Point Blank Read Free Page A

arched doggie door covered with a slab of limestone. So what? No big deal. She’d go back out of the chamber and think things over. How many feet had she come? A good long ways. She turned and fed out the measuring tape back toward the archway. Naturally, she couldn’t see the arched opening beyond the dissipated circle of light from her head lamp. She crawled on the tape to make sure she kept in a straight line. When she reached the end of it, she fed out a second twenty-five feet. Nothing. Then another twenty-five feet. She shone her head lamp together with her flashlight all around her. Nothing at all. She looked at her compass. It said she was moving northeast. No, that was absurd. She was heading due west, right back toward the opening.
    She looked up again, realized that her flashlight had faded away into a ghostly beam. All right, she’d walked a mile, who cared? And the compass was all screwed up. She didn’t need it to make her think she was crazy. She stuck it in her pocket, picked up the tape and fed it out another twenty-five feet, sure she’d see the archway at any moment. She’d come a hundred feet. At any moment, the tape would slither right through the opening back into the corridor. She crawled more slowly. By the time she’d crawled the full twenty-five feet, she was shaking.
    Stop it, stop it. She pressed the retract button and heard the hiss of the tape as it smoothly ran back in. She stood there, holding the tape, knowing she was afraid to feed it out again. What was the point?
    No, no, that was stupid. She had to. She had no choice. She fed out the tape again, smoothly and quickly. But even as she worked it out to its maximum twenty-five feet, she knew in her gut it wouldn’t touch anything. Still, she crawled the distance, then stopped, looked. She was nowhere, surrounded by black; she was being pressed in by black. No, no, stop it.
    She thought she’d crawled in a straight line, but it was obvious now that she hadn’t; it was the only explanation. She’d veered off to the left or right. But still, shouldn’t the tape measure hit a wall? Of course it should, but you’re not near a wall, are you? You’re not near anything at all. Ruth began to move in a circle, keeping the measuring tape fully extended. No wall, nothing. She was losing it, her brain was twisted up, gone squirrelly. At a wave of dizziness and nausea, she sat on the floor, barely breathing now. She felt cold, raw fear skitter through her, a deadly fear that made the hair on her arms stir. Her heart pounded, her mouth was dry.
    And she thought, I’m in the middle of a void and there’s no way out because I’m trapped in a black hole larger than anything I can imagine.
    That thought, fully blown and as clear as bright headlights in her brain, shook her to the core. Where had it come from? She couldn’t seem to draw a deep breath, couldn’t seem to focus her brain. This was ridiculous. She had to think her way out of this. There was an answer, there was always an answer. It was time to get her brain working again. All right then. She was in a cave chamber. She’d simply crawled in farther than she’d thought, the ridiculous chamber was much larger than on the map—
    She heard the noise again, a soft, sibilant sound that seemed to be all around her, but there were no visual reference points, like a snake slithering through sand, a snake so heavy it made a dragging sound as it pulled itself along. It was a snake that was coming toward her but she couldn’t see it, couldn’t get out of the way, couldn’t hide. Maybe it was one of those South American boas, thick as a tree trunk, heavy and sinuous, probably twenty feet long, dragging itself toward her; it would wrap its huge body around her and squeeze—She jerked the compass out of her pocket and hurled it as far away from her as she could. She heard it thud lightly against the cave floor.
    The sound stopped. Once again the silence was absolute.
    She had to get a grip.