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17

 

The hole was there all right, and it looked too small, just like the man said. But I got up there and got my shoulders in and twisted over on my side and started in.

The tunnel slanted down after the first couple of yards, tight going but just on the right side of possible. In a couple of places I felt smooth clay where somebody had done some excavating.

Twice I thought I'd been stopped, and had to back off and try again, at a new angle; and once I got my head through into a pocket my shoulders wouldn't pass and I was stuck there for a minute, feeling the weight of a mountain crushing me flat before I worked an arm up and pushed a fallen stone out of the way and went on through.

It was pitch dark once I was below the broken rock level and into the solid stuff. This part of the tunnel was wider. I did it on my hands and knees, using my head for a bumper. Even in the dark I could tell this was a man-made shaft now. It dropped at a thirty-degree angle, after about twenty feet cut hard to the left, then left again and down twenty feet, and there was light ahead.

I stopped there and felt of my gun for whatever good that did me and listened hard, trying to make up my mind whether I heard a faint sound coming from down below or not, decided it was just a ringing in my ears, and did the last few feet to another right-angle turn and was in a room.

It wasn't a cave. The walls were cut smooth and faced with concrete. The floor was natural stone, ground smooth. The ceiling was high enough that I didn't have to duck. The light was coming from a strip down the center of it that shed a pale green light on something bulky that almost filled the little room. It was a cylinder, ten feet long, five feet in diameter, looped and hung with plastic piping and wires. I'd seen something like it once before, in the sealed wing under my old plant. That one had had a corpse in it. This one felt different.

I came up to it easy, as if there might be something there that I didn't want to startle. I put a hand against the side of the big tank and felt a vibration so faint that if I hadn't been alone under forty feet of solid rock I wouldn't have thought it was there at all. The curve of the top of the thing was a little above my eye level, but there was a platform there for me to step up on. I did, and looked down at a clear plastic plate about a foot square, set in the top curve of the tank. It was misty, and I had to lean close to see through it and when I did a big hand as cold as death closed on my chest and squeezed.

The face behind the cloudy glass was that of a child, a little girl no more than six years old, pale and translucent as a china doll.

It was the face from the dreams.

* * *

I found the letter lying on the platform and got it open and by holding it three inches from my face I could read it:

 

She's here. Number Three was right; a billion dollars' worth of security systems, but our route slides under all of it. Frazier built it when he was building the Keep, right under his nose. He knew him; too tough to know when he met a man that was tougher.
 

There's just one place more to go now. I think I've got a chance, maybe even a good chance; but I'm leaving what I've got for you, in case I slip. Maybe I was a little too tricky, feeding it to you in pieces, but it makes a broken trail that can't be cracked by an outside man with one lucky find. Except the one man, and I'm counting on the trick paint to take him out. What I planted in the box for him to find should make him happy enough to call off his dogs, at least long enough to give you your chance, if it comes to that. He knows I'm here, somewhere, and I don't know how. He knows how I'd figure the play; but I know his touch too, so maybe it will be OK.
 

What's on the next sheets cost a lot of lives and years to get; it's the genuine article.
 

Now I'm going to take one more look, and remember some things, so when the choice gets tough I'll know which one to make. Then I'm going in, and I won't be back this way.

 

* * *

The drawing on the sheet tacked to the back of the note showed me the valley and the lake and a spot on the north side that matched the town, labeled "Keep." There was an X marking the cougar cave. Another sketch below showed the details of a door and a shaft cut to below the valley floor, and a tunnel down there that crossed to the Keep and then some more detail on a hatch that led out into a false wall behind a furnace room. Another page had the layout of the Keep, including more dummy passages and double walls than Canterville Castle. They led all the way to a big spread on the top level, with a couple of alternates and a few question marks, just to give me the feeling it hadn't all been done for me.

I read it through again, looking for some useful clue I might have missed, but I didn't find any more details of what I was expected to do. There was just the chart and the map, and the note, full of confidence that all I lived for was the chance to go where he'd gone and not come back from.

He was quite a guy, was my letter-writer, and he expected a lot of me. More than he was likely to get.

I was supposed to know a lot of things I didn't know, and maybe those were the things that would have made me hot to tighten my belt and go looking for the kind of trouble that would be waiting for me at the end of that cute tunnel and those neat rat holes in the walls.

I thought these thoughts for half an hour or so. Then I went over to the door that was cut into the wall behind the big tank and got it open and saw steps and started down.

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Framed