Wedded in a Whirlwind

She sipped at the bottle of water she carried in her shoulder bag before pouring a small amount on to the hem of her shirt to wipe over her face. Then, wondering how much longer she would have to endure this ‘privilege’, she glanced at her watch.

Three o’clock? Was that all it was?

She frowned. The pink streaks in the sky suggested it was later. She’d reset her watch to local time when she’d landed, but maybe she’d got it wrong; she hadn’t actually been paying much attention to the time.

She stared up at the sky for a moment longer, then at the path taken by her companions. Night fell with stunning rapidity in this part of the world and she listened for any sound that might indicate their imminent return.

There was nothing. The birds had fallen silent, the insects had stopped their apparently ceaseless stridulating as if they, too, were listening.

The absolute quiet that a minute or two earlier had seemed so welcome now seemed strangely eerie, prickling her skin with goose-flesh, setting up the small hairs on the back of her neck at some unseen, unknown danger. A feeling that the earth itself was holding its breath.

‘Wait!’ Her urgent cry seemed pathetically small, smothered by the density of the vegetation and, in a sudden burst of panic at the thought of being left on her own in that ancient, ghost-filled place, she leapt to her feet and, quite oblivious of the heat, began to scramble up the steep path after the others.

‘Wait,’ she cried out again. ‘Wait for me.’

She had covered perhaps twenty yards when she staggered slightly and, stumbling, put her hand to the ground to save herself. She didn’t stop to wonder at such unaccustomed clumsiness, she was in too much of a hurry to catch up with the rest of the party. Then, as she took another step, she lost her balance again and grabbed for a tree as she was overcome with dizziness, staring down at the forest floor, which appeared to be rippling beneath her feet. Puzzled, but not yet alarmed.

Leaves, small pieces of twig and bark began to tumble from the dense canopy high above her and she gave a startled little scream as something hit her shoulder and bounced to the ground. It was a large spider and, for a moment, they stared at one another, both of them confused by the earth’s uncharacteristic behaviour. Then the tree she was clinging to began to shake and Manda forgot all about the spider.

For a moment she hung on, clinging to the thick trunk regardless of the debris raining down on her head and shoulders, unable to concentrate on anything but the absolute necessity of remaining on her feet as the earth shook.

If she could just hold on, it would stop and then she would walk slowly back down the path to the tour bus and wait for the others to return.

Except that it didn’t.

Instead, the shaking grew steadily worse until the ground beneath her felt as if it were surging in great undulating waves and the tree she was clinging on to for dear life lurched sideways as the path split open with a great jagged tear.

For a frozen moment in time Manda hung on, staring down into the thick green forest that carpeted the valley wall rippling beneath her like some storm-tossed sea. Then, as she realised she was about to be tipped into that maelstrom, she let go of the tree and flung herself across the gaping path a split second before the tree, its roots and the ground to which they were attached, fell away like a stone.

She was screaming now. Seriously screaming.

She knew she was screaming because, although she could not hear herself—all she could hear was the crack and roar as the earth split and tore about her—she could feel the harsh vibration in her throat.

Lying where she had thrown herself in her mad leap for safety, her arms wrapped around her head, her eyes tightly closed, she shrieked, ‘Enough! No more, God. Stop it! Please!’

Then the ground beneath her gave way and she, too, was sliding into the abyss.

CHAPTER TWO

MANDA had no way of knowing what time it was, or how long she had been lying on cold stone. She was just grateful that the earth had stopped shaking.

After a while, though, she lifted her head, gingerly feeling for damage. Her fingers were stiff, sore as she tried to move them and there was a tender spot at the back of her head. A dull throbbing ache. Nothing that she couldn’t, for the moment, live with, she decided. And she seemed lucid enough.

Lucid enough to know that she had lived through an earthquake and be grateful to have survived.

Lucid enough to know that living through the initial catastrophe might not be enough. She had been alone, separated from her party…

She let her head fall back against the stone and lay still for a moment while she gathered her wits, her strength, knowing that she should move, shout, do something to make herself heard, alert searchers to her presence.

In a moment.

She would do all that in a moment.

It was dark. Pitch-dark. There were no stars, no moon, which suggested dense cloud cover. Was that normal after earthquakes? Tropical rain would be the absolute limit, she thought, as she tried to piece together exactly what had happened.

The earth shaking. The path splitting. Her fingers clawing at the earth as she had begun to fall.

She went cold as she relived that moment of terror as she’d been carried down on a torrent of earth and stones. As she realised just what that meant. Why there was no sky.

It wasn’t cloud that was blocking it out. She’d fallen into some cavity. Into one of the temples? Maybe even one that hadn’t been excavated. Or even discovered…

She was beneath the ground. Buried. Entombed. Locked in…

Panic sucked the breath from her. Her cry was wordless and, while every instinct was urging her to fling herself at the walls, claw her way out, she was unable to move.

She knew this feeling. The claustrophobia. The desperation to escape. Her body and mind too numb to do anything about it.

She’d been here before.

She swallowed hard, forced herself to concentrate on breathing…

In. One, two, three…

Told herself that it wasn’t the same.

Hold. One, two, three…

That had been a mental lockdown. She’d been confined by the darkness in her mind.

Out. One, two, three…

This was physical.

She could do something about this, dig herself out with her bare hands if need be, she told herself, even as she strained desperately for the comfort of voices, the clink of stones being turned. A promise that there was someone there. A hand in the darkness.

There was nothing. Only a blanketing silence. Only the rapid beating of her pulse in her ears.

For a moment she lost the rhythm of her breathing, gasping for air as fear began to overwhelm her.

She couldn’t afford to panic. It would be a waste of energy, a waste of time, and if there was one thing she’d learned, it was how to take control of her body, her emotions.

Breathe in to the count of three…

She had to shut down everything but the core need to concentrate.

Hold to the count of three…

After that she could make a careful assessment of her situation. Decide what action to take. If ever there was a time to use everything she’d learned—to block out emotion by fixing on what had to be done, making a plan and carrying it through, this was it. If she once succumbed to mind-numbing, will-sapping terror…

Easier said than done.

Control was easy when you were calling all the shots, when you were the one directing events. But it was a long time since she’d been thrown entirely on her own resources.

In the metaphorical dark.

At least this dark was physical. Not that it was much comfort. She was miles from anywhere and even if any of her party was capable of making it to the nearest village it would take time for help to arrive.

She blotted that out.

She mustn’t think about that.

Breathe, breathe… The air, at least, was fresh. For now.

She tried to swallow but her throat was dry. There was water in her bag. She had to find her bag. Concentrate on what she could do to keep herself alive because it was far too soon for any serious attempt at rescue.

If she was ever going to get out of here, the important thing was to keep calm. Conserve her strength.

She listened for the smallest sound.

The silence was so dense that it was like a suffocating weight against her eardrums, her chest and once again it almost overwhelmed her and she had to force herself to focus on normal, everyday things. Good things.

Ivo and Belle.

Daisy.

The precious new babies…

At least they didn’t know where she was. Wouldn’t be glued to news reports, worrying themselves sick. Ivo wouldn’t be flying here to take charge…

No. On second thoughts that didn’t help. She needed someone out there moving heaven and earth to find her. Lots of earth and stone.

But it wasn’t going to happen.

She’d cut loose, broken the ties, had wanted to prove that she was capable of standing of her own feet.

Great timing, Manda…

Maybe she should see if she could stand up, try exploring her surroundings. Maybe she could find her own way out.

‘See’ being the operative word.

Alone in the dark, it was as if she had suddenly been struck blind and deaf. She lifted a hand but couldn’t see it until it was right in front of her face and even then she wasn’t sure if she could actually see it, or whether her brain was providing a picture of what she knew was there.

She’d never been in such absolute darkness, the kind of darkness that made an overcast night in the depths of Norfolk seem bright as day.

Maybe, she thought, with a rising tide of panic, she really was blind. Or deaf. Or both. Maybe she’d banged her head harder than she’d imagined and lost those precious vital senses. Maybe she’d been unconscious for hours.

In a sudden desperate need to remind herself that this wasn’t so, she shouted, ‘Help!’

Trapped in the confined space, her voice echoed and reverberated back at her, again and again until she covered her ears.

There was nothing wrong with her hearing.

She was just alone and in the dark. It might be her worst nightmare, but she wasn’t about to wake up and find Ivo waiting to pick up the pieces and put her back together again. Not this time.

There would be no Belle to reach wordlessly for her hand.

No Daisy to grin at her, say something utterly outrageous.

A groan escaped her and suddenly her precious lucidity did not seem such a prize.

Muddle-headed, her memory would not be quite so painfully sharp. Confused, she wouldn’t be quite so aware of the danger of her position.

Fear, real icy-cold fear, began to seep into every pore as she realised that, separated from her companions, no one would even know where to begin looking for her…

‘Shut up, Manda,’ she said. Then tried to decide whether talking to herself was a good sign or a bad one.

Rubbing briskly at her arms, she made a determined effort to exclude the building terror by thinking of something else.

Working out exactly where she was.

Okay.

She’d been standing on a forest path, so logic suggested that she should now be buried beneath tons of earth and vegetation. But she wasn’t. Which was a good thing.

Instead, she was in a dark, echoing space, which presumably meant she had fallen into one of the temples.

Which was not…

The path had twisted and turned as they had climbed up the side of the hill and she tried to remember the temple they had visited before she had rebelled against so much enforced culture. Tried to remember which way the path had turned, but the darkness was confusing, blocking her thoughts.

If only she could see!

‘Stop it, Miranda Grenville,’ she told herself sternly. So she couldn’t see. Tough. For her it was just a temporary inconvenience. There were millions of people who were forced to live with it every day of their lives. They coped and so would she.

Her eyes would adapt to the darkness in a few minutes.

She’d get herself out of there…

She stopped the thought before it reached the inevitable…if it was the last thing she did.

There was no point in tempting fate. Fate, it was clear, was already on her case in a big way. She had to treat this as if it were some organisational problem. The kind she’d handled for Ivo every day of her working life until she’d made the move to set up her own television production company with Belle and Daisy. Proving to herself, to everyone, that she no longer needed her brother as a prop.

Except that so far it had been a one-show wonder and without Belle…

No! Belle was brilliant in front of the camera, but she was the one who’d made it happen. That was what she did. Give her a goal, a project to bring in on time and she’d deliver the goods and she’d get herself out of here, too.

Breathe!

One, two, three…

Get up!

Rubble rattled off her as she finally managed to sit up; small pieces of stone, along with what felt like half a ton of fine cloying dust that rose up to choke her.

Coughing as the dust filled her nose, her throat, filtered down into her sensitive bronchial passages, Manda groped around for her bag. She’d been holding on to it as she’d taken off after the rest of the party and it must have fallen through the gap in the earth with her, although obviously not conveniently at her side.

Her left arm buckled a little as she eased herself forward to spread her arc of search, her elbow giving way when she put weight on it. Prompted by this, all her other joints decided to join in. Her left knee began to throb. Her shoulder. Her fingers were already stinging…

She stopped making a mental inventory when she realised that she hurt pretty much everywhere and instead congratulated herself that nothing seemed to be broken, although she hadn’t actually tried to stand up yet. She flexed her toes but nothing too bad happened.

She had, it seemed, been lucky.

The last thing she remembered was the ground heaving upwards, shifting sideways, tipping her through into the earth’s basement like so much garbage, but at least she was in one piece and able to move about.

Check out her surroundings…

She spread her hands and began to feel around for her bag. That had to be her first priority. She had water in her bag.

No luck.

She carefully eased herself to her knees, then cautiously to her feet, feeling above her for the roof, blinking rapidly as if that would somehow clear her vision.

Her hands met no resistance, but maybe her eyes had adjusted a little because the darkness didn’t seem quite so dense now. Or were those shapes no more than her brain playing tricks?

She swallowed, inched forward, hands outstretched, letting out a tiny shriek as her palms touched something. For a moment her heart went into overdrive, even while her head processed the information.

Cold, flat. It was a wall.

Once she’d regained her breath, she began to edge her way carefully around the boundary of her underground prison.

She was certain now that she was in one of the temples. They had passed a truly impressive entrance that had been more thoroughly cleared than the rest, but the guide had hurried them past, nervously warning that it was ‘not safe’ when one of the businessmen had stopped, wanting to go inside.

At the time she hadn’t questioned it; she’d just been grateful to be spared yet more of the same. But, before they’d been hurried on, she had glimpsed tools of some kind, a work table.

The tools would be very welcome right now. And if someone was working there, presumably there’d be a lamp, water…

She tried not to think about what would happen if she didn’t find her bag with her water bottle. She’d find it…

Every now and then her fingers encountered sharply cut images carved into the walls. Protected from the elements within the temple walls, they were as clean-edged as the day they had been chiselled into the stone.

She had seen enough of them before she’d abandoned the tour and her brain, deprived of light, eagerly supplied pictures of those strange stylised creatures to fill the void.

In the powerful beam of the guide’s torch they had seemed slightly sinister.

In the blackness her imagination amplified the threat and she began to shiver.

Stupid, stupid…

Concentrate. Breathe…

She counted the steps around the edge of her cell. Two, three, four… Her mind refused to cooperate but took itself off on a diversion to wonder about her companions. Had they survived? Were they, even now, being picked up by some rescue team? Would they realise that she wasn’t with them?

One of the businessmen had been eyeing her with a great deal more interest than the ruins. Maybe he would alert the rescuers to her absence. Assuming there were any rescuers.

Assuming any of them had survived.

That thought brought the fear seeping back and for a moment she leaned against the wall as a great shuddering sigh swept through her and she covered her ears as if to block it out.

There was no point in dwelling on such negative thoughts. She had to keep strong, in control, to survive. But, even as she clung to that thought, the wall began to shake.

‘No!’ She didn’t know whether she screamed it out loud or whether the agonised word was a whisper in her mind as an aftershock flung her away from its illusory protection.

She used her hands to protect herself, landing painfully on palms and knees.

Dust showered down on to her, filling her eyes and, as she gasped for air, her mouth. For a moment she was certain she was about to suffocate and in sheer terror she let rip with a scream.

That was when, out of the darkness, fingers clamped tightly about her arm and a gravelly voice said, ‘For pity’s sake, woman, give it a rest…’

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