Blind Descent-pigeion 6 (37 page)

  "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 her 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. Above ground 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.

  "Why would Sondra take up the tape?" Curt asked.

  Anna remembered when, during the carry-out, they'd finally reached the field phone: Frieda talking to her folks, Oscar Iverson and Brent Roxbury on the phone, Sondra sitting too close, taking notes.

  "She didn't," Anna said with certainty. "She was eavesdropping. Something Oscar or Brent said must have struck her as that big news story she was so hungry for. She went back to find it. Somebody must have followed, pulled the tape, and left her."

  "Gad, but that's cold."

  "Or desperate."

  Curt dug through his pack for a roll of tape. Anna carried some as well, part of the rudimentary kit for cavers in new environments. Following footprints and scuff marks, they moved on but much more slowly, leaving orange ribbon to mark the way back.

  On a natural balcony overlooking Lake Rapunzel, they cried Sondra's name but could not scare up the ghost of the cave a third time. Urgency was growing in Anna, a need to find the woman, to reach Tinker's Hell, to get out of the realm of the dead before she started seeing three-headed dogs and smelling sulphur. Had Curt not insisted on a rest, she would have pushed on.

  They sat; they drank. They did not speculate. It took too much energy, and even Curt was beginning to flag. Anna shined her light down glistening red-gold flowstone and ignited the perfect topaz of Rapunzel. That serene and liquid jewel, cradled in its basket of burnished limestone, made her doubly glad for the invention of the buddy system. Without Curt to curb her baser instincts, she knew, with what would have been shame had she not been too tired to care, she might have plunged in, clothes and all, introducing a cloud of grime into the pristine waters. Tracing her light up the far side of the sunken lake to Razor Blade Run, she remembered the glassine forest of aragonite crystals yet to be threaded through. She hoped she'd never be so brain-dead she would bull her way through that china shop. She liked to think that even without witnesses there was a limit to her fatigue-induced evil.

  They moved without incident through the descents and ascents of Rapunzel and the dry pit of encrusted pillars called the Cocktail Lounge. The two rooms and their connecting passages were simple by Lechuguilla's standards. Few openings existed that hinted at further trails. At the mouth of each they called and listened lest Sondra had wandered in and become disoriented.

  In the long and crushing passage that linked the Cocktail Lounge with Tinker's Hell, their shouting at last elicited a response. Standing upright in the chamber where Sondra and Peter had argued, they froze, willing the sound to come again. Just beyond was the belly-crawl where Anna had lain newtlike and eavesdropped. Anna's muscles twitched and her psyche trembled. Holding the reincarnated claustrophobia at bay took energy, akin to carrying a pit viper in a cotton pillowcase, ever vigilant, ever careful not to let it get too close.