“We’re here.” She pointed to a snaky line on the paper that represented the translucent drapery.
“Where? I can’t see it.” He shifted until he could look over her shoulder. “Okay. Got it.”
He was standing so close that each time he exhaled, his breath washed warmly over her cheek. She breathed in sharply, trying to control the shiver of awareness that went over her when she realized how little space separated them.
He reached around her with both arms, took the notebook and pencil from her hands, and began to write, but all she noticed was the pressure of his chest against her back. She told herself to move away. She didn’t. She wanted to give in to the delicious warmth stealing through her body. She wanted to lean against his strength and glory in it.
I’ve got to be crazy, she told herself wildly. I haven’t been able to let a man touch me in seven years. Gabe killed that part of me when he left, and I proved it when I tried to date other men.
I can’t kid myself that anything has changed. I’ve just got a bad case of memories, that’s all. That’s the only way I can respond sexually—in memories. That’s why Kati will be a lonely-only the rest of her life.
If Gabe made a real pass, I’d freeze solid. So quit tormenting yourself and teasing him. That kind of revenge is contemptible.
When her eyes focused again on the map, she saw that Gabe had labeled the stone drapery “Love.”
“Naming is the prerogative of the one who discovers, isn’t it?” he asked calmly, seeing the sudden tension in Joy’s face. “According to you, it was my light that picked out the formation first.”
“Yes,” she said in a faint voice.
She took a deep breath to steady herself. With the air came the warmth and scent of his body, triggering an extraordinary burst of memories. For a timeless instant she was in the desert rather than in the cave, and the Voices were Gabe’s love words caressing her as he merged with her for the first time, making both of them whole. It was a moment that often returned to her in dreams and memories, the exquisite sliding instant when his body first moved within hers.
“Joy?” He steadied her as she swayed. “Are you all right?”
No! I’m going crazy!
Don’t stand so close to me. Neither one of us can take what you’re offering, so just back the hell up!
The desperate words went no farther than Joy’s mind. Stepping away, she shook off the hands that were burning through layers of cave clothing to the vulnerable flesh beneath.
“I’m fine,” she said curtly. Or I would be if you and my damn memories would just quit teasing me, reminding me of what I felt once and never can feel again.
She found a light stick and twisted it sharply. Eerie green illumination pooled in her hands. Using a shoelace from her pack she looped the light around the slender tip of a head-high stalagmite. She tried to take a reading from Gabe’s compass, but her hands weren’t steady enough for the delicate instrument.
Without a word he took it from her. When he called out the numbers she wrote them on her map. It was a routine that had become familiar in the last ten days.
Together Gabe and Joy eased into the Maze, trying a new route. They paused frequently to describe cave formations on the map, to take readings on the compass, and to stack bits of natural debris as direction markers. Twice she added new light beacons, leaving behind unearthly glows as she and Gabe pushed deeper into the unexplored Maze.
After Fish’s second “Yooooo!” came to them from the Voices’ immense darkness, marking the passage of another hour, Joy called a halt. Despite the strenuous cave crawling she and Gabe had already done, they didn’t take a rest break. They simply stayed in one place long enough to eat a handful of high-energy food and drink deeply from their canteens.
There was no way for them to know how wide the Maze itself was, how long it would take to find the wall of the cave and work their way along it in their search for passages that might lead to other rooms. Proper exploration was a time-consuming job. Two precious hours belowground had already passed.
Gabe shrugged into his backpack again. “Ready?”
Joy muttered something as she groped through her rucksack for some hard candy. Her fingers closed around several circular, paper-wrapped shapes. She didn’t remember packing anything like them. She pulled out her hand and looked.
Pink-and-white peppermint pinwheels gleamed on her palm. It was Gabe’s candy, the sweets she once had told him to hide before she stole them. He’d given them to her and she hadn’t even known.
“Thank you,” she said, looking up suddenly, sensing that he was watching her.
“My pleasure.” His voice was deep. He was remembering how much better peppermint tasted from her lips.
She glanced away quickly. With clumsy fingers she unwrapped the mint, put it in her mouth, and tucked the wrapper deep inside her rucksack where it wouldn’t spill out to litter the virgin cave.
“Let’s try this direction,” she said, blindly heading off into the Maze.
Walking carefully over the rough, often slippery floor, always trying to avoid the most delicate formations, Gabe followed Joy deeper into the unknown. The Maze was a fantastic forest of cave formations, a beautiful obstacle course made of draperies, flowstone, glistening stalactites, rugged stalagmites, and the columns that formed where the ceiling and floor decorations met and merged.
Sometimes the columns were so thick that they made an impassable barrier. Then all Joy could do was stand on tiptoe and shine her light longingly through the hand-size openings that remained between formations. Beyond, where only her light could go, she saw more parts of the Maze, hidden parts, openings that could only be reached by destroying the cave.
She marked the barrier on her map and set off in another direction.
Sometimes the stalactites growing from the uneven ceiling had no stalagmites beneath them. When that happened, the formations hung down like a extraordinary, delicately colored fringe. In other places the stalactites were no larger than soda straws and far more delicate.
Once they had discovered an opening with a ceiling of flawless white gypsum “chandeliers” that all but filled the small room. Light had spun back to them in every possible shade of white and silver, light dancing, light alive far below the reach of any sun.
There was so much beauty to explore. So little time.
“Gabe, look,” Joy said, wonder in her voice. “Be very careful,” she added, stepping backward, easing around his body in the narrow gap between two slender columns. “You’ll never see anything more fragile, more beautiful.”
He felt the sweet, changing pressures of Joy sliding by him and wanted to cry out at the stolen pleasure of the moment. Silently telling himself that nothing he would see could be half so beautiful as she was, he walked carefully toward the grotto that she’d just abandoned.
As his light swept past the last barrier, his breath came in sharply. Within the grotto grew incredibly slender crystals that reflected light in tiny glittering splinters. The formations grew neither up nor down, but had a spiral orientation, as though the laws of gravity had been magically suspended deep within Lost River Cave.
The least current of air, including Gabe’s breath, caused hair-fine curves to quiver and sway. He backed up a step, afraid that he would destroy the eldritch beauty shimmering in the circle of his helmet lamp.
Slowly he turned toward Joy. “What are they?”
He whispered as if the impossibly fine crystals were alive and would be frightened by the sound of his words threading among the eternal murmuring of the Voices.
Joy felt the same way. “Helictites,” she said, her voice as hushed as his.
“How are they formed?” Then, quickly, Gabe added, “Wait. I’m not sure I want to know. I don’t want to spoil their mystery.” He made an odd sound and shook his head. “Listen to me. I’m the guy who makes a living taking the mystery out of the unknown for others.”
Joy’s gentle smile made his breath thicken in his
throat. It was a smile from his memories, when two lovers had looked at each other and shared something silently yet just as completely as though they had spoken aloud.
“Your writing enhances what you describe.” Her hand briefly touched his arm. “Knowledge, real knowledge, always enhances. It’s ignorance that destroys.”
“Then enhance me.”
As she spoke, he memorized the elegant lines of her face and remembered what it had been like to have the right to bend down and taste peppermint from her mouth.
“The latest theory is that helictites are formed by water squeezing through solid stone,” she said. “If the water finally reaches an air pocket, the drops that emerge on the interior hollows of the bedrock are so tiny that they aren’t affected by gravity. The crystals form without reference to up or down or sideways. They follow their own rules, their own internal logic.”
“They do it with extraordinary beauty.”
“Yes. But it isn’t free or easy,” she added, her voice both whimsical and serious. “Those crystals spend a long time suspended within bedrock, waiting for just the right circumstances that allow their beauty to be born.”
“I must be part helictite,” he said, searching her luminous gray eyes. “I know how they feel. Suspended in bedrock. Waiting.”
After a moment she was able to look away from the naked hunger in his eyes. She trained her light on the notebook in her hands. She braced it on her thigh and wrote quickly. It gave her hands something to do besides reach for him, soothe him, want him.
“What are you calling the crystals?” he asked.
“Gabriel’s Grotto.”
“People will think you mean something biblical.”
“Good. Names should have as many levels as caves do.”
He laughed softly. “You know, I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to be around someone whose mind is as quick, curious, and off the wall as mine.”
“As in warped?” she suggested wryly.
“Definitely. Like helictites. Shaped by our own spiral necessities in a world where most people only recognize up or down.”
She glanced up and smiled as if it was seven years ago. “It seems like that sometimes, doesn’t it? Maybe it comes from exploring caves. Most people only live in two dimensions. Caves live in three.”
“Or four.”
She waited, her eyes intent, her heart beating oddly. “Four?”
“Time,” he said quietly, watching her. “Time changes everything.”
Joy didn’t know how much time—and how much change—passed before she looked away from Gabe.
“You’re right,” she said. “Four dimensions.”
Twenty
WORKING SLOWLY, JOY AND GABE FOUND A NEW PART OF the maze poking out from the twisting route that had brought them to the helictites. Joy gently eased herself between columns, under stalactites, and around the fluted bases of stalagmites. Flowstone formed by water seeping over the cave’s uneven surfaces began appearing everywhere. Soon it was impossible to go any farther without walking on some type of cave formation.
“Now what?” Gabe asked.
“We go forward. Carefully.”
“My feet are bigger than yours.”
She smiled. “Don’t worry too much. We can’t help leaving some marks, some sign of our presence. In time it will all be covered in flowstone, just part of the cave itself.”
“With enough time everything heals, is that it?”
She searched his shadowed green eyes. “Yes.”
Picking her way with great care, she went deeper into the Maze. When she paused to write down a compass reading, she felt a cool breath slide across her face. With the faint stirring in the air came a very slight increase in the sound of falling water.
She froze, not even daring to breathe.
The cool movement of air came again.
With a quick jerk she pulled off her glove, licked her index finger, and held it upright. The left side of her finger felt cooler than the right.
“Joy.” Gabe’s voice was urgent, excited. “Can you hear it?”
She spun around. He was turning his head slowly, helmet held in his hands as he sought the direction of the new sounds murmuring among the old Voices. In her headlamp his eyes flashed like green gems.
“Yes, to the left,” he said.
He had already pulled off a glove and licked his skin. Like her, he knew that skin was one of the most sensitive organs of the body for detecting slight differences in temperature and pressure.
“There’s air moving,” he said, turning toward the left. “This way.”
She grabbed his arm. “Wait.”
He stared down at her.
“Mark this point with a light stick,” she said. “It may be the only place in the whole Maze where we can really feel a distinct current of air. We’ve lost so many other leads. I don’t want to lose this one.”
He reached into his rucksack, took out a slender tube, and twisted it. Pale green light flowed over him. A thin piece of cord and a few knots made a harness for the stick. Gently he looped the light over a small knob on a stalagmite that was as thick as his body.
While he worked, Joy took a compass reading off the other two light sources she could still see and made notes on her crude map. When she looked up again, Gabe was watching her.
“Ready?” He held out his hand to her.
She felt her bare hand resting on the hard warmth of his palm and didn’t even remember reaching for him.
“Lead the way,” he said, squeezing her hand and releasing it.
Fingers tingling, she followed the vague stirring of air through a breathtaking variety of cave formations. There were pools as small as her hand and as big as a banquet table, and the fluid in them was so perfectly clear that it was invisible until water dripped from overhead, leaving rings on the transparent surface of the pools.
Each pool was surrounded by shelfstone growing out over the surface of the water itself, anchored on the limestone shore. Often the shelf stood alone as a fragile lip jutting over a pool that had shrunk down below the shelf. Sometimes stalactites grew down, only to later be flooded by a rising water level. Where that had happened, shelfstone grew out from the stalactites like a string of fantastic mushrooms. Each jut of shelfstone marked a change in the depth of the pool at some time in the past.
The effect was like being on another planet, where gravity was a matter of opinion and the shelfstone around the pools had voted to float on air or grow underwater.
“I can’t stand it any longer,” Gabe said when Joy paused to make notes.
Her head snapped up. “What’s wrong?”
“The upside-down mushrooms and the rims of stone hanging over air or floating on water. How?”
When she understood what he couldn’t stand any longer, she smiled in relief. “I thought you might be tired and want to go back.”
“Sweetheart, they’re going to have to drag me out of here with a team of mules. I’ve never seen anything so purely incredible.”
“Lucky for you, we can’t get even one mule down here.”
As they pushed deeper into the Maze, Joy explained what she could about the formations they saw. Her words became farther and farther apart, then fell into mutterings. Only frequent compass readings and the light sticks they had left behind kept her from becoming totally disoriented. The air current she was trying to follow was baffling, coy, and elusive. It breathed out from glittering stalagmite forests and curled among columns of golden stone seven stories high.
When she finally lost the vital breath, Gabe came to stand behind her, listening intently, holding himself with the stillness he’d learned in the wild places of the world.
“There,” he murmured. “To the right.”
As he spoke, he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her toward the fey breeze. She held herself as still as he was and half closed her eyes, trying to reach into the Maze with primitive senses that were more useful than sight within Lost River Cave
’s mysteries.
After a moment she sensed a tiny, trembling current of air caressing her face.
“There,” she whispered. “So close.”
She shivered as she felt Gabe’s warmth and strength behind her and sensed the rich mystery beckoning ahead. His hands squeezed her shoulders. She thought she felt the brush of his cheek against her helmet just before he released her.
“Go find it,” he said.
Her head tilted back, seeking the vertical dimension of the section of the Maze that they were in.
“Ceiling coming down,” she said, her voice oddly taut, almost breathless.
She pressed deeper into the Maze, seeking pathways through or around crowded formations. When she was blocked, Gabe’s helmet light swept the cave alongside hers, probing the darkness from a different angle. The unusual dual illumination made formations leap into high relief.
For the first time Joy noticed that there was a tantalizing hint of pattern to the cave floor in front of her and the stalagmites beyond, as though they were signposts on a loosely curving road cobbled by smaller, younger cave formations.
“It’s a piece of Lost River,” she said, excited.
“What?”
“Lost River. The one the cave is named after, the river that makes it not quite like any other Guadalupe cave we’ve found so far. A river flowed through here once, long after the majority of the cave itself was eaten out by hot, dilute acids. The Voices holds parts of the ancient river channel, but I’ve never been able to trace it this far before.”
She looked up and saw from Gabe’s face that he didn’t understand yet.
“The cave’s levels have been dried out and decorated and drowned again and dried out and decorated repeatedly,” she said. “During some of that time, a river flowed, dissolving stone. Unlike thermally driven cave formation, a river follows some kind of predictable pattern. As it flows from room to room, cavern to cavern, a river carves out connecting passages. All we have to do is—”
This Time Love Page 18
