فصل 12

CHAPTER 12

THE GLOW

IT WAS LONG PAST MIDNIGHT, but Cheeky O’neal was wide awake, listening. Fighting Prawn, keeping a close watch on his unwanted guests, had posted two warriors outside the hut where O’neal and his men slept. The warriors had been talking for hours, but in the past few minutes their murmuring voices had stopped.

Silently, O’Neal rose from his sleeping mat. Around him, snoring loudly, lay DeWulf, Kelly, and McPherson. Picking his way carefully past them, O’Neal went to the doorway and looked out. As he’d hoped, both sentries were slumped against the hut’s log supports, dozing.

O’Neal left the hut, his huge bare feet silent on the dirt. He quickly crossed the village compound and entered the jungle, finding the path he had scouted earlier. He knew exactly where he wanted to go; he’d been carefully studying the island’s geography, and particularly its water supply.

The jungle echoed with the hoots, twitters, screeches, and screams of unseen creatures. In places it was pitch-black, but most of the time just enough moonlight filtered through the thick tree canopy to enable O’Neal to follow the path. In a few hundred yards it led him to the mountainside, where it began to climb steeply. Every few steps O’Neal grunted in pain as his bare feet found sharp lava. To his left he heard water rushing, and after another fifty yards the path turned that way.

He came to the stream and turned right, following it up the mountainside, which was steeper now, sometimes forcing him to use his hands to climb. Finally he saw, in the moonlight ahead, what he was looking for: a cave mouth, nearly as tall as he was, the source of the stream. He stepped into the rushing water and waded to the cave, then inside. The water seemed to sparkle at his feet, like phosphorescence in the ocean, only different. In a few feet he was in pitch blackness, his feet feeling their way forward in the strong, cold current, his hands reaching out for rock walls he could not see. Deeper and deeper he went, his feet now, strangely, no longer sore.

The stream swung to the right. O’Neal felt his way around the bend. Suddenly the darkness gave way to a luminescence; the air was no longer ink black. O’Neal shuffled forward twenty feet. Another bend. He rounded it.

And then, in the distance, he saw it.

A constant, golden glow. Like sunshine. But warmer than sunshine. And coming from somewhere—it seemed from the air itself—he heard…music.

O’Neal smiled.