He decided to move straight ahead first, because it occurred to him that it would be easier to find his way back to the starting point if he moved in a straight line. That way, if he ran into an obstacle, all he had to do was move directly backward until he found the wall again. This realization was the first thing approaching an actual plan, and he felt proud of it, as if the notion of crawling forward were a true breakthrough and not something instinctive to such brilliant creatures as earthworms and ants.
He began to crawl, and even though the impact was minimal, the stone was brutal on his knees. He considered standing but thought that would be more dangerous—by crawling, he was at least limiting how far he could fall.
He had gone maybe twenty or thirty feet when his left hand made contact with what seemed to be a wall in front of him. He ran both hands along the surface as far as he could extend his arms. He found no break in the wall. A dead end.
Unless, of course, the passage opened up a little to the left or to the right. It could be just ten feet away, and he wouldn’t know.
His mouth was dry and his pulse hammered. He tried to calm himself with the reminder that he had no other choice but to keep trying. He was warmer when he was moving too, and that was important. That was critical. He could envision his mother in the snow of that Montana prairie, the blue tint seeming to come from within her flesh. Yes, it was important to keep moving.
He moved backward just as he’d come, but the going was slower because his feet weren’t as dexterous as his hands and made poor guides in the dark. When he finally found the wall, he felt a sense of triumph. He’d achieved what he’d set out to do. Never mind that it hadn’t actually taken him anywhere or changed his situation—he’d proved that he could move away from this spot and make it back again.
Now he was back to the old question: Right or left? He decided that right felt more natural, simply because he was right-handed. When he began to crawl again, he found that he preferred this path because he could keep the wall against his side. As he worked along the wall, he thought he heard sounds that weren’t of his own making. He stopped and listened and what he would once have called silence now seemed filled with soft murmurs. Whispers of motion.
Snakes.
His brain treated that just as it had the opening and closing of his hand; because he could visualize snakes, it was almost as if he’d actually seen them. He crept backward, banging his knees painfully on the stone, and had gone about five feet before he stopped himself. He listened again, and now he wasn’t sure there was anything. Sweat ran down his face despite the cold. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths and tried to clear the image of the snakes from his mind.
Doesn’t matter if the place is crawling with snakes. If it is, they already know you’re here, and they’ll come for you if they want. Moving will make you more threatening, scare them off.
Sure. The mental commandments were easy to make, harder to obey.
Go forward, damn it. Go!
He began to crawl again, faster now, ignoring the pain in his knees, and the amount of distance he’d covered from his starting position was encouraging, seemed to suggest this passage led somewhere.
When his right hand reached forward and didn’t make contact with rock, he wasn’t immediately scared. There had been small dips and drops here and there, and he assumed this was just another one, worthy of added caution but not cause for true alarm. Then he reached farther and still found nothing. He moved his left hand forward, and his left hand didn’t come down on stone either. He was sitting on his knees, waving his hands in the air like a mime in a box. Where in the hell did the passage go? What was he missing? He reached down, trying to find out how far the floor dipped, and his hands kept extending through air. He was leaning so far forward that his balance was precarious, and the pressure caused a fresh ache in his knees. He swore, edged backward, stretched out flat on his stomach, then reached again, determined to figure out which way the floor was curling away from him.
His hands found nothing. He reached until sharp rock bit into his armpits, and he still couldn’t find the floor. The drop ahead was a decent height. He fumbled around until he found a loose stone and then he pushed it over the edge, hoping he’d hear an immediate smack of contact that would tell him it was just a short step down.
Instead, he had enough time to be aware of the sound of his own breath—several breaths—before the rock landed with a crack on the floor below and broke into pieces.
Only then did he understand what was directly in front of him: a cliff.
16
Ridley had been in his workshop all day, never once venturing outdoors, but he looked snow covered nevertheless, his shirt and hair coated with fine flakes of sawdust, when the sheriff’s car pulled into the yard. He knew just from the height of the driver that it was the sheriff himself. It had been a long time since Ridley had dealt with Blankenship.
He went to the door, opened it, and said, “Everything okay, Sheriff?,” working hard on his I’m-just-another-good-citizen voice. He needed more practice with that one. Never sounded right, not even to his ear.
Blankenship looked him up and down without saying a word, and then he reached out and brushed Ridley’s shoulder with the palm of his hand, making a show of dusting him off. Ridley kept his hand tight around the doorknob, knowing the sheriff had touched him just to rattle him. Ridley was sensitive about personal space, something that Blankenship had learned during their interviews. Maybe the only thing he had learned.
“Been woodcutting?”
“Damn, you must be some sort of detective.”
“One of those boards bite you back?”
“What’s that?”
“Your face looks a little busted up.”
“Caving,” Ridley said. “Rough hobby.”
“Must be. I’ve seen men lose fights and come out looking better than that.”
“Those men probably should stay aboveground.”
“I’ve always figured we all should, for as long as we can. You got an idea what brings me to your door?”
“I asked Novak to town,” Ridley said, “but I didn’t put on a wig and a dress and tell him I was Sarah Martin’s mother. So you don’t need to linger. If anyone has a right to press charges, it’s me, and I’m not doing that. Storm like this, I imagine people need you on the roads, not wasting your time with me. Go help the innocent.”
“What would you be pressing charges for?”
“Like I said, I’m not.”
“But you think you could be.” Blankenship studied Ridley’s face. “Did you not get along with the fellow from Florida, Ridley?”
Ridley didn’t answer.
“Oh boy, we are already there, huh?” Blankenship said. “I ask a question, and you stare at me like you’re a mental defective, and we go round and round.”
A trace of a smile slipped onto Ridley’s face then. He controlled it, but not before Blankenship saw it and lights of anger went on in his eyes.
“Entertaining shit to you, is it, old boy? Glad to know that it pleases you. Not a lot of happy people working down in that cave right now, so I’m glad you’re pleased.”
Ridley lost the smile. “Working in what cave?”
Blankenship didn’t respond.
“What in the hell are you talking about, working in a cave?” Ridley hated the interest in his own voice, the need, but he couldn’t help it.
Blankenship was silent, watching him.
“All right, I get it,” Ridley said. “You want to play my game while you’ve got the chance. Enjoy it, Sheriff. I don’t need to let the heat out.” He started to push the door shut, but Blankenship got his foot wedged in.
“Cecil Buckner found Mark Novak’s clothes inside the entrance of Trapdoor. You don’t know anything about that, I’m sure.”
Ridley opened the door and stared Blankenship full in the eyes.
“Who let him into Trapdoor? Cecil?”
Blankenship shook his head. “Cecil didn’
t so much as crack that door once he saw the clothes. He waited for a deputy.”
“Then how in the hell did Novak get inside?”
“Someone spent time and muscle working on that gate with a crowbar.” Blankenship gave him an appraising look. “You’re pretty handy, aren’t you? Good with tools, stronger than you look.”
“Nice line, Sheriff. But what you should have said was that I understand leverage. You’ve experienced that, haven’t you?”
“Go to hell,” Blankenship said. “I’ve no more interest in verbal games with you than I ever had. I want to see some cave maps. Immediately.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody can find the son of a bitch, and you’re the one who knows that cave.”
Novak was off the maps. Interesting. Trapdoor was up to something. Trapdoor had come alive again. Ridley shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but he surely needed to respect it. Trapdoor had responded to Novak. Ridley had hoped for as much, but he’d thought it would be a long process. He hadn’t anticipated that the cave would show her power so swiftly to an outsider. Still, it had been quite some time since she’d had visitors. Maybe she’d gotten lonely.
“He was just supposed to sit there and think,” Ridley said.
Blankenship’s eyes hardened. “You knew Novak was headed into the cave?”
“I’m the one who told him to go. I didn’t expect he’d make such an effort, frankly. But he seems resourceful. She’s more resourceful, though. He probably didn’t count on that.”
“She?”
Ridley ignored that and said, “You’re going to need me in there.”
“I don’t think that idea will be real popular.”
“If you think he’s actually in there, you’re going to need me.”
“To do what?”
“Find him. Let me guess, you’ve called Anmar Mirza already, haven’t you?”
“He’s on his way from Bloomington.”
“Sure he is. And he’s good. But he doesn’t know that cave like I do, and he’d be the first to admit it.”
“I don’t need Mr. Mirza’s opinion of you, Ridley. And I’m not about to grant you access to Trapdoor. What we’re going to do is talk about Mark Novak.”
“Not enough time for that.”
“No?” Blankenship tilted his head back. “Funny observation. You seem to know he’s at risk.”
“If the man’s naked and in Trapdoor, he’s at risk.”
“Naked?” Blankenship echoed in that stupid cop voice that suggested he thought he’d caught Ridley in a slip because he was some sort of master interrogator.
“You were the one who said they found his clothes, Sheriff.”
“Could have been his jacket. Could have been his belt. I don’t recall any specificity.”
“Well, was it?”
“I’d have to check my notes.”
“You’re doing the same thing you did last time. You’re asking the wrong questions of the wrong people, killing time above the surface while somebody does real killing down below.”
“Who did that killing down below?”
Ridley didn’t answer.
“Right,” Blankenship said. “That shuts your mouth pretty fast every time, doesn’t it? Well, we don’t need to worry about what happened in the past—”
“The past is the reason he’s here. It’s the reason he’s in that cave. You might not want to admit it, but your past is now your present. Any other notion is wrong. And you can’t afford to be wrong, Sheriff. Not again. You think about that. You think about what happens if you pull another body out of there.”
For an instant, Ridley thought that Blankenship might hit him. All he did, though, was say “You pulled the body out” through clenched teeth.
“I sure did. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to if you’d gotten me down there earlier. So now I’ll make you an offer. I’ll go into that cave, but this time it’ll be different. This time, I’ll make a concession. I’ll keep you right by my side.”
Blankenship stood silently in the snow, and his silence made Ridley’s pulse race. The sheriff was considering it. He was actually considering it, which meant only one thing: he wanted to track every move Ridley made in the cave in the hope that it would tell him things about the past, because the sheriff had never gotten over the lack of answers to what had happened in Trapdoor ten years earlier. And that meant only one thing to Ridley: a chance to go back into the cave. If he played this right, he was going to get to see her again.
“Scared to go down there with me?” Ridley said. “Scared of being alone in the dark with me, Sheriff?”
“You’re a sick son of a bitch.”
“That isn’t a fresh verdict.”
“You’re not going back into Trapdoor. We saw how that turned out last time.”
“We sure as hell did. You let the girl die,” Ridley said, and Blankenship swung on him then, hit him with an open palm but a damned big open palm; it knocked him back a step and brought blood to his lips. Ridley touched his mouth with his hand, looked at the blood, and shook his head.
“I am growing tired of getting hit today.”
“You’re going to—”
“Have some fun with a police-brutality charge, if I want to. But I don’t. What I want to do is what you need to do: pull that Florida boy out of Trapdoor while he still has a pulse. I’ve already said I’ll keep you or any of your deputies at my side. The choice is yours, Sheriff. Remember that you had the chance to make it. Remember how things might have gone if you’d made a different choice ten years ago.”
“There’s a special hell for you,” Blankenship said. His voice was choked. “There just has to be.”
“We’ll find out one of these days,” Ridley said, but in truth he’d already found out. “Back to your choice, Sheriff. Time’s wasting. Decisions need to be made, and you’re the man who has to make them. The good people of Garrison County have voted on that. Make your choice.”
“I don’t need you, Barnes. I just need the maps.”
Ridley smiled and tapped his temple with his index finger. “I’ve got them archived.”
Blankenship’s jaw worked and he turned away from Ridley so he wasn’t facing him when he said, “Get your damn gear, then. Let’s you and me go for a ride. I’ll be curious to see how being back in that place works on you, Ridley. Might just sharpen a few of those memories you claim to have lost.”
Ridley managed to smirk at that, but he, too, was wondering how being back in that place might work on him. He’d suggested going in with the sheriff because he knew it was the only chance he had of getting in. Inside Trapdoor, though, back there in the dark, the sheriff might end up regretting being at Ridley’s side. Depending on how the cave worked on Ridley, that might wind up being a very poor decision indeed.
17
Mark’s technical understanding of hypothermia came from diving courses, but his visceral understanding of it came from memory, of carrying his mother over his shoulder, trying to rub warmth into unresponsive flesh. It was on that long walk that he’d sworn he would never return to the Rockies, that when he died, it wouldn’t be in the cold.
Now here he sat, half naked and shivering, remnants of an unknown drug from an unknown needle in his bloodstream. He’d become his mother.
You can’t run away from your family, she had told him when he’d left for the bus station, and maybe she had been right.
Then again, she’d survived the cold that day.
He started to laugh and when the echo returned it to him, the laugh sounded deranged. Sounded, in fact, like his mother’s.
“Get it together,” he whispered. “Keep your head.”
He thought that he should have reached the place he’d started from by now; he had been crawling away from the cliff for a long time, longer than it had taken him to reach it. Or maybe not. Time and distance were hard to judge in the blackness.
Getting cold. You are getting too cold.
The cave wasn’t frigid, i
t wasn’t the sort of alarming cold of the snowstorm above, but it could be just as deadly. Your core temperature came down slowly but steadily. You had to be aware of all the ways you might lose heat. Down here with no supplies and no clothes, Mark couldn’t fight many of them. Something as simple as keeping his skin from making contact with the stone was impossible. The only way to stay warm was to keep moving, and there was some danger in that as well. The more he moved, the more likely he was to sweat and breathe hard, which cost him heat, and the more he moved, the more glucose he sapped from his bloodstream. He needed the glucose, his essential fuel. All of this he had written in notebooks when he was studying for a diving-instructor certification, a course that he’d never finished. After Lauren was killed, he’d never gone back into the water.
He felt as if he were crawling against a breeze, and that confused him for longer than it should have. Of course there would be a breeze. Air didn’t just sit because it was underground. It still moved.
His thought process seemed clogged, mud in the gears, and he tried to blame whatever drug lingered in his system, but the more frightening possibility had nothing to do with that. Mental difficulties went hand in hand with physical difficulties in hypothermia. Simple thinking became complex.
He searched for a word that should have been easy to find, the one that explained what that cold cave air was doing to him, a word he’d written in one of those notebooks. He had crawled for quite a while before he came up with the word: convection. You lost heat via convection when air circulated. You lost heat via conduction when you came in contact with cold surfaces. You lost heat via radiation when you didn’t have sufficient clothing; you lost heat via evaporation when you sweat; and you lost heat via respiration when you breathed. Those were all the ways you could find yourself in a hypothermic state. Any one of them could kill you, and Mark was experiencing every one of them.
Stop thinking about all the ways it’s bad. Just concentrate on going forward. On doing the one thing you can do to help yourself. There’s nothing left of you now but the essential. The only resources you have are your mind and body. Don’t waste them.
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