“On my way.”
When she had reached the second-to-last rung and her lower body was hanging in space, Sam reached out and wrapped his arms around her thighs. “I’ve got you.”
She let go, and Sam lowered her to the shelf. Remi adjusted her skewed headlamp, then looked around. The shelf on which they were standing was six feet wide and jutted several feet over the river. In the cliff face was a roughly oval-shaped cave entrance, closed off by hurricane fencing screwed into the rock. The bottom left corner of the fence had sprung free from the rock. A red-on-white sign written in both Nepali and English was affixed to the rock:
DANGER
NO TRESPASSING
DO NOT ENTER
Below the words was a crudely painted skull and crossbones.
Remi smiled. “Look, Sam, it’s the universal symbol for ‘quaint.’”
“Funny lady,” he replied. “Ready to spelunk?”
“Have I ever said no to that question?”
“Never, bless your heart.”
“Lead on.”
Their suspicion that the cave had been sealed off to keep curiosity seekers from getting lost or injured was confirmed seconds after they crawled through the gap in the fence. While pushing himself to his feet, Sam’s arm slipped into a fissure in the floor barely larger than his forearm. Had he been moving even at a modest pace, he would have broken a bone; had he been walking, it would have been his ankle.
“Bad omen or fair warning?” he asked Remi with a half smile as she helped him to his feet.
“I’m going with the latter.”
“Reason 640 why I love you,” he replied. “Ever the optimist.”
They shone their flashlights around the tunnel. It was wide enough that Sam could almost spread his arms to their full breadth but only a few inches taller than Remi, forcing Sam to stand stoop-shouldered. The floor was rough, like stucco magnified a hundred times.
Sam turned his head, sniffing. “Smells dry.”
Remi ran her palm over the ceiling and wall. “Feels dry.”
With luck, moisture was out of the equation, or almost. Spelunking in a dry cave was dicey enough; water made it hazardous, with floors, ceiling, and walls that could collapse at the slightest disturbance. Even so, they knew that unseen tributaries of the Bagmati River could be running beneath their feet, so the cave’s composition could change with little or no warning.
With Sam in the lead, they started forward. The tunnel veered sharply left, then right, then suddenly they found themselves standing before their first obstacle, this one also man-made: a set of vertical iron bars running from wall to wall, drilled into the floor and ceiling.
“They’re not kidding around,” Sam said, shining his flashlight over the rusted steel. How many curiosity seekers had triumphantly squeezed through the hurricane fence at the entrance only to find themselves thwarted here? Sam wondered.
Remi knelt before the bars. One by one, she gave each a shake. On the fourth try, the metal let out a grating sound. She smiled over her shoulder at Sam. “The beauty of oxidation. Give me a hand.”
Together they began working the bar back and fourth until slowly it began to loosen in its socket. Stone chips and dust rained down from the ceiling. After two minutes’ work the bar fell free, striking the floor with a clang that echoed through the tunnel. Sam grabbed the bar and dragged it back through the gap. He examined the ends.
“It’s been cut,” he murmured, then showed it to Remi.
“Acetylene torch?”
“No scorch marks. Hacksaw, would be my guess.”
He shone his flashlight into the bar’s empty floor socket and could see, a few inches down, a stub of metal.
Sam looked at Remi. “The plot thickens. Somebody’s been here before.”
“And didn’t want anyone to know about it,” she added.
After taking a moment so Sam could get a bearing on his compass and sketch a rough map in his moleskin notebook, they squeezed through the gap, refitted the bar in its upright position, and continued on. The tunnel began zigzagging and narrowing, and soon the ceiling was at four feet, and Sam’s and Remi’s elbows were bumping along the walls. The floor began sloping downward. They put away their flashlights and turned on their headlamps. The floor steepened until they were sidestepping their way down a thirty-degree grade, using rock protrusions as hand- and footholds.
“Stop,” Remi said suddenly. “Listen.”
From somewhere nearby came the gurgling of water.
Sam said, “The river.”
They descended another twenty feet, and the tunnel flattened out into a short corridor. Sam shimmied ahead to where the floor began sloping upward again.
“It’s nearly vertical,” he called back. “I think if we’re careful, we can free-climb-”
“Sam, take a look at this.”
He turned around and made his way back to where Remi was standing, her neck craned back as she stared at the wall. In the beam of her headlamp, an object about the size of a half-dollar bulged from the rock.
“It looks metallic,” Sam said. “Here, climb aboard.”
Sam knelt down, and Remi climbed on his shoulders. He slowly stood up, allowing Remi time to steady herself against the wall. After a few seconds she said, “It’s a railroad spike.”
“Say again?”
Remi repeated herself. “It’s buried in the rock up to the cap. Hold on . . . I think I can . . . There! It’s tight, but I managed to slide it out a few inches. There’s another one, Sam, about two feet up. And another one. I’m going to stand up. Ready?”
“Go.”
She rose to her full height. “There’s a line of them,” she said. “They go up about twenty feet to what looks like a shelf.”
Sam thought for a moment. “Can you slide out the second one?”
“Hold on . . . Done.”
“Okay, climb back down,” said Sam. Once she was back on the ground, he said, “Good show.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I can think of only one reason they’d be that high off the ground.”
“So they’d go unnoticed.”
She nodded. “They look fairly old.”
“Circa 1973?” Sam wondered aloud, referring to the year Lewis King disappeared.
“Could be.”
“Unless I miss my guess, it looks like Bully, or some other phantom spelunker, built himself a ladder. But to where?”
As Sam’s words trailed off they panned the beams of their headlamps up the wall.
“One way to find out,” Remi replied.
8
CHOBAR GORGE, NEPAL
As a ladder, the vertical alignment of the spikes would make Sam’s ascent awkward-if, in fact, he was able to reach the first rung. To that end, he uncoiled his rope, tied a slipknot in one end, and spent two minutes trying to lasso the second spike. Once done, he used a bit of parachute chord to secure a stirrup-like prusik knot to the rope to climb-and-slide his way up the wall.
With one foot perched on the lowermost rung and his left hand wrapped around the second rung, he untied the slipknot and clipped it to his harness. He then reached up, slid out the third spike, and started upward. After five minutes of this he reached the top.
“Not that I’d care to try it,” Sam called down, “but there are just enough handholds to make the ascent without the spikes.”
“It would have taken some skill to set them, then.”
“And strength.”
“What do you see?” Remi called.
Sam craned his neck around until his beam shone over the rock shelf. “Crawl space. Not much wider than my shoulders. Hang on, I’ll drop you a line.”
He withdrew the second-to-last rail spike and replaced it with a SLCD (spring-loaded camming device), which locked itself into the hole. To this he attached first a carabiner, then the rope. He dropped the coil down to Remi.
“Got it,” she said.
“Wait there. I’m going to scout ahead. There’s no sense in both of us being up here if it’s a dead end.”
“Two minutes, then I’m coming after you.”
“Or if you hear a scream and a thud, whichever comes first.”
“No screaming or thudding allowed,” Remi warned.
“Be back in a flash.”
Sam adjusted his position until both his feet were perched on the uppermost spike and his arms were braced against the rock ledge. He took a breath, coiled his legs, and pushed off while levering with his arms, launching his torso onto the ledge. He inchwormed forward until his legs were no longer dangling in air.