The Snake Stone

82

Yashim shot to his feet. The water reached to his knees. He was aware of a searing pain in his left arm.

A kind of sob escaped him, like a cough. The pain made him wince, but he could move his fingers and he did not think he had broken a bone. He sloshed forward through the icy water, sliding his feet over the ground, and touched a wall in the dark.

Like the tunnel itself, it was slimy. He reached up with his good arm and tried to find the top, and when that failed he began to follow the wall with his hand, looking for an opening. He counted four corners, and didn’t find one. Once he stumbled against something soft and large, which seemed to be rolling on the floor under the surface. He drove it away with his foot and tried not to think about it again.

He put a hand to the wall and leaned his forehead against it. It seemed that he was in a small chamber, some seven feet across, without exits. There was about two feet of water at the bottom. He had dropped through an opening in the channel or pipe above; it could not, he thought, be more than twelve feet above or he would have got more badly hurt.

However high it was, it was still beyond his reach.

A thin trickle of water slid over his fingers and onto his forehead.

He wondered if, by a miracle, the waterman would come this way.

Then something touched his leg again, and he reached down into the water and knew immediately that no one was ever going to help him out.