“Got it. I’ll follow, but I won’t breathe down your neck.”
“Hang on,” the sheriff said. “I don’t want him going first.”
There were a few murmurs of agreement. Anmar and Cecil were noticeably silent. Ridley called back and said, “Tell him, guys. Tell him why that is a bad idea.”
Cecil’s voice was soft and grudging. “It’s about speed, Sheriff. He’s fast, and he’s been through it before, which is the big difference. If we lose speed, we might lose our chance.”
The sheriff was still objecting when Ridley pulled his body up and reached into the gap with both arms. When his hands found purchase on the rough rock, he dragged his head into position, happy that there was a good foothold to help with balance, and leaned down so that the headlamp illuminated the interior, which looked like the inside of a stone air duct, and not a big one. The scene wasn’t made any more appealing by the way the duct angled steeply down.
“Going in,” he called, and then he lowered his head and pushed it forward. The helmet banged against rock immediately, and he twisted, hearing a scraping noise on all sides, and got his helmet through. His shoulders wedged tight. The sensation told him, Stop, you do not belong in here, but Ridley ignored the warning and wriggled forward. His feet were free now, kicking in open air above the ninety-foot drop, and he heard the sheriff say, “Good Lord.” The belay rope tangled in Ridley’s feet, and he wriggled again and got a few inches farther in, sure that he was solid now and would not fall. The rope was bothering him, and though he knew Anmar and the others would insist he keep it, he called, “Off rope,” and, with difficulty, found the carabiner and unclipped it. He was untethered now, on his own. His head and torso were jammed into the crack in the stone, but his legs were still outside, and he knew that from down below, he must look like a rabbit being consumed by a snake.
His helmet scraped off the rock again as he used his elbows to pull himself forward. His headlamp had gotten jostled and was angled up a bit, which was a problem because the crawl was angled down. With the light pointed up, most of what lay ahead was dark.
He drove forward using his elbows. His feet left the air and found stone as he slipped all the way into the chute, thinking that it was going to be one hell of a hard thing to get Novak back up through here if he was in bad shape.
Don’t do that, he scolded himself. The minute you began to worry about getting back out, panic could rise, claustrophobia could set in. One of the great myths of caving was that regulars couldn’t be touched by claustrophobia. That was what the weekend warriors said, maybe, but people who’d spent a lot of time underground had seen others get stuck or had gotten stuck themselves or both. Real cavers understood real consequences.
But you’re not going to get stuck. You’ve made it through here before.
Yes, he had. Ten years ago. And if a single piece of rock had fallen in that decade, he’d be worming himself right into a dead end.
Takes most rocks ten thousand years to fall.
Not all of them.
He paused there, the back-and-forth interior dialogue beginning to get to him, the worries about backing out of the chute into a ninety-foot fall—all of it swirling, threatening. This was where a cave could start to break your mind, and if you were brooding over these things in the dark…
That was what he’d practiced for all of these years, ever since his last descent into Trapdoor: control in the dark. He knew no panic. Not anymore. And no one would ever suffer the consequences of Ridley’s panic in the dark again.
He closed his eyes, breathed a few times, and then continued on with his eyes closed. At this pace, you didn’t need your eyes anyhow. Hell, at this pace, he could crawl over razor blades and just give himself a nice smooth shave.
Inch, inch, inch. The slope was getting steeper, and he knew that he was angling down behind the wall now.
When his shoulders caught, he wasn’t immediately unnerved. He opened his eyes and assessed what little he could—not much to see except the backs of his hands—and tried to shimmy his shoulders around and loosen the grip.
It didn’t loosen.
Well, now. Well. He was breathing faster, not all that different from the sheriff back in the entrance crawl, and he wet his lips and sucked in air and reminded himself yet again that he’d done this once before. Back when he hadn’t known whether it was open, he’d gotten through. He took as deep a breath as he could manage with the squeeze on his ribs, braced his toes against the floor, and drove forward.
He moved a little. Just enough to wedge his upper body in even tighter. He was upside down behind the wall now, and he was stuck.
Come on, Ridley, come on!
His face was pressed right against the stone. When he tried to wet his lips, his tongue licked across the rocks and brought the taste of wet earth into his mouth.
There’ll be a day when you’re too old. When your heart can’t take it. There’ll be a day…
“This ain’t that day,” he whispered, his lips brushing the stone. He braced his toes again and drove forward and, finally, earned a bit of relief. The steel bands around his chest loosened just a touch, and after some more scrabbling, he got to the point where he could use his elbows. The point where he could lift his chin off the stone floor. This must have been what he meant when he’d said it opened up a little once you got going.
And there it went, widening enough that he could lift his head and extend his arms. It was amazing just how free he felt. A few inches made a world of difference down here.
“Anmar? You good?”
“Working through it. Son of a bitch, this is tight.”
“It gets better.”
The idea of bringing Novak through here reared up again. He was taller than Ridley, but he wasn’t stocky, thank God. Muscled but lean. That was good, because they weren’t pulling anybody of girth through this crawl. Trying to get him through that squeeze Ridley had just left behind was going to be hell anyhow. He wasn’t sure they could make that with Novak.
The chute bent slightly to the right and widened, and now he could hear water. Soft drips and trickles. The last time—the only time—he’d made it down here, he’d found a chamber filled nearly to the ceiling with water. That had been after a series of strong rains, though, and the water table had been higher than it was tonight. He’d run out of time then, but he’d left the cave and told Pershing MacAlister that he thought he might be on the verge of a breakthrough, a discovery that would take Trapdoor into the ranks of the longest caves in the country. There had been great excitement that evening, sitting on the deck of MacAlister’s place and sharing beers and musing about the possibilities. Then the cave turned into a homicide scene, and then Pershing shut it down for good.
Sarah Martin had been there that night. She’d come down with Evan Borders, had sat on his lap and listened to the caving talk, looking impossibly young. That was the last time Ridley saw her alive. He thought. He hoped.
But it wasn’t. You know that it wasn’t.
It depended on your definition of see, he supposed. After the light died, when he’d met her in a blackness that was darker than any night in history, he hadn’t seen a thing.
“You good, Barnes?”
Anmar’s voice shook him back into the present.
“I’m good,” he called. “Almost to the bottom.”
The water sounds were louder now, and Ridley could see a yawning gap in the rock just ahead. His headlamp beam reflected off murky water beyond. The chute was tall enough here that he could rise to his knees, and the sensation was a sweet relief. On his hands and knees, he slipped through the gap, looked left, and saw Mark Novak’s body on the rocks.
“Novak?” Ridley said. “Novak!”
There was no response. The body was motionless, and Novak was naked except for water-soaked underwear. His skin had a faint blue tint against the beam of Ridley’s lamp, an almost ethereal glow, like a ghost.
“Shit!” Ridley shouted. The cave threw the word bac
k at him, mocking.
“What’s wrong?” Anmar cried from somewhere in the chute.
Ridley cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Get back up there and tell them to have a medevac unit ready. Not an ambulance, a helicopter.”
“You can see him? Is there a chance?”
Ridley was about to say no, was about to resign himself to bringing a second corpse out of Trapdoor, when Novak lifted his head to look in the direction of the sound, then raised a hand to block the glare from Ridley’s headlamp. Ridley dimmed it immediately.
“You’re alive.” He said it with true surprise, because he hadn’t anticipated that Trapdoor would release Novak once she’d gotten him this far. He’d hoped she might—it would be a shame to lose Novak so early—but he hadn’t counted on it. In fact, this was the most fascinating development he had encountered underground in years. Trapdoor had allowed Novak in, and then kept him alive? There was an element of trust there that Ridley hadn’t expected. Perhaps the old girl didn’t mind the occasional visitor.
And perhaps she didn’t appreciate that locked door at the entrance.
Ridley entered the water, which rose swiftly to his knees and then to his waist, and an odd thought passed through his mind: You’ve been here before.
He pivoted away from Novak, who was struggling to get upright, and stared at the water-filled passage ahead. They were off the maps now, at least the maps that everyone else had seen, but Ridley remembered this room, and he remembered the swim he’d made to get here.
He’d lost his first light in this room. Since he adhered to the rule of three, he hadn’t worried over that too much, because he’d been equipped with two backups. At that time, he hadn’t understood what Trapdoor thought of light, just how strongly she resisted it. At that time, Ridley Barnes had yet to meet the dark man.
“You came close, Novak,” he said. Anmar was struggling down the chute, sweating and gasping, a smashed backpack of first-aid equipment with him. He looked at Ridley and then at Novak, who had managed to get himself into some semblance of a sitting position but was staring at them with uncomprehending eyes.
“I lost her,” Novak said. His voice was a dying man’s rasp to which Trapdoor refused to even grant an echo. “I almost caught up to her, but then I lost her.”
Anmar said, “We’re never going to get him back up through there. It’s too damn tight.”
“Don’t need to,” Ridley said. He brightened the headlamp once more and pointed across the eerie aquamarine waters that carved through the stone and led away from Novak’s resting place. “He was nearly out himself. Wouldn’t that have been something, if he’d made it out alone? I wouldn’t have thought it possible.”
Again he wondered why Trapdoor had granted such favors, but Anmar interrupted his thoughts.
“What are you talking about, we don’t need to? I thought that chute was the only way down here.”
“Of course not. You have something to warm him up and keep him covered? More covered than he is, at least?”
“Yes.”
“Get to it, then. We’re going through the water, and we’re going to need to hurry.”
Anmar stared at the place where the water vanished around a bend of rock.
“You think that water passage goes anywhere good?”
“It’ll take us right out to the place where they used to end the boat tours. It’s a cakewalk for the medics from there.”
“How in the hell do you know that?”
“Because I swam it once. The water table was higher then, and it required diving equipment. It’s lower now, and we’ll be able to find air. There’s not a chance in hell we’d get him back up that chute. Time is the ticket, and we can get him out of here in a hurry if we go through the water. It’s not far at all, and it’s easy going. Trust me.”
“How long has it been since someone did that?”
Ridley turned to him, let his glance linger for just a moment, and didn’t answer the question.
“Clock’s ticking,” he said instead. “Let’s move.”
21
When Mark woke, he was in a bed with metal rails and there was an IV tube in his arm. He felt an incredible thirst and indescribable muscle aches. There was a call button beside him that would summon a nurse, and he considered it but didn’t punch it, trying to take stock of his circumstances and recall how, exactly, he had ended up here. Events existed in his memory like scattered snapshots, all out of chronological order and some badly out of focus. The road back from Ridley’s house—that was where it had started. A truck behind him, a van up ahead. Men with black masks and black shotguns. A field of windswept snow, and then…
A cave. That memory frightened him more than the others, even though it was among the out-of-focus set. Blackness and cold water. He’d been left there. He’d tried to find his way out of the dark.
And apparently succeeded? The hospital room told him that he had, but the foggy memories offered no confirmation, not even a hint.
He punched the call button then, and the door opened within seconds, and an overweight brunette woman with kind eyes looked at him and said, “My goodness. Let me get the doctor.”
She was gone before he could even ask for water.
The doctor was a short, slender man named Mehir Desare, and as soon as he introduced himself to Mark, he told him that he owed him some thanks.
“If all continues to go well, you’re going to get me in some medical journals. We’re not supposed to confess that we desire that sort of thing—it’s quite self-important and shameful to admit—but the truth is the truth, you know.”
Mark nodded, though he wasn’t following at all. Dr. Mehir Desare smiled at him over steepled fingers as he sat on a stool beside the bed and said, “Don’t you want to know how we did it?”
“Sure,” Mark said. His throat hurt when he spoke.
“You arrived to us with a core temperature of 24.8 Celsius—that would be, oh, 76.6 Fahrenheit, you know—quite low. Quite low. The EMTs had done a fine job with you, the very best they could, and still they had not succeeded in bringing your core temperature up any higher than that. A grim situation.”
The doctor paused as if to make certain Mark appreciated the drama.
“Grim,” Mark echoed, and Dr. Desare nodded.
“To rewarm you, we used ECMO, extracorporeal circulation. Do you know what extracorporeal circulation is, Mr. Novak?”
Mark didn’t, but he considered the adjective for a moment and then said, “Out of body. Whatever you’re talking about that kept me alive, it came from outside of the body.”
“Indeed. The technique involves oxygenating the patient’s blood outside the body via mechanical means. Where your system stops, ours begins. Consider it a pinch hitter for your circulation. Oxygen-depleted blood—or, in your case, chilled blood—is diverted from the body, rewarmed and enriched with oxygen, then pumped back in. We weaned you from extracorporeal circulation when your own system indicated that it was ready to get back into the game. But you were kept alive thanks to an out-of-body experience.”
Dr. Mehir Desare smiled at that, pleased with the little joke, but Mark was shuffling through some of those out-of-focus snapshots of memory. Shotguns. A van. Walking a plank that couldn’t have been a plank. Then—
The wall was melting.
Then he’d been alone in the dark. Or had he been alone? He felt as if someone had been with him. But the image that came to mind—
Sarah Martin was watching me. She was lit from within and she was watching
—was not one he wanted to dwell on. Or even remember.
He thought then of his mother, of her skin turning blue on the wind-whipped prairie. A spirit quest, she’d told him when she was conscious again. By that point, she was so out of her head that she’d begun to believe her own con. She thought she really was a Nez Perce. You’re fucking German, he’d told her, and when she insisted he was wrong, he’d held up his hands and said, You’re right, Mother. You’r
e not German. You’re a fraud, that’s all, and then the nurse had asked him to leave, and he never went back to the hospital. Last words. He had a way with them, certainly. He tried to think of the last thing he’d said before he’d ended up in the cave. If they hadn’t gotten him out in time, what would his last words have been? He couldn’t come up with anything.
“We administered some drugs to protect the brain and now you are”—Dr. Desare consulted his watch—“twenty-eight hours into your stay with us.”
More than a day.
“How long was I in the cave?” Mark said.
“You remember the cave? Excellent!” The doctor was jubilant. “Memory function of the kind you’re displaying is exciting. There was some concern about neurologic deficits. We’ll be conducting tests, but at this juncture I’m pleased with your general cognitive ability.”
“Deepest thanks,” Mark said, and the doctor laughed.
“It might not seem like the highest of compliments, but we were worried. As for how long you were in the cave, I can’t say. Are you up to seeing visitors, by the way? There’s one waiting rather impatiently. A man from Florida.”
Jeff London had arrived.
22
Jeff looked good, fit and rested, which came as no surprise. He worked out with religious fervor. He’d probably been doing push-ups in the waiting room. His hair was still thick but starting to go gray. His tan face was weathered. Still, he could have passed for forty without much question, and he was fifty-five.
“Rumor has it someone finally figured out how to thaw you out,” he said.
“They pumped my blood out, warmed it up, and then let me have it back. Pretty good deal, don’t you think?”
“Most people who know you wouldn’t have given your blood back once they took it, that’s for sure.”
The hospital room might have seemed the wrong venue for the exchange of wiseass barbs, but the barbs were needed. From the way Jeff let his eyes drift, though, Mark knew the good humor wouldn’t last long.
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