Last Words

15

Full consciousness had been with Mark for a while before he accepted that it had returned. It was difficult to believe that his mind was functioning, because the world he existed in now was stranger than what he’d experienced in the drug haze.

Blackness was all that he knew, but the hood was off his head, his eyes were open, and he believed he should be able to see. It took some time before he understood that the problem wasn’t with his eyes — there was nothing but darkness.

What finally put him in motion was the cold. It wasn’t bitter and wind-driven and there was no snow. The cold simply rose up and soaked into him. He ran his hands over his body and found his skin prickled with gooseflesh. He was naked except for his underwear, and at first he’d hoped that was an imagined condition, just as he’d hoped the blackness was. Another hallucination that would pass eventually.

It wasn’t.

He extended his hands and swung them around, testing the blackness to see what was out there. His fingers made no contact with anything. He lifted one hand and held it directly in front of his face, then opened and closed it. He saw nothing, but there was a bizarre sensation that he could. He could visualize what the hand was doing, and so his brain seemed to accept it almost as if he had seen it.

There was a stone wall at his back and a stone floor beneath him but what was in front of him, or even nearby, was unknown.

Fear seized him then, a swift panic that made him get to his feet too fast, and he almost fell. His legs were numb from the long period of sitting, and all of him ached. He stood in the dark and tried to make some sense of it, of how he’d come to be in this place. Memories came at him in disjointed fragments, and that only exacerbated the panic.

Slow down, he told himself, slow down and relax. You’re alive, you’re safe.

Wasn’t he? Maybe he was. How could you know when you couldn’t see a single thing?

Where the hell are you? How did you get here?

He remembered the drive through the snow, the truck behind him, the van ahead of him, the men with shotguns. Three of them. Then he’d been in the van. Then he’d been somewhere in the snow with a knife against his throat and questions coming. Then...

He couldn’t put that together. That was the point where memory turned to fragments and then to dust. None of the memories told him where he was now. Some sort of basement? No. The stone wasn’t smooth like poured concrete. It was rough and smelled of soil and water, no trace of human interference. This was some kind of pit, some kind of...

“Cave.” He said it aloud, and the sound of his voice made the darkness seem darker, made him feel smaller and more alone, more helpless. He shouted then, yelling “Help!” and “Hello!” over and over.

There was no response but an echo that made the place feel large and empty, as if he were a long way beneath the earth. He thought of Ridley Barnes, all those ropes and helmets and lamps scattered around his house. How far had Mark been taken into this place? And from what direction? Was the exit in front of him, or to the left, or to the right? Or, hell, above? How did you even begin to search for it?

The panic he felt then was unlike any he’d known before. A sensation of being trapped in someplace small and abandoned in someplace endless all at once. Anything would be better than this blackness — being adrift on miles of empty sea or being caught in a cage; either would be better, because at least it would be known.

He moved his hands down to the stone floor and spread his fingers wide and dug them in, felt his nails scrape against the rock. He stayed like that, as if he were hanging on to keep from being pulled away, and he closed his eyes, even though there was no point — eyelids shielded you from nothing down here — and he tried to confine his concentration to the physical sensation of touch, to the feel of the stone. It was a known entity here in a world without many.

“All right,” he said, and his words echoed. “All right, Markus. Go ahead and open your eyes, and know that nothing will change.”

Talking aloud provided some level of reassurance. He opened his eyes, and while there was another stab of fear when nothing changed, he contained it this time.

You ought to spend some time down there, Ridley Barnes had said. In the dark. Think about her, think about me.

“Let’s get out of here,” Mark said, still speaking aloud because sound was comfort. “Let’s go.”

There was the challenge. Go where?

Moving in total blackness was daunting even if you had an understanding of where you were. Without any, it seemed impossible. But he had no choice. In this cold, if he didn’t find a way out soon, he never would.

Right or left? Or straight ahead? Every option seemed the same. The only logic he could imagine was a process of elimination: pick one direction, head that way, and see what happened. Rinse and repeat and eventually he’d be moving in the right direction.

Unless there isn’t a right direction. Because if this is a pit, and you need to go up...

He decided to move straight ahead first, because it occurred to him that it would be easier to find his way back to the starting point if he moved in a straight line. That way, if he ran into an obstacle, all he had to do was move directly backward until he found the wall again. This realization was the first thing approaching an actual plan, and he felt proud of it, as if the notion of crawling forward were a true breakthrough and not something instinctive to such brilliant creatures as earthworms and ants.

He began to crawl, and even though the impact was minimal, the stone was brutal on his knees. He considered standing but thought that would be more dangerous — by crawling, he was at least limiting how far he could fall.

He had gone maybe twenty or thirty feet when his left hand made contact with what seemed to be a wall in front of him. He ran both hands along the surface as far as he could extend his arms. He found no break in the wall. A dead end.

Unless, of course, the passage opened up a little to the left or to the right. It could be just ten feet away, and he wouldn’t know.

His mouth was dry and his pulse hammered. He tried to calm himself with the reminder that he had no other choice but to keep trying. He was warmer when he was moving too, and that was important. That was critical. He could envision his mother in the snow of that Montana prairie, the blue tint seeming to come from within her flesh. Yes, it was important to keep moving.

He moved backward just as he’d come, but the going was slower because his feet weren’t as dexterous as his hands and made poor guides in the dark. When he finally found the wall, he felt a sense of triumph. He’d achieved what he’d set out to do. Never mind that it hadn’t actually taken him anywhere or changed his situation — he’d proved that he could move away from this spot and make it back again.

Now he was back to the old question: Right or left? He decided that right felt more natural, simply because he was right-handed. When he began to crawl again, he found that he preferred this path because he could keep the wall against his side. As he worked along the wall, he thought he heard sounds that weren’t of his own making. He stopped and listened and what he would once have called silence now seemed filled with soft murmurs. Whispers of motion.

Snakes.

His brain treated that just as it had the opening and closing of his hand; because he could visualize snakes, it was almost as if he’d actually seen them. He crept backward, banging his knees painfully on the stone, and had gone about five feet before he stopped himself. He listened again, and now he wasn’t sure there was anything. Sweat ran down his face despite the cold. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths and tried to clear the image of the snakes from his mind.

Doesn’t matter if the place is crawling with snakes. If it is, they already know you’re here, and they’ll come for you if they want. Moving will make you more threatening, scare them off.

Sure. The mental commandments were easy to make, harder to obey.

Go forward, damn it. Go!

He began to crawl again, faster now, ignoring the pain in his knees, and the amount of distance he’d covered from his starting position was encouraging, seemed to suggest this passage led somewhere.

When his right hand reached forward and didn’t make contact with rock, he wasn’t immediately scared. There had been small dips and drops here and there, and he assumed this was just another one, worthy of added caution but not cause for true alarm. Then he reached farther and still found nothing. He moved his left hand forward, and his left hand didn’t come down on stone either. He was sitting on his knees, waving his hands in the air like a mime in a box. Where in the hell did the passage go? What was he missing? He reached down, trying to find out how far the floor dipped, and his hands kept extending through air. He was leaning so far forward that his balance was precarious, and the pressure caused a fresh ache in his knees. He swore, edged backward, stretched out flat on his stomach, then reached again, determined to figure out which way the floor was curling away from him.

His hands found nothing. He reached until sharp rock bit into his armpits, and he still couldn’t find the floor. The drop ahead was a decent height. He fumbled around until he found a loose stone and then he pushed it over the edge, hoping he’d hear an immediate smack of contact that would tell him it was just a short step down.

Instead, he had enough time to be aware of the sound of his own breath — several breaths — before the rock landed with a crack on the floor below and broke into pieces.

Only then did he understand what was directly in front of him: a cliff.

16

Ridley had been in his workshop all day, never once venturing outdoors, but he looked snow covered nevertheless, his shirt and hair coated with fine flakes of sawdust, when the sheriff’s car pulled into the yard. He knew just from the height of the driver that it was the sheriff himself. It had been a long time since Ridley had dealt with Blankenship.

He went to the door, opened it, and said, “Everything okay, Sheriff?” working hard on his I’m-just-another-good-citizen voice. He needed more practice with that one. Never sounded right, not even to his ear.

Blankenship looked him up and down without saying a word, and then he reached out and brushed Ridley’s shoulder with the palm of his hand, making a show of dusting him off. Ridley kept his hand tight around the doorknob, knowing the sheriff had touched him just to rattle him. Ridley was sensitive about personal space, something that Blankenship had learned during their interviews. Maybe the only thing he had learned.

“Been woodcutting?”

“Damn, you must be some sort of detective.”

“One of those boards bite you back?”

“What’s that?”

“Your face looks a little busted up.”

“Caving,” Ridley said. “Rough hobby.”

“Must be. I’ve seen men lose fights and come out looking better than that.”

“Those men probably should stay aboveground.”

“I’ve always figured we all should, for as long as we can. You got an idea what brings me to your door?”

“I asked Novak to town,” Ridley said, “but I didn’t put on a wig and a dress and tell him I was Sarah Martin’s mother. So you don’t need to linger. If anyone has a right to press charges, it’s me, and I’m not doing that. Storm like this, I imagine people need you on the roads, not wasting your time with me. Go help the innocent.”

“What would you be pressing charges for?”

“Like I said, I’m not.”

“But you think you could be.” Blankenship studied Ridley’s face. “Did you not get along with the fellow from Florida, Ridley?”

Ridley didn’t answer.

“Oh boy, we are already there, huh?” Blankenship said. “I ask a question, and you stare at me like you’re a mental defective, and we go round and round.”

A trace of a smile slipped onto Ridley’s face then. He controlled it, but not before Blankenship saw it and lights of anger went on in his eyes.

“Entertaining shit to you, is it, old boy? Glad to know that it pleases you. Not a lot of happy people working down in that cave right now, so I’m glad you’re pleased.”

Ridley lost the smile. “Working in what cave?”

Blankenship didn’t respond.

“What in the hell are you talking about, working in a cave?” Ridley hated the interest in his own voice, the need, but he couldn’t help it.

Blankenship was silent, watching him.

“All right, I get it,” Ridley said. “You want to play my game while you’ve got the chance. Enjoy it, Sheriff. I don’t need to let the heat out.” He started to push the door shut, but Blankenship got his foot wedged in.

“Cecil Buckner found Mark Novak’s clothes inside the entrance of Trapdoor. You don’t know anything about that, I’m sure.”

Ridley opened the door and stared Blankenship full in the eyes.

“Who let him into Trapdoor? Cecil?”

Blankenship shook his head. “Cecil didn’t so much as crack that door once he saw the clothes. He waited for a deputy.”

“Then how in the hell did Novak get inside?”

“Someone spent time and muscle working on that gate with a crowbar.” Blankenship gave him an appraising look. “You’re pretty handy, aren’t you? Good with tools, stronger than you look.”

“Nice line, Sheriff. But what you should have said was that I understand leverage. You’ve experienced that, haven’t you?”

“Go to hell,” Blankenship said. “I’ve no more interest in verbal games with you than I ever had. I want to see some cave maps. Immediately.”

“Why?”

“Because nobody can find the son of a bitch, and you’re the one who knows that cave.”

Novak was off the maps. Interesting. Trapdoor was up to something. Trapdoor had come alive again. Ridley shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but he surely needed to respect it. Trapdoor had responded to Novak. Ridley had hoped for as much, but he’d thought it would be a long process. He hadn’t anticipated that the cave would show her power so swiftly to an outsider. Still, it had been quite some time since she’d had visitors. Maybe she’d gotten lonely.

“He was just supposed to sit there and think,” Ridley said.

Blankenship’s eyes hardened. “You knew Novak was headed into the cave?”

“I’m the one who told him to go. I didn’t expect he’d make such an effort, frankly. But he seems resourceful. She’s more resourceful, though. He probably didn’t count on that.”

“She?”

Ridley ignored that and said, “You’re going to need me in there.”

“I don’t think that idea will be real popular.”

“If you think he’s actually in there, you’re going to need me.”

“To do what?”

“Find him. Let me guess, you’ve called Anmar Mirza already, haven’t you?”

“He’s on his way from Bloomington.”

“Sure he is. And he’s good. But he doesn’t know that cave like I do, and he’d be the first to admit it.”

“I don’t need Mr. Mirza’s opinion of you, Ridley. And I’m not about to grant you access to Trapdoor. What we’re going to do is talk about Mark Novak.”

“Not enough time for that.”

“No?” Blankenship tilted his head back. “Funny observation. You seem to know he’s at risk.”

“If the man’s naked and in Trapdoor, he’s at risk.”

“Naked?” Blankenship echoed in that stupid cop voice that suggested he thought he’d caught Ridley in a slip because he was some sort of master interrogator.

“You were the one who said they found his clothes, Sheriff.”

“Could have been his jacket. Could have been his belt. I don’t recall any specificity.”

“Well, was it?”

“I’d have to check my notes.”

“You’re doing the same thing you did last time. You’re asking the wrong questions of the wrong people, killing time above the surface while somebody does real killing down below.”

“Who did that killing down below?”

Ridley didn’t answer.

“Right,” Blankenship said. “That shuts your mouth pretty fast every time, doesn’t it? Well, we don’t need to worry about what happened in the past—”

“The past is the reason he’s here. It’s the reason he’s in that cave. You might not want to admit it, but your past is now your present. Any other notion is wrong. And you can’t afford to be wrong, Sheriff. Not again. You think about that. You think about what happens if you pull another body out of there.”

For an instant, Ridley thought that Blankenship might hit him. All he did, though, was say “You pulled the body out” through clenched teeth.

“I sure did. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to if you’d gotten me down there earlier. So now I’ll make you an offer. I’ll go into that cave, but this time it’ll be different. This time, I’ll make a concession. I’ll keep you right by my side.”

Blankenship stood silently in the snow, and his silence made Ridley’s pulse race. The sheriff was considering it. He was actually considering it, which meant only one thing: he wanted to track every move Ridley made in the cave in the hope that it would tell him things about the past, because the sheriff had never gotten over the lack of answers to what had happened in Trapdoor ten years earlier. And that meant only one thing to Ridley: a chance to go back into the cave. If he played this right, he was going to get to see her again.

“Scared to go down there with me?” Ridley said. “Scared of being alone in the dark with me, Sheriff?”

“You’re a sick son of a bitch.”

“That isn’t a fresh verdict.”

“You’re not going back into Trapdoor. We saw how that turned out last time.”

“We sure as hell did. You let the girl die,” Ridley said, and Blankenship swung on him then, hit him with an open palm but a damned big open palm; it knocked him back a step and brought blood to his lips. Ridley touched his mouth with his hand, looked at the blood, and shook his head.

“I am growing tired of getting hit today.”

“You’re going to—”

“Have some fun with a police-brutality charge, if I want to. But I don’t. What I want to do is what you need to do: pull that Florida boy out of Trapdoor while he still has a pulse. I’ve already said I’ll keep you or any of your deputies at my side. The choice is yours, Sheriff. Remember that you had the chance to make it. Remember how things might have gone if you’d made a different choice ten years ago.”

“There’s a special hell for you,” Blankenship said. His voice was choked. “There just has to be.”

“We’ll find out one of these days,” Ridley said, but in truth he’d already found out. “Back to your choice, Sheriff. Time’s wasting. Decisions need to be made, and you’re the man who has to make them. The good people of Garrison County have voted on that. Make your choice.”

“I don’t need you, Barnes. I just need the maps.”

Ridley smiled and tapped his temple with his index finger. “I’ve got them archived.”

Blankenship’s jaw worked and he turned away from Ridley so he wasn’t facing him when he said, “Get your damn gear, then. Let’s you and me go for a ride. I’ll be curious to see how being back in that place works on you, Ridley. Might just sharpen a few of those memories you claim to have lost.”

Ridley managed to smirk at that, but he, too, was wondering how being back in that place might work on him. He’d suggested going in with the sheriff because he knew it was the only chance he had of getting in. Inside Trapdoor, though, back there in the dark, the sheriff might end up regretting being at Ridley’s side. Depending on how the cave worked on Ridley, that might wind up being a very poor decision indeed.

17

Mark’s technical understanding of hypothermia came from diving courses, but his visceral understanding of it came from memory, of carrying his mother over his shoulder, trying to rub warmth into unresponsive flesh. It was on that long walk that he’d sworn he would never return to the Rockies, that when he died, it wouldn’t be in the cold.

Now here he sat, half naked and shivering, remnants of an unknown drug from an unknown needle in his bloodstream. He’d become his mother.

You can’t run away from your family, she had told him when he’d left for the bus station, and maybe she had been right.

Then again, she’d survived the cold that day.

He started to laugh and when the echo returned it to him, the laugh sounded deranged. Sounded, in fact, like his mother’s.

“Get it together,” he whispered. “Keep your head.”

He thought that he should have reached the place he’d started from by now; he had been crawling away from the cliff for a long time, longer than it had taken him to reach it. Or maybe not. Time and distance were hard to judge in the blackness.

Getting cold. You are getting too cold.

The cave wasn’t frigid, it wasn’t the sort of alarming cold of the snowstorm above, but it could be just as deadly. Your core temperature came down slowly but steadily. You had to be aware of all the ways you might lose heat. Down here with no supplies and no clothes, Mark couldn’t fight many of them. Something as simple as keeping his skin from making contact with the stone was impossible. The only way to stay warm was to keep moving, and there was some danger in that as well. The more he moved, the more likely he was to sweat and breathe hard, which cost him heat, and the more he moved, the more glucose he sapped from his bloodstream. He needed the glucose, his essential fuel. All of this he had written in notebooks when he was studying for a diving-instructor certification, a course that he’d never finished. After Lauren was killed, he’d never gone back into the water.

He felt as if he were crawling against a breeze, and that confused him for longer than it should have. Of course there would be a breeze. Air didn’t just sit because it was underground. It still moved.

His thought process seemed clogged, mud in the gears, and he tried to blame whatever drug lingered in his system, but the more frightening possibility had nothing to do with that. Mental difficulties went hand in hand with physical difficulties in hypothermia. Simple thinking became complex.

He searched for a word that should have been easy to find, the one that explained what that cold cave air was doing to him, a word he’d written in one of those notebooks. He had crawled for quite a while before he came up with the word: convection. You lost heat via convection when air circulated. You lost heat via conduction when you came in contact with cold surfaces. You lost heat via radiation when you didn’t have sufficient clothing; you lost heat via evaporation when you sweat; and you lost heat via respiration when you breathed. Those were all the ways you could find yourself in a hypothermic state. Any one of them could kill you, and Mark was experiencing every one of them.

Stop thinking about all the ways it’s bad. Just concentrate on going forward. On doing the one thing you can do to help yourself. There’s nothing left of you now but the essential. The only resources you have are your mind and body. Don’t waste them.

It was hard to follow his own commands. Whatever confidence and concentration he might have been able to muster in other circumstances was drained by the darkness. It was one thing to summon the hope of salvation when you were crawling down a mountain or swimming away from a sinking ship; it was another to call it up when you were trying to escape blackness by moving into more blackness.

There’s a reason they bury people underground, he thought. It’s the place where they come to an end. And you’re there now.

So was Lauren. He thought of her casket being lowered into the earth, put into the blackness and sealed away. He was down there with her now. And with Sarah Martin. How sad it was that they’d put her back underground when her last moments had surely involved a desperate hope to return to the surface. In the end, they’d just sent her remains down to the very world she’d died trying to escape. How terrible.

Maybe not; maybe she was cremated and her ashes scattered somewhere high. You don’t know. She could be aboveground. You should find out, if you ever have a chance.

Strange thoughts, dark thoughts. Everything here was dark, though. There was no choice about that. He thought maybe his hands weren’t working as well as they had been earlier. Opening and closing a little slower.

Hands are just tired. That’s all.

Everything was coming at him in a swirl; a thought would be there and then something would spiral in and replace it and later the original thought would shoot back. He tried to do some simple math, addition and subtraction. Exercise the brain, keep it focused. No, wait, exercising it might be bad. Hadn’t he read somewhere that mental willpower drained glucose faster than physical exertion? That didn’t seem possible, but he thought it was what he’d read. They’d done a test, something involving weight lifting and problem solving. He was almost sure of it. So what should he think about? What took the least amount of will?

Quitting.

Sure. But it was cold on the stone, and he was warmer moving. When moving stopped being appealing or when he could no longer feel a difference, that was when he would know...

He stopped crawling and cocked his head. Something had changed. There were more sounds here.

He tried to quiet his breathing — it was more panting than breathing — and get a bearing on where the sound was coming from. No longer did he fear snakes. Any sound seemed friendly. It meant there was something else down here in the dark, meant that he wasn’t entirely alone. By now, this was only a good thing.

To the right.

Dripping and splashing. There was moving water somewhere ahead. And at some point, it had come from the surface.

He found the source in another twenty feet, a shallow creek, just a few inches deep, but enough. He cupped his palms and lifted the water to his lips and drank greedily. It was muddy and tasted of the earth, and fine bits of grit coated his tongue and his teeth, but it was also delicious.

He drank enough to slake the thirst and then forced himself to stop, not wanting to push it and not sure if he’d even be able to hold it down. For a brief time he felt nauseated, but that passed and he moved along the underground stream just far enough to determine that it was going uphill.

The only thing he could possibly do to make himself colder, to accelerate his course toward hypothermia and death, would be to slip into water. His core temperature would begin to plummet then, and he had no means of raising it.

He just wasn’t sure that he had any other choice. Staying dry was the thing to do if you believed that rescue might be on the way. Mark did not. So far as he knew, he’d been left in this place to die. Getting out was up to him. And while getting wet would hasten the onset of hypothermia, he knew he didn’t have much time on that front anyhow. The difficulty in concentrating and the loss of his fine motor skills had already arrived, but what concerned Mark more was not the symptoms he was noticing but the one he’d stopped noticing: shivering. At first blush, this might seem like a good thing, an adaptation to the temperature. That was a cruel prank of biology, though. The body never really adapted to a change in temperature. His body was reacting to the temperature, but reacting was very different than adapting. While shivering was an unpleasant sensation, it generated heat.

He attempted to check his pulse, but he had trouble feeling the beats because of numb fingertips. As he ran his hands over his body, trying to warm himself, he was aware of how muscular he felt. His chest and abdominal muscles and triceps were taut the way they might be after a good weight-lifting session. This was the worst sign yet. An increase in muscle tone meant he was well down the road to hypothermia. In severe cases, the muscles actually began to mimic rigor mortis, the body dying around you even while you still drew breath.

“Got to stay moving,” he said, and his speech was slurred. Getting wet and getting colder might speed things along, but he didn’t have enough time left to worry about wasting it.

He crawled into the stream going against the current. There wasn’t much force to it here, but the water sounded louder ahead, and that might be a problem.

He had nothing but problems, though. Might as well add another. He put his head down and crawled, and time and distance faded from him, and for a long while there was nothing but the cold. He splashed on, and the pitch of the slope became much steeper, turning his crawl into a climb. It took an enormous effort — several times he fell and slid back down, banging painfully against the rocks — but he wasn’t certain how much distance he’d gained for all the work.

He stopped crawling twice, when he became convinced that he was not alone. That someone was moving with him, splashing along right at his side. The most alarming thing was that in those stretches, he believed he could also see this other person. A white figure in the blackness, shapeless and featureless. When he stopped and stared, though, there was nothing but the darkness and the feeling of the water and the cold.

Better hurry, Markus. Once the mind goes, you’re done.

He almost laughed at that. He didn’t feel as if his mind had been his own for a long time.

A light broke in the darkness then. A glimmer of white, and he thought, That is the snow. That is the surface.

Then the light went away. He blinked and stared, squinted. Closed his eyes and counted to five — he thought it was five, but he seemed to get lost on the way there — and then opened them again.

Nothing. No snow, no surface. For a moment, though, he’d been so sure.

He pushed on, wishing that he hadn’t imagined the light. Wishing that it might return for him. He thought of the girl — What was her name? — who had died down here. Had she seen a light at the end? If so, depending on the source, it might have scared her. That seemed terrible, to be scared by a light. It was unnatural. Light was supposed to help you in the dark, it was supposed to guide you and protect you. How wrong, if she’d died fearing a light and hoping for blackness.

What was her damn name? He couldn’t forget that. It was the reason he was here.

Sarah.

He wondered who’d said that. Where the voice had come from. It didn’t matter, though — the voice, which came through the darkness in a whisper, was correct. Her name had been Sarah. He said it aloud to make sure that it felt right.

“Sarah.”

His voice wasn’t right but the name was. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten it. He couldn’t allow that to happen again. Keep saying it, then. Keep on repeating it, and that way he couldn’t forget it.

“Sarah,” he slurred. “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.”

The cave walls returned the name to him each time — Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. He thought it was an echo but maybe not. Maybe it was whoever was down here with him; maybe whoever had told him her name to begin with was saying it too. He tried to determine whether that mattered and couldn’t reach a conclusion. A rock caught his shin, hard, and this confused him. He stopped walking and looked down and, of course, could not see the offender.

When had he begun to walk? He’d been crawling for so long because crawling was safer. He considered that and then he got it: He couldn’t crawl here because the water was too high. He should have remembered that. Like the name. He should have remembered...

He felt a wild surge of panic, because she’d escaped his mind again. Damn, but she was crafty. She could slip right past you. He’d had her, though. He’d just had her, and he could get her back. It was...

“Sarah.”

Yes. Keep saying it. Keep walking.

He moved on, or thought he moved on, using her name as fuel.

Splash. “Sarah.” Splash. “Sarah.”

The cave whispered it back to him every time, and he was grateful for that. The cave wasn’t going to let him forget again. He’d remember her.

18

Ridley had expected to make a stir with his arrival and was almost looking forward to watching Blankenship have to deal with that, but when the two of them got out of the car and began to move through the snow toward the cave, Ridley wearing his helmet and carrying his backpack and a loose coil of rope, there was already a stir going on.

“We can hear him!” a uniformed officer shouted, rushing up, slipping in the snow. “Sheriff, we can hear him! But we can’t figure out how to get to him.”

“Let me in,” Ridley said, shoving past him. “If you can hear him, then I can find him.”

“That’s the thing,” the deputy said, following behind. “It’s like his voice is coming up from under the rocks. It’s creepy, to tell you the truth.”

Ridley made for the cave, Blankenship struggling to keep up. A few heads turned toward them and someone said, “What in the hell is he doing here?” but Ridley ignored that and passed them and entered Trapdoor Caverns for the first time in a decade.

He stood on the wide shelf of stone where steps had been carved so visitors could get down to the tour boats. The passage beyond was filled with people and voices. It was bright and loud and crowded. It was everything a cave should not be.

Two people rounded the corner and headed to the entrance, fighting through the tangle of bodies. One was a deputy whom Ridley remembered well; the other was a woman who was clearly part of the cave rescue team, dressed just like Ridley. At the sight of him, they both stopped short. The woman — Rachel? Robin? He couldn’t remember — said, “You sick bastard.”

He remembered her then. Rachel. She’d been on the outside preparing to go back in when Ridley arrived with Sarah Martin’s body. She’d fallen to her knees at the sight of Sarah Martin and cried as if the girl were her own daughter.

Ridley hadn’t said anything to her back then, and he didn’t now. The deputy moved up to Ridley with his chest puffed and was in the midst of telling him that he had better get the hell out of here or he’d be going to jail when he spotted Blankenship.

“Sheriff? You want me to get this guy into the back of a car? He’s trespassing, bare minimum, and interfering with police business.”

He was right in Ridley’s face now, wanting a fight, pressing as close as he could, one of those idiots who spent hours building up their pec muscles, as if you won fights by bumping chests. Ridley thought about kissing him, tried to imagine what the reaction to that would be. The image made him smile, and at the sight of that smile, the deputy actually reached out and grabbed the straps of his backpack, like a school-yard bully.

“Step back, Dawson, damn it, step back,” Blankenship said. “He’s here because I want him here. Now get the hell out of my way.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You want him—”

“Did I stutter? You want an explanation, you can come to my office once this scene has been handled. Until then, get out of my way.”

Ridley turned and looked up at the sheriff’s flushed face and said, “Thanks, Danny.”

“Just keep walking.”

They moved past the deputy and up to the woman, who was mud-covered and sweating. She regarded Ridley with revulsion and kept her eyes on him even when the sheriff asked her quietly, “Can you take me to the spot where they’re hearing his voice?”

“Yeah. It’s not far.” She finally broke eye contact with Ridley, turned, and started back along the passage. They followed and curled away from the bright lights of the entrance chamber, and minimal darkness encroached, allowing Ridley to breathe easier. After spending so many hours practicing, he felt as if he should be able to stay in control, but he hadn’t been practicing in Trapdoor. This cave was different. This cave was so very different.

Finally they reached full dark, and Ridley clicked on his headlamp but dimmed it down until it was only bright enough to show his boots. The sheriff had a bulky Maglite that was exactly what you didn’t want in a cave, always occupying a hand and always requiring you to aim the light instead of having the light follow the turn of your head. Ridley had given him a helmet but hadn’t outfitted it with a light because the sheriff insisted on taking the big flashlight.

They wound through the cave alongside the water for a time and then they parted from it and entered the Chapel Room. Its benchlike slabs of fallen stone resembled church pews, and a tall formation stood in the center like an altar. The woman said, “They’re in the Funnel Room,” and knelt in front of a crawling passage that led out of the Chapel Room.

Ridley said, “You’ll need to be on your belly for a bit, Sheriff.”

Blankenship didn’t answer, but his breathing changed. The entrance to the crawl was about the size of a garbage-can lid, and everything beyond it was blackness. It looked spacious enough to a caver, but to the inexperienced, it might look terrifying. Ridley didn’t glance back at the sheriff to see his face, just dropped to his knees and said, “Let’s go.”

“Her first,” Blankenship said. “You stay with me.”

“Going to have to go single file in there, Sheriff. Not a lot of room.”

“You just let her lead the way, and you stay back with me.”

Ridley shrugged, ignored another withering glance from Rachel, and waited as she dropped to her hands and knees. She was a bigger girl, wide-shouldered, and she had to wriggle a bit to slip through. Ridley could almost feel Blankenship tighten up, watching. Blankenship was a large man. Not fat, but tall and broad.

Ridley gave her a five-count to get moving so he wouldn’t be nipping at her heels, and then he slid into the tunnel, feeling more at home once the walls closed in and there was stone all around. Some said that Ridley’s unique abilities in cave exploration were a product of recklessness, of taking risks that others wouldn’t, wedging his body into any crack in the rock without hesitation just in case it might lead somewhere, but that wasn’t so. Ridley just read caves better than most. Listened to caves better than most. They told you things, if you wanted to hear. Funny, considering that caves had been used for silencing things so often in human history. As places for hideouts, secret meetings, buried treasure, buried bodies.

He listened for Blankenship, but the only thing he could hear was the scrabbling of boots and hands on stone. The sheriff was scared, which was natural enough, but he was also holding his breath.

“Sheriff? You’re going to want to take some deep breaths.”

“I’m fine.” The words shook.

“I know you are. But you also probably haven’t been in a space this tight before, and you probably feel like you could use up your air if you breathe too deeply, am I right? A sense that there’s a finite amount of oxygen in here, and we are going to use it all up?”

“Just move,” the sheriff barked. “I’m fine.”

But Ridley could hear him breathing now, deep inhalations. One of the best ways to rush toward panic was to hold your breath and worry about your air. It was a common mistake of first-timers in tunnels; they assumed that because they couldn’t see wide-open spaces, the air supply must be limited.

When the sheriff stopped moving, Ridley stopped too and said, “Rachel, hold up.”

He could tell by the way she stiffened that she didn’t like hearing him use her name. Probably didn’t like that he even knew her name.

“Sheriff? You okay?”

Blankenship’s breathing had changed again, gone faster. It took a few seconds before he responded, and when he did, his voice was soft and unsteady.

“I’m getting squeezed,” he said. “It’s getting too tight for me.”

“No, it’s not,” Ridley said. The sheriff ignored him and began to slither backward. Ridley spoke more firmly. “Stop moving.”

The sheriff listened. Silence again, except for those uneasy breaths. Edging toward hyperventilating, but not all the way there yet.

“Now, I can’t turn around to get my light on you, so you’re going to have to use your own,” Ridley said. His voice was measured and calm, a bedside manner. “I want you to do as I say, and to concentrate. Give me five seconds of focus. You going to do that?”

“Yes.” The word was a whisper full of self-loathing. The sheriff hated that he was showing fear, and he hated even more that he was showing it to Ridley.

“All right. Look to your right side.”

The beam of the sheriff’s flashlight bobbed around, casting shadows. He was doing as instructed, at least.

“Good,” Ridley said. “Now turn it to the left.”

The light bobbed again. Here the walls on each side were nearly touching Ridley’s shoulders, and the sheriff had broader shoulders than he did. So did Rachel, for that matter. One of Ridley’s greatest assets in a cave was his size.

“Those walls,” Ridley said, “haven’t done anything in hundreds of years. They’re not going anywhere. They’re solid. Now lift your head up.”

“I can’t. Too tight.”

“I didn’t say sit up. I told you to lift your head. Just lift until you can feel the stone.”

There was a pause and then a clink of plastic against stone as the helmet found the roof.

“Okay. It’s right there on top of me.”

“Sure it is. But you had to move to touch it, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.” Already the sheriff’s breathing was steadier. The simple act of following instructions kept him from feeling alone, and that made a dramatic difference.

“Then you know it’s not actually squeezing you,” Ridley said. “You can move. But the direction we need to move is forward. You ready?”

“Yeah.”

Ridley reached out and tapped Rachel on the back of the leg. He felt the muscle go taut. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Don’t touch me. Don’t you ever touch me.”

“Let’s go,” he repeated.

She began crawling again, moving faster, and that was just fine. Speed would help the sheriff, because he would imagine he was getting closer to an open space instead of deeper into the tunnel. Ridley would have preferred to take his time and let Trapdoor talk to him, but the circumstances weren’t right. He wasn’t communing with the cave now; he was just passing through.

When Rachel entered the chamber and stood, Ridley said, “Made it, Sheriff. You might need to duckwalk in here, tall guy like yourself, but you’ll be all right.”

“Duckwalk?”

“Just watch me.” Ridley rose to half standing, upright but bent at the waist, knees flexed. “You ever play baseball, Sheriff?”

“Yeah.”

“Think of yourself as a shortstop going after a ground ball. You’re moving laterally, you’re bent over, but you’re still fluid, still loose. Pretend you’re closing on second base, but you’ve got to keep your eye on the plate, right? That’s where the ball is coming from.”

“I played third.”

“Pretend you were a little more athletic, then.”

The sheriff scrambled awkwardly to his feet and imitated Ridley’s posture as best he could.

Rachel said, “Let’s go. It’s not a tour.”

“You think it would be faster if he’d frozen up back there in the crawl?”

“I’m not freezing up,” Blankenship said. “Let’s move.”

“Good man.” Ridley followed as soon as Rachel went into motion, moving in a side step, watching the sheriff’s footwork. Blankenship crossed his feet over now and then but he did all right. Being as tall as he was, he was going to have one hell of a stiff back by morning.

They were almost through the chamber and closing in on the next passageway when Blankenship said, “I can hear him!”

“No, you can’t,” Ridley said. He’d been listening to the voices for a while. “Those are the people who are trying to find him.”

They curled through the passageway and came out on the other side in a room larger than any they’d seen since the entrance chamber. This was the Funnel Room, so named because it was shaped like an upside-down volcano. In the center was a nearly perfect funnel formation, thirty feet in diameter at the top and about three feet at the bottom. There were six people in the room, five men and one woman; two of the men were down in the bottom of the funnel, clipped to ropes. You could make it up and down the funnel without the use of ropes and ascenders, but the rescue teams took their safety protocols seriously. They’d seen what happened to those who did not.

One of the men up on the ledge looked at Ridley when he entered and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“That line has already been used tonight,” Ridley said. “Hope somebody comes up with new material.” He didn’t look any of them in the eye, but that wasn’t because he felt intimidated — looking these folks in the eyes required staring into the beams from their headlamps. He crouched on the ledge and watched the men in the bottom of the funnel. One was Cecil Buckner; the other was Anmar Mirza, the cave rescue coordinator.

“He’s down there?” the sheriff asked.

“That’s where you can hear his voice,” Rachel said. “At first we weren’t sure it was a voice. Pretty weak.”

“Is he responding to you? Can you communicate?”

“He seems to be talking to himself.”

Down in the funnel, Cecil said, “Quiet! Listen!”

Everyone fell silent and looked toward the base of the funnel, casting their beams downward. For a time there was no sound, but then it came, faint but clear, a drawn-out call.

“Saaaarraaah.”

The sound whispered out of the funnel and echoed through it, the name clear as a bell.

Silence lingered until the sheriff broke it with a soft question. “Who’s he talking to?”

“We’re not sure,” Cecil answered. “He’s stuck on that name, though. It’s all we can hear.” He pushed back from the wall on his toes, letting the rope take his weight, and wiped sweat from his face. “To tell you the truth, it’s kind of freaking us out. Those of us who were... you know, in here before. Back then.”

They all looked at Ridley. It was impossible not to realize that; their headlamps followed their eyes. In the cave, there was no such thing as a surreptitious stare, because light couldn’t lie. Ridley felt as if he should say something, felt as if he should be defensive and angry or dismissive and wiseass or any combination thereof as long as he was something. But he couldn’t come up with a response. When the voice came again — Saaarrraaah — gooseflesh broke out across his arms, and his spine prickled with a fear he’d thought he would never know again.

I’ll be curious to see how being back in that place works on you, the sheriff had said. The way it worked on Ridley was supposed to be private, though. Internal. If the cave called her name, Ridley should have been the only one who could hear it.

He looked around the group then with an urgent need to make sure that they were hearing it. Because down here, your mind could warp a little. Down here, real things could become false, and imagined horrors could leave bruises.

Nothing was imagined about this, though. They all seemed to be hearing it. If he was imagining—

“Saaarrraaaah...”

— this, then he was as good as done. What happened next could be very, very bad. Could be the end of him. He knew that better than any of these suspicious sons of bitches. He’d lived it.

His heart was racing, and all those beams were lancing at him from different directions like searchlights, and he closed his eyes against them despite himself.

“Saaarrraaaahh.”

“You think you can get to him?” the sheriff asked Anmar after the last echo of that hair-raising whisper was gone. “Do you need blasting equipment, something to get through the rock?”

Ridley kept his eyes closed, but he was glad the sheriff was talking, providing a moment of distraction. Ridley concentrated on his breathing, trying to get steady. It wasn’t easy. He was waiting on that whisper again, although it wasn’t a real whisper, more of a weak howl. A cry from someone who wanted to sound strong but was too close to dead to achieve anything near that.

He heard it again, weaker still: “Saaarrrraaaah.”

Everyone went silent when it came, the way you did when the minister spoke in church. Even if you knew the message, you had to listen to it respectfully.

“Can you get to him?” the sheriff asked again.

“I don’t know,” Anmar Mirza said. “We’ve got to find him first. It sounds as if he’s just a shelf below us, but how he got there... I have no idea.”

“Could we drill it?”

“We go up,” Ridley said. He opened his eyes, and though he shielded them with his hands, like a golfer reading the green before a putt, he wasn’t bothered by the harsh beams from his audience this time.

“What?”

“There’s nothing down there but solid stone floor. You could drill all night and not make any progress. So we go up.”

“I don’t follow you, Ridley.” This was from Cecil Buckner, and he was the only person who’d spoken Ridley’s name. The only one who didn’t have pure contempt in his voice. Regardless of what he thought of the past, he understood this about the present: Ridley could help. Ridley had drawn the maps.

“Shelves,” Ridley said. “The cave is built in shelves.” He made a stacking gesture with one hand. “But they’re not laid properly. It’s like an old fieldstone wall — uneven, overlapping. What can always find its way down through one of those walls?”

“Water,” the sheriff said.

Ridley nodded. “So we turn into water. To find him, we become water. He’s below us, but we can’t get there from here. We’re sitting in a little catch basin. This is where water gets trapped. So we go up and we go sideways until we get off this shelf. You follow now?”

Several headlamps turned upward, putting a gloss of light across the ceiling.

“There’s no passage up there.”

“You didn’t draw the maps, Cecil.”

“And I didn’t get to see them either. But there’s no passage up there.”

“There’s a crawler. A chute that will take us to the shelf below this one. Down toward his voice.”

“Has anybody ever been through it?”

“Only one,” Ridley said. “And it’s tight.”

“Can you make it again?”

“Yes.” Ridley slipped his backpack off his shoulders and unzipped it.

“I’ll stay with him,” Blankenship said, but the unease in his voice was obvious.

“We need an experienced caver with him,” Anmar said. “With all due respect, you’re not right for the job. I’ll do it. I’ll make sure that whatever happens in here today, there are eyes on him.”

Ridley ignored them both, removed a drill powered by lithium ion batteries from his pack, then opened another compartment and grabbed a handful of expansion bolts.

“What are you doing with that?” the sheriff asked.

“Building us a ladder,” Ridley said. “And we need to do it fast. It’s wet down where he is, and it’s cold. Time isn’t on his side.”

As if to confirm this, the whisper came again, softer than ever: “Saaarraahh.”

19

Mark met Sarah Martin in the water.

She came to him only after he quit fighting ahead, when he finally stopped moving and let the current take him.

There wasn’t much current to speak of, because he’d made it back to water that was only up to his waist. Wading through waist-deep water was chore enough for a strong man, though, and Mark had stopped being strong long before, and he’d stopped being a man somewhere along the streambed, someplace where the water ran high and every now and then he’d stepped into a hole and was completely submerged, choking, close to drowning.

It was her name that brought him back to the surface on those occasions. The repetition of her name had felt critical to his memory once, but after a while, it became equally critical to his forward motion. He’d fallen into an unconscious cadence, saying her name with each step, and eventually he began to feel as if he could not do one without the other. Name, step. Name, step. He felt as if he had to say the dead girl’s name in order to move forward, had to remember it. The past drove the present, always.

The next time he forgot her name, he froze. Her name had been right there on his tongue, he’d said it at least a thousand times in a row. But then...

What was her name?

He stumbled on the rocks, and the water pushed at his legs, and then he gave up because he could no longer remember, and once you forgot the past, there was no point in pushing to the future. The two were intertwined. He understood that now in a different way than he had before.

And so he knew it was time to quit.

The water caught his weight and carried him away from this hopeless place and back to the one where he could have made different decisions, chosen different paths. He let himself drift, and for a long, beautiful moment, he believed that was how it would feel forever — an endless slow drift through the blackness, going backward, always back, and that was good because it was where everything he wanted waited for him.

When he hit rock with his shoulder, the beautiful dark path was gone, and pain replaced it. The impact was so jarring and painful that it temporarily cleared his mind and he was aware of the water, the stone walls, and the blackness again.

He was not aware of the cold. In fact, he realized that he’d reached hot water. A hot spring, perhaps? It had to be. What began as a creeping warmth quickly became scorching, and he blamed the water and tried to escape it. There was a flat shelf of rock above him, and though it was not even chest high, it felt like it would be an impossible climb. On the fifth try, he finally made it, pulling his body out of the searing heat of the water.

The heat didn’t leave him, though. It lingered, and the misery was terrible. He felt as if he were trapped inside a fire, one that would not burn over him and move on but was here to stay. He tried to brush the heat away from him, but his hands didn’t obey his commands anymore. He thought that he was still too close to the water, and the farther from it he got, the deeper into the stone, the better. He slid and scooted and scraped along the shelf until he made contact with a wall, and there he stopped, and that was when he saw her.

She was sitting on a flat rock just across from him. There was an impossible brightness to her, as if light came from her pores. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and running shoes, and she sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around them, as if to keep warm, which seemed a very strange thing to do down here where it was so damn hot. She didn’t seem hot or cold, though, didn’t seem bothered by the temperature in the least. Just comfortable. Watching him. Waiting. What was she waiting for? What did she want from him?

To remember.

Yes, that was right. He was required to remember her, to think about her in the dark. That was his instruction. No wonder she’d appeared; no wonder she was waiting on him. Knowing that you’d been forgotten had to be a unique and relentless pain.

“Sarah,” he said. She didn’t react, which was frustrating, because he knew that was right. That was her name. He thought that she must not have heard him. It had become loud down here, the water going from a trickle to a roar, and not only that, he seemed to be hearing voices from some other place, somewhere up above. Whatever they were saying, it wasn’t the right thing, it wasn’t pleasing to her, and it probably kept her from hearing him. He called her name again, louder this time, and still she didn’t react.

He tried again, and again, and still she just sat there, knees held to her chest, her eyes fastened on him, watching and waiting. Unsatisfied by him but still hoping.

For what? he wanted to scream, but he was terrified of upsetting her. No — of disappointing her. What in the hell did she want from him? If not to be remembered, then what?

He leaned his head back against the stone, and though he could no longer see her face, he could still see the light from where she sat in the darkness, watching and waiting and hoping.

20

They’d put in seventeen expansion bolts by the time Ridley reached the ceiling. From the bolts hung seventeen etriers, short stretches of rope ladder. Ridley didn’t travel underground with those, but the rescue team had, and he allowed them to be used because it would help others move up when he needed them. Not everyone was as skilled with single-rope techniques as he was, and he knew that when — if — the time came to move Novak down, the ladders would be a help.

He moved upward using a daisy chain attached to his climbing harness — a laborious process but a quick one if you were good. He’d secure a bolt above him, clip the daisy chain in, and use it to pull himself up until the bolt was at waist level. Then he’d reach up and install another bolt. A dynamic rope was tied to his harness, and this ran down to his belay man. If a bolt failed, the belayer would arrest his fall. Ridley understood that they preferred this approach and understood that perhaps it was safer, but he’d worked alone for so long that he didn’t trust the idea. If he couldn’t stop his fall himself, then let him fall.

He wasn’t going to fall, though.

By the time he had the seventeenth bolt in, he was able to get his hands on the lip of rock just below the ceiling. He hung there and caught his breath and rested for a minute while he searched the shadowed rocks for the right spot. He remembered that it had looked like nothing more than a large crack.

“How long now?” the sheriff asked, and the question put Ridley back into action, reminding him that there was no rest allowed. The sheriff was inquiring with the ground team, those still down in the funnel, as to how much time had passed since they last heard Novak’s voice. The whispered calls had ceased when Ridley was on his twelfth bolt.

“Nine minutes,” someone in the funnel said.

“Gotta move,” another voice responded. “Clock is ticking.”

If we’re lucky, Ridley thought. Could be that the clock has stopped, boys and girls.

He’d been certain that the chute entrance was here, but now he was second-guessing himself, beginning to worry that they’d spent all this time climbing toward the wrong spot on the ceiling. Then his headlamp beam caught it, and he realized why he’d missed it the first time — it was awfully small.

“Entrance located,” Ridley called, and he pointed toward it.

The sheriff’s voice said, “I don’t see it.”

Ridley stretched and got his hand hooked into the crevice. “Right here.”

One of the rescue-team members said, “No way we’re getting through that. No way.”

Ridley had to admit that it didn’t look encouraging. It was the sort of space that most people wouldn’t want to poke their heads into, let alone their bodies.

“I’ve been through,” Ridley said. And then, more for himself than the rest of them, he added, “It opens up a little. Once you get going, it’s not so bad at all.”

But his mouth was dry and his heart was thundering.

“Give me just a second,” he said, and then he closed his eyes and drank in the darkness, imagined he was folding it around himself like a shroud, then smoothing the shroud over each individual nerve ending. It was a burial shroud — the nerves were being put to permanent rest, one at a time, until all that remained within him was darkness and peace. In his mind, the nerves waved like blades of tall grass in the wind until he stilled them with the dark shroud.

“All right,” he said. “I’m going in now. Anmar, you give me at least a minute lead time before you follow. If there’s trouble getting through, we don’t need two people on top of each other in there.”

“Got it. I’ll follow, but I won’t breathe down your neck.”

“Hang on,” the sheriff said. “I don’t want him going first.”

There were a few murmurs of agreement. Anmar and Cecil were noticeably silent. Ridley called back and said, “Tell him, guys. Tell him why that is a bad idea.”

Cecil’s voice was soft and grudging. “It’s about speed, Sheriff. He’s fast, and he’s been through it before, which is the big difference. If we lose speed, we might lose our chance.”

The sheriff was still objecting when Ridley pulled his body up and reached into the gap with both arms. When his hands found purchase on the rough rock, he dragged his head into position, happy that there was a good foothold to help with balance, and leaned down so that the headlamp illuminated the interior, which looked like the inside of a stone air duct, and not a big one. The scene wasn’t made any more appealing by the way the duct angled steeply down.

“Going in,” he called, and then he lowered his head and pushed it forward. The helmet banged against rock immediately, and he twisted, hearing a scraping noise on all sides, and got his helmet through. His shoulders wedged tight. The sensation told him, Stop, you do not belong in here, but Ridley ignored the warning and wriggled forward. His feet were free now, kicking in open air above the ninety-foot drop, and he heard the sheriff say, “Good Lord.” The belay rope tangled in Ridley’s feet, and he wriggled again and got a few inches farther in, sure that he was solid now and would not fall. The rope was bothering him, and though he knew Anmar and the others would insist he keep it, he called, “Off rope,” and, with difficulty, found the carabiner and unclipped it. He was untethered now, on his own. His head and torso were jammed into the crack in the stone, but his legs were still outside, and he knew that from down below, he must look like a rabbit being consumed by a snake.

His helmet scraped off the rock again as he used his elbows to pull himself forward. His headlamp had gotten jostled and was angled up a bit, which was a problem because the crawl was angled down. With the light pointed up, most of what lay ahead was dark.

He drove forward using his elbows. His feet left the air and found stone as he slipped all the way into the chute, thinking that it was going to be one hell of a hard thing to get Novak back up through here if he was in bad shape.

Don’t do that, he scolded himself. The minute you began to worry about getting back out, panic could rise, claustrophobia could set in. One of the great myths of caving was that regulars couldn’t be touched by claustrophobia. That was what the weekend warriors said, maybe, but people who’d spent a lot of time underground had seen others get stuck or had gotten stuck themselves or both. Real cavers understood real consequences.

But you’re not going to get stuck. You’ve made it through here before.

Yes, he had. Ten years ago. And if a single piece of rock had fallen in that decade, he’d be worming himself right into a dead end.

Takes most rocks ten thousand years to fall.

Not all of them.

He paused there, the back-and-forth interior dialogue beginning to get to him, the worries about backing out of the chute into a ninety-foot fall — all of it swirling, threatening. This was where a cave could start to break your mind, and if you were brooding over these things in the dark...

That was what he’d practiced for all of these years, ever since his last descent into Trapdoor: control in the dark. He knew no panic. Not anymore. And no one would ever suffer the consequences of Ridley’s panic in the dark again.

He closed his eyes, breathed a few times, and then continued on with his eyes closed. At this pace, you didn’t need your eyes anyhow. Hell, at this pace, he could crawl over razor blades and just give himself a nice smooth shave.

Inch, inch, inch. The slope was getting steeper, and he knew that he was angling down behind the wall now.

When his shoulders caught, he wasn’t immediately unnerved. He opened his eyes and assessed what little he could — not much to see except the backs of his hands — and tried to shimmy his shoulders around and loosen the grip.

It didn’t loosen.

Well, now. Well. He was breathing faster, not all that different from the sheriff back in the entrance crawl, and he wet his lips and sucked in air and reminded himself yet again that he’d done this once before. Back when he hadn’t known whether it was open, he’d gotten through. He took as deep a breath as he could manage with the squeeze on his ribs, braced his toes against the floor, and drove forward.

He moved a little. Just enough to wedge his upper body in even tighter. He was upside down behind the wall now, and he was stuck.

Come on, Ridley, come on!

His face was pressed right against the stone. When he tried to wet his lips, his tongue licked across the rocks and brought the taste of wet earth into his mouth.

There’ll be a day when you’re too old. When your heart can’t take it. There’ll be a day...

“This ain’t that day,” he whispered, his lips brushing the stone. He braced his toes again and drove forward and, finally, earned a bit of relief. The steel bands around his chest loosened just a touch, and after some more scrabbling, he got to the point where he could use his elbows. The point where he could lift his chin off the stone floor. This must have been what he meant when he’d said it opened up a little once you got going.

And there it went, widening enough that he could lift his head and extend his arms. It was amazing just how free he felt. A few inches made a world of difference down here.

“Anmar? You good?”

“Working through it. Son of a bitch, this is tight.”

“It gets better.”

The idea of bringing Novak through here reared up again. He was taller than Ridley, but he wasn’t stocky, thank God. Muscled but lean. That was good, because they weren’t pulling anybody of girth through this crawl. Trying to get him through that squeeze Ridley had just left behind was going to be hell anyhow. He wasn’t sure they could make that with Novak.

The chute bent slightly to the right and widened, and now he could hear water. Soft drips and trickles. The last time — the only time — he’d made it down here, he’d found a chamber filled nearly to the ceiling with water. That had been after a series of strong rains, though, and the water table had been higher than it was tonight. He’d run out of time then, but he’d left the cave and told Pershing MacAlister that he thought he might be on the verge of a breakthrough, a discovery that would take Trapdoor into the ranks of the longest caves in the country. There had been great excitement that evening, sitting on the deck of MacAlister’s place and sharing beers and musing about the possibilities. Then the cave turned into a homicide scene, and then Pershing shut it down for good.

Sarah Martin had been there that night. She’d come down with Evan Borders, had sat on his lap and listened to the caving talk, looking impossibly young. That was the last time Ridley saw her alive. He thought. He hoped.

But it wasn’t. You know that it wasn’t.

It depended on your definition of see, he supposed. After the light died, when he’d met her in a blackness that was darker than any night in history, he hadn’t seen a thing.

“You good, Barnes?”

Anmar’s voice shook him back into the present.

“I’m good,” he called. “Almost to the bottom.”

The water sounds were louder now, and Ridley could see a yawning gap in the rock just ahead. His headlamp beam reflected off murky water beyond. The chute was tall enough here that he could rise to his knees, and the sensation was a sweet relief. On his hands and knees, he slipped through the gap, looked left, and saw Mark Novak’s body on the rocks.

“Novak?” Ridley said. “Novak!”

There was no response. The body was motionless, and Novak was naked except for water-soaked underwear. His skin had a faint blue tint against the beam of Ridley’s lamp, an almost ethereal glow, like a ghost.

“Shit!” Ridley shouted. The cave threw the word back at him, mocking.

“What’s wrong?” Anmar cried from somewhere in the chute.

Ridley cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Get back up there and tell them to have a medevac unit ready. Not an ambulance, a helicopter.”

“You can see him? Is there a chance?”

Ridley was about to say no, was about to resign himself to bringing a second corpse out of Trapdoor, when Novak lifted his head to look in the direction of the sound, then raised a hand to block the glare from Ridley’s headlamp. Ridley dimmed it immediately.

“You’re alive.” He said it with true surprise, because he hadn’t anticipated that Trapdoor would release Novak once she’d gotten him this far. He’d hoped she might — it would be a shame to lose Novak so early — but he hadn’t counted on it. In fact, this was the most fascinating development he had encountered underground in years. Trapdoor had allowed Novak in, and then kept him alive? There was an element of trust there that Ridley hadn’t expected. Perhaps the old girl didn’t mind the occasional visitor.

And perhaps she didn’t appreciate that locked door at the entrance.

Ridley entered the water, which rose swiftly to his knees and then to his waist, and an odd thought passed through his mind: You’ve been here before.

He pivoted away from Novak, who was struggling to get upright, and stared at the water-filled passage ahead. They were off the maps now, at least the maps that everyone else had seen, but Ridley remembered this room, and he remembered the swim he’d made to get here.

He’d lost his first light in this room. Since he adhered to the rule of three, he hadn’t worried over that too much, because he’d been equipped with two backups. At that time, he hadn’t understood what Trapdoor thought of light, just how strongly she resisted it. At that time, Ridley Barnes had yet to meet the dark man.

“You came close, Novak,” he said. Anmar was struggling down the chute, sweating and gasping, a smashed backpack of first-aid equipment with him. He looked at Ridley and then at Novak, who had managed to get himself into some semblance of a sitting position but was staring at them with uncomprehending eyes.

“I lost her,” Novak said. His voice was a dying man’s rasp to which Trapdoor refused to even grant an echo. “I almost caught up to her, but then I lost her.”

Anmar said, “We’re never going to get him back up through there. It’s too damn tight.”

“Don’t need to,” Ridley said. He brightened the headlamp once more and pointed across the eerie aquamarine waters that carved through the stone and led away from Novak’s resting place. “He was nearly out himself. Wouldn’t that have been something, if he’d made it out alone? I wouldn’t have thought it possible.”

Again he wondered why Trapdoor had granted such favors, but Anmar interrupted his thoughts.

“What are you talking about, we don’t need to? I thought that chute was the only way down here.”

“Of course not. You have something to warm him up and keep him covered? More covered than he is, at least?”

“Yes.”

“Get to it, then. We’re going through the water, and we’re going to need to hurry.”

Anmar stared at the place where the water vanished around a bend of rock.

“You think that water passage goes anywhere good?”

“It’ll take us right out to the place where they used to end the boat tours. It’s a cakewalk for the medics from there.”

“How in the hell do you know that?”

“Because I swam it once. The water table was higher then, and it required diving equipment. It’s lower now, and we’ll be able to find air. There’s not a chance in hell we’d get him back up that chute. Time is the ticket, and we can get him out of here in a hurry if we go through the water. It’s not far at all, and it’s easy going. Trust me.”

“How long has it been since someone did that?”

Ridley turned to him, let his glance linger for just a moment, and didn’t answer the question.

“Clock’s ticking,” he said instead. “Let’s move.”

21

When Mark woke, he was in a bed with metal rails and there was an IV tube in his arm. He felt an incredible thirst and indescribable muscle aches. There was a call button beside him that would summon a nurse, and he considered it but didn’t punch it, trying to take stock of his circumstances and recall how, exactly, he had ended up here. Events existed in his memory like scattered snapshots, all out of chronological order and some badly out of focus. The road back from Ridley’s house — that was where it had started. A truck behind him, a van up ahead. Men with black masks and black shotguns. A field of windswept snow, and then...

A cave. That memory frightened him more than the others, even though it was among the out-of-focus set. Blackness and cold water. He’d been left there. He’d tried to find his way out of the dark.

And apparently succeeded? The hospital room told him that he had, but the foggy memories offered no confirmation, not even a hint.

He punched the call button then, and the door opened within seconds, and an overweight brunette woman with kind eyes looked at him and said, “My goodness. Let me get the doctor.”

She was gone before he could even ask for water.

The doctor was a short, slender man named Mehir Desare, and as soon as he introduced himself to Mark, he told him that he owed him some thanks.

“If all continues to go well, you’re going to get me in some medical journals. We’re not supposed to confess that we desire that sort of thing — it’s quite self-important and shameful to admit — but the truth is the truth, you know.”

Mark nodded, though he wasn’t following at all. Dr. Mehir Desare smiled at him over steepled fingers as he sat on a stool beside the bed and said, “Don’t you want to know how we did it?”

“Sure,” Mark said. His throat hurt when he spoke.

“You arrived to us with a core temperature of 24.8 Celsius — that would be, oh, 76.6 Fahrenheit, you know — quite low. Quite low. The EMTs had done a fine job with you, the very best they could, and still they had not succeeded in bringing your core temperature up any higher than that. A grim situation.”

The doctor paused as if to make certain Mark appreciated the drama.

“Grim,” Mark echoed, and Dr. Desare nodded.

“To rewarm you, we used ECMO, extracorporeal circulation. Do you know what extracorporeal circulation is, Mr. Novak?”

Mark didn’t, but he considered the adjective for a moment and then said, “Out of body. Whatever you’re talking about that kept me alive, it came from outside of the body.”

“Indeed. The technique involves oxygenating the patient’s blood outside the body via mechanical means. Where your system stops, ours begins. Consider it a pinch hitter for your circulation. Oxygen-depleted blood — or, in your case, chilled blood — is diverted from the body, rewarmed and enriched with oxygen, then pumped back in. We weaned you from extracorporeal circulation when your own system indicated that it was ready to get back into the game. But you were kept alive thanks to an out-of-body experience.”

Dr. Mehir Desare smiled at that, pleased with the little joke, but Mark was shuffling through some of those out-of-focus snapshots of memory. Shotguns. A van. Walking a plank that couldn’t have been a plank. Then—

The wall was melting.

Then he’d been alone in the dark. Or had he been alone? He felt as if someone had been with him. But the image that came to mind—

Sarah Martin was watching me. She was lit from within and she was watching

— was not one he wanted to dwell on. Or even remember.

He thought then of his mother, of her skin turning blue on the wind-whipped prairie. A spirit quest, she’d told him when she was conscious again. By that point, she was so out of her head that she’d begun to believe her own con. She thought she really was a Nez Perce. You’re fucking German, he’d told her, and when she insisted he was wrong, he’d held up his hands and said, You’re right, Mother. You’re not German. You’re a fraud, that’s all, and then the nurse had asked him to leave, and he never went back to the hospital. Last words. He had a way with them, certainly. He tried to think of the last thing he’d said before he’d ended up in the cave. If they hadn’t gotten him out in time, what would his last words have been? He couldn’t come up with anything.

“We administered some drugs to protect the brain and now you are” — Dr. Desare consulted his watch — “twenty-eight hours into your stay with us.”

More than a day.

“How long was I in the cave?” Mark said.

“You remember the cave? Excellent!” The doctor was jubilant. “Memory function of the kind you’re displaying is exciting. There was some concern about neurologic deficits. We’ll be conducting tests, but at this juncture I’m pleased with your general cognitive ability.”

“Deepest thanks,” Mark said, and the doctor laughed.

“It might not seem like the highest of compliments, but we were worried. As for how long you were in the cave, I can’t say. Are you up to seeing visitors, by the way? There’s one waiting rather impatiently. A man from Florida.”

Jeff London had arrived.

22

Jeff looked good, fit and rested, which came as no surprise. He worked out with religious fervor. He’d probably been doing push-ups in the waiting room. His hair was still thick but starting to go gray. His tan face was weathered. Still, he could have passed for forty without much question, and he was fifty-five.

“Rumor has it someone finally figured out how to thaw you out,” he said.

“They pumped my blood out, warmed it up, and then let me have it back. Pretty good deal, don’t you think?”

“Most people who know you wouldn’t have given your blood back once they took it, that’s for sure.”

The hospital room might have seemed the wrong venue for the exchange of wiseass barbs, but the barbs were needed. From the way Jeff let his eyes drift, though, Mark knew the good humor wouldn’t last long.

“Why in the hell did you force your way into that cave?” Jeff said. “Even in the annals of your decision-making, that one stands out as poor, which is really saying something.”

“Force my way into the cave?” Mark stared at him without comprehension. “You haven’t been told what happened?” He realized then what should have been obvious from the start — nobody had been told what happened. He’d felt it would be clear somehow. He’d been put in the cave and he’d been rescued from it, and so it seemed someone should have understood the basics. The rescue effort had been organized. He had vague flash memories of uniforms and lights and official questions. Amid all the confusion, he’d gotten some comfort in that — the police had been called, and that meant they understood what had happened. The idea that he had gone into the cave willingly was astonishing.

“I’ve been told you pried open an old gate and went wandering,” Jeff said. “I don’t believe that you chose to take your clothes off for the trip, though. It’s been a point of contention between me and your friend the sheriff. The appearance of things suggested you went into the water after something. Your clothes were folded in a tidy pile right beside some sort of underground stream, like you’d taken them off before you waded in so they wouldn’t get wet.”

“Jeff... I was abducted. Three guys with shotguns.”

“They took you to the cave?”

“Yes. Well... not directly. I mean, two of them left. I think. But I had a hood over my head, and I can’t say exactly. But there was... I was somewhere else first.”

“How’d you get into the cave?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean? Did they knock you out?”

“Yes. Well... they must have. Because I don’t remember how I got in there. There’s a gap in my memory for a stretch, so they must have. I was up on the road, I was driving, and they stopped me and put me in this van. All of them had masks. All of them had shotguns. Then they put a hood over my head so I couldn’t see anything, and we went... somewhere. There was one guy asking questions.”

“The hood was on you the whole time?”

“No. It came off, I think.”

“You think?”

“I don’t remember!” He was watching Jeff’s eyes, seeing the skepticism in them, and panic began to rise at the idea that even his friend didn’t believe him. Jeff reached out and put a reassuring hand on his arm.

“All right, Markus. We’ll get it straightened out.”

“Straightened out? Someone tried to kill me! What do people think happened?”

Jeff pulled a plastic chair up close to the bed. “They think you went in there and got lost. The last report of you before that was from Ridley Barnes. He told the police that you came by and kicked the shit out of him. After tying him up with his own rope. That didn’t happen either?”

“That actually did.”

Jeff rubbed his eyes. “Beautiful.”

“But then I left, and there was a truck behind me. It turned and blocked the road, and then the van came. Three people total, two in the van and one in the truck.” Mark sat up with excitement, ignoring the aches that throbbed through his body. “My rental car. They took it. Didn’t it occur to anybody that it would be hard for me to get to the cave without a car?”

Jeff studied him for a few seconds before he said, “Your car was at the cave. Parked up on top, pulled off the side of the road. The caretaker saw it, and that’s when he went looking for you and found the damage to the gate and your clothes in a pile inside. Then he called the police.”

“What?” Mark eased back in the bed in disbelief, grateful that he could lie down. “I was left inside, Jeff. I don’t know how or by who, but I was left inside.”

“What do you remember about it?”

“Waking up in the dark and the cold. I couldn’t just stay there, so I started to crawl. I was looking for a way out. There was no light. I can’t explain just how dark it was.” He remembered seeing the dead girl, Sarah Martin, and he knew that he’d better not tell Jeff about that.

“I was delirious at some points,” he said. “Obviously, that can happen with hypothermia. But when it comes to how I was stopped on the road, I’m not confused. Not even a little.”

“Okay. Well, we’re going to need to figure out how to prove it, Markus. Because right now, we’ve got big problems. And I don’t mean just the obvious ones. I mean back home.”

“I don’t follow.”

“While the docs worked on you, I worked for you. I met with the sheriff, met with the state police, got your things out of the rental car, and generally did all the pushing I could to find that woman who told you she was the dead girl’s mother.”

Diane Martin. The first time that Mark’s reality and the one everyone else participated in had separated.

“People are lying about her,” Mark said. “I don’t know why. I don’t see how one man, who appears to be a town pariah, can exert so much influence. But he’s doing it. The story the hotel clerk told? Total bullshit, Jeff. That woman was pretending to be Diane Martin! I can’t say that clearly enough. If you’ve ever believed any words that came out of my mouth, it better be those.”

The look on Jeff’s face then was chilling — not because he was disturbed by what he’d heard, but because he apparently didn’t believe it.

“How is he getting them to lie, Jeff? How in the hell is Ridley Barnes getting so many people to lie?”

Jeff wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“What?” Mark said. “Damn it, you do believe me, don’t you?”

Silence for a beat, and then Jeff took a deep breath and faced him again. “I talked to the bartender who served the two of you. His version of events closely matches the hotel employee’s. He said he overheard you talking about Diane Martin, so unless you and this woman lapsed into the third person, it’s hard to use his story to validate yours. I’ve also seen the security tapes from the hotel lobby. There’s no audio, but your interaction with the woman... it certainly matches the clerk’s story better than yours. There’s no anger. You shake hands, talk a little, all pretty relaxed, and then you walk out the door together, happy as could be.”

“That’s not what happened,” Mark said, although how he intended to argue with the video, he wasn’t sure. He just needed to argue because doing anything else was to accept... what? That he was losing his mind?

“Fine. But it’s what appears to have happened, and credible witnesses are backing that version. You’ve got to come up with the best explanation you can. And finding that woman will go a long way toward it. I don’t want to keep you in Indiana, but... you’re going to need to provide some better answers than you have.”

Mark swallowed — a painful task — and said, “Let me guess. Board of directors isn’t pleased.”

“They weren’t pleased before all of this. Now, with that frigging attorney calling everyone on the board individually and threatening to sue—”

“Hang on. What attorney?”

“One Danielle MacAlister, Esquire, of Louisville, Kentucky. Her father owns the cave. Based on my conversation with Miss MacAlister, she owns the universe. Of all the caves to wander into, you picked the wrong one. She came at us aggressively. A lot of talk about criminal trespassing.”

“Trespassing!” Mark barked out a laugh at the absurdity of the claim. “I was—”

“I know. You were left there. But you can’t prove it. Just like you can’t prove that woman was really lying to you. And the board was already uneasy with your recent conduct. I’d just gotten that out of the way when this blew up.”

“Am I going to be fired?”

Jeff hesitated. “Nobody wants to say that you’re fired. Not right now, when press calls are flooding in. The board has decided to revisit the issue next week. Until then, you’re suspended without pay, pending internal investigation.”

Mark took the news in numbly. “What’s your read?” he said. “Do I even have a chance?”

“Before this? Yes. With the current story, though? Without a better explanation for it, at least? I won’t lie — the votes will be against you. There are some people who think you’re going off the rails.”

“I was kidnapped,” Mark said. “Doesn’t that mean anything? Doesn’t that give some credibility to my story, as you call it?”

“You’re going to need a witness.”

“I’m going to need a witness? I was attacked by three men and put in a van and beaten and drugged and left to die!”

Jeff rubbed his eyes again as if weary of Mark’s repetition. “I understand all of this. And I believe it, because I know you. But here’s the scenario that the rest of the world knows right now: You wandered into town and claimed that you’d talked to a dead woman, then you claimed that someone had impersonated her, and both claims have been blown out of the water. Then you left the sheriff behind and went after Ridley Barnes. You’re damn lucky he’s not pressing charges, frankly.”

Mark didn’t say anything, and Jeff nodded at the silent confirmation.

“Then you fell off the grid,” Jeff continued, and he lifted a hand before Mark could voice objection. “You were forced into the situation, but right now we can’t prove that.” His face was grim. “We’re going to need to. If you want to hold on to your job, Markus, you are going to need to give me something real.”

“It’s all real,” Mark said. “We’ll prove that.”

“Sure we will,” Jeff said.

Mark recalled a hospital in Wyoming where his uncle Ronny lay dying of lung cancer, evidence that forty years of chain-smoking and no visits to doctors wasn’t a recipe for a long life. Mark had told him they’d do some fly-fishing on the Lamar as soon as Ronny got out. Sure we will, his uncle had said with a wan smile, and they’d both known it would never happen. He was dead three weeks later.

“I’ve got to fly out tonight,” Jeff said. “We’re in trial on the Texas appeal. I’ve got to testify, and I don’t know how fast things will move. When I can be back, I will be. Two days, maybe three. You have any idea when they’re going to release you?”

“Not yet.”

“All right. If it’s before I get back, call me. I think we’re going to need to make some good friends out of the police down in Garrison. I know you probably hate the idea of setting foot back in that town, but if you come home now, no evidence of anything you’re claiming, then I’m afraid—”

“That it ends with the lie,” Mark finished for him. “And you can’t keep a crazy man employed.”