P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“Where’s Nathan?” I asked, shotgun ready. The dogs did their usual running around after greeting Carrie.

“Oh, he’s hanging around,” she said, indicating the other end of the rope. I walked over to where the rope disappeared into a stand of hawthorn. I pushed through the tangle and finally got to see the glass hole.

It was indeed an ancient lava tube: It looked like a long funnel, perhaps twenty, thirty feet across at the top and necking down to twelve feet across about a hundred feet down. The sides were polished basalt, and I could see why they called it the glass hole. At the bottom was a pool of dark blue water. At first, I thought the water was reflecting the sky, but then realized it couldn’t be-the tube went down at about a sixty-degree angle, so that water had to be connected to the main lake on the other side of the black tower. At the bottom of the rope, halfway down, was Nathan, hanging on with both hands and swinging gently from side to side.

“Okay,” I said. “How’d you manage this trick?”

“He got a little hands-on after he’d sent his boys out to find you,” she said wearily. “So I lay back and let him. Once he was distracted, I head-butted him, kneed him, whacked his limpy leg again, stuck an elbow in each eye, and then cold-cocked him with that tree branch over there by the fire.” She looked up at me. “Is Mose-?”

“Mose is gonna be okay, I think. He had his old police vest on under that coat.”

“Thank God,” she said. “I heard that round hit him and he went down like a tree. I saw all that blood while those ugly fucks were tying me up, and I just knew…”

“They were there already?”

“Apparently,” she said. “Nathan positioned them outside our camp, waited for his shot, and then they piled in and got me before I could get to a weapon.”

“That’s our Nathan,” I said, looking down at the hanging figure in the hole. “I managed to surprise his helpers. The bearded guy shot his buddy by mistake, and I took him and one dog out. The only problem we still have is that there are four of his dogs out there somewhere.”

“What do we do with Nathan?” she asked.

“Cut the rope,” I said. “Or not-let him hang down there until he dies. Except-”

“What?”

“First I want to talk to him. The bearded guy said they brought one of the kids up here, but the rest were still with Grinny.”

She became immediately alarmed. “I haven’t seen her,” she said, and then looked over at the hole.

I helped her tie off the rope, and then we both went back over to the edge of the glass hole. There was shrubbery growing right up to the lip, and woods creatures had probably been dying in that thing for centuries. Those shining sides looked entirely alien among the bushes and rocks at the top. There was absolutely no way anything could climb back out of that deadly funnel, especially if the climber was wet. It reminded me of one of those pitcher plants that trap insects. The light reflecting in from the tube’s other end in the main lake made the hole look almost infinite in depth.

I had thought that Nathan was holding his end of the rope, but when I looked closely, I could see that she had tied a noose around his two wrists. He was literally hanging from the rope by his hands, which looked larger than they would normally be. I shouted down the hole and heard my voice reverberating off those glasslike sides. Nathan raised his head but could not open his swollen eyes. Carrie had apparently grown tired of being abducted by Creighs; he looked positively battered.

“Hey, Nathan, can you swim?” I said.

I thought he muttered something, but he was too far down for me to hear it. “Let’s pull him up some,” I said, and so we did. We got him to within ten feet of the lip, but the sides were so smooth he might as well still have been a hundred feet down. He was, in fact, positively battered.

“Where’s the child, Nathan?” I asked.

He cracked one eye and glared up at us. The rope had pulled him into an elongated bow shape, and he was probably having trouble breathing. Broke my heart. He’d dropped Mose without a qualm with a long-range rifle shot and then taken Carrie back to his camp so that he could throw her into this alien geographical feature, where she would absolutely never be found. After he had gratified himself. The fact that they had a semi-permanent camp up here meant they’d done all this before.

“Where’s the little girl, Nathan?” I asked again. I kicked the rope, which had the effect of squeezing his purple hands.

He grunted with the pain. “Ain’t no girl,” he said, finally.

“Your bearded buddy said you brought one up here-he’s dead, by the way, along with his pal who had the big dog on the leash-so where is she? You throw her down this hole?”

“Y’all go to hell,” he said, closing the puffy eye.

“Cam, look,” Carrie said. She was pointing down into the lava-glass funnel. Way down there, in the water and at the edge of the lava walls, a tiny white object had appeared. It looked like a piece of paper, but it wasn’t. I suddenly had a very bad feeling.

“What’s that down there, Nathan? Down there in the water?”

Nathan tried to look down but couldn’t. His arms had to be just about screaming by now, but I had zero sympathy.

“Get on the very end of that rope,” I told Carrie. “Belay it around that tree right there, and then I’m going to drop this bastard.”

Carrie did exactly as I asked. I took up the tension on the rope, she wrapped the very end of it around the tree, and then I let go. Nathan slid down the side of the tube like a luge rider, yelling all the way. He hit the water below with a clumsy splash and disappeared until the rope snapped taut, and then he burst back up to the surface. Without hands, he couldn’t swim, so he went right back down again. I let him do this three times and then hauled in on the rope until his arms and head remained above water. I gave him a minute to breathe and then told him to go get the white thing that was floating about ten feet from him. He looked small and helpless all the way down there, which I thought was just about perfect.

He refused to move, so I tied off the rope to keep his head above water and then went and got my rifle.

“Cam,” Carrie began, but I waved her off.

“I want him talking, but he needs some encouragement,” I said. I knelt down at the lip of the lava tube and put a round three inches from his face. The sound effects were interesting, as was the knifelike slash of the bullet into the water right next to his face. I fired two more rounds, each one a little closer, and he finally yelled, “All right.”

I gave him some slack with the rope, and he crabbed sideways with his body and then reached down to pick up the white thing. It became obvious that his hands weren’t working anymore as he kept dropping it. I yelled down for him to grab it with his teeth, and, when he did, we both pulled on that rope with all we had. Nathan wasn’t a little guy, but the hole wasn’t vertical, either. Being wet, he slid up that glassine surface with very little friction. When his face got to the top, framed by his two straining arms, I stared at the white thing he held in his teeth.

So did Carrie. She began to curse him in a low monotone, using words I hadn’t heard since the Marines. Then I saw what it was: that frilly little cap that Honey Dee had worn when she came up to the cave and brought us the message from Grinny, the one with the crude yellow bees embroidered on it. This evil motherfucker had thrown her down there to her death. And she hadn’t been the first, as I kept reminding myself.

Nathan heard our reaction and for the first time looked afraid. I had trouble framing the words. “What-have-you-done?” I said through clenched teeth.