This Time Love

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Find out where Lost River went,” he finished, excitement kindling in his green eyes. “But it looks flat here. How can you tell which way is upstream and which is down, or doesn’t it matter?”

  “It matters.”

  She dropped to her hands and knees and pushed forward into the narrowing confines of the ancient streambed.

  “We know upstream was at a higher cave level, so we want to go downstream, where we haven’t been before,” she said as she examined the ground. “But there’s no problem. All we have to do is follow the channel markers.”

  “Glad to,” he said dryly, crawling along behind her. “Just point them out.”

  “The scallops.” She directed her helmet light to the point where the cave’s wall joined the floor. There Lost River’s ancient flow had hollowed out a long shallow curve, like the side of a tunnel. Smaller curves overlapped along the wall, making a scalloped pattern that was repeated on the far side of the channel. “They’re caused by moving water. In limestone the upstream end is rounded and the downstream end is more pointed.”

  “The things you learn in school,” he said, his tone both teasing and admiring.

  She laughed.

  The ceiling came down until the overhang was a slit barely three feet high and twenty feet wide. She knew that stream channels such as this one rarely contained pits like Surprise, but rarely was not the same as never.

  Especially when pits were a standard feature of Guadalupe mountain caves.

  She moved slowly, literally feeling her way, alert for a downward slant in the floor or any pool of shadow in her helmet light that could signal the mouth of a pit.

  “Wait,” Gabe said.

  Joy heard the sound of canvas scraping over rock and knew that he was having trouble with his backpack.

  “Stuck?” she asked.

  His only answer was a grunt and the sound of air being expelled forcefully.

  “Back up, take off your backpack and loop your elbow through a strap,” she said. “Or tie the backpack to your ankle. You can try pushing the pack ahead of you, if you can handle both it and your rope sack.”

  As she talked, she was following her own advice. With careful contortions she managed to secure the rucksack to her ankle.

  “Does it get smaller ahead?” he asked.

  “Count on it.”

  As they crawled forward, Gabe’s muttering was lost among the increasing volume of the Voices. The breeze hadn’t increased. It was still a fine, hardly noticeable exhalation over their faces. Soon Joy could hear little except the many-tongued whisperings of water, the sound of her own clothing rubbing over stone, and the occasional thump of her helmet on an unexpectedly low portion of the ceiling.

  The farther she went, the more the passage took on the aspect of a true tunnel rather than simply a long narrow strip gouged out of the Voices’ overhanging wall. The floor pitched down slightly. The passage narrowed even more. The ceiling came down.

  And the breeze caressed her face, stronger with each yard she crawled forward.

  Joy’s heart beat faster in sudden exhilaration. There was little doubt now that this channel would lead to another room instead of ending in a wall of debris or the breakdown of the ceiling. That sort of thing happened depressingly often in caves. For every passage that went somewhere, many more dead-ended at a natural, impassable obstacle.

  The sound of Gabe’s occasional searing curses came above the increased murmuring of the Voices. The passage twisted like a snake, a streambed tunnel carved through solid stone, complete with bends and deposits of stony debris swept from the huge room behind them.

  Very quickly Joy and Gabe were pushing along on their stomach or their side or their back, depending on which way the opening turned. Their progress was limited to strenuous, eel-like motions. Neither of them really noticed the effort. They were gripped by the possibility of a discovery just around the next twist or turn.

  From the dark opening ahead came the multiple voices of falling water, a siren song that grew louder with every moment.

  Joy’s light rarely revealed more than the next few feet of the passage, and as often as not the plugs leading to the battery pack pulled out as she wiggled around the narrow tunnel. Several times she came to a place where the limestone had been more easily dissolved. There the passage widened enough to allow them to rest.

  Each time they stopped, she checked her watch. As much as the lure of discovery called, she didn’t want them to stay long enough for the chill of the bedrock to seep into their bodies or for them to miss answering Fish’s hourly yodel.

  Radio contact wasn’t possible anymore. Too much solid stone lay between the radios.

  “Ready?” she asked after a few minutes.

  “After you,” he said wryly, giving a sidelong swipe of his arm toward the muddy tunnel that awaited them.

  A few minutes farther into the passage, she ran up against a barricade of debris that had been deposited by Lost River. The river was long since gone, but what it had left behind was damp, slick, muddy, as saturated with moisture as the air itself.

  After a single hissing word, she saved her energy for digging and avoiding the thought that the debris dam might be too deep, too thick, and too well packed for her to dig through it.

  “Problem?”

  Gabe’s voice came from behind Joy and to her right. Though the ceiling was no more than twenty inches from the floor, the tunnel itself was nearly four feet wide at this point.

  “Clastic fill,” she said, the words clipped.

  “Dirt.” This time his voice was nearly beside her.

  “Not to a biologist,” she said. “No worms.”

  “For these small things, Lord, we are extremely grateful,” he muttered as he wriggled alongside her and began digging.

  “Don’t like worms?”

  He made a throaty sound of disgust. “Give me a nice dry snake any day of the week.”

  Joy smiled to herself at the discovery that the great Gabriel Venture, a man who had proved his physical courage many times over, was icked out by worms.

  Working together they quickly scraped away silt and water-rounded limestone pebbles. Soon they could push through between ceiling and floor to the wider tunnel beyond.

  Joy forged ahead, making encouraging noises to Gabe, who was just behind her heels. The passage closed down, forcing her to work very hard to eel between floor and ceiling. She wondered if he was going to have to turn back. Or worse, if he would get stuck.

  Then she realized that she couldn’t hear him behind her anymore.

  “Gabe?” Her voice was breathless from more than snaking through the narrow opening. “Are you all right?”

  The answer was a hot curse and the sound of something ripping. “Just bloody fine, thanks,” he said a moment later. “Emphasis on bloody.”

  She hesitated, then squirmed around until she could bring her wristwatch in line with her helmet light. The face of the watch was muddy. Automatically she rubbed it against her chin. That didn’t work because her chin was as muddy as her hands. Her nose proved to be fairly clean. She rubbed and peered at her watch again.

  They had been in the passage twenty minutes. They had thirty-seven minutes before Fish would call out the hour.

  “Damn,” she said. “Maybe we should head back.”

  “Not on my account. Blood makes a great lubricant.”

  “We’re running out of time.”

  “That’s not all we’re out of.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Room. I’d have a bitch of a struggle slithering out of this place backward.”

  “It’s not as hard as it sounds. Davy can do Gotcha nearly as fast backward as he can forward.”

  “Davy’s mother must have been a python.”

  She laughed, relieved that Gabe wasn’t frightened at the thought of being so tightly held by limestone that he couldn’t even turn around.

  “You’d only have to do the first few minutes feetfirst,” she said.
“After that, you’d come to the wide spot where we rested and you could turn around.”

  “I’d rather go forward. If you want to.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Five minutes. Seven at most. All right?”

  His response was a low laugh that ruffled her nerves.

  “Get moving, beautiful,” he said, pushing at her feet. “There’s a whole new world waiting to be discovered.”

  “Beautiful?” She laughed, knowing full well that by now she was as muddy as a swamp puppy. “Turn on your lamp. You’re hallucinating in the dark.”

  He laughed again with an excitement that was contagious.

  She attacked the next section of the tunnel with high spirits, feeling like it was seven years ago, when she and Gabe had explored some of Lost River Cave’s secrets. It felt good to laugh with him again. For a few precious instants he wasn’t the man who had suspended her between yearning and hatred for long, long years.

  There was no warning. One instant Joy was snaking forward on her side. The next instant much of her upper body was touching nothing at all. She snatched at her falling rucksack.

  “Grab my feet and hang on!”

  Strong hands clamp around Joy’s ankles.

  “Don’t let go,” she said urgently.

  “Not a chance, sweetheart. Not one chance in hell.”

  Twenty-one

  SLOWLY JOY LET OUT THE BREATH SHE’D HELD IN ORDER to wedge herself more tightly in the tunnel. She couldn’t see anything ahead because the leads to her helmet lamp had come unplugged. She could be in a small expansion of the tunnel or she could be suspended over a drop hundreds of feet deep. Without light there was no way to be sure.

  As always in complete darkness, her other senses heightened. She could feel the faintest brush of air moving over her cheeks, or perhaps it was a motion caused by a thousand liquid voices whispering to her. When her heartbeat settled, she separated the sensations pouring into her.

  Distance.

  Space.

  Moisture.

  A beautiful rushing sigh.

  Somewhere ahead, cloaked in darkness and diamond mist, water was leaping from one level of the cave to another, a river shattering itself on stone and then flowing back together, healing itself, curling down and down into the limitless earth.

  “I’m going to try to connect the leads to my lamp,” she said, “so things might . . . change.”

  “No matter what, I’ve got you.”

  She smiled in the darkness. “I know.”

  Cautiously she connected the leads to her lamp. Light flared out into blackness, light that defined darkness and was itself defined in turn.

  For an instant Joy saw nothing but the stark opposites. Slowly a world condensed out of the void, a place of fantastic golden shapes, inky shadows, impossible spires and draperies and columns, a vision of flowing stone condensed out of water through time spans so great they could only be numbered, not understood.

  “Oh, Gabe,” she said, her breath rushing out. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I wish you could see it too.”

  Relief swept through him. Despite whatever danger had made her demand that he hang on to her ankles, she was all right.

  After relief came a fierce pleasure that her first reaction had been a desire to share the instant of discovery with him. After that came the more pragmatic concerns of a man who had spent his life in wild places.

  “Are you safe?” he asked. “Is it a pit? Should I pull you back?”

  “As long as you don’t let go, I’m safe,” she said absently.

  All her concentration was focused on the astonishing room that lay ahead. The certainty that no other human being ever had seen this exotic landscape sent currents of awe through her.

  Yet she wished Gabe was beside her, seeing it as she did, sharing it with her. There was too much beauty for one person to hold alone. It overflowed, nearly drowning her.

  “It’s not exactly a pit,” she said in a husky voice. “It’s a high entrance to another room. I think water once poured out of here into the cavern below.”

  He saw in his mind a tunnel in the sheer face of a cliff, an opening suspended between an invisible ceiling above and an equally invisible floor below.

  “I’d feel better if I had a rope on you.”

  Gabe heard his own words and smiled rather grimly. He’d feel better if he had Joy roped and tied to himself permanently. Failing that he’d settle for the usual methods—safety harness, carabiners, and anchor points.

  “I’m going to wiggle forward a bit so I can see if there’s a way down,” she said. “Ready?”

  “Joy—” he began.

  “It’s all right,” she interrupted quickly. “If you don’t let go and I keep my center of gravity inside the tunnel, I’ll be safe.”

  Even as he started to object, he remembered that a woman’s center of gravity was usually in her hips, whereas a man’s was usually about twelve inches higher. Given that, she could get a better, safer look than a man could.

  “All right,” he said. “But first I’m going to put some half-hitches around your ankles.”

  While Gabe worked over her feet, Joy surveyed as much as she could of the space ahead. Everywhere her light touched she saw flowing stone formations, stone sculptures both massive and delicate, turrets and naves and walls, columns that tapered in the middle like an elegant woman, flaring above and below into the velvet darkness.

  She couldn’t tell how big the room was, only that it must be huge. Even when she twisted the focus of her helmet lamp to the narrowest possible beam, darkness absorbed the light before it reached ceiling, floor or walls.

  With or without boundaries, the cavern was a place of extraordinary beauty. It sang with water, a chorus murmuring amid fantastic shapes, a three-dimensional poem composed out of confinement and space, limestone and water, darkness and light.

  And time. Immense time, eternity dreaming in stone.

  “Xanadu,” she said, and the word was a sigh.

  “What?”

  “Like the poem. ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree . . . ‘ “

  Gabe tested the knots on her ankles. “Xanadu, huh? Be careful, sweetheart. I didn’t come all this way to go back alone.”

  “I’ll be careful.” Her voice was husky. She heard the word sweetheart echo in her mind and her blood as it always had in her dreams. “I’m going to stuff my rucksack alongside my body as a wedge, then inch forward. Ready?”

  He cinched the rope more tightly around her ankles. “Ready.”

  She twisted around until the rucksack was alongside her. As she inched forward, the rope holding her resisted, then gave slightly. Very slightly. He was keeping a pressure on her that was just short of painful.

  It was also very reassuring.

  Her headlamp swept directly over and beneath the lip of stone where she lay. There was nothing at all under her but a velvet darkness that looked heavy enough to walk on.

  “Go back down the tunnel at least ten feet,” she said quietly.

  “Overhang?” he asked in a clipped voice, already backing up.

  “Yes.” She was grateful that he understood the danger instantly instead of hanging around and waiting for a long explanation. “It feels solid but—”

  Her words ended in a startled sound as she found herself being dragged backward down the tunnel whether she wanted it or not. She started to protest, then shut up and helped him retreat.

  In Gabe’s place she would have done the same thing. If the limestone overhang where she’d rested for a moment had any built-in weakness, the lip could give way at any time. Then she would be dangling by her heels over nothing at all.

  “This is far enough,” she said.

  The tugging on her ankles stopped.

  “I’m going forward again,” she said.

  “Like hell you are.”

  “Someone has to do it. I’m the lightest one.”

  A long silence answered her, followe
d by a single word.

  “Shit.”

  While Gabe chewed over the inevitable, Joy reached into her muddy rucksack and pulled out a slender tube.

  “I’ll check for cracks as I go,” she said.

  Grudgingly he played out enough rope to allow her to move forward again.

  This time Joy looked carefully at the surface she was crawling over and through rather than at the opening ahead. The stone was chill, smooth, even textured, and didn’t have any visible cracks or seams or joints. It stayed like that right up to the brink of the cavern.

  “Looks solid all the way,” she said.

  “Now what?”

  “Now I wish we’d found this four hours ago. Why do you always find the most interesting things toward the end of your exploring time?”

  Facedown in the mud and stone, hands wrapped around the line holding Joy, Gabe laughed. “Works the same way up top.”

  “I’m going to spend a light stick.”

  “Go ahead. I’ve got three more if you need them.”

  She twisted a light stick and threw it up and out into the void, counting beneath her breath.

  Pale green illumination washed over stone, throwing a nearby fluted drapery into fantastic relief. The light arced down and down, glowing like a comet across unknown skies before it struck a thick column and ricocheted. Still the light slid down and down and down, pulling darkness after it like a cloak.

  Finally the light stopped falling and became a motionless green glow calling to Joy. She ached to answer it, to explore every bit of the mystery opening before her, but she couldn’t.

  Not yet.

  She eased backward as Gabriel pulled in the rope behind her.

  “How far down?” he asked, retreating down the tunnel as he spoke.

  “Roughly—very roughly—ninety feet straight down. I couldn’t see, but I assume there’s some sort of breakdown before you get to the floor of the room. If this was once a waterfall, the bottom of the wall would have been undercut, leaving a pile of fallen stone where the floor meets the wall.”

  They came to a widening of the tunnel. Joy looked at her watch and calculated quickly.

  “Want to take a look?” she asked.

  “What do you think,” he retorted, the electric excitement of discovery in his voice.