by SM Reine
Given that my reception had disappeared a while back, I wondered if he’d been guessing a little as to their location in the end. Or maybe his app simply required less juice than a web browser. We hunted around for a moment, our faces toward the dusty earth.
“Found their prints.” I pointed to the ground and led the way. With brush clogging the riverbanks, there wasn’t much chance of the riders leaving the bed, but I kept my eyes open for the possibility anyway. Other than the footprints, the pair traveled lightly over the earth. I didn’t notice any broken branches or snapped twigs such as one expected in the wake of large animals and careless humans.
As we continued down the dry riverbed, I grew more conscious of the passing of time. I checked the clock on my phone often. My willingness to be out here was predicated on the monster’s history of nocturnal attacks. For all that I wanted to solve some of the mysteries around Eleriss and Jakatra, I wasn’t willing to die to do so.
“What’s that?” Temi whispered, pointing ahead.
Something dark lay between some rocks. I crept forward, pausing to note the fresh cup of a boot in the dust, then stopped. A bunch of weeds had been cut back, revealing a hole in a stretch of granite, its edges worn smooth. The sound of rushing water drifted up from within.
“Our underground river,” I said.
Simon peered into the hole. About two feet in diameter, it would be an unpleasant space to crawl into. I doubted the cold water waiting at the bottom would be pleasant either. The sun was still out, but it had moved behind the trees, and I didn’t fancy the idea of air-drying my clothing. Arizona or not, it was October, and we were five thousand feet above sea level.
I tried to pick up the tracks on the other side of the hole, but the earth there didn’t hold any footprints. I circled the area in case the riders had climbed out of the wash. Nothing.
“Why do I have a feeling they went down there?” Temi asked.
Simon looked to me.
“Because... I think they have.” Shaking my head, I returned to the hole. “How could they know if there’s air to breathe down there? You can’t tell from here. The water might fill the entire space.”
“A river should be low at this time of year,” Simon said.
“Maybe so, but I don’t relish the idea of plopping down there and seeing where the flow takes me.”
“It could be a trap too,” Temi said. “If they knew we were following them and wanted to... get rid of us, they could lead us to believe they’d gone down there when all they’d truly done was hidden their tracks and continued on.”
“That’s true. I’ve only tracked animals.” And not that many of them, I admitted to myself. “They don’t do things like sweeping branches across the sand to rub out their prints.”
Simon dug into his pack and pulled out a flashlight. He flopped onto his belly and peered into the hole.
“Still,” I added, “I didn’t get the impression that they wanted to do us any harm. The chatty one warned me to leave town.”
“This hole looks like it opens up before it hits the water,” Simon said. “Though I don’t know if there’s anywhere to walk on the sides.”
“Perhaps if we had some rope, we could lower him down,” Temi said.
“Me?” Simon drew back and knelt by the edge. “I didn’t volunteer for that.”
“Oh, you were volunteered,” I said. “We even voted on it while you were hanging over the side there. Due to our superior numbers, we easily obtained the majority.”
He pointed the flashlight at me. “We are going to have a discussion about voting procedures soon.”
“Of course,” I said. “In the meantime, why don’t you get out our rope alternative and see what kind of harness you can fashion for yourself?”
“Fine, but if there are any tarantulas down there, we’re switching places.”
“That’s fair,” I said.
As Simon dug into his pack again, Temi pointed at my bullwhip and said, “Can’t we use that like a rope? It might be long enough to lower someone down.”
“And risk having it drop into the water and float away? I took a special class so I could make it myself. It’s priceless.”
“Note, she’s perfectly willing to let me drop in the water and float away,” Simon said.
“Well, I didn’t make you by hand in a special class.”
Simon pulled out his trusty roll of duct tape. “Rope alternative, coming up.”
In an impressively short time, he’d braided strips of tape into a twenty-foot length and had fashioned the equivalent of a rappelling seat for himself. He found a sturdy stump to tie the end around, then handed the loose coils to us. He stuck the flashlight into his belt and crouched beside the hole, placing his hands on either side.
“Lower me down, ladies.”
Temi and I gripped the “rope,” and I took a wide-legged stance, ready to lean back to help with the weight while she found a bolder to brace herself against. Sometime I’d have to ask her if she wore a knee brace, which would account for the limp, or if she favored the leg because it hurt to put weight on. It’d be a drag either way.
“Ready when you are,” I told Simon.
He lowered himself, using his legs to slow his descent. At first, there was no pull on the rope, but his head dropped below the hole, and he must have run out of rock to brace himself against, for we soon had his full body weight.
“Should we start lowering you?” I asked, not sure if he’d hear me in my normal tone of voice, but not willing to shout in case the riders lurked nearby. Temi’s observation that this might be a trap hadn’t left my mind.
A couple of quick tugs came in response.
“Guess that’s a yes,” I said.
We let our rope slide a foot, then a foot more. When we didn’t receive any more feedback, we kept going. I wished I’d taken a closer look inside so I’d have an idea as to the depth, but it couldn’t be more than ten feet to the water. All right, maybe fifteen, I decided as more and more rope played through our hands.
Something jerked at the end of the line, and my gut lurched.
“Simon?” I asked, forcing my voice to stay low, though I wanted to shout.
Words floated up. I couldn’t decipher anything except a few curses followed by, “Cold!”
“He must have let himself drop into the river,” I said, not certain Temi had heard. She was farther away from the hole than I was.
“There’s probably not a bank or anything to stand on,” she said.
A couple more tugs came, and I let out a little more line, but it grew slack. He must be standing on the bottom. I knelt beside the edge of the hole. I couldn’t see Simon but a flashlight beam was waving back and forth down there.
“Anything promising?” I asked.
Simon stepped—no, waded—into view beneath the hole. Water lapped about his waist. “As far as I can tell, there are no tarantulas.”
So that was what all the flashlight waving had been about.
“That’s the most promising feature?” I asked.
“Actually, no. I can see... I don’t know. It might just be some natural caves, but I bet you’ll be interested.”
“Interested enough to warrant standing in freezing cold water?”
“I think so. There’s enough headroom for walking.”
I leaned back, facing Temi. I considered how fragile our duct tape rope was—it would be easy for someone to come along and cut it. I wasn’t sure about climbing back out again without it either. If Simon jumped, he might be able to reach the bottom of the hole, but those smooth stone walls didn’t offer any handholds.
“You want me to stay up here?” Temi asked.
“Would you? I’ll leave my bow in case... in case.”
“Because the handful of times I shot one as a kid will serve me so well if a monster blazes out of the trees,” she said dryly.
“You can use the staff as a club if you have to.” At her skeptical expression, I added, “You can serve a tennis
ball at a hundred miles an hour, right? You ought to be able to crack a monster on the head hard enough for it to see stars.”
“A hundred and thirty-two,” she said.
“What?”
“My fastest serve. It was a record, actually.”
“There you go. Add some adrenaline to that, and you should be quite lethal with a club.”
Temi eyed the bow, perhaps trying to decide if it had as many nice merits as a club, at least insofar as blunt instruments went. “I’d rather have a fire extinguisher.”
“We’ll add that to our arsenal in the future. Given the suspicious smells that come out of Zelda’s air conditioning vents, the ability to put out fires might come in handy one day.”
“I heard that,” Simon called up from below.
I left Temi my pack as well as the bow, in case she got hungry and wanted my munchies. “We’ll be back shortly,” I said with a parting wave.
Now that we knew there weren’t rushing rapids or anything else dangerous below the hole, I climbed down the sticky duct tape rope without help. It was darker than expected at the bottom—Simon had moved farther down the river with his light. I hissed when my feet hit the cold water, the damp chill penetrating my shoes immediately, and I almost yanked them out again. I knew the river flowed out of that lake and wasn’t glacier water, but it was a degree of cold I could only appreciate when the outside temperatures read in the 100s.
Simon was moving farther away, clearly drawn by something, so I gritted my teeth and dropped the rest of the way into the water. I managed to keep from cursing, but only because I remembered those two riders were around there somewhere. And also because Simon was doing this in his socks and sandals.
I pulled out my flashlight and let go of the rope. Smooth continuous stone lay beneath my feet rather than small, shifting rocks and pebbles. I slipped within the first two steps. Copious amounts of flailing kept my head from going under—barely—but I had to bite back curses again. I groped my way to the nearest wall to brace myself. Damp cool rock met my fingers. The lack of vegetation growing out of the cracks made me wonder if the passage flooded regularly. Hopefully not while intrepid explorers were visiting.
With one hand on the wall and one gripping a flashlight, I waded after Simon. He’d disappeared around a bend, though his light reflected off the slick walls, guiding me forward. The darkness soon grew oppressive, with the water particularly black as it flowed around me. I couldn’t see a thing under it and had to hold back a squeal as something brushed past my leg. When I jerked away, I slipped again. Only my hand on the wall kept me from pitching over backward.
“Just a fish,” I whispered.
I glanced back at the hole in the ceiling, at the beam of daylight flowing down from it, and was reassured by the presence of the rope dangling there. We could slosh back and climb out of the river anytime we needed to.
As I continued on, the ceiling rose, and I ran my flashlight along it. A few bats hung from roots that had found their way through the rock, the tips dangling a few inches down from above.
Simon hadn’t gone around a bend, I saw as I walked farther, but into a cave. Not a cave, I realized with a start. A cavate, a manmade cave dwelling. A row of them lined the wall, the openings about three feet wide, four feet tall, and a meter above the water level. The walls around the entrances appeared to be sandstone, with layers of granite above and below.
The discovery floored me, and I forgot about the icy water and other dangers. Arizona possessed cavates aplenty, with a whole mess of them over in the Verde Valley, but they were high up on cliffs, not underground.
I scrambled for the largest entrance, pausing only to touch a few old blocks, part of a masonry wall that would have once made the entrance more of a frame than a doorway. Once inside, I found myself in an oblong space about fifteen feet long with openings to other chambers on each side. The entry room was tall enough to stand in, though Temi would have had to duck. There weren’t any furnishings remaining or, at first glance, evidence of habitation. My first thought was that looters had been through, but it might be simpler than that: any time the river flooded, it would clean out the interior. What would have prompted people to scrape out dwellings down here? Hostile neighbors, I supposed.
“Amazing,” I whispered, turning a full circle. “I wonder if any archaeologists are aware of this spot.”
If the other rooms were as bare as this one, there might not be many clues left, but the simple existence and unique placement would raise a lot of questions. The answers might be somewhere within the complex.
I walked across a flat floor made of a rock and plaster aggregate to poke my flashlight into one of the side chambers. A bedroom most likely, though it was as devoid of remains as the main room. It was interesting though that the original floors were visible, that they hadn’t been coated with silt from floods. If these cavates were as old as the Verde Valley ones, they’d date back to the 1300s or 1400s. Without artifacts to offer more solid clues, I’d only be guessing. People might have come along much more recently and emulated the style.
After exploring a few more rooms, I was heading back to the entrance when Simon jumped inside, almost startling the pee out of me.
“You gotta see this,” he whispered, then scrambled back out again without waiting for me to ask questions.
If I hadn’t hurried, I would have missed seeing him duck into another cavate, three holes down. There was enough of a ledge that I could make my way to it without stepping back into the water. I shivered though, with my sodden jeans clinging to my skin. The air temperature was cool down here, far chillier than the sun-warmed forest above.
“Simon?” I asked.
He wasn’t in the main room, but three doorways opened in the walls.
A hand thrust out of the one in the back. “This way,” he whispered.
That whisper was telling. He must have found sign of the riders we were following rather than some interesting relic he wanted to share.
Keeping my flashlight beam toward the floor, so its glow wouldn’t travel far, I crept after him. He stood in a small room with a depression in the floor that would have been used as a fire pit; a hole in the ceiling must have served as a smoke vent. The decor wasn’t what held Simon’s attention though. In the far back corner, a hole dropped away, a steaming hole.
“All right,” I murmured. “That’s not normal.”
Simon knelt and prodded the edge, turning wide eyes toward me. “It’s hot.”
“As in from hot springs?” I scratched my head. Arizona had some hot springs, but I wasn’t aware of any near Prescott. Of course, I hadn’t been aware of any cave dwellings either.
Simon shook his head. “No, hot, like burning. Come feel.”
I knelt beside him and touched the rim of the hole—it was about four feet wide and curved out of sight under the wall. The stone wasn’t hot enough that my hand would burn, but it was unpleasantly warm.
“Weird. Heat from friction?”
“I think they just made this hole,” Simon whispered. “Burned it right into the stone. Like the Horta in that episode of Star Trek where miners were getting killed by that wicked acid.”
“You’re seeing aliens in every corner of the woods this week, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t say it was a Horta, just that they’d done something like the Horta.”
“Uh huh.”
As we knelt there talking, the smoke lessened, making me realize how recently the hole had been created. I wondered how they’d done it. There wasn’t any rubble or other debris. Could they truly have incinerated the stone? Even then, wouldn’t there be ashes or some sort of residue?
I crouched and shone my flashlight into the hole, but the curve a few feet down made it impossible to see far without crawling in.
“Should we...?” Simon waved to the hole.
I envisioned smacking into the two riders while they were on their way out. Somehow I doubted they’d built hiding spots into their little tunn
el.
“We could wait for them to come out,” I suggested.
“What if they come out somewhere else? We’d be waiting a long time. Temi would get bored and hungry up there. She’d eat all of your little boxes of cereal, and you’d have to replenish your hiking supplies.”
“I don’t think pro athletes eat Fruity Hoops. The packets of almond butter might be in danger though.”
“There you go: a reason we should follow them.” Simon touched the walls again and must have decided his sandals were unlikely to melt off, for he stepped inside. If he was willing to lead, I supposed I could go after him...
He scooted forward in something between a crouch and a crawl. I stepped in after him, using my hands to keep from plopping onto my butt. The slick chute reminded me of one of those tubular playground slides. I imagined us both slipping, then caroming down the tunnel to dump onto the floor of a subterranean chamber, right at Eleriss’s feet.
A few feet ahead of me, Simon halted and turned off his flashlight. I turned off mine as well, though I kept my thumb on the switch. Stygian blackness surrounded us. I knew we were only a few meters below the surface, but the utter darkness made it feel like we were miles down with millions of tons of rocks overhead waiting to crush us, and that we had no hope of seeing daylight again.
Way to be melodramatic, Del, I told myself. I inhaled deeply, seeking a calm state, or at least a state that wasn’t tinged with claustrophobic panic. The damp mustiness of the caves filled my nostrils, along with whatever they’d used to burn through the rock—the scent reminded me of the chemical smells of the short-lived meth lab that had cropped up down the street from the dorms at school.
Before I could ask what Simon had seen or heard, the sound of voices floated up the passage. They were familiar voices speaking in that unfamiliar language.
“Back,” Simon whispered.
I was already scooting out of the hole. I moved slowly enough that I didn’t trip, but the darkness was as absolute at the top, and it disoriented me so I couldn’t remember the direction of the door. Simon brushed past me. He turned on his flashlight again, this time with a red lens over the bulb. It provided enough light to find the way to the doorway and the cavate entrance beyond, but it didn’t carry far. With luck, the men behind us wouldn’t catch up and see it.