White Cave Escape (11 page)

“Geez, Tony,” muttered Petra, giving him a shove.

“What? What did I say?” asked Tony.

Petra sighed. “You guys check out the cave mouth. See if you can pull away any of the debris and at least see through to the outside. We need to know if the fire's out…and maybe Shawn is out there.” Petra tried to sound hopeful, for Craig's sake.

“What are
you
going to do?” Craig wanted to know.

“I'm going to talk to Colin.”

Petra picked her way carefully across the uneven, rocky floor. A shallow stream chuckled its way through the centre of the cavern before disappearing into the blackness at the back of the cave. Petra hopped over the water and felt her way along the cave wall. It was very dark. She almost bumped into Colin before she saw him. He was sitting slumped against a boulder, his head in his hands.

“Hey,” said Petra.

“What do you want?” mumbled Colin.

“You okay?”

“Swell,” muttered Colin. He shook his head and rubbed his sleeve roughly over his eyes. Sighing heavily, he turned to face Petra.

“Look,” he said. “I'm sorry you guys had to get stuck with me. I know you all hate me and I don't blame you, so just pretend like I'm not here, okay?”

Petra looked into the dark, pain-filled eyes of the older boy. She regarded him in silence for a moment.

“I don't hate you,” she said at last. “I mean, I did when I saw you in the quarry, but I don't now. I think you were in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong guys.”

“No kidding,” said Colin. “I was stupid—so
stupid—
to bring them there!” He slapped his hand against the cave wall in frustration.

“I won't argue with you on that one,” said Petra. “It was dumb. And you went along with what those jerks were doing, which was way dumber.”

“Thanks for pointing that out,” said Colin. A shudder shook his body and he covered his face with his hands. “This is so messed up! The forest, all those animals…So much is gone. How am I ever going to fix this? How can I ever make this right?”

Petra hesitated, then reached out a hand and touched Colin's shoulder.

“Some things can't be fixed,” she said quietly. “Sometimes all we can do is to try to make things better than they are.”

Colin raised his head and looked at her. His cheeks were wet.

“I don't know what to do,” he said, simply.

“You're already doing it,” Petra said. “You're helping us. You helped us get through the Pits of Despair. You carried me away from the fire and across that valley. You helped Shawn on the cliff by making him mad enough to fight his way to the top.”

Colin looked up at her in surprise.

Petra shrugged. “
I
knew what you were doing back there, even if Shawn didn't.
And
,” she continued, “you brought us to the White Caves. We made it through fire
and
water because of you.” She punched him lightly on the arm. “So you see? You're already doing something. A lot, actually.”

“But is it enough?” asked Colin.

“It's enough for right now,” Petra said, turning back in the direction of the others. “And we still need your help. This isn't over yet.”

“I'm not sure the others see it that way.”

“They will.”

“Not Tony.”

“Yeah, well, you have to excuse Tony,” Petra said, as she headed back towards the cave mouth. “He suffers from verbal diarrhea. You can safely ignore at least fifty percent of whatever he says.”

“I heard that!” Tony's indignant voice came from the darkness just ahead of them. His round face and bristly hair materialized out of the shadows. “And I'll have you know that
some
people actually
appreciate
my gift of gab, my charming chatter, my vibrant verbiage…”

“You see what I mean?” said Petra, rolling her eyes at Colin.

“…my eloquent locution, my proclivity for loquaciousness, my oral artistry…”

“Tony!” snapped Petra, interrupting him.

“What?”

“Did you have something to tell us?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah…Craig and I checked out the cave mouth and Pyro—I mean, Colin—is right. It's totally blocked.”

“Do you have any
good
news?”

“Well, there are a few gaps that we can see through—”

“Which would explain the little bit of light we have down here,” put in Colin.

“—and it looks like the water bomber put out the worst of the flames, from what we can see of the sinkhole, anyway.”

“Any sign of Shawn?” asked Petra, her voice tightening.

Tony shook his head. “No…nothing.”

“Which means,” said Petra, “that either he's not outside the cave, or…” She stopped, swallowing hard.

“Or he's in no shape to answer,” Tony finished grimly.

“There's another possibility,” said Colin.

“What?” asked Petra and Tony.

“That he's here inside the cave.”

“Where?” demanded Petra, spreading her arms wide. “There's just this one cavern. We're here and he's not. Where else could he be?”

chapter
20
Holes in the Dark

“The water found a way out of this cavern,” Colin said as he started running his hands along the cave wall. “Maybe we can find one, too.”

“You think Shawn got swept away with the water?” asked Petra.

“Maybe.”

There were footsteps and then Craig was at Petra's shoulder.

“What's keeping you guys?” he asked anxiously. “Did you find something?”

“Not yet,” Colin told him. “Caves don't give up their secrets easily. Everybody, spread out,” he ordered. “Feel around with your hands. Check the walls for any holes, crevices, or cracks.”

They did, sloshing back and forth across the icy stream that trickled through the heart of the cave. Fanning out to different sections of the cave, the kids ran their hands over the cold, damp walls. Craig slipped on what looked like a shiny rock.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed. “Holy crow—there's ice down here!”

Colin nodded. “There's ice in these caves even in the middle of summer,” he said. “It never gets warmer than two or three degrees down here.”

“Ice,” moaned Tony. “Why did it have to be ice? I
hate
ice!” He shivered and rubbed his arms. “Brrrr, it's cold! What I would give for a nice, warm fire!”

The others stared at him.

“What?” said Tony, holding up his hands. “I meant a
little
fire. Geez.”

“Actually, Tony's right,” said Petra. “It
is
really cold, and all of us are wet. If we don't get out of here soon, hypothermia is a very real possibility…as much as I hate to say it.”

“Oh, man,” groaned Tony. “Out of the fire and into the freezer! And did you
have
to say the H-word?”

“Hey, guys—I found something!” Craig had crawled up a sloping section of rock and was prying into the dark space where the cave roof met the wall. “There's an opening up here!”

“I've got news for you,” came Colin's voice from the far back corner of the cave. “There's an opening down here, too!”

The kids scrambled to look in first one and then the other of the openings. Both were small, dark, and forbidding looking. They returned to the centre of the cave and huddled together in the chilly darkness.

“So what do we do now?” said Craig.

“Well, we've got two choices,” said Petra, nodding in the direction of the two small holes that the boys had discovered. “Do we take the high road or the low road?”

“We could split up,” said Craig.

“No way,” said Tony. “Don't you ever watch TV? Splitting up is never a good idea. Somebody always ends up getting ambushed by aliens or murdered by mummies or swallowed by snakes or tortured by tarantulas or—”

“TONY!” snapped Petra.

“What?”

“We get the picture.”

“Oh. Okay.”

There was a pause. The only sound was the
drip-
drip-drip
of water in the cold, clammy darkness.

“M-m-maybe we should stick together…” suggested Craig in a small voice.

“Yeah. Sure. Good idea,” the others agreed hurriedly.

“So which tunnel do we take?” asked Petra.

The kids had hollered Shawn's name into both openings but received no answer in return. Neither opening was appealing. Both were small, inky-black holes. The tunnel Craig had found, near the roof, was a cramped, shoulder-width hole, less than three feet high. Petra had stuck her arm in as far as she could and found that the passage followed a tight curve into the black unknown.

Colin's tunnel was worse.

“It doesn't even qualify as a tunnel!” Tony protested. He was right. It was more of a crack than a hole—a narrow gap between the floor of the cave and a huge slab of rock that had shifted when the earth was shrugging off the last of the ice-age glaciers thousands of years ago.

“At least we know where the water is going,” Craig commented, pointing to the shallow, icy stream that bisected the cave floor. It vanished into the crack beneath the wall, disappearing into the subterranean darkness. Taking the low hole would mean a tight, freezing-wet belly crawl, sandwiched between a thousand-ton slab of rock and the glacial stream.

“Um, I vote for high and dry,” said Tony. “Anyway, the higher tunnel is closer to the cave mouth. Maybe the rush of water and debris knocked Shawn in there when he jumped.”

“It's possible, I guess,” said Petra. She didn't like the look of the low, wet hole any better than Tony. “We'll take the higher tunnel,” she decided. “If we hit a dead end,
then
we'll come back and try the lower tunnel.”

Alone in the smothering darkness, Shawn blinked frantically, willing himself to see something, anything. He strained his eyes, trying to penetrate the solid, black shroud that had dropped over him.

But there was nothing.

The darkness pressed down on him like a weight, leaving him breathless. Panic swarmed and swirled inside his skull. Shawn took three deep breaths, forcing himself to breathe slowly.

It's like being lost in space
, Shawn thought. Immediately, he was grateful for the sensation of the hard, wet boulder digging uncomfortably into his body. He pressed his hands against the rock's rough surface. It was proof that
something
existed in this cold, black vacuum—something solid, something real. Shawn was gripped by the sudden, irrational fear that if he let go of the rock, he might get sucked into the blackness and go orbiting away like an insignificant satellite.

Breathe
, Shawn told himself.
Just breathe. You have
four other senses—use them!

Sliding forward on his boulder, Shawn felt for, and found, the edge of the rock. He lowered his feet cautiously and landed in a shallow puddle on a wet slab of rock. Holding his hands out in front of him, Shawn took a step forward. Then another. But on the third step, his foot found only emptiness. He flung his arms out but there was no wall to catch him and he pitched forward into space.

Shawn landed in water.

It closed briefly over his head before he came up again, spluttering and choking. He thrashed wildly, his heart constricted in terror. He'd had enough of water. More than enough. Then he touched bottom and realized he could stand. Shawn staggered to his feet and stood, shaking and gasping in ice-cold water that wasn't quite waist deep.

His fall, and his brief but panicked struggle with the water, had disoriented him. He was no longer sure which way he was facing. Where had he been standing when he fell? Where was the edge of this underground pool? How big was it? Shawn stretched out his arms as far as they would reach. His exploring fingers touched only water.

Figures
, he thought. He rotated his body a few degrees and reached out his hands once again. More water. Where was the bank of this underground lake? He turned slowly in a full circle, his palms skimming the surface of the strange, black pool. His fingers met nothing but water.

He squinted again, straining to pierce the darkness, but that was hopeless. The blackness was impenetrable. He shuffled forward a step, feeling the water sloshing around his thighs. He walked farther. And stopped, uncertain. Surely he hadn't fallen
that
far from the bank. And was it just his imagination, or was the water getting deeper? He took another step.

It was definitely getting deeper.

He must be heading towards the middle of the lake. Shawn stopped and began wading in a new direction. He kept his hands stretched out in front of him, expecting to touch a stone wall that would signal the end of the water. But his fingers found nothing. This must be a bigger cavern than he had realized.

Shawn stopped again. For all he knew, he could be walking parallel to the water's edge, just out of reach of the bank. He hesitated, then turned, angling in yet another direction. No, that wasn't right—the water was getting deeper again.

And it was paralyzingly cold.

He began to shiver.

“Petra!” he called. “Craig!” But the water and the surrounding stone swallowed the sound, smothering the words as soon as they left his mouth.

If only I could see!
Shawn thought, and he slapped the water in frustration. The splash echoed in the darkness. And suddenly Shawn knew what to do.

Ducking under the water, Shawn ran his hands along the bottom, searching with his fingers. His hands closed on what he was looking for—a fist-sized rock. He stood back up, gasping with the cold. He tossed the rock out in front of him, a gentle, underhand throw. There was a gulping
plop
as the rock hit water.

“Okay, no dry land that way,” muttered Shawn. He bobbed back down under the water and grabbed another rock. He shifted direction and again tossed a stone out into the darkness.