The Hypnotist

FORTY-SIX

Lucian smelled earth and mold. He was cold, much colder than he’d been just minutes-or was it hours-before? There was a metal band of pain circling his head. If his eyes were open he could no longer see. The blackness surrounding him was so complete he couldn’t tell if he was inside it or it was inside him.

Dazed, he fought through the pain to try to make sense of what had just happened, of where he was, of why he was here, of what he’d been doing. Remember, he instructed himself. Remember. But he couldn’t grasp any thoughts. Pain swept over him in a wave, and all he could see in its inky swells were the faces of the women he had been drawing for the past few weeks. Jeering at him from out of the blackness-one angry, the next shocked, a third weeping. All of them had been wronged, were troubled, were grieving-and all blamed him, demanded something from him. The women stretched out their arms so their fingers were touching, creating an unbreakable chain around him, trapping him not just by their physical strength but by his guilt over what he’d done to them, what he had taken away from them.

Please, he pleaded. Tell me what I’ve done. How can I make amends if I don’t know what crime I’ve committed? What do you want from me?

“Lucian?”

Was one of them finally answering after so many weeks?

“Lucian?”

No, it was a man’s voice, calling to him from above the water.

Lucian tried to break the grip of the circle of women and their suffocating demands. He tried to swim up to the surface. He could just see the light filtering down through the murky green water.

“Lucian? Are you okay? Answer me, man. Answer me!”

Lucian concentrated. Open your eyes, he screamed at himself. Open your eyes. But he couldn’t. There was too much pain. Damn, his head hurt in what seemed like a million new ways.

No, not all of it was his head. There was pain ripping across his back, radiating out and down from his right shoulder. He must have hurt himself when he…fell…yes, when he fell. He’d been holding a gun on the Matisse Monster when the floor had opened and he’d fallen.

“Lucian?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m okay.” Forcing his eyelids apart, he looked into a cold white light.

“Hey!” He put his hand up to shield his eyes from Richmond’s small but powerful flashlight.

“Sorry.” Richmond moved the light so it wasn’t shining right in his face anymore. “You scared me there.”

“I scared you? You don’t scare.”

“I do when my partner doesn’t respond to me screaming in his ear and slapping his face.”

“For how long?”

“A few minutes.”

“Damn it.” Lucian was taking it all in now, looking around, assessing where he was, peering into the shadows where O’Hara, Sellers and Jeffries stood behind Richmond. He asked them if they were all right.

“Fine.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay, too, Richmond?” Lucian asked his partner.

“Actually, pretty banged up. We all are. Scratches, bumps, sprains, but nothing we can’t cope with. You got the worst of it. Opened your shoulder on some outcropping of rock as you fell.”

Lucian was examining the cave. “Where the hell are we?”

“Good a guess as any-hell. We’re in hell,” Richmond answered as he helped his partner stand.

“What happened?” A wave of dizziness hit Lucian but he fought it, willing it away. There was no time now.

“It felt like an earthquake to me. Not too bad, though. Maybe a two or a three,” Sellers said.

“Any idea how to get out of here?”

“O’Hara’s working the radios.” Richmond looked over at the youngest member of the team. “Any luck?”

“I’ve gotten through twice but there’s too much static. They don’t seem to be able to hear me at all, and I can’t make out what they’re saying. There’s a wall of interference between us and the outside.”

“Because we’re too damn deep,” Jeffries said. “We must have slid at least fifteen feet.”

“What the fuck is this place? Some kind of museum of natural history?” O’Hara asked.

Lucian looked up into the darkness. “Where’d we come from?”

Richmond aimed the beam skyward, illuminating an inky chute.

“We fell straight, then slid for a while and landed here. It’s not a direct plunge. Wherever we came from is out of sight.”

With nothing left to glean from above, Lucian scanned the small crypt. He walked the circumference of their trap, inspecting the walls and the floor. When he was three-quarters of the way around he noticed a set of drawings-menacing and primitive black lines on the rocky walls. It was a mural that unfolded like a story, encircling them. It started with naked hunters on horses riding over snakes curled in the grass and finding a herd of bison, and ended with the hunters brutally killing two of the giant beasts and then dancing victoriously around a fire while overhead giant, vulture-like birds circled the sun.

But not any sun Lucian had ever seen. This one had a black center. He stared at it. Something was wrong. He walked up to it. There was a hole in the center of the sun. He shone Richmond’s flashlight into the opening and saw an inner chamber half the size of this one, carved out of the same stone. On the floor he could just make out a bone-white skeleton ceremoniously laid out.

Woven baskets surrounded the body. Some were filled with multicolored beads, others with acorns, others overflowed with smaller bones and shells. Bits of fabric lay beneath the skeleton, as if the man’s burial shroud had disintegrated. Encircling his head was a headdress of twigs and shreds of brightly colored strings.

The macabre sight looked so familiar that Lucian wondered if this was like the faces of the women he dreamed about, whom he couldn’t forget but couldn’t remember.

The pain was making it hard to grab hold of a thought and follow it through, but he knew he’d seen this before.

Behind him, he was aware of other men waiting for him to report on what he was seeing. Turning to tell them, Lucian tripped. He wasn’t yet that steady after the fall, and as he lost his balance he dropped the flashlight, which rolled away, creating a moving light show on the rocky wall.

“You need to take it easy,” Richmond cautioned as he helped his partner up.

“I need to figure out how we’re going to get out of here, and you need to help me,” Lucian argued.

“How about we try to break a bigger hole in that wall and see if there’s an exit through there,” Richmond offered.

“There won’t be.”

“How do you know that?”

Lucian shrugged. “I have no idea.” He bent to pick up the flashlight and in the process noticed an irregular rounded stone set into the ground. Even before he looked more closely he knew it had a lion’s head carved into it.

The ferocious face stared up at him.

What was happening to him? He didn’t know how, but he knew something about this emblematic stone…something that really might help them escape from this dungeon.