Point of Law (28 page)

THIRTY-NINE

“W
HAT ARE YOU
talking about, spelunking?” Kim whispers to me. “Are we going down the hole in the kiva?” The dark and the long-sleeping age of the ruin obliges us to keep our voices down.

“Unless you want to try and reason with those guys.”

With the rope gathered over one shoulder, Roberto climbs down into the pit. I hold the light for him while he examines the hole at its base. He comes back up and begins a search for a crack or a stone solid enough to serve as an anchor for a rappel. After examining several large boulders that have long ago been dislodged from the cave’s roof, he pushes his shoulder against the biggest. It doesn’t budge. It’s probably sat in the same spot for hundreds of years. He loops the middle of the rope over it and drops the ends into the pit. All four of us then scramble down to squat by the dark hole. I feed the rope’s ends into the unknown space beyond.

“Who’s first?” Roberto asks. “Step right up. Don’t be shy.”

“I’ll go.” It’s my idea and my responsibility.

But I desperately don’t want to go into that slender cavity. I can’t imagine anyone doing it voluntarily. I wonder if Cal had lied to Sunny about his trip into the depths—no one could have the courage to do such a thing, especially not alone. But I remember his mud-stained Gore-Tex shells and realize that he’d been a braver man than me.

I wish for another way—maybe Fast will listen to reason. Maybe he’ll find some way to restrain his murderous partner. And maybe Burgermeister will forgive the bullet I fired through his thigh. Maybe they’ll both forgive my brother his brutal punch and kick and Kim her years in search of revenge.
Right
.

This isn’t my element. I belong on high and wild rock faces, the swirling wind all around me, not in some black pit like this. Especially not without light. But I have no choice and I hand Kim the headlamp so that each of them has light to tie in with.

I shove a bight of rope through my belay device and straddle the hole.
Oh shit
. I do everything I can to spend my life out in the open, unrestrained by walls and gravity, and here I am about to slide into an unknown hole that’s skinnier than my mummy bag. Belatedly, I realize I’m claustrophobic, terrified of tight, enclosed spaces. I remember the utter panic I’d felt as a child when I woke up in a sleeping bag for the first time. Even now, twenty years later, I still sleep with the zipper undone to my waist no matter how cold the night. I’m ready to change my mind, to take my chances on reasoning with the killers outside. Even if they just put a bullet through my head, it would be better than the terror that’s gripping my chest. Better than being buried alive.

Then Kim kisses my check. Roberto’s holding the light on my face and I’m embarrassed, thinking that they can all see just how scared I am. Kim must, because she kisses me again, this time on the lips. She even lightly touches her tongue against my teeth.

“We don’t have much time,” she reminds me when she pulls away.

Leaning away from the boulder that holds the middle of the rope above, I place one foot at a time into the hole. I start lowering myself. The cold trickle of water immediately soaks through my fleece pants and runs down into my boots. As I wiggle my hips into the tight cleft, I realize that this is what it really feels like to have Death’s bony hand grabbing my ankle. And here there is no room for me to kick.

The slot is even tighter than I’d thought. I squirm desperately against the cold, wet rock to fit my shoulders through. I almost get stuck and for a moment I want to scream. I imagine my body jammed into this cold hole at the bottom of the kiva, blocking the trickle of water as it slowly fills. But then I drop another inch. I turn my head to slide all the way in.

The fissure is probably only ten feet long but it feels like it goes on forever. It feels like I’m in the throat of some gigantic snake. Suddenly I notice that my feet are swinging free. Then my hips. And finally I’m released from its muddy grasp. But what’s around me isn’t much more comforting.

I’m suspended in a chamber that is smaller and higher than the one above. But it’s hard to tell all the details because the light Kim’s shining down the hole is growing dim. In the pale, dispersed beam I can make out steep walls that are riddled with holes, hopefully one of which is a passage. Pointed shapes are hanging beside me, like hanged men or jagged teeth. More sharp spikes rise up from the floor on the dry sides of the pool below. Directly beneath me is the water, which I pray is shallow. It appears clear and cold. The bottom of the pool is full of flakes of white stone.

“Hurry it up, Ant.”

My brother’s voice echoes off the walls and I remember that the dynamite could go off anytime now. I forget my own terror and am overtaken by fear for my brother, the young girl, and my potential lover above. I drop down the now wet rope and splash into the frigid water.

To my relief it’s only knee-deep. My feet crunch on the strange white stones as I jerk the rope out of my belay device. I splash my way through the water and step up onto dry ground. It’s a small, flat limestone shelf that encircles the water. There I wrap my arms around myself, trying to control the shivering. The whole world goes black as either Kim or Sunny fits into the hole in the roof.

FORTY

W
E STAND CLOSE
together on the dry ledge beside the pond. Roberto holds the dripping ends of the rope, which trail from the ceiling fifty feet above.

“Should I pull it?” he asks.

I don’t want him to. I know it’s at least possible that we could reascend the rope using prusiks made out of the slings of nylon webbing in my pack. By pulling it, I feel as if he’ll be cutting us off from light, even from air. But we have no choice. With an explosion imminent, we sure as shit aren’t going back out that way. I raise my hands over my head and feel a faint breeze on the burnt skin of my palms. Somewhere, somehow, there’s got to be another way out.

“Do you feel that?” I ask them. “There’s just a tiny bit of wind. I think I can even smell it.”

“Sorry. That was me,” Roberto says, trying to amuse us. For the millionth time I’m envious of his élan, of his total lack of fear. Not even a million tons of unstable earth over his head can suppress it.

We all hold our hands in the air, ignoring his comment. “I can feel it,” Kim says.

“Me too,” Sunny adds.

“Pull the rope,” I tell my brother. “We might need it to find a way out.”

While Kim holds the light on him, Roberto begins tugging on one end of rope. The rope doesn’t shift. Putting all his weight on it, he ends up penduluming out over the pond. When he swings back toward us I grab on, too, and the rope gives a little until we splash down in the cold water. Kim shines the light at our feet, intending to help us maintain our footing on the brittle white stones, as we pull together.

Suddenly Sunny screams. Again and again. The terrified keening coming from her mouth seems to push the air from the cavern.

The light jerks up so that it’s in our faces. “What?” I shout.

Sunny stops screaming, but she continues making noises like a wounded cat. Beside her, Kim tries to keep her feet on the dry shelf as Sunny tears at her clothes. They are both breathing so hard it sounds as if they might be running in place. Or fighting.

“What?” I shout again, trying to whirl around in the shallow water to see the new threat. But I’m blinded by the light that Kim still manages to hold aimed at my eyes.

“Bones,” Sunny says, her voice now a ragged whisper. “Bones. You’re standing on bones.”

Kim slowly lowers the light from our faces until it’s once again illuminating our feet, knee-deep in the clear, icy water. I realize what all those flat-looking white stones are—the delicate rocks that had been breaking beneath my boots. I feel a shiver that comes from somewhere beyond simple cold and fear.

Roberto pushes up one of his jacket’s sleeves. He reaches deep into the water and pulls out a human jaw. He holds it up and Kim keeps the light on it. It’s a little brown but otherwise perfectly preserved. The teeth, what would have been the bottom set, are painfully uneven.

“Dude needed a dentist. Bad.” Roberto drops the jaw back in the water with what seems like a disrespectful splash. “Don’t worry,” he tells Sunny. “He can’t bite. Not with those fucked-up teeth.”

“This must have been their cemetery,” Kim says, calming somewhat. “They must have pushed the bodies through the bottom of the kiva.”

I have another, even more unpleasant idea. Some of the bones clearly show the long nicks of blades. From where flesh had been peeled from the human bones. This was their trash bin—nothing more. I keep my thoughts to myself in the cavern’s gloom.

When we go back to tugging on the rope, ignoring the bones crunching underfoot, the headlamp’s beam starts to flicker and dim. I wade over to Kim and Sunny while Roberto finishes with the rope, which is sliding easier now. I take the zip-locked extra batteries from my soaking pack and put them on my lap with the headlamp. Then I dry my hands carefully on my shirt. The shirt is already crusting with blood and pus from the open burn on my belly. I have to do this just right—if I drop anything there is no doubt we’ll die in the gloom surrounded by the spirits of the cannibalized dead. After warning everyone as to what I’m about to do, I twist off the light. It feels like once again I’m falling in the total blackness. It rears up over us like a breaking wave.

Either Kim or Sunny staggers beside me, probably feeling the same lurch in her stomach. Although my numb fingers shake with cold and tension, I manage to replace the batteries and twist the light on again. That narrow beam of light is Hope—our only weapon against the dark. Without it the blackness just swallows everything.

There’s a long, gentle splash as the rope comes trailing down out of the ceiling. Our only known connection to the world outside has been cut.

I play the light over the cavern’s walls, studying the deep holes there. The slight breeze seems to come from a tunnel-like opening near the shelf where we stand. The four of us move together over the broken floor, huddled close together within the radius of light I try to keep aimed at our feet. Sunny requires extra effort from both Kim and Roberto because she won’t take her face out of Kim’s jacket. She’s willing to move her legs but she must be balanced with each step. I think we’re all relieved to be away from the pond and the bones.

What appeared to be a tunnel soon becomes very un-tunnel-like. After thirty feet the passageway narrows to just a refrigerator-size slot and rises in a series of jumbled steps. From the ceiling more white stalactites hang like dripping fangs. We continue into the fissure, trying to follow Kim’s exhortation not to touch them with our hands. She warns us that the oil on our skin could discolor them, but right now I’m more concerned for my life than about vandalizing some future tourist attraction. And I’ve already violated every environmental and archaeological precept by stomping through the bones. My jacket rasps against the smooth stone as I have to turn sideways to fit through one particularly narrow opening.

The slot ends abruptly in a barrel-shaped chamber. The floor is a punji pit of low, pointed stalagmites. I play my light over the walls, still thinking I feel a faint breeze. There’s a noise, too, a sort of distant moan. Wind somewhere on wet rock.

Up near the room’s ceiling, ten or so feet above us, is a small hole. I slip the headlamp over my head so that the elastic straps grip snugly. Finding small edges on the cool stone wall, I work my way up to it. I move cautiously, trying to keep three points of contact with the rock at all times. I’m terrified of falling the ridiculously short distance onto the points of a hundred tiny stalagmites. But I’m even more terrified of the blast that could come roaring through the caverns any minute.

“Give me a second. This might go,” I whisper into the darkness over my shoulder.

The hole is tiny. It’s just eighteen inches by one foot, barely big enough for a badger. But there definitely is a breeze coming from it. And on the wind I can smell the faintest scent of pine. Nothing has ever smelled so sweet.

“You’re fucking high,” Roberto tells me.

I explain the wind and the pine smell. Kim says she smells it, too, that it’s worth a try. The three make themselves as comfortable as they can next to the wall beneath the hole while I shed my jacket and rub my hands together, trying to warm them. I’m going to have to take the light with me into the hole, and I don’t have to warn them not to stumble over the stalagmites in the dark. It would be like falling on a bed of nails.

I grip the hole’s edge with my fingers and hesitate. The light from my headlamp reveals nothing down the narrow canal but a sharp turn a few feet away. If it weren’t for the breeze blowing through it, it would be impossible to believe it could lead anywhere. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m going to get jammed in there. Stuck.

Don’t do this!
a voice shouts in my head. But I slither in anyway.

For eighty feet I belly-crawl on my elbows and knees with my head banging into every irregularity on the fissure’s ceiling. Strapped to my forehead, the delicate headlamp takes most of the impacts. I pray it doesn’t break. The floor is thankfully mud-covered and soft instead of carpeted with sharp protrusions. The path winds to the sides like a fallen S.

Imagine twenty coffins lying end-to-end. Kick each place where they touch, so that they don’t quite fit together. Then drop a mountain on them. That’s what the part I’ve already crawled through feels like.

And it gets worse. I’m forced to drop all the way flat onto my belly, wriggling forward with my arms extended like a diver’s. The closeness of the stone walls, the millions of tons of rock and earth above and around me, begins to push in on me. It’s more than a physical pressure that robs my limbs of movement and my chest of air. It seems to press in on my mind, squeezing away my intellect and my rational thoughts. Instead the pressure focuses itself in my brain and then expands outward exponentially. Even when I try to lie still and rest, my heart rate keeps accelerating. My lungs huff faster and faster but they still can’t seem to draw enough air. I force myself to wriggle some more.

And it gets tighter still. I have to turn my head to one side and splay my feet flat. The fissure pinches my bruised ribs. I have an urge to roll over onto my back but can’t. My shoulders can’t roll more than an inch or two. It’s probably for the best, though—for some reason the thought of exposing my belly like a whimpering dog to the pressure and weight of all that earth above seems even more terrifying. I gain just an inch at a time.

A horrible thought keeps tugging at the edges of my mind, threatening to rip away my sanity.
It’s going to dead-end!
And there’s no fucking way I can squirm out backwards. There’s no way Roberto, so far behind me now, could ever get the leverage in this death trap to pull me out. I’m going to die, plugged in this foul, muddy hole. I’m going to die screaming and howling. I’ve never felt anything like the fear that crawls along with me.

My breath comes in fast, mad pants. I can feel a bubbly froth gathering on my lips. I try to will my body to calm but my pulse keeps increasing until it’s throbbing at what seems the speed of a hummingbird’s wings—and each new beat seems to swell me tighter in the hole. It takes all my strength and will to keep from losing my mind.

In my mind I shout at myself:
Anton, you conqueror of mountains, you cheater of Death, are you going to let a little fucking hole get the best of you? Are you going to lie down without a fight while it squeezes the life out of you? Coward! You’re going to die crying and gibbering, and they’re all going to die with you. Fight, you stupid son of a bitch! Fight!

Only the thought of my brother and Sunny and Kim saves me from the ultimate freak-out. I concentrate on them, huddling together in the pressing blackness of the round room with its floor of pointed rock stakes. I gasp and heave, squirming forward another inch. And another.
Roberto. Kim. Sunny.
Their names go through my mind like a mantra of salvation.

The pressure eases on my ribs. For the first time in what seems like hours, my lungs are able to fill all the way with dusty air. I gasp at it desperately, restraining sobs, and ignoring the awful pain in my ribs that comes with each full inhalation. Lifting my head, I look up to see the hellish tunnel emptying into a small room. The beam of light from my headlamp traces through it, measuring, and although it’s not much bigger than a closet, it seems to me to be big enough to hold the entire universe.

I worm out of my prison and crash onto the rubble-strewn floor chest-first. Sitting on the sharp stones with my knees pulled against my chest, I try to hold back tears of relief. The scent of pines is stronger now. High on one wall is a couple of inches of space that remains black even when I shine my headlamp there. I turn out the light for a moment and see stars.

For some time voices have been calling my name. They reverberate toward me from the terrible hole. Twisting the headlamp back on, I aim it into the fissure. “Come on,” I shout back in a shaky voice. “It goes. No problem.”