by Jon Land
“So what’s the record for an underground descent?” Denton wondered.
Ben was testing the array of carabiners clipped to his belt. “Two thousand feet into the Huautla cave right here in Mexico I believe, part of the same system as this one, carved out in prehistory. I’ll only need to manage half of that.”
“Well,” Denton said, shaking his head, “that’s a relief.”
In the trees around them, families of spider monkeys suddenly appeared and began cackling and hooting louder, as if to laugh at them. A few angry ones, Ben noticed, were throwing shit at each other, an apt metaphor for what he felt his world was going to.
“I hate the word should. Never heard it used in any way that was even remotely reassuring.”
Ben might have been a veteran mountain and rock climber, but the challenge here dwarfed any he’d experienced before. No matter how arduous, or even impossible, the task, at least when climbing he had a route to follow, the terrain ahead mapped in advance. Here he was descending blind with no idea whatsoever what awaited him, with forty pounds of gear—in the form of tools and materials he needed to repair the snare in the line—on his back. A thousand feet might not have been a relatively great distance outside with his eyes to guide him, but underground, amid utter darkness, Ben wasn’t sure how much his experience really helped.
First time for everything, he supposed.
“You and that adventure streak of yours aside, you’ve never done anything in conditions like this,” Denton said, pretty much summing up Ben’s own thoughts.
“The only condition that matters at this point, Dale,” Ben told him, “is that of our bank account. Now, get the men ready to lower me into the chasm.”
* * *
The first stretch into the fissure opened by the underground tremor came easily, Ben holding the rope with both gloved hands, as it slowly lowered him through the expanse that resembled the width of a submarine corridor, barely big enough for two. He reached the end of the first of the five ropes with nary an issue, starting in on the second in identical fashion until the cave widened and sloped to the left toward the actual location of the stuck feeder line.
Big oil companies, Ben reflected, maintained huge exploration budgets for potential underground reserves in previously untapped locations like the Yucatán. The cutting edge technology to first determine the location of such reserves and then drill down to reach them had changed the face of oil exploration forever, while still leaving it in the hands of a few mega-conglomerates like Texaco, Exxon, and Royal Dutch Shell. They could afford a misfire and the tens of millions in losses that came with it, while a start-up like the one founded by him and Dale Denton had no such luxury. The few borrowed millions they had tied up in this venture, first in the geophysical surveys that had identified the reserves and then the much greater expense to construct the drilling and pumping apparatus, had maxed out everything they could leverage on their limited assets. So, even before dwindling funds forced Dale Denton to borrow money off the street, they were essentially betting their futures on what was essentially a fifty-fifty proposition at best. Driving stakes literal and figurative into land abandoned by local and foreign interests alike, scared off by an area soured by bad luck and riddled by rumors and superstition.
In that moment, as he threaded his way through the increasingly narrow channel, Ben Younger was glad his wife Melissa couldn’t have kids. What would have happened to them, after all, growing up broke and fatherless on the chance he died down here?
He plucked the walkie-talkie from his belt and pressed the TALK button. “How’s the weather up there, Dale?”
“Hot as hell, partner.”
“Then you’d love it down here. Thirty degrees cooler and sinking. How far down am I?”
“Looks like you’ve gone through maybe three-quarters of the second rope. You should be at the source of the snarl in the line before you know it.”
“Can’t wait.”
“Say the word and we’ll pull you out of there.”
“Just make sure you pull hard.”
Ben clipped the walkie-talkie back to his belt and continued working his way down, the shifting angle of the fissure resembling more of a corkscrew, until it widened appreciably to allow for a comfortable descent. Ben fell into an easy rhythm not unlike the sensation of rappelling down a sheer mountain face with few handholds. The dark complicated matters, much different than night he’d grown accustomed to and even comfortable within. This was more utter blackness with nothing to break it other than his dome light that shined weakly in whatever direction he turned, barely making a dent in the nothingness before him.
Las Tierra del Diablo …
That message flashed through his mind again, not so much for the words themselves as the empty, idled tanker across which they were scrawled. It made him think of the long line of vehicles that, should they all remain empty, meant bankruptcy. Great motivation to keep himself going.
The rope continued to spiral out as he continued along the cave’s winding shape. The easy descent allowed Ben to recover his bearings, knowing he’d be level with the snag in the line just before the thousand-foot mark. That meant he’d be cutting things very close, no rope to spare and the odds of success getting lower the deeper into the cave he dropped.
Ben felt himself struck by the rapid, panicked breathing consistent with claustrophobia. He might have scaled some of the highest peaks in the world, but that said nothing for his ability to negotiate much tighter spaces like this so far beneath the ground instead of towering over it. He used his watch to check the depth of his descent and found, thankfully, he was closing on the snarl in the line that pumped oil-mud downward to force the contents of the crude back up. And, sure enough, another hundred feet found him drawing even with the point where the dark gray shape of Kevlar tubing that formed the feeder line had been snared by a jagged rock formation resettled by the tremor.
Ben again snatched the walkie-talkie from his belt, stopping briefly when the walls around him seemed to shift and move. Ben waited for the illusion to subside, continued anyway when it didn’t.
“Dale, do you read me?”
Nothing but static answered his call.
“Dale, this is Ben, come in.”
Still nothing.
“Dale, do you copy?”
When his call still garnered no response, Ben turned his attention to the task before him. There was no way to unsnare the line without tearing the fabric. So he used a small, battery-operated cutting tool to open the feed line on both sides of the snarl, careful to hold fast to the lower portion so it didn’t fall. With that process complete, he fished a bypass device Beekman had rigged for him from his pack and threaded it. Then he worked an epoxy, impervious to heat or pressure, around the bypass joints, to make sure the line was airtight, assuring an unobstructed flow of oil-mud downward.
I did it!
Ben had never felt more triumphant, until a gust of wind rattled him, shaking him in his dangling perch above nothing but black empty air. Air neither hot nor cold surging more through, than past him. The feeling, like none he’d ever experienced, dappled his arms with gooseflesh. It was as if he’d been sucked into the canister of a vacuum cleaner in the ON position. Even after the brush of air passed, he continued to feel something swirl around inside him, making him feel woozy and forcing him to blink the life back into his blurring eyes.
Suddenly, Ben felt a surge of heat emanating from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Then it turned cold, frightfully cold, pushing a chill through Ben that left a pulsing throb in his head like some kind of whole-body brain freeze.
I’m down too deep.
The instant he formed that thought, something jerked the line from above. Ben passed it off to a miscommunication at the other end of the line above the surface and snatched the walkie-talkie from his belt. He fumbled it upward precariously in the same hand grasping the heat gun.
“What the hell, boys?”
No response.
“Dale, you there? I’m all done down here. Mission accomplished.”
No response again.
“Dale, this is Ben, come in!”
Nothing greeted his call, not even static this time. Just dead air, the same air that seemed to be everywhere around and inside him, the world starting to spin, stealing his sense of balance as the wooziness returned.
What’s happening to me?
He’d done some scuba diving, too, deeper than he should have at times, and knew what it was like to be trapped in a black, endless void. The surreal sense of surrender that sets in when you have to listen to your heartbeat to know you’re alive.
This far underground, just over the point where he would’ve needed oxygen to survive, survival could be precarious indeed. Such depths could also cause dizziness and delirium; Ben was struck by that very sensation as the entire chasm seemed to quake and bounce, stealing his sense of equilibrium. Then he realized it wasn’t a product of the depth at all, rather of yet another seismic tremor that shook the walls, now seeming to extend outward around him. It felt as though he was dropping through the emptiness, falling into the void.
And then he was, watching the severed rope shrink in shape and then disappear altogether as he fell.
* * *
Dale Denton felt the tremor too, felt it in his core, as well as in the maddening vibrations of the rope in the work crew’s collective grasp.
“Pull him up! Pull him up!” Denton ordered, not bothering to disguise the panic in his voice.
There was more, he realized: the monkeys. They were screeching and shrieking even louder, the group that had been throwing shit at each other going at it with claws and teeth. Fur and blood flew, no quarter given by either side.
The unrestrained fury spread, from animal to animal and tree to tree, until the shrieking made Denton cringe. Then a few of the monkeys jumped out of the trees and lurched about aggressively, scampering uncomfortably close to him and his workers with teeth bared and snapping.
Those workers were pulling up on the rope in a desperate fury. Hands lashed across each other in a virtual blur, drawing the rope from the abyss and leaving it to collect in a pile that looked like giant strands of spaghetti.
Denton tossed handfuls of rocks at the monkeys to chase them back, but they held their ground, seeming to grow bolder, while their brethren in the trees continued to tear each other apart. He turned his attention from them to lend his efforts to his workers struggling to pull Ben Younger back to the surface.
By then, though, the rope was coming too fast, too easy. And too much, too much rope. Ben Younger had been down just over nine hundred feet of the thousand feet when the unspooling started.
“Ben! Ben!” Denton cried out into his walkie-talkie.
But only white noise greeted him, whistling wind sounds that reminded him of a banshee’s screams.
“Ben!” he yelled into the mouthpiece again, as the end of the rope emerged through the entrance to the underground cave, shredded as if something had bitten through it.
THREE
Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico; 1990
A ledge in the widening shaft had broken his fall. Ben moved his upper body first; neck, then shoulders, then arms, finding everything intact and in working order. He must’ve instinctively tried to grab at the shaft face for a handhold, leaving both his palms scraped raw, even through his gloves. His chin and forehead were bleeding, likely from banging up against the face as he dropped. He touched the wounds and felt his fingers come away wet and warm. He’d lost his helmet and its dome light in the fall, so he couldn’t be sure of anything around him, his world utterly black.
He’d taken the brunt of the impact on his left leg, currently curled under him. He moved it gingerly in manual fashion, recalling the lessons of what to do when sustaining a fall while rock climbing. He catalogued the injury as best he could, checking to make sure at the very least no bone had penetrated the skin. There was numbness and swelling, but not a lot of pain yet. And he found he could move his toes and turn his foot from left to right inside his boot. He felt for his walkie-talkie but it was gone, shed somehow during the fall or, perhaps, on impact, leaving Ben to resist the absurd temptation to shout up the length of the shaft at the top of his lungs.
Is this how it ends?
Ben had barely formed that thought when he caught a flicker of light just off to his right. It was there and then gone, then flickered again like a weak, stubborn strobe. He groped his hand out toward the source, careful not to put any pressure at all on his broken or badly sprained leg. His bloodied palm scraped metal and then his hand closed on the hard hat with dome light affixed to its front, pulling it toward him.
The bulb had loosened and the fitting bent, but he was able to maneuver the bulb to find the contact points well enough to make it stay on beyond a flicker, so long as he didn’t jar it. Instead of redonning the hard hat, Ben rotated it slowly about the ledge he’d landed upon.
The shaft continued spiraling downward before him, fortune the only thing that had spared him the full drop. The opposite wall face featured scaled impressions more like the hand and foot holds he was used to when rock climbing. If he could reach it, he might be able to pull his way upward even with a useless leg.
Ben aimed his dome light forward and up from the ledge, forming a plan. But the bulb was flickering again, rebelling against him, until he stilled the hard hat and it caught. He again worked the fittings the best he could to stabilize it, careful not to snap the whole housing off, the bulb angling sharply to the right in the process and catching something he first took to be his lost rope. Only it wasn’t a rope at all.
It was the Kevlar feed line, continuing its descent through the void toward the oil-rich pockets of magma he and Dale Denton were betting their lives lay below.
The world wobbled in and out of the half-light cast by his hard hat’s flickering bulb. Ben eased it back into place over his skull gingerly, hoping for the best. Then he rose all the way on his good leg and started, ever so slowly, to put pressure on his bad one. This as he extended his hand toward the feed line to use as a brace.
When his leg gave out.
Ben flailed desperately, groping at air, hand finding hold upon the line when a burst of agony surged through him, the fractured bone separating against the weight asked of it. He screamed, but squeezed harder instead of letting go. Fingers tight around the line, starting to pull himself upward.
Could he make it back to the surface this way, could he actually scale a thousand feet of feeder line? Ben had no choice, kept shifting hand over hand, shimmying with his working leg while his shattered one dangled numb and useless.
He rocked sideways and slammed into the jagged face, planting his good leg on a second ledge barely wide enough to hold him. He clung fast to the Kevlar with his stronger right hand and probed the face for a hold with his left. There was another ledge just over his head and he flailed for it, rocking on the Kevlar tubing until his left hand closed on the ledge and he prepared to add his right as well.
Until the ledge came apart with a tumble of black rubble behind it. Ben barely managed to grab firm hold of the feed line again, the momentum slamming him into the face and bouncing him backward into a precarious sway over the dark emptiness below. He smacked the face again, less hard this time, and recoiled away.
His dome light caught something in its flickering glow resting inside a chasm revealed by the tumbling rubble. As his vision cleared, though, Ben realized the object he spotted was glowing all on its own. An eerie, translucent sheen from what looked like some kind of lava-coated rock bored through with equidistant holes from which the glow emanated.
Impossible …
Ben closed his eyes, opened them again. The rock was still there, still glowing just outside his reach. Something made him reach out toward it, but the feed line jerked downward, leaving Ben desperately flailing for something, anything, to grab on to. He was trying for the ledge, to save himself from falling
, when his outstretched gloved hand slid into the chasm instead.
And closed on the glowing rock.
* * *
Back on the surface, amid the swirling panic, the four generators powering the exploratory drilling rigs exploded one after the other in sequence, starting from the one closest to the hole to the farthest away.
Dale Denton had been around his share of explosions and knew his way around dynamite. But these were different. He felt them in the pit of his stomach, his very core, as if they were sucking the oxygen out of the air. He passed it off to his imagination until a glance toward Beekman showed the scientist looking as if the air had been drained from his lungs.
“Professor!” he cried out, taking the older man by the arms. “Professor!”
Shaking him now, trying to force the life back into his eyes.
The generators continued to spark, then flame. Field workers rushed toward them wielding fire extinguishers like M16s. Denton heard secondary popping sounds, followed by something fizzling.
“What’s happening?” Beekman gasped in a high-pitched wail that carried his voice over the shrieks of the monkeys.
Amid all the ear-wrenching screeching, Denton realized the monkeys were tearing each other apart. Not just blood and fur flying anymore, but also tufts of flesh and limbs torn from their joints. He thought he glimpsed one monkey triumphantly jerking the severed head of a fallen one into the air, jumping up and down on a tree limb until a trio of the animals dropped upon him; the victorious squeals morphed into a blistering anguish as one severed head and then another hit the ground. All this while the animals that had already dropped to the ground were hooting and cackling; attention swung from the workers back to what was unfolding in the trees.
“What’s happening?” Beekman gasped again.
Denton was still holding him by the shoulders. “You tell me, Professor.”
* * *
Only slightly bigger in diameter than his palm, the rock Ben had inadvertently grasped seemed to pulsate with raw energy, while radiating the strangest light he’d ever seen.
