"Stop it," he whispered. "Don't make this any harder than it is. He told you he didn't want to shoot you. Now stop."
Lindsay stopped. When he relaxed his grip she ran free while trying to get the sack off her head. She pulled it off just in time to avoid a tree. She ran as fast as she could, but the man caught up with her and tackled her to the ground. She could see the entrance to a cave like a yawning mouth before her. Boards had been torn from the entrance and thrown aside. There was no doubt in her mind which cave this was. She saw one of her captors carrying a backpack. He was dressed in coveralls from a window-cleaning company, and he had a ski mask over his face. She thought of Denny Ferguson. The man also had latex gloves on his hands. The other man, the one holding her pinned to the ground was probably disguised the same way. They were not even going to let her know who was killing her. She struggled, but the man was too heavy on top of her.
"Come help me," he yelled. "She's damn strong."
The man dropped the backpack to the ground and came over. He wore hiking boots. She flinched, ready for him to kick her in the face, but he didn't. He put the gun against her temple.
"Get up. No more trouble or we'll end it here."
She rose. The other man helped her up while telling her to put her hands behind her head and lace her fingers. She complied. The first man held a gun on her while the other one got the backpack. He was dressed exactly like the first one. They could have been identical twins for all she could tell.
They marched her into the cave. It was damp, earthy smelling, and very cool. "Put on this backpack." They handed it to her and again she complied.
"Now keep going." They prodded her and turned on flashlights.
Lindsay understood their plan now. While investigating the cave where the accident happened, she would have a tragic accident herself. She would be found with caving equipment, and there would be no unexplained bruises if she was found before she decomposed. It would be as tidy as the last one was supposed to be. John West was right. She was stuck on a tar-man, and no wolf would be along that she could entice to take her place.
They walked through a short corridor into a chamber with rubble piled here and there and against the walls, away from the center. It smelled musty and damp. This was the place it happened last time. One of the men, the one without the gun, walked over to retrieve some equipment stashed behind rocks. The other set his flashlight down and dug in his pocket with his free hand. Lindsay was standing between the two men. With one rapid motion she reached and grabbed the flashlight and swung it hard, hitting the man on the temple. The other one turned and started for her. She ran through an opening deeper into the cave. Suddenly, after a few slippery feet she was sliding down a slick surface. It was like a water slide with a thin sheet of water. Instinctively, she clutched the flashlight. She slid for an eternity, the walls of the cave a mere kaleidoscopic flicker as the light of the flashlight illuminated her passage like a strobe. Then she was in the air, but only for a second. She hit something, slid farther for several moments, then rolled off onto the ground, rolled again, and stopped. She lay there, numb, afraid to move. There was no sound but her heart beating furiously in her ears. The flashlight was still on, and she moved the light around the chamber. She saw a beautiful cascade of stalactites with stalagmites growing up to meet them. The long water slide was like a lava flow. She couldn't see the top, even with the light. She heard a mild explosion and a vibration. After several moments, debris came sliding down the flow. Lindsay realized they had sealed the entrance to the cave.
Chapter 12
IT WAS DARK, pitch black except for the small circle of light produced by the flashlight reflecting off the ground and a distant wall. Lindsay stood up on shaky legs. She could stand. Her legs weren't broken. She took a couple of steps. They weren't sprained, but she limped slightly from sore joints. Lucky. She set the flashlight down and felt her arms and sides. Her clothes were torn. She felt numb in places, but she believed she was unhurt. She took the flashlight and looked around the chamber, more methodically this time. The walls curved upward to form the domed ceiling. Roughly twenty by twenty, the chamber was like a cathedral-alien and beautiful.
She walked to the base of the flowstone. This must be the Hell Slide, she thought. Aptly named. She shone her light toward the top of the slide again, but couldn't see it because of the way the flow curved. She traced the light down the slide and caught her breath. The slide was interrupted partway down by a gap, an abyss. The chasm was a few feet across and the slide started again. That must have been when she was airborne. As if on skis, she had leaped across the crevasse and slid to the center of the earth.
Lindsay felt a heaviness on her back and realized she was still wearing the backpack. She took it off, opened the flaps, and began taking inventory of what was in it. There was a trowel-her own trowel-and three nutri-bars, also her own. When did they get her trowel and her nutri-bars? There were batteries-batteries, she hadn't thought about batteries. She looked at the flashlight as if it might treacherously go out at any minute. She would have to conserve the batteries. No light. No life. She clutched it and turned off the switch and was plunged into absolute darkness. She looked around her for anything, any pinpoint of light anywhere, any reflection, any shining thing. Nothing. She wondered if blind people were in this kind of darkness. The darkness was like a thing itself, substantial, smothering. Her situation hit her like a solid object slamming her body, knocking the wind from her, catching her throat. She was lost in a way few people are ever lost, buried alive in the bowels of the earth, and no one knew where she was-no one, that is, who wanted her found.
"Oh, God," she choked, "please, don't let this be true." She started to cry-a desperate, frightened crying that echoed throughout the cave. If her crying were heard by anything, it would have sounded like the dreadful mourning of a lost spirit. Lindsay cried as she had never cried before, a gut-wrenching sobbing that made her stomach heave. Never had she been this frightened or felt this hopeless or been this lost.
She lay in the dark for a long time, hiccuping from her crying, pain creeping into her body, replacing the numbness. She thought of Derrick, wishing he would come to her rescue. She thought of her family, never to know what had happened to her, their lives ruined by her disappearance. Then she thought of Harley Davidson.
Harley, her seventh-grade boyfriend-her first boyfriend-had been named by parents who loved motorcycles and had spent a big part of their youth on one. He had not been her parents' choice of a boyfriend for her, but Lindsay had liked him.
Unlike his parents, Harley didn't like motorcycles. His passion was caves. He loved caving. Mammoth Cave was his favorite place in the world. He talked to Lindsay all the time about caves and caving. She learned from his friends that he was a pretty good caver.
There was a place he'd had to show her: a cavern covered in gypsum blossoms-white crystal florets made when water seeps into the dry passages and evaporates, leaving behind the deposit of gypsum. It was beautiful. They'd had to drop into the cavern using a rope, but it had been worth it. Harley had been good with the rope, she remembered. He'd also brought a couple of friends to stay outside and wait for them. Harley had always said that caves are safe if people are safe.
When they'd returned to the surface, their parents had been waiting for them. Lindsay had never seen her mother and father so angry. Neither had spoken to her on the way home. That event prompted her father to tell her that a life with Harley was not what they were raising her for and that she had to stop seeing him. Her mother, often sympathetic to Lindsay in disagreements with her father, was not sympathetic on the matter of Harley Davidson. They argued, but in the end Lindsay had done what she always didobeyed her parents. But for a month, every evening when her father came home, he had been greeted with the song "Leader of the Pack, " a song about a girl whose father made her stop seeing her motorcyclist boyfriend. Despondent, he had a wreck and was killed rather dramatically. After a month Lindsay's father had asked he
r to please stop, that someday she would thank him. She'd told him she would never thank him, but that she would stop playing the song. Harley had grown up to be a lawyer and was currently running for the state senate in Kentucky. Lindsay had framed the announcement when she had seen it and sent it to her father.
Now, Lindsay wished she had paid closer attention to Harley when he'd talked about caves, which he had done so incessantly that often she hadn't paid attention to what he said, but simply listened to his voice. She tried recalling his voice now.
She sat up and turned on her flashlight. She continued the inventory of things she had with her. There was a pencil and paper, a tape measure-all belonging to her. Her kidnappers had packed some aluminum foil, a waterproof case with matches, candles, an extra bulb for the flashlight, and a magnifying glass-she wondered what that was for. The cache cheered her. There were a lot of useful items. She thought of Clay talking about how Jennifer Darnell planned things as if they were actually going to be carried out. That was Jennifer's genius. Lindsay wondered if this was her work. Were they going to kill her, crush her skull, and place her in the cave? Make it look as if she had gone there to investigate and some of the debris fell on her and killed her? Tragic. But then what was an amateur doing in a dangerous cave where experts had been killed? Foolish girl. But at least she had taken the right caving things with her.
Anger washed over her, momentarily covering the fear. She turned her attention back to the inventory. There was fishing line and her own pocketknife. They had taken several things from her motel room after all, and from her Rover as well. Lindsay knew what most of the things were to be used for; she remembered Harley talking about them. She remembered him getting things ready for their foray into Feather Cave. Whoever had prepared her death backpack was a caver.
Many caves had several entrances; this one would, too, she told herself. Lindsay took off her belt and threaded it through the handle of the flashlight. She buckled and further secured the belt by tying fishing line through the buckle and one of the belt holes. She couldn't afford to lose the light. She put the belt over her head and around her shoulder so that she carried the flashlight more or less under her arm.
"Okay," she said to herself. "That will work." Her own voice sounded strange to her ears. Too breathy, too shaky. Be calm, she told herself. Her hands shook as she worked.
She repacked the backpack and put it on, securing the straps around her waist. She looked at her watch. It was broken. She almost started to cry again.
"No," she said aloud. "I'll get out of this. I will. The watch is not important."
She started by shining the light on the ground around her. She examined the slide again, looking for a way up the flowstone. It was steep and slick. The chasm she had flown across was too wide to jump. She walked carefully to the wall of the chamber, watching where her feet would go on each step. Caves have a lot of drop-offs, Harley had told her. She made her way carefully along the circumference of the chamber, looking for a way out. She was almost in despair again when she found the entrance to a large opening. It was across a chasm, but the gap was only a few feet, perhaps five, a distance she could jump. And it had a ledge in front of it, but it was damp and probably slippery. If she fell here, she would become wedged between the narrow walls of the crevice, where she would die-suffocate from slipping deeper between the narrow walls or from dehydration and despair. The prospect terrified her. I can't, she thought. Oh, God, I can't.
She thought of the famous death of Floyd Collins in a Kentucky cave. It was a horrific story that everyone in Kentucky knew. It happened in 1927, but even small children could tell you the story today. A newspaper reporter had crawled near the spot where Floyd was wedged, and the whole nation had watched through his newspaper reports the sad and lonely death that took days. But she wouldn't be another Floyd Collins. There was no one here to see her die.
She raked her fingers through her hair. "What am I going to do? Damn, what am I going to do?" She heard the words echoing in the cave and realized she had said them aloud. What if I get across to the opening and it's a dead end? Then what? She said this silently to herself.
Lindsay shone her light into the opening. It looked like a passageway. The walls were limestone, scalloped with small, scale-shaped indentations. Lindsay tried to remember her geology. Small scallops, fast water. The passage was narrow. That fit also. Narrow passages, fast water. This passage had been shaped by fast water flowing through it. Then did that mean it was probably not a dead end? Yes. She remembered now. The steep side of the scallops were upstream. The steep side was away from her. That meant the water flowed in her direction. That also meant that the passage went up. Didn't it? She couldn't tell from her vantage point, but she was filled with hope. If she could find passages that led up, she would find a way out.
It wasn't a far jump across the chasm, she told herself. Just do it. If you're going to get out of here, you're going to have to be confident and unhesitant. Don't look down. She looked down. She thought about becoming wedged between the narrow walls of the crevasse. Already she was suffocating. She couldn't do it. Again she examined the walls of the cave for another, more accessible, opening. She found herself back at the one hole that she could find leading from the cavern.
"You have to do it." The voice echoed in the chamber again, like some spirit, not herself. "You have to do it. Dear God, please help me," she prayed. She stepped back and leaped, landing hard, falling forward, catching herself with another step and slipping. She fell again, but not hard. Oh, no, the light. What if she had broken the light? She pressed the switch off, then on. The beam of light reflected off the wall. Be more careful, she told herself. Be more careful.
The passageway was narrow and gently curved. It did go upward. She felt confident. She was moving, going up. She turned a curve and was again slapped with desperation. The way was blocked by breakdown, huge boulders fallen from a collapsed ceiling. She nervously examined the ceiling above her head. It looked stable. She looked again at the boulders blocking her path and tears stung her eyes. She wanted to sink to her knees. Instead she shone the light around the breakdown and the walls of the passage.
She found one small opening to her right. Her flashlight revealed a rocky passage that led downward at a very steep angle farther into the depths of the earth. Tears dropped on her cheeks. Her head hurt. Should she go back, she wondered, and look for another opening? What if she had missed a different passage? It was so dark, she could have missed a passage hidden behind a stalagmite, or breakdown or-
"No," she whispered. These emotional ups and downs and insecurities could end her life as surely as the hazards in the cave. If she was going to save herself, she was going to have to reach some equilibrium within herself. She sat down and turned off the flashlight.
The darkness engulfed her like a thick, suffocating blanket. She closed her eyes. She fought the panic rising in her by thinking about how people in other desperate lifethreatening situations had survived. How, in the most dire circumstances, the most hostile environments, people had survived. The Eskimo, the African bushmen, the Indians of Terra del Fuego-even Bruno Bettelheim in Dachau. People who lived and survived in the most severe circumstances had one major characteristic in common; she knew that. They learned and understood their environment to an extraordinarily high degree, and they faced their fate with courage.
The path might lead downward for a while, but she would find a passage that led up to the surface. She would bring to the front of her mind any knowledge she had learned from Harley or her geology classes that would help. She would be alert for dangers or signs that an opening to the outside was near, like pack rats that live in caves but have to get to the surface for food. She would do these things, and she would get out of this cave, and when she did, she would find whoever put her here and . . . She turned on the flashlight, took a deep breath, and started down the yawning throat of the passage.
Calderon lit his torch and stepped into the entrance to the cave
, motioning for the others to do the same. Finally, he thought. Finally he was on the brink of getting the riches he deserved.
They entered into an underground room and quickly found the one passageway that led off of it. Calderon searched the walls for the sign that his cousins had told him he would find. But there was so much wall, and the light was so dim. There! There was the mark, carved into the zuall. It was true, then. There was treasure here! He was at the right place. He rubbed the symbol with his fingers as if by touching it, it would tell him more.
"This is it," he said. "This is the way."
It has to be, thought Diego. It is the only way. He was, after all these years, becoming weary of his old friend. Perhaps he was getting old and simply wanted to go home. Perhaps lie wearied of Esteban because lie knew that he would not share the treasuremuch of it anyway. Diego, of course, expressed none of his thoughts. He simply followed Esteban Calderon down the passage.
Piaquay, Tesca, and Roberto lit their torches and entered the cave. The first chamber was small and littered with rocks. Footsteps in the fine dirt led to a winding narrow passageway that sloped gently downward. It is so winding, thought Piaquay. This must be the path where the serpents slithered out of the underworld. He listened for the conquistadores, but heard no sounds except his own footfalls. He stopped and listened again. Quiet. It was then that he saw carved into the rock the shape of a hand with an eye in the center. The symbol of the ability to see into the future. Were the devils following this sign? Did they know of it? Yes, he answered himself. There were many willing to trade these devils information for the hard metal axes and knives they carried.
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