Roderick Gordon - Deeper

He whistled in astonishment.

"That's one humongous hole!" he exclaimed, immediately going to the brink and peering down.

His vertigo affecting him, Cal maintained a wide margin between himself and the edge of the enormous drop.

Will was examining the curvature of the Pore through his headset. "Man, this is big. Really big."

"Yes," Elliott said. "You could say that."

"Can't even see to the other side," Chester muttered to no one in particular.

"It's about a mile at its widest," Elliott said, taking a swig of water. "And who knows how deep it is? Nobody who's ever fallen in has come back to tell the story — except, a long time ago, they say a man hauled himself out of it."

"I heard about him. Abraham someone," Will said, recalling that Tam had talked about him.

"Many people thought he was a fraud," Elliott went on. "Either that or his brains were cooked by fever." She stared deep into the Pore. "But there's a heap of old legends about some sort of" — she hesitated, as if what she was about to say was ludicrous — "sort of place below."

"What do you mean?" Will asked, quickly turning to her. He had to know more, regardless of how Chester might react. "What place?"

"Oh, here we go again with his twenty questions," murmured Chester, right on cue. Will ignored him.

"They say there's another world, but Drake thought it was a load of old codswallop," she said, screwing on the top of her canteen.

As they passed around the edge of the Pore, there were no further signs of any more Limiters. Within a few minutes of fast marching, Will noticed the outline of some sort of regular structure. Through his lens it became clear that it wasn't a building but a massive arch.

Although crumbled and eroded, the arch had an icon on its keystone that he recognized. Carved into it were three divergent lines: the same symbol that was on the jade pendant Uncle Tam had given him just before his final showdown with the Styx Division in the Eternal City.

While pondering this coincidence, Will was distracted by the peculiar sight of papers strewn all over the ground on the far side of the arch. Chester and Elliott had already picked up a few of these pages and were examining them.

"What's all this?" Will asked as he joined them.

Chester put some pages in his hand without comment.

One glance was all it took.

"Dad!" Will exclaimed. "My Dad!"

A number of the sheets contained pictures of stones, on which were painstakingly drafted sketches of strange and complex symbols. Densely penciled notes filled the other pages. The unmistakable handwriting of his father littered the margins.

Will scanned the ground, pushing through the loose pages with his boot. He found a rather ratty pair of brown wool socks knotted together, with large holes in the toes, and then, bizarrely, a Mickey Mouse toothbrush, well used from the looks of it.

"I wondered where that had gone!" Will smiled, pushing against the grimy and worn bristles with his thumb. "Silly old Dad… he took my toothbrush with him!"

But any cheerfulness evaporated as he came across the blue-and-purple-marbled cover of a notebook. It was clear then where all the pages he come from. He snatched it up and studied the label stuck of the front, a bookplate with a bespectacled owl at the side and Ex Libras printed in swirly copperplate lettering across the top.

"Journal Three… Dr. Roger Burrows," Will read aloud

He dashed back to the arch. Passing under it, he didn't pause as he moved out onto the platform, immediately spotting a weather-worn flight of stone steps that led off from it. Reaching the last one, he stooped to peer below. He couldn't see anything. But as he raised his eyes, blinking as the rain fell on his face, something caught his attention.

Straight in front of him was his father's blue-handled geological hammer, its tip lodged in the rock. He leaned over to retrieve it. It came loose after several tugs, and he regarded it for a few seconds before renewing his efforts to try to see farther down the walls of the Pore. Even through the lens of the headset, he saw nothing there.

Deep in thought, he rejoined the others.

"What happened here?" he said, his voice brittle with apprehension.

Elliott and Chester were silent — neither of them able to give him an answer.

"My dad…?" Will said to Chester.

Chester looked into the space between them, his face expressionless and his lips tightly clamped as if he was disinclined to say anything.

"He's probably all right," Elliott said. "If we keep going, we might…"

"Yes, we might catch up with him," Will completed her sentence, grabbing at the suggestion to give himself some comfort. "I bet he just left these things behind by accident… dropped them… He's a bit forgetful sometimes… His mind churned with explanations for his father's absence as he looked back at the arch. "But… not… careless," he added slowly. "I mean… it's not as if his rucksack's here, or…"

A terrified yelp from Cal yanked him from his thoughts. The boy had been lounging against a sizable boulder a little way back from the edge of the Pore, and leaped up as if he'd been stung by a bee.

"It moved! I swear the stinking rock moved!" he shouted.

The rock had moved, and it was still moving. Like some miracle, it had risen up on jointed legs and was rotating. As it came to a stop, they all saw the huge, vacillating antennae. The machinelike mouthparts gave a single clack.

"Ohmygosh!" Chester shrieked.

"Oh, do shut up!" Elliott rebuked him. "It's only a cave cow ."

The boys watched as the insect — Dr. Burrows gargantuan "dust mite" and one-time traveling companion — clacked again, and then trundled cautiously forward. Bartleby scampered around its circumference, venturing forward to sniff at it and then retreating back again, as if he didn't quite know what to make of the creature.

"Shoot it!" Chester exhorted Elliott as he shielded himself behind her, petrified. "Kill it! It's horrific!"

"It's only a baby ," Elliott said, quite unconcerned as she went up to it and slapped its thick exoskeleton with a dull thud. "They're harmless. They graze on algae, not meat. You don't need to be…"

Something speared on the cave cow's mouthparts silenced her. Patting the insect again, she leaned forward to retrieve it.

It was Dr. Burrows's backpack, badly torn and turned inside out.

Will approached her slowly and took it from her.

His eyes said it all.

"So this thing… this cave cow… you say it's harmless, but could it have hurt my father?"

"Not a chance. Even the adults wouldn't harm a hair on your head, unless one of them sat on you by accident. I told you, they don't eat flesh." She put her hand over Will's as he continued to clutch the rucksack, and pulled the bag toward her face so she could sniff at the ruined canvas. "Thought so… it had food in it. That's what the cow was after."

Will wasn't reassured as he glanced repeatedly between the stationary cave cow and the arch. His brow creased with concern.

It didn't look good and everyone knew it.

"Sorry, Will, but we can't hang around," Elliott said. "The sooner we get clear of here, the better."

"No, you're right," he agreed.

As Elliott, Chester, and Cal set off again, Will rushed around, gathering up as many of the pages as he could and stuffing them inside his jacket. Then, fearing he might be left behind, he ran to catch up with the others, the Mickey Mouse toothbrush clasped firmly in his hand.

"These… boots… are…"

Lines of the song ran through Sarah's befogged head. She was half grunting, half gasping odd snatches from it as the Limiters on either side forced her to keep walking, each step causing the most terrible pain in her hip, as if barbed wire was being slowly twisted deep in her flesh.