Before Jack could question his last statement, Lonetree turned sideways and pushed into the thicket guarding the side of the path. Jack could hear the branches snapping but Lonetree himself disappeared completely from sight, as if the forest had swallowed him whole. He walked up to the point the big man had disappeared and saw that there was another path faintly traced on the ground running perpendicular to the path they were on. Jack put his hands up to guard his face from the scratching thorn bushes and pushed forward.
Twenty yards later, the bushes thinned and it was possible to walk without the dry thorns snagging his clothes and skin. Lonetree picked up the pace again and Jack struggled to keep up. He thought he was in good shape, but he realized that he was no match for the man he was following. Jack estimated that Lonetree had him by five inches and at least sixty pounds, yet the man wasn’t even breathing hard.
Finally Lonetree stopped and waited for Jack to catch up. He pointed in front of him. “This is it.”
Jack looked carefully where his guide pointed. Behind a thin cover of vines he saw a black gaping hole that opened up into the earth. He crept down the slope that led to the opening and pulled back the vines. Jagged rocks hung suspended in the dark earth that ringed the fissure. It was a rough circle about twice the width of a man. The floor of the cave disappeared in a dark slope littered with loose rock. Jack’s eyes could penetrate no more than a few feet into the gloom. It reminded him of an animal’s lair. The kind of cave he threw rocks into when he was a kid. Right before he and his friends ran like hell in case something came out after them.
Lonetree slapped a huge hand in the middle of his back. “Hope you’re not claustrophobic.” Jack looked down and saw Lonetree’s other hand in front of him. It held a hardhat with a miner’s lamp attached to the front.
“Welcome to the entrance of Hell.”
FORTY-FIVE
Lonetree dumped out the gear from his backpack on the ground between them. He separated the equipment into two piles, stuffing some of the items back into the pack for later use. He threw Jack knee and elbow pads, a hardhat with a miner’s lamp attached, and a pair of overalls to put over his clothes. Jack pulled on the overalls, fighting back the rising panic he felt over going into the cave. He didn’t like to label himself as claustrophobic. He just didn’t like tight, dark spaces where he couldn’t breathe. The prospect of crawling into a cave did not appeal to him at all.
Lonetree looked him over, tightening the elbow pads until they pinched at Jack’s skin, and demonstrating how the miner’s lamp worked. “Ever been spelunking before?”
“Yeah, I took my kids to the Luray Caverns.”
“The big cave with the concrete sidewalks for tourists and the little light show? That’s not spelunking. That’s walking.”
“O.K. So I haven’t been spelunking before. Anything I should know?”
“Yeah,” Lonetree scrambled into the cave opening, “don’t get lost. And don’t get stuck.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Jack said but he doubted the big man heard him. Lonetree was through the opening and out of sight. With a deep breath, Jack followed.
Past the mouth of the cave the temperature dropped several degrees. The air was moist, like after a thunderstorm, and smelled of freshly tilled soil. In fact, after the bed of loose rock at the opening, the floor of the cave turned to slick mud. The cave, more like a tunnel, slanted down at a sharp angle. Jack followed Lonetree’s example and used the mud to slide down on his backside, steadying himself by dragging his hands along the tunnel walls.
When the tunnel curved enough to block out the little light that had been filtering down from the cave opening, Jack had to fight back a wave of panic. Gravity was pulling him down into the earth but it seemed to push the walls of the cave in around him as well. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths, blocking out the horror images flashing through his mind. Trapped underground. Running out of air. Buried alive.
He focused on Lonetree’s back moving away from him, surrounded by a halo of light from his miner’s lamp. The image of the space closing in around the descending figure only made it worse. He tried to take his mind off the constricted space by examining his new environment more closely.
The miner’s light attached to his helmet danced around as it illuminated the space in front of him. He saw that the mud ran up the sides of the wall. He realized it must be from runoff from recent rains that had carried soil down the tunnel like a drain.
Jack tried to remember details from a semester of college geology wishing that he had actually paid attention. The sides and ceiling of the tunnel were solid rock. He assumed that the walls were limestone. There were entire networks of limestone caves throughout the area, especially over in West Virginia, where the ex-miners made a cottage industry catering to adventure tourists from around the country.
Every now and then the local paper ran a short story about spelunking. Occasionally there was a piece about some new system being discovered, or a human interest story on a local guide. Most of the stories were about deaths. Usually amateurs who went down for a short afternoon and never returned. The local writers failed to hide their contempt for the out-of-towners who tromped through the caves every year decked out in their brand new Patagonia outfits and shiny helmets.
Search parties made up of guides and serious cavers were organized and sent out with every disappearance. The success rate for search parties was not good. Going against the basic tenets of survival, the lost cavers never stayed put after they realized they were lost. Whether from panic or optimism, the amateurs kept on looking for a way out and kept going, as if thinking that if they traveled far enough, they’d walk out of their nightmares. In reality, all they did was walk deeper into them.
It suddenly struck Jack that he was no different. Wasn’t he just going farther and farther into this crazy story on the slim chance of stumbling across something that might help?
He stopped in his tracks. What the hell was he doing? It was crazy to follow this lunatic down this tunnel. Crazy to have even gotten into the car with the man. What he needed to do was get back to the surface and get back to town. He needed to get down to Baltimore and make sure the kids were safe. He had to get out of there.
Jack reached out to the walls for balance and readied himself to turn his body around in the confined space to head back to the surface. Before he made his move he noticed Lonetree had stopped below him.
Grunting from the effort, the big man managed to wiggle out of the backpack. He looked back at Jack, raising his hand over his eyes. “Watch your torch. If you look right at me, your light is in my eyes.”
“Sorry.” Jack cocked his head to the side so that the beam hit the wall.
“How are you doing?”
Jack sat down on the muddy floor. Hearing Lonetree’s voice, the urgency to turn around started to fade. He sucked in a deep breath through his nose and exhaled through his mouth, willing himself to relax. “Just tell me whatever is down here is worth it.”
Lonetree didn’t bother with an answer. He reached up and switched off his light and pointed at Jack’s helmet. “We need to let our eyes adjust a little. Turn the switch on the side of the helmet. No, it’s on the other side.”
Jack turned the switch and the world went black. The cave walls disappeared, replaced with a pure darkness unlike anything he had experienced. It oppressed his senses, as if it were actually sucking light out of him. He waved his hand in front of his face and had no sensation of movement. The claustrophobia returned. He imagined being lost in the void, left alone to struggle through the cave, a blind, pale worm burrowing through the earth looking for the sun. A shudder ran through his body.