Alexander C. Irvine (31 page)

Archie was in
the hotel lobby before six-thirty, when the western sky was still blazing with stars and a faint smear of dawn was just visible in the east. He hadn’t slept for hours after returning to his room around ten o’clock, and then had started awake shortly after five, edgy and dull from the combination of fatigue and excited dread. He hadn’t the slightest idea what he would do once he was in the cave, and conjuring half-baked schemes in the predawn darkness had done nothing but exacerbate his tension.

The most obvious course of action would be to simply tell Stephen everything. If Stephen was able to believe even half of it, he might be persuaded to help; if not, nothing would have been lost, and at least Archie would have seen the parts of the cave he would need to get through later. Yet, if Stephen didn’t believe Archie’s story, Archie realized he would have to find some way to sneak back in, with enough time before the ceremony that he could set up some sort of surprise attack. The trouble with that alternative plan was that the chacmool would see him coming as soon as he entered the cave, if not before. But it couldn’t do anything until Sunday midnight, when—unless Archie came up with a plan a good deal better than what he had so far—it would end Jane’s life with a stroke of a sacrificial knife.

I will not live to see that, Archie swore to himself. If the chacmool doesn’t kill me, I will kill it. I can’t sneak up on it—all I have left is the force of my will. And the mysterious ally, whoever that was.
Seek the Mask-bearer:
what did that mean?

Stephen came in through the swinging doors between the lobby and the ballroom, startling Archie, who had been watching for him through the front windows. Archie stood, reaching for his coat before he remembered that he’d left it in his room. He thought it would be too bulky for some of the narrower passages. Actually he thought
he
might be too bulky for those passages; he was broader than Stephen through the shoulders and hips. I’ll get where I have to go, he thought, his’ resolve bolstered by Stephen’s appearance. It won’t kill me to leave a bit of skin on a rock somewhere, not after what I’ve been through to get here.

“Bad news,” Stephen said solemnly. “Can’t go to the cave today.”

“What? But you said—”

“April Fools’, Mr. Prescott.” Stephen smiled broadly and nodded toward the front doors. “Come on. Let’s get you a coverall, and then we’ll go.”

“I
didn’t find
that humorous, you know,” Archie said as they walked down the sloping trail to the mouth of the cave. He pulled and twisted at his mustard-colored canvas coverall, trying to adjust his clothes underneath it.

“You’re too fidgety, Mr. Prescott,” Stephen said without stopping. “Tense people freeze up in caves, the small parts in particular.”

“Oh, so that was your idea of an icebreaker? Well, let me tell you something—” Archie broke off as they rounded a sharp bend in the trail and he saw the mouth of Mammoth Cave.

The trail ended in a series of rough stone steps that dropped perhaps thirty feet into a steep-walled depression in the earth. A broken pipeline made from hollowed-out tree trunks paralleled the stairs and was swallowed by the cave.

“God,” Archie said, awed not because it was big—though it certainly was, gaping from beneath a protruding slab of limestone like the half-lidded eye of the earth itself—but because he could feel it breathing. A whispering breeze, warm compared to the predawn chill of the surface, touched his face like the finger of a curious spirit, and Archie had the strange feeling that his own shallow breathing was being taken for some sort of answer to a question he hadn’t heard. Archie’s mouth dried up and he could feel his pulse pounding in his throat; the talisman against his chest took up a steady, slow counterpoint.

He took a deep breath, held it, then let it slowly out, forcing his attention back to the task at hand. If Jane was in there, he had to go and get her, if he had to crawl to the very gates of hell to do it.

“Come on, Mr. Prescott,” Stephen said. He was already at the bottom of the crude stairway, leaning casually on the trunk of a fallen tree that lay roots upward against the rocky wall of the pit. “It’s easier once you get inside and see how big it is.” Somewhere above Archie’s head, the stuttering clatter of a woodpecker echoed through the trees. Archie took it as a signal, a farewell from the world of light and air.

Stephen was right. Once Archie actually entered the cave and ducked through the flattened tube Stephen called Houchins Narrows, his fear began to melt away. Stephen’s rambling guide patter took them through the first tremendous room, the Rotunda, and a mile or so down a gently curving passage called the Main Cave. Archie nodded and made the appropriate noises at the appropriate times, responding automatically to Stephen’s prompts while he gave himself time to get used to the enormity of the cave and the furtive sound of dripping water.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that all of this had been
made,
consciously constructed by some forgotten agency of incredible power. The Main Cave was perhaps thirty feet high and forty wide, and it went on seemingly forever like an abandoned hall through which majestic processions must once have moved. The Rotunda was larger still, far larger than any room Archie had ever been in. He thought it would have comfortably fitted a country estate within its pocked limestone walls.

Stephen pointed out branching passages as they appeared: Gothic Avenue, Kentucky Cliffs, Cyclops’ Gateway. Just after the arched entrance to Gothic Avenue, Stephen held his lamp up to illuminate two stones, each taller than a man.

Looking closely, Archie could see the remains of a pattern scratched into the stones. “What does it mean?” he asked Stephen. “Some sort of gateway?”

“What do
you
think?” Stephen answered, and led Archie on.

Each dark space seemed to call to Archie the way he imagined the words
terra incognita
must have called to Marco Polo or Vasco da Gama, an irresistible seduction spiced with unknown dangers. Several times he nearly called out to Stephen, wanting to ask about the room where the chacmool had been discovered, but each time he stopped himself. Stephen knew what Archie had come to see, and he’d closed off completely the night before when Archie had pressed the issue. Best to wait until Stephen brought it up himself.

Archie had the feeling that rules of conduct between free man and slave didn’t apply here. They were artifacts of the surface world, like the picks and shovels scattered about from the long-abandoned mining operations in the cave.
I
don’t belong here,
Archie thought.
But somehow Stephen does, and that gives him power.

“Giant’s Coffin,” Stephen announced, holding up his lamp to illuminate a huge block of stone, fully thirty feet long, resting on the right side of the hall. It was indeed shaped like a coffin, precisely enough that it might have been carved that way. A visible crack ran the length of it, separating a three-foot thickness at the top of the formation that gave the appearance of a lid.

“Does a vampire come out of it at sunset?” Archie asked. His voice sounded strange to him—not muffled, exactly, but strengthless. He laughed shakily, trying to dismiss the nervousness that had crept up inside him again.

Stephen smiled at him and nodded, as if to say
Now you’re getting the idea.
“I always wanted to take a peek inside myself,” he said.

A trough in the cave floor separated Giant’s Coffin from the cleared trail. Stephen clambered down into it, motioning Archie to follow. At what would have been the foot of the coffin he stopped. “If I fell down a hole right now, Mr. Prescott,” he said, “you think you could find your way out?”

“Of course,” Archie said immediately, though he wasn’t at all sure. “Just stay on the trail and then stay to the right in the— Rotunda, right?”

Stephen nodded. “But you’d be in the dark. How’s your sense of direction with your eyes closed?”

Archie understood suddenly. He’d been right: down here Stephen wasn’t a slave anymore. He quite literally held Archie’s life in his hands, and this little interlude was a performance carried out to make that point clear.

How many times has Stephen acted out this drama? Archie wondered. He doesn’t need to tell me to be careful. But this was more about power than safety. A slave on the surface, Stephen was in total control once daylight faded around the first bend in the Main Cave. And he wanted Archie to know that.

Quite a presence he has, Archie thought, and was reminded again of Frederick Douglass. Something about Stephen’s hair, the shape of his jaw; and they were both mulatto … He didn’t say anything. Stephen looked into his eyes for a long moment, then broke into a broad grin. “Now things get interesting,” he said. “Down this way.”

Doubling back behind Giant’s Coffin, Stephen led the way down a steeply descending tunnel into a low-ceilinged room. “Used to be a wooden bowl here, right on the floor. Think we’ll wait a bit before lunch, though. That is, unless you’re hungry now.”

“No, let’s go on.” Let him have his game, Archie decided. “What’s down this way?” he asked, pointing into an opening on his left.

“Oh, nothing so much. This is the way to go,” Stephen said. Archie followed him into a narrow passage just tall enough to stand in. They followed its sharper curves for several minutes, the silence broken only by Stephen saying at one point, “Careful here.” He held his lamp out to the right. “Sidesaddle Pit.”

The trail around the pit looked perilously narrow to Archie. He could feel faint stirrings of vertigo as he stepped carefully past the yawning hole, and along with the vertigo came the uncomfortable realization that he had completely lost his sense of direction. Could I find my way out now? he thought. Not bloody likely. Probably I’d find my way to the bottom of that pit, or another one Stephen hasn’t seen fit to mention.

“That’s just a little one,” Stephen said as they approached a four-way intersection. “Forty feet or so. Big one’s up here.”

Turning left, Archie saw that just ahead the trail narrowed to a muddy trace with a sharp dropoff on the right and absolute blackness on the left. A few wooden posts were set at the lip of the pit, a sort of gesture at the idea of a railing.

My God, Archie thought. Who was foolish enough to cross that first? At the same time, the feather talisman began to quiver excitedly against his chest.

Is this where the chacmool was? Or is?
Archie strained to see beyond the limits of Stephen’s lamp, but his gaze was drawn back to the pit on his left. “When did you first come down here?” he asked.

“Two years ago. Hadn’t found this path yet, so I went across the pit on a ladder.”

“On a ladder? Christ, how deep is it?” Archie could feel himself edging dangerously close to babble, but God, to cross that chasm on a ladder—he couldn’t even imagine it, and the feather token kept jittering, distracting him when he needed all of his attention just to stay on level ground.

Stephen appeared not to notice Archie’s anxiety. “It’s hard to plumb,” he said, shrugging. “But this’ll give you an idea.” From his bag Stephen took a twist of cotton. He struck a match to it and beckoned Archie closer. “Watch it fall.”

Archie stepped as close as he dared to the edge of the pit and looked down into it, gripping a rail post so tightly his fingers ached. Stephen dropped the torch and it fell in a lazy spiral, throwing light on the grooved walls of the pit. After an impossibly long time, the torch hit bottom, a flurry of sparks bursting from it as it landed among a jumble of rocks.

“Might be only a hundred twenty feet or so on that far edge,” Stephen said. “But that rockpile slants down under this crossing. I don’t know how deep it is there.”

“Have you been to the bottom?” Archie watched the torch burn itself out, swallowed by darkness returning to the bottom of the pit.

“Nope. Don’t even know if there’s a way. Think there is, but the lead’s a long way from here. This is the deepest pit I’ve found; it could run across all kinds of other cave down there.”

“What’s it called?”

“Bottomless Pit.” Stephen chuckled. “Used to think it was true.”

Leaving Bottomless
Pit
,
they wound through a sharp S-curve, the roof of the cave dropping continuously toward the muddy floor. The mud was deeper here as well; Archie sank in over his ankles at every step and still didn’t feel solid rock. He wondered if quicksand was a feature of the cave. At the end of the S-curve, the talisman had quieted somewhat, leaving Archie certain that Bottomless Pit was, if not the chacmool’s lair, certainly some kind of focus for its activity. He made up his mind to ask Stephen about the possible way to the bottom of the pit; Riley Steen had babbled something about Stephen often taking his charges into previously unexplored portions of the cave. Maybe he would do that for Archie.

Soon I’ll have to ask him again about where he found the chacmool, Archie thought. And what can I say about Jane that won’t make him think I’m a lunatic? Then he lost his train of thought completely as he saw where they were going next.

“Welcome to Winding Way,” Stephen said with a wicked grin. “It’s bigger now than it used to be. Everyone who goes through takes a bit of the mud out with them.”

The hole in the wall ahead of them was perhaps four feet wide, but Archie doubted it was more than eighteen or twenty inches high. “Keep your nose up,” Stephen said, “and watch out, under the mud there’s a crack that can catch your foot.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Archie said. His throat had gone dry again, and he was very much aware that more than a hundred feet of limestone hung inches over his head.

Stephen saw Archie’s apprehension, and his expression grew serious. “Just keep moving,” he said. “Follow my light. This only goes a couple hundred feet and then there’s big cave after that.

“Follow my light,” he repeated. Then he pushed the lantern ahead of him and wriggled into the hole.

I could just stay here, Archie thought. He’d have to come back for me. The cave felt cold to him for the first time.