Time......... (Part 3)

It was warm in the hole, if hole it could be called; when Peter had recovered from his fall and stood up, he felt along the floor, hoping to meet up with a wall or something, but after considerable searching, he came upon nothing. Finally he got the courage to stand up. He had only walked two steps, though, before he fell into Frank.
"Ouch!" Frank howled.
"Hush!" Peter whispered frantically. "Have you got a match?"
"Of course! It says- bother! What does it say?"
"Not a watch, a match! But now that you mention it, does your watch light up?"
"It used to," Frank shook it. "There!" A faint blue-green glow came from it. It was too weak to show anything in the cavern, however; even in the utter darkness.
"That won't help very much," Peter sighed.
"Peter!" Frank cried out suddenly.
"What? Keep your voice down!"
"My watch! It's - it's going all weird!"
"What do you mean?"
"The hands are spinning around it non-stop! I'm afraid it's broken!"
"Hmm," Peter said thoughtfully. "I wish I could read my watch. It doesn't light up."
"Here, hold it under mine and I'll turn its light on."
"It says - it says - it's broken too!" Peter saw the hands of the watch glittering in the faint light as they wound around and around.
"Do you think it's a time glitch?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, couldn't it have been ruined by the speeding up of time?"
"Yes, I -I guess so. But come on, now! There's something much more important than broken watches here. We've got to figure out how to get out of here!"
"Get out?" a strange voice said suddenly. Frank grasped Peter's hand tightly. The two of them searched the darkness anxiously.
"You'll never get out." A glimmer of light started to fill the hole, and straining their eyes, the boys could see that a light was entering the hole by a door on the side. They now saw that the hole was a large chamber lacking both door and window, excepting the opening in which the light was now entering. But of yet, the figure behind it could not be seen.
"Never - never get out?" Frank stammered. He felt like he could have believed anything at that moment.
"No. At least, not yet." They caught sight of the speaker now. It was a man, tall and thin, but very young. The light he held shown up on his clean shaven face, revealing his stern features. They were stern, but not unkind, Peter noted with some comfort. The man's dark hair was straight, flipping out on the ends, by his ears.
"Who are you?" he said.
"That's what we were going to ask you," Peter said slowly. His hands shook as he said it, but he would not - he could not - let the man see that he was afraid.
"I asked you first," the man replied calmly.
"I'm Frank Liftun," Frank replied, gulping hard.
"Never heard of you," the man said simply. "But that's no matter. What were you doing, spying on us?"
"Spying?" Frank gasped.
"That's what I said, didn't I?"
"We aren't spies," Frank said quickly.
"What are you then?" the man grinned.
"We're - explorers," Frank said hesitatingly.
"Explorers?" the man laughed. "That's the lamest excuse I've heard yet!"
"We're lost," Peter said finally. "Can you help us?"
"Lost? In this place? You can't just wander into here from nowhere. Not unless you had a purpose."
"We do have a purpose! Just give us back our time machine, and we'll get out of here!" Frank yelled suddenly.
"Time machine? Just what is a time machine?"
"Come on! You guys are in the future! Of course you know what a time machine is!" Frank said impatiently.
"Future? Time machines? I just don't get it. But never mind. You'll have to come with me."
"Where are you going to take us?" Frank asked.
"To the General, of course," the man stepped towards them. Frank started to back away, but Peter stopped him.
"These are the only people who can help us," he explained in a low voice. "Better oblige them."
The man heard him and grinned again. He took Frank's hands in one of his own, and searched Frank's clothes for weapons.
"Odd clothes you two have got," he chuckled as he moved on to Peter. "No weapons. That's good. But I can't understand why you haven't got any." He looked at them curiously, then motioned them to go ahead of him. They left the dark chamber and entered a long, dark, tunnel-shaped hall, lighted by an occasional light. Peter looked hard at the lights as they clambered down the hall, but he couldn't figure out what they were made of. The odd thing about them was that they appeared to be supported by nothing, just a ball of light hanging in the air. Also, when he looked away from them and at one of the dark walls in the hall, no eerie green spots formed in his eyes.
"Where are we?" Frank asked after they had trudged on for ten minutes. "This place is huge! And I'm tired."
"Fairly so. It takes some getting used to."
"How much longer?" Peter sighed. He was out of breath, and his legs were becoming so tired they started to drag.
"You aren't tired, too, are you?" the man asked. "Most people I know can stand a ten-minute walk."
"Yeah, well, we had a difficult hike beforehand, and a long run before that," Frank explained.
"I see," the man sounded uninterested, "we're almost there now."
Peter looked back at the man's face and saw a grin hovering on it. "He seems to think we're very comical," Peter thought. "I wonder that we don't see any other people?"
They had passed several intersections where the main tunnel was jointed by other tunnels, slightly smaller, when the man took a sudden turn into one of the smaller halls. If the boys found the other tunnel dark, this tunnel was darker. The lights in it were fewer and farther between. Peter also began to notice doors appearing on the sides of the tunnel walls. Some were entirely dark, but underneath others, a crack of yellow light streamed out.
"I wonder what's in those rooms," Frank whispered to Peter. Peter glanced at the man and saw that he was grinning again. He had obviously heard Frank.
"He has amazing ears," Peter thought to himself. His thoughts sounded loud to him in the still tunnel, and he wondered if the man could hear them. "I can't hear his thoughts, so perhaps he can't hear mine," Peter started to comfort himself. And yet, in books, there was always an amazingly smart character who, if he couldn't read your thoughts, could accurately guess them.
"Okay, this is it!" the man said suddenly, paused before one of the doors. He knocked on it loudly.
"Who is it?" said an irritated voice.
"It's me, Uncle; it's Kevin."
"Kevin? I thought I told you not to bother me when I'm in my office!"
"I know but-"
"And don't give me any half-hearted excuses! Last time you bothered me, you said you lost your laser-gun while chasing badgers in the left wing. Badgers indeed! As if there are badgers around here!"
"There are, but that's not the point. It's-"
"Don't contradict me. Your getting too impertinent, thinking yourself so important just because you're the general's nephew!"
Kevin sighed and look at the two boys. The manly air he had held earlier seemed to have vanished, and deteriorated in his annoyance.
"So, I take this to mean you won't see me, or the-" Kevin was interrupted again.
"No! Go do something else!"
With another sigh and a shrug, Kevin turned to the boys. "Oh well, if you turn out to be spies, and you guys manage to escape and bring important news to your commander, uncle can't blame me for not doing anything!"
His uncle, who was so "deeply engrossed in his work" managed to overhear his nephew, and yelled out, "It's not going to work! Go away!"
"Is your uncle always like that?" Frank asked as they started down the hall once more.
"Most of the time," Kevin said. "He's extremely busy and can't stand interruption.
"I think I kind of noticed," Frank responded. "So what do we do now?"
"I don't know," Kevin thought for a moment.
"Look, if we're going to be stuck here for a bit, we might as well get to know each other," Peter said.
"Yeah, I guess so. It gets awful lonely around here," Kevin remarked.
"Why? Do you and your uncle live all alone here?" Frank asked.
"No. But almost everyone's older than me, and they always make fun of me."
"And you let them?"
"Yeah. After all, I'm not very important here, and so for me to stand up for myself would probably bring more down on my head."
"I see."
"How old are you?" Kevin asked.
"Me? Fifteen. Sixteen in November," Frank said.
"November? Where's that?"
"You mean 'when's that'?"
"Huh?"
"You know, November, the month?"
"Who's he? A guy who discovered a planet and named it after himself? Though I've never heard of the group of aliens called 'months.' "
"Huh?"
"What?"
Frank and Kevin stared at each in a confused sort of way. Peter smiled to himself. Kevin seemed nicer now; he acted like a boy in some ways, and, his stern expression completely vanished, he looked little older than 18 or 19. "Odd," Peter thought, "learn a guy's name and you feel like you know him."
"How many people are here?" Peter asked suddenly.
"I don't know," Kevin shrugged. "I could make a guess, but I think it's supposed to be a secret."
"I see, kind of," Peter said. "What is this place?"
"It's - no, I shouldn't say. I've said enough already. And you probably could guess more from what I said than I intended to say."
"We aren't spies if you're still worried about that," Frank insisted.
"But what else could you be?"
"Normal, average teenagers, who like adventures and get themselves into trouble a lot?"
"I'm normal and average, so you can't be because your not like me. And what's a teenager?"
"It's somebody in their teens," Frank explained.
"Teens?"
"Yeah, it's -"
"Frank!" Peter said with a laugh. "Don't try to explain, you'll only mess things up again."
They suddenly heard a clomp, clomp, the echoes of footsteps falling in another area of the tunnel. Kevin's face grew very grave, and he searched the smooth side of the tunnel with an experienced hand.
"What are you doing?" Frank asked.
"Shh!" Kevin said. His hand hit against a small jut in the wall, and a hidden door soundlessly opened. "Into here!" He whispered and quickly thrust them into the alcove. Then he climbed in himself, and shut the door after him.
"What are we doing in here?" Frank whispered.
"Hiding," Kevin said simply.
"From what?"
"From the somebody in the tunnel."
"Why?"
"Because I - I don't want you guys to be found," he stammered.
"I thought we were spies that you were just longing to hand over to your uncle."
"Yeah, well, not anymore. You see, that was before I knew you. But if I hand you over now, who knows what will happen to you! And then I'll be lonely again."
"But if we're spies, don't you think that it's more important to hand us over to protect this - whatever it is, than to be concerned with your own loneliness?" Frank asked.
"You aren't spies."
"I thought you said we were."
"But you never said you were."
"That doesn't count."
"To me it does."
"But just because it does to you doesn't mean-"
"Hush! He's here!" Kevin bit his lip nervously as the loud clomping of the somebody's shoes was heard distinctly outside the door. But the shoes didn't passed by! They stopped at the door. A faint brushing sound followed it as the somebody searched the wall for the nail. There was a click, and the door began to open.

Copyright - 9/18/2008 - Curious Cognitive Content (CCC)
Please do not reproduce without permission from the author(ess).