by Jeff Long
“He must have been heading for the front door,” Ike said. “I’ll go take a look.” Reluctantly he unzipped his and Kora’s paired bags and felt their body heat vanish into the chill air.
He looked around the cave’s chamber. It was dark and freezing. The naked corpse towering above them made the cave feel like a crypt. On his feet now, blood moving again, Ike didn’t like the look of their entropy. It was too soon to be lying around dying.
“I’ll come with you,” Kora said.
It took them three minutes to reach the entranceway.
“I don’t hear the wind anymore,” Kora said. “Maybe the storm’s stopped.”
But the entry was plugged by a ten-foot-high drift, complete with a wicked cornice curling in at the crown. It allowed no light or sound from the outer world. “I don’t believe it,” Kora said.
Ike kick-stepped his boot toes into the hard crust and climbed to where his head bumped the ceiling. With one hand he karate-chopped the snow and managed a thin view. The light was gray out there, and hurricane-force winds were skinning the surface with a freight-train roar. Even as he watched, his little opening sealed shut again. They were bottled up.
He slid back to the base of the snow. For the moment he forgot about the missing client.
“Now what?” Kora asked behind him.
Her faith in him was a gift. Ike took it. She—they—needed him to be strong.
“One thing’s certain,” he said. “Our missing man didn’t come this way. No footprints, and he couldn’t have gotten out through that snow anyway.”
“But where could he have gone?”
“There might be some other exit.” Firmly he added, “We may need one.”
He had suspected the existence of a secondary feeder tunnel. Their dead RAF pilot had written about being reborn from a “mineral womb” and climbing into an “agony of light.” On the one hand, Isaac could have been describing every ascetic’s reentry into reality after prolonged meditation. But Ike was beginning to think the words were more than spiritual metaphor. Isaac had been a warrior, after all, trained for hardship. Everything about him declared the literal physical world. At any rate, Ike wanted to believe that the dead man might have been talking about some subterranean passage. If he could escape through it to here, maybe they could escape through it to there, wherever that might be.
Back in the central chamber, he prodded the group to life. “Folks,” he announced, “we could use a hand.”
A camper’s groan emitted from one cluster of Gore-Tex and fiberfill. “Don’t tell me,” someone complained, “we have to go save him.”
“If he found a way out of here,” Ike retorted, “then he’s saved us. But first we have to find him.”
Grumbling, they rose. Bags unzipped. By the light of his headlamp, Ike watched their pockets of body heat drift off in vaporous bursts, like souls. From here on, it was imperative to keep them on their feet. He led them to the back of the cave. There were a dozen portals honeycombing the chamber’s walls, though only two were man-sized. With all the authority he could muster, Ike formed two teams: them all together, and him. Alone. “This way we can cover twice the distance,” he explained.
“He’s leaving us,” Cleo despaired. “He’s saving himself.”
“You don’t know Ike,” Kora said.
“You won’t leave us?” Cleo asked him.
Ike looked at her, hard. “I won’t.”
Their relief showed in long streams of exhaled frost.
“You need to stick together,” he instructed them solemnly. “Move slowly. Stay in flashlight range at all times. Take no chances. I don’t want any sprained ankles. If you get tired and need to sit down for a while, make sure a buddy stays with you. Questions? None? Good. Now let’s synchronize watches.…”
He gave the group three plastic “candles,” six-inch tubes of luminescent chemicals that could be activated with a twist. The green glow didn’t light much space and only lasted two or three hours. But they would serve as beacons every few hundred yards: crumbs upon the forest floor.
“Let me go with you,” Kora murmured to him. Her yearning surprised him.
“You’re the only one I trust with them,” he said. “You take the right tunnel, I’ll take the left. Meet me back here in an hour.” He turned to go. But they didn’t move. He realized they weren’t just watching him and Kora, but waiting for his blessing. “Vaya con Dios,” he said gruffly.
Then, in full view of the others, he kissed Kora. One from the heart, broad, a breath-taker. For a moment, Kora held on tight, and he knew things were going to be all right between them, they were going to find a way.
Ike had never had much stomach for caving. The enclosure made him claustrophobic. Just the same, he had good instincts for it. On the face of it, ascending a mountain was the exact reverse of descending into a cave. A mountain gave freedoms that could be equally horrifying and liberating. In Ike’s experience, caves took away freedom in the same proportions. Their darkness and sheer gravity were tyrants. They compressed the imagination and deformed the spirit. And yet both mountains and caves involved climbing. And when you came right down to it, there was no difference between ascent and descent. It was all the same circle. And so he made swift progress.
Five minutes deep, he heard a sound and paused. “Owen?”
His senses were in flux, not just heightened by the darkness and silence, but also subtly changed. It was hard to put words to, the clean dry scent of dust rendered by mountains still in birth, the scaly touch of lichen that had never seen sunshine. The visuals were not completely trustworthy. You saw like this on very dark nights on a mountain, a headlight view of the world, one beam wide, truncated, partial.
A muffled voice reached him. He wanted it to be Owen so the search could be over and he could return to Kora. But the tunnels apparently shared a common wall. Ike put his head against the stone—chill, but not bitterly cold—and could hear Bernard calling for Owen.
Farther on, Ike’s tunnel became a slot at shoulder height. “Hello?” he called into the slot. For some reason, he felt his animal core bristle. It was like standing at the mouth of a deep, dark alleyway. Nothing was out of place. Yet the very ordinariness of the walls and empty stone seemed to promise menace.
Ike shone his headlamp through the slot. As he stood peering into the depths at a tube of fractured limestone identical to the one he was already occupying, he saw nothing in itself to fear. Yet the air was so … inhuman. The smells were so faint and unadulterated that they verged on no smell, Zen-like, clear as water. It was almost refreshing. That made him more afraid.
The corridor extended in a straight line into darkness. He checked his watch: thirty-two minutes had passed. It was time to backtrack and meet the group. That was the arrangement, one hour, round trip. But then, at the far edge of his light beam, something glittered.
Ike couldn’t resist. It was like a tiny fallen star in there. And if he was quick, the whole exercise wouldn’t last more than a minute. He found a foothold and pulled himself in. The slot was just big enough to squeeze through, feetfirst.
On the other side of the wall, nothing had changed. This part of the tunnel looked no different from the other. His light ahead picked out the same gleam twinkling in the far darkness.
Slowly he brought his light down to his feet. Beside one boot, he found another reflection identical to the one glinting in the distance. It gave the same dull gleam.
He lifted his boot.
It was a gold coin.
Carefully, blood knocking through his veins, Ike stopped. A tiny voice warned him not to pick it up. But there was no way …
The coin’s antiquity was sensuous. Its lettering had worn away long ago, and the shape was asymmetrical, nothing stamped by any machine. Only a vague, amorphous bust of some king or deity still showed.
Ike shone his light down the tunnel. Past the next coin he saw a third one winking in the blackness. Could it be? The naked Isaac had fled from some prec
ious underground reserve, even dropping his pilfered fortune along the way.
The coins blinked like feral eyes. Otherwise the stone throat lay bare, too bright in the foreground, too dark in the back. Too neatly appointed with one coin, then another.
What if the coins had not been dropped? What if they’d been placed? The thought knifed him. Like bait.
He slugged his back against the cold stone.
The coins were a trap.
He swallowed hard, forced himself to think it through.
The coin was cold as ice. With one fingernail he scraped away a veneer of encrusted glacier dust. It had been lying here for years, even decades or centuries. The more he thought about it, the more his horror mounted.
The trap was nothing personal. It had nothing to do with drawing him, Ike Crockett, into the depths. To the contrary, this was just random opportunism. Time was not a consideration. Even patience had nothing to do with it. The way trash fishermen did, someone was chumming the occasional traveler. You threw down a handful of scraps and maybe something came, and maybe it didn’t. But who came here? That was easy. People like him: monks, traders, lost souls. But why lure them? To where?
His bait analogy evolved. This was less like trash fishing than bear-baiting. Ike’s dad used to do it in the Wind River Range for Texans who paid to sit in a blind and “hunt” browns and blacks. All the outfitters did it, standard operating procedure, like working cattle. You cultivated a garbage heap maybe ten minutes by horse from the cabins, so that the bears got used to regular feeding. As the season neared, you started putting out tastier tidbits. In an effort at making them feel included, Ike and his sister were called upon each Easter to surrender their marsh-mallow bunnies. As he neared ten, Ike was required to accompany his father, and that was when he saw where his candy went.
The images cascaded. A child’s pink candy left in the silent woods. Dead bears hanging in the autumn light, skins falling heavily as by magic where the knives traced lines. And underneath, bodies like men almost, as slick as swimmers.
Out, thought Ike. Get out.
Not daring to take his light off the inner mountain, Ike climbed back through the slot, cursing his loud jacket, cursing the rocks that shifted underfoot, cursing his greed. He heard noises that he knew didn’t exist. Jumped at shadows, he cast himself. The dread wouldn’t leave him. All he could think of was exit.
He got back to the main chamber out of breath, skin still crawling. His return couldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes. Without checking his watch, he guessed his round trip at less than an hour.
The chamber was pitch black. He was alone. He stopped to listen as his heartbeat slowed, and there was not a sound, not a shuffle. He could see the fluorescent writing hovering at the far edge of the chamber. It entwined the dark corpse like some lovely exotic serpent. He lashed his light across the chamber. The gold nose ring glinted. And something else. As if returning to a thought, he pulled his light back to the face.
The dead man was smiling.
Ike wiggled his light, jimmied the shadows. It had to be an optical trick, that or his memory was failing. He remembered a tight grimace, nothing like this wild smile. Where before he’d seen only the tips of a few teeth, joy—open glee—now played in his light. Get a grip, Crockett.
His mind wouldn’t quit racing. What if the corpse itself was bait? Suddenly the text took on a grotesque clarity. I am Isaac. The son who gave himself to sacrifice. For love of the Father. In exile. In my agony of Light. But what could this all mean?
He’d done his share of hardcore rescues and knew the drill—not that there was much of a drill for this one. Ike grabbed his coil of 9-mm rope and stuffed his last four AA batteries into a pocket, then looked around. What else? Two protein bars, a Velcro ankle brace, his med kit. It seemed as if there should have been more to carry. The cupboard was pretty much bare, though.
Just before departing the main chamber, Ike cast his light across the room. Sleeping bags lay scattered on the floor like empty cocoons. He entered the right-hand tunnel. The passage snaked downward at an even pitch, left, then right, then became steeper. What a mistake, sending them off, even all together. Ike couldn’t believe he’d put his little flock at this kind of risk. For that matter, he couldn’t believe the risk they’d taken. But of course they’d taken it. They didn’t know better.
“Hello!” he called. His guilt deepened by the vertical foot. Was it his fault they’d put their faith in a counterculture buccaneer?
The going slowed. The walls and ceiling grew corrupt with long sheets of delaminating rock. Pull the wrong piece, and the whole mass might slide. Ike pendulumed from admiration to resentment. His pilgrims were brave. His pilgrims were foolhardy. And he was in danger.
If not for Kora, he would have talked himself out of further descent. In a sense, she became a scapegoat for his courage. He wanted to turn around and flee. The same foreboding that had paralyzed him in the other tunnel flared up again. His very bones seemed ready to lock in rebellion, limb by limb, joint by joint. He forced himself deeper.
At last he reached a plunging shaft and came to a halt. Like an invisible waterfall, a column of freezing air streamed past from reaches too high for his flashlight beam. He held his hand out, and the cold current poured through his fingers.
At the very edge of the precipice, Ike looked down around his feet and found one of his six-inch chemical candles. The green glow was so faint he had almost missed it.
He lifted the plastic tube by one end and turned off his headlamp, trying to judge how long ago they had activated the mixture. More than three hours, less than six. Time was racing out of his control. On the offchance, he sniffed the plastic. Impossibly, it seemed to hold a trace of her coconut scent.
“Kora!” he bellowed into the tube of air.
Where outcrops disturbed the flow of wind, a tiny symphony of whistles and sirens and bird cries answered back, a music of stone. Ike stuffed the candle into one pocket.
The air smelled fresh, like the outside of a mountain. Ike filled his lungs with it. A rush of instincts collided in what could only be called heartache. In that instant, he wanted what he had never really missed. He wanted the sun.
He searched the sides of the shaft with his light—up and down—for signs that his group had gone this way. Here and there he spotted a possible handhold or a shelf to rest upon, though no one—not even Ike in his prime—could have climbed down into the shaft and survived.
The shaft’s difficulties exceeded even his group’s talent for blind faith. They must have turned around and gone some other way. Ike started out.
A hundred meters farther back, he found their detour.
He had walked right past the opening on his way down. On the return, the hole was practically blatant—especially the green glow ebbing from its canted throat. He had to take his pack off in order to get through the small aperture. Just inside lay the second of his chemical candles.
By comparing the two candles—this one was much brighter—Ike fixed the group’s chronology. Here indeed was their deviation. He tried to imagine which pioneer spirit had piloted the group into this side tunnel, and knew it could only have been one person.
“Kora,” he whispered. She would not have left Owen for dead any more than he. It was she who would be insisting on probing deeper and deeper into the tunnel system.
The detour led to others. Ike followed the side tunnel to one fork, then another, then another. The unfolding network horrified him. Kora had unwittingly led them—him, too—deep into an underground maze.
“Wait!” he shouted.
At first the group had taken the time to mark their choices. Some of the branches were marked with a simple arrow arranged with rocks. A few showed the right way or the left way with a big X scratched on the wall. But soon the marks ended. No doubt emboldened by their progress, the group had quit blazing its path. Ike had few clues other than a black scuff mark or a fresh patch of rock where someone had pulled loose a ha
ndhold.
Second-guessing their choices devoured the time. Ike checked his watch. Well past midnight. He’d been hunting Kora and the lost pilgrims for over nine hours now. That meant they were desperately lost.
His head hurt. He was tired. The adrenaline was long gone. The air no longer had the smell of summits or jetstream. This was an interior scent, the inside of the mountain’s lungs, the smell of darkness. He made himself chew and swallow a protein bar. Ike wasn’t sure he could find his way out again.
Yet he kept his mountaineer’s presence of mind. Thousands of physical details clamored for his attention. Some he absorbed, most he simply passed between. The trick was to see simply.
He came upon a glory hole, a huge, unlikely void within the mountain. His light beam withered in the depths and towering height of it.
Even worn down, he was awed. Great columns of buttery limestone dangled from the arched ceiling. A huge Om had been carved into one wall. And dozens, maybe hundreds, of suits of ancient Mongolian armor hung from rawhide thongs knotted to knobs and outcrops. It looked like an entire army of ghosts. A vanquished army.
The wheat-colored stone was gorgeous in his headlamp. The armor twisted in a slight breeze and fractured the light into a million points.
Ike admired the soft leather thangka paintings pinned to the walls, then lifted a fringed corner and discovered that the fringe was made of human fingers. He dropped it, horrified. The leather was flayed human skins. He backed away, counting the thangkas. Fifty at least. Could they have belonged to the Mongolian horde?
He looked down. His boots had tracked halfway across yet another mandala, this one twenty feet across and made of colored sand. He’d seen some of these in Tibetan monasteries before, but never so large. Like the one beside Isaac in the cave chamber, it held details that looked less architectural than like organic worms. His were not the only footprints spoiling the artwork. Others had trampled it, and recently. Kora and the gang had come this way.
