Catherine yelled aloud and then listened as the sound of her voice drowned in the silence. There it was again! The whirring noise. It was coming this way. It grew louder, racing toward her in a great screaming rush of wind. It was getting closer and closer. Suddenly it leaped on her in the dark; cold and clammy skin brushed against her cheeks and kissed her lips and she felt something crawling on her head and sharp claws in her hair and her face was smothered by the mad beating of wings of some nameless horror attacking her in the blackness.
She fainted.
She was lying on a sharp spike of stone and the discomfort of it brought her back to consciousness. Her cheek was warm and sticky, and it was a minute before Catherine realized that it was her blood. She remembered the wings and the claws that had attacked her in the dark and she began to shiver.
There were bats in the cave.
She tried to recall what she knew about bats. She had read somewhere that they were flying rats and that they congregated by the thousands. The only other information she could conjure up from her memory was that there were vampire bats, and she quickly dropped that thought. Reluctantly Catherine sat up, the palms of her hands stinging from being scraped on the sharp stones.
You can’ t just sit here, she told herself. You’ ve got to get up and do something. Painfully she dragged herself to her feet. She had lost a shoe somehow and her dress was torn, but Larry would buy her a new one tomorrow. She pictured the two of them going into a little shop in the village, laughing and happy and buying a white summer dress for her, but somehow the dress became a shroud and her mind began to fill with panic again. She must keep thinking about tomorrow, not the nightmare she was engulfed in now. She must keep walking. But which way? She was turned around. If she walked the wrong way, she would be going deeper into the cave, and yet she knew she could not stay here. Catherine tried to estimate how much time had elapsed since they had entered the cave. It must have been an hour, possibly two. There was no way of knowing how long she had been unconscious. Surely they would be looking for Larry and her. But what if no one missed them? There was no check on who went in or out of the caves. She could be down here forever.
She took off her other shoe and began to walk, taking slow, careful steps, holding her burning hands out to avoid bumping into the rough sides of the tunnel. The longest journey begins with but a single step, Catherine told herself. The Chinese said that and look how smart they are. They invented firecrackers and chop suey, and they were too clever to get caught in some dark hole in the ground where no one could find them. If I keep walking, I’ m going to bump into Larry or some tourists and we’ ll go back to the hotel and have a drink and laugh about all this. All I have to do is keep walking.
She stopped suddenly. In the distance she could hear the whirring sound again, moving toward her like some ghostly, phantom express train, and her body began to