Chapter 3: The Bargain in the Dark
I went down face first, the air punched out of me. But I wasn’t laying still on the pine needles. I was sliding backwards, up, over the dirt.I twisted up, flipped over onto my back, to see what the hell was going on.
A hand. Bigger than a man's chest, a hand held of my right ankle. No arm, no body. Just the hand. Translucent, black, lit from inside with threads of violet light that moved under the surface like water under ice. Six fingers. The palm was soft. That was what got me more than the size. Velvety, like the inside of a wrist. Under the softness something pulsed, more veins of pale violet light, slow as breathing, and a fine mist hung around the knuckles wherever they touched the air
A smell came with it, sharp and clean and wrong, ozone and crushed wet stone.
By then I was shouting and, dragging furrows with my hands. The pine needles came up in fistfuls. I got my fingers around a root and lost it, and took the skin off my palm doing it. The drag never hurried. It hauled me backward at a walking pace, patient as a man pulling a sled, and my heel cut a furrow through the duff.
The grip on my ankle was not wet and not warm, but cold the way a stone is cold at the bottom of a creek. and it had weight, real weight.
And it was pulling me to its home. That thought exploded in my mind and I screamed. I want to be honest about that. I was fifty-five years old an hour ago, and I screamed like a boy. I was loud, and long. And the sound went down the hill. And nobody down there heard it.
It dragged me back into the cave while I grabbed the last thing I could reach--a wedge of limestone the size of a loaf. It came out of the ground in my hand, and then the dark closed over me and the light was gone. I shut my eyes.
But the dark faded. The passage should have been black, maybe wet with condensation, maybe some moss.
But instead the walls had begun to glow. They pulsed, slow, the way a heart pulses, and each pulse threw geometric shapes across the wet floor, sharp-edged reflections sliding and folding over each other.
And there was a hum. It was so low I felt it, mostly, shaking my insides. The air tasted like a mouthful of pennies and old iron, and it was thick, a heavy hand pushing down on me. In the meantime, the hand that pulled me through it used no more effort than a man reeling in a trout.
Then it stopped, the hand did. It set my leg down on the floor. Released its grip.
I lay still, eyes closed. Waiting. And waiting. I might have fallen asleep, I honestly don’t know.
Then Somebody grabbed my wrist.
I swung at him or her. Or It. Whoever it was, they caught the punch out of the air.
"Hey. Hey. Look at me."