Death is Forever

by Elizabeth Lowell

  While Cole talked, he kept crawling toward the throaty, increasing sound of thunder coming from up ahead. Excitement sleeted through him, taking away the pain of cuts and bruises gotten from crawling over stone. The ceiling rose until he could duck-walk and then walk almost normally. Water lapped around his feet. He ignored it as he flexed muscles that had cramped. When Erin’s lamp appeared a few feet behind him, he turned and pulled her to her feet. She groaned with relief.

  “This is more my idea of a cave,” she said, shining her light around. “A little cramped from top to bottom, but lots of space otherwise. Lots of puddles, too.”

  “Yeah. And they’re getting bigger every minute.”

  He spat out his diamond and put it into one of the pockets of the rucksack she carried. She handed over her own diamond and watched it disappear.

  To her surprise, Cole didn’t immediately press further into the cave’s wide horizontal opening. He simply stood and ran his lamp over everything within reach of the cone of light, memorizing his location within the larger opening. Then he turned and scanned the tunnel they had just emerged from.

  A large, rough #1 had been gouged into the limestone above the tunnel. As Cole turned away, a #2 appeared just at the limits of his helmet light.

  “See any more marked openings?” he asked.

  Erin turned in the opposite direction and looked. All she noticed was a distinct cool breeze.

  “No more numbers, but there’s a lot of air moving.”

  “Probably because there’s a lot of water coming in and pushing the air out of the way.”

  “What?”

  “Listen,” Cole said. “That’s not thunder. Somewhere up ahead there’s at least one cascade or waterfall pouring from the ceiling down to whatever passes for the floor around here.”

  Shivering, she stood and listened.

  “You’re cold,” he said.

  “I’ve been a lot colder and survived just fine.”

  He hesitated, then accepted her judgment of her own physical limits. “We’d better get going. I don’t know how much longer we have down here.”

  “Which way?”

  He pointed to the wall. “See that arrow? We go in the opposite direction.”

  “Why?”

  “In a cave or a mine, all arrows point to the way out.”

  She walked closer to the arrow and made a sound of surprise. “It looks like it was just made.”

  “When it comes to rocks, a decade or two isn’t much time.”

  Cole turned and began walking against the arrow. After thirty feet it was clear that somewhere ahead water was pouring in faster than it could drain out. A thin puddle appeared on the floor. Within twenty feet, the water was over his shoes.

  “Don’t trust the footing,” he said. “There could be potholes underneath this puddle deep enough to drown in.” He stopped and turned toward her. “You can swim, can’t you?”

  “Yes, but I’d rather not. This water isn’t getting any warmer.”

  “Do you want—”

  “No,” she said, cutting across his words. “I don’t want to go back. I want to see Abe’s jewel box.”

  “We may be walking over it right now.”

  Instantly Erin’s light flashed down to the water lapping over her feet. “Do you really think so?”

  “Maybe, but not likely. I don’t see any piles of rubble. Mining, even placer mining, is a messy process.”

  Accompanied by the steadily increasing thunder of distant water, they splashed through the broad, shallow puddle. He was careful to stay within sight of the wall and its arrows until the #2 opening appeared. The prospect of crawling through it wasn’t inviting. The opening was small. The water was at least six inches deep and flowing with a pronounced current.

  “Well?” she asked as she came to stand beside Cole.

  “It’s flowing away from us.”

  “So?”

  He shrugged. “So I expected it to be flowing toward the sound of falling water, which is behind us.”

  With that he dropped to his hands and knees and began to crawl, cursing steadily.

  She followed without hesitating. A few minutes later she understood why he was swearing so savagely. The ceiling came to within a foot of the floor and the sides of the tube closed in until his shoulders audibly scraped both sides.

  “Can you make it through?” she called.

  His only answer was a grunt, followed by splashing and another round of curses as the tunnel took a hard bend to the left. He jackknifed through it and found himself in easier going. The ceiling lifted again. Soon he was standing upright, but sideways. The solution channel was so narrow that his shoulders wouldn’t fit any other way.

  The sound of falling water filled the narrow space, but only a few trickles showed in the lantern light. Twelve feet farther down the channel, another ladder appeared. It led up through another long narrow shaft that had been widened at one point by rushing water. The ladder was wet with runoff.

  “Wait until I’m up top before you start climbing,” Cole said.

  He put his weight onto the first gleaming metal rung. The opening of the crack was so narrow there was no worry about the ladder twisting and banging him against stone. Water poured over an unseen lip above, drenching the ladder with an insistent shower.

  Fourteen rungs later, his helmet light picked up another opening in the slowly dissolving limestone. He rolled out of the hole and called down to Erin.

  “Come on up.”

  Her helmet light went out halfway up. Instantly he shined his own light over the rim. When her shoulders and the rucksack poked above the hole, he lifted her free, removed her helmet, and lit the flame. She gave a broken sigh of relief.

  “I was afraid it wasn’t going to work again,” she admitted in a shaky voice.

  “That might happen, honey. Too damn much water.” He hesitated. “We should go back.”

  “We have plenty of matches and candles, if it comes to that.”

  For a long moment Cole looked at Erin. Her face was drawn into taut lines of unease. She was a woman who loved light, who had made it the core of her professional life. Being in the cave’s total absence of light, even for a few seconds, had shaken her.

  “You don’t like it down here, do you?” he asked.

  “I liked finding that diamond. The rest of it I can put up with for a while longer.”

  His grin flashed in the sidelight from her lamp. “Fifteen more minutes. If we don’t find anything by then, we’ll head back. It’s too damn dangerous for you.”

  “But not for you?”

  “I know the risks. You don’t.”

  “So how risky is it?”

  “If we live, I’ll dream about this and wake up sweating,” he said bluntly. “We’re damn fools for being down here.”

  “Abe survived.”

  “God watches over fools and drunks.”

  “So we’re half safe,” she retorted.

  Cole laughed. “Close your eyes, honey.”

  “Why?” she asked even as she closed them.

  “So my light won’t blind you.”

  She felt the smooth warmth of his lips, the rough brush of beard stubble, and the heat of his tongue as the kiss deepened suddenly, fiercely. He stripped away the weight of the rucksack, pulled her off her feet, held her hard and close.

  Almost as soon as it began, the kiss ended, leaving her shivering with more than the chill of limestone and water.

  He peeled off his khaki shirt and gently stuffed her into it, ignoring her protests at the third layer of clothing.

  “I’ll just rip it to pieces in the next narrow passage,” he said calmly, handing her the rucksack.

  “You’ll freeze without your shirt.”

  “I’ve easily twice your mass. I retain heat much better than you do. Ask any biologist.”

  Before she could argue any more, he turned and began making his way along another passage. This one was tall and so narrow that walking sideways was
the only way to go. This channel, too, showed signs of having been filled with water at some time in the past. It also had arrows gouged in its sides at every point where new openings occurred.

  The sound of running water came from everywhere around. Erin felt like she was pushing a bubble of light and air through a maze of waterfalls and cascades. She wondered how far down they’d come into the limestone mass but didn’t ask.

  She really didn’t want to know the exact size of the massive weight of stone pressing down overhead.

  She put the thought out of her mind and concentrated on orienting herself in the three-dimensional maze. Each time she thought she’d figured it out, she found she hadn’t. It was impossible to visualize their progress as they twisted and turned, crawling up and down and sideways to the sound of running water.

  If it hadn’t been for the arrows, she’d have been utterly lost. She wondered if it was the same for Cole.

  She didn’t ask.

  As Cole pushed around a corner, he felt the pressure of limestone walls fall away. He walked three steps and turned slowly in a complete circle, discovering everything within reach of his helmet light. Erin came and stood beside him, adding her own light to his.

  From all around came the sound of water rushing and falling and cascading through unseen solution channels in the limestone. The ceiling was beyond the reach of their light. So was every wall but the one behind them. Air moved faintly, stirred by countless currents of water pouring into the space that had been dissolved by a thousand, thousand seasons of rain.

  Cole looked at his watch. “Four minutes. No more.”

  Erin was too captivated to argue. The unmistakable sensation of space around her was both welcome and eerie. The opening was alive with the thousand voices of water, water whispering, murmuring, rushing, pouring, pounding, tumbling, seeping, dripping, sliding. There was water everywhere she looked, a world alive with silver drops and dense blackness.

  A huge, shallow pool expanded into the dark as far as her helmet light could reach. Hidden currents caused streaks of light to twist over the water’s surface like a ghostly silver aurora.

  For the first time since she’d entered the limestone maze, she longed for her camera. Except for her first brush with the long arctic night, she’d encountered nothing quite so alien yet so beautiful as the underground lake.

  The roving cone of her light fell on mounds of water-rounded chunks of limestone. The rubble piles poked up through the sheet of water that stretched away into the darkness.

  She grabbed Cole’s forearm and pointed. “Look!”

  His helmet light cut a swath through the darkness until he saw more mounds rising from the dark lake. He walked to the edge of the lake. It quivered at his feet as though alive, responding to unseen currents of air and water. The water in the lake was absolutely clear, having rid itself of surface grit on the long trip down through the limestone reef.

  If the lake hadn’t caught the light with each disturbance of air or water, it would have been invisible.

  Slowly Cole turned, scanning the wall behind him, memorizing the location of the passage. Abe hadn’t numbered the tunnel. As far as Cole could see, none of the other cracks and holes had numbers.

  “I don’t see any arrows,” Erin said.

  “Don’t go out of sight of the tunnel mouth. You’re my safety line.”

  Cole walked to the edge of the trembling water, then began wading along the shoreline, searching for some sign that Abe had been there before him.

  “Here. Underneath the water,” Cole said after a minute. He looked up. His helmet lamp easily reached to the tunnel mouth. “Come over here.”

  He had to repeat the words again, because the throaty roar of water filled Erin’s ears. She waded toward him until she saw the arrow mark gouged out of the limestone floor.

  “Does that mean it was dry when Abe was here?”

  “Probably,” Cole said. “He wasn’t much on water. Hated it, as a matter of fact. Couldn’t swim.”

  “It must have been awful for him to explore the cave.”

  “Not in the dry. The water that’s coming down now is new.”

  Her breath came in and stayed until she forced herself to breathe out. She thought of the torrential rains of the wet and ten square miles of surface limestone covered one inch deep, and all those drops gathering together into rivulets and tiny streams, streams that flowed into crevices that also joined together, creating runoff channels that ate down and down into stone, dissolving tunnels and shafts and small rooms, water lured by gravity further and further down.

  And each solution channel was the narrow end of a funnel whose mouth could be half a mile square, or a mile, or more. Tons upon tons of water sliding down and down and down. When runoff filled up all the holes, there would be nothing left but darkness and water and stone.

  Don’t stay too long. You’ll drink black water and drown.

  With an effort Erin pulled her thoughts away from the massive weight of stone and water balanced over her head. Deliberately she waded after Cole, keeping her head down and watching the silver patterns of water glittering around her feet. Overhead, long ribbons of water gushed out of darkness into the artificial light, creating random showers.

  “There are potholes among the rubble mounds,” Cole said. “Channels, too. At one time this whole chamber had powerful currents of water moving through it.”

  “During the last wet?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Grimly she concentrated on the water that was now halfway up her ankles. There was a definite sluggish current leading into the darkness they hadn’t yet explored.

  While Cole knelt in the water and probed a small pothole, she looked for something to distract her from the ominous weight of darkness and the increasing thunder of water. The cone of her light probed in the water for a pothole. A circular shadow caught her attention.

  At first she thought it was simply another water-rounded stone. Then she realized that it was too perfectly circular, and there were others like it, all circular, all perfect. She waded farther, then made a startled sound as she stumbled into a pothole whose depth was masked by the clarity of the water. She put her hands out to break her fall.

  Her fingers closed over a candy tin.

  The pothole was full of them.

  “Erin?” he asked, looking up from a handful of rubble he had gathered. “Are you all right?”

  She tried to answer but couldn’t speak. She grabbed a tin in each hand and held them up to meet the cone of light sweeping toward her as Cole turned. Water showered down her arms, reflecting light in countless glittering points of white and green and yellow.

  Then he realized that it wasn’t water cascading from the rusted tins. She was standing knee deep in God’s own jewel box, and diamonds were pouring from her hands.

  45

  Abe’s mine

  The ladder closest to the surface was buried in a cascade of water that was twice as heavy as it had been when they’d first descended its slippery rungs less than an hour ago.

  “I’ll tie the rucksack to my ankle and drag it up after me,” Cole said loudly.

  “Don’t be silly.” Erin shifted her shoulders beneath the rucksack’s nylon webbing straps. “The ladder will be tough enough to keep your balance on without having the rucksack pull a foot out from under you. And I’ve carried packs heavier than this one. It can’t weigh more than twenty pounds.”

  He gave her a worried look. She was shaking from the cold and from the knowledge that the lowest crawl space they had negotiated was more than half full of water and rising quickly. If they’d spent another half hour in the jewel box, they wouldn’t have gotten out until the water level dropped again.

  If ever.

  “I’ll go first,” he said. “If your lamp goes out again, I’ll be able to light the way for you. But don’t wait long. You could drown climbing up that narrow shaft. If you get hung up, shrug your shoulders. If that doesn’t work, breathe out and shru
g again. If that doesn’t work, back up, leave the rucksack at the bottom, and I’ll bring it up. Understand me?”

  She nodded, sending her light bobbing.

  Turning his face to the side so that he could breathe beneath the pouring water, Cole went up the first rungs of the ladder. The runoff this close to the surface was cloudy and felt almost warm by comparison to the water down below. Ignoring the scrape of stone over bare skin, he went up the ladder on a single breath and lifted himself out onto the limestone floor. He jackknifed around and looked back into the hole.

  “Up!” he called.

  Taking a deep breath, Erin turned her head aside and fought her way up the ladder as water pounded over her, trying to drive her back down into the cave. Her cold hands locked around metal rungs, holding her against the water. The ladder shivered and rattled from the force of the runoff. She climbed two more rungs, driving herself upward into the narrowest part of the shaft.

  When she tried to go up one more rung, she couldn’t. She reached behind her back, shoving candy tins away from whatever had caught the rucksack.

  Beneath her fist, a rusted tin crumpled. Diamonds poured down into the bottom of the rucksack. She lunged upward, only to be snagged again. She tried to struggle out of the straps. She couldn’t.

  Water beat down on her, not enough air to breathe.

  Fear raced through her. Around her the shaft was filling with water. Her body and the pack were acting like a cork, keeping most of the runoff from draining.

  If she didn’t move, she’d drown.

  She bucked against the sack, using the strength of her legs to drive her body back against the hard stone. More tins gave way, their rusted seams no match for her frightened struggles, but it wasn’t enough to free her.

  Shrug.

  Cole’s advice came back to Erin as clearly as if he was standing next to her. She drew her shoulders forward and arched her body, trying to slip past the obstruction. When that didn’t work she forced herself to relax and let all the air out of her lungs. Another tin shifted, but it wasn’t enough to free her.

  She rolled to one side. It didn’t help. She rolled the other way. The contents of the pack shifted, giving a few inches. Aching for air yet afraid to breathe, she rolled farther.