Blind Descent

by Nevada Barr

  Every muscle in her body melted with fatigue. Aches and pains would come with rest. For the moment she felt only warm and liquid, her mind as pliant as her limbs. With a poorly concealed grunt of exhaustion, she dumped her pack and dragged herself up beside him.

  Sixty feet below, in the immense room, was a scene of rampant destruction. Breakdown littered the floor; blocks of limestone, some the size of houses, lay one on top of the other like the building blocks of a spoiled giant flung across his nursery. Amid this majestic rubble were cones and pillars of gold and burnt umber, stalactites and stalagmites that had been growing for countless ages and now lay broken and scattered.

  “Jesus,” Anna said. “Earthquake?”

  “Who knows? I’ve never seen anything like it. But the breaks are old, old, old. Whatever happened, happened a long time ago.”

  Holden joined them, his light weaving in with theirs as they looked at the magnificent ruin.

  “Yup,” Holden said after a few minutes’ study. “It looks like a bomb hit a tinker’s cart. Have you spotted the camp yet?”

  From his pack Iverson dug a secondary light source, a powerful six-cell flashlight, and played the beam over the jagged floor. Near the end of the great room, on a flat place tucked up near the left-hand wall, his light picked out the litter of humanity. Looking pathetically small and fragile in the confusion of elemental stone, six people lay in sleeping bags. The wrinkled forms were soft and shapeless, like larvae on a deserted patch of beach. The necessities of human existence—packs, stoves, water, and food—were piled neatly at one end of the clearing. The group had been there four days, one since Frieda was hurt. The camp appeared clean and well organized.

  “Another twenty minutes and vacation’s over,” Iverson said.

  They donned packs and started the tedious climb down to the cavern floor. This time Holden Tillman led.

  Underground operations had officially commenced.

  BY THE TIME they neared the camp, Anna was so tired she was stumbling. It was as if her brain, recognizing that the end was in sight, had quit holding her muscles together. The only workable mode of travel across Tinker’s Hell was boulder-hopping. At each leap, she found herself keeping her center of gravity closer to the ground. When Dr. Peter McCarty came from the camp to meet them, she was traveling on all fours, the wolfman reverting to type.

  McCarty and Tillman exchanged greetings, and introductions were muttered. Anna dredged up a nod. A handshake was beyond her. She was even too far gone to protest when McCarty took her pack to carry it the last ten yards. At that point she doubted she’d have put up much of a fight if he’d offered to carry her.

  Even with the stamp of the cave on him and five days from a showerhead, Peter McCarty was a handsome man. Not a matinée-idol pretty—Anna would have found that off-putting—but with enough flaws to keep his face interesting. His lips were chiseled but a little too thin, his jaw strong but with a crude boxiness at the angle of the bones. His voice was light but pleasant, with an adenoidal quality to it as if he suffered from a slight head cold. His curling brown hair was thinning at the hairline. Anna guessed his age to be forty, or near enough—it didn’t matter.

  He and Holden fell into a close, whispered conversation, needing to share information but not wanting to disturb the sleepers. They’d forgotten to douse their helmet lights, and feeling mildly righteous, Anna switched hers off and leached from them as she staggered in last and folded onto the floor. She was too tired even to sleep without being told to and sat lumpishly staring at them as they conversed in tones too low for her to make sense of.

  At length, Holden broke away and came over to where she waited, beyond patience and nearly in a state of catatonia.

  “Frieda?” she asked.

  “No better, no worse.”

  “Good news,” Anna said. With a wound to the head, it was. Deterioration of levels of consciousness or motor control augured evil, usually swelling or bleeding in the skull that, unchecked, would create deadly pressure.

  Holden nodded. “Peter is putting her on a hundred percent oxygen with a non-rebreather. He’s got things well in hand. He separated Frieda from the others to give her a little quiet and privacy. He wants you to bed down over near her. Don’t talk to her, he said. Let her sleep. Just be there in case she wakes up.”

  “Got it.”

  Holden pointed out the recumbent form that was Frieda Dierkz. In his shielded light, Anna could see the leg, an air-splint from foot to mid-thigh. Dr. McCarty was fitting the non-rebreather oxygen mask over the woman’s face. Frieda was fighting his attempts to help her, moving her head from side to side and moaning in such a way that Anna was overcome with an irrational fury toward her tormentor.

  Biting back words she was bound to regret, she knelt in the dirt near her friend’s head and laid her hand on her brow. “It’s me, Anna,” she said softly. “I got here as fast as I could. You couldn’t have hurt yourself in the Bahamas or Paris, could you? It had to be here. You are such a pain in the butt, Frieda.”

  “Interesting bedside manner,” McCarty said dryly.

  Frieda stopped fighting. The tension went out of her muscles, and her breathing evened out.

  “Ooh. Hey,” the doctor said. “Maybe I’ll have to give it a try.”

  Anna laughed. “Where are you from?” she asked on impulse.

  “St. Paul, Minnesota.” She couldn’t have said why, but it didn’t surprise her. “I’m glad you showed up,” McCarty said wearily. “Let’s go with the nasal cannula at six liters. I don’t want her getting agitated again.”

  Anna handed him the appropriate tubing and, when he had it in place, turned the flow to six liters per minute. He watched her carefully. She didn’t bother telling him she was an EMT. Doctors seemed to make a point of being aggressively unimpressed by that tidbit of information.

  McCarty took his patient’s pulse one last time, then turned his light on Anna’s face. She didn’t like being diagnosed, and busied herself with her pack. “Sleep,” he prescribed. “Do you need something to help you?”

  Too tired to laugh at him, she managed a “No thanks,” and was rewarded by his departure.

  She didn’t pull out her space blanket or take off her boots. Laying her head on the unkind lumps in her sidepack, she was instantly asleep.

  So deep was her unconsciousness that when she was awakened she didn’t know if minutes or days had passed. For a horrifying moment she didn’t know where she was; then, with no decrease in the horror, she did. Such was the suffocating blackness, Anna was blind, deaf, and dumb with it. Black filled her lungs, and she couldn’t get enough air. Fighting the drawstrings of her pack, she felt for and found the little blue Maglite. Clicking it on, she carved a space big enough that she could breathe. The pounding of her heart racketed in her ears, and she had to go to the john desperately; a mere Baggie seemed inadequate to the task.

  Breathing evenly, she quieted her heartbeat to a dull thunder. Through it she heard the noise that had pulled her from sleep: her name, a sound so insubstantial it could have been the whisper of a ghost. “Anna . . .” and an exhalation.

  On elbows and knees, she crawled over to Frieda. “I’m here,” she said.

  “Anna . . .” again, and something about a lake with marble clouds, and Taco throwing up on her good shoes.

  Shading the light, Anna studied her friend’s face. The skin was flushed on forehead and cheeks but white and drawn around the lips. Automatically she checked Frieda’s pupils. Equal and reactive. No battle signs showed behind the ears. No fluids leaked from ears or nostrils, and the flesh around her eyes was not discolored. McCarty would have looked at all this, Anna reminded herself; still, she checked.

  Frieda’s gaze skimmed across her face and wandered to the impossible darkness above. “Thirsty,” she said. Anna fed her sips of water, scared to lift her head lest there was a neck injury, scared of choking her to death if she didn’t.

  “Stay with me, Frieda. I came all this way. Don’t lea
ve me now,” Anna pleaded. “I’m not leaving you.”

  Frieda’s hand closed convulsively on Anna’s tee-shirt, bunching the fabric tight around her ribs. “It wasn’t an accident,” she said clearly.

  “What? What wasn’t an accident?” Anna demanded.

  “Lily pads ruined,” she whispered, and Anna could see that reason had fled.

  “Frieda,” she begged, but the woman’s eyes closed. Anna resisted a cruel urge to shake her.

  Not an accident.

  Marble clouds, dog vomit, and lily pads: Frieda was delirious. It didn’t take Freud to figure that out. But there’d been a moment’s clarity. And a reason Frieda had asked for a friend, a noncaver friend from outside.

  Anna sat back, traced her finger of light over the feet of her companions. “God, but this sucks,” she muttered. Curling herself around Frieda like a Viking’s dog on his master’s funeral ship, Anna laid her head down once more. If anyone wanted to get to Dierkz, they would have to tread on some part of Anna’s anatomy to do it. It was all she could do till morning.

  Morning was two days away.

  4

  THE NEXT TIME Anna was dragged from sleep, the effect was not so jarring. People were on the move. A lantern pushed back the dark walls until the camp seemed almost spacious. Voices softened the sepulchral stillness, and there was the smell of coffee. The odor was weak, the brew undoubtedly instant, but it was enough to stir Anna’s sluggish mind.

  Lying motionless, she watched the wakening camp. This far from the sun, all was shrouded. Shadows claimed more than light, and light cloaked as often as it revealed. Focus flickered, changeable as candle flames, as a lamp caught one plane, then another, lopping off a nose with moving shadow, sparking an eye bright as opal. Colors were fired and quenched, leaving comet trails on the retina as they passed. Beams sought out sudden horizons at varying distances, and the cavern appeared to be expanding and contracting; an uncertain and secretive world, more hidden than would ever be told.

  Anna fantasized about bringing great mercury-vapor lamps in and cranking up the wattage. The movie Interview with the Vampire had given her a similar feeling, though to a much lesser degree. She needed to see the sun rise.

  Rolling onto her side, she realized that while she slept someone had spread a space blanket over her to keep off the chill. Fear had laid down with her, and at this sign of interference, she instinctively reached for a weapon. The reflex was a mere flick of her hand, aborted before her hand had moved even a finger’s width. Here she was not a law enforcement ranger. Her assignment had been quite specific. Ladies-in-waiting didn’t customarily go heavily armed. Anna was without so much as a hat pin.

  Remembering her nocturnal exchange with Frieda, she wondered how much danger there was. What was delirium and what was the truth? That, too, was wrapped in shadow. She looked over at her friend. Frieda’s eyes were closed. If she slept, Anna didn’t want to disturb her. She lay a bit longer, taking advantage of the extended night to see what fellows she had fallen in amongst.

  Holden, Oscar, and Peter McCarty were huddled around a single lamp, heads low and close, fannies in the air. Anna guessed they were going over surveys of the cave, discussing the care of Frieda as she was subjected to the rigors of her rescue.

  A big man, his face lost in darkness, stood a few feet behind them, listening but contributing nothing. Light from the floor caught the bottom of the cup he held, the edges of two large, soft-looking hands, and the underside of a jaw bearded in short red-brown whiskers as thick and shiny as a cat’s fur. His bulk took Anna by surprise. He was more than six feet tall and easily weighed two hundred pounds. She’d thought all cavers would be lean and lithe, eel-like. She wasn’t sure whether the man’s size suited her or not. Should she follow this large subterranean specimen, she would be assured of never getting wedged in a tight spot. Anywhere he could get through would be a breeze for a person Anna’s size. Then again, should he become stuck fast when she was behind him, a considerable wall of human flesh would stand between her and freedom. It would take weeks to eat the man; he had that much meat on him.

  Behind him, closer to the cavern wall, was a woman cast in a more classic cave formation. Working by the light of two helmet lamps, facing into her camp like lanterned turtles, a lanky woman, so thin that anorexia came to mind, banged gear into packs. Her movements were abrupt, each cached item cracking in protest as she smashed it against the rest. Long straight hair, not caught back in a braid or bandana, swung around her bony shoulders with the angry switch of a mare’s tail. Every few seconds she flung it irritably back from her face. As the curtain of hair was raised and the lamps painted her face, Anna noted sharp, clear features. Each was exaggerated just enough that the woman would never be considered truly pretty. Her nose was well shaped and large, her jaw thin, jutting slightly and ending in a squared-off chin with a hint of a dimple. The widely spaced eyes were long, exotic, and slightly unnatural looking. Her mouth was her best feature. The upper lip was well cut with a cupid’s-bow fullness, the lower pouted but so girlishly it charmed rather than irked. Anna guessed she was in her late twenties.

  “How is Frieda doing?”

  Anna rolled over to see a woman hunkered down on her heels not three feet behind her. Anna had neither heard her coming nor sensed her presence. For protection, Frieda would have been better off with a Lhasa apso, she thought sourly.

  “She’s going to be fine,” she said firmly, hoping Frieda could hear and take comfort.

  The uninvited guest nodded slowly. She had a round bland face and dark hair pulled back under a bandana that had once been green. The kerchief was tied across her forehead in the fashion of pirates, artists, and outdoorswomen. “Frieda is one tough lady,” she said after giving the matter some thought.

  Bovine, Anna thought, but it wasn’t an insult. The woman brought to mind not the cow-like traits of stupidity or of being easily led, but of solidity and being slow to anger. The image was helped along by dark brown eyes, black and liquid in the dimness, and her size. She was nearly a match for the bearded man. Unfolded, she was probably close to five-ten with broad hips and heavy thighs. She wore shorts and a white tee-shirt, the sleeves rolled above her shoulders. A soft layer of fat hid the muscle, but Anna was willing to bet she was terrifically strong.

  “Zeddie Dillard,” she said, and stuck out her hand. Damp hair curled from her armpits, and Anna was impressed. Zeddie wasn’t more than twenty-four, yet she was as comfortable as an old hippie.

  “Anna Pigeon.”

  Clanking cut into their exchange of pleasantries, and both looked to where the skinny woman knocked a cookstove into its component parts.

  “Tantrums on the River Styx?” Anna asked.

  “That’s the doctor’s wife,” Zeddie replied with a careful lack of inflection. “And that’s what’s got her so pissed off.”

  “That she’s Peter McCarty’s wife?”

  “That she’s the doctor’s wife.”

  “Ah.”

  “Zeddie Dillard, amateur psychiatrist and oracle to the stars,” the woman said, and laughed. “Coffee?”

  Anna was warming right up to Ms. Dillard. “Cream?” she asked hopefully.

  “Better. Magic white powder that turns into cream if you stir it with a little plastic stick. It might not work down here,” she added as she rose to her feet. “All there is to stir with is the community spoon.”

  “I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve visited the ladies’ room,” Anna said.

  Zeddie took a flashlight and used it to point out a black gateway between two sizable blocks of stones. “Unisex johns. Easier on the cave,” she said. “Put that pointy rock in the path. Privacy guaranteed.”

  Destination confirmed, Anna worked her way up from the ground. Everything hurt. The aggressively three-dimensional nature of caves ensured that she had been battered equally from all directions. She felt as if she’d been beaten up by experts. Muscles unused for decades cried their lament as she hobbled toward the pow
der room. Bruises made themselves felt in places that never came into contact with anything more abusive than a down comforter or silk underpants.

  Nothing was easy.

  Anna was accustomed to the practice of cat-holing, digging tidy holes for waste and covering them. She’d burned enough toilet paper in the wilderness to raise the stock of Scott Tissue a point or two. And she knew why it wouldn’t suffice. None of the normal elements of the terrestrial world were at work here, no self-cleaning features built in. Pack it in; pack it out. With stoicism if not good cheer, she completed her toilette as she’d been told: a neat rectangle of aluminum foil, Lisa’s “burrito bag.” Anna laughed in spite of herself.

  Zeddie was waiting with fresh-brewed water. Anna added brown powder and white powder and told herself it was coffee with cream. The group had gathered around an upended flashlight that took the place of a campfire. The people she’d observed earlier were there, as well as another man who had not been in camp before. In his forties, he looked in good physical condition. His hair was blond and cut short, reminiscent of the Nazis in World War II movies, but his face wasn’t hard. If anything, he looked slightly timid, slightly aggrieved. He was clad in a muscle shirt and cutoffs so short Anna made a mental note not to get behind him on a steep climb unless she wanted to get to know him a whole lot better.

  Zeddie saw where she was looking and muttered, “Brent Roxbury. Fortunately for Brent, there are no fashion police in a cave.”

  “Is Frieda any better?” Roxbury asked, interrupting their less-than-kind gossip. The question sounded genuinely concerned, and Anna felt mildly guilty. To make it up to him, she forgave him the short-shorts.

  “The same,” she replied, sorry she didn’t have better news. As Anna looked at the ring of concerned faces, Frieda’s words of the night before seemed absurd. It was possible she had been thinking clearly and yet had been mistaken. If a blow to the head could erase the trauma, surely it could scramble the facts. Frieda might have been recalling an event from the delirium, a dream so real that in a confused state it would be remembered as gospel. Memories could and were implanted, often so deeply that even faced with proof that an event never actually occurred, a person couldn’t shake the feeling from muscle and bone that it had happened.