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.