FIFTY
ON A HIGH-NUMBER CABLE CHANNEL THAT I THINK IS called Crap That Nobody Else Will Show TV, I once saw an ancient movie serial about these adventurers who descend to the center of the earth and discover an underground civilization. It's an evil empire, of course.
The emperor resembles Ming the Merciless from those old Flash Gordon festivals of hokum, and he intends to make war on the surface world and take it over as soon as he develops the right death ray. Or when his immense fingernails grow long enough to be appropriate for the ruler of an entire planet, whichever comes first.
This underworld is populated by the usual thugs and knaves, but also by two or three kinds of mutants, women in horned hats, and of course dinosaurs. This film masterwork was made decades before the invention of computer animation, and the dinosaurs were not even stop-motion clay models but iguanas. Rubber appliances were glued to the iguanas to make them appear scarier and more like dinosaurs, but they just looked like embarrassed iguanas.
Descending the vertical chase, careful step by careful step, I reran the plot of that old serial in my mind, striving to focus on the absurd mustache of the emperor, on the particular race of mutants that looked suspiciously like dwarfs outfitted with rubber-snake headgear and leather pantaloons, on remembered bits of the hero's dialogue marked by a wit that crackled like cream cheese, and on those campily amusing iguanasaurs.
My mind kept drifting to Datura, that dependable spike through the foot: to Datura, to reverse psychic magnetism, to how unpleasant it would be when she disemboweled me and fished her amulet out of my stomach. Not good.
The air in the service well proved not to be as savory as the soot-scented, toxin-laced air in the rest of the hotel. Stale, dank, alternately sulfurous and mildewy, it gathered substance as I went down into the hotel, until it seemed thick enough to drink.
From time to time, horizontal chases entered the well, and in some instances, drafts flowed from them. These cool currents smelled different from but no better than the shaft air.
Twice I began to gag. Both times I had to pause to repress the urge to heave.
The stink, the claustrophobic dimensions of this chimney, the trace chemicals and mold spores in the air combined to make me feel lightheaded by the time I had descended only four floors.
Although I knew that my imagination was running away with me, I wondered if a couple of dead bodies-human, not rat- might lie at the bottom of the shaft, undiscovered by the rescue crews and post-fire search teams, reposing in a slime of decomposition.
The deeper I went, the more determined I became not to direct the flashlight downward, for fear of what I would see at the bottom: not just the tumbled dead, but a grinning figure standing atop them.
Representations of Kali always show her naked, brazen. In that particular idol called a jagrata, she is gaunt and very tall. From her open mouth protrudes a long tongue, and she bares two fangs. She radiates a terrible beauty, perversely appealing.
Every two floors, I passed through another crawlspace. At each of these interruptions, I could have gotten off the ladder, then on it once more; instead, I found myself switching to the rope, using the knots as grips, swinging back to the ladder when it reappeared.
Given my lightheadedness and incipient nausea, using the rope struck me as reckless. I used it anyway.
In her temple representations, Kali holds a noose in one hand, a staff topped by a skull in another. In her third, she holds a sword; in her fourth, a severed head.
I thought I heard movement below me. I paused, but then told myself that the noise had been only the echo of my breathing, and I continued down.
Painted numbers on the wall identified each floor as I went by it, even when no passable opening existed at that level. As I reached the second floor, my right foot dipped into something wet and cold. When I dared to direct my light below, I found that the bottom of the shaft was filled with stagnant black water and debris. I could go no farther by this route.
I climbed to the crawlspace between the second and third floors and exited the vertical chase.
If rats had perished at this level, they died not by suffocation but by hungry mouths of fire that spat out not even charred bones. The flames had been so intense, they left behind an absolute black soot that absorbed the beam of the flashlight and gave back no reflection.
Twisted, buckled, melted, mercurial metal shapes, which had once been heating-and-cooling equipment, formed a bewildering landscape that no mere drinking binge or jalapeno pizza could have inspired in a nightmare. The soot that coated everything-here a film, there an inch deep-was not powdery, not dry, but greasy.
Weaving around and climbing over these amorphous and slippery obstacles proved treacherous. In places, the floor felt as if it had bowed, suggesting that the heat at the height of the blaze had been so terrible that rebar embedded inside the concrete had begun to melt and had almost failed.
The air here was more foul than in the shaft, bitter, almost rancid, yet seemed thin, as if I were at some great altitude. The singular texture of the soot gave me intolerable ideas about the source of it, and I tried to think instead about the iguanasaurs, but saw Datura in my mind's eye, Datura with a necklace of human skulls.
I crawled on hands and knees, slithered on my belly, squeezed through a heat-smoothed sphincter of metal in a blast-blown bulkhead of rubble, and thought of Orpheus in Hell.
In the Greek myth, Orpheus goes to Hell to seek Eurydice, his wife, who has gone there upon her death. He charms Hades and wins permission to take her out of the realm of damnation.
I could not be Orpheus, however, because Stormy Llewellyn, my Eurydice, had not gone to Hell, but to a far better place, which she so well deserved. If this was Hell and if I had come here on a rescue mission, the soul that I struggled to save must be my own.
As I began to conclude that the trapdoor between this crawlspace and the second level of the hotel must have been plated over with twisted and melted metal, I almost fell through a hole in the floor. Beyond that hole, my light played across the skeletal walls of what might have once been a supply room.
The trapdoor and ladder were gone, reduced to ashes. Relieved, I dropped into the space below, landed on my feet, stumbled, but kept my balance.
I stepped between the twisted steel studs of a missing wall, into the main corridor. Only one floor above ground level, I should be able to escape the hotel without resorting to the guarded stairs.
The first thing my flashlight fell upon were tracks that looked like those I had seen when I first entered the Panamint. They had made me think saber-tooth.
The second thing the light revealed were human footprints, which led within a few steps to Datura, who switched on her flashlight the moment that mine found her.