by John Everson
A handful of cars were parked along the side of the road, and he pulled up behind a sky blue VW Bug. Why and how so many of those things were still on the road, he had no idea, though he often wondered. And there seemed to be a lot of them here on the coast. He considered the motley collection of beat-up, rusty autos, and the lanky long-haired kids collected just beyond the impromptu parking lot and shook his head. This should prove…interesting.
The group was sitting in a rough circle on the ground and on boulders, and as a group they looked up at Joe’s approach. Measuring him.
“You must be Joe,” a dark-haired, long-nosed, lanky guy in khakis said as he approached the group.
“Ken?”
“The same. Glad you could make it. We hold our meetings here, usually, unless it’s raining. Then we go into a little cave down the ravine there.”
He pointed down a short slope of brush.
“There are caves in this hill?” Joe asked.
“Yeah! That’s the whole point. I formed the Cliff Combers a couple months ago to explore the caves. I couldn’t do it on my own. That’s the first rule of spelunking, you know. But have a seat with the others, and we’ll get things started.”
“Your ad said something about discovering the dark things that could swallow the town and worshipping a spirit or something….”
Ken laughed and slapped Joe on the shoulder.
“Yeah, I was trying to find some way to make caving sound mythic. Brought you out, didn’t it?”
Ken moved away and Joe took a seat on the ground. From the bohemian looks of the other club members, he was getting the idea that this was a wrong turn. But he felt stupid turning around and walking away, so he tucked his knees in and kept his mouth shut.
Ken stepped up on a pink and gray granite boulder in front of the small group and bowed with a flourish.
“Greetings, fellow Combers and recruits. Welcome to our fifth meeting. Today, there is something…special…that I have to show you. So I won’t waste time standing here talking. We won’t be going deep today, but our rules still apply: check your flashes now, check your rope, and get a partner. I don’t ever want to have to call old Chief Swartzky to pull in a search party after any of us.”
The caving guide rubbed his long fingers together as the group began milling about, checking equipment and pairing up.
This was not what he had been hoping for. A bunch of hippies playing tag in some muddy caves was not what he’d looked to find. There wasn’t a whisper of the occult about this band of losers. Joe decided now might be a good time to escape. Looking around to see if anyone was sizing him up for partnership, he found no one. But before he could begin heading back up the path to the car, a hand slapped him on the back.
“You probably didn’t bring any equipment with you this time, huh?”
It was Ken, who, Joe now noticed with distaste, had extremely yellow teeth.
“No. Maybe I can catch up with you guys on another meeting.”
“Nonsense,” Ken boomed. His voice was as long and tapered as his figure. “I’ve got some extra rope and a flash, and no partner. You can come with me. It’s a great introduction for you to our group. I was down here a few days ago, and discovered something really exciting. Come on.”
Ken marched him over to a large black hiking backpack, and proceeded to clip a bundle of rope to his belt. He also fitted what looked like a miner’s helmet onto his head, and flipped on the flash on its front.
“Let’s move in!” he yelled, and the party moved down a dirt path into a gully that ran parallel to the road. In seconds, they were lost in a maze of shrubs and grass and trees. The back end of Terrel’s Peak rose up slowly ahead of them, and suddenly Joe saw where they were headed. A black hole between a stand of thin, scraggly evergreens led straight into the ground. It wasn’t large, maybe three feet or so wide, but the trampled dirt path led straight to it.
“Hope you don’t mind getting your jeans muddied up,” Ken said, clapping Joe on the shoulder again.
One more and I’ll punch him, Joe thought.
“Duck down and go slow through the entry—it drops off pretty quickly,” Ken warned, before climbing through himself.
Joe followed, and was forced to take it slow because he couldn’t see where the hell he was going. The air changed from summer heat to autumn cool as soon as he passed the lip of the entrance, and his skin grew goose bumps instantly. He rubbed his arms and waited for his eyes to adjust to the surreal mix of pitch darkness and the piercing glares of the helmet lights. Someone grabbed his belt from behind and something went click.
“There, Joe. Now you’re tethered to me,” Ken explained, stepping around him. “If anything goes wrong, I’ll be right around the corner.” The guide grinned his dentist’s nightmare again. It seemed well-suited to the underground. Like a badger, Joe thought.
“Okay, people,” Ken yelled, his voice disappearing and then echoing through the cavern in a strange play of acoustics. “We’re going to take the left fork that we explored last week, but when we reach the third room, we’ll be starting a new route. Hank, would you be our back tether?”
A portly behemoth of about nineteen nodded, rippling his rosy jowls and sandy hair, and moved to clip a rope to a piton previously hammered into the entryway.
“All right,” Ken grinned. “Let’s go!”
The next hour was, as near as Joe could figure, hell on earth. Somebody was trying to punish him. Maybe it was the cliff itself. He slogged through damp, dripping, muddy passages and crawled across slimy floors where the ceiling was only a foot above his head. He’d never been claustrophobic, but as they wriggled their way between open caverns, his stomach began to tie itself up in knots as he considered the weight of the mountain bearing down over his head.
Behind him, the grunts and groans of the rest of the group echoed. He wondered how Hank was sliding through the narrow chimney he’d just squirmed through. The worst part about it all was that he knew he had to go through it again just to get out.
Ken kept pushing farther, turning around every few minutes to whisper, “You still with me, Joe?”
The desire to unclip his rope before Ken turned around the next time was almost undeniable.
But at the end of the hardest crawl, they emerged into a large cavern. How large, it was impossible to tell, since the helmet beams stopped short of connecting with any rock but the floor. The temperature here seemed to have dropped another ten degrees. Ken stopped pulling Joe forward.
“All right, Cliff Combers! You all still with me?” A chorus of enthusiastic assent followed. Joe mouthed a hesitant “Yes.”
“This is it. Last time we went forward and hit a dead end. That really bothered me for a few days, so this week, I came back with Charles Donahue. I was sure that with this large of a main cavern, that a tributary chain had to extend off of it somewhere. Charles and I tried this way.” He pointed to the right. “And we were lucky. Follow me. And listen closely.”
Listen for what? Joe wondered. Bats? Avalanches?
The quiet reverberations of the cave chambers were starting to give him the creeps. There were the coughs and footsteps of the group, but now and then, it seemed as if something moved ahead of them. As if a bat or a snake had shot forward, desperate to evade them. Joe fervently hoped if there were animals in the cave ahead of them that they succeeded in avoiding them. And he was feeling cold and damp. Where were all the beautiful stalagmites and stalactites he’d always heard were the big payoff of caving? All he’d seen so far were gray walls and muddy floors. He felt as though he were crawling naked through a rabbit’s burrow searching for a pot of gold. The reward was unlikely, at best.
A tug came on his rope and he reluctantly forced his legs into motion again, following Ken into the darkness. Their lights bobbed off a wall to the right and reflected off the floor when he looked down, but ahead lay only a veil of dark mystery.
“What are we looking for?” he finally ventured, only to receive a stern “Sh
hh. Listen.”
Joe rolled his eyes and trudged on, noticing that the walls were at last starting to close in again. When he looked to the left, his light trailed across a smooth gray sheen of moist rock. Something skittered across the path of his light and he turned away from it to stare again at Ken’s broad back. He didn’t need to know what it had been. He’d caught a glimpse of something that had a lot of legs and some kind of tail. And eyes. If he ignored it, maybe it would ignore him, he reasoned.
Are we almost there yet? a voice nagged in his head.
“God, I hope so,” he told himself. He was really starting to feel thirsty. The low trickle of water somewhere up ahead wasn’t helping.
Trickle of water?
Up ahead?
That was what Ken must be so smug about! He must have discovered the remains of the channel that cut these caves out.
Joe was so proud of figuring out Ken’s surprise that he almost walked right into the lead caver.
“Hold up!” Ken called out. The group slowly collected. Joe paced over to the left and squinted into the distance. He could just make out the walls on the far side of this chamber, but the floor began to get rougher and descend just ahead of where Ken had stopped. The faraway trickle had grown in volume to a dull rush somewhere below. He moved tentatively, one cautious step at a time, toward the black void that ate the floor just a few feet ahead.
“This is what we’ve been looking for over the past month, everybody,” Ken was saying. “The creator of this cave system. The ‘dark force’ that eats the very rock out from beneath us.”
“The only dark force in this cliff that I’ve ever heard of doesn’t seem too interested in eating rock,” someone joked.
Joe edged his way closer, trying to catch a reflection of the water that roiled somewhere below. It sounded close, but everything in these caves sounded close. It could be a couple hundred feet down, for all he knew. Or the passage below might be dry and the river working another level below it.
“Now we know it’s still active,” Ken continued. He sounded extraordinarily smug in this announcement. “More caves are being cut in this mountain every day. What we have to do now is find the route the water has carved to lead us to the heart of the hillside. Step carefully here; when we find that route, the drop could be a big one.”
Joe stepped away from Ken, threading his way down a slight slide of stone to peer out into the void. Somewhere down there, black water was rushing with the force of a mighty river, carving its name into the slick rock of the mountain.
Joe jumped back from the edge abruptly. There was some kind of reflection bouncing back from below, but whether it was water or rock, he couldn’t tell. They were closer to the bottom than he’d thought. He grabbed a slippery spike of limestone and heaved his weight up the slight slope to the main floor, where the rest of the group was gathered. But his weight was too much; the limestone gave way with a sharp and sudden crack and Joe felt his weight shift.
“Oh shit,” was all he got out, and then his balance was gone, his feet sliding upward as his back went down. His head struck the stone, and the cave was suddenly a lot brighter—the air exploded, lit with brilliant stars of pain. Joe scrabbled with his hands to gain another handhold, but his fingernails only scratched stone that might have been coated in Teflon.
His head was already in space when it occurred to Joe that he was really going down. Maybe all the way.
He was free-falling, yelling at the top of his lungs and praying that it was water he had seen in the inky blackness below.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It lasted forever and yet it took no time at all. His body slipped in a timeless flight through the pitch-black hole in the earth. Joe felt the bone-chilling, damp air rush past him like the breeze from a bird’s wings, and then he hit the bottom with a shocking crack.
He noticed the cold first, the icy hand that slapped him in the face and punched him in the groin. And then he realized that unless he tried to move, he would be carried into an even worse predicament than this one. Because he had survived the fall and in doing so, he now had firsthand knowledge of the river Ken had been looking for. But the current was fast and he was already several yards from where he’d hit the water. Forcing frozen arms and legs into motion, he made a tentative turtle swish, and then began scissoring his legs in earnest to reach the top. His lungs were burning with heat while his skin was on fire with cold. The fall had knocked the wind from him, and so far, he’d managed not to suck in a chestful of water. But he needed air now.
Everything was black. This must be how a sensory deprivation tank feels, he thought. There was a faint lessening of the darkness above him, and he forced himself to swim up toward it. The current urged him backward and down, but he fought it, breaking the surface just as he finally inhaled, gasping and sputtering.
Great, he thought, looking around the cavern he’d dropped into. It extended into inky infinity as he looked upstream, and it dropped off suddenly not too far downstream from where he was now. But the worst part was, the walls seemed to be of polished limestone. Alternately gray or green depending on how his light hit them, they looked as smooth as polished glass.
How the hell was he going to get back up?
“Maybe you should stick around,” answered a thick voice.
It seemed to come from all around him, and at the same time, boomed inside of him. He could feel its vibrations in his heart. His blood chilled even further, and he began to shiver uncontrollably.
“Huh?” he called out. “Who said that?”
Something tugged at his waist, and he panicked for a second, wondering what was grabbing him to drag him down.
He slapped at the water to free himself, and his hand hit something thin and rough in the dark. Running his hand along it, he realized it was his guide rope. And it extended in a taut arc from his belt to the surface of the water and up into the air above the underground river.
“Wouldn’t you like to stay here with James and I? Wouldn’t you like to swim down, down, down into the blackness with us?”
Joe screamed.
Then the ghostly conversation was interrupted. Someone was calling him.
“Joe? Joe?” a voice echoed from far away.
The line pulled sharply taut again, and his progress downriver stopped. He felt like a rock jacked up in the midst of a stream of rapids. The water shattered and poured around him on its way into a deeper blackness. On its way to hell.
“I’m all right,” he coughed back, his head swiveling back and forth like a pendulum to watch for anything that might be moving in the darkness. Ducking his head back underwater, he strained to swim against the current to close the distance between him and the other cavers.
“Been looking for me, I hear. What can I do for you? Suck on your bones?”
The voice slid through his head and played a merciless beat on his heart. It tickled his toes and kissed him on the lips. Joe shook himself from its hypnotic grip and shrieked aloud again.
“No!” he cried. “Let me go.”
“No, Joe, hang on!” Ken called from above, not understanding. “We’ll get you. Try to get near shore, if you can.”
Guessing that he wanted to be on the right, Joe angled that way, his headlamp bobbing like a spastic searchlight off glistening, sheer rises of rock. But as he got close to the rock on the right, he banged his toe painfully into something, and recoiled.
“Shit,” he complained, but then his whole foot touched bottom. He kicked off the rock floor with both feet toward the shore and pulled like an oarsman with his arms.
At the base of the wall, he was able to stand up. The current still tried to pull him back in, but he could withstand it while wading waist deep in the water. There was no way to get completely out of the river; it was as if he stood in a half-full tube of rushing water. But he pushed his way back, following the tug of the rope toward the point where it angled upward. The point where he’d fallen in.
“Joe, can you hear m
e?” Ken’s voice echoed strangely in the dark cavern, but he sounded a little closer.
“Yeah, Ken. I’m here.”
“Are you okay? Anything broken? We heard you yell.”
“No. Just cold. The river broke my fall. But there’s no stairway to climb back the way I came!”
There was some muffled conversation from above, and then Ken’s voiced called back down.
“Are you familiar with rappelling?”
“In theory.”
“We’re going to try to pull you up. If you can kick off the rocks in between our pulls, it might help.”
“I’m all for it.”
The rope suddenly tightened painfully around Joe’s waist. His feet left the bottom of the river and he began, inch by inch, to rise along the sheer rock face.
“I feel like a poor man’s Peter Pan,” he called up.
“Well, start waving your arms and helping us out,” came a muffled reply.
“Doing my best,” he cried out weakly.
He couldn’t stop looking below him, waiting for something to jump out of the murky water to bite down on his legs and drag him back into the river’s depths. The rope began to swing a little, and soon his body was arcing in toward the rock wall. He pushed off with his feet, as Ken had suggested, and felt himself jerked upward as soon as he left the wall.
He hit again, and once more kicked off, but this time, there was a yelp from above him.
“Hold on, Joe!”
And he was falling again.
The water kissed him with a slash of icy steel, and he gasped in pain, floundering for a second to get his bearings again before kicking himself to the surface once more. His body was shaking with fear and cold and shock now. The thought that he might not actually make it out of this hole finally whispered its dismal message across his mind.
“Decided to stay after all?”
The voice shot through his bones like an electric current. He felt his kidneys give way at last.
