Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

Zeddie reached down. Anna clasped her wrist and was hauled to her feet. "I tripped," she said to the concerned crowd.

"Watch your footing," Zeddie said to the visitors. "These paths can be treacherous. Are you all right?" she asked Anna because the audience expected it of her in her role as the ranger.

"Right as rain," Anna said. The clout behind her ear had been delivered by the meaty part of Zeddie's forearm. No harm was done, but she was stunned and disconcerted.

When the group passed out of earshot, Zeddie turned. Not willing to take another hit, Anna stepped back. Evidently Zeddie thought better of fisticuffs, but her rage was undiminished.

"Get out," she said. "Out of my cave, out of my house, out of my park. Stay the fuck away from me."

There was no give in her face, no chinks in her armor. Anna didn't precisely turn tail and run, but a hasty departure was the only option she'd left herself. Having backed out of range, lest Zeddie change her mind about using physical violence, she walked through the Urinal, cut across a corner of the Big Room, and caught an elevator back up the seven hundred fifty feet to the real world.

No question about it, Anna had hit a nerve. For that matter, so had Zeddie. A pervasive ache was spreading from behind Anna's ear up to her temple and down her neck into her shoulder.

As predicted, Peter and Curt were crumpled in front of the television, Calcite stretched along the back of the sofa, one paw kneading the bristle of hair on Curt's cheek. Greetings were grunted. Surreptitiously, Anna gathered up her things. It took all of three minutes. Standing at the door, she said, "I've got to say good-bye."

Like drunks emerging from stupor, the men tore their eyes from the TV and refocused on Anna. "Going?" Curt said stupidly.

"It's time. I can catch a flight out to somewhere-Las Vegas or Phoenix or Dallas-and be in Durango late tonight or tomorrow."

"This is sudden," Curt said. A roar erupted from the crowd on the television, and his eyes strayed back to the set.

"Not really. Walk me to the car, Curt," Anna said firmly.

It wasn't until the door closed between them and the game that the spell was broken, and Anna noted signs of intelligence returning to Curt's brown eyes.

Booked into a charming but cold cabin in White's City, Anna telephoned Dottie Dierkz. She remembered when Darla had been killed. Yes, Frieda had been there. The death of Darla Dillard was only half the tragedy. Anna thanked her and replaced the receiver in its cradle.

Zeddie and Peter at breakfast, Peter sneaking sips of her milkshake: the meaningless particles that had been floating in Anna's mind like dust motes settled into a pattern.

"Holy smoke," she said. She had been way the hell off base.

I hope you realize you're putting me in an awkward position."

By the light of the flash Anna held, Curt was tying an anchor line around the stunted oak at Lechuguilla's mouth. "I realize," she said. "Arrest, fines. You're a pal."

"Not that. Going to jail would lend me a certain cachet with my students. And you are going to pay any and all fines incurred, including the speeding tickets we get while running from the law a la Thelma and Louise. No, this goes deeper than that. It's dangerously close to midnight. We are about to descend into utter isolation. Isolation, I might add, from which your screams will not be heard. I am the only one whom you trust completely. Are you with me so far?"

"Hurry up." December was breathing ice down Anna's collar. Mixed with a bad case of nerves, it was all she could do to keep teeth from chattering and knees from knocking.

"I'm duty-bound to try to kill you," Curt said. He stopped twisting the nut on the locking carabiner and looked up. His eyes were masked in shadow, but the glow from the flashlight illuminated small white teeth bared in a wolfish smile. A chill deeper than that of the north wind worked its way toward Anna's bone marrow.

"What?" she said stupidly.

"That's the way it is," Curt said. He went back to his anchor. "Hold the light still."

Anna's hand was shaking. She grabbed her wrist to steady it.

"In the next to the last chapter the only guy the hero-or heroine, in this case-trusts undergoes a sudden and total personality transplant. Sort of the literary equivalent of growing fangs and hair on his palms. And it turns out he was the killer all along. Voila!" This was in mild celebration of the completed anchor. "You first or me?"

Anna was unable to speak. Like a child by the campfire, she had been scared by the ghost story. When she was twelve, her parents had left her home alone. A city council meeting, the results of which could affect their business, required their joint attendance. Anna had the flu but, wanting to be grown-up, she hadn't told them. To pass the evening, she'd curled up in her dad's big chair by the fire and read Bram Stoker's Dracula. Somewhere around ten P.M., fever and Stoker's genius combined to raise the undead. Vampires whined on the wind under the eaves, scratched at the windows with bony twig fingers, hid in shadows behind the piano and at the end of the hall. To put even a foot from her father's chair was to court disaster. There was but one way to exorcize her febrile demons. Knowing she committed the unthinkable, Anna had thrown the hardbound book into the fire and watched until even the cardboard curled in, completing the black rose-petal ruin of pages.

That same feverish terror gripped her on the limestone ledge above the gateway to Lechuguilla. This time there was no book, no symbolic crucifix to frighten away the bogeyman.

"Anna! You or me?" Curt's voice cut through the sludge of remembered horrors.

"That wasn't funny," Anna said.

Curt registered mild confusion, then laughed. "Sorry." He didn't sound it. "My sisters used to take me out for walks at night when we were little, then stop and say, 'Did you hear that? What was that!' then run shrieking away, me shrieking right behind them. I fell for it every time. Till now I didn't know I'd inherited the knack."

"Not funny. I'll go first." Anna handed him the light. They traded places, and she straddled the rope where it snaked over boulders hinting at white in the truculent light from the stars. Having clipped her safety to the line, she began threading rope through the ladderlike rack for the descent.

"You're sure this is a good idea?" This was not the first time Curt had asked that question since Anna had stolen the key to Lechuguilla from the pegboard behind Oscar Iverson's desk.

"Nope." She gave the usual answer. "But Holden knows all the details. He'll know where to come looking."

"Tell me you didn't leave him a letter marked 'To Be Opened in the Event of My Death.'"

"Something like that. On-rope." The circle of gold from her headlamp dancing giddily across her boots, Anna walked backward down the face of a boulder the size of a small Airstream and providing only slightly more traction than polished aluminum. Among Holden, Rhonda, endless phone calls, and a short stint as a burglar, the day had been tiring. Closeted in her cold cabin in White's City she had tried for a few hours' sleep. Though her body ached for rest, her mind refused to cooperate.

Much as she liked Curt and-morbid fantasies aside-trusted the man, she wished Holden Tillman were with them. The broken foot rendered it out of the question. Superstitiously she couldn't but believe the cave wouldn't hurt Holden. Her it might devour. Like a dog or a horse, it would smell her fear and turn on her.

"Cut that out," she said aloud.

"I didn't say a word," Curt complained.

Anna didn't have sufficient concentration to explain that it wasn't he but her own subconscious she ordered to silence.

The night below sucked her inexorably from the night above, darkness swallowing darkness till even the hope of day was lost. Fleetingly, she wished she were a religious woman. Perhaps it would be a comfort to have a blessed congregation lobbying a beneficent deity on her behalf.