into the bush, trusting him to keep to the task they had assigned, was one that had always been too good to be true. But the fact that there would be only a single guard was a blessing. Two or three of the things would have been difficult to evade. More than that, impossible. Only one, however …
The alien who had led him here moved silently to Ramon’s side. It was eerie – nothing so big should be so quiet.
‘Maneck, eh?’ Ramon said to the thing. ‘Your name’s Maneck? I’m Ramon Espejo.’
While Ramon was still wondering if he should attempt to shake hands with it, Maneck abruptly reached out and took him by the shoulders, lifted him like a doll, and held him immobile in the air. Ramon fought instinctively – nights at the bar and in the street coming back to his arms and legs in a rage. He might as well have punched the ocean. Maneck didn’t budge.
Up from the pit rose a pale white snake.
Ramon watched in horrified fascination. It was obviously a cable of some sort – two bare wires protruded from the visible end – but its movements were so supple and lifelike that he could not help but think of it as a pale and sinister cobra. It reared almost to eye-level, swayed slowly from side to side, and aimed its blind pallid head at Ramon. The head quivered slightly, as though the snake was testing the air in search of its prey. Then it stretched out toward him.
Again Ramon tried desperately to break free, but Maneck wrenched him effortlessly back into position. As the cable-snake came closer, he saw that it was pulsating rhythmically, and that the two naked wires in its head were vibrating like a serpent’s flickering tongue. His flesh crawled and he felt his testicles retract. He felt his nakedness vividly now – he was unprotected, helpless, all of the soft vulnerable parts of his body exposed to the hostile air.
‘I’ll do it!’ Ramon shrieked. ‘I said I’d do it! You don’t have to do this to me! I’ll help you!’
The cable touched the hollow of his throat.
Ramon felt a sensation like the touch of dead lips, a double pinprick of pain, a flash of intense cold. An odd quivering shock ran up and down his body, as though someone were tracing his nervous system with feather fingers. His vision dimmed for a heartbeat, then came back. Maneck lowered him to the ground.
The cable was now embedded in his neck. Fighting nausea, he reached up and took hold of it, feeling it pulse in his hands. It was warm to the touch, like human flesh. He pulled at it tentatively, then tugged harder. He felt the flesh of his throat move when he tugged. To rip it free would obviously be as difficult as tearing off his own nose. The cable pulsed again, and Ramon realized that it was pulsing in time to the beating of his heart. As he watched, it seemed to darken slowly, as if it were filling with his blood.
He saw with horror that the opposite end of the cable had somehow linked itself to the alien that had held him, blending into its right wrist. Maneck. He was on a leash. A hunting dog for demons.
‘The sahael will not injure you, but it will help to resolve your contradictions,’ the thing in the pit said, as if sensing his distress but failing to understand it. ‘You should welcome it. It will help to protect you from aubre. Should you manifest aubre, you will be corrected. Like this.’
Ramon found himself on the floor, though he did not remember falling. Only now that the pain had passed could he look back at it and realize that it had been the worst pain he had ever experienced, as a swimmer turns to look back at a wave that has passed over his head. He didn’t remember screaming, but his throat was raw, and it almost seemed as if the echo of his shriek was still reverberating from the chamber walls. He caught his breath, and then retched. He knew that he would do whatever was required to prevent that from happening again, anything at all, and for the first time since he woke in darkness, Ramon Espejo felt truly ashamed.
I will kill you all, Ramon thought. Somehow, I will cut this thing out of my throat, and then I will come and kill you all.
‘School yourself,’ the pale alien said. ‘Correct aubre, and even such a flawed thing as yourself may achieve cohesion or even coordinate level.’
It took Ramon some time to realize that this gibberish had been a dismissal: a stern but kindly admonition, hellfire threatened, the prospect of redemption dangled, and go forth and sin no more. The sonofabitch was a missionary!
Maneck lifted Ramon back to his feet and nudged him toward a tunnel. The fleshy leash – the sahael – shrank to match whatever distance was between them. Maneck made a sound that he couldn’t interpret and apparently gave up gentle coaxing. The alien moved briskly forward, the sahael tugging now at Ramon’s throat. He had no choice but to follow, like a dog trotting at its master’s heel.
And you, mi amigo, Ramon thought, staring at Maneck’s indifferent back, will be the very first to die.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Back through the tunnels they went, through cavern after cavern, through rhythmic noise, billowing shadow, and glaring blue light. Ramon walked leadenly, like an automaton, pulled along by Maneck, the tether in his neck feeling heavy and awkward. The chill air leached the heat from his body, and even the work of walking wasn’t enough to keep him warm.
As he stumbled along, in the privacy of his mind, Ramon searched for hope.
How long would it be before Elena noticed his absence? Months, at least. Or she might think he’d gone off again, down to Nuevo Janeiro without her, to file his reports and collect his fees and keep his money for himself. Or run off on a drunken spree with some other woman. Rather than start a search for him, she was more likely to work herself into a blind rage and go fuck some hairy prospector from a bush bar or rum shack in revenge. Likewise, Manuel Griego would expect him to be in the field for three or four weeks at the least. Ramon silently berated himself for talking about hunting and his fantasy of disappearing into the Sierra Hueso to live off the land. Manuel might assume he wasn’t coming back at all, especially if he suspected (as he probably did) that Ramon knew that the cops were after him.
The only ones who would look for him was the law, and the law would have followed him with public execution in mind.
There was no one. That was the truth. He had lived his life on his own terms – always on his own terms – and here was the price of it. He was on his own, hundreds of miles from the nearest human settlement, captured and enslaved.
If he was going to get out of this, he would have to find his own way out.
Maneck tugged at the sahael and Ramon looked up, aware for the first time that they had stopped. The alien thing pushed a bundle into his arms. Clothes.
The clothes were a sleeveless one-piece garment, something like pajamas, a large cloak, and hard-soled slipper-boots, all made from a curious lusterless material. He pulled them on with fingers stiff from cold. The aliens were obviously not used to tailoring for humans; the clothes were clumsily-made and ill-fitting, but at least they afforded him some protection against the numbing cold. It wasn’t until his nakedness was covered and warmth began to return to his limbs that his teeth began to chatter.
Maneck led him down a bright white passageway to another great, high-vaulted chamber. Things the color and size of aphids swarmed across the floor, bumping into each other and into his legs, singing incomprehensible gibberish in high, sweet voices. In the center of the room squatted a bone-colored box like the one that had destroyed his van. As they drew near, Ramon saw that the thing was not solid. Instead a million tiny strands of dripping white and cream made a webwork of slats that shifted to create an opening and then close it behind them.
The interior of the box was likewise only half solid – a wide low bench that appeared intended for Maneck’s barrel-like form and also a smaller area set into the wall where Ramon himself might sit, legs pulled up to his chest.
Ramon waited leadenly while Maneck examined the box, leaning in to run its long slender fingers carefully over the controls. He could feel himself becoming dazed and passive, numbed by weariness and shock – he’d been through too much, too fast. And he was tired, more tired than he could remember being before; perhaps the shot they’d given him, glucose or adrenaline or whatever