After James (32 page)

“It's got a real
come hither
to it. I'm going down.”

“That's too stupid even for you. It might just drop you half a mile inside the mountain.”

“That's why we have the rope.”

“Oh, come on. A cave. We thought we'd walk in, we'd walk out. Nobody said holes.”

“We're prepared.”

“We are definitely not prepared. We should have a team. With radio communication, helmets, gloves, water, first aid, harnesses, those mountain-climbing spiky things, and at least one person who knows what they're doing.”

“Humans explore. We wonder what's beyond.”

She saw how it set up in his mind. He tied the rope to a stone anchor, a kind of newel post at the top of the opening. The rope was just something he'd found along with the ladder in the storage room under the rented house. It was thick, but old and dry, and would fray easily. He tied the other end in a loop under his arms and braced his hands against the smooth wall of the hole mouth.

“Jesus, Dad. If I got hysterical would you stay?”

“You're not the kind. Now, if I get in far enough you
won't be able to hear me through the rock. Give me thirty minutes. If I'm not back, then don't—do not—come after me. There's no cell reception so you'll need to go down to the car and drive it to town.” He leaned to one side, extracted the car keys from his pocket, and tossed them to her. “Go to Armin and he'll call the police. Take the map so he can tell them how to get here. I'll be fine, likely just stuck with my head in a prehistoric honey jar. I'll have a sleep while you lead them up.”

“Let me go instead. I'm lighter and thinner and my joints work better.”

“Nonsense. I won't allow it. Much too dangerous.” He suppressed a smile, clamped the flashlight in his mouth, and started down.

She'd been waiting twelve minutes. He'd been in voice contact for about eight. He'd barely disappeared when she heard his first exclamation. Right below her the ground levelled out and opened into a chamber. “I can stand up,” he said. After a few seconds he said, “No artifacts or remains but…hold on.” She stared into the hole. “There's a ledge, sort of recessed in the stone, and it's full of seashells. I need to know who put these here.” She saw flashes of light come out of the hole and remembered he had a camera in his vest. He said there was a narrow passage ahead. His voice was fainter now. “I'll investigate.” She asked him to describe the space and he said, “It's pretty small.” “How small?” There was no answer. Four minutes later the rope went slack.

She was inside the very quality of strangeness she'd felt the night before at the chateau, with its shards catching the light. She'd seen them passing in the river, rising in the fountain. They ran along the levers of the penitent machine and curved around the bowed head of a boy. Things full of meaning but resistant to words. The presentiments had been pushed forth by a lack of sleep and the pressure of things unsaid. And again now, the unsaid or unheard. A simple human commerce stopped. What else had he said about the cave on the way up? Nothing useful now. He said certain caves were places of deep solitude, that it wasn't just fear or necessity that would make people gather out of the killing elements, but something inward that needed to be acknowledged to others around a fire. “These were the first stirrings of religion, the deepest parts of ourselves brought into the social. A collective of souls, staving off fear, hunger, loneliness, if not doubt.”

She reasoned that he'd come to the end of his rope but not the end of his time. He'd untied himself and kept exploring. Near the thirty-minute mark she'd feel the tension back on the line. She'd hear him, he'd emerge. She tried to have faith in this idea and the faith or tending there opened a space inside her where the dim figure she made out was herself.

The rim of the hole was the only smooth surface, worn by thousands of years of hands and bodies. On the pocked wall above it she tried to detect the smallest movement of the stippled shadows. In its simplest form time was light, nothing more. Our sense of it changed from being with others. Others marked it, were marked by it, set it at variable speeds in the
social flux. But isolated, removed from other presences, time was light and nonlight in perpetual bend and stretch.

She would deny rogue freedom to the one she most loved out of her own childish need. She sampled the idea that he was after balanced understanding, not revelation, that a word like
god
didn't need to injure her. Maybe he'd just grown tired of the terms and metaphors of science, the terms they'd always shared. A balanced understanding would close distances but in the hours since she'd arrived, distances had formed.

The shadows had notched along without detectable movement. The sun leaned on the mountain faces opposite, the distant fields and vineyards far below. From where she sat the superstitious mind would see the god in all things moving each day left to right, up to down, changing its slant with the seasons. The first divine readings would come from such a prospect. At an earned altitude, in your very body you felt great meanings were arrayed before you, you could look and know yourself. The trouble was in trying to say them, the things you came to know. She would say them only this way. Left to right and up to down.

It had been forty-two minutes. No sound for thirty-four. Something was wrong but she hadn't yet moved, weighted in place against the whirl of her thoughts. If she left the cave he'd be alone up here inside the mountain for five or six hours, too long if he was injured or in danger. The rope lay slack against the wall. The first chamber was safe, the one he'd called from, with the shells. It would make sense to
lower herself into it and call to him through the next opening. If she couldn't hear him she'd have to keep calm and crawl out and timber the ladder, and cross it without anyone to hold it steady, and start down the mountain. She had to bring help before dark or she wouldn't know how to find her way back up. Assuming she could do so by day. She hadn't paid attention on the climb, only following his lead in slight variation, as she'd done much of her life.

She imagined sitting with him on a patio somewhere, beginning the story of what they'd done wrong today. It had been a mistake not to tell anyone. Was it from vanity or cool, delicious hope that he wanted this for the two of them alone? Another error, not to have planned for emergency. The previous night they should have given directions to creepy Koss, explaining that if they hadn't called him by such and such an hour he was to do so and so. Were there earlier mistakes? He should have told her of the cave before she left Canada. She would have researched what to bring, planned for contingencies. How far back could they go? What were their mistakes, through the years, and how had they contributed to this colossal miscalculation?

It wasn't yet panic she felt, as if panic were a stable marker. She wasn't hysterical. Her heartbeat was getting up there but she'd experienced nothing to cause real fear, only a duration of silence. She told herself that her father was simply late. He was often late, he lost track of the hour, though admittedly given the directions she expected him to know it had been forty-four minutes, fourteen overdue, or six if he was counting from the last voice contact. On the imagined
patio she told him her calculations. A small delight held on his face. It would all have worked out, of course, so he was enjoying the story. She looked for the slightest sign that the enjoyment went only so far, but unless you knew him, by his face you'd think nothing much had ever happened to him. You'd guess he'd lived a safe and lucky life, that he felt fear only as mock fear, fright, a tingling on the skin, a shiver along the neck. Never as drops of blackness spreading in the blood, thickening the tongue, numbing the light. But he understood as she did that the world divided between those who knew and those who didn't.

She would need both her hands, so how to carry the flashlight? If she put it in her mouth like on TV she'd gag. It was too thick to fit into a belt loop but she had a belt, pretty much decorative, so she took it off and cinched it around the base and then tied a knot and looped the flashlight around her neck so that it nodded and swayed, catching random shapes in the illuminations as she took the rope in hand and felt along the smooth rock wall and lowered herself into the hole. She found level ground almost immediately and stepped forward before taking hold of the light and looking around. She'd stopped herself all of six inches before a spur in the rock that would have brained her. Another mistake, a lucky break. She ducked and moved forward and stood again. The light now caught all of the small chamber. The ledge with the shells, about a dozen, was at eye level. At its highest point the ceiling was maybe eight feet. The rope ran straight across the floor and into a low, small opening in the opposite wall, five or six strides ahead. She could not see how anyone could fit through it.

She kneeled at the opening and listened, nothing. Even the light draft she'd felt above was absent. She shined the beam into the passage and up came a wall forty or more feet ahead, but she couldn't tell the dimensions of the space. The rock was smooth, water-worn. She called, “Dad. Can you hear me?” and her voice seemed to wreck in the passageway. The rope—how long was it?—ran true along the shadowed ground. Maybe he'd seen a safe way forward beyond the end of his tether. Even if there was no chamber, even if what she was seeing was forty feet of tunnel, there must be a curve or drop or else she'd be able to see him. All she saw now was a frayed rope lying along a rock shaft.

She checked the time. Forty-six minutes, no contact. He was just ahead somewhere. If he was hurt, in trouble, time was short. She did not want to enter the tunnel. She could not go down the mountain, go to town and get help, come up again in the dark. Already she was sixteen minutes behind in whatever action she would take.

She said fuck it and sat and started in, feet first. She rested the flashlight on her chest and pulled herself along with her hands. The top side of the passage was inches from her face and she felt her short breaths burst back upon her. Her knees could barely bend but little by little she went forward, telling herself that her father had made it through so there had to be room for her. After several seconds she opened her feet and looked down along the beam. A penumbra had formed around the light on the wall ahead and so she knew that the shaft widened, though by how much she couldn't tell. She seemed to be moving on a slight downward grade.

The thought to be suppressed was that she might not be able to reverse her direction. It made no difference to close her eyes so she closed them and kept moving and only when the air and the sound of her motion changed did she open them to see that she'd come out into a large chamber. She sat up, shined the beam around. The rope ran to its end midfloor. She checked her watch. Inching through the shaft had taken less than two minutes.

The chamber looked fifteen or twenty feet high. She stood, breathed. There was something very different about the space, the way it held her imagining. Against this deeper silence even her breath sounded different, muted. If she were here alone she'd panic but knowing her father was ahead somewhere allowed her to keep it together. She crossed the chamber and saw the passageway to her left. Up ahead, through another narrow space, she saw the moving beam.

As he must have seen hers. She could have wept with relief but instead felt a wave of unsteadiness, an inability to speak. She came forward. The opening to the next chamber was narrow but vertical. She crouched and stepped through.

But he hadn't seen her light. Only now did he notice the concentration spot next to his own on the omphalos of rock that hung from the ceiling, huge, rose-coloured. The rock was conical, rounded at the bottom, as if shaped by intention, and she saw, felt, immediately why he hadn't been able to leave it. At some point—time was hard to reckon now—he registered the second beam and turned quickly and they trained their lights on each other. His face looked strange, as if she'd woken him from a sleepwalk.

“You didn't come back,” she said. She dropped her light to his chest. He did the same. He said nothing. “Are you all right?”

He turned his light back on the hanging rock. It was smooth, vegetable, sparkling. She came forward and stood with him. He walked her around the perimeter. The rock seemed suspended, floating three or four feet from the floor. She felt something larger than fear, though it had the same intensity. It was awe, strickenness, a shiver of beholding, as on first seeing a vast canyon, maybe, or walking into a great cathedral. But here the measurelessness was directly before them, with dimensions perceived all at once. The rock's hovering shape and colouring were hard to account for, but more so its proportions in relation to the rest of the chamber. It hung exactly midspace and though its curving surface was uneven, from anywhere on the cave floor, itself irregular, the rock seemed to face her.

She stopped walking. He continued. She tilted her light up to the dome, then down, and clipped her eyes to him as he was about to round out of sight.

“Stop.”

“Quiet, dear.”

She came to him, held him at the elbow, trained the light on the back of his head. His hair was matted in blood that had run behind his left ear and down his neck, under his shirt collar.

“What happened?”

“I don't know. I got dizzy. I bumped my head when I fell. It's all part of it.”

“Part of what? You fell? Are you disoriented?”

A short laugh escaped him. He held his hand up to ask her patience as he reached into his pocket and produced a pack of matches. He struck one. It flared and went out immediately. He did it again and again it was there and gone.

“There's not enough oxygen,” he said. “This is how they died.”