It was hard to follow his own commands. Whatever confidence and concentration he might have been able to muster in other circumstances was drained by the darkness. It was one thing to summon the hope of salvation when you were crawling down a mountain or swimming away from a sinking ship; it was another to call it up when you were trying to escape blackness by moving into more blackness.
There’s a reason they bury people underground, he thought. It’s the place where they come to an end. And you’re there now.
So was Lauren. He thought of her casket being lowered into the earth, put into the blackness and sealed away. He was down there with her now. And with Sarah Martin. How sad it was that they’d put her back underground when her last moments had surely involved a desperate hope to return to the surface. In the end, they’d just sent her remains down to the very world she’d died trying to escape. How terrible.
Maybe not; maybe she was cremated and her ashes scattered somewhere high. You don’t know. She could be aboveground. You should find out, if you ever have a chance.
Strange thoughts, dark thoughts. Everything here was dark, though. There was no choice about that. He thought maybe his hands weren’t working as well as they had been earlier. Opening and closing a little slower.
Hands are just tired. That’s all.
Everything was coming at him in a swirl; a thought would be there and then something would spiral in and replace it and later the original thought would shoot back. He tried to do some simple math, addition and subtraction. Exercise the brain, keep it focused. No, wait, exercising it might be bad. Hadn’t he read somewhere that mental willpower drained glucose faster than physical exertion? That didn’t seem possible, but he thought it was what he’d read. They’d done a test, something involving weight lifting and problem solving. He was almost sure of it. So what should he think about? What took the least amount of will?
Quitting.
Sure. But it was cold on the stone, and he was warmer moving. When moving stopped being appealing or when he could no longer feel a difference, that was when he would know…
He stopped crawling and cocked his head. Something had changed. There were more sounds here.
He tried to quiet his breathing—it was more panting than breathing—and get a bearing on where the sound was coming from. No longer did he fear snakes. Any sound seemed friendly. It meant there was something else down here in the dark, meant that he wasn’t entirely alone. By now, this was only a good thing.
To the right.
Dripping and splashing. There was moving water somewhere ahead. And at some point, it had come from the surface.
He found the source in another twenty feet, a shallow creek, just a few inches deep, but enough. He cupped his palms and lifted the water to his lips and drank greedily. It was muddy and tasted of the earth, and fine bits of grit coated his tongue and his teeth, but it was also delicious.
He drank enough to slake the thirst and then forced himself to stop, not wanting to push it and not sure if he’d even be able to hold it down. For a brief time he felt nauseated, but that passed and he moved along the underground stream just far enough to determine that it was going uphill.
The only thing he could possibly do to make himself colder, to accelerate his course toward hypothermia and death, would be to slip into water. His core temperature would begin to plummet then, and he had no means of raising it.
He just wasn’t sure that he had any other choice. Staying dry was the thing to do if you believed that rescue might be on the way. Mark did not. So far as he knew, he’d been left in this place to die. Getting out was up to him. And while getting wet would hasten the onset of hypothermia, he knew he didn’t have much time on that front anyhow. The difficulty in concentrating and the loss of his fine motor skills had already arrived, but what concerned Mark more was not the symptoms he was noticing but the one he’d stopped noticing: shivering. At first blush, this might seem like a good thing, an adaptation to the temperature. That was a cruel prank of biology, though. The body never really adapted to a change in temperature. His body was reacting to the temperature, but reacting was very different than adapting. While shivering was an unpleasant sensation, it generated heat.
He attempted to check his pulse, but he had trouble feeling the beats because of numb fingertips. As he ran his hands over his body, trying to warm himself, he was aware of how muscular he felt. His chest and abdominal muscles and triceps were taut the way they might be after a good weight-lifting session. This was the worst sign yet. An increase in muscle tone meant he was well down the road to hypothermia. In severe cases, the muscles actually began to mimic rigor mortis, the body dying around you even while you still drew breath.
“Got to stay moving,” he said, and his speech was slurred. Getting wet and getting colder might speed things along, but he didn’t have enough time left to worry about wasting it.
He crawled into the stream going against the current. There wasn’t much force to it here, but the water sounded louder ahead, and that might be a problem.
He had nothing but problems, though. Might as well add another. He put his head down and crawled, and time and distance faded from him, and for a long while there was nothing but the cold. He splashed on, and the pitch of the slope became much steeper, turning his crawl into a climb. It took an enormous effort—several times he fell and slid back down, banging painfully against the rocks—but he wasn’t certain how much distance he’d gained for all the work.
He stopped crawling twice, when he became convinced that he was not alone. That someone was moving with him, splashing along right at his side. The most alarming thing was that in those stretches, he believed he could also see this other person. A white figure in the blackness, shapeless and featureless. When he stopped and stared, though, there was nothing but the darkness and the feeling of the water and the cold.
Better hurry, Markus. Once the mind goes, you’re done.
He almost laughed at that. He didn’t feel as if his mind had been his own for a long time.
A light broke in the darkness then. A glimmer of white, and he thought, That is the snow. That is the surface.
Then the light went away. He blinked and stared, squinted. Closed his eyes and counted to five—he thought it was five, but he seemed to get lost on the way there—and then opened them again.
Nothing. No snow, no surface. For a moment, though, he’d been so sure.
He pushed on, wishing that he hadn’t imagined the light. Wishing that it might return for him. He thought of the girl—What was her name?—who had died down here. Had she seen a light at the end? If so, depending on the source, it might have scared her. That seemed terrible, to be scared by a light. It was unnatural. Light was supposed to help you in the dark, it was supposed to guide you and protect you. How wrong, if she’d died fearing a light and hoping for blackness.
What was her damn name? He couldn’t forget that. It was the reason he was here.
Sarah.
He wondered who’d said that. Where the voice had come from. It didn’t matter, though—the voice, which came through the darkness in a whisper, was correct. Her name had been Sarah. He said it aloud to make sure that it felt right.
“Sarah.”
His voice wasn’t right but the name was. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten it. He couldn’t allow that to happen again. Keep saying it, then. Keep on repeating it, and that way he couldn’t forget it.
“Sarah,” he slurred. “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.”
The cave walls returned the name to him each time—Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. He thought it was an echo but maybe not. Maybe it was whoever was down here with him; maybe whoever had told him her name to begin with was saying it too. He tried to determine whether that mattered and couldn’t reach a conclusion. A rock caught his shin, hard, and this confused him. He stopped walking and looked down and, of course, could not see the offender.
When had he begun to walk? He’d been crawling for so long because crawling was saf
er. He considered that and then he got it: He couldn’t crawl here because the water was too high. He should have remembered that. Like the name. He should have remembered…
He felt a wild surge of panic, because she’d escaped his mind again. Damn, but she was crafty. She could slip right past you. He’d had her, though. He’d just had her, and he could get her back. It was…
“Sarah.”
Yes. Keep saying it. Keep walking.
He moved on, or thought he moved on, using her name as fuel.
Splash. “Sarah.” Splash. “Sarah.”
The cave whispered it back to him every time, and he was grateful for that. The cave wasn’t going to let him forget again. He’d remember her.
18
Ridley had expected to make a stir with his arrival and was almost looking forward to watching Blankenship have to deal with that, but when the two of them got out of the car and began to move through the snow toward the cave, Ridley wearing his helmet and carrying his backpack and a loose coil of rope, there was already a stir going on.
“We can hear him!” a uniformed officer shouted, rushing up, slipping in the snow. “Sheriff, we can hear him! But we can’t figure out how to get to him.”
“Let me in,” Ridley said, shoving past him. “If you can hear him, then I can find him.”
“That’s the thing,” the deputy said, following behind. “It’s like his voice is coming up from under the rocks. It’s creepy, to tell you the truth.”
Ridley made for the cave, Blankenship struggling to keep up. A few heads turned toward them and someone said, “What in the hell is he doing here?” but Ridley ignored that and passed them and entered Trapdoor Caverns for the first time in a decade.
He stood on the wide shelf of stone where steps had been carved so visitors could get down to the tour boats. The passage beyond was filled with people and voices. It was bright and loud and crowded. It was everything a cave should not be.
Two people rounded the corner and headed to the entrance, fighting through the tangle of bodies. One was a deputy whom Ridley remembered well; the other was a woman who was clearly part of the cave rescue team, dressed just like Ridley. At the sight of him, they both stopped short. The woman—Rachel? Robin? He couldn’t remember—said, “You sick bastard.”
He remembered her then. Rachel. She’d been on the outside preparing to go back in when Ridley arrived with Sarah Martin’s body. She’d fallen to her knees at the sight of Sarah Martin and cried as if the girl were her own daughter.
Ridley hadn’t said anything to her back then, and he didn’t now. The deputy moved up to Ridley with his chest puffed and was in the midst of telling him that he had better get the hell out of here or he’d be going to jail when he spotted Blankenship.
“Sheriff? You want me to get this guy into the back of a car? He’s trespassing, bare minimum, and interfering with police business.”
He was right in Ridley’s face now, wanting a fight, pressing as close as he could, one of those idiots who spent hours building up their pec muscles, as if you won fights by bumping chests. Ridley thought about kissing him, tried to imagine what the reaction to that would be. The image made him smile, and at the sight of that smile, the deputy actually reached out and grabbed the straps of his backpack, like a school-yard bully.
“Step back, Dawson, damn it, step back,” Blankenship said. “He’s here because I want him here. Now get the hell out of my way.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You want him—”
“Did I stutter? You want an explanation, you can come to my office once this scene has been handled. Until then, get out of my way.”
Ridley turned and looked up at the sheriff’s flushed face and said, “Thanks, Danny.”
“Just keep walking.”
They moved past the deputy and up to the woman, who was mud-covered and sweating. She regarded Ridley with revulsion and kept her eyes on him even when the sheriff asked her quietly, “Can you take me to the spot where they’re hearing his voice?”
“Yeah. It’s not far.” She finally broke eye contact with Ridley, turned, and started back along the passage. They followed and curled away from the bright lights of the entrance chamber, and minimal darkness encroached, allowing Ridley to breathe easier. After spending so many hours practicing, he felt as if he should be able to stay in control, but he hadn’t been practicing in Trapdoor. This cave was different. This cave was so very different.
Finally they reached full dark, and Ridley clicked on his headlamp but dimmed it down until it was only bright enough to show his boots. The sheriff had a bulky Maglite that was exactly what you didn’t want in a cave, always occupying a hand and always requiring you to aim the light instead of having the light follow the turn of your head. Ridley had given him a helmet but hadn’t outfitted it with a light because the sheriff insisted on taking the big flashlight.
They wound through the cave alongside the water for a time and then they parted from it and entered the Chapel Room. Its benchlike slabs of fallen stone resembled church pews, and a tall formation stood in the center like an altar. The woman said, “They’re in the Funnel Room,” and knelt in front of a crawling passage that led out of the Chapel Room.
Ridley said, “You’ll need to be on your belly for a bit, Sheriff.”
Blankenship didn’t answer, but his breathing changed. The entrance to the crawl was about the size of a garbage-can lid, and everything beyond it was blackness. It looked spacious enough to a caver, but to the inexperienced, it might look terrifying. Ridley didn’t glance back at the sheriff to see his face, just dropped to his knees and said, “Let’s go.”
“Her first,” Blankenship said. “You stay with me.”
“Going to have to go single file in there, Sheriff. Not a lot of room.”
“You just let her lead the way, and you stay back with me.”
Ridley shrugged, ignored another withering glance from Rachel, and waited as she dropped to her hands and knees. She was a bigger girl, wide-shouldered, and she had to wriggle a bit to slip through. Ridley could almost feel Blankenship tighten up, watching. Blankenship was a large man. Not fat, but tall and broad.
Ridley gave her a five-count to get moving so he wouldn’t be nipping at her heels, and then he slid into the tunnel, feeling more at home once the walls closed in and there was stone all around. Some said that Ridley’s unique abilities in cave exploration were a product of recklessness, of taking risks that others wouldn’t, wedging his body into any crack in the rock without hesitation just in case it might lead somewhere, but that wasn’t so. Ridley just read caves better than most. Listened to caves better than most. They told you things, if you wanted to hear. Funny, considering that caves had been used for silencing things so often in human history. As places for hideouts, secret meetings, buried treasure, buried bodies.
He listened for Blankenship, but the only thing he could hear was the scrabbling of boots and hands on stone. The sheriff was scared, which was natural enough, but he was also holding his breath.
“Sheriff? You’re going to want to take some deep breaths.”
“I’m fine.” The words shook.
“I know you are. But you also probably haven’t been in a space this tight before, and you probably feel like you could use up your air if you breathe too deeply, am I right? A sense that there’s a finite amount of oxygen in here, and we are going to use it all up?”
“Just move,” the sheriff barked. “I’m fine.”
But Ridley could hear him breathing now, deep inhalations. One of the best ways to rush toward panic was to hold your breath and worry about your air. It was a common mistake of first-timers in tunnels; they assumed that because they couldn’t see wide-open spaces, the air supply must be limited.
When the sheriff stopped moving, Ridley stopped too and said, “Rachel, hold up.”
He could tell by the way she stiffened that she didn’t like hearing him use her name. Probably didn’t like that he even knew her name.
“Sheriff? You okay?”
Blankenship’s breathing had changed again, gone faster. It took a few seconds before he responded, and when he did, his voice was soft and unsteady.
“I’m getting squeezed,” he said. “It’s getting too tight for me.”
“No, it’s not,” Ridley said. The sheriff ignored him and began to slither backward. Ridley spoke more firmly. “Stop moving.”
The sheriff listened. Silence again, except for those uneasy breaths. Edging toward hyperventilating, but not all the way there yet.
“Now, I can’t turn around to get my light on you, so you’re going to have to use your own,” Ridley said. His voice was measured and calm, a bedside manner. “I want you to do as I say, and to concentrate. Give me five seconds of focus. You going to do that?”
“Yes.” The word was a whisper full of self-loathing. The sheriff hated that he was showing fear, and he hated even more that he was showing it to Ridley.
“All right. Look to your right side.”
The beam of the sheriff’s flashlight bobbed around, casting shadows. He was doing as instructed, at least.
“Good,” Ridley said. “Now turn it to the left.”
The light bobbed again. Here the walls on each side were nearly touching Ridley’s shoulders, and the sheriff had broader shoulders than he did. So did Rachel, for that matter. One of Ridley’s greatest assets in a cave was his size.
“Those walls,” Ridley said, “haven’t done anything in hundreds of years. They’re not going anywhere. They’re solid. Now lift your head up.”
“I can’t. Too tight.”
“I didn’t say sit up. I told you to lift your head. Just lift until you can feel the stone.”
There was a pause and then a clink of plastic against stone as the helmet found the roof.
“Okay. It’s right there on top of me.”
“Sure it is. But you had to move to touch it, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” Already the sheriff’s breathing was steadier. The simple act of following instructions kept him from feeling alone, and that made a dramatic difference.
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