BLIND DESENT Read online

  "Jesus," Anna breathed as she cleared the last tumble of rock. Iverson was seated on a square block of breakdown the size of a refrigerator. The stone was sheared as neatly as if a gargantuan mason had done it with a chisel. Pieces, varying in size, clung to the edge of the precipice. She scratched her way up to sit gingerly beside Oscar, her hands hooked on the back of their limestone couch lest the pull of the deeps should suck her down. "Shouldn't there be a sign here that reads 'Beyond This Point Be Monsters'?"

  "Left goes up to the North Rift," Iverson said. "Right is the main route to the rest of the cave. We go right."

  The word "impassable" came to mind. Above, stone vanished into the gloom. Blocks the size of rooms jutted from the walls. Where she and Iverson sat, it was about thirty feet wide, the far side smooth, vertical, offering nothing in the way of an inducement to cross.

  "Right?" Anna said.

  "Right."

  "How?"

  Iverson smiled. "There." He painted a curved surface of rock above her with his light. The wall of the rift bulged slightly and bent around in a southwesterly direction. On closer examination, Anna could see where a rope had been strung. The trail—using the term loosely—was suspended along the wall eight or ten feet above where they sat. Pitons, bolts were frowned upon in wild caves. Driving these man-made anchors into living stone left scars. The rope above them made use of a motley assortment of natural anchors: BFRs, Big Fucking Rocks; jug handles, natural holes in the rock; and stalagmites.

  Below, the rift fell away in a rugged canyon. Light served only to beckon forth the shadows and veil secrets. It struck her as odd that all of it—this tremendous gorge, the seeps and falls and spires—could continue to exist in the total absence of light and life. Like the philosophical tree falling in the theoretical forest, with no one to hear, not so much as a gnat or a dung beetle to take note, did it really exist? Apparently it did. "How deep?" she asked.

  "Here? Maybe one hundred twenty-five feet or so. It varies, of course. Nobody's ever really done much exploring down there."

  As far as Anna was concerned, that left it wide open as a habitat for impossible creatures from the underworld. It was no mystery why the ancients peopled caves with evil spirits and placed their hells deep within the earth.

  "Definitely a No Falling Zone," Iverson said mildly.

  Anna turned her light on his face. He was smiling with what looked to her like genuine delight. "You really are a creepy person, you know that, don't you?"

  Holden Tillman eased up beside them and swung his legs over the edge. Anna kept all her appendages on solid ground, her legs folded neatly under her, tailor-fashion.

  "So," Holden said, uncapping his water bottle and pausing for a long pull. Anna followed suit, checking first to reassure herself there wasn't a "P" scrawled on the cap.

  "Freak-Out Traverse," Holden said, and waved toward the roped cliff face with his water bottle.

  "Gee, why do you think they call it that?" Anna asked.

  Holden didn't seem to notice the sarcasm. "Interesting story," he said. "See below the rope there? That great, big, old, solid-looking poke-outance, just exactly the right size to wrap your arms around and hang on to for dear life?"

  He traced the rock outcrop he described with a golden finger of lamplight. It was the obvious place to make the traverse. Anna had wondered about the trail being set so high above the starting point.

  "We got here. Me and a caver named Ron. I, being the gentleman that I am, insisted Ron have the first crack at it. 'Oh, no,' he said. 'After you, my dear Holden.' 'I wouldn't dream of it. After you,' says me. So he goes first. Ron gets to that big, old, friendly rock and spreadeagles himself across it like a love-struck starfish. And that sucker starts to move. The thing is on ball bearings. Hence 'Freak Out Traverse.' I let Ron name it. I'm just naturally generous that way."

  Even in the wandering half-light, Anna noted the twinkle in his eyes.

  "Everybody rested and rejuvenated?" Iverson asked.

  A sheer curtain of panic, like heat rising from the desert, quivered behind Anna's breastbone; panic not at the traverse but at going on instead of turning back. Gideon, the horse she'd ridden on backcountry patrol when she was a ranger at Guadalupe, and she had this discussion at every fork in the trail, Anna insisting they go on, Gideon determined to take every opportunity to go back to the barn.

  Rest stops were going to be bad news.

  "Ready," she said, and was the first to get to her feet. Movement was good, work even better. She felt herself almost looking forward to Freak-Out. That should take up every shred of her thought processes for a few minutes.

  After Freak-Out the going got somewhat easier. Though a good deal of effort went into climbing on, around, and under the blocks, little of it was heart-in-mouth stuff.

  Shoving her hands in cracks, her face in the dirt, reaching into darkness, squeezing through the narrow ways, Anna came to appreciate the sterility of the cave environment: no spiders, grubs, scorpions, rattlesnakes, wasps, tarantulas, ants, or centipedes. She burrowed and barged her way through with more or less complete confidence that, as predators went, she was pretty much alone. Given the forced intimacy with blind crevices and dank hidey-holes, this was definitely a plus. This far in there wasn't even any evidence of that benign resident, the cave cricket. For the first three or four hundred yards she had seen a few of the harmless, spectral insects, but cave crickets found their food on the surface or in the twilight zone where the outer world reached within. They seldom wandered more than an easy cricket commute from the terrestrial world.

  Partway down the North Rift, half an hour's travel and not quite a hundred yards as the crow flies—should a crow choose such a batlike endeavor—Iverson stopped again, perched this time on a narrow ledge, his lamp extinguished. Lest he startle Anna and make her lose her footing, he announced himself shortly before her light strayed across his aerie. "I'm here," he said softly.

  Anna squawked, her heart leaping so forcefully it felt as if it pounded against the rock she embraced. "Don't do that," she said when breath returned and she'd found a stable roosting place.

  "Sorry," Iverson said politely. "I guess 'I'm here' are the two scariest words in the English language."

  "Nope."

  "Uh-oh?" Iverson guessed.

  "Floyd Collins," Anna said, and he laughed.

  Holden joined them and switched off his lamp. Having no taste for the darkness, Anna let hers burn. "Better be careful," Holden warned. "Oscar's a light leach. He'll drain your batteries faster than a disgruntled Hodag."

  Hodags, Anna knew from earlier banter, were known for sucking the energies from cavers' batteries, tying shoelaces together, and swapping the caps on water and pee bottles when annoyed in some fashion. "Leach away," she said. She wasn't turning her light out.

  Just beyond the cranny where Oscar had curled his bony frame was a tilted tyrolean traverse. A line was anchored around a boulder on the side of the rift where the three of them sat. It ran over the chasm and up to another anchor, a jug handle on the cliff face five yards above them on the opposite side. Anna had used a tyrolean once on a recreational climb in the Rockies. For some reason they gave her the willies where a good vertical ascent failed to. Maybe it was that one had to lie horizontal. Gravity seemed more virulent when one's back was turned to it.

  "Who rigged the traverse?" she asked. Her insecurities were showing.

  "Me and Holden," Iverson said.

  "I sure hope we were sober," Holden added.

  "From here on we're in new country," Oscar said, and Anna could hear the quiver of anticipation in his voice.

  "You've never been to Tinker's Hell?"

  "Nope. Neither of us. Just got to pore over the surveys. Might never have gotten to go either. The chief—Iverson referred to his boss, George Laymon, Chief of Resource Management for Carlsbad Caverns—"has been keeping a tight lid on who goes in here. After the big push in the 1980s they closed the cave to all but scientific research and
restoration—"

  "And anybody who knew somebody they could lean on," Holden put in, and Anna was reminded of the usually friendly but still existing rivalry between federal land management agencies, in this case the NPS and the Bureau of Land Management. Ostensibly the Park Service was dedicated to total conservation. The BLM espoused a more commercial view, leasing and exploiting some of the resources of public lands.

  "Hey, it's who you know," Oscar said equitably.

  The closing of Lechuguilla was an old bone of contention. "How do we know where we're going?" Anna asked, bringing the conversation back to a subject nearer her heart.

  "If you don't know where you're going, you're liable to end up someplace else," Holden said philosophically. Anna heard telltale crackling as he unwrapped a Jolly Rancher.

  "House rules," Iverson told Anna. "You survey as you go: maps, sketches, measurements, the whole enchilada. No scooping booty."

  "It happens," Holden said. "Somebody gets excited and boldly goes where no man has gone before. But it's severely frowned upon."

  "Do they lay orange tape like we've been following?" Anna asked.

  "Them's the rules," Holden said, and she found herself immeasurably relieved, though she knew the tape was laid more for the cave's protection than that of the cavers. If each expedition followed precisely the same trail, never veered from between the lines, a majority of the cave would remain untrammeled. Oscar looked at his watch. "Seven p.m.," he said. "We've been on the go just over two hours. With luck we'll be there by midnight. Everybody holding up okay?"

  "Okay," Anna echoed.

  "The Wormhole," Iverson said. Clicking on his headlamp, he ran the beam along the traverse to where it was anchored on the far side. Below the jug handle securing the line was an irregularity in the stone about the size and shape of an inverted Chianti bottle. The opening was flush with the wall: no ledge, lip, or handholds; no nooks or crannies to brace boots in.

  "You're kidding," Anna said hopefully.

  "I'll admit it looks tricky," Iverson said. "You want to go first, Holden?"

  "And rob you of the glory? No indeed."

  Iverson peeled off his pack and began strapping on ascenders.

  The one time Anna had been on a tyrolean traverse it had been a simple horizontal move over a river valley under kind blue skies with the music of frogs to keep her company. They'd not used ascenders, just strung the traverse line through a trolley on the web gear and scuttled across with much the same movements used when shinnying along a rope. Because of the steep tilt of this traverse—close to forty-five degrees—ascenders were needed.

  Mechanical ascenders were a relatively simple invention that had revolutionized climbing. A one-way locking cam device about the size of a pack of cigarettes and shaped like a tetrahedron was strapped to the right boot above the instep. An identical device was attached to the left foot but on a tether that, when pulled out to full length, reached the climber's knee. This ascender was tied to a thin bungee cord and hooked over the shoulder. Once this awkward arrangement was complete, the rope to be climbed was hooked through both ascenders and a roller on the climber's chest harness. Thus married to the rope, it was a not-so-simple matter of walking, as up an invisible ladder. Raise the right foot; up comes the Gibbs ascender. Put weight on the right foot; cam locks down on the line. The foot is firm in its stirrup, and the body is propelled upward. This movement tightens the bungee, which in turn pulls the second ascender up along the rope. When the left foot steps down, the cam locks and another "stair" is provided.

  Anna had used Gibbs ascenders enough that she was proficient, but she always enjoyed watching a master. The ascenders, so arranged, were called a rope-walker system. On the right climber that appeared literally true. Anna had seen men walk as efficiently up two hundred feet of rope as if they walked up carpeted stairs in their living room.

  "Croll," Iverson said as he rigged a third ascender into his seat harness. "Ever used one?"

  Anna shook her head.

  "Like falling off a log," he assured her.

  Rotten analogy, Anna thought, but she didn't say anything.

  "Get the packs ready," Iverson said to Holden. "Once I get settled, I'll bring them across with a haul line."

  "We'll use the haul line, too," Holden told Anna. "Ever so much more civilized."

  As Iverson rigged himself to the traverse, Anna watched with a keen interest. One lesson, then the test. It crossed her mind how much better a student she would have been if in school the options had been learn or die.

  Crouching on a thumb of rock as big around as a plate, eighteen inches of it thrust over the chasm, Oscar attached his safety, clipped his Croll into the rope, wrestled his two foot ascenders onto the line, then pushed till his torso and buttocks hung like a side of beef a hundred twenty feet above God knew what.

  Anna kept her headlamp trained where he would find it useful, kept the light steady and out of his eyes. It was all she could do. There was no room for a second pair of hands to help him.

  Holden was occupied with the business of tying the packs into trouble-free bundles that could easily be hauled across. Along with personal gear were medical supplies requested by Dr. McCarty, among them oxygen. In the case of a head wound it might be the only thing that could keep Frieda's brain tissue from permanent damage.

  Iverson finished and snaked an elbow over the line so he could hold his head up. "Check my gear?" he said to Holden.

  "Right-o."

  Having been checked out by a fresh pair of eyes, Oscar began rope-walking over the rift. Suspended at four points along the line, his body was nearly horizontal, spine toward the center of the earth. As always in a traverse, there was an element of sag. It made the operation of the ascenders inefficient, and progress was measured in inches. As the line began to angle, rising steeply toward the Wormhole, the slack was taken up. After a few strangled kicks to get the cams to lock down, Oscar climbed like a pro, covering the last thirty feet in as many seconds. The rig was a work of art; not so much slack that he was head-down at the bottom, but enough so that he was standing upright when he reached the hole.

  In the scattering light, Anna could see his skinny arms weaving some sort of magic near the top of the traverse, where his shoulders blocked her view.

  "That's the tricky part alluded to earlier," Holden said. Anna was startled at the nearness of his voice. She could feel his breath against her cheek. In their absorption, they'd knelt shoulder to shoulder on the edge of their limestone block like a couple of White Rock fairies in a troglodyte nightmare.

  "What's he doing?" The words gusted out, and Anna realized she'd been holding her breath.

  "There's no place to be, and the Wormhole's so tight it's sort of pay-as-you-go. He's changing ropes. Hooking onto the rebelay. He'll let himself loose a little bit at a time as he gets that part of himself into the hole. The hard bit is feeling for the Gibbs down at your feet. Sort of like tying your shoelaces when you're halfway down a python's throat."

  Iverson squirmed a moment more, Anna and Holden so entranced they forgot to talk. Then it was as if the rock swallowed his head. It was gone, and only the body remained, twitching with remembered life. The shoulders were next, melting seamlessly into the cliff, the pathetic stick legs kicking in short convulsive movements. Hips vanished, and Anna and Holden's lights played over a pair of size-thirteen boots flipping feebly. The image was ludicrous, but Anna didn't feel like laughing. Hands reappeared, only the hands, gloved and bulky. With no assistance from a corporeal body, they fussed and fluttered and danced like a cartoon drawn by an artist on acid.

  "Removing the foot ascenders," Holden said. "Last link."

  Abruptly, the hands were sucked back into the limestone. The boots followed. All that remained to indicate that any life-form had ever existed was the gentle swaying of the rope.

  "He's good," Holden said admiringly. "The man is good. He could thread himself through all four stomachs of a cow and never even give her the hiccups."<
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  Anna eased back from the edge of the rock and rearranged legs grown stiff from too long without movement. "Me next," she said, and was pleased at how normal her voice sounded.

  "Not yet. Oscar will holler when he's ready. There's no room to turn around in the Wormhole. He's got to crawl on up a little ways. There's a chimney. He'll go up, spin himself about, then come back down so he can get the gear and pull you in. One of you guys will do the same for me.

  "The creepy-crawly part of the hole's fifty feet or so." Holden answered Anna's unasked question. "Then it opens right up. Big stuff like we've been doing."

  Anna nodded. She'd not wanted to ask, but the Wormhole was eating away at her hard-won control. Fifty feet; she measured it out in her mind. Frieda's backyard in Mesa Verde was fenced to keep her dog, Taco, from wandering. The posts were eight feet apart. Anna had helped replace four of them at the beginning of the summer. Fifty feet: six pestholes. She could swim that far underwater. Sprint that far in high heels and panty hose. Fifty feet. Nothing to it.

  "All set." The words reverberated across the chasm, and Anna and Tillman trained their lights on the orifice that had swallowed Oscar. A disembodied hand waved to them from the solid fortress that was their destination.

  "Now you next," Holden said. "Have fun." He smiled and she smiled back, glad to know him, glad to have him with her. Holden Tillman's smile was better than a bottle of Xanax.

  Anna was always careful with climbing gear. This time her attention to detail was obsessive. The contortionist movements required to hook ascenders with half her body bobbing over a crevice she couldn't see the bottom of required that each movement be thought through before it was attempted. She was glad the ranger from Rocky Mountains who had taught her to climb had insisted she practice everything one-handed, and by touch, not sight. Tillman trained his lamp on her hands and watched.