by Nevada Barr
“Off-rope,” she hollered into the void. On hands and knees, she crawled to the side of the pit, trailing the end of the rope so she could steady it when Curt neared the bottom.
“On-rope,” filtered down from above.
Less than ten minutes later she and Curt had negotiated the ten-foot nuisance drop from the floor of the pit. They crouched in the cramped chamber, where a trapdoor sealed the throat of Carlsbad’s other world-class cave. The stolen key fitted the lock, and Anna pulled on the iron trapdoor. It gave easily, the heavy octagon springing upward. A blast of wind screamed out of the bowels of the earth as if the cave howled in rage. Blinded by dust, she staggered back, tripped over Curt’s feet, and fell heavily.
“Holy smoke,” she muttered, trying to rub the grit from her eyes. Wind continued to pour from the pipe at forty to fifty knots, filling the tiny earthen room with its own noxious brand of weather. “What the hell—”
“Pressure equalization,” Curt said, unperturbed. “Must be a low-pressure zone passing over New Mexico. Still want to do this?”
“No. You first or me?”
Curt went first, giving Anna time to weep the dirt from her eyes. After he called clear of the ladder, she followed. Standing on the second of the rungs welded inside the culvert, she had to use all her strength to force the trapdoor down against the gale. A muffled clang and sudden absolute peace let her know she’d succeeded.
Careful not to think more than was necessary, she hurried down the pipe and crawled out the dirt tunnel into the cave. Curt waited in the wide corridor that had once before ushered her into Lechuguilla. Corkscrewing away in the shadowed and toothy way of limestone passages, it was surprisingly comforting. For the first time she felt a glimmer of the passion that had cavers crawling into holes since the beginning of time. A fortress sense of safety surrounded her. The knowledge that bombs could fall, stock markets crash, and hemlines go up again, and none of it could touch her. Not in this world. Holding her breath, she waited for the familiar bite of claustrophobia to gnaw away this tenuous truce. It never came, and she breathed out her relief. Maybe she was cured. Chalk up a victory for aversion therapy. She made a mental note to tell Molly when next they talked.
Swept along by Holden Tillman’s grace and expertise, Anna had made the trip from Old Misery Pit to Tinker’s Hell in just over six hours. Curt was not so lithe, and neither she nor he so sublimely confident. A steady and careful trudge brought them to the rift in four hours. The traverse that had raised Anna’s blood pressure the first time brought her close to a heart attack the second. When Curt finally dragged her into the constricting coils of the Wormhole, she was almost relieved. To the list of classic choices—rock and a hard place, devil and the deep blue sea—she added abyss and wormhole.
Minutes after dawn in a world that grew increasingly unimaginable with each slithered mile, they were at the egress from the Distributor Cap by the exit that would take them down the newly fallen rock and into Katie’s Pigtail. There was just room in the opening for the two of them to sit side by side, their feet dangling over the lip, like children sitting on a tailgate.
After six hours’ hard travel without a night’s sleep to bolster her, Anna was tired. Muscles quivered on bones that felt brittle and old. In dire need of refueling, she spooned cold beans into her mouth from a foam cup. Curt drank noisily, his elbow jostling her each time he hoisted his water bottle. Close quarters foment love or war. Anna was unsure which way she was going to fall. “Nudge me one more time and you’re meat for cave crickets,” she said before it came to a decision.
“You’re little. You don’t need any space,” Curt returned. “Airplanes, ironing boards, shower stalls—all made for Munchkins. I’ve got to be somewhere.”
Several suggestions came to mind, but Anna left them unvoiced.
True to the tradition of light leaches, Curt had turned his headlamp off to preserve batteries. Anna’s burned a lonely hole in the darkness of the Pigtail. Below them, a fifty-foot slope of powdery silt and rock spread in an apron filling the Pigtail to the bridge from which Holden had called his orders. Tracks from their exodus and the subsequent extrication of Frieda’s body were perfect, ageless in the soft soil. This internal hillside remained unstable. Another rock slide poised to tumble down at the least provocation. Untried by the vicissitudes of the surface, much of the underground teetered on this edge for eons, awaiting that first tip of the scales: an earthquake, the flicked wing of a lost bat, the footfall of an unwary caver.
“Would you think less of me if I pretty much said, ‘you’re on your own,’ and went home?” Curt asked. Another drink, another bump of the elbow against Anna’s sweaty shoulder.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Absolutely. Left alone and helpless I would naturally have to accompany you out and blacken your name on ladies’ room walls forever after. Are you going to back out?” she asked hopefully.
“Not now.”
“Damn.”
The light from her helmet had dimmed to a myopic eye, a dull yellow-brown iris around a darker center. With the movement of her head the watery orb wandered across the rockfall. “ ’S’pose she’s under there?”
“Could be.”
“Want to dig?”
“We’d be digging for days.”
“Days,” Anna agreed. The bottom of the slide, where one might reasonably expect Sondra’s body to have been carried by multitudinous tons of loosed soil, was bulldozer and backhoe country. Two people with small folding shovels could dig till retirement and not find a thing.
“Not Zeddie?” Curt said.
“I don’t think so. Maybe Peter. Zeddie didn’t know Sondra was going for the jugular over the divorce issue. Peter did. Besides, Zeddie didn’t have much of a motive. Neither money nor marriage rings her chimes.”
“She’s young,” Curt said. “Give her a few years. They will.”
“Too true.” Anna remembered her aunt Peg telling her when she was in college, “Of course you’re not conservative. You have nothing to conserve.” Zeddie was still at an age at which “security” and “tedium” were synonyms.
“If you tell me about Zeddie and Frieda, I’ll go down first,” Curt offered.
Anna followed his gaze over the delicately balanced hill of loam. “I have to go first,” she said. “I’m lighter.”
“And I can dig faster.”
“Good point.” Anna didn’t relish the image, but it was good to know he’d be standing by with a shovel. “Five more minutes.” Screwing her courage to the sticking place, she switched off her headlamp to save the batteries. Total darkness closed around them. She touched Curt’s knee, then the cool stone in the passage beside her to reassure herself that space had not vanished with light. Curt scooted closer, brushing her shoulder with his, letting her know she wasn’t alone. Anna appreciated it. Fear of the dark had never been a problem for her. Since beginning her reluctant caving career, she understood why. She’d never been in the dark. Night was a kindly living entity. Darkness was not. Darkness was an invitation to the bottom dwellers of the id to come out and play.
“Frieda and Zeddie,” she said, her voice sounding odd in her ears, as if the going of the light had altered the acoustics of Katie’s Pigtail. Or those of her own skull. Resisting an impulse to feel her cranial bones to see if they had shifted, she went on. “Frieda’s mom told me the story. It’s Zeddie’s secret to share or to keep, not mine.”
Curt didn’t say anything. Without light, not only space was rendered a bizarre and changeable entity, so was time. A blunt-edged clod of it tumbled by to a ticking in Anna’s head.
“Strictly entre nous?” she said when a brief struggle between ethics and temptation had concluded.
“Oui, oui,” Curt replied. “Sub rosa and all that good stuff.”
Anna laughed. The noise rebounded from unseen walls, frightening her. Returning to a murmur, she told Curt the story Dottie Dierkz had related over the phone.
“Short and sad,” she said, and in he
r blindness felt as if she spoke only to herself. “Zeddie was a sophomore in high school. Her sister was home from college on spring break. She and Frieda took Zeddie climbing with a group of other college kids up to some rocks on the Yellow River, north of Minneapolis. There was ice. There was beer. There was a lot of general horsing around. Zeddie was belaying her sister. The anchor didn’t hold. Zeddie wasn’t strong enough. Her sister fell sixty-five feet and broke her back and neck. Eight days later they pulled the plug on the life-support machines, and she died.”
A moment passed, then Curt said, “Like I’d dine out on that story.”
Drowning in cave ink, Anna nodded.
“No wonder she went ballistic when you so rudely brought the subject up.”
“I said maybe Frieda had died like her sister. I meant killed for revenge. Zeddie must have thought I was suggesting she’d screwed up.”
“She was always anal retentive about rigging.”
“Nobody was going to die on her watch again.”
“Maybe that’s why Zeddie got so strong,” Curt suggested. “The woman is an ox.”
A tremor took Anna as she saw herself, too weak to hold on, dropping Molly half a hundred feet to shatter on icy river rocks.
Time for the monsters to scuttle back under their stones. She flicked the button and turned on her lamp. A pool of light no bigger than a Frisbee and the color of mud feebly illuminated their boots.
“Why do people bury their dead?” Anna growled. “It’s redundant.” She pulled her helmet off and turned the switch, extinguishing the pathetic beam. Fresh batteries were in her sidepack and a Maglite was Velcroed in a canvas pocket on her belt. Before she could free it, a thin ululating wail stopped her hand. Caught in the Never-Never Land of Lechuguilla’s night, the sound was directionless, without substance, a frail lament of the cave. Anna hadn’t heard its like before: the keening of a child lost to hope, a meager, broken, madhouse moan. Prickling spread up her scalp as the vestiges of primordial muscles tried to raise the hackles on her neck.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered.
“No. God, no. And I never want to hear it again,” Curt breathed, a voiceless warmth in her ear. Fear shook through his words. Anna’s own ratcheted up a notch. She clung to his arm, Becky to his Tom Sawyer, listening for Indian Joe.
“Wind?” she managed.
“No.”
“Kelly’s ghost?” She was thinking of the obnoxious grandstanding of the man swearing he heard Frieda calling from beyond the grave.
“Get a grip,” Curt hissed. Veiled by a testosterone version of the heebie-jeebies, his irritation failed to bolster her courage.
“Light!” Anna fumbled out her flashlight, felt it tip from her fingers to fall away soundlessly. “Fuck. Light!” she demanded.
Curt sat too still. She wanted to pound him. Fractured visions from movies her mother had told her not to watch flickered through her brain. “It” had gotten him. She sat next to a headless corpse. Possessed by an evil spirit, even now he lifted his hands to close around her throat.
Anna punched him.
“Doggone it, Anna, I’m trying to find that little switch thing.”
Relief tugged a giggle from her throat. A thin heartless wail trailed on after her laughter stopped. Adrenaline worked its way to her bowels. The phrase “having the shit scared out of you” took on a sudden and graphic interpretation.
Curt’s headlamp came on, pushing the cave back where it belonged. With the return of the sense of sight, the chilling cry seemed an unreal memory. Panic subsided, and thought resurfaced; still, every cell in Anna’s body quivered.
At their feet the Pigtail yawned. The long rift looked bottomless in the imperfect light. Curtains of stone, rounded and draping from ages of gentle erosion, filled the chamber with theatrical shadows, a stage where the most impossible fantasies were rendered credible.
“You did hear it?” Anna begged. There was something about the bend and waver of the sinuous limestone walls that brought back memories of acid nights and flashback days. She needed reality ratified.
“I heard. Let’s get out of here.”
A good idea. A great idea. Probably the best idea Anna had heard in weeks.
“We can’t,” she said finally.
“Why not?”
“We’re grown-ups.”
“Now you tell me.”
20
ANNA AND CURT sat without speaking. Breathing deep and slow to return her heart rate to normal, Anna listened until her ears ached with the silence.
“Maybe we should turn the light out again,” Curt suggested.
“No,” she said too quickly, then relented. “Try it.” Entombed in darkness they waited. The eerie cry was not repeated.
“An aural hallucination?” Curt took a stab at explanation.
“We both heard it.”
“Jesus. It’s been nearly four days.”
Anna said nothing. She doubted she herself would have lasted four days.
“Doggone that Kelly,” Curt exploded. It was as close to swearing as Anna’d heard him come. “I hate people who can’t grasp the obvious. If you think you hear a woman wailing in the dark, there’s probably a woman wailing in the dark.”
“Sondra!” Anna shouted.
The name ricocheted from tiers of limestone. A tiny avalanche broke loose to their left, skittering furtively as far as gravity would take it.
Curt turned his lamp back on. By its light Anna replaced the batteries in hers and added its inadequate glow.
“Let’s keep the hollering down until we’re clear of the Pigtail,” Curt whispered. “Ulterior motives aside, resource management was right to close this section. It’s wanting to come down; I can feel it.”
Anna could too, or thought she could, a pregnant heaviness in the atmosphere that was only partially accounted for by an overactive imagination. Once, snowshoeing in the Rockies under an unstable drift of spring snow, she had had the same sensation, as if the air between her and ten thousand tons of snow was being compressed.
Talking only when they had to, and then with an eye to the boulders preying on them from above, she and Curt rigged a rudimentary belay using his body as anchor. The descent was not so steep that Anna needed to be roped up, but, should the dirt begin to shift, Curt might be able to pull her free. Failing that, he could dig along the line, confident that at least a part of her would be waiting at the end of it.
The claustrophobia from which Anna had recently declared herself cured thundered back and took up residence behind her breastbone. Lechuguilla no longer seemed a benevolent fortress. With each trickle of stone set in motion by her boots, Anna heard the chuckle of a mountain waiting to bury her alive.
Then the Pigtail was at her feet. Crabbing sideways she set foot on solid rock. Leaving the line secured to her web gear, she picked a trail along the side of the chasm following the goat track that would never see a goat. To her left the rift dropped away, sheer on one side and vicious with broken rock on the other. Her light didn’t reach the bottom, but the Pigtail’s terrors were all in memory. Falling no longer frightened her. At this point in the journey it was the lesser of half a dozen evils.
When she was far enough away that a second slide would not reach her, she tied the line to a stalactite, moist and growing in its imperceptible way, and called gently, “Off-rope.” With his greater weight, should he trigger a slide, Curt could drag Anna down with him. The stalactite would hold. Intellectually she knew this was appropriate. Viscerally she would have preferred to station herself directly below Curt. Standing at ground zero when the bomb dropped would be a quicker and easier end than being left alive to deal with the fallout.
Schatz’s light winked as he turned his back, following the route she had taken. Though streaked with mud and darkened with sweat, his tee-shirt shone a rich emerald green. Color. Anna longed for the sight of color. Aboveground the bleakest desert landscape was alight against the blue of the sky at midday, dyed in hues of red and
ocher with the setting of the sun. The darkest nights sparked silver from the sand. As a child she’d learned color was only a trick of the light, a wavelength reflected back to the human eye. Till entering a lightless realm, the truth of that hadn’t come home to her.
Curt reached bottom. Years of caving made his big feet fall with such delicacy he dislodged scarcely half a cup of soil. Winding line as he came, he made his way down the rift to where she waited.
Pride, a favorite sin of Anna’s, wasn’t operative this deep in the earth. Content to let the younger, stronger, more experienced Schatz take the lead, she concentrated on where she put feet and hands. As they worked along the sketchy traverse, she kept an ear open for a recommencement of the haunting cry. If it came, she didn’t hear it over the rasp of labored breathing.
From the repetitive clutching required in cave travel, the muscles in the palms and fingers of her hands ached as if she’d opened dozens of recalcitrant peanut-butter jars at a single sitting. By the time the Pigtail was behind them, Anna was wringing her hands in an unconscious parody of Lady Macbeth. Twenty feet into the dirty and uninteresting passage connecting the Pigtail to Lake Rapunzel, Curt stopped abruptly.
“It’s gone.”
Anna came up beside him, cramped under his arm by a pinch of stone.
“The tape is gone. Somebody took it.”
The monomania of sustained movement cleared from her mind. The orange plastic surveyor’s tape marking both sides of the trade routes through Lechuguilla was missing. Without it as a guide, the cave became a treacherous maze, each junction in the sinuous underground indistinguishable from the last. The way was not linear. Jagged rips in the limestone, some big enough to drive a truck through, others providing only wiggle room, were above, below, all around. Only one led out. A hundred such junctions, each with its myriad possibilities, rendered the odds of consistently making the right decision virtually nil.
