Three

by Shoshi

make it.”

  (SIX)

  Roke pulled up the dangling pair of ropes. There was resistance at first, like there was something tied to them, but, then, the ropes seemed to let go and came up fast. Joel hoped there’d be something attached to one of them—something personal that Bryan had tied on like his watch to tell them it was him down there---but there was nothing.

  “We’ll use a single rope,” said Roke. “Means I can make it longer. Could be two-three hundred feet down there. My hunch is he was too short—it happens.”

  “Help me set up, Roke. I’ve got to get down there right away.”

  “‘On it, kid.”

  Roke scrounged in his magic bag and Joel’s duffle, fished out a couple of climbing harnesses and strapped one onto Joel. Then, he attached the rope to it. The extra harness was for Bryan in case his had gotten broken. “I’m lucky you’re a dwarf,” he said with a thin smile. “Yeah, and I’m lucky you’re a monster,” Vsaid Joel.

  Roke braced himself against the rock walls of the tunnel. “Yank on the rope a couple of times when you want me to haul you back up.” He hesitated. “Make that three times if you’ve found him;”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now get going---before I change my mind. Toss me a couple more of those Milky Ways.”

  Joel threw him whatever he had left in one of his pockets. Then, he stepped forward, sat down on the edge of the ledge, trying not to look down, trying not to be scared as hell though he was. Not just scared, he thought. More like totally terrified. He thought of Roke’s advice: don’t give in to it. He closed his eyes and eased himself off the rock shelf as Roke slowly paid out the rope. He dropped downwards into the middle of formless darkness.

  A hundred feet down, he shouted: “Bryan! Are you there?”

  Only a soft, eerie echo came back. He slowly opened his eyes, but there was little to see. The LED attached to his helmet didn’t penetrate very far. He began to have a hazy awareness of steep walls all around him. He was starting to shiver. He was still wet. This is the start of hypothermia, he thought. Must be colder down here than up on the ledge. Is he really down here? Is he hurt? Is he---he didn’t want to think it.

  “Hang in, man!” he shouted. “I’m coming. I’m almost there.” Suddenly, with a jolt he wasn’t expecting he was down. His feet jounced hard on rock. This gigantic sinkhole wasn’t quite as deep as they’d thought. Still, the top of it where it punched through the earth’s surface was so far up and bright it looked like a full moon shining in a night sky. Now he untied his harness from the rope and peered around him. He immediately saw a dim figure hunched near him on the ground.

  “Bryan,” he whispered uneasily. “It’s you---isn’t it?”

  He hurried over to him and lightly put his hand on his leg. It felt cold right through his pants. He peered at his face. It was ashen pale, the eyes closed. One cheek was really cold. Yes, it was him. He reached for his wrist to find a pulse. There was none. He put his ear to his chest. Still nothing. If his heart was beating, it was too faint for him to detect.

  “Oh, boy, this is bad,” he said aloud.

  He swept the LED around the space at the bottom of the amphitheater, looking for entrances, passages, anything that would offer an easier way out. That’s when he saw, thought he saw the huge maw of a cave-like exit from the amphitheatre. It was far too dark to see into it. It might be a mile deep. It might be only a few hundred feet or even less. It could be an exit, but either way he’d never be able to carry or drag Bryan that far. There was only one choice: haul him up.

  He remembered the signal system they had set up. Three yanks, he had found him. Two yanks, bring him up. He pulled on the rope three very deliberate times and felt Roke yank back three times. Great. He had understood. Now he had to haul him over to the dangling rope. He locked his hands together under his brother’s arms from behind and began to drag him across the crumbled rock strewn around the bottom of the shaft. It was like hugging him as he had often done when they were kids. He was crying again, convulsing with sobs. This time he just let the tears come, let himself cry out with grief.

  Suddenly, he saw it. A note on a piece of paper on the ground where he’d been lying. He could tell the writing was Bryan’s.

  Hi Joel. I knew you’d find me. I fell. Not enough strength left to go back up. Tell them all I’m sorry. I had fun, I did. I wish it didn’t have to end.

  He stuffed it into a pocket. “Come on, Bry,” he said aloud. “We’re going up.” There was no need to fit the extra harness onto his brother’s body. He already had a harness on. He just had to attach the rope to his harness. The dead are heavy. He remembered reading that once. It was true. He yanked on the rope twice and waited.

  The seconds crawled by. A minute’s worth. Damn, didn’t Roke get it? He wasn’t pulling Bryan up. He was about to yank on the rope again--and, then, miraculously Bryan’s body began to lift slowly and agonizingly off the ground and into the air.

  Joel’s heart lifted with it. He felt so full of joy as he watched it rise up as though rising up had somehow brought him back to life.

  The body went up and up and disappeared into the murk above.

  While he waited for Roke to drop the rope back down to him, he thought of the yawning mouth of the cave that seemed to lead out of the sinkhole. Should he have a look at it? He felt a great tug of curiosity about it—the kind of tug real cavers feel, he guessed, when they discover a mystery underground. A mystery, perhaps, no one else has ever seen. He found himself striding across the rocky bottom of the sinkhole. One quick look, he figured, to see what Bryan must have seen or maybe fell before he had a chance to see it. All the more reason for him to take a moment to see it now.

  The darkness inside the cave seemed absolute. It gave no hint of what lay inside it or where it led. He took a few halting steps into it and swept his lamp across its low-hanging ceiling. It revealed very little--but suddenly it did reveal something. Painted onto a far corner of the ceiling was a riotous jumble of red and blue images. Snakes, huge-eyed rodents, a snarling bear, elk fleeing before a fire and a host of mysterious symbols. It was unmistakable---Native American art. Had to be.

  So the Indians knew about the sinkhole, had known about it, perhaps, for centuries or longer. Where did the cave lead to? What was the meaning of the art? Was it part of the secret that Bryan had talked about? He was dying to find out, dying to walk further into the cave—until, far in the distance, he heard Roke’s voice. He realized he must have tossed down the rope and now was getting worried because Joel had not responded. He must not keep him waiting.

  In a moment he was yanking on the rope to assure him he was all right and ready to ascend. Poor old Roke. Now he’s got to do it again, he thought. What an insanely powerful guy. What if he’d been down here alone? Bryan might have had to stay there for eons—until some future earthquake gave him a decent burial. And his twin along with him.

  He began tying the rope to his own harness. He had never been good at knots. He just about knew how to tie a clove hitch and a bowline from his sailing days, but they weren’t the right knots for this caving stuff. He’d used a bowline on Bryan. It never failed, and it was easy to untie. He knew that. The trouble was you couldn’t slip the knot to make it tighter. Well, it couldn’t be helped.

  He tugged on the rope again two times and waited. Before long he was rising even faster than Bryan did. He kept banging against the walls of the sinkhole as he lifted up. Once he struck his head and began to spin. There was no way to stop the spin. He felt dizzy and sick to his stomach, and, then, suddenly, wonderfully, he had reached the lip of the ledge.

  “Holy Moley! Here comes another one!” shouted Roke. “Thank God, they aren’t triplets. Hang on, Joel, this is going to be tricky.” He had to tie off the rope before he could reach over the ledge and pull Joel in. It was more than tricky. Only brute
force, Roke’s kind of strength, made it possible. He tumbled backwards as Joel came over the edge. They sat there for a few moments just looking at each other.

  “It’s incredible. You actually did it,” said Joel.

  “Where’s the TV crew?” Roke was grinning.

  “They’re right behind me. Pull them up!”

  Then, they remembered Bryan. He lay there on his back, his eyes still closed, with his face turned upwards. “I suppose you’ll want to take him home now,” said Roke.

  “Definitely,” said Joel.

  “Give him a proper burial,” said the big man softly.

  They carried Bryan as carefully as they could back down the passage that had gotten them to the ledge and out into the cavern that Joel had dubbed the fairytale cavern. Shafts of light angled down from tiny fissures in the roof as they laid him down on a limestone slab. The cavern looked almost like a cathedral now, thought Joel, with its soaring columns of sturdy stalagmites and delicate stalacmite fingers probing downward. Here and there the light filtered through shimmering cascades of white gypsum crystals. It was truly breathtaking, an exactly right resting place for his brother.

  “The scumbag’s gone,” said Roke noting that Deeter had come to and escaped. “Should have tied him up. Now we’ll have to find our own way out of here.”

  “I almost forgot about him,” said Joel.

  “Me too, I guess,” said Roke.

  Joel read him the note that Bryan had left behind.

  “Poor guy,” said Roke. “Not a great way to go. Well, you did what you could.” He ran his fingers through his wild hair. “Joel, we’ve got to get practical. We’ve got to do some planning. First, who knows how long these lights are going to last. We’ll save one, turn the other one off.” He squelched Joel’s. “Okay, now I’ve got to find a way to get us out of here fast. Can’t go together. Too slow. You stay here with your brother. I’ll make like Ulysses. When I find an exit, I’ll come back for you. Those three slime-balls got out of here somehow. I’ve got to find out how they did it.”

  Joel remembered the cave with the Native-American art at the bottom of the sinkhole. He told Roke about it. “It probably leads to an exit,” he said.

  “Come on, Joel. What do you want us to do? Go back down in there and fumble our way through it? It may not go anywhere.” Roke was emphatic. “We’re at risk without a way out. We’ve got to find an exit from one of these caverns. Real soon. And I’m going to find it.”

  Roke glanced at Joel who was dumbly staring at his brother. “Just say yes, Roke, I’m with you all the way. You don’t have to say it. I said it for you. I’m off.”

  It felt eerie hanging out with Bryan with Roke gone. God, what if he rose up like Lazarus? Joel didn’t think he could handle that—much as he would dearly love to have him back. Well, he had stopped hoping. He knew now he was gone. It was time to get real. He checked his pockets and realized they were running low on trail mix and candy bars, their precious food supply. They needed to start rationing it, especially the good stuff like the Milky Ways that Roke was fond of--in case his big friend couldn’t find an exit. Of course, Roke still had a supply of jerky left. But beef jerky? How disgusting can food get?

  He looked a long time at Bryan’s shadowy face. Just then, a bat flew by in front of him. He barely paid attention to it. He was used to bats after seeing them flying around the cave’s entrance, and, then, it hit him like a lightning bolt. A bat! That meant there was a real, live exit to the outside maybe right here in this cave or close by.

  He began peering around the cavern. Now he saw other bats hanging from the ceiling like they usually do. Of course, the opening might be too hard to get at or too small to squeeze through, but he had heard that bats like a good-sized hole they can swarm through when they go out to feed. It had to be in here somewhere and closer by than the escape routes Roke was checking out. He decided he better look for it himself—to save time.

  “You okay if I leave you alone for a while?” he said to the motionless body lying on the slab in front of him.

  A shaft of light from one of the tiny crevices in the roof had moved onto Bryan’s face lighting up every detail. On an impulse he leaned down and gave his brother a kiss on his forehead. He hadn’t done that since childhood. It felt good. It said he loved the guy and always would---but there was something strange about it. He wasn’t as cold as Joel expected him to be. A long ways from warm, but still it was curious.

  Then, he saw something, thought he saw something, that made him think he was hallucinating. There was a very slight flicker in Bryan’s left eyelid. He knew muscles sometimes twitch after death—but suddenly a tremendous impulse swept over him like a flood. He began to shout, scream, shriek Bryan’s name over and over as though he could reach across the void and yank him back to life.

  Now another voice called out almost as loudly. “What the hell’s going on?”

  It was Roke, back from his scouting foray. He scrambled across the cavern to the place where he had left Joel and his brother. Joel now had one finger on his lips.

  “Cheest--one minute you’re screaming like a fiend, the next minute no one’s allowed to speak. What is it?”

  Joel looked ashen and solemn. He stared up at his friend. “I think he’s alive.”

  (SEVEN)

  Roke stared back at Joel. “Are you off your nut?” he said under his breath. He knelt down by Bryan and put his ear to his heart. “Nothing,” he said. “You hear what I said? Nothing. This thing is starting to get to you, boy. I know you want your twin back, but you can’t have him. He’s gone. Believe me.”

  Joel had his head in his hands. He looked up suddenly and said evenly and deliberately: “Roke, I’m telling you, he’s alive.” He ticked off what he’d noticed: the twitching eye, the skin temperature.

  “He had advanced hypothermia,” said his big friend. “Nobody can survive what he’s been through and tell the tale.”

  “Feel his skin.” He had his hand on his brother’s stomach.

  Yes, it was cold, but it still felt less cold than anyone would expect.

  Roke placed his huge bear-like hands on Bryan’s face. Joel could only think anyone with hands as thick-skinned as that could hardly feel anything at all.

  He grunted. “I’m not saying you’re wrong---but---I don’t know. I just don’t know. None of this makes much sense.”

  Then, they both saw it at the same moment. Bryan’s left eye unmistakably flickered---again. Very slightly.

  Roke shook his head and jumped to his feet. He was suddenly urgent. “We’ve got to get him out of here. Get him warmed up somehow.”

  Joel was smiling. “I knew you’d come around. You know, I saw a couple of bats flying around in here and more of them hanging off the ceiling. Doesn’t that mean there’s an exit? They must be getting in and out somehow.”

  “Yeah, well, I heard a whole bunch of them. That means there’s a big swarming hole in one of these caverns. We’ve just got to find it. It’s our best chance.”

  “Thank God I’ve got the cell phone,” said Joel. “It’ll start working again as soon as we get outside. I’ll call for a helicopter.”

  “Hey, is that the cell you said you threw across the room?”

  “It’s working fine,” said Joel, but he wasn’t sure. He had only used it once since putting it back together. “How are we going to carry him out?”

  “I have this handy chariot,” said Roke.

  “You, I suppose,” said Joel.

  “You got it, kid.”

  So Roke set about gingerly lifting Bryan onto his back, and they began a slow parade out of the fairy cavern into the one next door.

  “Three more caverns,” said Roke. “That’s where I heard the bats.”

  “We’ve got to hurry it up. It’s going to be dark soon.”

  “Hey, I’m dancing as fast as I can.�
�� Roke did a couple of half-way dance steps.

  “Look out, you big ox!” Joel ran to keep his brother from sliding off the guy’s huge back.

  “Ever see that movie?” Roke asked. “Good flick. Jill Clayburgh. Back when I could see.”

  They clambered through several more caverns without a hint of an opening to the outside world---or seeing any more bats. It was discouraging, to say the least. Then, Joel grabbed Roke’s sleeve and held a finger to his ear.

  “Now what?” said his big friend. “You’re holding us up.”

  “What’s that sound?” asked Joel.

  “It’s the wind,” said Roke. “There’s often a little wind moving around a cave.”

  “You sure it isn’t---?”

  “We’ll check,” said Roke. He carefully laid Bryan down on his back, took out a small knife and held it under his nose. “You see any fog on the blade?”

  “I guess not,” said Joel.

  “What you’re hearing is the wind, boy,”

  Joel didn’t want to argue about it, but the fact was there wasn’t any wind where they were.

  They hiked on and were stopped again—this time by a wondrous discovery. And this time it was Roke who stopped. He turned his head and sniffed. “Smell that, Joel?” His eyebrows went up as his face broke out in that odd half-smile Joel had first seen when he tasted the Mars Bar. “Pine trees, man. There’s a way out, and it’s in this cavern.”

  A moment later, Joel spotted bats, a couple of dozen of them straggling out of the cave through a gap behind several stalagmites. Then, he saw the hole. “It’s big, Roke,” he said. “A bunch of old ladies holding hands could make it through there.”

  Right afterwards he whispered: “Put him down, Roke! He’s doing it again!” In a moment they were both leaning over Bryan’s prostrate body, ears pressed against his chest, listening and listening. They waited, it felt, like forever.

  “Yes!” screamed Joel. “Yes!”

  “It’s impossible,” said Roke, “He’s moaning.”

  “And that means he’s breathing. Roke, move it, move it. We’ve got to get out through that hole.”

  But it wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, it brought on another near disaster. This cavern did have a spectacular gash in one wall that led to a possible exit, but it was located at the top of a high, steeply sloping mass of limestone. They would have to get themselves and Bryan up it to get to the hole.

  “This is a job for somebody small. You,” said Roke. “Scamper up there, boy, and see if it really goes out.”

  It was far more than a scamper. Joel scrambled and climbed and clutched at handholds that were hardly handholds at all and slowly made his way to the top of the wall. As he clambered up, the smell of pine needles grew stronger and stronger, bringing with it an aura of blue sky and the wonderful outsideness of the world that lived on top of