“I’ve got a Snickers bar and a bottle of water,” said Art. “If I can just pull off that loaves-and-fishes trick I read about in the Bible, we’ll have bushels of leftovers. Oh, this might help — the map Methuselah the Caver faxed me.”
“What good’s that gonna do? We already found the cave. Unfortunately.”
“It’s not a map to the cave, Smarty Pants, it’s a map of the cave. The interior. The part where we happen to be trapped like rats. Or bats.”
“But we’re sandwiched between two cave-ins, with nothing in the middle but fifty yards of tunnel and that damn grotto.” Art studied the map silently. “Face it, Art,” I said. “We’re sealed up in here. No way out.”
Art aimed his headlamp straight into my eyes, blinding me. “You’re just gonna give up?” he said. “Me, I’m not ready to throw in the towel.” With that, he spun and began picking his way back through the debris, back toward the grotto.
“Art, wait. Slow down.”
“You hurry up.” He kept moving, his lights sweeping every square foot of the tunnel’s walls and ceiling. But his pace slackened slightly.
I caught up with him in the grotto, just in time to see the beam of his light point upward at the grotto’s ceiling and disappear into a circular opening about the diameter of a beach ball. “Aha!” he said.
“Did you know that was there?”
“Not until I checked the map. Back there when you were busy kissing our asses good-bye.”
“Sorry. Does it go out?”
“Don’t know.”
“What’s the map say?”
“Says ‘Unexplored.’ Guy who made the map used to be pretty hefty. I’m guessing the word ‘Unexplored’ shows up on most of his maps.”
“So maybe it leads to another entrance — but maybe it just meanders around inside the mountain for a while and then peters out?”
“Maybe. Do I need to get all hardass with you again, or are you feeling optimistic and exploratory?”
“Let’s go.”
That proved easier said than done. The opening was about ten feet overhead. Even if I stood on Art’s shoulders, I doubted I could reach it. I was about to suggest we start hauling in rocks from the tunnel — we certainly had enough debris to build a big pile — when Art clambered up onto the stone shelf and began studying the wall above, playing his light across the surface from various angles. “Hand me that case, will you, Bill?”
I stared at him, dumbfounded. “You found some evidence up there?”
“No, genius. I need something to stand on.”
I handed it up, and he stood the rectangular case — a glorified tackle box, basically — up on end. Reaching slightly up and to one side, he grabbed a small knob of rock with his left hand. With his right, he stretched straight up and jammed two fingers into a narrow vertical crack in the wall. With a grunt, he levered himself up off the box, the toes of his hiking boots somehow latching onto projections I hadn’t even seen. Once he had both feet up off the evidence kit, he extricated his fingers from the crack, reached a foot higher, and inserted his entire right hand into the crack. As first one foot, then the other, sought purchase on the wall, I saw him strain. His left hand lost its grip and he slipped, smacking against wall and dangling by his right hand, still wedged tightly in the crack. He cried out in pain, and his feet frantically scrambled against the rock. Instinctively I climbed onto the stone bench, took his boots in my hands, and hoisted upward with all my strength. With agonizing slowness, his boots reached the level of my chest, then my shoulders; finally, I found myself standing with my arms fully extended, quaking with the effort. Just as I was about to gasp out a warning about my strength failing, I felt the load lighten, and then he was gone, his legs disappearing up through the opening in the roof of the grotto.
I kept expecting him to reappear, and when he didn’t after a few moments, I felt the panic returning. Finally, his head popped back into view. “Damn, that was tough. Thanks for the help. I thought for a minute there I was gonna leave that hand behind.”
I was still panting, partly from exertion, partly from fear. “No problem. Anything encouraging up there?”
“Come see for yourself.”
I considered the rock wall facing me. “Hell, Art, I can’t climb this. I can’t believe you could.”
“My wife gave me some visits to a climbing gym last Christmas. I think she was hoping I’d get hooked on climbing and fall off a cliff somewhere.”
“Well, unless there’s a ladder up there you can send down — or unless you want to trade places and push me up — you might have to go on without me after all.”
“And break up this winning team? No way. How big’s your waist?”
“Thirty-four. No, more like thirty-six these days. What’s that—” A glimmer of understanding began to dawn on me. “How ’bout yours, Slim?”
“None of your business. But throw me your belt and we’ll see if we’re fat enough.” I took off my leather belt, refastened the buckle to make a hoop, and tossed it upward. Art snagged it, then disappeared. When he reappeared, he had fastened the tapered end of my belt into the buckle of his own. As he lowered one end of the linked belts, I saw that they added up to a good six feet long. “Let’s hope that buckle holds,” he said. “The rivet looks pretty stout, but then again, so do you.”
Art sat on the lip of the circular opening, bracing his feet on the opposite edge. Wrapping a loop of leather around one wrist, he gripped the strap with both hands. “Try to feel for footholds,” he said. “I’m not sure I can deadlift you all the way up.” I nodded, climbing onto the evidence kit. Standing on tiptoe, I could reach just enough of the strap to take a turn around one wrist, as Art had done. He nodded. “Ready?”
“Ready. No, wait. Shouldn’t we bring the evidence kit?”
He considered this. “We’ve got bigger problems now than evidence gathering. Besides, I don’t think we can — you’re gonna need both hands to get up.”
“Yeah, but we might need to stand on it again. Lucky you’re trapped with a Ph.D.” Stepping down off the case, I bent down and unlaced both of my hiking boots. Splicing the two laces together gave me a piece of cord nearly ten feet long. I knotted one end to the case’s handle and hitched the other to one ankle. Then I climbed back up, put my flashlight in my pocket, and took hold of the dangling belt again. “Heave-ho,” I said, and he did.
Much grunting and scrambling later, I felt one of Art’s hands grasp first one wrist, then the other. He hauled me through the opening and landed me like some giant fish, thrashing and gasping. I undid the loop of belt from my now-purplish hand, fished out my light, and set it beside me, pointing upward. As I reeled in the evidence kit, I surveyed my new surroundings. We were in a disappointingly small chamber, narrow and low-ceilinged. I looked at Art. “You sure this is progress?”
He was wearing his poker face, but I thought I saw a trace of a smile at the edges of his mouth. “Let’s take a look around, see what we see.”
It didn’t take long to spot what he was smiling about. “Okay, I see footprints going around that bend in the wall. But do they go anywhere besides a dead end?”
“What do you think? Study the tracks, Sherlock.”
I did. “Okay, I see prints going in both directions. But the last ones are leading away from here.”
“Which means…?”
“This must go somewhere.”
“Bingo. Unless, of course, we find Injun Joe’s shriveled corpse wedged in a cul-de-sac up ahead.”
“Or Lester Ballard’s lying in wait to have his way with us.”
“Lester? I thought Lester only had a thing for the female body.”
“These days,” I said, “you never know. Forensics makes for strange bedfellows.”
CHAPTER 25
We didn’t find Injun Joe or Lester, but it wasn’t long before we came to a cul-de-sac, or at least a crevice we couldn’t fit through. The tracks we’d been following led straight through it, so it wasn’t as if
we’d missed a turn or side passage. There were none to miss in any case — we’d kept one pair of eyes on the tracks and another on the walls and roof of the passage. From the opening in the top of the quartz grotto, it led here and only here. It had seemed to be sloping upward, too, which had given us hope that we were slanting toward the surface. For all we knew, at this moment we might be standing within a hundred yards of an exit — but it might as well have been a hundred miles.
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” said Art glumly. “We know these aren’t the sheriff’s tracks. At least, not unless he passed through here about eighty pounds ago.”
“So now what? Do we go back down and try to dig our way out to the church, or do we dig for the back door, or just stay here till we get skinny enough to squeeze through?”
“I don’t know anymore, Bill. I’m out of ideas.”
I studied the crevice more closely. The problem wasn’t actually that we were too fat, although it wouldn’t have hurt either of us to lose twenty pounds. But fat could be squeezed through almost any opening, given enough effort, as Sheriff Kitchings and his ample belly had demonstrated the day we recovered the body from the grotto. Our problem wasn’t flesh, it was bone — the unyielding dimensions of our skeletal structures. If there wasn’t room, there wasn’t room.
I studied the geometry of the crevice. Its widest point — located about waist-high — was roughly ten inches across. The slot tapered gradually above and below that point; down by my knees and up by my chest, it narrowed to barely six inches across. Maybe, just maybe, if we went at it sideways, we could worm our way through in the center.
I bent from the waist until my chest was parallel to the floor, then rotated my trunk until my shoulders were aligned vertically, like the slit. Easing forward, slowly and awkwardly, I inserted my head in the slot. It would clear, though by an uncomfortably small margin. I tend toward claustrophobia, so the idea of wedging my body into the narrow crack — which led into unknown darkness — was only slightly more appealing than remaining trapped where we were. Think, man, think, I told myself.
I knew my cranial dimensions — I’d measured my head countless times in undergraduate classes, demonstrating how to use a pair of calipers. From the center of my eyebrow ridge to the back of my skull, my head measured 187 millimeters, or seven and a quarter inches. The width, on the other hand, was only 165 millimeters, or six and a half inches. Either way, there was no risk of getting my head stuck, I knew. The real problem would come lower down, with my chest. I’d have to rotate my shoulders to slide them through the vertical slot, and I wasn’t at all sure the opening was big enough for my rib cage. “I wonder if babies have to problem-solve like this to fit through the birth canal,” I muttered, “or if they’re just squished out by uterine contractions and plenty of slime.”
“I’d feel better about our chances if we had a big jar of Vaseline to grease you up with,” Art said. “But I took that out of the evidence kit last night so I could fry up some chicken. Clean forgot to put it back.”
Claustrophobic or not, I couldn’t procrastinate any longer. Bending over, I easily threaded my head through the gap. My shoulders and arms passed through easily enough, too, once I’d twisted my trunk ninety degrees. Now for the chest; if I could manage that, the pelvis and legs should be simple. “Okay, Art, I might need your help in a second here,” I grunted as I wriggled forward. I’d barely squeezed past my collarbones when I ground to a halt. Panic gripped my chest as tightly as the rock did. “I don’t think I can make it,” I said, wriggling back out.
“Try exhaling as much as you can,” Art suggested. “That’ll make your rib cage contract.”
“Make me asphyxiate, too,” I said.
“Not if I can push you on through.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Well, if you’re sure you won’t fit, just click your heels together three times and say ‘There’s no place like home,’ and I’ll yank you back real fast.”
“And what if I won’t budge? I won’t last more than a minute or two if I can’t breathe and you can’t get me loose.”
“I’ll get you loose. Count on it.”
I tried to visualize it, but all I could see in my mind’s eye was a pair of alternating images: one was my head, shoulders, and arms wiggling frantically on the far side of the crevice; the other was my legs kicking desperately on the other side, as Art pushed and pulled in vain. The disjoint halves of me were like images from a cartoon, or an old-fashioned television set whose vertical hold was wrong by half a screen. Finally I forced the images from my mind and made my shaky voice as calm as I could. “You think this is our best chance, Art?”
There was a long silence. “Yeah, Bill, I do.”
“Okay. Once I get my head and shoulders through, count to three while I empty my lungs, then lift my legs and push like hell.”
I took off my jacket and tossed it through the crevice; that took a whopping tenth of an inch off my girth, and I knew the margin between success and failure might well be that narrow. I considered shucking my shirt, too, but knew I’d leave a lot of skin on the rocks if I went through bareback. Taking a long, deep breath, I held it for a few seconds, squeezing my chest and abdominal muscles tight, putting as much pressure on my lungs as I could stand without blacking out. By forcing more oxygen into my blood, like a pearl diver, I could go longer before needing a breath.
Or so I hoped.
After four or five seconds I pursed my lips and blew hard, until my lungs felt completely empty. Then I sealed my lips, worked my cheeks and jaw like a bellows, and managed to draw a bit more air from my chest up into my mouth. I quickly forced that out my lips, then repeated the maneuver twice more. By now I felt on the verge of imploding. I thrust myself into the opening, willed myself to contract within myself, and wriggled as best I could while Art lunged forward, gripping my legs.
I felt myself slide forward an inch, two inches…and then I stopped, wedged tight. My rib cage was pinned in a vise, and the vise’s grip felt deadly. Desperately I struggled to knock my heels together, the signal for Art to pull me back, but something — maybe the rock, maybe Art — had my legs immobilized. Oh God, what a way to die, I thought as I began to suffocate.
Then came a sensation like a locomotive slamming into my knees. I opened my mouth in an involuntary scream, but there was no air to carry it. My chest and spine ground forward, and I thought I heard something crack, and then I found myself lying in a heap on the floor, my shirt hanging open, its buttons smashed and torn off. I felt battered, maybe even partly broken, but I was on the other side. And I could breathe. I closed my eyes, took in a huge, agonizing, delicious breath of air, savored it greedily, and let it out with a loud groan.
When I opened my eyes, I winced. A blinding light was shining directly into them from just inches away. From my side of the crevice, not Art’s. “Hello, Doc,” rumbled a familiar voice. “Looks like I got here just in the nick of time.”
I shielded my eyes and stared up at the big man looming over me. It couldn’t be coincidence that brought him here. I had been far too trusting of Waylon and his homespun routine, I realized; he’d just been stringing me along, biding his time, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. I didn’t know if he was acting on his own, or on Jim O’Conner’s orders, but I knew our luck had run out.
“Hello, Waylon,” I said flatly, too defeated even to plead. “Guess you’re here to take care of us, huh?”
“Well, you might could call it that. Just doing my job, really.”
“Right,” I said. “Nothing personal, just business, is that it?”
“Let’s quit jawin’ about it, Doc, and just get you and Art to a better place as quick as we can.”
“A better place? You talking about heaven? Give me a break, Waylon. If you’re fixing to kill us, at least spare us the Sunday School euphemisms.”
“The whats? Fixin’ to kill you? What the hell are you talkin’ about, Doc? You done hit your head in this cave?”
“You’re not here to kill us? Then what are you doing here? What about the explosions, the cave-ins?”
He set the light down on a shelf, pointing at himself. As usual, he was dressed head to toe in camouflage. He held his arms out, palms up, I guess to show he was unarmed, though I knew there were probably several weapons tucked into each of his many pockets. “Big Jim ast me to keep a eye out for you, make sure you didn’t get into any trouble you couldn’t handle. I heard y’all was up at Cave Springs Church, so I come up to check on you’uns. Time I got there, the entrance was all blocked up. I didn’t know if you know’d about this other entrance — hell, I didn’t know if y’all was even alive still — but all I knowed to do was get in here as far as this squeeze and start hollerin’, see if anybody hollered back. Figured if I could get you this close, I could get you out somehow.”
I felt ashamed. Far from being too trusting, I’d been way too suspicious. “Well, I’m out, but I don’t think Art can squeeze through the way I did. You got an idea how we can get him out?”
“I got me some blasting caps in the back of the truck, but that seems a little chancy right here — roof looks kindly unstable.”
Blasting caps? Maybe I hadn’t been too suspicious after all. “Waylon,” I said, “we’ve had enough blasting to last us awhile.”
“Yeah, I reckon so. I b’lieve we’ll have to get him out the old-fashioned way.”
Art’s voice echoed hollowly from the other side of the crevice. “What, you gonna starve me out? That might take about six months.”
Waylon laughed. “Naw, ain’t got time for that. Got to get you’uns back on the job quicker’n ’at.” He fished around in the rear quadrant of his capacious pants and hauled out a hand sledge and a stout chisel. The man was like a human Swiss Army knife. “Few good whacks with this ought to do the trick. Y’all might want to step back aways, in case I underestimate my own strength.” Art and I both gave him plenty of room.
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