The cave echoed back at him as Artemus entered, his breath loud against the cold walls. The light of his candle did only so much against the gloom and the analytical side of his brain started to invent a device that would solve that problem. An invention that would magnify the light power of a candle ten fold. Something he would have to survive this little adventure to invent, he told himself, and kept moving forward.
The walls narrowed quickly, dropping down from almost twenty feet at the mouth of the cave to ten, eight, then six feet, crushing in at the sides. The delta like spread of water that had branched into the riverbank, tapered into a lightly flowing stream that flooded the floor of the cave as the walls closed in. He was soon forced to hold the lantern directly over his head, the rope down against his side, walking nearly sideways before he was given a little more breathing room he wasn't entirely certain he would reach. Arte pressed through three similar slender passages before the cavern opened up again.
The new 'room' was larger than the entrance had been and sported three distinct openings around its circumference. It wasn't until Arte got closer that he noticed the pick marks. Excavation tools had been used to widen the natural openings in the rock wall, to make the tunnels that branched off more uniform. In fact great detail had been put into making the three branches look as identical as possible. As if the miner in charge of the devilish doings had intended for whoever followed to get lost.
The water that flowed through the cave was coming from the central passage opposite where Arte had entered, and there was a slight breeze brushing past Gordon, in a hurry to escape to the outside world. Arte marked the passage he had just come from with several wide strokes of wax from one of the spare candles. Under the lamp light the candle wax was distinctive against the wall of the cave.
The most obvious next step was to backtrack the path of the runoff trickling through the cave. Instead Arte chose the tunnel on his left and followed it until it dead ended in a small rounded space. This tunnel was hardly natural, and the marks of the pick axe were pockmarked with holes for dynamite, and the black sweeping marks left over from dynamite blasts. A decoy, pure and simple.
Something to waste his time, Arte thought, and when he returned to the large cavern he marked the wall by the tunnel with wax, checked on his first wax mark, then chose the tunnel on the right.
He expected a similar waste of time and had gone forty feet down the winding passage before he realized just how severely the tunnel was beginning to slope. Worse, a trickle of water from somewhere had turned the floor of the passage into a slick, foul smelling mud and Arte was beginning to lose his purchase with every other step. When his foot slipped and he almost lost the lantern Arte slowed his forward momentum to a halt, wedged his left heel into a cranny and pressed his shoulders back against the wall, resting for a moment.
As he caught his breath he flashed the light around the narrow tunnel inspecting the walls and floor. There were no chisel marks, and he couldn't remember when he had last noticed any. Ahead he expected to find a gradual decline of mud and wet stone. Instead, five feet away from where he had stopped, the passage ended in a wide, open hole.
"Of course there's a giant pit at the end of the slippery dark tunnel..." He chided himself, then shifted so that he could cast some of the light into the hole. The light was reflected back toward him, flickering off of a hundred different surfaces. Arte edged closer, still keeping his foot wedged in the cranny, and met the open eyes of a bear. He flinched, but didn't draw back, realizing a second later that the bear was dead, speared through on half a dozen roughly made wooden poles that had been sharpened to a needle point. A crude trap, and probably a few months old. The corpse, however, was quite fresh.
On the other side of the deadly pit, the tunnel continued, but Arte could see no reason to pursue it. Getting back up the slick incline was going to be challenge enough. He was pulling his foot free and turning to the task when he heard a child's voice reverberating faintly down the tunnel. "Hello!?"
There was so much rock that Arte wasn't sure at first if the voice had come from further down the tunnel, or from the main chamber above. After a moment he responded in kind, shouting, "Hello!" Following the quiet repetition of his voice Arte heard what sounded at first like a cat's purr, rumbling through the rock around him. As the sound died he heard the young voice calling again. "Can somebody help me?"
"I'm here!" Arte shouted, "I can help you, where are you?"
In the silence Arte could hear water dripping, a sound that he didn't remember hearing on the way down. The purring sound followed then the young voice shouted over it all. "I'm in a cave. It's cold and wet!"
Arte sighed softly, then called, "Are you hurt at all?"
"My arm hurts, real bad. And there's a girl here." The sound of mild revulsion in the voice told Arte that he was speaking to a boy, and he smirked just a little, pressing his hand against the wall. To his surprise there was the slightest of vibrations feeding through the stone. Not a good sign.
"How big is the cave you're in?" Arte called, praying that the voice was indeed filtering down from the main cavern, and not from beyond the insurmountable pit full of spikes in front of him.
"Really big!" The voice filtered down, "And there are tunnels!"
Arte turned away from the pit and took his first step carefully, digging his heel hard into the mud and shifting his balance with the fingertips of one hand wedged into a break in the stone wall. The mud gave a little, but held long enough for him to repeat the process with his other foot. He'd taken three steps before his foot slipped and he went down hard on his stomach, the front of his clothes instantly soaked through with the wet mud.
"Should I go down one of them?" The voice came from above and Arte shouted, "No!" and felt the walls around him shudder. "Just talk to me until I find you." Arte pushed himself to his knees then getting his feet under him, and once more tried to navigate the slick floor as quickly as possible. The purring sound had turned into a louder, constant rumble, heralding a natural phenomenon that he knew this part of the country was especially susceptible to.
"What should I say?"
"The young lady with you, is she alright?" Arte called. He didn't dare put as much store in the shifting mud, and found that the surest way to travel was to straddle the floor of the tunnel, pressing his feet into the irregular formations where the rock walls met.
"She's sleeping...I think." The voice said, and Arte could hear the beginnings of the slightest note of despair in the boy's voice.
"What's your name, son?" Arte called.
"Jimmy!" The boy shouted back, and Arte couldn't help but smirk. He'd found a Jim, even if it wasn't the Jim he'd been looking for.
"Hang on, Jimmy, I'm almost to you." Arte shouted, sensing the breeze from the larger cavern even before he noticed the slight change in ambient light.
The tunnel began to flatten out again, the sand and rock drying out, giving Arte better purchase and easier travel. The dripping sound was fading as well, though the walls of the tunnel had been twice as damp as they had been on the way down.
He walked as fast as he could, leaving the tunnel in the same moment that the low rumble became a terrifying quake. Arte hastened his pace, running to the two children who were situated in the middle of the large cavern, covered in mud and caked in dust.
The boy could not have been more than seven and the girl younger, four or five, perhaps. The girl's dress, and the boy's shirt and pants were ripped, moth eaten and wet, and Arte could see that the boy's forearm was slicked with blood. He scooped up the girl without wasting much time on formalities. The way out was going to require squeezing through at least three very narrow passages, and they would only get narrower with the cavern shaking the way it was.
"Come along, Jimmy, on your feet." Arte encouraged and pointed the boy down the middle passage, marked by two strokes of candle wax. Light colored eyes met his through the caked muck on his face, before the boy nodded and ran ahead.
The quaking and shuddering held steady as they moved, the little boy scrambling over a small jumble of stone with remarkable grace for a child his age. Not grace, Arte thought, but adrenaline coupled with the fearlessness of youth. They navigated the first narrow passage with relative ease, the tunnel opening up for about forty yards before it began to narrow again. The light should have been getting brighter, at least a little, but it wasn't, setting off an alarm in the back of Arte's mind.
When Arte realized that he was sweating but could no longer feel the cool breeze, he shouted at Jimmy to stop before the youngster stepped into the second narrow cleft. The boy turned, eyes glinting against the pale light of the candle.
"I think the way is blocked. Stay here with her a moment." Arte ordered, setting the girl down and giving the boy a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder before he pressed past him and started into the passage.
With the walls so tight around him he could feel the mountain vibrating. Whatever was causing the quake was holding back, like a man suppressing a giggle at a funeral. It was going to let loose, but there would be no predicting it. And the passage wasn't getting any brighter.
If the way to the river was shut off already, Arte didn't want falling debris to seal them in the tunnels with no water. The airflow from the fourth tunnel, the one he had not tried, seemed to at least suggest that there was another way out. Arte hated playing the odds, but it truly was a game of chance at this point. Either he risked the narrow passage, or he put his hopes on the tunnel he hadn't yet tried.
The vibrations of the wall turned into an unsettling roar that showered debris on his head and Arte backed out of the narrow chute as quickly as he could, tripping and sprawling backwards into the wider tunnel, barely avoiding trodding over the two children. His decision made for him, Arte gathered up the girl and pointed Jimmy back the way they had come.
They navigated the narrow spot once more before the boy vaulted into the large open cavern, Arte hard on his trail.
"Do you remember which tunnel you came from?" Arte asked loudly, thinking that if the boy had come from the fourth tunnel he might know a little of what lay ahead. All he got was a slightly panicked shake of the head. The boy was lost, and Arte couldn't blame him. Rocks the size of his fist were starting to fall from the walls, landing with wet splats on the cave floor.
"Straight ahead then, get going." Arte ordered and Jimmy raced forward, disappearing into the tunnel, his roughly shod feet splashing into the stream that collected there. Arte had just ducked into the tunnel after him, when the main wave hit.
It felt as if the cave had been placed on the down side of a teeter totter and a mean giant had come along and leapt onto the up-side, tossing them in the air. Arte flew up and to the left, felt his shoulder and the side of his head impact the stone wall, his left ear ringing at the impact, then he was dumped back on the tunnel floor, slamming a knee into something hard and unforgiving. He heard the glass of the lantern shatter, and was distantly grateful that it contained a candle and not karosene. He did everything in his power to keep the girl in his arms from taking the brunt of his weight, and forced himself once more to his feet, calling for Jimmy over the roar of the quake.
Arte lurched ahead in the sudden darkness, the broken light now lost somewhere in the mix, keeping one hand ahead of him. When his fingers encountered roughly woven cloth Arte clamped down and felt Jimmy's hands dig into his forearm.
The shaking dwindled, the walls settling, groaning. The flow of the stream had changed, ebbing. Arte loosened his grip on the boy and patted his pockets for a spare candle until he realized that he still had the lantern, the flame had just gone out. He located a waterproofed match and struck it to life, carefully avoiding the jagged glass and lighting the candle again.
"At least we have light," Arte said, "at the absolute least." His left ear was ringing so loudly he could barely hear his own voice.
The tunnel ahead was clear, littered with pock marks from falling stones, but the structure had not collapsed and Arte handed the lantern to the boy and urged him on ahead. Jimmy's face was streaked with two fresh paths through the caked mud, grooves carved by tears, but he gave Arte a reassuring nod, the nod of a brave seven-year-old given an adult task, and ventured forward, frequently checking over his shoulder to make sure Arte was keeping pace.
As he walked, or rather limped on a now throbbing knee, Arte looked over the little girl. She seemed unharmed but for a goose egg that he could feel on the back of her head, and he could sense and hear her breathing. She was wet and cold, but there was nothing he could do at the moment to remedy that problem.
Jimmy was picking his way slowly but steadily up ahead of him, but Arte asked anyway, "You alright, Jimmy?"
Jimmy paused, one foot perched on a rock half his size, and looked back, breathing heavily. "I'm...I'm scared, mister."
Arte stopped as well, leaning against the cave wall, surprised suddenly at how hard his chest was heaving. He was scared too, he realized, but it had been so deeply buried under concern for the children, and duty, and all the other rediculous reasons he'd built up over the years for continuing this job, he hadn't noticed it.
"Yeah..." He said, forcing deeper breaths down his throat. "That's a good sign of a sane mind..." He muttered, and resettled the girl in his arms.
"Is she okay?" Jimmy asked, and Arte smiled again. She may have been a despised 'girl' but obviously the boy still cared.
"She'll be alright, I think, Jimmy. Is this your sister?" Arte asked.
"No. I don't got a sister." Was the boy's response before he turned and climbed over the large stone, then waited on the other side with the lantern held high."I don't think I got a sister."
The obstruction Jimmy had climbed over turned out to be the new addition to the tunnel that had dammed up the stream, as Arte discovered when his boot splashed down into the half-foot deep puddle of freezing water collecting on the other side. Eventually the water would crest the small stone and begin flowing again, water overcoming all other elements as it always did, but the shock of cold halfway up his calf was not welcome.
"Keep moving, Jimmy." Arte encouraged, watching as the boy tiredly pushed away from the wall. The sudden lethargy alarmed Gordon just a little, and as the tunnel rose slightly, opening and taking them out of the stream, Arte called for the boy to stop. He could hear the distinct change in the makeup of the ground from the squelching of saturated sand, to the scrape of dry sediment. Once he could, Arte set the little girl down again and knelt on his good knee to take the lantern from Jimmy. Once more the light played over the splash of blood on the boy's arm.
Arte felt his stomach drop when he discovered that the blood was the result of a sharp bone breaking through flesh. Shock, Arte realized. Both children were probably suffering from it, and Jimmy had the added danger of blood loss. Arte felt the boy's uninjured hand come to rest on his shoulder and a moment later the boy was leaning against him, Jimmy's head starting to droop. By the time the boy passed out, Arte had already put an arm around his waist and simply held onto him, his ear pressed to the boy's chest, pleased to hear the heartbeat, fast but strong enough.
Not for long, Arte thought. The children needed warm blankets and food, beds to sleep in, and time to recover from what had undoubtedly been a nightmare. But, none of those things existed in this god-forsaken cave.
The earthquake had done terrible things to the Doctor's lab. When Boy finally crawled out from beneath the heavy work table that had offered him shelter, he began to weep at what he saw. All but the vials that had been safely packed away in crates under the very same table was shattered and spilled, eking through the cracks in the table, or puddling on the ornate rugs the Doctor preferred to the sandy ground.
The Doctor's favorite toy, the turn table that made music had been destroyed. The base crushed on one corner by a giant stone, the metal funnel from which the sound came was dented and torn away from the machine. The disc that hid the sound had shattered, sitting like a desolate pie destroyed by blackbirds.
The medicines, the experiments...his precious toys. All that the Doctor had worried over was gone.
Even Walter was gone, missing from the little cage he had been in when the quake began. As Boy began to gather the shattered pieces of his hopes for the future, storing what little that remained under the sturdy work table, his only joy came in knowing that the Doctor had been very far away from the caves when the quake struck. The Doctor and his friend, Voltaire, they weren't due back until late that night. And Boy would have known if the Doctor had been in the cave.
Just as he had been informed about the new invader to his home. The invader! This reminded him about the patients and with a shout Boy hustled out of the lab and into the recovery room, terrified of what he would find.
Fourteen beds were within. Nothing more than mattresses and blankets set on the dirt floors, and until recently only three had been occupied.
One of those three was buried under rubble. The other two were quite clearly empty.
By the time Artemus reached the second big cavern the candle in the lantern was down to a trembling puddle of wax, the wick bravely swaying in time to Gordon's footsteps. There was little he could do about it, his arms full of unconscious children, literally tied to his chest and back. Via the dim light he could see that the second 'room' wasn't as large as the first had been, and there was only one option for travel. The opening straight ahead once more showed signs of human tampering and Arte could feel the breeze out of it.
He crossed the distance of wet, slopping sand with heavy plodding steps, his body one solid ache. Stopping at the opening that would undoutbedly lead him even further into the matrix of caves, he let the delicious breeze play over his face.
Would Jim have turned back by this point, he wondered? He'd passed ten or so alternate routes, opting against each in favor of following the path of the water. Could any one of those alternates have lead him to his partner, or to a shortcut out of this entrance to the underworld? How could the cave system be so elaborate? So thoroughly pockmarked by nature and by man's influence and yet remarkably, under the circumstances, stable?
Loosening the bindings of the rope that he had used to tie the children to his body, Arte carefully lowered first one sleeping child, then the other to the ground. He sipped from his canteen, rationing what was left for the sake of the children then worked to replace the dying candle in the lantern, careful to light the new one before the other sputtered out.
Once the lantern sat squarely on a pile of scooped and sculpted sand Arte looked to the children, checking on the young girl first. She was cold, her eyes sluggish to respond when he forced them open, but breathing steadily and resistant to having her eyes pried open. A good enough sign he decided, and removed his jacket, wrapping it around the girl before turning to Jimmy.
He was surprised to see slivers of light colored eyes glittering in the candle light, the boy watching him silently. Arte winced sympathetically. He'd stopped to take a closer look at the broken arm and do what he could to fix it. Neither part of the plan was going to feel very good and he had hoped to do them both while the boy was still unconscious.
"Jimmy..." Arte began, guiding the boy into a sitting position before he turned to start tearing at his own sleeve. The moment his hands stopped supporting the boy, however, Jimmy slumped back toward the ground. Alarmed Arte lunged forward, catching the boy and quickly pressing his fingers to the youth's carotid artery. His pulse was there, still beating strong but fast, and Arte felt the boy's chest expand with a slow breath. Yet the eyes were still half open.
Perhaps the boy slept that way, Arte thought, something familiar tickling at the back of his brain. He eventually found a way to prop Jimmy against his good knee and finished tearing off the sleeve of his shirt. He used the remaining unused candle and the cloth to make a loose splint over the break, pressing the bone back through the skin. The young man shifted and groaned in his sleep but did not wake. The girl was still unconscious as well, but breathing and shivering. A sign that the body was fighting for warmth on its own. A good sign, as far as Arte understood it.
He fastened both children to his person the way he had before and rose, trying to ignore the painful stiffness in his swelling knee. His ear and head throbbed as well, the ear that had impacted the wall, but the pain dimmed as he stepped once more into the draft of the breeze and entered the next tunnel, wider still than those before it.
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead!" He quoted to the stones, then continued the speech to an adoring audience of one. "In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility:"
"But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger..."
The words echoed through the sound magnifying tunnels that the mice used, rattling in Boy's ears, and shaking his nerve soundly. He was so accustomed to being alone. To only hearing the voices of the children, or the Doctor. This new voice was boisterous, and loud, and far too confident. It sounded dangerous, and yet there was humor.
Not the zealot like laughter of the Doctor, but a different kind of humor. The kind that maybe laughed in the face of danger, or perhaps only laughed at...no WITH the insecurities of man.
The voice was vibrant. And educated. The accent crisp and strange to Boy's ears. He listened, pausing in his work.
"Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage; then lend the eye a terrible aspect..."
The voice paused, a strange theatrical growl entering the tone. "Let...pry..." The voice gasped, sounding now very much like the Doctor. Focused, passionate, determined. "...through the portage of the head like the brass cannon! Let the brow o'erwhelm it as fearfully as doth a galled rock o'erhang and jutty his confounded base...Swill'ed...gah!"
The voice stopped, and Boy could hear loud panting come through the holes in the rock. Holes he had dug, and blasted, with carefully packed powder and nitrate. Holes and tunnels made to aid him in protecting his home.
He hadn't thought about the earth quaking. The shaking turning his dream to so much rubble.
And he was wasting time! Precious time, that the Doctor would not like wasted.
Boy suddenly hated the voice. Hated it for distracting him, for causing him to pause in his duties. He hated the voice, and he hated the newcomer who had brought the quake and destruction with him.
No...he had work to do. To fix things. To make it ready for the Doctor. Because even though the newest boy was missing, the boy that Boy knew was so very important, he had still succeeded at capturing the ENEMY.
The Doctor could still be pleased about that.
An unexpected divot had stalled the soliloquy. He'd stepped before the lantern had lit the depression in the earth and twisted his already painful knee. The flash of white heat had upset his balance and it had taken everything in his power to keep his feet and avoid crushing the children against either the rock walls or the floor.
He'd gritted his teeth and found his balance and waited for the throbbing to stop, the whole time cursing his partner. He was sick of this cave, sick of the darkness, and sick of the worry. Why Jim had felt the need to traipse off into this god forsaken hole with nothing but a sixteen-year-old for back-up confounded him. Even Orrin would have made a decent partner in exploration and might have ensured West's safe return, thus preventing Gordon from ever having to enter this ridiculous cave in the first place.
Then he'd be warm, safe, confined to a well appointed varnish car where he could solve the mystery of the sudden appearance of children with his mind, and logic, and plain genius. He wouldn't be the sole adult responsible for two young lives, and he wouldn't be once more plotting the date of his retirement because...dammit he was told old for this sort of nonsense!
But what choice did he have...?
"Shakespeare..." Arte sighed, finally, gritting his teeth as he took a careful, testing step forward on his bad leg. The joint held his weight, barely, and he quickly took another step forward, "...is inappropriate for this misadventure, children." He mused, knowing he was talking to himself, but entertaining the idea that he wasn't necessarily going insane if he was doing it for the sake of the little ones. "What do you say to a little Lewis Carrol, hmm? Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths...ah...they outgrabe!"