THE HOLE

The Colon Ridge Zone

Those new regions which we found and explored . . . we may rightly call a New World . . . a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa.
-- Amerigo Vespucci, on America

"Now it's your turn to explain," Ike said. "Just how did you end up here?"

Unsure how much he really wanted to hear, Ali edited herself. He kept asking questions and soon she found herself defining proto-language and the mother tongue.

"All we need is one translator who can read their writings," she said. "It could unlock their whole civilization to us."

Ike misunderstood. "Are you asking me to teach you?"

She kept her voice flat. "Do you know how to, Ike?"

He clicked his tongue in the negative. Ali instantly recognized the sound from her time among the San Bushmen in southern Africa. That, too? she wondered. Click language? Her excitement was building.

"Even hadals don't know how to read hadal," he said.

"Then you've never actually seen a hadal reading," she clarified. "The ones you met were illiterate."

"They can't read hadal writings," Ike repeated. "It's lost to them. I knew one once. He could read English and Japanese. But the old hadal writing was alien to him. It was a great frustration for him."

"Wait." Ali stopped, dumbfounded. No one had ever suggested such a thing.

"You're saying the hadals read modern human languages? Do they speak our languages, too?"

"He did," said Ike. "He was a genius. A leader. The rest are . . .much less than him."

"You knew him?" Her pulse raced. Who else could he be speaking of except the historical Satan?

Ike stopped. He was looking at her, or through her, with those impenetrable glacier glasses. She couldn't begin to read his thoughts. "Ike?"

"Why are you doing this?"

"I have a secret." She wanted to trust him. They were still touching, and that seemed a good start. "What if I told you my purpose was to get a positive identification of that man, whatever he is? To get more information about him. A description of his face. Clues to his behavior. Even to meet him."

"You won't." Ike's voice sounded dead.

"But anything's possible."

"No," he said. "I mean you won't. By the time you ever got that close, it wouldn't be you anymore.

She brooded. He knew something, but wasn't telling. "You're making him up," she declared. It was peevish, a last resort.

Ike held out one arm. Turned just so in the light, Ali could see the raised scars where a glyph had been branded in the flesh. To the naked eye, the scars lay hidden beneath more superficial markings. She touched them with her fingertips . . . the way a hadal might in complete darkness. "What does it mean?" she asked.

"It's a claim mark," he said. "The name they gave me. Beyond that, I don't have a clue. And the thing is, the hadals don't, either. They just imitate drawings their ancestors left a long time ago."

Ali traced her fingers across the scarring. "What do you mean by a claim mark?"

He shrugged, regarding the arm as if it belonged to someone else. "There's probably a better term for it. That's what I call them. Each clan has its own, and then each member his own." He looked at her. "I can show you others," he said.

He started to unbutton his pocket, then stopped. "You're sure about this?"

She stared impatiently at the pocket, willing it to fly open. "Yes."

He pulled out a small packet of leather patches, each roughly the size of a baseball card, and handed them to her. They had been sliced in a neat rectangle and tanned to stay soft. At first Ali thought the leather was vellum of some kind, and that Ike had used them to trace or write on. There were faint colored designs on one side. Then she saw that the colors came from tattooing, and the weltlike ridges were keloid scars, and there were tiny, pallid hairs. It was skin, all right. Human skin. Hadal skin. Whatever this was.

Ike did not see her misgivings; he was too busy arranging the strips on her still, cupped palms. He gave a running commentary, intent, even scholarly. "Two weeks old," he said of one. "Notice the twisted serpents. I've never come across that motif. You can feel them twining together, very skillful, whoever incised him."

He laid a pair of patches side by side. "These two I got off a fresh kill. You can tell from the linked circles, they'd been travelers from a long way off, from the same region. It's a pattern I used to see on Afghans and Pakis. Captures, you know. Down beneath the Karakoram."

Ali was staring as much at him as at the skin pieces. She had never been squeamish, but she was stilled by his collection.

He set down the last of his patches. "Here's some of the geometries you see on the borders of their mandalas. They're pretty standard for down here, a way to ritually enclose the outer circle and hold in the mandala's information. You've seen them on the walls."

"Ike." Ali stopped him. "What do you mean 'fresh kill'?"

Ike picked up the two patches she was referring to. "A day old. Maybe two."

"I mean, what. What was killed? A hadal?"

"One of the porters. I don't know his name."

"We're missing a porter?"

"More like ten or twelve," Ike said. "You haven't noticed? In twos and threes, over the past week. They're sick of Walker's bullying."

"Does anyone else know?" No one had remarked on this to her. It signified a whole other level of the expedition, one that was darker and more violent than she -- or the other scientists -- had comprehended.

Excerpted from The Descent by Jeff Long. Copyright © 1999 by Jeff Long. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Copyright © 1999, Random House, Inc.