Meggie didn’t watch him go down. Kaitlyn was busy going through her pack, but Meggie kept her in sight at all times.
“Off rope!” Benjamin called from below. His voice came up hollow and distant.
Meggie hooked herself to the rope and backed toward the cave. When she got to the edge, she took a deep breath and leaned her weight back, then gave a jump while releasing the rope through the figure-eight descender.
Her boot caught some loose dirt and gravel at the first stop, sending it showering down the shaft. It bounced against the walls as it fell.
“Rock!” she called. Then, when the shower of pebbles stopped, “Sorry!”
“No worries,” he called up. “I’m clear.”
She kicked off again, dropped another five feet, then did it again. She had barely reached the mossy boulder when Kaitlyn was following her down.
Meggie looked up at the other woman’s silhouette against the sky. “What the hell are you doing?”
“The rope is rated over a thousand pounds. Don’t worry.”
“The plan says one at a time.”
“Only to watch for rockfall. He’s already down—he didn’t call a warning.”
Meggie was irritated to be sharing the rope, and worse, Kaitlyn was moving too quickly for her taste. By the time she was halfway down, the other woman was practically on top of her.
“Give me some space, will you?” Meggie told Kaitlyn.
“Don’t be so timid. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a total newbie.”
Meggie had a hard time catching her breath. She was too wired. The key to rappelling around all these obstacles was to keep calm, just release and bounce, release and bounce. Having Kaitlyn breathing down her neck wasn’t helping. Every time she looked up, the woman’s cave lamp was right in her face. Cave Etiquette 101. Sheesh!
“Come on,” Kaitlyn said. “We’ve got a lot of cave to go.”
“Hold up, we’ll get there soon enough.”
They reached the bottom of the first drop to find that Benjamin had already tied off the second rope to a pair of anchors he secured in the rock, and was marking his cave journal. “122.5 feet to the first landing,” he said, “The previous group was a little off in their notes.”
The ledge wasn’t flat, except right up against the wall, and if Duperre and HalfOrc had made it down, it would have been a tight fit for all of them. It had also collected a fair amount of rock and gravel, fallen from above and collected here in a loose, hazardous scree.
Once he’d marked the journal, Benjamin hooked himself onto the second rope, and then he was testing the new rope and lowering himself again. Moments later, he’d disappeared.
“Maybe you should go first,” Meggie told Kaitlyn, who was unhooking herself from the upper rope.
“Oh my God, you’re not going to freak out on us, are you?”
Meggie flushed. “I’m not freaking out.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Why, are you freaking out?”
Kaitlyn snorted. “Should I be?”
“Yeah, maybe you should. I see what you’re doing here.”
“And what is that, Megs? Why don’t you tell me?”
Inside, something was telling her to shut up. Keep her mouth closed and remember the main reason she’d proposed the trip to Benjamin in the first place, so that she could get him away from this poisonous woman.
“Back off,” Meggie said. “You’re acting like a jealous ex-girlfriend, you know that?”
Kaitlyn laughed. “You don’t get it, Megs. We have a deep connection you couldn’t begin to understand.”
Meggie wanted to stop, but couldn’t. Her emotions were on edge and all her frustrations were boiling out now.
“Right, because I’m only going to be his wife. Nothing deep about that.”
“Like I said, you don’t get it.”
“You mean the company? Because your grandpa started it and you think you’re in charge?”
Kaitlyn didn’t answer. Her helmet light pointed over Meggie’s shoulder, but the contrast was such that her face was invisible in the shadows.
Now, too late, Meggie knew she’d pushed too far. This was not the time or the place. She softened her tone. Alone with Kaitlyn on this ledge, she needed to shut her mouth and get on with the expedition.
“Listen,” she said, “I don’t want to fight with you. I’m not trying to wreck your friendship, and I don’t want to run the company. You want to pick a fight, worry about Benjamin’s brothers. If anything, they’re the ones who will try to force you out, not me.”
Not entirely true. Not when Meggie’s entire plan had been to bring Kaitlyn’s theft to her fiancé’s attention.
Benjamin called from below. “Are you guys arguing up there? Come on, get down here. You’ll want to check this out.”
Kaitlyn clipped herself onto the lower rope. Then she leaned backward over the ledge and rappelled out of sight.
Meggie took a deep breath. “Nice, Megs. Way to go.”
She clipped herself to the new rope, swearing to herself that she would keep her stupid yapper shut. She’d address Kaitlyn only when absolutely necessary. Exchange technical information only.
Freshly resolved, she leaned back into the hole and followed the other two down.
*
Challenges greeted them at the bottom of the central shaft. After finding themselves in a narrow, rubble-strewn room with a muddy floor, they eyed the three side passages branching off in various directions. One was high up the wall about a dozen feet and cut at a sharp angle back toward the surface. A second corkscrewed into the ground behind Benjamin, and the third opened directly into a wider room beyond. But it was so narrow they would struggle to get through to the other side.
Benjamin poked his head into the narrow hole to shine a flashlight through. He pulled out a moment later, and let out a low whistle.
“Wow. Check it out.”
Kaitlyn looked first, holding the spot for a good thirty seconds while Meggie waited behind, remembering her earlier promise and resisting the urge to nudge the other woman out of the way so she could see. At last Kaitlyn stepped aside and gave a dramatic wave of the hand.
Meggie stuck her flashlight up to the hole and shone it through and into the room on the other side. She caught her breath as her light penetrated the gloom. The light flickered across columns and stalagmites and other speleothems glistening with water. What little she could see was stunning. Peering through the hole was like holding a long cardboard tube to one eye without the ability to move the tube. She was only seeing a fraction of what lay on the other side.
“We have got to find a way in there,” she said. “Get some real light. Take pictures.”
“First things first,” Benjamin said, slipping off his pack and taking out the trip journal.
They spent a few minutes using the instruments to map the room. Meggie had the laser rangefinder and flashed it on the walls to calculate distances. When they finished, they turned their attention back to exploring.
“The corkscrew is the obvious path,” Benjamin said, pointing at the twisting tunnel descending at a sharp angle below them.
“The other team already went there,” Kaitlyn said. “I want to get in that big room somehow.”
“They didn’t map it all,” Meggie said. “Could be we go down and find a side passage leading up and connecting to that room on the other side.”
“I didn’t see any other passages,” Benjamin said. “The whole room looks like a geode with a single hole drilled in it. Gorgeous, but no way in except that thing.” He pointed at the slender opening.
Meggie wasn’t so sure. “We don’t know that until we explore. Can’t even see most of the room through the hole. I’ll bet it opens up. The water has to drain somewhere, and it’s not coming here.”
The narrow hole was smooth, but not damp. Only when it flooded would water come through, she thought.
Kaitlyn walked over to the hole lea
ding to the chamber they were all dying to explore. “Lift me into the squeeze. I’ll climb through.”
“I don’t know,” Benjamin said, doubtfully. “Hell of a place to get stuck.”
“I’m the smallest, so I’ll go first. You can follow. Might be too tight for Meggie, but she can wait here.”
“No way am I staying behind,” Meggie said.
“Then you can take your chances on the squeeze. You’ve got those wide hips, but maybe you’ll make it through.”
Meggie bit back her response. Anyway, it was stupid. The hole was too small. Maybe you could get in there by blowing out all your breath, but then what? Get wedged and suffocate? That’s how cavers died. Kaitlyn was the trip leader—she should be the cautious one, not goading people on.
When neither of the others spoke, Kaitlyn let out her breath in a hiss. “What a couple of pussies. Fine, we’ll do it your way. The corkscrew it is.”
Chapter Twelve
Meggie kept her vow not to engage with Kaitlyn as they followed the corkscrew deeper into the cave. It was steep, with loose rock and rubble, and occasionally speleothems growing from fissures in the wall. Getting around the delicate formations without soiling them with grubby boots or oily hands proved challenging. Twice, they reached short chimneys, which they descended by pressing hands, feet, shoulders, and back against opposite walls to maintain tension.
It proved slow going, even more so because they stopped to map and chart, and to carefully note landmarks so they could find their way back to the ropes. It wasn’t exactly a labyrinth down here in the dark, but there were occasional side tunnels or narrow fissures to squeeze through. In some well-traveled caves, careless teams would spray paint arrows on walls to indicate the return to the surface. Some people even laid trails of string. Their online group preferred a minimalist approach, which meant careful planning.
Still trying to reach the huge room they’d spotted initially, they tried to follow passages that led back up, instead of further down, but this meant some tight fits. Once they had to belly crawl ten feet, then slide through a slit in the rock that looked like a grinning, toothy mouth. Benjamin and Kaitlyn passed through, grunting and sliding packs ahead of them, but when it came Meggie’s turn, she balked.
“Are you sure this is the way?” she asked through the fissure.
“Come on, it opens up on the other side,” Benjamin said. “And there’s a draft. I think this is the way back up.”
Meggie didn’t think of herself as unusually claustrophobic. Maybe a little, but who wasn’t down here, with 250 feet of rock and mountain above you, and darkness and narrow walls on all sides? After an hour in the cave, squirming and ducking, crawling and groping, she was dying for a chance to stand and stretch. Squeezing into that tiny, suffocating fissure raised an instinctive fear that Meggie struggled to conquer.
Come on, you’ve crawled through tighter fits than that. Get in there and do it.
Kaitlyn stuck her head up to the gap from the other side of the wall. “Fine, you don’t want to come, that’s your loss. Find your way back and we’ll meet you at the ropes.”
Benjamin muttered a protest, his voice muffled. Probably something about how stupid it was to split up. Kaitlyn spoke back, her voice soothing, and Meggie realized with alarm that the other woman wanted to leave her. Let her get lost. Maybe something would happen to her and wouldn’t that be great?
Meggie gathered her courage, slipped out of her pack and scooted up to the fissure. She pushed the pack ahead of her so she couldn’t chicken out midway through. A hand reached under, grabbed the strap, and pulled it through. She squirmed, flattening herself to get beneath an especially bony part of the fissure. Moments later, she got through. The others were waiting in a tunnel that was a good seven feet high and three feet wide. She straightened her back, relieved.
It was smooth going from there. Sloping and twisting more gradually uphill, they discovered a series of small chambers with high ceilings, before entering a room so large that at first Meggie thought they’d circled back around to the magical room they’d spotted after their initial descent. But the room was dry and there were only a few stone icicles growing from a crack that ran along the ceiling. This was not their goal.
“My God,” Benjamin said, looking up at the wall with his helmet light sweeping around the room. “Look at all those passages.”
Half a dozen holes, squeezes, and passageways exited the room, including the one they’d just taken. As he squatted to record their findings, Meggie grew excited at the implications.
“We’ve stumbled on a major cave formation,” she said as she retrieved the rangefinder from her pack. “For all we know, this is another Lehman Caves. We’re the discoverers.”
Kaitlyn scoffed. “We didn’t discover this place. Someone explored down here in 1987. And someone else found the hole way back in the fifties.”
“Yeah, but we’re the first ones to know it’s something big. The ’87 team didn’t get past the bottom of the corkscrew.”
When they finished their work, they took a break to eat protein bars and dried fruit. Nobody wanted to rest for long. After identifying the two most likely passages to lead them to the big cavern, Kaitlyn chose one and led them on.
They picked their way through a narrowing tunnel that sloped upward for about thirty feet before it dropped into another chimney. This shaft was wide enough that they couldn’t chimney crawl to the bottom without a rope. They only had one twenty-footer on hand, which Benjamin lowered into the hole. It didn’t reach the bottom.
“I could run back for the forty footer,” he said. It was too heavy to schlep about the caves, so they’d left it at the bottom of the second landing.
“We do that, we lose an hour,” Kaitlyn said. “Maybe more.”
“Anyway, we’re trying to get up from here, not down,” Meggie said. “I don’t think this is the way.”
“You think you can do better?” Kaitlyn snapped.
Meggie blinked. “That’s not what I’m saying. Just that, now that we’re here, it’s obvious this isn’t the way.”
Kaitlyn was still scowling from the perceived challenge to her authority. She turned on her heel, back toward the previous chamber. They followed. When they got back, Kaitlyn ordered them into the second tunnel they’d identified as leading in the right direction.
It also led to a chimney, but going up this time. The shaft was neither too narrow, nor too wide, and offered plenty of boulders and other protruding rocks to help maintain three points of contact at all times. But the chimney was at least thirty feet long and at a steep angle, and they were exhausted by the time they climbed to the next horizontal stretch. They took another breather.
“Got the time?” Meggie asked.
Benjamin’s watch lit up with an indigo glow. “Two-thirty. We’ve been down six hours already.”
It was hard to believe, but that was cave time for you. In all, they’d only traveled half a mile, if that, but between tying ropes, mapping, and rests, the hours dripped relentlessly away.
“We should start thinking about a return,” Meggie said.
“What, are you the trip leader now?” Kaitlyn asked.
“Just trying to be safe. What time did it get dark last night?”
“Not until 9:30,” Kaitlyn said.
“Yeah, but we’ve still got to hike back down the hill. I don’t want to do that with flashlights. Also, those guys have been waiting all day.”
“Not our fault. Anyway, they knew we’d be gone until late. We have until midnight before they go back for help.”
Probably, Meggie was being overly cautious. Without stopping to map, but taking usual precautions, the return would be quicker than the initial exploration. Until they got to the two ropes leading to the surface. Then it would be a slow, exhausting climb via the vertical ascenders. Using a pulley system attached to the shoes, climbing the rope would be like working out on a high-tension StairMaster, as they ascended inch by excruciating inch back to th
e surface.
“We’ve come too far to go back now,” Kaitlyn added.
“How about another half-hour?” Meggie said. “And if we don’t find it, we’ll turn around.”
Benjamin shrugged and turned to Kaitlyn, who scowled.
“An hour,” she said. “If we don’t find it by then, we can turn around. We’ll still have plenty of time to get back to the surface and down to the truck.”
Then, without waiting to see how the others would respond, she rose to her feet, hoisted her pack, and continued up the passageway. The other two followed. Meggie struggled to fight down her misgivings.
*
They found the chamber about forty minutes later. It took another chimney, a lucky guess at a fork, and then some more belly crawling through a passageway maybe three feet high. It wasn’t the tightest squeeze, except that it seemed to go on forever. In reality, probably less than fifty feet. But if time was different down here in the dark, then so were distances. More so when you found yourself pinched between two slabs of rock, each hundreds of feet thick. Get wedged down here and you’d die. No rescue team in the world could do a thing.
Then she came out the other side to find Benjamin and Kaitlyn standing upright and staring slack-jawed. They’d found it.
The room was a wonderland of speleothems. Stalactites glistened from the ceiling by the hundreds, looking like so many milky icicles. Stalagmites squatted on the ground, some white, others streaked brown or glittering. Waves of mineralized formations smeared across the walls, looking alternatively like frosting, or popcorn, or even strange, glistening faces. Cascading waves of flowstone formed frozen waterfalls. The cavern amplified and echoed the drip of water, which fell into a clear, bluish pool in the center of the room.
For several seconds nobody said anything, they simply gawked, turning on their spare flashlights and flashing them around the chamber. Then they set about mapping the room. Benjamin wrote everything down, while the two women moved carefully around the room with their flashlights, calling out excitedly whenever they discovered a new formation.
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