The thin gray light showed
him the rough walls, chipped out with some kind of sharp tool. "Edward?"
he called. His voice did not echo or bounce back to him.
Tentatively, he reached down the tunnel, bending at the waist over the
rough lip of the former fountain. Deep he reached and reached and
reached, and as his fingertips hit loose dirt, he leaned farther in and
groped blindly, digging his hands into the plug of soil that had been
shoveled into the tunnel's bend a few feet below the surface. He
straightened up and climbed in, sinking to the waist, and tried to kick
the dirt out of the way, but it wouldn't give -- the tunnel had caved in
behind the plug of earth.
He clambered out, feeling the first fat drops of rain on his bare
forearms and the crown of his head. *A shovel*. There was one in the
little coach house in the back of his place, behind the collapsed boxes
and the bicycle pump. As he ran across the street, he saw Krishna,
sitting on his porch, watching him with a hint of a smile.
"Lost another one, huh?" he said. He looked as if he'd been awake all
night, now hovering on the brink of sleepiness and wiredness. A roll of
thunder crashed and a sheet of rain hurtled out of the sky.
Alan never thought of himself as a violent person. Even when he'd had to
throw the occasional troublemaker out of his shops, he'd done so with an
almost cordial force.
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