Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

"Could be."

"Want to dig?"

"We'd be digging for days."

"Days," Anna agreed. The bottom of the slide, where one might reasonably expect Sondra's body to have been carried by multitudinous tons of loosed soil, was bulldozer and backhoe country. Two people with small folding shovels could dig till retirement and not find a thing.

"Not Zeddie?" Curt said.

"I don't think so. Maybe Peter. Zeddie didn't know Sondra was going for the jugular over the divorce issue. Peter did. Besides, Zeddie didn't have much of a motive. Neither money nor marriage rings her chimes."

"She's young," Curt said. "Give her a few years. They will."

"Too true." Anna remembered her aunt Peg telling her when she was in college, "Of course you're not conservative. You have nothing to conserve." Zeddie was still at an age at which "security" and "tedium" were synonyms.

"If you tell me about Zeddie and Frieda, I'll go down first," Curt offered.

Anna followed his gaze over the delicately balanced hill of loam. "I have to go first," she said. "I'm lighter."

"And I can dig faster."

"Good point." Anna didn't relish the image, but it was good to know he'd be standing by with a shovel. "Five more minutes." Screwing her courage to the sticking place, she switched off her headlamp to save the batteries. Total darkness closed around them. She touched Curt's knee, then the cool stone in the passage beside her to reassure herself that space had not vanished with light. Curt scooted closer, brushing her shoulder with his, letting her know she wasn't alone. Anna appreciated it. Fear of the dark had never been a problem for her. Since beginning her reluctant caving career, she understood why. She'd never been in the dark. Night was a kindly living entity. Darkness was not. Darkness was an invitation to the bottom dwellers of the id to come out and play.

"Frieda and Zeddie," she said, her voice sounding odd in her ears, as if the going of the light had altered the acoustics of Katie's Pigtail. Or those of her own skull. Resisting an impulse to feel her cranial bones to see if they had shifted, she went on. "Frieda's mom told me the story. It's Zeddie's secret to share or to keep, not mine."

Curt didn't say anything. Without light, not only space was rendered a bizarre and changeable entity, so was time. A blunt-edged clod of it tumbled by to a ticking in Anna's head.

"Strictly entre nous?" she said when a brief struggle between ethics and temptation had concluded.

"Oui, oui," Curt replied. "Sub rosa and all that good stuff."

Anna laughed. The noise rebounded from unseen walls, frightening her. Returning to a murmur, she told Curt the story Dottie Dierkz had related over the phone.

"Short and sad," she said, and in her blindness felt as if she spoke only to herself. "Zeddie was a sophomore in high school. Her sister was home from college on spring break. She and Frieda took Zeddie climbing with a group of other college kids up to some rocks on the Yellow River, north of Minneapolis. There was ice. There was beer. There was a lot of general horsing around. Zeddie was belaying her sister. The anchor didn't hold. Zeddie wasn't strong enough. Her sister fell sixty-five feet and broke her back and neck. Eight days later they pulled the plug on the life-support machines, and she died."

A moment passed, then Curt said, "Like I'd dine out on that story."

Drowning in cave ink, Anna nodded.

"No wonder she went ballistic when you so rudely brought the subject up."

"I said maybe Frieda had died like her sister. I meant killed for revenge. Zeddie must have thought I was suggesting she'd screwed up."

"She was always anal retentive about rigging."

"Nobody was going to die on her watch again."

"Maybe that's why Zeddie got so strong," Curt suggested. "The woman is an ox."

A tremor took Anna as she saw herself, too weak to hold on, dropping Molly half a hundred feet to shatter on icy river rocks.

Time for the monsters to scuttle back under their stones. She flicked the button and turned on her lamp. A pool of light no bigger than a Frisbee and the color of mud feebly illuminated their boots.

"Why do people bury their dead?" Anna growled. "It's redundant." She pulled her helmet off and turned the switch, extinguishing the pathetic beam. Fresh batteries were in her sidepack and a Maglite was Velcroed in a canvas pocket on her belt. Before she could free it, a thin ululating wail stopped her hand. Caught in the Never-Never Land of Lechuguilla's night, the sound was directionless, without substance, a frail lament of the cave. Anna hadn't heard its like before: the keening of a child lost to hope, a meager, broken, madhouse moan. Prickling spread up her scalp as the vestiges of primordial muscles tried to raise the hackles on her neck.

"Did you hear that?" she whispered.

"No. God, no. And I never want to hear it again," Curt breathed, a voiceless warmth in her ear. Fear shook through his words. Anna's own ratcheted up a notch. She clung to his arm, Becky to his Tom Sawyer, listening for Indian Joe.

"Wind?" she managed.

"No."

"Kelly's ghost?" She was thinking of the obnoxious grandstanding of the man swearing he heard Frieda calling from beyond the grave.

"Get a grip," Curt hissed. Veiled by a testosterone version of the heebie-jeebies, his irritation failed to bolster her courage.

"Light!" Anna fumbled out her flashlight, felt it tip from her fingers to fall away soundlessly. "Fuck. Light!" she demanded.

Curt sat too still. She wanted to pound him. Fractured visions from movies her mother had told her not to watch flickered through her brain. "It" had gotten him. She sat next to a headless corpse. Possessed by an evil spirit, even now he lifted his hands to close around her throat.

Anna punched him.

"Doggone it, Anna, I'm trying to find that little switch thing."

Relief tugged a giggle from her throat. A thin heartless wail trailed on after her laughter stopped. Adrenaline worked its way to her bowels. The phrase "having the shit scared out of you" took on a sudden and graphic interpretation.

Curt's headlamp came on, pushing the cave back where it belonged. With the return of the sense of sight, the chilling cry seemed an unreal memory. Panic subsided, and thought resurfaced; still, every cell in Anna's body quivered.

At their feet the Pigtail yawned. The long rift looked bottomless in the imperfect light. Curtains of stone, rounded and draping from ages of gentle erosion, filled the chamber with theatrical shadows, a stage where the most impossible fantasies were rendered credible.

"You did hear it?" Anna begged. There was something about the bend and waver of the sinuous limestone walls that brought back memories of acid nights and flashback days. She needed reality ratified.

"I heard. Let's get out of here."

A good idea. A great idea. Probably the best idea Anna had heard in weeks.

"We can't," she said finally.

"Why not?"

"We're grown-ups."

"Now you tell me."

Anna and Curt sat without speaking. Breathing deep and slow to return her heart rate to normal, Anna listened until her ears ached with the silence.

"Maybe we should turn the light out again," Curt suggested.

"No," she said too quickly, then relented. "Try it." Entombed in darkness they waited. The eerie cry was not repeated.

"An aural hallucination?" Curt took a stab at explanation.

"We both heard it."

"Jesus. It's been nearly four days."

Anna said nothing. She doubted she herself would have lasted four days.

"Doggone that Kelly," Curt exploded. It was as close to swearing as Anna'd heard him come. "I hate people who can't grasp the obvious. If you think you hear a woman wailing in the dark, there's probably a woman wailing in the dark."