Well in Time Page 11

  “Instead of me.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I mean our plan was never complete. Did I really expect that Javier would leave his workers undefended? Or his property? Maybe he always knew it would be like this, but I had the idea we’d be doing this together.” She stirred the soup, averting her face, but Hill heard the crack in her voice. “His plan all along was probably to send me with Pedro and I just never realized it.”

  “Do you have any idea where we are?”

  “Yes. This cavern is about five hundred feet lower than the plateau where the house sits and over two miles east of it.”

  “No kidding!”

  “The passage slopes much more steeply from here on. There are even a couple of places where we’ve installed ropes. And we’ve marked the places where the tunnels split, so that we don’t wander forever under here, like the Piper of Keil.”

  “The who?”

  Calypso poured soup into a small aluminum bowl and handed it to Hill along with a camp spoon. “The Piper of Keil. He made a bet that he could play the bagpipes better than any fairy piper. Of course, he lost. His punishment was to wander forever under the ground in the mazes of fairyland, playing as he went. In Scotland, you’ll find people who swear they’ve heard him passing under their feet.”

  “How do you know these things?” Hill’s voice registered his amazement.

  “My grandmother was a Scot from Clan Ross. She was born in the Orkney Islands, up in the North Sea. She used to regale me with stories about Scotland.”

  “So Celtic mysticism runs in your blood.”

  “Pretty much. I think my grandmother’s sense of the occult made it easier for me when Berto gave me the locket. She’d told me about similar precious objects—especially the Holy Grail. It’s supposed to be in a vault deep under Rosslyn Chapel in Midlothian, you know.”

  “That sounds like someplace in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.”

  “No. It’s in Scotland. Almost as many stories attach to it as to this locket.” She touched the necklace that lay beneath her shirt as she settled beside Hill and leaned against the stone wall. She blew on her soup to cool it.

  Hill rummaged in his pack and with an “Aha!” came up with two crumpled scones. “Your bread, madame,” he said, handing her one with a flourish.

  “My scones! That’s what you went back for this morning?”

  Hill grinned wickedly. “I can have surprises, too.”

  They bit into the pastries and savored them in silence. “Apricot,” Hill said at last.

  “Um-hum.” Calypso’s voice was small. “I picked these apricots last spring and dried them.” Her eyes, filled with sorrow, found Hill’s. “There are so many little reasons why I love it here, Walter. Mainly because Javier loves it so. But these apricots are reason enough, aren’t they?”

  “They are,” he agreed solemnly.

  “The hardest part isn’t sitting here in the dark, surrounded by tons and tons of stone, is it? It’s not knowing what’s going on up above. That part is almost more than I can bear.”

  Hill nodded. There were no words in any language to comfort the desolation in Calypso’s voice.

  She began to clean up their lunch mess. “Wash these in the pool, will you? We need to move on now. We still have a long way to go.” She turned to the open hamper with such solemnity it might have been a sarcophagus. “And we’ll need to fill the water bottles. There won’t be open water again for a long time.”

  §

  “This cavern must have been an initiatory chamber in ancient times,” Calypso said as they shouldered their packs. “Before we leave, I want to show you something.” Her headlamp beam played along the edge of the black pool until it lit upon a narrow ledge, just above water level. “Come over this way,” she said as she sidled onto the ledge, facing the wall of stone.

  Hill, realizing he would never be able to anticipate Calypso’s sudden changes of direction, sighed resignedly and followed her onto the rock shelf. It was just wide enough to accommodate his size fifteen shoes as he sidestepped along. “This better be good,” he grumbled.

  About twenty feet onto the ledge, where the wall of rock curved to encircle the pool, Calypso halted and directed her headlamp beam onto the stone in front of her. “Here it is! Look at this!” She turned toward Hill, who was blinded momentarily, as he tried to steady himself and keep the weight of his pack from pulling him backward into the water.

  Hill squinted at the stone wall in front of them. “What? I don’t see a thing.” In the same instant, he saw them: handprints. Actually, stencils of hands. “Oh! What are they?”

  “They’re the signature of one of our ancient cousins. They blew pigment through a reed, leaving a negative imprint of their hands. See . . . this hand fits mine perfectly! The fingers are the exact lengths of mine.” She held her long, slender hand against the stone for Hill’s perusal. “And that one over there fits Javier as if he’d made it himself.” She indicated a large imprint with tapering fingers. “You try this one. I bet it will fit you!”

  Hill edged closer to Calypso, raised his thick, square hand with fingers spread and carefully aligned it with the hand outlined on the wall. As he did, he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. The handprint fit him like a glove. He had the uncanny sensation that it was his handprint, left there long ago as a reminder to himself. It seemed preposterous, yet the sense of ownership of the print was overpowering.

  By his headlamp’s beam he examined his hand, looking for overlaps or places where the print was too big for him, and found none. He stared at his hand with its surrounding aura of timeless red pigment and lost all sense of himself as a twenty-first century man, of his place in the world, of time altogether. He stood suspended in the eternal moment, with time’s linearity collapsed into the ever-present and ongoing Now. A deep sense of wonder and humility pervaded him.

  And then the moment passed. He was aware again of the weight of the pack, the thin spray from the waterfall, of Calypso’s large, solemn, observing eyes.

  “Well?” she breathed.

  Hill didn’t answer but began sidling back off the ledge. Calypso followed him silently. When they had regained solid footing, she put her hand on Hill’s arm.

  “I know,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything.” Then she turned and, hitching her pack up on her hips, started into the void of the tunnel.

  §

  Rancho Cielo

  When it came, it was as bad as Javier expected. A convoy of SUVs and trucks came racing down the road at dawn the next day. The beds of the trucks were filled with men and bristled with guns. Javier watched with field glasses as the convoy turned across the first cattle guard onto Rancho Cielo property. First one, then another, then another laden vehicle pounded forward, tearing across the second cattle guard at the base of the driveway.

  Javier muttered under his breath, “Let them come, Pedro. Just enough. Not too many.” Six vehicles were inside the perimeter, and the seventh was just crossing the upper cattle guard, when there was a tremendous explosion. The front end of the seventh SUV rose up and the vehicle flipped over backward, bursting into flames as it rose in the air. Parts flew off and bodies hurtled, as it landed upside down on the hood of the truck following. That vehicle, too, burst into flame, and the two SUVs following rammed into it, in a massive collision.

  A victorious shout went up from the men on the walls. Javier turned and caught the eyes of his gunners. He raised his arm and brought it down decisively, and three men stood up, with rocket-propelled grenade launchers on their shoulders, took aim, and fired. The three lead SUVs exploded. The men sank down behind the parapet wall again, and Javier signaled three more to stand. Their RPGs took out the next three vehicles in line, leaving bodies and burning metal littering the driveway.

  Behind the cattle guard, all was chaos. Men swarmed from the stalled vehicles, shouting, to congeal behind one of the trucks. Javier followed them with his field glasses, but could not make out what they were doing. At last
, the crowd began a concerted effort and suddenly, from behind the truck, they rolled out a howitzer and positioned it facing the walls.

  Javier’s heart sank. He could see they had positioned it about two hundred yards away, just beyond the reach of the RPGs. He knew that, using comparatively small propellant charges, the artillery piece could propel projectiles at relatively high trajectories, with a steep angle of descent. Against such a weapon he, his men, and their fortifications were powerless.

  Ordering up his long-range snipers, he commanded, “Kill as many as you can around that howitzer. Keep up a steady barrage. Don’t let them get a shot off.”

  It was too late, however. With a deep whoosh, the howitzer launched a shell, just as the snipers got off a volley that dropped several men around the artillery piece. Javier watched the shell arc up into the sky, as if in slow motion. He could hear his snipers firing again and again, but the sound was distant and muffled. With all his being he watched the shell descend, calculating where it would hit. It seemed to hang suspended for a lifetime before it plummeted down, right through the tiled roof of his home.

  §

  The Cave

  Almost immediately the passage grew much more difficult. “Be careful near this siphon,” Calypso yelled.

  From the waterfall’s basin, water poured down a stone chute and cascaded into a whirling pool, with a sucking vortex at the center. The way past was slippery and the roar of the descending water terrifying. Hill shouted something but Calypso couldn’t hear it and shook her head, concentrating on crossing the slick stone. When they were sufficiently past the monster, she turned back to him, asking, “What did you say?”

  “I said,” Hill called over the diminishing din, “it’s like a big bathtub drain. I wonder what would happen if I fell in there?”

  “You’d probably end up in a chamber like the one we just left—only with no way out!”

  Soon they came to another cavern, this time from up near its ceiling. Calypso waited for Hill to catch up.

  “Javier thinks we’ve been following the original water course,” she explained. “Where we’re standing would have been another waterfall. But for whatever reason, the water got diverted. Maybe the rock wore thin and the water just dropped through as a siphon, into a tunnel below. It probably has an outfall in the river somewhere. Anyway, that’s the last we’ll see of it. Our challenge from here on is to be like water ourselves.”

  “What do you mean?” Hill stood on the lip of the drop-off, running his headlamp beam along the vertical wall beneath them. The light was lost in the abyss of the cavern below.

  “Water, of necessity, flows on. That’s our challenge now too.”

  “Going over this drop looks more like a big splat than a flow.”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks. This is one of the places where we’ve set up ropes. Over this way.” Calypso led along the lip of the drop off. Back in a shadowed nook, her light caught another iron ring set into the stone, with a rope already attached and coiled on the stone floor. “This won’t be nearly as scary as that first rappel. It’s only about fifty feet to the floor of the cavern.”

  “Great!” Hill couldn’t muster sufficient confidence to sound sincere.

  “Relax, Walter. We’re almost halfway there,” she said as she busied herself, setting up the rappel.

  “And just where, pray tell, is ‘there’?”

  “Our stopping place for the night.” She fiddled with the equipment. “Okay,” she said at last. “It’s ready. Do you want to go first or last?”

  “I don’t want to go at all.” Hill sounded as petulant as he felt.

  “Fine. Then you can stay here, if that’s what you choose.” Calypso slipped the climbing harness around her and buckled it tightly. “If you change your mind, just let me know, before I pull the rope free.” And with that she pushed off, disappearing into the chasm of darkness.

  Hill rushed to the edge and followed her looping trajectory to the cavern floor. He watched as she unbuckled the harness. When she turned her face up to him, it was set and grim and she refused to speak. Her hand on the rope said it all.

  “Okay. All right. Send the harness up,” he sighed resignedly. “And if I ever agree to go adventuring with you again,” he muttered under his breath, “just shoot me.”

  “I heard that.” The harness came whipping over the edge. “The acoustics in here are like a cathedral.”

  “Speaking of cathedrals, I could be in Paris right now”—Hill growled as he buckled the harness—“sitting in a café, admiring Our Lady’s flying buttresses and eating something delightful. Actually, a stiff drink of fifteen-year-old scotch also comes to mind.”

  He backed toward the edge, clinging to the rope, trying to remember where he should hold his hands so as not to have his fingers devoured by the figure eight. “But no! Instead I’m immured inside a mountain of stone, performing trapeze acts in pitch blackness.” He sat back and let the rope slide a few inches.

  “Just quit your resistance and get it over with, quickly and simply. Like water.”

  “Okay. Here comes the big flush.” And he pushed off into space.

  §

  Calypso caught his arm and steadied him as his feet hit the cavern floor. “Careful! It’s really uneven here.” She could sense the quivering of Hill’s limbs, more than feel it. “You did well, Walter,” she conceded.

  “Right! Consider that last act an evocation of my undying love for you.” He pulled at the buckles of the harness with trembling fingers.

  “It’s your pure heart that got you through that, for sure. Because it certainly wasn’t your technique.”

  “I could experience self-pity about now,” Hill sniffed, “but I won’t. I will be noble and stalwart and steadfast, despite the hellishness.”

  “Walter, you and I both know that you’ll write a report about all this that will probably win you the Pulitzer.”

  Leaving the rope and harness hanging in place, they shone their lights ahead and chose a path through the rock-strewn chaos of the cavern floor, grousing and sniping companionably as they went.

  “The passage is over this way,” Calypso said, waving her light across the far wall. Then she turned to Hill and said with deep sincerity, “You had great courage up there, Walter. Don’t think I don’t know it.” She turned and trudged on, before he could master his astonishment and think of a suitably cavalier response.

  §

  Calypso stopped before a low, black opening in the cavern wall and turned toward Hill, who still was navigating a series of rough, rounded boulders with difficulty.

  “It’s like climbing around where old Volkswagens go to die,” he huffed. As he approached, she held him in a solemn stare that alarmed him. “What?” he asked defensively. “Am I slowing you down?”

  “No, Walter. It’s just that…I have to tell you about the next part. But first, we need to put fresh batteries in our headlamps.”

  She knelt and dug into the open top of her pack.

  “Here. Put these in and give me your old ones. They must be just about used up.” She busied herself with her own light and the cave suddenly went dark. “Oops!” Her laugh came out of utter blackness. “Let’s do it sequentially, shall we?” Her light flicked back on and Hill felt himself take a deep breath.

  “I think I stopped breathing for a second there.” He slid the batteries out of his lamp and she handed fresh batteries back, with a stare that was so intense that Hill became nervous. “What?” he asked again, a little shrilly.

  “I have to tell you about the next part.”

  “You already said that. What do I have to do now? Swing hand over hand across a bottomless chasm filled with sightless albino snakes?”

  Calypso took her time answering, choosing her words carefully.

  “The next part is…well, honestly, the hardest.” She held up her hand to stop the response that was already forming on Hill’s lips. “Once we’re through it, everything else is a piece of cake. But this next
part is…” She let out a little sigh. “Is hard.”

  “Well, that was enlightening.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s not easy to describe it. It’s going to be harder for you because you’re bigger. And it’s hard enough for me. But!” she held up her hand again, to stop his exasperation. “Javier can make it through, so I know you can, too.”

  “Through what?” Hill’s voice was laden with his growing suspicion.

  “The next part is very…very small.”

  Calypso’s eyes held a particular kind of pleading that made him distinctly uncomfortable.

  “At first, you can crawl. But then, very quickly, you have to…well, I would call it slither. The tube gets very…close. I like to do it face down, because I can’t stand to see the ceiling so close to me. And I do it in the dark, by feel, for the same reason. But Javier likes to go face up, because in the narrowest part he says there are handholds in the ceiling that he uses to pull himself along.”

  She stopped and stood staring at her feet. “So that’s it. Any questions?”

  “What about my pack?”

  “We take our packs off and drag them behind us on leads. You have to maneuver them with your feet so they don’t get caught crosswise in the tunnel.”

  “This sounds like swell fun! And how long does this passage go on?”

  “I’m not sure. It seems like forever but I’m thinking it’s probably no more than a couple of hundred yards.”

  “A couple of hundred yards. I see.”

  “It’s not wonderful, Walter. I’ve done it many times and I never really get used to it. The first time is the hardest though. So you’ve got to believe me when I say that it is possible to get through. When you think you can’t, that’s when you’re closest to it getting better. Does that make sense?”

  “Perfect. And I suppose it’s not an option to just sit and wait for a demolition team to come and blast me out of here?”