The Devil's Cauldron

by Michael Wallace

  “What now?” Becca asked. “Wait?”

  “Problem is, we have no idea how long they’ll be up here. Maybe not long. They come every week, after all.”

  “Let’s try to get his attention. Walk by and see if he notices.” She put a hand on his arm when he started to rise. “Not you, me.”

  “After that stunt the other day? One of the aides will recognize you.”

  “I’m not the only pregnant woman up here.”

  “You’re the only pregnant gringo.”

  Becca fixed him with a look that said she thought he was arguing for the sake of arguing. Maybe he was. Nothing wrong with looking after your pregnant wife, he thought stubbornly.

  She climbed out of the water and wrapped herself in a towel while Wes watched. And another thing. He was not going to feel guilty for still admiring her body. The glow of her skin, the healthy color in her cheeks. Her enlarged breasts and the extra padding on her hips and butt. Surely he wasn’t the only guy who thought his wife looked sexy when she was pregnant. She saw him watching and raised her eyebrows. He raised his right back, which made her grin.

  Becca put on flip-flops and hiked up and around the cauldron. When she came down the other side, Wes saw what she was about. Eric sat in the hot pot with his back downhill, which left him facing back up the hill toward the steaming cauldron. Diego, on the other hand, faced away from her. At the moment, Eric was occupied with tossing the beachball with the other residents, but soon his gaze drifted uphill. She waved at him.

  He let out a shout. Wes winced. Becca ducked behind the cauldron, into the narrow gap between the stone bowl and the cloud forest behind. The other residents and their aide looked to where Eric was pointing, but she was now out of sight. They turned their attention back to the game. A moment later Becca reappeared, and this time moved her finger dramatically to her lips, then away and back again.

  Shh.

  Eric climbed out of the pot. Diego watched him go, but Eric didn’t immediately hike to the cauldron. Instead, he wandered around, looking in on other residents from Colina Nublosa. A few wandered about the hot pots, and the staff left them alone until they bugged other visitors to the springs. Soon, Diego seemed to lose interest and returned to the game. Just when Wes started to worry that Eric had forgotten about Becca, he made his way uphill.

  “Way to go, Ruk,” Wes said in a low voice.

  Then he casually climbed out of the water himself, grabbed his towel and flip-flops, and hiked up around the cauldron. He met Becca and Eric in the trees to its rear.

  Eric spotted him. “Wussy!” It wasn’t a nickname, so much as the result of a slight speech impediment.

  Wes grinned and hugged his brother. Eric slapped him on the back.

  “What are you doing here?” Eric exclaimed.

  “Shh, not so loud. We’re undercover, right?”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot. Sherlock Holmes!”

  “That’s right. You were supposed to send me an email.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t you remember?” Becca asked. “If you got the video, you’d complain about the food. But if you said the food was yummy, it meant you hadn’t filmed Meggie yet. Don’t you have email?”

  Eric’s face darkened and his tongue stuck out a fraction of an inch from the corner of his mouth as he chewed on it. That meant he was confused.

  Wes pressed him. “Did you get the video? You were supposed to ask Meggie questions.”

  “Oh.”

  “You forgot, didn’t you?”

  “I tried to remember.” Eric plunged his fingers into his hair and tugged at the roots. Then he made a fist and beat it against his forehead. “I’m a stupid dumb-dumb.”

  Wes caught his wrist. “You know the rules, Ruk. You never say that, remember?”

  This settled him down, and he nodded gravely. “Against the rules.” His face brightened. “Are you coming to take me home?”

  “Not yet.”

  He slumped, frowning. “I want to go back to the big house.”

  Becca rubbed his shoulder. “We’re not staying there anymore. We’re in a lodge on the other side of the lake.”

  “Far away.”

  “Not that far,” Wes said. “Take that trail down to the lake, hire a boat, and you’re across. An hour or two, that’s all. Anything goes wrong, we’ll come get you. Don’t worry.”

  “I want to go with you to the other side of the lake.”

  “Not yet,” Becca said. “Soon, though.” She cleared her throat. “We don’t have much time, Ruk. Tell us everything that happened. Did you talk to Meggie Kerr?”

  “She doesn’t talk much. But she’s really pretty.” He blushed.

  It took a few minutes to cut through the confused jumble of Eric’s story. He’d struggled to remember the clear and simple instructions. Find Meggie Kerr alone, use Wes’s camera phone to capture her blinking answers to some simple questions, then send an email that the food was terrible. That was the signal to extract him. They’d have enough to bring pressure to get her out of here and back to the States where they could break her out of her LIS.

  How frustrating. They’d spent so much time drilling instructions, but the instant Eric stepped onto the grounds of Colina Nublosa, that information evaporated from his mind like steam rising off a hot spring.

  He hung his head. “I’m sorry, Wussy.”

  “Not your fault, buddy.” Wes turned to Becca. “It’s not going to work.”

  “He’s not in any danger, and Davis is giving us a pass, so why not try again?”

  The Davis thing was odd, admittedly. It was now Sunday, six days after the flight from San Jose that they had blown off. They should have physically checked in by Wednesday, at the latest. Wes and Becca had been emailing back and forth with Davis, carrying on their work remotely, and he hadn’t yet asked why they weren’t coming out to the house.

  Uncle Davis knew. That was the only thing that made sense. Somehow, he’d figured out they were still in Costa Rica, but wasn’t pressing the issue. But if he didn’t care, why had he been so insistent in the first place?

  Wes studied his brother, who rocked back and forth on his heels. Eric chewed on his tongue, which still hung out the corner of his mouth.

  “We have to try something else,” Wes said, “or the exact same thing will happen. He’ll forget.”

  “I’m trying!” Eric said.

  “I know you are.” Wes put an arm around his brother. “It’s not your fault.”

  Becca threw up her hands, looking bewildered.

  “I tried to remember,” Eric said. “I tried, I tried. Stupid bad memory.”

  Wes fought down his own frustration and kept his voice even. “Your memory isn’t that bad, Ruk. You know the lyrics to movie musicals, right?”

  Eric responded by belting out the theme song from Man of La Mancha in his off-tune baritone. Wes and Becca hushed him again.

  “Wait,” Becca said to Wes. “He can remember some of it. The part about Sherlock Holmes—that’s the part that sticks. It’s the story that he remembers.” Her voice rose in excitement. “Dramatize the rest of it. Tell it like a story. Do that, and he’ll remember.”

  It was a great idea. Wes planted a kiss on her mouth, which made Eric hoot in delight.

  He turned back to Eric, thinking. “Okay, um . . . so let me tell you a story about Sherlock Holmes and the pirate queen.”

  “Make her a princess,” Eric said.

  “Right. There was a princess from the far away kingdom of Vermont. Every day for breakfast she ate waffles with maple syrup and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream for dessert. And when she was queen she would banish kale and cauliflower eaters from Vermont, never to return on pain of death.”

  Eric guffawed.

  “She was happy,” Wes continued, “except then a wizard cast a spell—”

  “A witch,” Eric interrupted.

  “Okay, a witch. She cast a spell on the beautiful princess and trapped her in a deep dungeon. The dungeon is
her body, Ruk. The princess can’t speak, ever—she can’t move—because the witch has trapped her up here.” He tapped his forehead. “If only she could tell someone, she could banish the witch and get her kingdom back.”

  “It’s like a magic spell,” Eric said.

  “Exactly. She can’t talk because of the spell. She can only blink her eyes. Maybe move one finger.”

  “Wow.”

  Becca took Eric’s hand. “The princess is Meggie, Ruk. And you’re a knight, coming to free her from the dungeon.”

  “I thought I was Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Not anymore, not in this story,” Becca said. “You’re a knight. A brave, smart knight. You’re the only one who can help her.”

  “Tell me the rest.”

  Eric listened, enraptured, while the other two spun a story about the magic phone that could take pictures and break the spell. When they finished, they asked him to repeat the story. He almost got it. So much better than last time. Unfortunately, exactly how to work the phone camera eluded him. They’d gone over that part a good twenty times the last time they’d given Eric instructions, so the fact that he couldn’t recall was incredibly frustrating. And it didn’t help that Eric had left the phone in his bedroom at Colina Nublosa. They couldn’t show him, either.

  “Okay, Ruk,” Wes said with a sigh. “Let’s go over this one more time. The phone has a green button.” More details. “It’s because the witch tried to poison the knight and a drop of green poison fell on his phone.”

  He was reaching now, but couldn’t think of anything else.

  “Wes,” Becca said, her voice sharp.

  Eric’s aide came around the side of the Devil’s Cauldron. He scowled as he looked this way and that. The frown vanished when he spotted Eric, replaced by a look of relief.

  “Hombre, you can’t wander off like that. These people don’t want you bugging them, they—” He stopped and sized up Becca and Wes. His eyes widened as he met Wes’s gaze. “Wait, what are you doing here?”

  Any hope Wes had of slipping away unrecognized vanished. He’d spoken to Diego for several minutes when he dropped his brother off, asking questions about Eric’s care. Playing the concerned family member.

  Wes laughed. “How funny. I had no idea you guys were going to be here. We were sitting in one of the hot pots and were totally shocked when we saw Eric.”

  Diego’s eyes hardened. “Oh, really?”

  Wes thought about forcing his denial. He’d be lying, Diego would know he was lying, and Wes would know that Diego knew. In a social situation, they might each get away with egos intact. Here, that game would be fatal to Wes and Becca’s plans.

  Becca seemed to grasp this a split second sooner. “Okay, we’ll admit it,” she said. “We were checking up on Eric.” It was a clever deflection.

  “I’m sorry,” Wes said. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I’m having real problems turning my brother over. He’s so far from home, and he’s not used to this place. I needed to see Eric one last time before I flew home—make sure he’s happy.”

  “That’s against the rules,” Diego said. “Two weeks, no phone or personal contact. Email, if you want.”

  “That seems unfair,” Wes said.

  “We didn’t pull that out of thin air. It’s been proven to help residents adjust. If you want to stick around the country, feel free to come back in another week. And after thirty days, you can check him in and out of the facility any time you want. Forty-eight hours notice, that’s all.”

  “Sorry.” Wes made his voice sound sheepish.

  “Come on, hombre,” Diego said. “If Usher gets wind of this, you’ll be the one to get in trouble, not your brother.” He shot Wes a dirty look, then hauled Eric away.

  “I should have come clean,” Wes told Becca after the other two had left. “Maybe Diego would help us.”

  “I doubt it. He’s already bent out of shape that you were talking to your own brother. If he thinks that’s out of line, what would he think if he knew we were trying to get to Meggie Kerr?”

  “Point taken.”

  “Besides,” Becca said, “if she can blink and move her eyes, everyone there must know she has LIS, and nobody has bothered to help her yet. Why would they start now?”

  “Because they don’t understand. They have no idea we can give her back her voice.”

  But it was a troubling question. Locked-in syndrome had been defined for decades. Means to communicate directly with a person’s brain had been developed several years ago, and the technology to enable speech and other forms of autonomy were advancing all the time. And it was well known that thousands of people were out there, either suffering in silence, undiagnosed and mistaken for vegetables. Nobody cared.

  That was the most maddening thing about their job. It was like the princess in the dungeon who Eric was trying to find. There were real dungeons out there, with thousands of innocent prisoners. Wes wanted to scream it to the world.

  Let them go!

  “Is Eric going to remember?” Becca asked. “Do you think he’ll get it this time?”

  “I hope so,” Wes said. He remembered the suspicious look on Diego’s face. “Because we’re pushing our luck.”

  They’d been gradually drifting around the edge of the cauldron to look down on the hot pots and the bathers and hikers dotting the hillside. He spotted a woman waiting near Eric’s team.

  She was tall with light brown hair. She didn’t look Costa Rican. When Diego came down leading Eric, she stopped them. No way to hear what they were saying, not from this distance and with the cauldron gurgling so loudly only a few yards away. But Diego’s gestures and the woman’s aggressive posture made it look like an interrogation.

  The woman turned to look up the hillside. Becca and Wes shrank back into the trees, but not before the woman spotted them. Even from a hundred feet away, her expression spoke volumes. It was a hard, penetrating stare.

  “Not good,” Becca muttered. “Not good at all.”

  They’d been found out.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Meggie was stuck two hundred feet below the ground, her entire body wedged inside a frigid stone tunnel only a few inches wide. At first it was only her hips, but with every movement, her body twisted into greater discomfort. A stone band gripped her around the chest and tightened with every gasp. Her helmet light reflected off the far wall and bounced back into the tunnel to cut the blackness and she could see her fingers digging at the stone for leverage.

  She tried to scream. No breath. The only thing that came out was a squeak. Kaitlyn and Benjamin were only a few yards away, climbing up the rope. If only she could get a single lungful of air. Out came another squeak, like a dying rat in the coils of a python.

  Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic.

  She panicked.

  Twisting and writhing, her movements measured in fractions of fractions of a millimeter, she made no progress. Her arms stretched ahead, shoulders bent awkwardly. Her fingers clawed at the stone. If only they could reach the outside of the tunnel, she could get a grip and pull. They brushed the helmet and it lurched forward.

  She’d pushed it over the edge. The light blinked as the helmet turned end over end. It smacked on the ground with a hollow thud. Everything went black. More than black, it was a total absence of any sort of light, as deep and profound as death itself.

  Another silent scream came out of her mouth. Her pulse thundered in her ears and her heart felt like it would hammer free of her chest. Spots of light flashed behind her eyes.

  Deep inside, an insistent voice begged her to calm down. All this thrashing and panic would only make her muscles and joints swell. Then not only would she stay wedged, she’d suffocate. As it was, she couldn’t catch her breath, couldn’t get any air at all. She was breathing through a straw, the opening shrinking until it was no wider than a coffee stirrer.

  Please, God. No. I don’t want to die. Not like this. Please.

  Then, she tou
ched the edge. Just barely, only the very tips of her fingers, but she felt it. During all this thrashing and squirming, she must have made actual progress.

  A sob of relief bubbled up. It came out as a whimper.

  Gyrating, twisting, digging her toes, knees, everything, she clawed for the edge of the tunnel like a drowning woman grasping for the surface of the water, barely out of reach. She was more than lightheaded now, she was faint, on the verge of passing out. Her nails dug at the stone. She wasn’t moving.

  The last thing she felt was a final wave of panic. Then the blackness took her.

  #

  Meggie came to with her head pounding. How long had she been out? Maybe a few seconds. Maybe minutes or longer. Her body must have kept struggling for air even after she gave up. Once she was no longer thrashing, the sips of air drawn into her gasping lungs must have been enough to keep her alive.

  The problem was at her waist. The rest of her could move a little, even her chest. Enough to keep her from suffocating, so long as she controlled the panic. At least in the short term. But Kaitlyn’s initial assessment was right—Meggie’s hips were too big. She’d advanced a little, to the point where her fingers brushed the edge of the tunnel, but there was no more forward movement. If she didn’t figure something out she would die. It didn’t matter if Duperre gathered a rescue team. Nothing short of dynamite would get her out.

  The thundering headache proved that her oxygen deficit wasn’t imagined, but real. The bands of stone around her chest hurt more than ever. Her muscles and joints screamed in pain after being wedged for so long. Her arms, still outstretched over her head, felt like they’d been ripped from their sockets. She twisted her right arm and brought it down, painfully, contorting, until she was able to force it beneath her toward her crotch. That gave her other arm room to move. The relief on her shoulder joints was exquisite. But the tucked arm made any breathing impossible.