Once, he thought he heard something and came to a stop. Killed his light and listened. All he could hear was Julianne’s breathing and, up ahead, the soft sounds of moving water. He turned the light back on and kept crawling.
They came out of the crawling passage into the Funnel Room and Ridley guided Julianne away from the basin and toward a high ledge at the far wall. The stalagmites here were taller than a man. Where the floor and ceiling sloped steeply toward an angled meeting point there was a shallow stream that bubbled up at one end and had carved a small portal through the wall at the other.
The only sound beyond his own breathing came from echoing drips of water that were carving new crevices that would later become new passages and, later still, spectacular chambers. The drips had a leisurely pace as they went about their work, and why not? They had literally all the time in the world.
Julianne disobeyed the order of silence to say, “It really is incredible.”
Ridley didn’t answer. He was looking at the stalagmites and remembering when they had started to move. There had been a time, in a room not so far from here, when the rocks had begun to move around him. At first he’d believed it was a trick of shadow, but then the rocks had grown hungrier and he could hear them sliding in from behind and cutting him off up ahead, circling him, drawing ever closer. He’d taken to the water then in a hurry — in a panic, fine, he would admit that. He had panicked when the formations moved; who wouldn’t?
It was then, entering the water in the panic, that he’d lost his first light.
He wiped sweat from his face. He was sweating freely, though not due to either temperature or exertion, and his mouth was so damn dry. “Yes, it is a special place,” he said.
Up ahead, the stream trickled through an opening in the wall about the size of a truck tire. Ridley pointed at it.
“That’s where I went into the water for Sarah Martin. It’s where I came back from the water with Mark Novak.”
“They were found in the same place?”
“No. She didn’t want me to go that way for Novak. It was too easy. She wanted to have some fun with me. She made me earn him. I had to climb up and crawl down, that was all she would give me, but once I got to him, she gave me an easier out. She was done with Novak by then, I guess.”
“When you went in after Sarah, this is where you left the group?” Julianne was ignoring the directive of silence, but he didn’t care to stop her. It was time to begin.
“Yes,” he said. “This is where I left the group.”
Julianne stared at the opening. “It’s tight. And the water doesn’t look deep.”
“Not here, but you crawl through for about fifty feet, and it gets much deeper. Crawl a little farther than that, and you begin to swim. When the water table is high, you’re bouncing right off the ceiling. The best way to explore this section is with diving equipment.”
“What’s that in the water?”
He followed her gaze and, sure enough, saw something floating. That was odd. He walked closer, with Julianne trailing, and trapped the object in the beam from his headlamp: it was a remnant of crime scene tape. The rest had been torn free when they cleared out of the cave ten years ago, but this short length had been missed, and now it undulated slowly in the water, like a dying snake. Or a long strand of a girl’s blond hair.
“A welcome mat,” he said. “She knows we’re here. I think maybe she even knows why.”
Julianne had taken a few steps back, but she said, “This is good. This is perfect. I hadn’t dared hope for anything so perfect.”
“Why so pleased?”
“It’s ideal visualization. That narrow opening is a literal portal.”
Her voice was natural again, just as if they were inside her living room for a scheduled appointment. As if she’d never had a knife at her throat and tape over her mouth. He was both pleased by that and disarmed by it. He needed her to be a willing, focused participant, but her calm suggested that she believed she could gain control again. She simply had to learn that down here, neither of them would have control.
“A portal is exactly what it is,” he said. He thought he saw one of the rock formations moving, shifting as if leaning down to overhear them, but he didn’t turn toward it. He knew better. “This is where your work begins.”
“You wish to enter trance here.”
“A form of it.”
“There’s only one form I know.”
“She knows others. She’ll guide the process. You’ll facilitate, but she will guide. It won’t be what you’re used to. She won’t allow that.”
“There are many reasons you don’t want to leave here now,” she said, “and it is obvious that whatever trust you had in me has been damaged, but for your own well-being, I would like you to listen to me when I say that trance here is a dangerous thing for you.”
“Remaining on the surface is far more dangerous.” Ridley dropped to his knees on the stone and removed his backpack and began to assemble the special equipment he’d brought for this portion of the journey. He had a white wax candle and a small crystal base, and he fit the candle into it carefully and withdrew a pack of matches and struck one, tingeing the damp air with sulfur. The wick accepted the flame immediately.
“This isn’t how we do things,” Julianne said. “Not with candles and crystals, Ridley. You know better than that.”
“Things are different here. Do you have the necklace?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Hold it in both hands, please. And turn your headlamp off.”
She removed the helmet to turn off the lamp. She was clumsy with the equipment, and he watched that with dismay, because he knew they would have some traveling to do. At least she was not scared of tight spaces, or hadn’t been so far. Trapdoor could breathe new fears into you swiftly, though.
When her headlamp was off, he was relieved. The candlelight was softer and it shifted and breathed and it was natural. Ridley’s mouth was the driest it had ever been. He freed a water bottle from his pack and drank heavily. It made no impact.
56
Mark had spent hours in a cave in a way few people alive could relate to, and yet he’d never experienced one in anything but blackness.
In the light, it could take your breath away.
The deepwater channel with its odd coloration set the tone, but it was the way the cave expanded as it descended that really created a sense of awesome power, a promise that there was so much more here than you would have guessed.
The small flashlight seemed weaker with each step. He thumped it against his hand and adjusted the focus, trying to coax more light out of it. The sense that it was dimming was an illusion, though, created by the size of the cave and the totality of the darkness.
He walked on a ledge to the right of the water because it was the only option.
Drops of fresh blood painted the cave floor. Cecil was wounded, but he wasn’t bleeding badly. Just a steady drip. Mark’s flashlight caught something reflective and glistening up on the stones. A strip of duct tape, sliced neatly in half. A twin of what had been on the floor in Cecil’s apartment, only without any of Danielle MacAlister’s blood on it.