5

The light bobbed before them, touching timber after timber. Their feet hushed on the dirt. An unrecognized image, almost a sense of deja vu, troubled Tom. But it was not deja vu, because he knew he had never been in this place before. Still, the sense of a parallel experience hung in his mind - something that had led to… what? A taste of unpleasantness, a hint of wrongness, of things being not what they seemed.

'What did you think you heard back there?' Del asked quietly.

'I guess I was just nervous.'

'So was I,' Del confessed.

Down they went, feeling as much as seeing their way. The air in the tunnel grew damper and colder. Rose's flashlight picked out beads of moisture on the wall.

'Did you really come here this summer to… you know. Protect me?' Del could ask this because of the darkness which hid his face.

'I guess I did.' Tom's voice, like Del's, went out into pure blackness.

'But how did you know I'd need it?' Del's piping voice seemed to hang in the air, surrounded by charged space. How could he answer it? Well, I had this vision about a wizard and an evil man, and then later I saw that the evil man had overtaken the wizard. Bad things were coming for you, and I had to put myself in their way. It was the truth, but it could not be spoken: he could not send out his own voice into the waiting blackness if it were going to say those things.

'I guess it was that 'towers-of-ice' night - remember?'

'When I didn't know if you were taking Uncle Cole away from me or not,' Del said.

'God.'

Del actually giggled.

Then he had it, the memory: Registration Day: walking down the headmaster's stairs after filling out forms in the library, following Mrs. Olinger's flashlight and fat Bambi Whipple's candle. Going toward their first sight of Laker Broome.

For a long time they walked in silence as well as darkness, going always down, down, as if the tunnel led to the center of the earth instead of Hilly Vale.