Hunger (Gone 2)

Like Caine was a fish on a hook.

He crawled up onto the step. The granite was cold. He felt exposed and ridiculous sitting there, almost doubled over, beads of sweat forming on his brow.

It still had its hook in him. It was playing him, letting the line go slack, letting him think he was free, then yanking back hard, making sure the hook was still set, wearing him out.

Playing him.

Caine flashed on a memory almost forgotten. He saw his “father,” seated in a deck chair with salt spray darkening his tan jacket, holding the long, supple pole, sawing it back and forth.

Caine had gone fishing that one time, with his “father.” It hadn’t been a Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn kind of experience. Caine’s father—the man he’d grown up calling his father—was not a man for small, intimate moments, for worms in a bucket and bamboo poles.

They were on a trip down to Mexico. Caine’s “mother” had been left to shop in Cancún, and Caine had been granted the high privilege of accompanying his father on what amounted to a business trip disguised as a father-son fishing trip.

Caine and his father; a kid named Paolo and his father; a girl named…well, he couldn’t recall her name. The three fathers were doing business and fishing for swordfish aboard a seventy-foot power boat.

The girl, what was her name?

Oh, my God, her name had been Diana. Not the same Diana, of course, a very different girl, not very attractive, red hair, bulging eyes, not at all the same.

Diana had led them, Caine and Paolo, down into the tight forward space where the anchor and ropes and so on were stored. There she had produced a joint, a small, tightly rolled marijuana cigarette.

Paolo, an Italian kid a couple of years older than Caine, had shrugged and said, “No problem,” using his American slang. Caine had felt trapped. Trapped on the boat. Trapped in the company of the two kids. Trapped into getting high.

Trapped.

It wasn’t Caine’s favorite feeling.

He’d sat there in that dark, damp, cramped space taking hits of the joint and wishing he was anywhere else.

Paolo had tried to hook up with the girl, the pre-Diana Diana. She’d discouraged him and eventually Paolo had gone off in search of food. The girl had sidled up beside Caine and made it clear that she’d like to make the most of their privacy and the drug’s effects.

Caine had rebuffed her, but she’d said, “Oh, you think you’re too cool, right? You think you’re out of my league, don’t you?”

“You said it, not me.”

“Yeah? Guess what? Your dad needs my dad. What if I go up on deck and tell my dad you forced me to smoke pot? I do that and guess what? Your dad loses this deal and he blames you.”

Her eyes shone with triumph. She had him. She had her hook in him, no different from the loudly laughing men up on deck and their stupid fish.

She was sure of it, that Diana.

But Caine had laughed. “Go ahead.”

“I will,” she said.

“Fine. Go.”

He had come to realize a basic truth that day: You can’t be trapped by other people, you can only be trapped by your own fear. Defy and win.

On that day, that day on the boat, Caine had been less afraid than the girl. And he’d known intuitively that he held the winning hand.

Defy and win.

The problem now was that Caine was truly, deeply afraid of the creature in that mine. Afraid all the way down to his bones. Afraid down to the smallest, farthest, most secret recesses of his mind.

He couldn’t bluff the Darkness. The Darkness knew he was afraid.

There was a rope wrapped tightly around his mind and soul. The other end of that rope was held by the dark thing at the bottom of that mine shaft. Caine imagined himself cutting that rope, picking up an ax, raising it high above his head, bringing it down with all his might….