The Ruins (12 page)

 Stacy
watched him pressing his hand to his head, to his ear, as if he were
miming talking on a phone, and she sprang to her feet, started quickly
toward him. "Hurry," she said to the others, waving
for them to follow. She'd realized suddenly what that steady
chirping was: somehow—miraculously,
inexplicably—there was a cell phone ringing at the bottom of
the hole.

A
my didn't believe
it. She could hear the noise coming from the hole, and—along
with the others—she had to admit it sounded like a cell
phone, yet even so, she had no faith in it. Jeff had told her not to
pack her own phone before they left; it would be too expensive to use
in Mexico. But that didn't mean there weren't local
networks, of course, and why shouldn't it be possible that
what they were hearing was a phone linked to one of these? It should be
possible—there was no reason for it not to be
possible—and Amy struggled to convince herself of this. It
wasn't working, though. Inside, in her heart, she'd
already dropped into a place of doom, and the plaintive beeping coming
from the darkness wasn't enough to pull her free. When she
peered into the hole, what she imagined was not a phone calling out to
them, but a baby bird, open-beaked, begging to be fed—
chirrrp
…
chirrrp
…
chirrrp
—a
thing of need rather than assistance.

 The
others were enthusiastic, however, and who was Amy to question this?
She stayed silent; she feigned hope along with the rest of them.

 Pablo
had already uncoiled a short length of rope from the windlass. He was
wrapping it around his chest, tying it into a knot. It seemed he wanted
them to lower him into the hole.

 "He
won't be able to answer it," Eric said. "We have to send someone who speaks Spanish." He
reached for the rope, but Pablo wouldn't relinquish it. He
was tying one knot after another across his chest: big, sloppy tangles
of hemp. It didn't look like he knew what he was doing.

 "It
doesn't matter," Jeff said. "He can bring
it back up, and we'll try calling from here."

 The
chirping stopped, and they stood over the hole, waiting, listening.
After a long moment, it started up again. They all smiled at one
another, and Pablo moved to the edge of the shaft, eager to begin his
descent. The flowering vine had twined itself around the windlass,
growing on the rope, the axle, the crank, the sawhorse and its little
wheel; Jeff pulled much of it off, careful not to get the sap on his
skin. Mathias had vanished into the blue tent. When he reappeared, he
was carrying an oil lamp and a box of matches. He set the lamp on the
ground beside the hole, scratched one of the matches into flame, and
carefully lighted the wick. Then he handed the lamp to Pablo.

 The
windlass was a primitive piece of equipment: jerry-built,
flimsy-looking. It sat beside the shaft on a small steel platform,
which appeared to have been bolted somehow into the rock-hard dirt. Its
barrel was mounted on an axle that was rusting in places and in
definite need of greasing. The crank didn't have a brake to
it; if it became necessary to hold it in place midway down or up, this
would have to be accomplished by brute strength. Amy didn't
believe the apparatus could support Pablo's weight; she
thought he'd step into the open space above the hole and the
entire contraption would give way. He'd drop into the
darkness—fall and fall and fall—and
they'd never see him again. But, after the exchange of many
hand signals and gestures and pats of encouragement, when he finally
began his descent, the windlass groaned, settling into its mount, and
then started to turn, creaking loudly as Jeff and Eric strained against
its hand crank, slowly lowering the Greek into the shaft.

 It
was working. And, despite herself, Amy felt her heart lift. Maybe it
was a cell phone after all. Pablo would find it down there in the
darkness; they'd hoist him back up and then call for help:
the police, the American embassy, their parents. The beeping had
stopped once more, and this time it didn't resume, but it
didn't matter. It was down there. Amy was beginning to
believe now—she wanted to believe, had given herself
permission to believe—they were going to be saved. She stood
beside the hole, peering over its edge, with Stacy on her right and
Mathias across from her, watching Pablo drop foot by foot into the
earth. His oil lamp illuminated the walls of the shaft: the dirt was
black and pitted with rocks toward the top, but it became brown and
then tan and then a deep orange-yellow as he descended. Ten feet,
fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, and they still couldn't see the
bottom. Pablo smiled up at them, dangling, one hand reaching out to
steady himself against the shaft's wall. Amy and Stacy waved
to him. But not Mathias. Mathias was staring at the slowly uncoiling
rope.

 "Stop!"
he shouted suddenly, and everyone jumped.

 Jeff
and Eric were straining against the crank, both of them sweating
already, their hair sticking to their foreheads. Amy could see the
muscles standing out on Jeff's neck—taut,
tendoned
—and it gave
her a sense of the immense tension on the rope, gravity grasping at the
Greek, dragging him downward.

 Mathias
was growing frantic now, yelling, "Pull him up! Pull him
up!"

 Jeff
and Eric hesitated, uncertain. "What?" Eric said,
blinking at him stupidly.

 "The
vine," Mathias shouted, his voice urgent, waving for them to
start reeling Pablo back up. "The rope."

 And
then they saw it. Jeff had stripped most of the vine off the windlass,
but not all of it. The tendrils he'd left behind had burrowed
their way into the spool of rope and now, as the windlass turned, they
were being crushed, their milky sap oozing out, darkening the
rope's hemp, eating away at it.

 Pablo
shouted up to them, a short string of Greek words, a question, and Amy
had a brief glimpse of him, swinging gently back and forth there,
twenty-five feet down the shaft, the oil lamp in his hand; then she was
rushing with Stacy and Mathias toward the crank, all of them struggling
to help, getting in one another's way, putting their weight
into it, the sap visibly burning into the rope
now—implacably, too fast, faster than they could work. Pablo
was just beginning to bump his way upward when there was an abrupt,
gut-dropping jerk, and they fell forward onto one another, the windlass
spinning wildly behind them, free of its weight. There was a long
silence—too long, far too long—and then a thump
they seemed to feel more than hear, a jump in the earth beneath them,
which was followed an instant later by the shattering pop of the lamp.
They scrambled to the hole, peered into it, but there was nothing for
them to see.

 Darkness.
Silence.

 "Pablo?"
Eric called, his voice echoing down the shaft.

 And
then, sounding impossibly far away, but somehow close, too—
suffocatingly
close—as
if it were coming from inside Amy's own body, the Greek began
to scream.

T
he screaming filled Eric with
a sense of panic. Pablo was down in the hole, in the darkness, in
terrible pain, and Eric couldn't think what to do, where to
turn, how to make it better. They needed to help him, and it was taking
too long. It ought to be happening now, instantly, but it
wasn't; it couldn't. They had to come up with a
plan first, and none of them seemed to know how to do this. Stacy just
stood beside the windlass, wide-eyed, biting her hand. Amy was peering
down into the hole. "Pablo?" she kept calling. "Pablo?" She was shouting, but even so, it was hard
to hear her over his screams, which refused to stop, which went on and
on and on, without diminishment or pause.

 Mathias
ran off toward the orange tent, disappeared inside. Jeff was pulling
the rope back up from the shaft. He uncoiled it from the windlass,
spreading it out in big looping circles across the little clearing.
Then he began to work down its length, carefully removing all traces of
the vine from it, examining the rope foot by foot, searching for
sections where the sap might've weakened the hemp. It was a
slow process, and he was going about it in an excruciatingly methodical
manner, as if there were no rush at all, as if he couldn't
even hear the Greek's screams. Eric stood beside him, too
stunned to be of any assistance, motionless, yet feeling as if he were
running inside—in full, headlong flight—his heart
beating itself into a blur behind his ribs. And the screaming
wouldn't stop.

 "See
if you can find a knife," Jeff said.

 Eric
stared down at
him.
A
knife?
The word hung in his head, inert, as if it belonged to
a foreign language. How was he supposed to find a knife?

 "Check
the tents," Jeff said. He didn't look up at him; he
kept his gaze focused on the rope, crouched low over it, searching out
the burned spots.

 Eric
went to the blue tent, unzipped its flap, stepped inside. It smelled
musty, like an attic, the air still and hot. The blue nylon filtered
the sunlight, muting it, giving everything a dreamlike, watery tint.
There were four sleeping bags, three of them unrolled, looking as if
they'd only recently disgorged their owners'
bodies.
Dead
now,
Eric thought, and pushed the words aside. There was a
transistor radio, and he had to resist the impulse to turn it on, to
see if it worked, if he could find a station, music maybe, something to
drown out Pablo's screams. There were two backpacks, one dark
green, one black, and he crouched beside the first of them, began to
rifle through it, feeling like a thief, an old instinct, from another
world entirely, that sense of transgression inherent in handling a
stranger's
belongings.
Dead
now,
he thought again, summoning the words this time,
searching for courage in them, but they didn't make it any
better, only turned it into a different sort of violation. The green
backpack seemed to belong to a man, the black one to a woman. Other
people's clothes: he could smell cigarette smoke on the
man's T-shirts, perfume on the woman's. He wondered
if they belonged to the woman whom Mathias's brother had met
on the beach, the one whose promised presence had drawn them all
here—doomed them, perhaps.

 The
vine was growing on some of the objects: thin green tendrils of it,
with tiny pale red flowers, almost pink. It was more prominent in the
woman's pack than the man's, twining itself among
her cotton blouses, her socks, her dirt-stained jeans. He found a
windbreaker in the man's backpack, gray, with blue stripes on
the sleeves, a double of one he himself owned, hanging safely back in
his closet at his parents' house, so out of reach now,
awaiting his
return.
A
knife,
he had to remind himself, and he turned away from the
tangle of clothes, searching through other pockets, unzipping them,
emptying their contents onto the tent's floor. A camera,
still loaded with film. Half a dozen spiral
notebooks—journals, it looked like—filled nearly to
capacity with the man's jagged handwriting, blue ink, black
ink, even red in places, but all in a language Eric not only
couldn't decipher but couldn't even recognize:
Dutch perhaps, or something Scandinavian. A deck of playing cards. A
first-aid kit. A Frisbee. A tube of
sunblock
.
A folded pair of eyeglasses with wire rims. A bottle of vitamins. An
empty canteen. A flashlight. But
no
knife
.

 Eric
emerged from the tent, carrying the flashlight, squinting at the
sun's sudden brightness, that sense of space abruptly opening
around him after the airless confines of the tent. He turned on the
flashlight, realized it didn't work. He shook it, tried
again: nothing. Pablo stopped screaming—for the space of two
deep breaths—then he started up again. The stopping was
almost as bad as the screaming, Eric decided, then immediately changed
his mind: the stopping was worse. He dropped the flashlight to the
ground, saw that Mathias had reappeared, bringing a second oil lamp
from the orange tent, a large knife, another first-aid kit. He and Jeff
were busily cutting the burned sections from the rope, working as a
team, silently, efficiently. Mathias would cut away the weak spots;
then Jeff would tie the rope back together again, grimacing as he
tugged the knots tight. Eric stood above them, watching. He felt
stupid: he should've taken the first-aid kit from the blue
tent, too, should've at least checked to see what was inside.
He wasn't thinking. He wanted to help, wanted to stop
Pablo's screams, but he was stupid and useless and there was
no way to change this. He felt the urge to pace, yet he just kept
standing there, staring, instead. Stacy and Amy looked exactly like he
felt: frantic, anxious, immobile. They all watched Jeff and Mathias
work at the rope, cutting, tying, tugging. It was taking so long, so
impossibly long.

 "I'll
go," Eric said. It wasn't something he'd
thought out before speaking; it emerged from his panic, from his need
to hurry things along. "I'll go down and get
him."

 Jeff
glanced up at him; he seemed surprised. "That's
okay," he said. "I can do it."

 Jeff's
voice sounded so calm, so bizarrely unruffled, that for an instant Eric
had difficulty understanding his words. It was as if he first had to
translate them into his own state of terror. Eric shook his head. "I'm lighter," he said. "And I
know him better."

 Jeff
considered these two points, seemed to see their wisdom. He shrugged.
"We'll make a sling for him," he said. "You may have to help him into
it. Then we'll pull
it up. After we get him out, we'll drop the rope back down
and pull you up, too."