Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  “An answer that could make you a very rich man,” Gregor snapped.

  “What is it exactly you guys are after?” Tom asked.

  “None of your fucking business,” Kelly said. “Shut up unless you’re spoken to.”

  But Gregor said, “You’re a scientist, Burke. You might just comprehend it.”

  “Hey,” Kelly warned. “It’s just like back in The Castle, Gregor. Keep him dumb, ignorant, and happy, and we won’t have no problems.”

  The pale man ignored Kelly, his face suddenly flushing. “It’s best understood mathematically, but I’ll give it to you in laymen’s terms,” he said, then went on in the tone of a young professor addressing an upper-level class. “It goes back to the Egyptians. They were the first to refine metal ores. They were the first to make alloys, mixing gold with silver to create the jewelry Pharaoh wore.

  “At the same time,” Gregor continued, “the Greeks were refining their method of logical inquiry, culminating in Aristotle’s first science experiments. These two forces—Egyptian metallurgy and the Greek rational-thought process—collided in Alexandria, which was then the greatest center of learning on Earth. And so was born the great arcanum, the science of alchemy.”

  Tom stared at Gregor for a long moment, then rolled back his head and laughed. “Alchemy?” he chortled. “What, you think you have some philosophers’ stone or something in here that can change lead into gold? Is that what this is about? Ridiculous!”

  He continued to chuckle and Gregor’s entire body twisted with fury.

  “I … I was speaking in a metaphorical sense, you dimwit,” he retorted. “The first scientists were seeking to manipulate the building blocks of the universe. What all those crackpots back in medieval times did not understand was that the philosophers’ stone was not some substance that could be isolated. It was unbridled energy, transformative energy. That’s what the Big Bang was, fool: an outpouring of the creative force of the universe. That’s what I harnessed, that creative force. And that’s what we’re in here to recover: the harness.”

  JUNE 16, 2007

  4:15 A.M.

  MUNK’S RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Dr. Jeffrey Swain looked through the bars of the locked gate at the Nautilus Entrance to Labyrinth Cave. Cool steam bearing the faint scent of rot billowed up from the dark slot in the ground bordered by two knobby arcs of gray limestone that jutted out of the earth like spire whorls on a crustacean.

  “Check it out, Chester,” Swain said.

  Heaving and sweating from the forty-five-minute hike up the side of Munk’s Ridge, the third of the Labyrinth’s nine, the physicist’s plump nephew pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, took several steps toward the cave entrance, reached into his pack, and took out an electronic device about twice the size of a minicassette tape player. It was cased in green metal and fitted with a thick nylon lanyard, two small screens, and a stubby rubberized antenna.

  Swain slid up next to his nephew. In the dawn light, Chester looked so much like his mother it made Swain’s heart hurt. The physicist’s sister had raised the boy herself after a miserable short-lived marriage. She’d been a brilliant attorney who died of leukemia when the boy was nine. Chester had gone to live with Swain because there was no one else capable. For the physicist it had been a long period of adjustment. His only commitment in life up until that point had been to science, and then there was this responsibility shoved upon him. But Chester was an intellectual prodigy as Swain himself had been, and he had spent the ensuing years pushing, prodding and driving his nephew until now the nineteen-year-old was just a semester away from obtaining dual master’s degrees in physics and computer science. At this rate he’d have his doctorate before he turned twenty-five. Swain knew that at some level Chester resented his relentless goading, but he told himself it was all for the good. True scientists were interested in one thing: immortality through achievement and discovery. And Chester, so young so brilliant, so masterfully guided, was positioned to do exactly that.

  “Motherfucker,” Chester said, startling Swain from his thoughts. “It’s for real.”

  Swain looked at the sensors. On the lower screen, an elongated infinity symbol floated serenely in a sea of digital cobalt. A baffling series of numbers spat themselves across the upper screen below a multicolored, bell-shaped bar graph. For a moment, the infinity symbol lay inert, then almost imperceptibly it began to pulse. And the bell-shaped bar graph began to rise and fall, as if in rhythm with someone’s breath.

  “Unbelievable,” Swain said.

  “What’s unbelievable?” Finnerty demanded behind them.

  The physicist turned. The marshal, Sanchez, and Two-Elk were now dressed in ballistic-cloth suits colored mottled gray. On slings around their necks they carried small machine pistols mounted with glow-in-the-dark tritium sights. Cave packs hung at their hips. Mrs. Burke wore the same outfit, minus the weapon. She was sitting on a log forty yards down the slope, her head in her hands. Captain Boulter was busy positioning a crew of FBI snipers who had flown in overnight.

  They had begun climbing the mountain in the pitch dark after getting just three hours of sleep. The plan that he, Finnerty, and Mrs. Burke had put together during the long night was twofold. The physicist, his nephew, and Boulter would use sophisticated sensors at the various entrances to the cave to try to triangulate the moon rock’s position. Mrs. Burke would lead Finnerty, Sanchez, and Two-Elk into Munk’s Ridge. The theory was that unless Gregor managed to retrieve the rock within twenty-four hours, the inmates and their hostages would be forced to get food and batteries and use the sleeping bivouacs at the supply dump deep within the far northeastern corner of the third ridge of the Labyrinth’s nine. From the Orpheus Entrance to the cave, where Cricket and Tom had gone in, it was a minimum of twenty-two hours to the supply cache. But Mrs. Burke believed she could get Finnerty and his team to the dump within just six hours by going in through the Nautilus Entrance. Leaving at dawn, they should make it to the cache site in plenty of time to prepare for the ambush.

  But Swain’s immediate concern was the stone. He looked at Finnerty and pointed to the sensor his nephew held.

  “It’s the exact electromagnetic signature Gregor said he measured coming off the moon rock,” he explained. “Staggeringly high energy output. Low photon surge. Incredible neutron exchange, not to mention the quark decay. That rock’s definitely in this cave.

  “Now, whatever you do,” Swain went on, “do not attempt to deactivate the stone should you happen upon it. The way Gregor’s log notes read, he believed there’s a risk of destabilization should the stone be disconnected from its power source too abruptly.”

  “Just frigging great,” Sanchez said. “We’re gonna go play hide-and-seek in a cave with some kind of atomic bomb inside.”

  “Perhaps one of us should go inside with you, Marshal,” Swain said.

  Finnerty shook his head. “It’s bad enough I have to take one civilian.”

  Norton reached into his pack and handed the marshal a second sensing device. “At least take this with you. It’ll give you an idea if you’re at all close.”

  Finnerty took the sensor as if it were a live grenade, then handed it to Two-Elk, who put the lanyard around her neck and tucked the machine into her cave suit.

  The woods were waking up around them. Mosquitoes whined, squirrels chattered, owls hooted, crows cawed, and in the distance wild turkeys gobbled. Then the moist breeze turned gusty, spinning the live oaks around them like thousands of green pinwheels. The forest fell silent. The dawn sky showed the patina of hammered brass. Far off on the southwestern horizon, puffer clouds rolled steadily east, violent through their bellies, the first portent of distant unrest.

  Finnerty turned away from the physicist and his nephew and looked up at the threatening sky. “How bad could this storm get?” he asked Boulter.

  The state police captain chewed at his upper lip. “Latest report says we could be feeing two inches an ho
ur, maybe more, sometime after midnight. But you get in and out quick, you should be okay, Damian.”

  The marshal hesitated, then said, “Do me a favor, Mark”

  “Anything.”

  “Natalie. I just tried to call, but she was in the OR. Would you call her, give her reports on our progress?”

  “Absolutely,” Boulter said. “But don’t worry, you’re going in and out clean.”

  Finnerty hesitated again, then said, “Tell her I love her, Mark. More than anything. And if something should happen to me, there’s a letter in my—”

  “Knock it off. You’re gonna be fine.”

  “I got a bad feeling about this one,” Finnerty said.

  Boulter glanced over at Whitney Burke. “Think she can do this?”

  “We’re about to find out,” the marshal replied, then he called out, “Mrs. Burke? Whitney? We’re ready.”

  Whitney had intentionally kept her head down, studying the moldering leaves and branches on the forest floor, unwilling, unable, to look anywhere near the distinctive seashell shape of the Nautilus Entrance.

  At Finnerty’s call, she got to her feet with the movements of an arthritic. She tied the red silk bandana she always wore when caving around her neck. She snapped her helmet in place, then got her pack and started shuffling toward the cave. Every snap of twig, every cry of bird, every tremble in the forest canopy around her seemed more distinct than it should have. Finnerty, Sanchez and Two-Elk, Boulter, and Swain and Norton stood aside to let her lead. She went right by them without a word and stopped just short of the cave’s mouth, throwing her arm out against the frame of the open gate. Her vision tunneled, then went kaleidoscopic.

  She heard Two-Elk murmur to Sanchez, “This is gonna be like the disturbed leadin’ the blind.”

  “Knock it off,” Finnerty growled. “You okay, Whitney?”

  But Whitney could not answer. She felt herself falling into the darkness of her mind.

  “It’s in the tube! The flood’s in the tube!”

  “For God’s sake, go!” Jeannie screeched.

  Whitney battled the hysteria surging within her and by sheer will pulled herself along. But with every foot of passage gained, she felt the power of something wild, savage, and uncontrollable take possession of her. She had an overwhelming desire to get up and run, wanting nothing more than to smash the walls of her confinement and escape into sweet, clean, open air.

  Whitney reached a section of the cave that doglegged left and then immediately back to the right. The water was six inches deep now. Her hands and forearms were submerged. A foot of air remained. Whitney made it through the contortion, glanced up, and saw what looked like the arched interior of a belltower about three feet wide and ten feet high. She ducked down to tell Jeannie. The crown of her assistant’s white helmet poked around the second dogleg.

  “There’s a shaft ahead,” Whitney called, “with a ledge that should get us above flood level.”

  Jeannie squirmed forward a foot, stopped, then splashed and pulled herself along another ten inches. Suddenly her eyes widened and widened again. “Whitney, I’m caught!”

  Whitney jerked at the dread that swept over her. “Where?”

  “My left boot. It’s locked in a crack in the floor!” Jeannie’s face turned crimson as she struggled to free herself, then she stopped and heaved in frustration. Water reached the corner of her mouth and she sputtered at it.

  “Try to go backwards,” Whitney soothed. “Caving 101, remember? Whatever you can get into, you can get out of.”

  Jeannie nodded. She braced her hands against the ceiling and pushed, arching her body in a grotesque limbo move. She strained, let out a grunt of exertion, strained again, then all at once she let herself slump. “No way.”

  “I’m coming in there!”

  Whitney stood into the belltower grotto. She threw her pack up onto the little ledge, then ducked back into the lower passage. Jeannie had twisted her face toward the ceiling to keep her mouth out of the water. The flame of her carbide lamp burned a black tongue on the roof of the passage. Whitney reached Jeannie in three pulls and said, “I’ll push on three, okay?”

  Jeannie seemed not to hear. She stared at the black scorch on the roof of the cave.

  “On three!” Whitney yelled.

  “Okay.”

  “One, two, three!”

  Whitney got her left hand against Jeannie’s shoulder and pressed forward with all her strength. She felt the muscles in her assistant’s upper body bunch for the longest time and then sag again. “It’s no good, “Jeannie said.

  They rested helmet to helmet, panting, watching the water swirl in the lamp glow. Then Jeannie started to cry. “Whitney, I’m so scared.”

  Whitney fought off the urge to sob. She thought of her daughter, sitting in school, and her husband, on his way home from Houston. She gazed into Jeannie’s eyes. Over the years they had become the sisters neither of them had ever had.

  “I’m gonna try one more thing, okay?”

  Jeannie could not speak.

  “When I tell you to, you’re going to arch your body as high as you can against the ceiling. I’m going to try to get under you and see if I can untie your boot. Ready?”

  Jeannie managed to nod.

  Whitney took a big breath and dropped into the water. With the light of her headlamp it was all harshly bright and bubbling brown. She found Jeannie’s coverall and got a shoulder under her assistant’s torso and stretched her arm as far as she could. Her fingers brushed Jeannie’s thigh, her knee, her shinbone—Whitney struggled, shifted, and stretched again. Her lungs felt as if a torch were burning inside them.

  She breached back up. “I can’t reach it. I …”

  The water pressed against their lips. Jeannie stared at Whitney. “Save yourself,” she said.

  “No. I won’t leave you.”

  “For Tom and Cricket. You do it for them. You hear me?”

  It was all beyond her comprehension now, but at some deep survival level Whitney knew she had to leave or they would both drown. Robotically, she began to back out of the passage. Jeannie bent her head back to keep her mouth and headlamp flame above the water. When there was only an inch of air left, she called out, “Tell my mom and dad and … Jim … that I loved them.”

  “Oh, God, Jeannie, I …”

  But Jeannie’s flame was gone, swallowed by the food.

  “Whitney!” Finnerty said, shaking her by the shoulder. “Are you okay to do this?”

  “No,” she said. Then she twisted on her headlamp. “But I’m going in anyway.”

  She moved carefully through the open gate, as if it were electrified, then pressed both her hands out to the rock walls beyond. The limestone was slick and cool and had the consistency and color of molten pewter. The opening spiraled left and steeply down.

  Whitney took one step, then shakily another, and the full force of the cave’s rotting breath came whistling up the stone staircase at her. She saw dots before her eyes, and when her vision returned it was as if she had somehow disconnected from her body and the anxieties that dwelled within it. But she kept thinking about Tom and Cricket and reminding herself that she had come this way safely dozens of times before the accident. Her body moved stiffly down a third step and another and then five more. The limestone walls seemed to close in around her. She wanted to scream. She wanted to scream, turn, and run. But she forced herself to keep going footstep by footstep, even as she realized that the dimensions of her fear were becoming circumscribed as her headlamp replaced the fading sunlight behind her.

  The passage bent again to the left and Whitney moved completely out of the cave’s twilight zone. She slowed, letting her eyes adjust to the graduating cone of beamed light that was now the only thing separating her from complete and permanent darkness. The tone of the cave wind changed, turned broader and more muted, almost like the undulating hollow roar of a distant crowd. It all seemed as if she were doing it for the first time and she was hating every mo
ment.

  “I don’t have to go back in the—” Whitney stopped, realizing that this would no longer do. She seized on an older mantra, one that had supported her through miles and years below ground: “Okay, Whit, never give the cave a chance.”

  8:00 A.M.

  JENKINS-HAWKINS CONNECTION ROUTE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  “This is crazy!” Mann cried. “How much more of this we gotta go through?”

  Tom was concentrating too hard to answer. They were in a floorless canyon, a passage without a bottom. Looked at in cross-section, it was like a series of stacked figure eights with no closure between the loops. They were in the uppermost loop, feet braced against one curved wall of the cave, shoulders pressed back against the other. Their butts and thighs hung in space above a twenty-five-foot fall through jagged rock outcroppings to rushing water below. Worse, honey-colored mud caked the curved walls. As they started to inch sideways over the chasm, the ooze avalanched. The saturated soil splattered off the ragged stone teeth and fell like dirty hail into the Whitewater. The sound echoed all around them. The air in that confined space turned thick with the stench of muck and the sweat of fear.

  They were negotiating one of several connection routes between Jenkins Ridge and Hawkins Ridge. Over the years, Tom had come to equate going through a cave connection as akin to slithering down a rotting sewer drain—it got tighter and nastier the deeper you went. And he had chosen the nastiest way he could think of to get from this part of the cave to the next.

  It was part of his strategy. Ever since seeing how upset Gregor had become when he’d challenged him about alchemy, Tom had come to realize that keeping the inmates off-balance might be the best way to fight back. Caves are among the most unforgiving environments on Earth; they have a way of punishing people who are too tired or too preoccupied. If Tom could get his captors to make mistakes, the odds of him and Cricket escaping would rise dramatically.

  He glanced over his shoulder to see the inmates spread out behind him on the slick ledge. They were coated waist to toe in a film of mire. There was a glazed quality to the way they took in their surroundings. It was happening: They were learning that the cave was a living thing, the skin of which changed at every moment. Keep them going at this pace, Tom thought, and one of them will screw up soon.