by Will Hobbs
When I was finally able to move again, the clock said 3:45. For thirty-some minutes, I’d been completely paralyzed. I sat up, put my feet on the floor, tried standing up. Everything seemed to work.
I got back in bed, curled up on my side, and fell sound asleep. When I woke, I felt like I’d been mauled by a bear. I couldn’t remember a worse night in my entire life. The nightmare about being mistaken for dead, I could live with that. I’d been living with it for years. The part about being paralyzed—had that really happened, or had I dreamed that part, too?
Quinn was already awake. He was sitting on the edge of his bed and pulling on his jeans. “I didn’t know you were such a thrasher,” he said. “You kept mumbling something about Custer. What was that all about?”
“Custard,” I said.
“That’s kind of unusual.”
Suddenly I could see the way to get past the tension of the night before and get us back on track. “Hey, Quinn,” I said. “Are you still up for exploring the Halls of the Dead?”
“Are you?”
“What’s the use of discovering a cave if you aren’t going to explore it?”
“You aren’t spooked by it anymore?”
“I dreamed about it last night. We could even see in the dark—that must mean something.”
“Maybe you’ll be able to. I think I’ll bring along some serious illumination.”
18
Attila, Go Home
WE WOLFED DOWN SOME breakfast and were out the door in half an hour. This time we jumped on our mountain bikes instead of our road bikes. We’d need them for where we were going.
Half a mile down the Mickelson Trail, we passed the foot of the Carvers’ driveway. Attila was there again, on the lookout, almost like he was waiting for us.
Just like before, the war dog fell in alongside me. “Go home!” I yelled. “Attila, go home!”
Nothing doing.
“He’ll peel off,” Quinn said. “Don’t pay any attention to him.”
Attila didn’t peel off. He followed us all the way into Custer and whined when we went into the Wal-Mart to buy the “serious illumination” Quinn was after. We bought headlamps to rig on our bike helmets and lantern flashlights to hold in our hands.
By now I’d run out of allowance money, but Quinn was still flush from busing dishes. I told him I’d pay him back. His reply: “Fuhgeddaboudit.”
From the checkout, we could see Attila waiting outside the sliding doors. Craftily, we exited the back of the building. From there we sneaked around the side and practically tiptoed to the bike racks. Wouldn’t you know, the war dog was keeping an eye on our bikes from the front entrance. He bounded over to us and planted himself at my feet with a “What’s next?” expression on his face. I asked Quinn if he thought we should call the Carvers.
“There goes our day if you do. This dog’s way smart. He knows how to get home. I still think he’ll peel off, but if he doesn’t, what does it really matter?”
We made another stop at a convenience store, for bottled water, Gatorade, and snacks. Just west of Custer, with Attila still sticking like glue, we left the pavement and charged up a dirt Forest Service road.
Logging had fallen off in the Black Hills, but the roads left behind make it easy to get just about anywhere. We’d discovered the cave the summer before while messing around at the headwaters of French Creek. As the crow flies, the entrance was only five miles from home.
The riding began to get steep, and for some reason, I started feeling the pain. Quinn was opening up a good lead on me, and not because I was letting him. In fact, I kept trying to keep up. I could feel the strength draining from my legs like water out of a leaky bucket. My windpipe was burning. My lungs couldn’t get enough air. I was glad I had my inhaler in my pocket. I might have had to use it.
Quinn looked back from time to time, but never slowed up. Maybe he thought I was faking it. Finally I couldn’t see him anymore. I kept riding as best I could, the war dog close by my side and running as tirelessly as ever. It almost seemed like he was wondering why I was having trouble.
The punishment continued until I finally caught up with Quinn. He was waiting in the shade of a big ponderosa. He had found the spot where we had to start walking.
I pulled in, gulping air, dismounted, and went to ground. Quinn’s smile was full of doubts. “What’s up with you?”
“You blistered me, that’s what. You were merciless.”
“C’mon, you were doggin’ it. Quit pretending, Brady, you coulda blown by me anytime.”
“I’m tellin’ you, I was out of gas. Maybe I’m losing it. Fine by me if I am.”
“I thought you said the buzzing didn’t really hurt. So what’s the problem?”
“Problem? Quinn, I’ve been infected by germs from outer space.”
“Infected? Germs? What are you talking about? Germs are bad bacteria. What you’ve got is more like the kind the professor told us about, the ones that help you digest food. Your bacteria are a gift no one else has. They make it possible for you to be incredible. You aren’t talking about going to see the doctor, are you?”
“Are you kidding? They’d put me in quarantine for weeks, months, maybe even years, until they developed an antibiotic that could kill off space germs.”
“There you go again.”
“Okay, space bacteria. I wouldn’t be playing any basketball, that’s for sure.”
“Quarantine…you’re onto something there. The government would keep you in some high-tech containment bubble, and we’d never even know where. Probably at some secret base in Nevada. You’re right, we shouldn’t tell anybody about your microbes, not even the professor.”
“I wasn’t thinking I would.”
“Meanwhile, if nature has dealt you a winning hand, you might as well play it. Instead of hoping it’s gone away, you should be hoping it’s only recharging its batteries.”
Right then I thought about telling Quinn about my freeze-up episode during the night, but I wasn’t sure I hadn’t dreamed it, and he didn’t want to hear about it anyway. I got some Gatorade out of my pack, sat in the shade for a few minutes, and drank it down. “I’ve got my wind back,” I announced. “Onward!”
As we were stashing the bikes in the trees, I tried telling Attila to wait behind with them, but of course he wouldn’t. We hiked across a mountainside that had burned back in the summer of 2000. The forest fire started near Jewel Cave and torched about 85,000 acres. It skipped over the draw where we’d found the Halls of the Dead.
We had a landmark in mind, a giant ponderosa shaped like a slingshot that would help us find the entrance to our cave. If the distant face of Crazy Horse lined up perfectly in the fork of the pine, you were almost there.
It was rough picking our way across the burn, through all the timber the wind had brought down. I thought it would be even rougher for Attila, but he turned out to be nimble as a cat.
We took a rest with a panoramic view—Crazy Horse to the northeast, the town of Custer below us to the east, and beyond the town, French Creek winding across Custer State Park and into the rolling prairies. Attila stayed at my side. I stroked the crown of his head; he licked my face. “That’s a Carver you’re petting,” Quinn pointed out.
“I know. I can’t believe it.” I poured some water out of one of my bottles, and Attila lapped it up in midair.
Blink, and from this spot, you could see Custer’s column advancing up French Creek in July of 1874, two summers before the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He brought a thousand men along on his camping trip into the Hills, ten companies of horse soldiers and two of infantry. They had a hundred and fifty wagons loaded with supplies and five hundred beef cattle for fresh meat.
The expedition included two miners and a geologist. Custer brought them along in case of any discoveries of gold they weren’t supposed to be looking for—wink, wink. Find gold they did, and Custer sent a man on horseback to speed the news to the nearest telegraph station. Hordes of gold seekers p
oured into the Black Hills, off-limits since the treaty signed only six years earlier had promised it to the Sioux for “as long as the rivers run and grass grows, and trees bear leaves.” Three years after Custer’s expedition, their sacred Black Hills, and a whole lot more, were taken away from them.
“Hey, Brady, I can see the wheels turning. What’s on your mind?”
“History.”
“Well, let’s go make some.”
We were getting close to the cave. The adrenaline began to pump, and I jumped ahead of Quinn. I even found our marker tree, the big ponderosa with the view of Crazy Horse’s distant face through the fork.
The entrance to our cave was just as we’d left it, a small hole in the mountainside camouflaged by a leaning tree and an overhanging rock. A strong wind was rushing out of the Halls of the Dead. My fear of the place came rushing back, too. I could feel it in the roots of my teeth.
I had to get ahold of myself. I have too much cave experience, I told myself, to be this afraid. We both did, and Quinn would be with me. We’d been in Wind Cave together, Jewel Cave, Rushmore Cave, and Sitting Bull Crystal Caverns.
As we kicked off our hiking boots and pulled on our warm clothes, we weren’t saying a thing. Even Quinn seemed real nervous. All that caving you’re talking about, I reminded myself, was on guided tours. This isn’t going to be anything like a guided tour.
We sat down and put our boots back on, double-tying the laces. My mind was going a mile a second. The guys who discovered those famous caves, do you think they were members of some caving club? No way, they were guys like us. Go big or go home, Brady.
All the while, I was hoping Quinn was questioning our sanity. We hadn’t even left a note back home about where we were going.
Stop it, I told myself. What are the chances an accident would happen to both of us?
By now we were pulling on our rain gear, tops and bottoms. The only thing we remembered for sure about our cave was that it was cold and damp. We rigged our headlamps onto our bike helmets, pulled on our gloves, and threw on our backpacks. After losing mine at the lake, I’d brought along my old one, ratty but serviceable. “What about Attila?” I asked.
“He’s not crazy enough to follow us inside.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“What does it matter? You ready?” Quinn’s jaw was clenched, but he sounded a little shaky.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” We flicked on our lights, and Quinn slithered inside, supple as a snake. I wriggled in after him.
Behind us, Attila had only his head inside the entrance and was whining something awful. “Stay,” I ordered. “You got the right idea. Stay, Attila!”
The war dog wasn’t about to be left behind. In he came.
19
The Halls of the Dead
ATTILA AT MY SIDE, I waited inside the mouth of the cave as Quinn scrambled down the slope, all strewn with loose rock, into the Halls of the Dead. From the murky landing below, Quinn motioned for me to follow. I remembered how much I hadn’t enjoyed being here, in the cold and the dark and the confinement, nobody knowing where we were.
Attila’s ears were on alert, and the hair along his spine was standing up. He was looking at me like, Are you sure about this?
I started down. Attila whined, and then he followed.
“So far, so good,” Quinn said. “This is as far as we could get the first time. Then we came back the next day with those junky flashlights and got a little farther.”
I pointed my big lantern flashlight down the cramped tunnel leading out of the landing. Water was dripping from the ceiling to a muddy floor. “I remember,” I said. “The second time we got to a small room where we could stand up.”
Quinn led the way into the low passage. Our bike helmets crunched and scraped whenever they struck the ceiling. “How you doing?” Quinn called over his shoulder. From behind me Attila whined as if in answer.
“I wish our headlamps gave more light, so we could put these flashlights away in our packs. It’d be better to have both hands free.”
“The headlamps are more for playing cards in a tent, I guess.”
No whining, I thought as Quinn got going again. Leave that to Attila. You got yourself into this, so suck it up.
At last we made it to the room we remembered. It was no bigger than my parents’ walk-in closet. “From here on,” Quinn declared, “it’s all uncharted territory.” Quinn pointed his beam into the passage leading deeper into the cave. The tunnel was narrower than the one we’d come through. “How does it look to you?”
Like the entrance to a tomb, I thought. “Like the gut of a snake,” I replied.
Quinn stooped low and led onward. We followed the passage as it wound back and forth like a sidewinder, up and down like a roller coaster. With all the duck walking, my backbone felt like it was breaking. Quinn stopped for a rest, finally, at a dry rock as flat as a park bench. My Achilles tendons were tight as bowstrings.
Attila wasn’t so anxious anymore. He lay down beside me and rested his head on his paws. “Don’t you wish you had his coat?” I asked Quinn. “All these layers I’m wearing, and the cold’s pouring right through.”
Quinn tugged at his chin strap and pointed his light down the tunnel. “We’re cold because we stopped. The answer is to keep moving.”
As we started out again, the passage began to widen. Before long we had standing room, a huge relief. I stopped to rest, but Quinn sped ahead like he was on an Easter egg hunt. His lights turned a corner and disappeared. If he hit a dead end, it would’ve been fine by me. I was still feeling weak. We could call it good and head for home.
Was Quinn waiting or was he on the move? I stopped and listened. Attila held his breath, too. We heard faint footfalls. I got going and hustled to catch up. When Attila and I finally did, Quinn was standing still like he’d been turned to stone.
He didn’t say a thing, just let me come up beside him and shine my light around. “Stay back, Attila,” I warned. We were standing above a room three or four times bigger than my house. “How’s this for a discovery!” Quinn cried, and slapped me on the back.
“Major discovery,” I agreed. The cavern below, damp and dripping, was exquisite and fantastic beyond belief. It had hundreds upon hundreds of stalagmites, stalactites, and much more: columns, formations that hung like draperies, freestanding sculptures of smooth white stone. I was glad, after all, that I’d talked myself into this craziness.
“It needs a name, Brady.”
“Palace of the Dead King.”
“Perfect.”
“You hungry, Quinn?”
“Let’s dine in the palace.”
We found a way down through enormous blocks of limestone fallen from the ceiling. The blocks weren’t covered with calcite like the rest of the cavern, maybe because they’d fallen recently. I pointed my beam at the ceiling and saw fractures among blocks that hadn’t come down yet. If one of those things broke loose, it could crush a T-rex.
Out in the middle of the palace floor, we sat on a marble slab of white flowstone with a high back to it that looked uncannily like a throne for our dead king. He must have been something of a giant. We pulled out our lunch. It didn’t take long to devour the pb&js we’d slapped together at home, two apiece. Quinn was amused when I gave one of mine to Attila. “What is it with you two? It’s like a boy and his dog, only he’s not yours.”
“Beats me what’s gotten into him. Let’s explore the palace.”
We discovered four passages leading out. We knew they went places because every one had a strong airflow. It was mind-boggling to try to imagine the complexity of passages in this one layer of limestone, like cracks running every which way through a shattered windshield.
One of the passages had standing room. Five minutes down it, we made out the eerie, faraway sound of running water.
Twenty yards farther on, we started down an incline. The sound of the ever-louder water led us on. The pitch got steeper. “Don’t slip,” Quinn said.
As the rush of water became a roar, Quinn froze in his tracks at a threshold of pure blackness. “Careful,” he said. “There’s room for you to stand right beside me, but nowhere else.” I inched my way toward him, Attila close on my heels.
I told Attila to keep back and he did. As I joined Quinn, I found myself above a gaping pit. It had to be eighty feet across. Halfway around to the left, the waterfall we’d been hearing shot out of a hole in the wall and dropped a hundred feet or more into the pit’s inky waters. “Another huge discovery,” Quinn said. “Let’s call it the Abyss of Hades.”
“You nailed it.”
We were standing on a ledge that made almost a complete circle around the top of the pit. Quinn ran his beam around the right side of the ledge, and I added mine. Halfway around the circle was the mouth of a tunnel. “We can explore that if we can reach it,” Quinn said.
The ledge between us and the tunnel was littered with broken rock. It was also slick with dripping water. At its narrowest, the ledge was about two feet wide. “That’s doable,” Quinn said.
Why push it? I thought, but what I said was “I guess so, as long as we don’t slip. The ledge kind of tilts down.”
“No way we’re gonna slip. You could do it in your sleep.”
I pointed my beam into the pit. The utter blackness all but swallowed the light. If we fell in, there’d be no climbing out. We would tread water until the cold killed us, which wouldn’t take long. “Must be a sinkhole,” I said. “Like that one all those Ice Age mammoths down at Hot Springs fell into and couldn’t get out of. If we fall in, it’s going to be a mammoth mistake.”