“Then you know it’s not actually squeezing you,” Ridley said. “You can move. But the direction we need to move is forward. You ready?”
“Yeah.”
Ridley reached out and tapped Rachel on the back of the leg. He felt the muscle go taut. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t you ever touch me.”
“Let’s go,” he repeated.
She began crawling again, moving faster, and that was just fine. Speed would help the sheriff, because he would imagine he was getting closer to an open space instead of deeper into the tunnel. Ridley would have preferred to take his time and let Trapdoor talk to him, but the circumstances weren’t right. He wasn’t communing with the cave now; he was just passing through.
When Rachel entered the chamber and stood, Ridley said, “Made it, Sheriff. You might need to duckwalk in here, tall guy like yourself, but you’ll be all right.”
“Duckwalk?”
“Just watch me.” Ridley rose to half standing, upright but bent at the waist, knees flexed. “You ever play baseball, Sheriff?”
“Yeah.”
“Think of yourself as a shortstop going after a ground ball. You’re moving laterally, you’re bent over, but you’re still fluid, still loose. Pretend you’re closing on second base, but you’ve got to keep your eye on the plate, right? That’s where the ball is coming from.”
“I played third.”
“Pretend you were a little more athletic, then.”
The sheriff scrambled awkwardly to his feet and imitated Ridley’s posture as best he could.
Rachel said, “Let’s go. It’s not a tour.”
“You think it would be faster if he’d frozen up back there in the crawl?”
“I’m not freezing up,” Blankenship said. “Let’s move.”
“Good man.” Ridley followed as soon as Rachel went into motion, moving in a side step, watching the sheriff’s footwork. Blankenship crossed his feet over now and then but he did all right. Being as tall as he was, he was going to have one hell of a stiff back by morning.
They were almost through the chamber and closing in on the next passageway when Blankenship said, “I can hear him!”
“No, you can’t,” Ridley said. He’d been listening to the voices for a while. “Those are the people who are trying to find him.”
They curled through the passageway and came out on the other side in a room larger than any they’d seen since the entrance chamber. This was the Funnel Room, so named because it was shaped like an upside-down volcano. In the center was a nearly perfect funnel formation, thirty feet in diameter at the top and about three feet at the bottom. There were six people in the room, five men and one woman; two of the men were down in the bottom of the funnel, clipped to ropes. You could make it up and down the funnel without the use of ropes and ascenders, but the rescue teams took their safety protocols seriously. They’d seen what happened to those who did not.
One of the men up on the ledge looked at Ridley when he entered and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“That line has already been used tonight,” Ridley said. “Hope somebody comes up with new material.” He didn’t look any of them in the eye, but that wasn’t because he felt intimidated—looking these folks in the eyes required staring into the beams from their headlamps. He crouched on the ledge and watched the men in the bottom of the funnel. One was Cecil Buckner; the other was Anmar Mirza, the cave rescue coordinator.
“He’s down there?” the sheriff asked.
“That’s where you can hear his voice,” Rachel said. “At first we weren’t sure it was a voice. Pretty weak.”
“Is he responding to you? Can you communicate?”
“He seems to be talking to himself.”
Down in the funnel, Cecil said, “Quiet! Listen!”
Everyone fell silent and looked toward the base of the funnel, casting their beams downward. For a time there was no sound, but then it came, faint but clear, a drawn-out call.
“Saaaarraaah.”
The sound whispered out of the funnel and echoed through it, the name clear as a bell.
Silence lingered until the sheriff broke it with a soft question. “Who’s he talking to?”
“We’re not sure,” Cecil answered. “He’s stuck on that name, though. It’s all we can hear.” He pushed back from the wall on his toes, letting the rope take his weight, and wiped sweat from his face. “To tell you the truth, it’s kind of freaking us out. Those of us who were…you know, in here before. Back then.”
They all looked at Ridley. It was impossible not to realize that; their headlamps followed their eyes. In the cave, there was no such thing as a surreptitious stare, because light couldn’t lie. Ridley felt as if he should say something, felt as if he should be defensive and angry or dismissive and wiseass or any combination thereof as long as he was something. But he couldn’t come up with a response. When the voice came again—Saaarrraaah—gooseflesh broke out across his arms, and his spine prickled with a fear he’d thought he would never know again.
I’ll be curious to see how being back in that place works on you, the sheriff had said. The way it worked on Ridley was supposed to be private, though. Internal. If the cave called her name, Ridley should have been the only one who could hear it.
He looked around the group then with an urgent need to make sure that they were hearing it. Because down here, your mind could warp a little. Down here, real things could become false, and imagined horrors could leave bruises.
Nothing was imagined about this, though. They all seemed to be hearing it. If he was imagining—
“Saaarrraaaah…”
—this, then he was as good as done. What happened next could be very, very bad. Could be the end of him. He knew that better than any of these suspicious sons of bitches. He’d lived it.
His heart was racing, and all those beams were lancing at him from different directions like searchlights, and he closed his eyes against them despite himself.
“Saaarrraaaahh.”
“You think you can get to him?” the sheriff asked Anmar after the last echo of that hair-raising whisper was gone. “Do you need blasting equipment, something to get through the rock?”
Ridley kept his eyes closed, but he was glad the sheriff was talking, providing a moment of distraction. Ridley concentrated on his breathing, trying to get steady. It wasn’t easy. He was waiting on that whisper again, although it wasn’t a real whisper, more of a weak howl. A cry from someone who wanted to sound strong but was too close to dead to achieve anything near that.
He heard it again, weaker still: “Saaarrrraaaah.”
Everyone went silent when it came, the way you did when the minister spoke in church. Even if you knew the message, you had to listen to it respectfully.
“Can you get to him?” the sheriff asked again.
“I don’t know,” Anmar Mirza said. “We’ve got to find him first. It sounds as if he’s just a shelf below us, but how he got there…I have no idea.”
“Could we drill it?”
“We go up,” Ridley said. He opened his eyes, and though he shielded them with his hands, like a golfer reading the green before a putt, he wasn’t bothered by the harsh beams from his audience this time.
“What?”
“There’s nothing down there but solid stone floor. You could drill all night and not make any progress. So we go up.”
“I don’t follow you, Ridley.” This was from Cecil Buckner, and he was the only person who’d spoken Ridley’s name. The only one who didn’t have pure contempt in his voice. Regardless of what he thought of the past, he understood this about the present: Ridley could help. Ridley had drawn the maps.
“Shelves,” Ridley said. “The cave is built in shelves.” He made a stacking gesture with one hand. “But they’re not laid properly. It’s like an old fieldstone wall—uneven, overlapping. What can always find its way down through one of those walls?”
“Water,”
the sheriff said.
Ridley nodded. “So we turn into water. To find him, we become water. He’s below us, but we can’t get there from here. We’re sitting in a little catch basin. This is where water gets trapped. So we go up and we go sideways until we get off this shelf. You follow now?”
Several headlamps turned upward, putting a gloss of light across the ceiling.
“There’s no passage up there.”
“You didn’t draw the maps, Cecil.”
“And I didn’t get to see them either. But there’s no passage up there.”
“There’s a crawler. A chute that will take us to the shelf below this one. Down toward his voice.”
“Has anybody ever been through it?”
“Only one,” Ridley said. “And it’s tight.”
“Can you make it again?”
“Yes.” Ridley slipped his backpack off his shoulders and unzipped it.
“I’ll stay with him,” Blankenship said, but the unease in his voice was obvious.
“We need an experienced caver with him,” Anmar said. “With all due respect, you’re not right for the job. I’ll do it. I’ll make sure that whatever happens in here today, there are eyes on him.”
Ridley ignored them both, removed a drill powered by lithium ion batteries from his pack, then opened another compartment and grabbed a handful of expansion bolts.
“What are you doing with that?” the sheriff asked.
“Building us a ladder,” Ridley said. “And we need to do it fast. It’s wet down where he is, and it’s cold. Time isn’t on his side.”
As if to confirm this, the whisper came again, softer than ever: “Saaarraahh.”
19
Mark met Sarah Martin in the water.
She came to him only after he quit fighting ahead, when he finally stopped moving and let the current take him.
There wasn’t much current to speak of, because he’d made it back to water that was only up to his waist. Wading through waist-deep water was chore enough for a strong man, though, and Mark had stopped being strong long before, and he’d stopped being a man somewhere along the streambed, someplace where the water ran high and every now and then he’d stepped into a hole and was completely submerged, choking, close to drowning.
It was her name that brought him back to the surface on those occasions. The repetition of her name had felt critical to his memory once, but after a while, it became equally critical to his forward motion. He’d fallen into an unconscious cadence, saying her name with each step, and eventually he began to feel as if he could not do one without the other. Name, step. Name, step. He felt as if he had to say the dead girl’s name in order to move forward, had to remember it. The past drove the present, always.
The next time he forgot her name, he froze. Her name had been right there on his tongue, he’d said it at least a thousand times in a row. But then…
What was her name?
He stumbled on the rocks, and the water pushed at his legs, and then he gave up because he could no longer remember, and once you forgot the past, there was no point in pushing to the future. The two were intertwined. He understood that now in a different way than he had before.
And so he knew it was time to quit.
The water caught his weight and carried him away from this hopeless place and back to the one where he could have made different decisions, chosen different paths. He let himself drift, and for a long, beautiful moment, he believed that was how it would feel forever—an endless slow drift through the blackness, going backward, always back, and that was good because it was where everything he wanted waited for him.
When he hit rock with his shoulder, the beautiful dark path was gone, and pain replaced it. The impact was so jarring and painful that it temporarily cleared his mind and he was aware of the water, the stone walls, and the blackness again.
He was not aware of the cold. In fact, he realized that he’d reached hot water. A hot spring, perhaps? It had to be. What began as a creeping warmth quickly became scorching, and he blamed the water and tried to escape it. There was a flat shelf of rock above him, and though it was not even chest high, it felt like it would be an impossible climb. On the fifth try, he finally made it, pulling his body out of the searing heat of the water.
The heat didn’t leave him, though. It lingered, and the misery was terrible. He felt as if he were trapped inside a fire, one that would not burn over him and move on but was here to stay. He tried to brush the heat away from him, but his hands didn’t obey his commands anymore. He thought that he was still too close to the water, and the farther from it he got, the deeper into the stone, the better. He slid and scooted and scraped along the shelf until he made contact with a wall, and there he stopped, and that was when he saw her.
She was sitting on a flat rock just across from him. There was an impossible brightness to her, as if light came from her pores. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and running shoes, and she sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around them, as if to keep warm, which seemed a very strange thing to do down here where it was so damn hot. She didn’t seem hot or cold, though, didn’t seem bothered by the temperature in the least. Just comfortable. Watching him. Waiting. What was she waiting for? What did she want from him?
To remember.
Yes, that was right. He was required to remember her, to think about her in the dark. That was his instruction. No wonder she’d appeared; no wonder she was waiting on him. Knowing that you’d been forgotten had to be a unique and relentless pain.
“Sarah,” he said. She didn’t react, which was frustrating, because he knew that was right. That was her name. He thought that she must not have heard him. It had become loud down here, the water going from a trickle to a roar, and not only that, he seemed to be hearing voices from some other place, somewhere up above. Whatever they were saying, it wasn’t the right thing, it wasn’t pleasing to her, and it probably kept her from hearing him. He called her name again, louder this time, and still she didn’t react.
He tried again, and again, and still she just sat there, knees held to her chest, her eyes fastened on him, watching and waiting. Unsatisfied by him but still hoping.
For what? he wanted to scream, but he was terrified of upsetting her. No—of disappointing her. What in the hell did she want from him? If not to be remembered, then what?
He leaned his head back against the stone, and though he could no longer see her face, he could still see the light from where she sat in the darkness, watching and waiting and hoping.
20
They’d put in seventeen expansion bolts by the time Ridley reached the ceiling. From the bolts hung seventeen etriers, short stretches of rope ladder. Ridley didn’t travel underground with those, but the rescue team had, and he allowed them to be used because it would help others move up when he needed them. Not everyone was as skilled with single-rope techniques as he was, and he knew that when—if—the time came to move Novak down, the ladders would be a help.
He moved upward using a daisy chain attached to his climbing harness—a laborious process but a quick one if you were good. He’d secure a bolt above him, clip the daisy chain in, and use it to pull himself up until the bolt was at waist level. Then he’d reach up and install another bolt. A dynamic rope was tied to his harness, and this ran down to his belay man. If a bolt failed, the belayer would arrest his fall. Ridley understood that they preferred this approach and understood that perhaps it was safer, but he’d worked alone for so long that he didn’t trust the idea. If he couldn’t stop his fall himself, then let him fall.
He wasn’t going to fall, though.
By the time he had the seventeenth bolt in, he was able to get his hands on the lip of rock just below the ceiling. He hung there and caught his breath and rested for a minute while he searched the shadowed rocks for the right spot. He remembered that it had looked like nothing more than a large crack.
“How long now?” the sheriff asked, and the question put Ridley back i
nto action, reminding him that there was no rest allowed. The sheriff was inquiring with the ground team, those still down in the funnel, as to how much time had passed since they last heard Novak’s voice. The whispered calls had ceased when Ridley was on his twelfth bolt.
“Nine minutes,” someone in the funnel said.
“Gotta move,” another voice responded. “Clock is ticking.”
If we’re lucky, Ridley thought. Could be that the clock has stopped, boys and girls.
He’d been certain that the chute entrance was here, but now he was second-guessing himself, beginning to worry that they’d spent all this time climbing toward the wrong spot on the ceiling. Then his headlamp beam caught it, and he realized why he’d missed it the first time—it was awfully small.
“Entrance located,” Ridley called, and he pointed toward it.
The sheriff’s voice said, “I don’t see it.”
Ridley stretched and got his hand hooked into the crevice. “Right here.”
One of the rescue-team members said, “No way we’re getting through that. No way.”
Ridley had to admit that it didn’t look encouraging. It was the sort of space that most people wouldn’t want to poke their heads into, let alone their bodies.
“I’ve been through,” Ridley said. And then, more for himself than the rest of them, he added, “It opens up a little. Once you get going, it’s not so bad at all.”
But his mouth was dry and his heart was thundering.
“Give me just a second,” he said, and then he closed his eyes and drank in the darkness, imagined he was folding it around himself like a shroud, then smoothing the shroud over each individual nerve ending. It was a burial shroud—the nerves were being put to permanent rest, one at a time, until all that remained within him was darkness and peace. In his mind, the nerves waved like blades of tall grass in the wind until he stilled them with the dark shroud.
“All right,” he said. “I’m going in now. Anmar, you give me at least a minute lead time before you follow. If there’s trouble getting through, we don’t need two people on top of each other in there.”
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