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.”