Covenant (9 page)

He didn’t like to take chances.

It took a long time for Joe to fall asleep. He kept closing his eyes and remembering flashes of Cindy from their “double” date. He’d seen her both in Day-Glo frolic and night-club vision, and she’d been radiant both times. He felt her fingers slipping between his, and her cool shoulder pressing back into his own. Again and again, he relived her quick, warm kiss, just before she slid out of his car at the end of the night. He saw glimpses of her running like a kid across the pebbly sand of the beach in the afternoon. Of her golden hair tossed back across her shoulder at the bar. Of her eyes sparkling with mischief, and a hint of something else. Of promise?

But then he thought back to her words from the beach. Something she’d said had troubled him, nagged at him all day. When she’d talked about the founder of Terrel, she’d talked about a covenant.

Just like the title of Mrs. Sander’s painting. Could there be something here after all?

He pushed those thoughts away. He didn’t want to think about cliffs and suicides and murder. He wanted to concentrate on seeing Cindy’s face again, a wide-mouthed smile beaming at him from mere inches away. He wanted to slip into dreams with her kiss lingering on his lips like a prayer.

And eventually he did.

But Sunday when he woke up, he lay in bed staring at the
ceiling feeling foolish. Here he was, having erotic day and night dreams about a pretty girl who was only a college kid, for chrissakes. What would she ever want with him? He was no Chippendale. Her hugs and handholding and soft kisses last night had probably just been the reaching out of a girl who needed a friend. Some nonthreatening dalliance that would blot out the horror of losing her true love. She’d told him what a difficult time this was for her, and how her parents couldn’t really help her.

He gave himself a mental shake. Enough already!

Time to get back to his pet case. Though he was starting to wonder why he bothered. If the whole town believed in a genie in a rock bottle, well, hell, why should he try to convince them different?

But he pulled out his jeans from the night before and fished around in the pocket.

The yellow snake-bordered paper was still there, folded and creased. He unfolded it and considered. Was there really any point to this? Would a group of cultists really advertise themselves through flyers on the wall of a club?

Learn about what dwells below Terrel’s Peak
.

He read that line again and again. He wanted to learn exactly that.

What can it hurt
, he thought finally, and took the paper over to the phone to dial Ken Brownsell.

On the sixth ring, a groggy voice picked up.

“Sorry to wake you,” Joe apologized after introducing himself. “I was wondering when I could get together with you to talk about your Cliff Combers group.”

“No problem, I had to get up anyway,” the voice gurgled. “We’re having a meeting this afternoon if you want to join us. On the north face of Terrel’s Peak. You wanna meet up with us there?”

“Sure. I’d love to,” Joe answered. “How do I get there?”

He copied down the directions, thanked Ken, and hung up.

Once again, a date at the cliff. But this time, he’d be a couple miles away from the murder sites. In an area he’d never visited.

He found it easily enough. Instead of taking the high fork of Main Street up to the top of Terrel’s Peak, he swung the Hyundai onto a gravel road that dug deep into the forest and wound the long way around the rocky crag. The meeting site was hard to miss, since the road dead-ended into it.

A handful of cars were parked along the side of the road, and he pulled up behind a sky blue VW Bug. Why and how so many of those things were still on the road, he had no idea, though he often wondered. And there seemed to be a lot of them here on the coast. He considered the motley collection of beat-up, rusty autos, and the lanky long-haired kids collected just beyond the impromptu parking lot and shook his head. This should prove…interesting.

The group was sitting in a rough circle on the ground and on boulders, and as a group they looked up at Joe’s approach. Measuring him.

“You must be Joe,” a dark-haired, long-nosed, lanky guy in khakis said as he approached the group.

“Ken?”

“The same. Glad you could make it. We hold our meetings here, usually, unless it’s raining. Then we go into a little cave down the ravine there.”

He pointed down a short slope of brush.

“There are caves in this hill?” Joe asked.

“Yeah! That’s the whole point. I formed the Cliff Combers a couple months ago to explore the caves. I couldn’t do it on my own. That’s the first rule of spelunking, you know. But have a seat with the others, and we’ll get things started.”

“Your ad said something about discovering the dark things that could swallow the town and worshipping a spirit or something….”

Ken laughed and slapped Joe on the shoulder.

“Yeah, I was trying to find some way to make caving sound mythic. Brought you out, didn’t it?”

Ken moved away and Joe took a seat on the ground. From the bohemian looks of the other club members, he was getting the idea that this was a wrong turn. But he felt stupid turning around and walking away, so he tucked his knees in and kept his mouth shut.

Ken stepped up on a pink and gray granite boulder in front of the small group and bowed with a flourish.

“Greetings, fellow Combers and recruits. Welcome to our fifth meeting. Today, there is something…special…that I have to show you. So I won’t waste time standing here talking. We won’t be going deep today, but our rules still apply: check your flashes now, check your rope, and get a partner. I don’t ever want to have to call old Chief Swartzky to pull in a search party after any of us.”

The caving guide rubbed his long fingers together as the group began milling about, checking equipment and pairing up.

This was not what he had been hoping for. A bunch of hippies playing tag in some muddy caves was not what he’d looked to find. There wasn’t a whisper of the occult about this band of losers. Joe decided now might be a good time to escape. Looking around to see if anyone was sizing him up for partnership, he found no one. But before he could begin heading back up the path to the car, a hand slapped him on the back.

“You probably didn’t bring any equipment with you this time, huh?”

It was Ken, who, Joe now noticed with distaste, had extremely yellow teeth.

“No. Maybe I can catch up with you guys on another meeting.”

“Nonsense,” Ken boomed. His voice was as long and tapered as his figure. “I’ve got some extra rope and a flash, and no partner. You can come with me. It’s a great introduction
for you to our group. I was down here a few days ago, and discovered something really exciting. Come on.”

Ken marched him over to a large black hiking backpack, and proceeded to clip a bundle of rope to his belt. He also fitted what looked like a miner’s helmet onto his head, and flipped on the flash on its front.

“Let’s move in!” he yelled, and the party moved down a dirt path into a gully that ran parallel to the road. In seconds, they were lost in a maze of shrubs and grass and trees. The back end of Terrel’s Peak rose up slowly ahead of them, and suddenly Joe saw where they were headed. A black hole between a stand of thin, scraggly evergreens led straight into the ground. It wasn’t large, maybe three feet or so wide, but the trampled dirt path led straight to it.

“Hope you don’t mind getting your jeans muddied up,” Ken said, clapping Joe on the shoulder
again
.

One more and I’ll punch him
, Joe thought.

“Duck down and go slow through the entry—it drops off pretty quickly,” Ken warned, before climbing through himself.

Joe followed, and was forced to take it slow because he couldn’t see where the hell he was going. The air changed from summer heat to autumn cool as soon as he passed the lip of the entrance, and his skin grew goose bumps instantly. He rubbed his arms and waited for his eyes to adjust to the surreal mix of pitch darkness and the piercing glares of the helmet lights. Someone grabbed his belt from behind and something went
click
.

“There, Joe. Now you’re tethered to me,” Ken explained, stepping around him. “If anything goes wrong, I’ll be right around the corner.” The guide grinned his dentist’s nightmare again. It seemed well-suited to the underground. Like a badger, Joe thought.

“Okay, people,” Ken yelled, his voice disappearing and then echoing through the cavern in a strange play of acoustics.
“We’re going to take the left fork that we explored last week, but when we reach the third room, we’ll be starting a new route. Hank, would you be our back tether?”

A portly behemoth of about nineteen nodded, rippling his rosy jowls and sandy hair, and moved to clip a rope to a piton previously hammered into the entryway.

“All right,” Ken grinned. “Let’s go!”

The next hour was, as near as Joe could figure, hell on earth. Somebody was trying to punish him. Maybe it was the cliff itself. He slogged through damp, dripping, muddy passages and crawled across slimy floors where the ceiling was only a foot above his head. He’d never been claustrophobic, but as they wriggled their way between open caverns, his stomach began to tie itself up in knots as he considered the weight of the mountain bearing down over his head.

Behind him, the grunts and groans of the rest of the group echoed. He wondered how Hank was sliding through the narrow chimney he’d just squirmed through. The worst part about it all was that he knew he had to go through it again just to get out.

Ken kept pushing farther, turning around every few minutes to whisper, “You still with me, Joe?”

The desire to unclip his rope before Ken turned around the next time was almost undeniable.

But at the end of the hardest crawl, they emerged into a large cavern. How large, it was impossible to tell, since the helmet beams stopped short of connecting with any rock but the floor. The temperature here seemed to have dropped another ten degrees. Ken stopped pulling Joe forward.

“All right, Cliff Combers! You all still with me?” A chorus of enthusiastic assent followed. Joe mouthed a hesitant “Yes.”

“This is it. Last time we went forward and hit a dead end. That really bothered me for a few days, so this week, I came back with Charles Donahue. I was sure that with this large of
a main cavern, that a tributary chain had to extend off of it somewhere. Charles and I tried this way.” He pointed to the right. “And we were lucky. Follow me. And listen closely.”

Listen for what?
Joe wondered.
Bats? Avalanches?

The quiet reverberations of the cave chambers were starting to give him the creeps. There were the coughs and footsteps of the group, but now and then, it seemed as if something moved ahead of them. As if a bat or a snake had shot forward, desperate to evade them. Joe fervently hoped if there were animals in the cave ahead of them that they succeeded in avoiding them. And he was feeling cold and damp. Where were all the beautiful stalagmites and stalactites he’d always heard were the big payoff of caving? All he’d seen so far were gray walls and muddy floors. He felt as though he were crawling naked through a rabbit’s burrow searching for a pot of gold. The reward was unlikely, at best.

A tug came on his rope and he reluctantly forced his legs into motion again, following Ken into the darkness. Their lights bobbed off a wall to the right and reflected off the floor when he looked down, but ahead lay only a veil of dark mystery.

“What are we looking for?” he finally ventured, only to receive a stern “Shhh. Listen.”

Joe rolled his eyes and trudged on, noticing that the walls were at last starting to close in again. When he looked to the left, his light trailed across a smooth gray sheen of moist rock. Something skittered across the path of his light and he turned away from it to stare again at Ken’s broad back. He didn’t need to know what it had been. He’d caught a glimpse of something that had a lot of legs and some kind of tail. And eyes. If he ignored it, maybe it would ignore him, he reasoned.

Are we almost there yet?
a voice nagged in his head.

“God, I hope so,” he told himself. He was really starting to feel thirsty. The low trickle of water somewhere up ahead wasn’t helping.

Trickle of water?

Up ahead?

That
was what Ken must be so smug about! He must have discovered the remains of the channel that cut these caves out.

Joe was so proud of figuring out Ken’s surprise that he almost walked right into the lead caver.

“Hold up!” Ken called out. The group slowly collected. Joe paced over to the left and squinted into the distance. He could just make out the walls on the far side of this chamber, but the floor began to get rougher and descend just ahead of where Ken had stopped. The faraway trickle had grown in volume to a dull rush somewhere below. He moved tentatively, one cautious step at a time, toward the black void that ate the floor just a few feet ahead.

“This is what we’ve been looking for over the past month, everybody,” Ken was saying. “The creator of this cave system. The ‘dark force’ that eats the very rock out from beneath us.”

“The only dark force in this cliff that I’ve ever heard of doesn’t seem too interested in eating rock,” someone joked.

Joe edged his way closer, trying to catch a reflection of the water that roiled somewhere below. It sounded close, but everything in these caves sounded close. It could be a couple hundred feet down, for all he knew. Or the passage below might be dry and the river working another level below it.

“Now we know it’s still active,” Ken continued. He sounded extraordinarily smug in this announcement. “More caves are being cut in this mountain every day. What we have to do now is find the route the water has carved to lead us to the heart of the hillside. Step carefully here; when we find that route, the drop could be a big one.”

Joe stepped away from Ken, threading his way down a slight slide of stone to peer out into the void. Somewhere down there, black water was rushing with the force of a mighty river, carving its name into the slick rock of the mountain.