Reprisal (8 page)

The cave's cool breath came sighing through.

Joanna set the rope sacks down. ... The gate's big padlock was a thick round of stainless steel. She unlocked it, hung it on a crossbar, and swung the heavy grid squealing open. Then she walked back down through the trees to the car ... put on her helmet, lashed the sleeping bag, selected and stowed gear into one equipment pack ... then slung the pack, the carabiners, and her harness over her shoulders. She closed the Volvo's trunk, and bent under the load, climbed back up to the cave's mouth, careful of her footing.

In two trips, she hauled her gear inside, and down a rough passage slightly more than two feet wide ... piled the pack, sleeping bag, and rope sacks, then went back and closed and locked the gate behind her.

Hefting the gear again, Joanna moved farther down the passage into deeper darkness and damp, the daylight only a faint glow behind her. ... She switched on her helmet lamp, and by that yellow cone of light, sorted out her webbing, then buckled on the sit harness, checked the adjustment--tight, but not too tight--and did the same for her chest harness. Then she buckled a one-inch-wide webbing strap up from her waist to connect them.

After Budwing fell, Chris Leong had bolted two steel rigging anchors into the low stone ceiling of the passage, just short of the mud-slide chute. Joanna tugged the Blue Water's working end out of one rope sack, snapped back-to-back carabiners up into each anchor fitting, then tied into one set with a figure eight on a bight loop ... took the line over to the slightly lower anchor and tied another figure eight through the carabiners there. She examined the anchors' set by her helmet light, saw that the limestone they were bolted into was sound-not flaking, not cracked--then checked her rigging knots again, dressed and set them hard.

Joanna dug for the Blue Water's running end, tied a looped knot there to keep from rappelling off it into the pit--then began the routine of attaching her gear and herself to the rope. She snapped the web-tape runners of her pack and rope sacks to her harness loops with small bent-gate Petzl carabiners, then clipped her rack descender to the steel link at the front of her sit harness, and threaded the Blue Water back and forth through the rack's small bars.

She tested her harness buckles, snapped the safety shunt's runner to her waist link, and clipped the shunt onto the rope, for backup braking in case the rack failed. ... Then she double-checked everything she'd done, looked along the passage's wet mud floor for anything she might have dropped, anything forgotten, overlooked.

When she was sure, Joanna backed slowly away from her anchors, feeding out rope through the rack, keeping tension on it ... gripping the shunt with her left hand to let the rope run free. She backed down until the heels of her boots rested just at the edge of the irregular black mouth of the chute.

Then she stepped back and down--and instantly began to slide fast on slick mud

... kept her feet straddled wide as she skidded backward at a steeper and steeper slant into darkness. She clamped the rack's bars in her right hand to slow herself, half sliding, half dangling from the angled rope ... and looked up, trying to find the carabiner hanging from the chute roof. They'd rigged it suspended from a web-tape runner bolted to the chute ceiling, to pass the ropes through ... run them high at the pit's stone lip, out of the mud.

Joanna caught a gleaming in her helmet's light, saw it was the carabiner hanging above her and to the left, and clamped the rack's bars to stop. She reached up with a loop of the rope in her left hand, unscrewed the carabiner's gate with thumb and forefinger, snapped the Blue Water in, and screwed the gate shut.--That was just done, and the shunt gripped again, when the pack and rope sacks, trailing on their tape runners, slid suddenly downslope past her, toppled over the rock's edge and into the pit.

Their weight yanked at her, and Joanna slipped and fell hard, skidded down the mud slope on her belly, and was over the lip and falling into blackness, emptiness.

She felt fear flash through her, bright and freezing cold. The rack. Hold tight ... hold tight.

And she gripped it, gripped it with all the strength in her right hand, squeezing the rack bars together so the rope hummed, then whined running through them. She was too frightened to let go of the safety shunt, let its cam engage to halt her.

She hung frozen instead, gripping the rack with all her strength so the rope, as friction took hold, gradually ... gradually ran through more slowly, until she was hardly falling, until she was only drifting down into darkness forty stories deep ... her pack dangling beneath her with the rope sacks, the Blue Water line feeding out of the first one.

Embarrassed, grateful to be alone and have no one know how she'd panicked--gripping her rack in terror, instead of simply releasing the shunt-Joanna sailed down, sailed down the murmuring rope, its thin, sheathed nylon cording strong enough to hold anything but a fool.

She imagined Merle Budwing's ghost calling to her from below. A ghost eternally in darkness, coolness, calling others down to him at the bottom of the pit. It would make a poem. ...

Now, after those moments of fear, the reality of Frank's dying came sharply, freshly to her. She'd thought of her loss, of his leaving her. She'd thought of Frank's death--but not his dying. She hadn't considered the moments of drowning, his exhaustion and agony.

Descending through an immense stone cathedral, hundreds of empty feet across, more hundreds of feet deep--its upper air lit after all, now that her eyes were accustomed, by two dim slender beams of light from minor cracks in the great dome of its ceiling--Joanna began to cry, and realized it was only the second time she had wept since Frank had died, as if she'd been waiting for this more proper place for tears. The cave, like the ocean, revealing so clearly how small, how minor they were, and in what a temporary way Frank had lived--and she lived still, and hung now on her little thread, a tiny, thinking spider with a poem in its head.

Joanna took a breath and stopped crying. She blew her nose on her coverall sleeve, eased the bars of her rack and fell a little faster, so the Blue Water's sound rose in pitch as it payed through the friction. Above her as she sank, the rope's thin strand ran up and out of her helmet's light into distance and vaulted uncertain shadow. Beneath her was a gulf of deeper, then perfect dark.

Joanna stood, her helmet lamp switched off, on heaped shifting slabs of fallen stone. She'd tied her second length of line on at two hundred and thirty feet ... then attached herself to the new rope below the joining knot, to rappel down the last two hundred-plus feet to the pit's floor.

She'd turned off her helmet lamp to enjoy the dark, to stand in this great vault of darkness deep within the world ... alone except for Merle Budwing's ghost. He'd struck this heap of spoil after accelerating second by second in his fall, breathless, out of shout, not knowing when he'd strike--or whether he'd strike at all, perhaps only fall and fall forever, fall endless miles in pitch darkness toward the center of the earth.

For him, the white smacking flash of impact must have been a fraction of an instant of relief.

Joanna looked up, searched for those two beams of light in the dome's great height, and saw, high and higher, almost out of sight, their hair-thin traces that by contrast made the cavern's darkness darker, as if it were flooded by a river of blackness flowing in, and bringing silence with it.

She lit her helmet lamp, and by that small bright cone of light fed the slack running end of the second Blue Water length into a rope bag, then weighted that with a heavy chunk of rock. Above the rope bag and its stone, the rest of the line rose up into cool damp dark air, up forty stories to the mud chute, the passage, and the gate. The rope, hanging slender as her finger, and moving slightly in the cave's cool breezes, was her only way up, her only way out.

She took her chest harness off and left it with the rack and shunt by the rope sacks, along with her sling of carabiners. Then she dug in the equipment pack and took out two nylon tape runners and the sixty-foot braid of Pigeon Mountain climbing rope--dynamic rope, with stretch and give to it to cushion a fall. She hunted through the pack again, found the folded plastic survival bag, took off her helmet and tucked the bag into it, then put the helmet back on and checked her chin strap.

It was odd to be alone in the pit, in darkness, alone in the tangled miles of the cave. Odd to be without the company of other cavers, their noise and occasional grunts of effort working passages in climbs and crawls, or lugging gear. Without their harsh joking.

Strange to be alone, and a relief. As if being beneath the earth in pitch darkness, coolness, silence, being here and all alone, were the truth of the human condition--and everything brightly lit, crowded, noisy and warm, were only a lie waiting to be exposed. Exposed by drowning and death. Exposed by loneliness and loss. The cave, like the bottom of the sea, presented the fact.

Joanna imagined herself as Merle Budwing was, and Frank. In stillness, silence, and the dark. The difference being that she still knew of death-and the dead did not.

She shouldered the pack and rope, took six carabiners from her sling and snapped them to her waist harness, and walked away from the hanging line ...

trudging, sliding down the long, unstable hundred-yard ridge of broken fallen stone. An insect crawling along the rough dark carpet of an enormous room. ...

It took her half an hour to get off the ridge of fallen rock and onto the pit's stone floor--scored and ravined yards deep by ancient rushing waters, scattered with the rubble the currents had left behind them, boulders, gravel, megaliths larger than houses. The vaulting space around, above her, seemed to sing in Joanna's ears, then shrink to only the reality of her helmet's cone of light--a yard or two across, a yard or two distant as she traveled.

If she mistook a narrow trench in the pit's floor for a shadow in her light's beam, if she misstepped and broke her ankle, broke her leg, she could still self-rescue--crawl back to her distant rope in agony, rig her ascending gear, and struggle up, her bad leg dangling. It would take hours, it would be difficult, but she could do it, weeping, screaming if necessary.

But if she slipped and fell here and broke her pelvis, or broke her back, then there would be no getting up the rope, even if she could drag herself over the long ridge of rubble to it. ... Then, she would lie licking damp stone for any moisture, and huddle dreaming, shivering, hallucinating as her lamp batteries failed, backup lights were exhausted, her rations were eaten ... and she died of darkness and thirst, before she could starve to death.

Someday, after her car was found, cavers would come sailing slowly down through shadow for her body. They'd be very angry with her. ...

Two hours later, Joanna had crossed the pit's floor, climbed a steep fifty-foot rise of rubble breakdown to its north wall, and stopped to rest a few minutes before climbing the forty feet of vertical limestone to the first passage entrance.

It was a sheer wall of fractured soft stone-chocks and aids useless to wedge into cracks that crumbled and broke away on strain. It was hand-and-foot climbing. The Midstate Grotto had a policy of avoiding permanent bolted anchors where it could.

"If you can't rock climb, don't cave-'cause where there're downs, there're going to be ups." One of Chris Leong's lectures. The Mad Chinaman--also known as Genghis Khan-Chris would be first down the rope, if they had to come for her body in a few months. He'd be absolutely furious. ...

Joanna went to the wall ... sidestepped along its irregular base, and found a deep crack that seemed to go. She stepped up to wedge her boot toe in, then reached up and found a grip to balance her for the next toe-in. She slowly walked the crack up at an angle to the right along the wall, keeping her body away from the stone, using her feet to climb, her hands only for balance.--Her helmet light was not much use; it threw too many shadows above her as she climbed. She did better with her eyes closed ... relying on touch, running her fingers in slow sweeps above her, feeling for slight depressions, slight ridges to grip lightly for a moment as she went up.

The rock crack narrowed and vanished beneath her, and Joanna, committed, climbed with her feet turned sharply out, using the inner edges of her boot soles to boost her. It was a matter of keeping moving, not stopping--not hanging still on the wall.

Left step and right step up in darkness, in rhythm with her reaching, searching for finger holds to keep her on the rock. She began to notice the weight of the pack and rope braid on her back ... notice the soft ringing of the carabiners as she rose. Her fingertips were hurting. Now she was twenty-five, thirty feet up, too far to allow herself to fall. There'd be no falling, now. Only climbing.

... At the passage ledge, Joanna had to mantle, brace her weight up on a stiffened arm to lever herself over the edge. She lay resting there a few minutes, then rolled to her feet, clumsy with the pack and rope--and walked over rubble into the passage. It was an ovaled tunnel, floored in a fine silted dust that sparkled in her lamp's light. Fifty to sixty feet wide, almost thirty feet high, its gleaming walls were dimpled by current swirls, the stone burnished by the White River's flowing through for two or three million years.

The river had flowed through for those ages before diverting to a lower level, slowly dissolving its way down. It had flowed through the passage and thundered out into the pit, an immense waterfall filling a black lake in pitch darkness.

This passage was the meandering mile-long walkway into the labyrinth--the maze of interconnected tunnels, chutes, squeezes, dead ends, river duck-unders, corridors, crawl spaces, waterfalls, galleries and great chambers of the cave.

... The Grotto hadn't had time to map very much of it. Joanna had supplies for two days, two days to explore and rough-map a new mile, perhaps two.

Two days in which she had to think of nothing but staying alive--of caving, and its cold, harsh, and muddy labor, discomfort, danger, and exhaustion. Two days in which she had to think of nothing else, remember nothing else in a world of dependable darkness beneath the treacherous world of light.