The Genocides

“I didn’t. I did not. I—”

“Well, you were the last one who had a hold on it, and now it’s gone. Now we need another rope. Of course, if you don’t care about getting back…. Or if you think you’ll do better on your own…”

Eventually Neil agreed. “But Blossom ain’t going to touch him, understand? She’s my sister, and I ain’t going to have it. Understand?”

“Neil, you don’t have to worry about anything of that sort till we’re all home safe,” Buddy temporized. “Nobody’s going to—”

“And they better not speak to each other either. Cause I say so, and what I say goes. Blossom, you go on ahead of me, and Buddy behind. Orville goes last.”

Neil, naked now except for belt and holster, knotted the legs of their several trousers together, and they set off, each with a grip on the line. The water was deep and so hot their skin seemed to be coming off their bones, like a chicken that boils too long. The current was weakening, however, and they moved more slowly.

Soon they had found a root angling upward from which the trickle of water was not much worse than when they’d first noticed it—how many days ago? Wearily, almost mechanically, they began to climb again.

Blossom remembered a song from nursery school days about a spider washed down a water spout by the rain:

Out came the sun and dried away the rain,
And the inky-dinky spider be-gan to climb again.

She began to laugh, as she had laughed at the strange words of Jeremiah’s poem, but this time she couldn’t stop laughing, despite how much the laughter hurt.

Of them all, Buddy was the most upset by this, for he could remember the winter before, in the commonroom, and the people who had run out into the thawing snow, laughing and singing, never to return. Blossom’s laughter was not unlike theirs.

The root at this point opened onto a tuber of fruit, and they decided to rest and eat. Orville tried to calm Blossom, but Neil told him to shut up. The pulp, which was now semiliquid, dropped down on their heads and shoulders like the droppings of huge, diarrhetic birds.

Neil was torn between his desire to go away where the noise of his sister’s laughter wouldn’t disturb him and an equally strong desire to stay close at hand and protect her. He compromised, removing to a middle distance, where he lay on his back, not intending to go to sleep, just to rest his body…

His head came down on the handle of the axe that Jeremiah had dropped there. He let out a little cry, which nobody noticed. They were all of them so tired. He sat for a long time, thinking very hard, his eyes crossing with the effort, though you couldn’t see anything in that uncompromising dark.

The softened fruit pulp continued to fall from overhead and spatter on their bodies and on the floor with little crepitant sounds, like the sounds of children’s kisses.

FIFTEEN Blood and Licorice

His hand touched her dead body. Buddy thought at first it was his father’s corpse, but then he remembered how he had once already stumbled across that same cold body, and delight displaced terror: there was a way back! This was the thread that led out of the labyrinth. He traced his steps back to Orville and Blossom.

“Is Neil asleep?” he asked.

“He’s stopped whistling,” Orville said. “He’s either asleep or dead.”

Buddy told them his news. “…and so, you see, that means we can go back the way we tried to in the first place. Up the shaft. It was a mistake, our turning back when we did.”

“Here we are, come full circle. The only difference now,” Orville observed, “is that we’ve got Neil with us. Perhaps we’d do best to ignore that difference and leave him behind. We can go now.”

“I thought we’d agreed to let the others decide what to do with Neil.”

“We won’t be doing away with him. We’ll be leaving him in almost exactly the same place we found him—caught in the trap he meant for you. Besides, we can leave Alice’s body in his way, and he can figure out for himself that the way back is up the shaft he threw her down.”

“Not my half-brother. Not Neil. He’d only get scared if he found her body. As for figuring his way back, you might as well expect him to discover the Pythagorean theorem all by himself. Hell, I’ll bet if you tried to explain that to him, he wouldn’t believe it.”

Blossom, who had been listening to all this rather dazedly, began to shiver, as the tension which her body had sustained so long began to drain away. It was like the time she’d gone swimming in the lake in April; her flesh trembled, yet at the same time she felt strangely rigid. Then her body, naked and taut, was suddenly pressed against Orville’s, and she did not know if he had come to her or she to him. “Oh darling, we’ll go back! We will—after all! Oh, my very own!”

Neil’s voice shrilled in the darkness: “I heard that!”