Wild Mystic

by Sandi Ault

  I emerged from the air shaft, which no doubt had been created by years of drainage when water trapped in the back of the cave found its way deep into the mountain and out onto the ledge where it fed the juniper that now held my lifeline, and perhaps that of Adoria Abasolo as well. The rear part of the cave was low-ceilinged and dark, while light from a flickering fire danced on the massive walls of the main chamber before me. I could not yet see the fire itself, because the cavity was large, and the ancient ones had built a wall of adobe bricks, now crumbled and half-decomposed, but still blocking much of this hindmost, compressed area. I surmised that the wall had been built so that this space could be used for food storage. Since it was barely tall enough for me to crawl in, it could not have been used for much else, especially not for sleeping, due to the draft caused by the opening I had just come through. I planned to crawl forward and examine more of the cave, but my pain from tunneling through the air chute was so severe that I stopped, rolled onto my bottom and sat as much as I could, head bent over, and knees folded. I delved a hand into my pocket and found the little cloth pouch that Tecolote had made for me and pressed it to my nose. I could not smell the fragrance any more. Had I used all its medicine up already? I managed to untie the bit of twine around the cloth. Inside the square of fabric was a gooey gob with bits of texture, as if dried herbs had been rolled into a marble-sized ball of soft cheese, or butter, or even grease. I sniffed this. It smelled acrid, no longer exuding the healing aroma. On impulse, I popped it in my mouth and had just swallowed it whole when I felt something nudge my right foot. A shiver ran through me. What creature was huddling back here in the depths of this cave? Again, I felt something press against my foot and then recede. I stopped breathing, my senses heightening, my pupils widening. I could not yet see the high opening at the cave’s front that both Prescott and Rico had described, which was likely where the firelight was coming from. I could hear faint voices drifting along the current of air, but they were so muted that I could not tell whether they were male or female, much less what they were saying. I determined from all this that the mouth of the cave was some distance afar, and that was where the fire and the people who were talking were. I took my headlamp off of my forehead and held it in one hand, shielding it on the sides with the other, and aimed the light toward the farthest reaches at the back of the cave while I watched for it to illuminate the area directly in front of me. I toggled the switch as rapidly as I could. In the fast flash, I saw the source of contact I had felt through my boot. Susan Lacy lay bound, gagged, and curled into a fetal position on her side right at my feet.

  I maneuvered onto my hands and knees and carefully pulled at the duct tape over Lacy’s mouth. When I peeled it back, she frantically whispered, “Momma!”

  I located the knife in my cargo pocket and began working on the tape around her wrists. “Where is she?”

  “They are going to throw her into the canyon! They’re just waiting for daylight so they can see well enough to make sure that she’s dead!”

  By now, I had begun sawing away at the layers of duct tape at Lacy’s ankles. “We need to get you out of here. You’ll have to go out the way I came in.”

  “I’m not leaving without Momma. She’s hurt. They’ve had her taped up for over a week, they haven’t been giving her much food or water. She broke her ankle yesterday when they were moving us up here from the mines, after those people found her car. She can’t walk. She’s in pain, dehydrated; they’ve been starving her. She’s really weak.”

  Leaving Lacy’s side for a moment, I crawled forward and took cover behind a section of the low, crumbling adobe wall. I still could not see the cave’s opening. I made my way through a downed section of rubble and forward, keeping myself to the side wall of the passage. The ceiling here was higher, and a slight turn in its layout obscured the view of the outer chamber and the large main opening. I edged along the rock wall until I could see around a corner created by a massive shoulder of stone. The main chamber of this natural structure remained dark in spite of the flickering firelight, which failed to illuminate it, in part because the fire had been built at the very edge of the cliff at the mouth, rather than in the center of the main cavity. I could see the large opening well, though, and it was indeed tall enough that a man could stand easily in it. But the recess was shallow, not more than six feet deep before it took the turn and the ceiling dropped dramatically toward the rear of the cavern, from where I had just come. The cave’s window onto the canyon was a perfect arch, and the floor was flattest at the very edge of the cliff. On one side of the fire, Kyle Lindstrom sat cross-legged, poking at the burning logs with a stick. On the other, Uma Lindstrom reclined with her left side toward the crackling embers, leaning back on her elbows, legs outstretched, her boots resting on something placed treacherously close to the edge of the cave mouth. Uma’s footrest was Adoria Abasolo, huddled in a heap, bound and gagged as Lacy had been, curled on her side. “Once the sun is up, we’ll get that tape off of her and throw her in first,” Uma said, nudging with her boot, causing her captive’s body to wobble precariously. “She’s not going to give us any trouble, she’s almost gone as it is. But the other one, if we try to take the tape off of her without knocking her out, she’s strong enough to fight. We’re going to have to hit her over the head first. No one will be able to tell because she’s going to be all banged up when they find her anyway.”

  Kyle said, “Okay, but let’s keep her conscious long enough so she can watch when her precious mommy takes a leap into the beyond, like she was supposed to do. That’s what they all agreed! Our mother kept the pact. Now it’s time for her to keep her part of the bargain. Then we’ll take care of little Susie next.”

  Uma spoke again, “We want to make it look like mother and daughter jumped together.”

  “But how do we arrange to have them discovered? I don’t want to make an anonymous call or anything like that. I’m worried they might be onto us, as it is. They nearly caught us back in the mine with this one when that big crew came through there and found her car. We should have brought her up here first thing, instead of waiting until we found the daughter.”

  Uma argued, “I didn’t think they’d find the car with the Pueblo closed because no one could use that road. We would have been okay if that hadn’t happened. Besides, it’s too hard getting in and out of this cave, we couldn’t have come and gone from here while we were still looking for the daughter.”

  I turned and edged my way back to Susan Lacy. “How are you? Are you okay?”

  “I don’t think so. I thought my leg was just numb, but now, I don’t know. I think something’s wrong with my right knee.”

  “Do you think you can put weight on it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let me see you kneel.”

  Susan Lacy tried her best to put her weight on all fours, but when she did, she made a small cry.

  At this, the murmur of voices from the main chamber stopped.

  I grabbed Lacy’s hips and helped her roll gently onto her side. We both waited, hushed. I could hear my own breath, my pulse at my temples.

  A large snap broke the silence as a pocket of resin in one of the burning logs exploded, and then the twins resumed talking again, their voices growing louder as their disagreement grew more heated, alongside the fire.

  I tried to think of a strategy. I had two injured hostages, and two kidnappers poised and ready to kill. If I pulled my gun and came from behind to confront them, I knew Uma would only need to press lightly to tip Adoria Abasolo over the edge and into the ravine below. I tried to calculate any way these two could be contained without someone dying. If I tried to lure them into the rear of the cave, I was sure their first response would be to dispose of Abasolo. If I tried to hold them at gunpoint, they could threaten to topple Adoria and turn the tables on me. If I shot Uma, even in an extremity, she would push Abasolo over the edge. Even if I shot her with deadly force, which I was loathe to do, she might accidentally do the sam
e. If I shot Kyle to disable him, pushing Abasolo off the cliff still seemed like Uma’s most likely response. I ran through scenarios in which I could possibly distract and separate them, but these all involved me and Lacy being trapped in the rear of the cave with no control over what happened at the entrance. There was nothing for it but for me to go in from the front.

  I worked at my safety line until I lengthened it several feet, reconfiguring several redundant knots. I encircled Lacy’s tiny waist with rope and ran it through the carabiner so that if it slipped, it would still catch under her arms. I took lead as we worked our way out of the tunnel and—knowing this time about the stone snag at approximately halfway through—I rolled to my side and managed to get through without incident. Lacy was smaller than me, so she didn’t require this extra maneuver. Once I emerged and stood upright, I helped her get to her feet, but her right leg buckled. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but I can’t stand on that leg.”

  The ledge wasn’t wide enough for me to assist her, so I edged ahead and she half-crawled behind me, still tied to my belt via the safety line, dragging her injured leg. When we got to the juniper, I unhooked the spare harness. Susan had to lie on her back so I could get the leg supports on and then I cinched the belt tight once she sat up. “Tell them to send the litter down and be ready to bring your mother up.”

  “How are you going to get Momma out of there? They’ve got her right on the edge; they’re just waiting for the sun to come up.”

  I looked around and saw that the darkness I had arrived in had begun to relent. Black night was fading to deep indigo blue, and daybreak was imminent. The east-facing cliff wall was hidden in obscuring shadow now, but in less than fifteen minutes, the sun would emerge over the far rim. I looked above me at the shelf where the raven’s nest lay, and I looked to my left where the mouth of the cave would receive the first rays of morning light. “I’m going to fly,” I said. And I gave the winch line a big, hard tug. In a matter of seconds, Susan Lacy began to lift and then to rise as Prescott ran the lift winch from above.

  44: Into the Mystic

  I calculated the distance between where I stood and the mouth of the cave. Once again, I reconfigured my safety line, undoing half the redundant knots and playing out the line until the triple cord was one solo length of about twenty-five feet. I kept one end of this hooked to my harness and then wound the rope repeatedly around me until I reached the other end and hooked that to the harness, too, along with the items I had removed from the belt before going through the tunnel. Then I tugged once hard on the belay rope: On belay. I worked my way up the rock face until I reached the raven’s nest, then around one side of it to where I could reach the thick roots of the juniper that lived above it. I unwound the safety line from my waist until I had unfurled the entire length and it dangled below me in a loop again—one end of it hooked to my belt, and the other in my hand. I looped the free end of the rope through the ascender pulley, which I attached with my heaviest carabiner around the juniper root. I added a safety to the carabiner as well, by tying it to the root with a nylon strap for extra security, looping it over the root a few times, double-knotting it, and also passing the strap through the opening of the carabiner so that any resistance or freezing of the pulley would cause the strap above it to tighten its grip on the juniper root. As I worked at all this, the air around me grew softer and lighter with the promise of dawn. I could almost make out the interior of the nest. The rock face in front of me began to take shape. I drew in a breath and let it out in a whispered prayer: Spirit, let me fly. I tugged on the belay rope, waited a second, tugged again, let another second pass, and then tugged a third time: Give me rope. And then, I edged around to the right side of the roof of the kòki’ína’s nest and, doubling my legs up as springs, I pushed away from it with all my might.

  And I flew…

  At first, I swung wide away from the raven’s nest even farther from the mouth of the cave than the north edge of the ledge, and I jackknifed my body, pulling back into the lift as my belay line grew longer, just as a child pulls back hard to gain momentum on a swing. When I reached the farthest point away on my pendulum ride, I pushed my chest forward, extended my legs into a straight line behind me with toes pointed, and I opened my arms as wide as I could. As I soared toward the cave opening, searing sunlight burst above the clifftop on the other side and flooded the rock walls around me with golden light. For an instant, I felt free, weightless, unbounded, and exhilarated, and just as I reached the cave opening, dazzling sparks—hundreds of tiny lights—nearly blinded me, as dozens and dozens of shapes on the cave walls shimmered in the sun’s first precisely-directed rays, revealing the ravens carved with rough rock chisels and decorated with painstakingly applied flecks of mica and soot and tar paint. When my rappel line jerked at its zenith, a weight struck me in the middle of my body so hard that it took my breath away. Pain shot through me from the assault on my ribs and my bruised midsection, and I began to choke as if something had risen up from within me and was blocking my air pipe. Again, the rope seized and I dropped and swung wildly, now yards below the lip of the cave opening, the heavy weight upon me, threatening to break the line.

  For an instant, I felt like I might pass out, and time seemed to stop as if I were suspended between the two possibilities of consciousness and escape. I felt a searing heat in my throat and I swallowed, after which came immediate relief, as if the lardy lump of cura had been lodged in my gullet all this time and had now suddenly melted and infused me with strength. I realized that Adoria Abasolo was clinging to me with both arms, half-tangled in both my lead and rappel lines and flailing one leg wildly. The rope lunged erratically back and forth as we swung, and I looked up and saw the faces of Kyle and Uma watching, their mouths open in disbelief as we passed out of their view, away from the mouth of the cave and back again toward the other end of the arc. I realized that my prayer had somehow been answered and my flight had put me right at the mouth of the cave at the exact moment they had pushed the poet off the ledge. “Shhhh,” I said to Abasolo. “Hold on.”

  As I held tight to my belay line with my right hand, I managed to get hold of the safety with my left. At the top of the arc I yanked hard on the safety, and touched my boots to the lip of the ledge base of the kòki’ína’s nest, drawing line as fast as I could through the pulley to tighten it and hold us in place. A large black raven huddled in the center of the structure, it’s head twisting rapidly on top of its neck to view us first from one eye and then the other. The bird did not leave its bed, and it thrust out both wings and began to flap them wildly. My feet slipped, Adoria grasped at me, pulling painfully on my shoulders, but I kept hold of the line and got the tips of my toes to light again on the stone shelf. “Get in here,” I told the poet, and the raven stood up and moved off the center of the nest to one side of the ledge, surrendering the space to us. “It’s okay. I know that raven. She’s here to help. You’ll be safe here. Go ahead and crawl in.”

  Abasolo managed to pull herself under the overhang and then fell backward into the nest and the bird watched all this with great interest, then stepped off the stone shelf and soared silently away, its wings catching a loft that lifted it toward the rising sun. I looked up and saw the litter high above me. A woman dressed all in black wearing a vest emblazoned with big white letters reading FBI was suspended alongside it, coming down to help with the rescue. Above her and to the south, a second FBI agent was rappelling down the cliff face, on the opposite side of the mouth of the cave. As soon as the litter reached the nest, I tugged hard once on my belay rope. On belay.

  Leaning back into the harness, I walked myself down and over to the side, toward the cave entrance. Before I edged around the sidewall where I could be seen, I rested my boots against the stone and reached into the cargo carry pocket on the leg of my pants and pulled out my pistol. I sidestepped carefully, the rappel rope taut, until I could peek around the mouth of the cave. I pointed the gun into the openi
ng. The Lindstrom twins stood on the edge, holding hands, their faces set with a grim determination. They both turned to look at me, and just as the witches who raised them had pledged to do, and as their own mother had no doubt done, they leapt into the beyond…and fell quickly and silently into the canyon below.

  45: Aftershock

  I stood over Mountain and looked down at him as he slept on the makeshift operating table in the ranger station where I’d left him hours before. The vet said, “He’s been dreaming. He whimpers and his legs tremble and jerk, and he even opened his eyes for an instant, but I don’t think he was conscious. This is all good news.”

  “How long do you think it will be before he wakes up?” I asked.