Following the stream had become a good, reliable mantra. Even if the walls seemed closer, the darkness deeper than the candle could penetrate, the stream was an undeniable sign of hope. It had to stem from somewhere, Arte reasoned, some source from beyond the cave. Streams came from mountains, he told himself. Mountains that were capped with snow. Snow that came from the heavens. Somewhere that stream was fed by the outside world.
When the tunnel unexpectedly split in a Y Arte automatically followed the path of the stream without a second glance. A dozen yards later he encountered a wall. A jumble of stone and mud had filled the tunnel from floor to ceiling. There were gaps, crevices, the stream still merrily trickling through the rock, following a path that it was clearly accustomed to, but there was room for the water, and the water only.
As he stared numbly at the wee cracks that allowed neither light, nor perceivable air flow through, Arte felt his spirits drop.
Man was not meant for darkness, he thought, turning around and carefully working his way back to the source of the split. Man was meant for sunshine, daylight, bright breezy days, and brilliant, star filled nights. These caves were meant for bats and bugs and all the slimy, ugly things that crawled about in the shadows, for fear of being seen and squashed in the light.
Not for him, and certainly not for the children.
By the time he returned to the Y Arte had to stop and lean against the upright column of rock separating the tunnels. The alternate opening at least still boasted a flow of air and Arte took bracing breaths, quelling the panic that had begun to close the back of his throat, before he stepped forward again.
At first the tunnel narrowed, forcing Arte into a painful hunch that put the weight of his young burdens squarely on his thighs and weak knee. The pain was worse than he expected, and he slowed his pace dramatically, moving as though he carried pure nitrate. The breeze became audible, starting with a whistle that became a gale as the walls closed in. Arte was beginning to imagine, with dread, the tiny cannon sized hole that was going to end his journey, the backtracking he would be forced to do. All the other discouraging options he had yet to try.
He hadn't bothered to count the hours he'd been in the cave, hoping that they would be inconsequential once he was outside again. Now he wondered how long they had been trapped.
Before he'd finished the calculations the tunnel opened again and to Arte's relief the ambient light changed drastically. The tunnel expanded into a cavern that was the smallest of the three he had discovered so far, but offered the most choices. Five pick-marked openings, all of them dark but one. The one that fed the stream of air into the cave. The way out...it had to be. Arte lurched forward, no longer needing the candle to light the way.
The breeze was sharper, colder, and Arte felt himself shiver as he stepped into the first faint filter of sunlight he had seen in too long. It glittered off the moisture on the natural cave walls and filtered through a film of dust in the air. The warmth of the beam of light overwhelmed the chill the closer Arte got to the egress and when he finally stumbled to a halt at the base of a steep incline of fallen rock he pushed his palm into the shaft of light and was surprised at the sudden, extreme heat it provided.
It was daylight still, up above. He would have time to climb out, to orient himself and perhaps find the supplies, or at least gather firewood and set up a camp for the night. He need only climb up to the exit.
Taking a deep breath Arte leaned into the shoulder of the first massive rock, lifted his left leg and planted his foot, pressing up against the weight of tired muscles, the mass of both children, and hefting himself up a foot and a half. He found purchase above his head, straining shoulder muscles that had all but frozen against the dig of the rope, and pulling until he could wedge his right foot into a solid toe hold, and seek another hold with his left. One foot, then one hand at a time, careful not to crush the young girl against the stone as she began to rustle in the confines of the rope and his coat, Arte struggled up the final obstacle keeping him from that which he so desperately desired.
Freedom.
Day light.
He was breathing hard, struggling against the debilitating pain in his knee when he was first able to press his face into the opening. He expected to find blue skies, clouds, trees, perhaps a stream bed flowing past or snowy ground dotted with pines and redwoods. The light was blinding him and it took a moment to get high enough, swinging his right leg over the final boulder, before he could see beyond it...into a room.
If it weren't for the rock walls he would have thought he'd just climbed through the window of a cabin. Rugs covered the floors, overlapping to create an island of woven color. The light that wasn't sunlight after all, emanated from several bright kerosene lanterns mounted to the stone ceiling by bolts that had been driven into the rock. Phalanges of reflective, shining metal had been fastened around the source of the flame to reflect the light creating the powerful and enticing beam. The room was warm and inviting, laid out with a dinner table and chairs, a bed in the corner, a heavy brass tub full of water and a chest for clothes.
A solitary door, set into the carved stone walls, served as the only other exit for the room and it was made of heavy oak and brass, with iron bars in the window. Probably locked. It looked like the door to a jail cell.
This was a trap, Arte thought. A mouse trap, a man trap. The cheese? Precisely the sort of thing that a weary traveler would want most after hiking arduously through the caves. There was food on the table, but it looked like it had been there for most of the day. The water in the bath was clean looking, but not hot. A fire might have once glowed from the grates of the pot belly stove, but it was dead now, untended for several hours.
The earthquake, Arte thought, must have disrupted the routine of whoever tended this place. It had done some damage to the room, knocking the bed away from the wall, and the chest of drawers cockeyed. Water had spilled from the tub soaking the rugs around it and one of the chairs had been knocked over.
As he swung his other leg over the barrier Arte noted the ladder leading down into the room, but didn't use it. There was a scales balancing in his head, weighed down on the one side by suspicion and doubt, and on the other by fatigue, pain and need.
He was hungry, and the children had to be also. He was thirsty and in pain, and needed to take the time to look after his injuries and those of the children. He was tired, so very tired...but this room had all the earmarks of the sort of accommodations that Dr. Miguelito Loveless tended to provide. Undoubtedly the food or the water would be poisoned or drugged, a trigger somewhere on the entrance was likely to sound an alarm and close off the tunnel the minute he stepped through.
It could mean capture, but it could also mean survival, this room. And the restless girl and boy now moving about and moaning against him were tipping the scales whether he liked it or not.
Arte craned his neck to look over the round stone entrance, then down the length of the ladder checking for strings, levers or notches. But whatever trap was likely to close over the entrance once he stepped into the room was invisible, as was the trigger that set it off. Finely crafted.
"I expected no less..." Arte muttered to himself, then finally made his decision, stepping down on the first rung of the ladder, turning and descending into the room carefully and quietly.
He was about to step straight down to the floor but thought better of it and carefully stepped as far to the side of the base of the ladder as he could manage, eyeing the stone entrance above.
No alarms sounded. No barrier snapped down over the stone hole.
Carefully Arte knelt on his good knee and pulled back the rug on which the ladder sat and smirked with satisfaction when he saw the rectangular outline of a pressure plate into which the ladder itself had been planted. It might not be the only trigger in the room but it was the main trigger, Arte thought. Leaving the plate uncovered, Arte pushed himself back to his feet, turning as he did. Or at least he tried to.
His knee, apparently, had had enough. He managed to rise only a few feet before he felt something snap, and white hot pain shot through his leg and up his spine. He let out a cry and desperately reached out to catch himself on the ladder with his left hand, his right swinging back and slapping against the stone wall behind him. The pain was overwhelming, bursting into his head with the rapid pulse of his heart beat and storming against his equilibrium. He wouldn't be upright for long he realized and lurched toward the bed, digging into the knots that held the children against him, and lowering both to the surface of the bed. Jimmy he managed to lay on the bed gently. The girl flopped with more force than he intended, moments before he crumpled to the floor and once more into darkness.
An alarm sounded. Not a very loud alarm, as the bell had probably been dented or warped by the earthquake. But Boy heard the sound as it altered the environment around him and stopped in his work, trying to remember what the sound meant.
He had forgotten about the trap in all the excitement. The room that lay in wait for the curious and lost, for the experiment subjects that weren't lured in by other means. The room that had successfully trapped Mr. West and Miss Cherry. Someone else had entered the room and Boy wondered who.
The voice he had heard earlier, of course, Boy chided himself, turning back to the rough handled broom and dust pan, collecting the last of the broken glass and dumping it into the large refuse pail. He had returned the lab to some semblance of its former glory, and returned the various machines to a glimmer of their former function. There was only one crate remaining of the Doctor's precious Fons adulescentia, the vital ingredient in the formula.
Boy could only hope that he had managed to re-calibrate the machines appropriately, and watched with intelligent, mismatched eyes as the swell of light blue liquid bubbled in one beaker, swirled through several feet of tubing, and dripped languidly into a second. There it mixed with another liquid that was black, viscous and always kept as ice cold as possible.
These two churned together, the one causing the other to constantly expand and contract until something the color of the sky at midnight funneled into a series of graduated cylinders, tripping down into a wide, rectangular receptacle. Here the greatest amount of heat and pressure was applied, constantly boiling the mixture, sending a backwards cascade of chemical mist upward into a wide filter. There the mist formed and crystallized, the crystals cleared every five hours by Boy's own hand, and deposited into a shallow vat of the Doctor's Fons adulescentia where they dispersed again, mixing and changing the precious and mysterious liquid into something else. Something more important. Something that could be used for good or for evil.
Boy had seen what it could do. He had seen it work miraculously, and kill just as miraculously.
What if HE used it? What if Boy employed the first of the new doses and gave it to his newest visitor before the Doctor arrived. Would then the Doctor's expected ire be reduced? Would then the Doctor be delighted and overlook the loss of the precious new patients?
The idea appealed to Boy, and he licked warped lips in anticipation. A few more hours, he thought, only a few more hours and he could test this first new batch. Just in time...
Arte was in a happy place. A very happy place that contained a memory of a gathering at the White House. A gathering to which he had brought Louise, the thirty-one-year old daughter he had only recently been reunited with, and Hannah, Louise' older sister. The gathering had been bright and gay and filled with notable scholars of the capital and surrounding areas. It had done what he had hoped it would, opening his daughter's world and giving her and her sister the opportunity to meet with professionals in their field, to establish contacts and hopefully begin their journey into a profession that under most circumstances had no consideration for the fairer sex. Arte had no doubt that Louise and Hannah were well on their way to changing that.
Fatherhood had been a foreign concept to Gordon, especially in light of the fact that he had never known his own father. Yet this year's missadventures seemed to be constantly placing him in that role. It had begun with an orphaned Ute child and now he had Louise. And something else, something nagging at the back of his mind. Fatherhood and the name Artemus Gordon (or for that matter, James West) had never belonged in the same sentence together and yet..here he was. Here they were.
When Arte woke, the topic of fatherhood was right there at the brink of his consciousness, gradually overridden by various sensations. Cold...and wet, his face was damp and chilled and the rest of his body uncomfortably laid out on something hard and unforgiving. There was a consistent weight over most of his chest and lower body, a little heavier against his legs, where the occasional movement jarred him with pain radiating from his right leg. And another pain, a repetitive pain that jolted near his left ear, over and over again.
Arte cleared his throat and worked at opening his eyes. His head was beginning to pound, his throat thick and raw as if he'd been talking for days without end. He vaguely remembered something about Shakespeare and then something else about Lewis Carroll. Then he remembered what the other memory had been and jerked his head upright, desperately blinking the fog from his eyes.
The little girl knelt on his right side, a wet, stained cloth in her left hand, concerned brown eyes peering into Arte's from less than five feet away. "You awake now Mister?"
Arte moved his hands, fished them out from under the blanket and carefully pushed the girl back a few feet with a gentle palm against her side. He nodded in response to the girl's question and pushed himself up onto his elbows to find the young girl sitting crosslegged and pressed against his bad knee.
"You was sleepin' on the floor, Mister." The girl offered, concern, fear and uncertainty filling round, brown eyes. "I woulda put you on the bed but..." The girl looked sadly up at the surface of the mattress, then back to Arte. He followed her gaze and saw that she had tried to tear the blanket off the bed, but stopped when Jimmy's unconscious form got in the way. Instead she had tugged the second, folded blanket off the foot of the bed and it now lay over his legs.
"S'alright." Arte said, trying to force reassurance into a voice that sounded rough and groggy. "I'm...I'll be alright. Are you alright, Miss..."
"Mm..Susie." The girl said, drawing her knees up. "I'm Susie, but I don't know who he is." She said tossing her thumb over her shoulder.
Arte smirked a little at the boy and said, "That's alright, we met earlier. My name is Arte."
"Hi, Arte." Susie greeted softly, then scooted a little closer to Arte's chest, laying a hand against the blanket. "Do you wanna get up now?"
Arte looked around the still brightly lit room, considered his options then nodded. "Yes, I do think that would be best."
Under his direction the little girl went to one of the chairs set at the table and managed to drag it over to the bed. Arte was able to muscle his way up into the chair, not trusting the heavy, throbbing pain in his knee to support his weight, and moved from the chair to the bedside where he was able to sit up and examine his other charge.
Susie had apparently been busy. The pain in his ear had been caused by her ministrations with a wet napkin. She had used it to clean up Jimmy's face and hands, and her own, and the cloth still clutched in her hand was now stained with blood. His own. She still wore the mud stained clothing and she might have tried to comb her hair, but a nasty looking clump of a knot arrested the attempt near her shoulders.
"How long have I been sleeping?"
"Not very long." Susie offered brightly, taking a step towards the bed and carefully lifting a cup full of water to the seat of the chair. She dipped her cloth into the vessel, and brought it back towards Arte's pulsing head. He intercepted the cloth gently and felt at the crust of blood that had collected around a split in the arch of his ear, and caked through his sideburns.
"Your ear was bleedin'," Susie offered, "but I made it stop. And cleaned off some of the dirt."
"That was smart..." Arte muttered, his voice betraying some of the surprise he felt as he swiped the cloth at his ear a few times. She looked young, had to be very young, and yet showed the sense of a child much older, even of an adult. "How old are you?"
Susie thought for a minute then held up her hand with all of her fingers extended.
Only five! It couldn't possibly be, and yet there she was, looking frightened and alone, just like any other five year old. Arte glanced over at the boy, watching his chest rise and fall, wondering how old he was. It took him a moment to realize that Susie was staring at him expectantly. He gave her a look of askance in return and Susie prompted, "How old are you?"
Arte pursed his lips in annoyance and found he had to actually stop to think about the number. "Old." He said finally, and the face he made prompted a giggle from Susie.
Arte scanned the room, noting once again the food on the table. "Did you try to eat or drink anything?" He asked, and was met with solemn, shaking head. She looked hungry. They both had to be. Arte sighed and said, "I hate to tell ya, but we would be better off not eating that food."
"The food is safe!" Said a voice that caused Susie to jolt, and Arte to turn sharply toward the door. The area beyond the barred window was dark but the voice had clearly come from there. And it wasn't a voice he recognized.
"Who is out there?" Arte called and reluctantly used the chair to get to his feet, barely using his wounded leg at all to cross to the door. Susie remained near the bed, watching the door and Arte guardedly.
The speaker hesitated, drawing in a breath, but not using it. "The food is safe." He finally said again. "And the water is clean. No poisons or potions of any kind."
Almost as if the mysterious voice could read his mind, Arte thought, looking to the laden table, the pitchers that likely contained water and wine.
"So then you mean me no harm?" Arte asked, using the singular article instead of the plural, not sure if the speaker had yet noticed the children.
"Oh no! You are a guest." The voice insisted, sounding pleased to have the opportunity to give the assurance.
"A guest!?" Arte asked, his voice deceptively friendly. He reached out a hand, and rattled the bars of the window, reassuring himself that the knob-less door was indeed secure. "Why then is the door locked?" He asked. "And don't tell me it's for my own safety because, frankly my friend, I have had enough of such pointless reassurances. This is a trap, yes?"
The voice hesitated a moment then replied, "Yes..."
"Set by none other than the...narcissistic Miguelito Loveless, yes."
"Doctor Miguelito Lovel-"
"And this doctor is responsible for all the bizarre appearances of children in the river valley, and for this depressing cave of wonders, and has all manner of dark and evil plans set for me and my partner eh?" Arte ranted, moving with painful slowness away from the door and once more sitting on the edge of the bed where Susie still stood silently. Moments after he'd settled he could feel Susie's weight once more leaning against him, her hands clutching his wrist lightly.
"The Doctor does good." The voice said finally, filled with outraged hatred. "He's going to save California, and then save the world, from the evils of man. And I don't know anything about your partner, but you will be the next to benefit from his genius, make no mistake."
"The Doctor is a mad man! And the only benefit that-" Arte was cut off by a distant slam that told him that his audience had moved on. It was just as well. He didn't have the energy left to be eloquently defiant. Why not save it for the main act, Arte ol' boy?
"His voice is scary." Susie told him. TOLD him, as if she knew what she was talking about. As if she'd heard the voice before and it had unconsciously struck fear into her.
Arte bent forward and lifted Susie onto his lap where she quickly settled, her arms going about his waist, her cheek settling against his chest. Arte tightened his arms around her, the action feeling familiar. "Don't worry my dear. He can't get to us in here. And we still have a way out, see..." Arte said quietly, pointing up to the still open hole in the rock wall.
"For now, I would imagine that we're all hungry, and dirty, and tired, am I right?"
Brown eyes met his, and a tousled head nodded. Arte looked to where Jimmy lay, still unconscious. He reached a hand over and touched the boy's face, feeling the beginning of a fever. He pushed back the tattered edges of the sleeve he had used to secure Jimmy's broken arm and winced at the red pallor of his skin. The arm needed to be disinfected and properly set. Arte could feel his knee swollen tight in his pant leg, and all of them needed something warm and nourishing before too long.
"Right then." Arte said, looking to pot belly stove, "Let's see if we can't build up that fire."