4

'What time is it now?'

Del asked several hours later.

The flashlight flared out light: illuminated Rose's wrist and bare arm. 'Twenty minutes later than the last time you asked. Six-fifty-one. Is everybody awake?'

'Yeah,' Tom said, jolted out of deep sleep. Rose played the light around the vaulted chamber, shining it in his face, then in Del's. Finally she turned it on herself. She was sitting against the wall, and unlike Del and himself, did not look disheveled. Her hair was in place; Tom saw with astonishment that she was even wearing lipstick. 'There's still coffee in the thermos, and I've got some hardboiled eggs. We can have breakfast before we start.'

'I have to pee,' Del said, sounding embarrassed. 'So do I,' Tom said.

In pitch darkness they stumbled into the first tunnel and splashed the walls; came back guided by the light to eat the hardboiled eggs.

'Now, which tunnel do we take?' Del asked.

'That one.' Rose stabbed the light toward a gaping hole in the curving wall. She walked to the entrance of the tunnel and played the light on a white chalk line. 'I made this when I brought everything down. This is the one.'

'Didn't you say the one next to me?' Tom said.

'This was the one next to you,' Rose said. 'You got mixed up walking back here. This is the one I marked.'

'How far does it go?' Del asked.

'Long way,' Rose said. 'We'll have to be in it about half an hour.'

'You're sure this is the right one?' Tom asked.

'I marked it. I'm sure.'

… sell you out. Just an unhappy dream: but had it not been from this tunnel that he had heard the lost and captured voices spinning through their eternal and terrible summer? 'Shine the light on your face,' Tom said. 'Humor me.'

Rose lifted the flash and pointed at her face. She squinted in the glare, but her hand was steady. That creature you think you love. She was the girl in the window; she was the girl in the red cape carrying a basket down the wooded, path. He wrapped his fingers around the broken figure in his pocket.

Farewell, Nick.

Come back anytime, Sweet Sue.

In the lake? Nailed to a tree to be eaten by birds?

'Let's get started,' Tom said.