Blind Descent

Curt went first, giving Anna time to weep the dirt from her eyes. After he called clear of the ladder, she followed. Standing on the second of the rungs welded inside the culvert, she had to use all her strength to force the trapdoor down against the gale. A muffled clang and sudden absolute peace let her know she'd succeeded.

Careful not to think more than was necessary, she hurried down the pipe and crawled out the dirt tunnel into the cave. Curt waited in the wide corridor that had once before ushered her into Lechuguilla. Corkscrewing away in the shadowed and toothy way of limestone passages, it was surprisingly comforting. For the first time she felt a glimmer of the passion that had cavers crawling into holes since the beginning of time. A fortress sense of safety surrounded her. The knowledge that bombs could fall, stock markets crash, and hemlines go up again, and none of it could touch her. Not in this world. Holding her breath, she waited for the familiar bite of claustrophobia to gnaw away this tenuous truce. It never came, and she breathed out her relief. Maybe she was cured. Chalk up a victory for aversion therapy. She made a mental note to tell Molly when next they talked.

Swept along by Holden Tillman's grace and expertise, Anna had made the trip from Old Misery Pit to Tinker's Hell in just over six hours. Curt was not so lithe, and neither she nor he so sublimely confident. A steady and careful trudge brought them to the rift in four hours. The traverse that had raised Anna's blood pressure the first time brought her close to a heart attack the second. When Curt finally dragged her into the constricting coils of the Wormhole, she was almost relieved. To the list of classic choices-rock and a hard place, devil and the deep blue sea-she added abyss and wormhole.

Minutes after dawn in a world that grew increasingly unimaginable with each slithered mile, they were at the egress from the Distributor Cap by the exit that would take them down the newly fallen rock and into Katie's Pigtail. There was just room in the opening for the two of them to sit side by side, their feet dangling over the lip, like children sitting on a tailgate.

After six hours' hard travel without a night's sleep to bolster her, Anna was tired. Muscles quivered on bones that felt brittle and old. In dire need of refueling, she spooned cold beans into her mouth from a foam cup. Curt drank noisily, his elbow jostling her each time he hoisted his water bottle. Close quarters foment love or war. Anna was unsure which way she was going to-fall. 'Nudge me one more time and you're meat for cave crickets,' she said before it came to a decision.

'You're little. You don't need any space,' Curt returned. 'Airplanes, ironing boards, shower stalls-all made for Munchkins. I've got to be somewhere.'

Several suggestions came to mind, but Anna left them unvoiced.

True to the tradition of light leaches, Curt had turned his headlamp off to preserve batteries. Anna's burned a lonely hole in the darkness of the Pigtail. Below them, a fifty-foot slope of powdery silt and rock spread in an apron filling the Pigtail to the bridge from which Holden had called his orders. Tracks from their exodus and the subsequent extrication of Frieda's body were perfect, ageless in the soft soil. This internal hillside remained unstable. Another rock slide poised to tumble down at the least provocation. Untried by the vicissitudes of the surface, much of the underground teetered on this edge for eons, awaiting that first tip of the scales: an earthquake, the flicked wing of a lost bat, the footfall of an unwary caver.

'Would you think less of me if I pretty much said, 'you're on your own,' and went home?' Curt asked. Another drink, another bump of the elbow against Anna's sweaty shoulder.

'Oh, yeah,' she said. 'Absolutely. Left alone and helpless I would naturally have to accompany you out and blacken your name on ladies' room walls forever after. Are you going to back out?' she asked hopefully.

'Not now.'

'Damn.'

The light from her helmet had dimmed to a myopic eye, a dull yellow-brown iris around a darker center. With the movement of her head the watery orb wandered across the rockfall. ''S'pose she's under there?'

'Could be.'

'Want to dig?'

'We'd be digging for days.'

'Days,' Anna agreed. The bottom of the slide, where one might reasonably expect Sondra's body to have been carried by multitudinous tons of loosed soil, was bulldozer and backhoe country. Two people with small folding shovels could dig till retirement and not find a thing.

'Not Zeddie?' Curt said.

'I don't think so. Maybe Peter. Zeddie didn't know Sondra was going for the jugular over the divorce issue. Peter did. Besides, Zeddie didn't have much of a motive. Neither money nor marriage rings her chimes.'

'She's young,' Curt said. 'Give her a few years. They will.'

'Too true.' Anna remembered her aunt Peg telling her when she was in college, 'Of course you're not conservative. You have nothing to conserve.' Zeddie was still at an age at which 'security' and 'tedium' were synonyms.

'If you tell me about Zeddie and Frieda, I'll go down first,' Curt offered.

Anna followed his gaze over the delicately balanced hill of loam. 'I have to go first,' she said. 'I'm lighter.'

'And I can dig faster.'

'Good point.' Anna didn't relish the image, but it was good to know he'd be standing by with a shovel. 'Five more minutes.' Screwing her courage to the sticking place, she switched off her headlamp to save the batteries. Total darkness closed around them. She touched Curt's knee, then the cool stone in the passage beside her to reassure herself that space had not vanished with light. Curt scooted closer, brushing her shoulder with his, letting her know she wasn't alone. Anna appreciated it. Fear of the dark had never been a problem for her. Since beginning her reluctant caving career, she understood why. She'd never been in the dark. Night was a kindly living entity. Darkness was not. Darkness was an invitation to the bottom dwellers of the id to come out and play.

'Frieda and Zeddie,' she said, her voice sounding odd in her ears, as if the going of the light had altered the acoustics of Katie's Pigtail. Or those of her own skull. Resisting an impulse to feel her cranial bones to see if they had shifted, she went on. 'Frieda's mom told me the story. It's Zeddie's secret to share or to keep, not mine.'

Curt didn't say anything. Without light, not only space was rendered a bizarre and changeable entity, so was time. A blunt-edged clod of it tumbled by to a ticking in Anna's head.

'Strictly entre nous?' she said when a brief struggle between ethics and temptation had concluded.

'Oui, oui,' Curt replied. 'Sub rosa and all that good stuff.'

Anna laughed. The noise rebounded from unseen walls, frightening her. Returning to a murmur, she told Curt the story Dottie Dierkz had related over the phone.

'Short and sad,' she said, and in her blindness felt as if she spoke only to herself. 'Zeddie was a sophomore in high school. Her sister was home from college on spring break. She and Frieda took Zeddie climbing with a group of other college kids up to some rocks on the Yellow River, north of Minneapolis. There was ice. There was beer. There was a lot of general horsing around. Zeddie was belaying her sister. The anchor didn't hold. Zeddie wasn't strong enough. Her sister fell sixty-five feet and broke her back and neck. Eight days later they pulled the plug on the life-support machines, and she died.'

A moment passed, then Curt said, 'Like I'd dine out on that story.'

Drowning in cave ink, Anna nodded.

'No wonder she went ballistic when you so rudely brought the subject up.'

'I said maybe Frieda had died like her sister. I meant killed for revenge. Zeddie must have thought I was suggesting she'd screwed up.'

'She was always anal retentive about rigging.'

'Nobody was going to die on her watch again.'

'Maybe that's why Zeddie got so strong,' Curt suggested. 'The woman is an ox.'

A tremor took Anna as she saw herself, too weak to hold on, dropping Molly half a hundred feet to shatter on icy river rocks.

Time for the monsters to scuttle back under their stones. She flicked the button and turned on her lamp. A pool of light no bigger than a Frisbee and the color of mud feebly illuminated their boots.

'Why do people bury their dead?' Anna growled. 'It's redundant.' She pulled her helmet off and turned the switch, extinguishing the pathetic beam. Fresh batteries were in her sidepack and a Maglite was Velcroed in a canvas pocket on her belt. Before she could free it, a thin ululating wail stopped her hand. Caught in the Never-