Covenant (10 page)

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.

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 me?” 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.

“Who are you!” he shouted.

There was no reply. Just the rush of water sluicing over a fall somewhere downriver.

“Sorry, Joe! Are you okay?”

“Maybe,” he called back.

“Our anchor rock gave way. Let’s give it another shot.”

“
I’m everything you ever wanted
….” came a belated answer in his mind. A shimmer of heat flowed through his belly at those words, as he thought of Cindy and Chicago. The things he wanted.

The rope ripped against his gut again, and with a series of short, sharp tugs, he was airborne again.

“
And everything you didn’t,
” the voice continued, freezing his bowels.

“Hurry up!” Joe yelled, kicking wildly at the air. He started trying to climb the rope hand over hand. He had to escape the thing that was in his head. Now.

“
You can run, but we’ll meet again,
” it promised.

Joe’s feet pulled free of the current once more, his heart beating thunderously above the rush of the water.

“Please, God, let them pull me up this time. Please!” he murmured.

He kicked viciously at the rock wall when it came near, willing himself higher. He could hear the grunts of the cavers above as they pulled him inch by inch, foot by foot, back up the steep drop.

“Almost there,” Ken called, his voice a raspy wheeze of exertion. “Hold tight.”

The top came suddenly, a blinding glare of headlamps lancing into Joe’s face as his head cleared the top.

Ken was at the front of the line of rope pullers; they had strung themselves out evenly around a large boulder and were using the rock as a pulley.

Hands reached out to grab his own, and then Joe was lying flat on the cave floor, his breath coming in gasps of relief, his body shivering with the cold and fear. Hands pulled off his shirt and pants and shoes, but he couldn’t focus on what they were doing to him. The air was swimming around his eyes, and all he could think of was the voice, telling him it knew of him, was waiting for him.

And promising that it would speak with him again.

He was staggering with his arms propped around the shoulders of two of the others in the group before the fog finally cleared from his head.

“C’mon, man. You’ve got to crawl through here, remember?”

He stared blankly at the narrow tube before him and shuddered
at the thought of climbing that close to the earth again. Now that he knew something was here…

“We’ll be right behind you.”

“Let him be, guys.” Ken’s voice came from behind them. “Go on ahead. Take the rest of the group out first and we’ll follow.”

One by one, the cavers filed to the opening, stooped down to the crack in the wall and shimmied their way inside the earth like worms groveling their way back into the mud.

“Not exactly the best introduction to the mountain, huh?” Ken said, putting a hand on Joe’s shoulder. Someone had donated a blue-checked, long-sleeved shirt and a pair of too-large jeans to replace Joe’s sodden clothes. The jeans owner’s shorts and bare legs were now sticking out of the dark crevasse ahead of them, sliding out of sight like a snake.

“No,” Joe mumbled, shaking his head and turning to look at the caving group leader.

“We shouldn’t have taken you in so fast,” Ken said, looking dejected. “It’s my fault. You should do some preliminary crawls and stuff to get ready for this. Caves can be dangerous—that’s why we always go in twos. And that’s why we always have the guide ropes. Although”—he cringed slightly— “if you had fallen much farther, you would have dragged me over the edge with you! Our rope was just about out.”

“I’m sorry,” Joe said, his voice still shaking. “I went too close to the edge. It was my fault. I’m sorry I ruined your outing.”

“No, no!” Ken said, shaking his head vigorously. “I’m sorry it had to happen, but everything worked out fine. The group saw the river, and also saw how dangerous it can be down here. A victory and a lesson all in one. It will make us all a little more careful. Will you come with us the next time?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t let this put you off. We’ve been coming down here for weeks and never had an accident like this.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

Joe took a deep breath and, looking around, realized that they were alone. The rest of the group had slithered through the vent and were probably almost outside by now.

“Have you ever heard the rumors about this cliff?” Joe asked.

“You mean the bogey monster that keeps making people think they can fly?”

Joe nodded.

“What about it? You don’t buy that crap, do you?”

“Until today, no,” Joe said. “I came to see you because your ad sounded like you were into the occult and focused on this cliff or something. I’ve been following up on all the suicides from the peak, and wondered what was behind them. I figured, there’s no way that it’s natural for one person to jump off the cliff every Halloween. There must be a group that’s behind it.”

“So you thought the Cliff Combers might be some kind of killer Cliff Cult?”

Ken laughed out loud, his voice echoing far behind them into the depths of the earth. Joe stared at his yellowed teeth and shivered hard.

“Not us,” Ken said finally. “And I wouldn’t be down here if I thought there was someone else waiting to meet us. That’s kid stuff, man. People jump off that cliff on Halloween because it’s Halloween. Creepy night. The time for all the weirdos to want to join the undead and all that. This is the biggest peak for a hundred miles, and all the crazies just naturally seek this place out. And it’s kind of legendary for that, so they just keep coming.”

“That’s not good enough for me,” Joe said. “I don’t buy it.”

Ken shrugged. “What can I tell you? We could sit around
down here and creep each other out with weird stories and shit, but I’m saying this is just a cave, like any other. And I want to find out where that river runs to. Whether it hits the ocean or keeps going deep underground, beneath the ocean floor. It was freshwater, wasn’t it?”

Joe nodded.

“Figured. It’s too big and too high to be an ocean runoff channel.”

They sat and looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then Ken wrinkled his forehead and asked, “When I asked if you bought that bogeyman stuff, you said not until today. What did you mean by that?”

“Just what I said,” Joe answered. “Until today, I thought there were people behind all the suicides.”

“And what changed your mind?”

Joe looked at the other man and smiled sadly. “If I tell you, you’ll think I’m nuts.”

“If you don’t, I might anyway. So what?”

“When I was in the water down there, I heard a voice.”

“Yeah. That was us. We were calling down to you.”

“No. This was a different voice. I could hear it in my brain and in the water and feel it vibrating right through my bones.”

Ken gave him a sideways “yeah, sure” look. “What did it say?”

“That it was everything I ever wanted, and didn’t want, and that it had been waiting for me.”

“So maybe you heard God and we pulled you back from the brink of death. Or maybe the devil’s waiting for your soul.” Ken grinned as he punched Joe in the shoulder.

“Cold water does strange things to a man’s head,” he offered, and then stood up. “We should catch up.”

“It said one more thing,” Joe said as Ken motioned him into the tunnel.

“What’s that?”

“It said we’d meet again.”

Ken looked at Joe and then looked behind them into the whispering, damp blackness that extended as far as the eye could see.

“Let’s get up top, huh?” he said.

Joe nodded and gritted his teeth as he forced himself into the tight channel of rock. He imagined the earth pulsing all around him, a giant gullet waiting to crush the human meal inside. With panicked breath and desperate arms, Joe pulled himself forward. He could hear the panting of his partner behind him.