I came over and hugged him. “My hero.”
“Yeah,” he said distractedly. “We got to move. You heard that radio. Someone else is heading this way. Where do we go?”
I turned and pointed the flashlight beam at the opening to the passageway. “Here.”
I kneeled in front of the hole and handed Flo the flashlight. I slipped off my backpack.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“The opening isn’t high enough for me to fit through with the pack on my back.”
Flo peered in and leaned back with a shudder. “This is freaking me out.”
“Just get down low and start moving. You want me to go first?”
“Definitely,” she said.
I looked back at Benny. “I’ll take up the rear,” he said.
I slid the backpack ahead of me into the opening, took a deep breath, and bent down until I was resting on my elbows. Ducking my head low, I scooted into the opening. I pushed the backpack in front of me with my left hand while I held the flashlight in my right.
I purposefully kept the flashlight off. In addition to conserving energy, I just plain didn’t want to see what was ahead of me. It was plenty creepy already. I was moving through a cold, wet space that was so narrow I couldn’t turn around. Darkness was just fine. My claustrophobia was bad enough without the added jolt of suddenly coming upon one of those ghostly white spiders or blind hairy millipedes.
I slithered onward in the dark. There were no other options: it was either forward on your belly and elbows or wait for the second killer to catch up to us. After what seemed like an eternity, I paused. “Are you okay, Flo?” I whispered.
“Yeah.”
I could hear the strain in her voice, the edge of hysteria. As distressing as this was for me, it had to be even worse for Flo. She was at least thirty pounds heavier than me, which made the fit that much tighter, and the physical and psychological strain that much more intense.
Poor Benny.
“Benny?” I called softly.
“What?” he snarled.
“How do you feel?”
“How do I feel? Like a pig moving through a snake, for chrissakes. I’m on the verge of a fucking mental breakdown back here.”
“We’re almost there,” I lied. I had no idea how much further we had to go, or even whether this narrow channel would stay large enough for us to reach the other cave channel.
The air seemed to get heavier as we moved on—probably more a factor of our growing fatigue than an actual change in atmosphere. But another change was definitely real: the floor was getting wetter. When we had started through the opening, the floor was cold and moist. Now it was actually wet. We were sloshing through water. I was soaking wet and exhausted. My right arm was starting to cramp from holding the flashlight off the ground, but I couldn’t risk letting our only light source get wet and short out on us.
Flo was wheezing behind me. “Rachel,” she gasped.
“What?”
“I can’t go on.
I stopped, trying to catch my breath. “We’ll take a break.”
“What?” Benny asked.
“Let’s rest,” I said. “Then we’ll go on.”
My elbows were scraped raw, my back was sore, my thigh muscles were throbbing. Gradually, my breathing returned to normal. As the ringing in my ears faded, I became aware of another sound: water trickling. Somewhere up ahead there was running water. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad.
“Ready?” I asked.
“No,” they both said.
“Come on, guys. We’re almost there. I hear water.”
“We’re in water, for chrissakes,” Benny said, “unless one of you is taking the goddamdest piss of the twentieth century.”
“Flo,” I said, “you still with me?”
“Oh, God,” she said wearily. “I’m with you.”
“Benny?”
He growled. “Someone ought to Vaseline this place.”
We slithered forward. The floor got wetter. Each time I paused, the trickling noise was louder. As we continued crawling, the ground began to incline slightly. We were moving uphill, and there was more water now. It was moving past us downhill. It was getting harder to hold the flashlight above the moisture. The sound of running water was much louder.
I stopped and fumbled with the flashlight. The beam went on, illuminating our narrow passage. I peered around the backpack. The end of the passageway was just fifteen feet away.
“We’re almost there!” I said excitedly as I turned off the flashlight.
Chapter Thirty-two
Because of the incline I couldn’t see what was on the other side of our passageway, but the trickling noises and the sight of water sloshing into the opening told me what was up ahead. I elbowed forward until I reached the end of the passageway.
I poked my head out of the hole in the cave wall and clicked on the flashlight. The passageway opened onto a cave tunnel that was about eight feet wide. The entire floor of the tunnel was moving water—an underground river. The floor of our passageway was less than an inch above the water level.
I scrunched my body around the backpack. Flo was right behind me.
“It’s a river,” I said.
“How deep?”
“I’m going to find out. Here.” I turned off the flashlight and handed it back to her.
I pushed my arms and head out of the opening. My hands dipped into the water. It was icy cold. Cautiously, I crawled head first out of the passageway and into the river. I couldn’t see a thing. Now my upper body was through the opening. My arms were in the water up to my elbows. I kept inching forward, telling myself that sharks didn’t live in caves, but then wondering what exactly did live in these rivers.
The water didn’t get any deeper as I continued to move forward. That was a good sign. I pulled the rest of my body out of the passageway opening and splashed into the water. I scrambled to my feet in the pitch black. I could feel the current at my ankles. Leaning over in the darkness, I touched the cold water with my fingertips. It was just below my knees.
Thank God.
“Turn on the flashlight, Flo. It isn’t deep.”
A few minutes later, the three of us were slogging forward down the middle of the river. Before leaving the opening, we had shined the flashlight back inside. There was no sign of anyone coming after us. It either meant that we were several minutes ahead of him, or that he was still back there searching other rooms, not yet realizing where we had gone. Either way, we knew we had to keep moving.
Flo was wearing the backpack now. I had the map and the flashlight. Assuming that I was still correctly aligned with the map, the current was flowing north east. We decided to follow the current for two reasons. First, there appeared to be more branches of the cave northeast. Second, smaller rivers flow into larger rivers. One of those rivers, roughly northeast of us, was the Mississippi River. If our river was headed for the Mississippi, it might eventually reach the surface.
I left the flashlight on. It was bad enough walking on solid ground in total darkness. Wading blind down a river was far too much for me. I checked my watch. It was almost 7:00 p.m. We’d been down in the cave for more than four hours. My clothes were soaked and the water was freezing.
“You think we can drink this water, Rachel?” Flo asked, her teeth chattering. “I’m dying of thirst.”
“I don’t know. Benny?”
“You’re asking me? I thought you were the one who took cave law.”
I shined the light into the water just in time to see a dull gray water snake slither past my right leg heading upstream. I caught my breath but kept quiet. No sense freaking out Flo even more. A small pallid fish circled in front of me and then darted away. Snakes and fish could live in it, right? I leaned over and scooped a few drops of water into my mouth.<
br />
“It tastes okay,” I said.
We each drank several cupped handfuls. I studied the map as Flo adjusted the backpack.
“What’s that noise?” Benny said.
I clicked off the light and listened, turning back toward the direction we had come. There was no sign of a flashlight back there. I listened again. The noise was the sound of rushing water. It was coming from somewhere up ahead. I turned. “I don’t know,” I said. “Rapids?”
“Down here?” Flo said.
“That’s what it sounds like,” I said.
“Fucking unbelievable,” Benny said. “All this, and now rapids? Who designed this miserable goddam hole in the ground? Stephen King?”
We walked on. The sound got louder. The tunnel, and thus the river, curved toward the left. As we came around the bend we saw a fork in the cave where it seemed to split into two tunnels. The sound of rushing water was much louder. As we got closer to the fork, we saw that both tunnel openings were actually positioned above the water level—the one on the right at least five feet above the water, the one on the left about three feet above. It was as if some huge drilling machine had punched two large holes into the wall. Both tunnels appeared to be dry.
The river seemed to disappear into the wall below the two tunnels. And as we got closer, we saw that the river did indeed disappear into the wall. The sound of rushing water was the sound of water falling. The river was literally funneling through a wide opening in the wall and cascading down what sounded like a significant drop-off. Seen from below, it must have been a magnificent waterfall. A Kodak scene. But we were way beyond Kodak scenes. We could have stumbled across the Taj Mahal down here and none of us would have given a damn. All we knew was that we were somewhere underneath St. Louis with a weakening flashlight beam and a growing sense of desperation.
The water current was much stronger here as the river funneled through the hole. The current dragged on us, too—pulling us toward the edge of the waterfall. Our only option was the tunnel on the left; the one on the right was too high to reach. I clambered up into the tunnel first and turned to help Flo. Then both of us helped Benny. Once we were all up in the dry tunnel opening, I took out the cave map and studied it as we caught our breath.
“Where are we now?” Flo asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t think this part is even on the map.”
“You’re kidding,” Benny said.
“Look for yourself.”
He leaned closer to the map. “How can you tell whether any of these caves comes back up to the surface?”
I shrugged. “You can’t.”
“So how do we know where to get out?” Flo asked.
I looked at her. “We don’t.”
“Oh, brother,” Benny said.
I pointed the beam forward into the darkness. “We just have to keep walking. We don’t have any other options.”
At 8:10, the batteries in the flashlight died. We put in our final set. Having lost our sense of direction, the map was totally useless. We just kept pressing forward. In order to avoid doubling back, we decided to take the left fork every time the cave tunnel split.
Ninety minutes later, the flashlight was starting to fade. We had just reached yet another fork in the cave and were about to go left when Benny grabbed my arm.
“Look.” He was pointing at the other tunnel.
I flashed the weak beam toward the tunnel on the right. “What?”
“Isn’t it sloped uphill?”
“Really?”
The three of us walked into the right tunnel. After several steps I said, “You’re right, Benny.” I tried to hold back my excitement by reminding myself that what goes up must come down. I prayed that the rule didn’t apply to cave tunnels.
We continued on. The tunnel was definitely moving upward. Our budding hopes made it hard to keep from running. The flashlight beam was almost worthless now—just a feeble glow. The ceiling was getting lower and lower.
Before long we were walking in a crouch. But still moving uphill. Definitely up.
The tunnel got narrower and narrower. We were crawling. But still moving uphill.
Gradually, the ground seemed to level off. By then I was crawling forward on my hands and knees, my head scraping the ceiling. The flashlight was dead. I tried to block from my mind what would happen if this passageway kept shrinking until we could proceed forward no further. I tried to block it out but couldn’t. If it got too narrow, we’d have to crawl back blind, all the way back to the fork in the tunnel. Then we’d take the left fork and we’d move on in total darkness and we’d just keep going and that was that. We’d deal with it then.
As I crawled forward, my head occasionally bumped the ceiling. Suddenly, though, there was nothing overhead. I stopped. Flo crawled right into me with a grunt.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I’m not sure.
“What’s that?” Benny said from behind her.
I reached over my head in the darkness. Nothing but air. Carefully, moving both hands around in the air over my head, I got to my feet. I inched forward very slowly. My hands bumped into a wall in front of me. It was a curved surface. I felt it with my hands. The wall curved toward me on either side. I realized I was standing in a vertical shaft. I kept my hands against the walls as I turned slowly in a circle. My hand touched a cold metal bar. I grasped it, felt around, grasped another metal bar.
“Oh, God,” I said.
“What?” Flo called from below.
“It’s a ladder.” My voice was shaking. “It’s a metal ladder. It’s attached to the wall.”
“A what?” Benny yelled.
“She said a ladder,” Flo answered.
“Hot damn!” Benny hollered.
I went up first, followed by Flo, and then Benny. We climbed in total darkness. I counted the first fifteen rungs and then lost track. We just kept climbing and climbing.
My head banged into the ceiling.
“What was that?” Flo asked from below.
I felt the ceiling with one hand. “It’s wood.” I leaned out from the ladder to touch as much of the surface as I could. The wood felt damp. I rapped it with my knuckles. It sounded hollow.
“Let me up,” Flo said.
I moved to one side of the ladder to make room for her. When we were even, she reached up to touch the wood.
“It feels rotten,” she said.
“It does,” I agreed.
“One way to find out for sure,” she said. I heard her take a deep breath and I felt her tense, her knees bending. Then a grunt and a quick thrust upward with her fist. The wood splintered. She did it again. More splintering, pieces dropping down on us. Again. More splintering.
And light!
There was light coming through the ragged holes in the wood. Moonlight.
I laughed. “God bless you, Flo. Have you been pumping iron?”
“Karate.”
I kissed her on the forehead. “You have brought great honor to your teacher, Florence-san.”
“Cut the crap,” Benny said. “Come on.”
Flo and I were able to reach up and yank off pieces of the rotting wood. The hole got bigger and bigger until it was large enough for Flo to climb through. I followed her, and then Benny followed me.
When we got to our feet, we were standing inside a small Greco-Roman gazebo. The gazebo was on a tiny island in the middle of a large round lake. Off in the distance, we heard the coughing roar of a lion.
“Where in the hell are we?” Flo said.
I peered around. Rising above the weeping willow on the shore of the lake was a broad, grassy hill. At the top of the hill was the unmistakable outline of a commanding figure on horseback. It was the statue of St. Louis at the top of Art Hill.
I gave Flo a big hug. “We’re
in Forest Park. We made it. We can wade across.” I turned to Benny with a big smile. There were tears in my eyes. I gave him a hug, too. “Oh, guys,” I said, “we made it!”
Chapter Thirty-three
It was an English Tudor with a circular drive and a giant pine tree on the front lawn. A slight breeze made the upper branches rustle and sway in the moonlight, casting menacing shadows on the freshly mowed grass below.
It was a big house surrounded by lots of land. Just like all the other homes on the grounds of the St. Louis Country Club. There were no lights on in the front of the house. Just like all the other homes on the grounds of the St. Louis Country Club. After all, it was nearly two in the morning.
Flo’s sources said he was in St. Louis tonight, not Washington, D.C.
He was. The kitchen was around back, and the light was on. He was seated at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. Alone. He was wearing pajamas, slippers, and a robe.
It was his second cup of tea. I had watched him drink the first cup while I stood in the garden near the kitchen window. His girlfriend had come in—the tall, beautiful redhead. She was wearing a silky blue bathrobe and her hair was in curlers. They spoke briefly. From where I stood, it looked like she asked him if he was coming to bed soon. He shook his head, distracted. She poured herself a glass of orange juice, drank it in three gulps, left the glass and the juice container on the counter, and went upstairs. When he got up to make more tea, he placed the juice glass in the dishwasher and put the container of juice on the top shelf of the refrigerator.
While he brewed his second cup of tea, I crept onto the back porch. That’s where I stood now. More than fifteen minutes had passed since the redhead went upstairs. I stepped back to look up. The second floor was dark. She was probably asleep by now.
I moved forward and peered at him through the glass of the back door. I rapped lightly on the door. He didn’t respond. I watched him through the window. He seemed a thousand miles away. I knocked harder. He looked up with a start and squinted at the door. I realized I was invisible, standing in darkness. He stepped over to the door and turned on a switch. Overhead spotlights lit up the back porch, as if I were on stage. In a way I was.
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