Fatalis (6 page)

The sheriff activated his red-and-blue flashing lights though he didn't turn on the siren. There was no need to disturb the community while it was still so early. Swinging from the parking lot onto Calle Real, he followed it east for nearly two miles before turning left onto Route 154, the only western approach to Painted Cave Road. He would stay on the twisting road straight into the mountains, through Los Padres National Forest. Just over five miles up, a winding right turn would put him near the sinkhole.

As he drove through the light morning traffic, Gearhart was proud of the fact that the people of the county and its three hundred Sworn Deputy Sheriffs hadn't been the only ones to benefit during the past two years. Perhaps the greatest winner had been someone who had survived almost daily belt-whippings as a kid, two tours of duty in a losing war, and eighteen years of fighting not only Los Angeles street gangs but judges and politicians who believed that the answer to crime wasn't hard time but compassion and gentle rehabilitation. Until one of those pundits had his car jacked or his wife mugged, they weren't going to believe that they were wrong. But they were.

After a lifetime of losing, Malcolm Gearhart had no intention of ever losing again.

Jim Grand always carried a small, slender penlight. He fished it from his pocket. Then he slid the night-vision goggles to his forehead so he could turn on his light without being blinded. He thumbed on the switch and a thin cone of white light spread across the cave wall.

Grand stared at the image.

Painted on the western wall of the cave was a volcano. The nearly pyramidal peak was massive and black and covered in a long, flat red cloud. Coiled in the base of the volcano was a serpent, its red tongue rising through the center to the top. There the tongue forked in two directions, becoming streams of red that ran down the mountain's smooth sides. The lava collected in flat, spidery pools along both sides of the volcano. On the far side of the wall, one leg of lava stretched all the way to what looked like a fissure and stopped, though the art did not. Grand twisted slightly and swung the light around. What he saw on the opposite wall was even more remarkable.

On the southern wall was another painting, different, yet not. It was virtually a mirror image of the first, with a black mountain at the center. Only instead of red flows the lava was white. And instead of a serpent there was a dolphin inside the mountain, spraying two streams of water.

Whatever it was. Grand had never seen Chumash renderings so large. And while the northern painting seemed to suggest that the Chumash had witnessed a volcanic eruption-either here or in the north, before their migration to Southern California-the white mountain puzzled him.

Could it be an underwater volcano? Or maybe a geyser of some kind.

He snapped off the penlight, tucked it away, and slipped the night-vision goggles back on. Relaxing his legs, he lowered himself the rest of the way to the ground. The surface of the cave was lumpy granite softened by ancient water flows. He removed the ropes and tied them together so they wouldn't slip from the pulleys. Then he stepped back from the wall. He studied the red volcano for a moment, then turned to look at the opposite wall.

Grand's initial reaction was that he was looking at some kind of geological yin and yang, the polarity of fire and water. Why it was painted and what it meant he had no idea; not yet, anyway. But he would. This was the kind of puzzle Jim Grand lived for.

He took a moment to describe the art on tape and then turned to the right. Though he wanted to spend more time with the paintings, just to examine the artistry, be also wanted to examine the rest of the cave. The particular cavern might have been sacred, but Chumash may have lived in other sections. If so, there might be other artifacts, from weapons to tools to clothing, in which case he would need to get graduate students up here before hikers and treasure hunters found the site.

Grand walked forward.

"Now that I'm on the ground I can also see the bottom of the cave more clearly. There are definitely fissures on both the northern and southern sides. There's also runoff from the rains spilling into both. I'm going to take a look."

The lingering pain of the previous night faded. His tired mind was alert. Feeling sinfully rich, Grand started walking to the nearer of the two openings, which was about fifteen feet away. His echoing footsteps were like gentle drumbeats on the smooth rock.

"The opening on the northern side is seven or eight feet high," he said. "It's about five feet wide at the bottom, three feet at the top, and surprisingly symmetrical. I don't see any of the jagged breaks that indicate a stress fracture. I also don't see any scoring outside, so it wasn't hand-cut."

Grand was just a few feet from the mouth of the cave. The light from the swallow hole was blocked by the ledge; even with the night-vision goggles it was difficult to see.

"I'm looking inside the fissure now," he said. "It's dark, but from what I can see, the walls look blistered. They remind me of the collapsed lava tube at Bandera Volcano in New Mexico."

He wondered if the volcanic art on the wall represented something that had happened here instead of to the north. This was going to cause some eruptions of a much different sort among the conservative old guard in the UCSB geology department. Elma Thorpe would have two reasons to be angry at him.

Volcanism in Southern California was a contentious subject. There were volcanoes well north of this region up through Canada-in Black Butte, Clear Lake, Gorda Ridge, and over a dozen others. But volcanism in the north was due to subduction zones, crustal plates moving together from opposite directions. That convergence caused earthquakes as well as huge gaps that released magma. Tectonics in the south were mostly transform faults, with one plate sliding past another like grinding teeth. The horizontal scraping caused earthquakes but it did not cause lava to vent.

Or so many geologists had always assumed. Armed with computer simulations, a few scientists believed that millennia of heavier earthquake activity had simply obliterated calderas and other signs of ancient eruptions in Southern California. They suspected that smaller subduction zones were hidden deep in the crust of the southlands, beneath strata that distorted or swallowed sound waves from acoustic mapping instruments.

Grand stopped just outside the opening; he thought he heard something under the trickling water. He listened. After a few seconds he heard it again. The sound was coming from deep inside the runnel.

"I don't know if the mike is picking this up," he whispered, "but there's a noise in the fissure."

The runoff from the swallow hole was washing slowly down the center of the tunnel Grand stepped inside. He was careful to place his feet on either side of the flow, which ran along a shallow, foot-wide trench in the center. Sinkholes often formed beneath these trenches. The rock underfoot was brittle, eroded. He stood still and listened.

"There it is again," he said. "A deep, intermittent gurgling. I can't tell what it is or exactly where it's coming from because of the echo. Maybe it's a Chumash spirit," he joked. "I'm going to see if I can find the source of the sound."

The scientist began walking slowly along the fissure. It was almost completely dark and he proceeded cautiously, looking around with each step. There were wide cracks in the tunnel floor where sinkholes were forming-probably leading to a network of similar tunnels-and there were occasional stalactites like those at the Bandera site. In some places the walls closed in suddenly and he had to move sideways to get through. The walls themselves were thickly pocked and bubbled. Grand didn't think he'd be finding any art in here.

After he had taken less than a dozen steps the light vanished completely. Removing his goggles, Grand snapped on the penlight and continued ahead. The gentle step of his boots and the rubbing of the harness against his pants echoed locally. They blended with the distant, hollow groan that he still couldn't identify while everything around him was solid and soundless. It was a strange combination, a hip-hop underbeat in a tomb.

But Grand didn't stop. He was driven by more than just curiosity. For most of his life Grand had worked on skills that most people never got to use. His senses had been refined and heightened by years spent reproducing prehistoric tools and using them to hunt small game for food on remote savannas and chaparrals. His endurance, his balance, his instincts had been pushed and enhanced by moving through dozens of caves and tunnels, by climbing mountains and hacking his way through unmapped jungle.

Something about this place had turned those senses on. The penlight roamed the walls like an eye looking back at him. It illuminated dark, narrow fissures on both sides. The rents were jagged, vertical cracks about five feet high and glistening with water seepage from the surface of the mountain. They were classic earthquake fractures; each successive split had relieved some of the stress caused by the shifting earth. By measuring the angles at which they had cracked, geologists could plot the direction of the underlying tremor.

But Grand also felt things that scientists couldn't plot. He knew that non-Chumash were not welcome in the caves. Not welcome by surviving Chumash and not welcome by the spirits that were said to dwell in the mountains. There were times in some of these caves when Grand knew that he wasn't alone. Reason told him that it was an animal hiding in the shadows. But isolation, eerie noises in the dark, and tunnels that were often the size and smell of a grave had a way of convincing one otherwise. There were times Grand could swear that it was not cold he felt but the delicate tail of an animal spirit brushing the small of his back.

Maybe you shouldn't have made that crack about it being a Chumash spirit
, he reprimanded himself. He wondered if the sound might be an underground geyser sputtering awake, perhaps the one pictured in the cave painting.

About twenty yards in the tunnel suddenly forked. On the left it continued as before. On the right the ground dropped away sharply and the ceiling was less than five feet high. The water went mostly to the right. Grand turned an ear toward that opening. The gurgling was coming from there.

"It figures," he murmured, looking at the steep, wet passageway.

The sound was much clearer now, with less echo. It couldn't be very far away. Grand also heard dripping water, which didn't surprise him. The antediluvian flows that carved caves and tunnels like these often created underground streams and lakes as well. Many of those became part of other subterranean water systems and survived.

Grand crouched and shined the light down the passage. The stone was very smooth here, definitely an ancient channel. It sloped down like a children's slide for about twenty feet and then leveled off. He ran his hand across the top of the tunnel; the rock seemed solid, not in danger of collapsing. Then he shut off the penlight. There was no other illumination. That meant this tunnel was the only immediate access to the lower level.

He switched the light back on. Jim Grand was not a reckless man, but he had never started an exploration he hadn't finished. Unhooking the videocassette recorder from his belt, he left it on the tunnel floor. He didn't want it damaged if he slipped or fell. And if anything did happen to him, at least the search-and-rescue personnel would know exactly where to look.

Holding the penlight in his mouth, Grand started creeping down. He kept his left hand on the ground and his right hand on the tunnel wall. There were small outcrops that helped him to steady himself.

The wall and its projections were warm and damp and a bit slippery. The warmth made sense. This section was located in the northeastern face of the mountain. Foliage was relatively low-lying here and the sun hammered it for a good part of the day. There was obviously enough water below to evaporate during the day and condense when it cooled at night.

The gurgling sound and the dripping water were much louder now. So was his own breathing, which echoed back at him in the tight passage. It took only a few minutes to crawl down the tunnel. Stopping when he reached the bottom, Grand took the penlight from his mouth and shined it around.

The scientist was in a small, rank, muggy cavern, about twenty feet high and perhaps forty feet across. He couldn't be sure since his light didn't quite reach the other side.

Large, unusually tenacious gnats clouded around him but he ignored them. Waving them away was pointless. The roof of the cave was crowded with stalactites and the walls, as far across as he could see, were smooth. In the center of the cave was an underground lake, about thirty feet across. Water from his tunnel and from a tunnel on the opposite side fed the lake. Overflow from the lake formed a gentle waterfall that vanished in the darkness of another tunnel.

Close to his boots, lying half in the water and half on the stone ledge, he also saw what was making the gurgling sound. It was neither a spirit nor a geyser.

It was a handheld radio.

Hannah Hughes was sitting in the front seat of her muddy red Blazer. It was parked off-road on a rutted, ravine-side ledge one hundred yards east of the sinkhole. In front of her was the gray van the engineers had used to drive up. Angled behind her was the black Jeep belonging to her linebacker-big photographer Walter "The Wall" Jones. The Wall was over at the site, taking pictures. Despite his girth, which was formidable, the Wall was a self-admitted wuss who practiced photojournalism because that's what he'd studied in college, where he met Hannah. What he really wanted to do was open a photo-portrait studio in Santa Barbara. He was saving up for that now. Until then, he was busy taking pictures with both a Kodak DC 260 digital camera and an old 35mm Bolsey that had belonged to his grandfather. The former could be sent to the newspaper from his car uplink. The latter was for backup in case the pixels got temperamental, which sometimes happened in the rain. Or when he dropped the camera. Or when he got disgusted with his work or Hannah or digital technology and threw it.