Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

Descending into a forbidden pit at midnight was ridiculously melodramatic. The sheer theatricality of it helped keep reality at bay. For half the afternoon Anna and Holden had gone around and around trying to find another way. She'd laid out her thoughts, and they'd spent an hour going over reports from the Blacktail well, Brent's recommendations for concrete and pipe, and the desert road, pulverized to a choking dust. Holden agreed that the key to Frieda's death would most likely be found in Lechuguilla. Between them they pieced together a picture of what must have occurred, though not one so clear they could identify all the players. Adding the Blacktail to the mix implicated half the brass in Carlsbad Caverns National Park. There was no one they could safely tell until they had proof.

And there was still the question of Sondra McCarty. How she fit in was unclear. The woman had literally vanished off the face of the earth, never to be seen again. If she, like Brent, had been involved and then disposed of, the field was somewhat narrowed. If not, then the number of people who would want Anna kept out of the cave and permanently silenced increased by at least one.

As Anna dropped down the last forty feet, the now-familiar musk of the underground filled her nostrils. A dank cellar smell, it put her on alert like a jittery cat. For Holden, Zeddie-true cavers-it was perfume, the scent of adventure, of untapped potential in the earth and within their own souls. To Anna it smelled of trouble, the olfactory hallucination that warned of a coming seizure. Once inside the cave it would be gone. Lechuguilla didn't have bat colonies to provide guano, no ready exchange with the surface to promote mold or insect life.

The floor of Old Misery Pit was below. Spinning like a spider on its web, Anna suffered a moment of vertigo. Her helmet light moved across one wall, was lost in a hole that fell sharply to one side, then flickered to life again on the ridge between the drop-off and the subtler exit that led into Lechuguilla. Giving in to momentary dizziness, she landed not lightly on her feet but firmly and solidly on her butt. She'd been right to descend first. This was not an entrance she would care to have witnessed by a pretty young man. Feeling all thumbs, she freed herself from the rope. In her limited but intense caving experience, she'd noticed a phenomenon she could always count on. Regardless of how often she changed batteries or switched lamps, the light from her helmet always appeared dirty brown, possessing only half the wattage of that of the other cavers.

"Off-rope," she hollered into the void. On hands and knees, she crawled to the side of the pit, trailing the end of the rope so she could steady it when Curt neared the bottom.

"On-rope," filtered down from above.

Less than ten minutes later she and Curt had negotiated the ten foot nuisance drop from the floor of the pit. They crouched in the cramped chamber, where a trapdoor sealed the throat of Carlsbad's other world-class cave. The stolen key fitted the lock, and Anna pulled on the iron trapdoor. It gave easily, the heavy octagon springing upward. A blast of wind screamed out of the bowels of the earth as if the cave howled in rage. Blinded by dust, she staggered back, tripped over Curt's feet, and fell heavily.

"Holy smoke," she muttered, trying to rub the grit from her eyes. Wind continued to pour from the pipe at forty to fifty knots, filling the tiny earthen room with its own noxious brand of weather. "What the hell-"

"Pressure equalization," Curt said, unperturbed. "Must be a low-pressure zone passing over New Mexico. Still want to do this?"

"No. You first or me?"

Curt went first, giving Anna time to weep the dirt from her eyes. After he called clear of the ladder, she followed. Standing on the second of the rungs welded inside the culvert, she had to use all her strength to force the trapdoor down against the gale. A muffled clang and sudden absolute peace let her know she'd succeeded.

Careful not to think more than was necessary, she hurried down the pipe and crawled out the dirt tunnel into the cave. Curt waited in the wide corridor that had once before ushered her into Lechuguilla. Corkscrewing away in the shadowed and toothy way of limestone passages, it was surprisingly comforting. For the first time she felt a glimmer of the passion that had cavers crawling into holes since the beginning of time. A fortress sense of safety surrounded her. The knowledge that bombs could fall, stock markets crash, and hemlines go up again, and none of it could touch her. Not in this world. Holding her breath, she waited for the familiar bite of claustrophobia to gnaw away this tenuous truce. It never came, and she breathed out her relief. Maybe she was cured. Chalk up a victory for aversion therapy. She made a mental note to tell Molly when next they talked.

Swept along by Holden Tillman's grace and expertise, Anna had made the trip from Old Misery Pit to Tinker's Hell in just over six hours. Curt was not so lithe, and neither she nor he so sublimely confident. A steady and careful trudge brought them to the rift in four hours. The traverse that had raised Anna's blood pressure the first time brought her close to a heart attack the second. When Curt finally dragged her into the constricting coils of the Wormhole, she was almost relieved. To the list of classic choices-rock and a hard place, devil and the deep blue sea-she added abyss and wormhole.

Minutes after dawn in a world that grew increasingly unimaginable with each slithered mile, they were at the egress from the Distributor Cap by the exit that would take them down the newly fallen rock and into Katie's Pigtail. There was just room in the opening for the two of them to sit side by side, their feet dangling over the lip, like children sitting on a tailgate.

After six hours' hard travel without a night's sleep to bolster her, Anna was tired. Muscles quivered on bones that felt brittle and old. In dire need of refueling, she spooned cold beans into her mouth from a foam cup. Curt drank noisily, his elbow jostling her each time he hoisted his water bottle. Close quarters foment love or war. Anna was unsure which way she was going to-fall. "Nudge me one more time and you're meat for cave crickets," she said before it came to a decision.

"You're little. You don't need any space," Curt returned. "Airplanes, ironing boards, shower stalls-all made for Munchkins. I've got to be somewhere."

Several suggestions came to mind, but Anna left them unvoiced.

True to the tradition of light leaches, Curt had turned his headlamp off to preserve batteries. Anna's burned a lonely hole in the darkness of the Pigtail. Below them, a fifty-foot slope of powdery silt and rock spread in an apron filling the Pigtail to the bridge from which Holden had called his orders. Tracks from their exodus and the subsequent extrication of Frieda's body were perfect, ageless in the soft soil. This internal hillside remained unstable. Another rock slide poised to tumble down at the least provocation. Untried by the vicissitudes of the surface, much of the underground teetered on this edge for eons, awaiting that first tip of the scales: an earthquake, the flicked wing of a lost bat, the footfall of an unwary caver.

"Would you think less of me if I pretty much said, 'you're on your own,' and went home?" Curt asked. Another drink, another bump of the elbow against Anna's sweaty shoulder.

"Oh, yeah," she said. "Absolutely. Left alone and helpless I would naturally have to accompany you out and blacken your name on ladies' room walls forever after. Are you going to back out?" she asked hopefully.

"Not now."

"Damn."

The light from her helmet had dimmed to a myopic eye, a dull yellow-brown iris around a darker center. With the movement of her head the watery orb wandered across the rockfall. "'S'pose she's under there?"