Son of the Hero Read Online Free

my pistol out and ready.
    I was slow— way too slow. If that lizard had really been determined, I’d have been supper before I got a shell jacked into the chamber. But when my bow clattered on the stone, the lizard turned and scuttled off deeper into the cave. I could hear it moving farther off even after I lost sight of it.
    I looked down at my hands. They were trembling. A deep breath helped, but for a bit all I could do was stand there. That lizard didn’t have any business being there—or anywhere.
    Finally, I realized that I wasn’t accomplishing anything and that the damn lizard might come back. I took another deep breath and then took a long, close look at the wall until I could follow enough of the silver tracing to locate the door mentally. When I touched the silver with my rings, I could see into the basement room, and that reassured me.
    I stepped right through then, just to assure myself that I could. Back in that strange-but-familiar basement room, I took my hand away from the door and breathed deeply, several times. There was a crazy jumble of thoughts bouncing around in my head, and “crazy” was still the operative word. I dearly wanted to dig out the rest of those beers and polish them off … but I remembered why I was in the cave in the first place.
    “You’re going to have to go back through there,” I told myself. I may even have nodded. But after my encounter with that damn lizard, I had to make a quick trip upstairs. Somehow, my bladder managed to avoid letting go when I saw the lizard, but it was clamoring for attention—and it gave me an excuse to put off my return for a few more minutes.
    Then, reluctantly, I stepped back through into the cave and let the doorway close behind me. This time, I had the pistol in my hand, cocked, with the safety off. At least I knew that if I could get back to the cave, I could get home.
    If I could get by the lizard again.
    I picked up my bow and started toward the mouth of the cave, counting my steps going out so I would know how far I had to come in to reach the door tracing.
    Although I didn’t waste a lot of thought on it (I had enough on my mind without that), the cave didn’t look altogether natural. Dad and I had done a little spelunking. There wasn’t much that we hadn’t sampled over the years. Dad was gone so often on his “business trips” that he always wanted to spend a lot of time with me when he was home. For Dad, that meant doing things like hiking, camping, and exploring caves, not just watching ballgames or parades—though we did that too. This cave had been altered. Low spots in the ceiling had been hacked out. The floor was flat and met the walls almost at right angles. Most of the passage was room-high and eight feet wide.
    Twenty paces from the tracing I didn’t need the flashlight any longer. A few steps beyond that, the cave widened into a chamber about twenty feet square. In the center of the chamber, an altar—a large cube of rock with arcane symbols chiseled into its surfaces—had been erected. The cave walls around it were painted with exaggerated nudes, fat-bottomed women with huge breasts, like the fertility goddesses of the ancient Mideast.
    Beyond that chamber, the cave narrowed down again, but the mouth wasn’t far off. The last few steps I had to take hunched over. I stayed inside the mouth of the cave long enough to let my eyes adjust to the outside light. I had had one surprise too many already.
    It seemed to be about mid-afternoon, not thirty minutes past dark—wherever I was. It had to be afternoon (rather than morning) because there had been light visible in the cave when I first looked through the green-trout door. I saw a lot of green outside the cave, even wilder and more disorganized than our backyard. The hillside around me was covered with something like Scottish heather, except for a few large bushes and trees. The cave mouth was some feet above the path. I could see it running off into the forest. The