Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  Finnerty and Two-Elk squatted on a projection of rock, casting their lamps on the bubbling, churning waterway. “Which way?” the marshal asked. His voice came to Whitney as if it had been fed through a synthesizer, slowed, stretched, and hollow. She felt her arm rise of its own accord and point downstream.

  “Is there another way across?” Finnerty asked.

  Her felt her head shake, No.

  “This passage is gonna close,” Two-Elk yelled. “We’re gonna lose them.”

  “Lets do it then,” Finnerty said. Both the marshal and his deputy jumped into the water and were swept fifteen yards downstream before they managed to get their footing and turn to wait for Whitney.

  But she breathed in through her nose and that smell, that smell of decomposition that accompanies a flood, triggered a full-scale mental retreat. She curled down into a ball and rocked back and forth, hypnotized by the terra-cotta water bubbling and flashing in the beam of light cast by her headlamp.

  Finnerty began making come-on motions, but Whitney ignored them and kept rocking. The marshal tried to fight his way back to her, but the flow there was too strong. Two-Elk gestured toward the sensor around her neck. Finnerty shook his head and tried again to get upstream to Whitney, but the current buffeted him, threw him backward. Two-Elk turned and began to swim downstream. Finally, with the horror of what he was doing painted all over his face, the marshal turned and followed her.

  At some level, Whitney was aware that they were leaving her but did not care; her head buzzed as if thrust into a hive, and then she collapsed fully into the waking nightmare. She saw herself back in the belltower in Terror Hole Cave, understanding that this buzzing in her head was what Jeannie must have felt before the flood took her; and gazing at Pluto’s River, Whitney had the overwhelming desire to follow Jeannie at last, to ease into the water and let it close over her head to stop the panic attacks forever.

  Then, from far away over the river’s roar, a piercing cry penetrated the buzzing haze.

  “Daddy!”

  Whitney blinked and turned her head toward it as a drunk might a distant police siren. Then she heard it again, faint but distinct

  “Daddy! Help me!”

  Whitney gazed beyond the bobbing headlamps of Finnerty and Two-Elk, already tapering from view.

  “Cricket?” she mumbled. Then, shaking her head to clear the buzzing, she stood and screamed, “Cricket! Cricket, I’m here!”

  For a stunned second, Whitney watched her headlight beam disappear into the darkness of the flooding cave and heard nothing. Then, from far off she heard Cricket’s voice again, “Mommy!” And then Tom’s voice, “Whitney!”

  Whitney took a step toward the water and froze. Finnerty and Two-Elk had disappeared; their lights were gone. Her own headlamp showed that the river was seconds from reaching the ceiling and becoming a sump.

  Rocks rumbled behind her. She twisted and found herself looking into a dying headlamp and under that frail light the unfixed eyes of Billy Lyons. His black skin was coated with a film of gray dust Blood caked at his nose and matted below his ears and down his neck. He reached out a hand toward her. “Wait,” he growled.

  Whitney freaked and jumped out into the flood.

  7:55 A.M.

  PLUTO’S RIVER

  Cricket fought her way back upstream. “Mommy!”

  For a split second as she thrashed against the surging river, she saw the flicker of headlamps coming at her. Then they disappeared. “Mom! Mom!” Cricket stopped treading water and listened. But there was no reply. And no more sign of the lights.

  She knew her mother was not coming, that she could not come; in the instant after their voices had reached each other, the river passage that linked Nyrens Ridge to Tower Ridge had flooded to a sump.

  Cricket began to sob and hit at the water. “No! No!”

  “Cricket!”

  She tilted her head up in a daze, her headlamp finding her father still leaning down out of the crack. Gregor and Kelly were perched on rocks above him.

  “Mommy was here,” she said, bewildered. “She came for us.”

  “I heard her, honey,” he replied, his face stricken with grief. “Give me your hand now, sweetheart. Swim across the current and give me your hand.”

  Cricket stared out at the point in her headlamp beam where the water met the roof. Her mom had conquered her fears and come for them. She had been in the cave the whole time, trying to rescue them. That must have been her making noise back on the underground mountain days ago. It all seemed so hopeless now that Cricket wanted to float away.

  “C’mon!” Tom shouted. “Don’t give up. Not now! Remember what you told me back there? With each other we can survive anything?”

  “You don’t believe it anymore,” Cricket sobbed. “You said so. I saw it in your face.”

  “No,” he said. “I do believe it. And so did Mommy. That’s why she came. Believe, Cricket.”

  Crying, punching and slapping at the water, Cricket made her way crosscurrent to her dad’s outstretched hand. She was barely aware of throwing her arm up, being caught and lifted into the fissure. Her thoughts were only of her mother and how much she wanted to be safe in her arms. And then Cricket found herself stumbling up the ledges after Gregor and Kelly, who were already climbing higher into the crack. Her teeth chattered. Her body quivered with cold. Her knee felt as if it had been bludgeoned with a hammer.

  Forty feet up, the passage broke left. Cricket stopped and shone her light back down toward the river. Tom saw what she was doing and shook his head. “It’s no use. No one could get through there, Cricket. Not even your mom on her best day.”

  Eighty yards to the south, Whitney slashed her way downstream. She looked over her shoulder and saw Lyons jump into the water after her.

  “Wait!” he called weakly. “Please!”

  Whitney came to where the roof of the cave and the surface of the river turned seamless. Cricket’s and Tom’s voices echoed through her mind. She looked around, then spoke to the cave itself: “Gimme a chance. That’s all I’m asking. Just one chance.”

  She took a deep breath and plunged into the sump.

  The chill water was like a slap to the face and Whitney became instantly aware of the implications of what she had done. Free diving into a sump, even one where you knew the way, was about the most dangerous thing a caver could ever do. Her potential for life was now measured in seconds. But rather than cripple her, that realization triggered a fight response and adrenaline coursed through her veins. The light cast by her headlamp bounced and refracted off millions of bronze-colored air bubbles. It was like having your head out a car window at night during a blizzard with the high beams on, disorienting, claustrophobic, damn near blinding. Whitney clawed at the lamp to weaken the beam. Then she kicked and swam her way into the swirl.

  Ten feet. Twenty feet. Her lungs began to burn. A voice inside her head screamed at her to keep swimming or die. Thirty feet. Forty. The adrenaline petered out of her system. Her diaphragm spasmed. She had an almost uncontrollable urge to open her mouth and breathe. Forty-five feet. Fifty. Her muscles were on fire. She couldn’t go much farther and knew it.

  At last she couldn’t swim another stroke. Twisting her head back and forth, she searched for something in the cold, frothing water, anything to give her hope. But there was nothing. She prepared herself to inhale and succumb at last to the waters and the darkness.

  A swell in the current caught her, twirled, and thrust her upward. Her helmet banged against the roof of the flooded cave. The current sucked her back down a foot and then propelled her up again in a spiral action.

  Whitney breached into an air pocket six, maybe seven inches high, just wide enough to accommodate her helmet and very long, close to the entire width of the passage. The current tried to tug her down again. She kicked against it, tilting her head back and sucking the sweet air into her lungs. She remembered when she and Tom had surveyed this passage years before. The roof of the cave was marked b
y so many deep grooves that it looked like the ribbed hull of an old wooden boat. She was up inside one of those grooves now; the river water must have risen so fast that the air was trapped.

  Whitney took several more deep breaths, then told herself she had to find the fissure in the ceiling that marked the way into Tower Ridge. If her memory served her right, between here and the fissure, every three yards or so, another one of these grooves traversed the cave roof. Were they filled with air, too?

  The current pulled at her again. Don’t think, she told herself. Just go.

  She filled her lungs one last time, let go of the sides of the groove, dropped down into the chill water, and arched herself backward. The flow shoved her straight up against the roof of the cave, which is what she’d hoped would happen; the pressure made her like a human fly, able to bounce along upside down against the cave ceiling. The headlamp illuminated every plane, every depression in the rock, and then the next groove.

  Flooded.

  One more chance. Just one more chance, she prayed as she pulled and scratched her way toward the next groove. She breached into a foot of air, sputtering, gasping, and panting. The sounds of her breathing boomed around her. Something bumped against her from behind. She looked over her shoulder and screeched bloody murder.

  Not six inches behind her, bobbing in the air pocket, was the head of Two-Elk’s drowned corpse. The deputy marshal’s eyes were rolled back in her head. Grainy bronze liquid drained from her nose and mouth. Her machine pistol trailed from a sling around her neck. The sensor Chester Norton had given her floated out in front of her; the golden infinity symbol was bulging and thinning on that emerald screen.

  Whitney’s consciousness went kaleidoscopic. Jeannie’s body bobbed on the surface of the water in Terror Hole Cave. Cricket’s body breached up beside it, followed by Tom’s and then Two-Elk’s.

  “No!” Whitney screamed. She kicked away from the deputy marshal’s corpse, scraping her helmet along the sides of the groove, fearing she might faint or go completely mad.

  Then, in the river below her, she felt a hand close around her ankle.

  8:05 A.M.

  TOWER RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  “At last!” Gregor crowed. He spun in circles, his arms held wide, letting his headlamp beam course about the lofty cavern.

  “I know you fancy yourself discoverer of this cave, Burke,” he declared. “But you’re not. My grandfather brought me in here when I was seven. An old Shawnee showed him the way in when he was a boy and swore him to secrecy. I was sworn to secrecy in return. I used to play in here all the time until …”

  Gregor fell silent, blinking at the ground, a tortured expression on his face.

  “Who fucking cares about your shitty childhood?” Kelly said. “Everyone’s got one. Let’s get the gold, man. The gold!”

  That seemed to bring Gregor back from some dark and private place. Without another word he sidled off toward the southernmost end of the cavern and a landslide of fallen boulders. Tom helped Cricket along. She looked like a cat that’d been kicked and left in the rain.

  “Hold on, Cricket,” he whispered. “Don’t give up on me now. I’ll think of something.”

  Cricket did not reply, and Tom raised his headlamp and gestured toward a cavity high on the side of the cavern wall. “If you’re looking for the way out, it’s up there,” he said. “Or at least that used to be the way out. It’s collapsed back up in there three hundred yards or so now.”

  “Guess what, Burke?” Gregor sneered. “You don’t have a clue.”

  Gregor crouched, reached in between two of the boulders at the base of the slide, and, to Tom’s surprise, withdrew a steel bar about four feet long. He walked eight feet to his left, fitted the bar into a worn slot underneath a rock about three feet tall, and threw his weight onto the lever. The boulder eased to one side, revealing a crawlway.

  “The Shawnee used to come here to bury their medicine men,” Gregor announced, shaking with anticipation. “This was the entrance to their sacred—”

  The scientist stopped, hearing something in the distance. Then Tom heard it, too; a faint but distinct vibrational shrieking noise emanating from the rock somewhere high above them.

  “They’re drilling,” Kelly said, shaken from his drugged stupor.

  “They’re after the stone!” Gregor cried. “Move!”

  8:05 A.M.

  PLUTO’S RIVER

  Whitney screamed, sucked in water, and gagged. The hand let go of her ankle. Finnerty surfaced behind her.

  “Thought I was toast!” the marshal sputtered. “I got a little air in a pocket back there. Saw your light underwater. Figured there had to be more air ahead and—”

  He stopped suddenly, looking over Whitney’s shoulder at Two-Elk’s drowned body. “Oh, God, Lydia, no!” He smashed his hand against the rock overhead.

  “My daughter! My husband!” Whitney said. “I heard them. They were just ahead of us.”

  “I heard them, too,” Finnerty said, unable to take his eyes off his dead deputy. “Just before the whole passage flooded and—”

  “I’m going after them,” Whitney said. She turned and swam toward Two-Elk. She shuddered, then reached up and got the sensor from the dead deputy’s neck and hung it around her own; then, almost as an afterthought, she took the machine pistol.

  That startled the marshal out of his shock. “I better take that,” Finnerty said.

  “No,” Whitney said. “This stays with me.”

  8:15 A.M.

  SHAMAN’S CATACOMB

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Gregor scrambled headlong down the secret passageway. Cricket and Tom followed, with Kelly urging them on with the shotgun. The cave walls were the color of tarnished brass. Designs had been worked into the stone with primitive chipping tools. The remnants of ancient bundled reed torches were strewn all along the floor. Three hundred feet down the shaft, the carvings petered out and the way hooked to the north. Here and there along the main route they passed small grottoes where skeletons lay amid ancient spears, bows and arrows, leather shields, and woven reed moccasins.

  Tom knew he and Cricket were near the end of their long journey and therefore in more danger than at any other time since being taken hostage. But as a cave scientist, the extraordinary anthropological evidence was almost overwhelming to behold.

  Then he smelled it. A chemical stench that gnawed at the lining of his nostrils. The fumes reminded him of a noxious smoke that had billowed down their street at home after an electrical transformer blew during a thunderstorm the summer before. Cricket cringed and sneezed, then pointed at the walls.

  “Look Dad,” she whispered.

  “I see them,” Tom said.

  Where the baseboard would have been in a residential hallway, a ragged line of newly fissured rock showed. It appeared as if the layer of limestone that composed the upper part of the passage had been fractured during the earthquake and shoved eight inches to the west. And the brass cast that had made the upper portions of the passage so attractive was now marred by broad swatches of soot, as if the walls had been scorched.

  With every step, the charring became more pronounced until the cave walls looked like the flanks of a recently erupted volcano. Tom reached out and ran his fingers along the rock and was flabbergasted at the pitted texture. Labyrinth Cave was composed almost entirely of limestone, a soft rock but this formation was as hard as volcanic stone, though it was unlike any basalt he’d ever seen or heard of before.

  Gregor stopped and stared around at the igneous rock. He reached out and touched it too, appearing as befuddled as Tom.

  “What’s going on?” Kelly asked suspiciously. “This ain’t gold.”

  “Don’t worry,” Gregor said. “There will be transmutation just ahead.”

  And indeed, within ten yards, the cave walls turned from pitted to riffled, like black ice formed under a sudden blast of arctic wind. Tom became aware of a powerful and resonant noise emanating from t
he cave ahead. The sound rose and fell in a wavelike pattern that put him in mind of the buzz of a barber’s electric clippers, only magnified a hundred times or more.

  “What the fuck is that?” Kelly demanded. For the first time, Tom heard uncertainty in the strangler’s voice.

  “The awesome rhythm of the universe at play, Kelly!” Gregor cried. “Hurry, we’re almost there!”

  The cave passage bent sharply right, and when Tom rounded the curve he was confronted with a painful strobe of light being generated from somewhere just ahead It was almost blinding after so many days of living in the soft columns cast by the headlamps, and all of them stopped for a moment, squinting letting their eyes adjust.

  Then Gregor surged forward. Kelly began to move, too, but Tom held Cricket back. The quality of the light was unlike any he’d seen before and he was sure now that he had more to fear from Gregor’s rock than from the mad scientist or the homicidal maniac who followed him. Twenty yards ahead, the passage dog-legged left and the light was most intense. Backlit by that dazzling, pulsing glare, the physicist’s skin turned a sickly, gelatinous silver color. Kelly halted in his tracks, staring after Gregor as if seeing his hair-less, waxen skin and disease-ravaged body for the first time.

  “Come on, Kelly,” Gregor exhorted. “See what a poor white-trash boy from the backwoods of Kentucky discovered. Transmuter of elements. Harness of the creative force of the universe. The philosophers’ stone!”

  “It’s running in there?” Kelly asked.

  “Of course. I told you it would be.”

  Kelly shook his head. “I ain’t going in there with it running.”

  “It won’t hurt you!” Gregor cried. “Look at me!”

  “I am looking at you,” Kelly growled. “And I ain’t going in there with it running.”

  “I need help to deactivate it,” Gregor insisted.

  “Take Burke,” Kelly said. “I’ll stay with the girl watch our backs.”

  Gregor raised his pistol toward Tom. “Let’s go.”

  “No, I won’t leave my daughter with him,” Tom said.