Project BTB

by E. G. Ross

  Our emotional impulse was to go down the other, quieter one. Of course we knew we couldn't. We reasoned it out. First, we'd obviously passed the howler somehow coming down here-maybe by taking a by-pass tunnel when the howler was in one of its quiet phases. Maybe in there we'd find some of our original blazes. Second, if a breeze was making that sound via the flute effect, then, it being summer, we might be able to follow the draft backwards to the warmer air source. That source, Dan assured me, had to reach the outside one way or another. Third, if there was water flowing into the howler, it had to come from somewhere and maybe we could follow it out.

  We couldn't think of anything better, so we started in. Meantime, we'd come up with a way to prevent ourselves from getting permanently lost, or at least anymore lost than we already were. We lifted the idea from the old fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. Instead of using bread crumbs, which we didn't have, we dropped little bits of the notebook paper behind us to mark our passage. I gulped and hoped we wouldn't run out before we found more intact blaze marks. Despite the breezes that would whip through the caves unpredictably, the paper shreds stuck fast to the wet floor.

  Well, we hadn't been hiking for more than five or six minutes, when Dan yelled, "Look, ahead, ol' bud. Shine your headlight up there and tell me what you see."

  I stepped up beside him and aimed my light where he pointed, up the tunnel. The air was definitely hazy there. It should have made me feel better, but didn't. It was too much like looking at a dark, foggy street in some oldTwilightZone episode. My brain, by its own odd willpower, brought up Rod Serling's pressed velvet voice saying, "Imagine, if you will, two young adventurers, in over their heads, and striding down a one-way passage into . . . theTwilight Zone . "

  I forced the gloomy thought aside and tried to imagine that I was John Galt, ideal man, thinking things through, lucidly, calmly. It helped more than I expected.

  "Is it...steam?" I asked, unsure of what I was seeing.

  Dan laughed and slapped my shoulder, "Yeah, that's my guess. Keep dropping those paper bits, Hansel. Just to be safe!"

  "Guess that makes you Gretel," I said, slapping him back.

  "Sharp comeback, dear brother," he chuckled, doing a mock curtsey. "Let's go see what the Wicked Witch has got for us."

  What we got was thicker, eerier steam-and a louder howling echoing through the caves.

  My mood was on a rollercoaster. It nose-dived again within minutes, but Dan's did the opposite. Right then, if I'd been able to package his mood, I could have sold it as anti-gravity.

  After about ten minutes, the tunnel warmed up. The steam grew as heavy as airport fog. The howling was so loud at times that it was nearly deafening. It kept rising and subsiding to its own measure of time. Dan rattled on about possible causes, inventing hypothesis like other people invent gossip. I relaxed a little. One thing for sure. No animal could scream that loud. I felt myself blush, realizing how much I'd feared that the howler really might be some kind of banshee tunnel monster; the notorious cave demon. In some of us, childhood legends die hard, whether or not we've consciously decided to be Rational Men. I also realized that I was hearing a kind of wet, hissing noise mixed in with the howling. It got louder as we got closer. Dan nodded his head like everything made perfect sense to him. Maybe it did, but it unaccountably irritated me. In another thirty yards, I understood.

  The tunnel had widened into a small cavern about as big as a two-car garage. Several stalactites hung from the roof, with accompanying, squat stalagmites beneath. Dan said that parts of the system here were had to be limestone.

  "Limestone?" I asked. "But I thought this was all volcanic stuff."

  "No, you've forgotten. I mentioned it earlier when I was telling you about fold formations. The two types of geology are not mutually exclusive," he explained. "Sometimes volcanoes erupt through old seabeds, which have sections of limestone created from pressure."

  "Oh."

  The passage continued through the cavern. We could see where it exited on the other side. In the cavern, off to one side, through clouds of steam, we spotted a gurgling pool.

  Dan said, "Aha!"

  The water in the pool was draining down a hole at the bottom. In a minute, the pool was completely empty. Dan quickly backed us out of the cavern. We waited warily, peeking in. In a couple minutes, the hole started to howl and hiss. Boiling water and steam geysered into the room. In a few seconds, all activity stopped. The pool was draining again.

  "Well," I confessed, giving Dan a sideways grin, "that's my demon."

  Dan nodded and smirked. I punched his arm and he swatted at me.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 6

  "Okay, now what?" I asked, remembering that we were still lost. After all, we'd never been in this room and there were no blaze marks visible.

  Dan rubbed the stubble on his jaw. I momentarily envied the fact that hehad stubble. I didn't have much more than an anemic patch of peach fuzz on my chin. Minor things sometimes loom big when you're fifteen.

  "Hmmmm," he said, helpfully.

  "I guess we oughta continue on through, right?"

  "Yeah, it seems like we head up after we cross through the steam room. Up is the direction we want. I think."

  "Looks to me like the fog's thicker out the other side, Dan. Lot more of it than on the way in, wouldn't you say?"

  "Well, it would be," he said, thrusting his lower lip out in a show of certainty, "at least for a ways. Doesn't seem to be much of a breeze coming through here, though. Thought there'd be a steadier current."

  "Why isn't there?"

  "Not sure. Maybe the steam keeps this part of the cave warm enough to reverse the air flow locally, you know, like a high pressure weather system."

  Sounded thin to me, but I bit my tongue and didn't say anything. With me dropping more of my paper crumbs, we moved on. Dan took the lead since he knew better than me what to look for; or at least he said he did.

  Beyond the steam room, not more than sixty or seventy feet, he stopped suddenly and said, "Whoa! What the hell is this?"

  He was looking right and left, then above and below where he was standing.

  I hurried up beside him. I looked and involuntarily whistled. A perfect, oval ring of what looked like shiny stainless steel was wrapped completely around the tunnel. The ring was about six inches wide and protruded roughly an inch from the rock facing. Its existence flabbergasted me.

  "Guess we weren't the first ones to find this passage," I observed blandly.

  Dan was running his fingers over the surface.

  "Man-made, for sure. Good engineering, too. But I don't understand why it's here. What's it for? What does it do?"

  "Maybe it's part of a mining shaft," I offered.

  "Never heard of a mining operation around here. Besides, this is way too high-tech for a mine. If this is a mining shaft, then Rand doesn't believe in reason. Anyway, they wouldn't use finished metal like this for simple shoring. This is more like something-oh, like you'd see in a laboratory or an industrial fabrication facility."

  We examined the ring more closely. From some angles, it was slightly iridescent. It threw my depth perception off. When I tried to touch it once, I jammed my finger because my eyes told me it was still a couple inches away.

  "It's like I can't see it right," I said to Dan.

  "Yeah," he replied, running his palms carefully along the edge over his head.

  I imitated him and did the same along the ring's bottom.

  "Hey, look down here!"

  I was on the ground peering at the edge of the metal, from the direction in which we'd come. Right where the ring passed seamlessly into the rock, we could see what looked like writing stamped into the surface of the steel, or whatever it was.

  Dan squinted and moved his lips.

  "What does it say?" I asked.

  "Symbols of some kind," he answered, squeezing his face closer, cocking his head. "No, not symbols. I'll be a fucked monkey-it's Cyrillic!"

  "Sir
-whatik?"

  "Cyrillic. It's an alphabet. Our words are written in Roman letters, but some places in the world use these instead."

  The little red warning light was blinking like a strobe as I asked, "Likewhat places, Dan?"

  Dan looked up at me from his bent position and said slowly, "Like some Eastern European countries, and-"

  "Andwhat ?"

  "And Russia."

  Our eyes locked in silence. Insects of nervousness scampered along the skin of my arms. I didn't know how to respond. It was too wild to work in my computer. I stood up instead and did a masterful job of looking perfectly retarded. Dan the genius started to yak irrelevantly about the history of the Cyrillic alphabet and how some saint of the Slavs had started it up.

  "Dan," I interrupted his monologue.

  "Yeah?" he said, standing and brushing his pants.

  "What does this mean, this ring being here like this?"

  "Haven't a clue. But I suspect that whoever built it contracted the job to the Russians."

  "The Russians are ourenemies ," I pointed out, feeling as though I shouldn't have to. It was true, of course, back then. All this happened as the Cold War was going full bore. Almost nothing came into the United States from Russia then. They were the bad guys. They were the murdering jerks who were going to cook us and our families with nukes and then piss on our ashes.

  "Can you read Cyrillic?" I asked.

  Dan shook his head. "Been intending to get around to it, though."

  He said it like you or I would say we meant to see a movie. I remembered how easily he'd learned French. It was like he'd absorbed it simply by breathing. He never seemed to study. He remembered everything, as far as I could determine. He could instantly pronounce things right, too. If he decided to learn Russian, I was sure that he'd do it as fast and flawlessly as he'd learned French.

  We decided to give the ring one more going-over for good measure. However, we found nothing new except that the ring felt slightly cool to the touch; that is, cooler than the cave walls that were coated in condensation from the steam. Curiously, nothing seemed to condense on the ring. Dan thought this was "maxo-weirdo," because cool metal should have been an attractive condenser. As he put it, it would act like a cold can of beer on a humid summer day. There was no moisture on the ring; not a drop; not even a hint of a wet sheen. Dan said it was as though the ring was operating by his own laws of physics. He said it jokingly, but I thought there was a shade of seriousness to the remark. Or maybe it was just my emotional mind fighting with my rational mind. Why couldn't the two ever get in step?

  After a few minutes, we hoisted our packs and trudged on silently, keeping to what appeared to be the main passage, each lost in his own thoughts, but trying to watch for blaze marks. I'm sure Dan was probably doing equations of higher calculus in his head or something equally sophisticated. All I was doing was churning with confusion, fear, and anger at myself for being the way I was, getting myself into so much trouble, and at a loss as to how to get out. I consoled myself with the thought that Dan the Genius was in the same boat and that we were only teenagers, after all.

  We saw nothing else like the ring, but it turned out to be far from the weirdest experience we were to encounter. There were stranger events ahead. Without a smidgen of a clue, we were walking straight into them.

  "One thing I don't get, Dan," I said after a couple minutes, breaking the gloomy, brooding silence that had hung over us.

  Dan looked at me and cracked a pained smile, "What's that, ol' bud?"

  "How come that geyser back there was so irregular? Aren't geysers supposed to go off like clockwork, you know, like Old Faithful over at Yellowstone?"

  "Most of 'em do, but sometimes not. I read about it. Depends on the source of the water that pours into the hot places. If you've got an irregular source, then I suppose you'll get an irregular geyser. They're on record. It's not as unusual as it seems."

  "Maybe it depends on how often the pigs piss above us on the butte."

  "Yeah," he said, laughing a little too sharply, "yeah, maybe it does."

  "You know," he continued after a few seconds' pause to retie a shoelace, "there was something else about it. I took a pretty good look down that geyser hole as we passed. It was lined with polished steel, just like the metal ring."

  I stopped and stared at him.

  "Huh?"

  "That howler was no natural phenomenon."

  I stood there with my mouth hanging open, like a paralyzed fish. I couldn't think of anything to say. Dan shrugged, offering no elaboration. It was too bizarre to register on my reason meter. Either I needed a better meter, or I needed to avoid this kind of adventure. I shook my head, sighed, hitched my pack into a better position, and started walking again.

  The tunnel climbed at a gradually steepening angle. The steam was so thick that I could hardly see Dan, even though he was only a few feet ahead of me. We'd been trudging along for a few minutes when he stopped suddenly and I almost ran into him.

  "Hey, what's up?" I asked as he turned to face me.

  "Notice anything funny?"

  "If you mean that this stuff's disorienting as hell, yeah, I feel like I can barely keep my balance."

  "Hmmmmm," he said, scratching his nose with a thumb knuckle. "Must be the fog. Throws off our visual perception. They say your sight is closely tied to your balance."

  "Whatever, it makes me kind of dizzy." I brushed my hands over my eyes like you do when you run into a cobweb string in the woods.

  "Same here," he said, "except I've never actually felt dizzy in fog before."

  "Makes me feel almost-" I broke off, embarrassed to say what I was thinking.

  "Like what?"

  "Don't laugh," I said.

  "I won't."

  "It's like gravity isn't working right."

  "Uh-huh. Well, it's theoretically possible, you know."

  I didn't know. He launched into a diatribe about gravity vortexes that some scientists thought might make water run uphill and screw up compasses.

  "I thought that was all a bunch of optical illusion show-biz," I protested, remembering some local tourist sites in Southern Oregon.

  "Not everyone thinks so," he responded. "Lots of twisted stuff in the real world. Unexplained, counter-intuitive. I'm not sure it's always possible to find logical answers. I don't think man is advanced enough yet to uncover all the solutions-even when he really needs 'em. No pun intended, but man is a lot closer to the caves than he likes to believe."

  I didn't particularly like that concept.

  After a short spurt of hiking, things started to get better, though. The air cleared and the disorientation passed. We squatted our lanky frames down on opposite sides of the tunnel and broke out a little food and water. I munched some jerky and he gnawed on a piece of hard chocolate. We didn't say much and didn't take a long break. We were both eager to keep going. I think Dan was finally looking forward to getting out of those godforsaken caves. We were both wet and grimy and bruised. I wanted a hot shower and a good meal and a long sleep.

  In no more than ten minutes, we were at it again, making considerably better time now that we didn't have to act like two-thirds of the three blind mice.

  Dan had stretched his lead out quite a bit, but was in easy sight of my miner's light. This rising tunnel had few branches. Those we saw were mostly small, and all headed back down. Down was not an option anymore.

  Then I looked up and noticed that Dan's light wasn't moving. I yelled with forced cheerfulness, "Find a stop sign?"

  He didn't respond and his light stayed stationary.

  "Hey!" I jibed, "they outlawed sleeping on your feet!"

  There was still no reply. As I drew closer, I could see that Dan was standing sideways, looking at something in or on the wall of the tunnel. At first I wondered if he'd found another ring. His body angle looked odd to me, like when a camera catches someone stop-action and off balance.

  I hurried up to him and said, "What's the big idea
not answering when your buddy calls?"

  * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  "Not possible," he muttered.

  I leaned closer, trying to catch his eye.

  "Huh? What's eatin' you," I asked, waving my hand in front of his face. He looked dazed.

  "That," he said, slowly raising a finger and pointing at the wall. "Not possible."

  I looked. I'd never actually felt goosebumps rise on my flesh. I did then. On the cave wall, pointing ahead, was an orange fluorescent arrow.

  "Crap," I said. It was the kind of arrow I'd sprayed, all right. But it was the color that we'd agreed to use in theSalem caves, forty miles away.

  "Not possible," Dan mumbled several times in succession.

  I didn't like the way he kept saying it. I didn't like Dan acting that way about anything. Dan was my reality anchor. Whenhis brain started to unscrew, I was in big trouble.

  I took a deep breath and tried to clear my head of the little vines of fear that had been pushing in to tangle up my reason.

  "Look, Dan," I said, trying to put conviction into my words, "it's a coincidence. That's all. Somebody else had the same idea we did and has been in this part of Darkhorse before. It's just another entrance to Darkhorse that we didn't know about. Anyway, orange paint is as common as grass in a pasture. No big deal."

  When he didn't react, I stepped in front of him, grabbed his shoulders and shook him, speaking slowly, like to a little kid, "C'mon, buddy! Let's shift out of neutral!"

  That brought him around.

  He shook his head and grinned sheepishly.

  "Yeah, yeah, you're right," he said. "Dunno what I was thinking. All that steam and disorientation must have gotten to me back there after all."

  "Could be," I said, nodding sympathetically. "Look, let's pull it together and get the hell out of this joint. Somebody's painted us directions and we'd be stupid not to follow them."