack of Lance crackers, munched them slowly, then washed them down with a few swallows from a Mason jar of blockade. Sleepy after his lunch, he stretched out on the seat and dozed.

When he awoke, the sun was low, and his joints complained as he slid from the cab and stretched. Brandon and Kenlaw should have returned by now, he realized with growing unease. Being a patient man, he sat on the running board of his truck, smoked two cigarettes and had another pull from the jar of whiskey. By then dusk was closing, and Reynolds decided it was time for him to do something.

There was a flashlight in the truck. Its batteries were none too fresh, but Reynolds dug it out and tramped toward the mouth of the cave. Stooping low, he called out several times, and, when there came no answer to his hail, he cautiously let himself down into the cavern.

The flashlight beam was weak, but enough to see that there was nothing here but the wreckage of the moonshine still that had been a going concern when he last set foot within the cavern. Reynolds didn’t care to search farther with his uncertain light, but the chance that the others might have met with some accident and be unable to get back was too great for him to ignore. Still calling out their names, he nervously picked his way along the passage that led from the rear of the antechamber.

His batteries held out long enough for Reynolds to spot the sudden drop-off before he blundered across the edge and into space. Standing as close to the brink as he dared, Reynolds pointed his flashlight downward into the pit. The yellow beam was sufficient to pick out a broken heap of a man on the rocks below the ledge.

Reynolds had seen death often enough before, and he didn’t expect an answer when he called out into the darkness