They wound through the cave alongside the water for a time and then they parted from it and entered the Chapel Room. Its benchlike slabs of fallen stone resembled church pews, and a tall formation stood in the center like an altar. The woman said, “They’re in the Funnel Room,” and knelt in front of a crawling passage that led out of the Chapel Room.
Ridley said, “You’ll need to be on your belly for a bit, Sheriff.”
Blankenship didn’t answer, but his breathing changed. The entrance to the crawl was about the size of a garbage-can lid, and everything beyond it was blackness. It looked spacious enough to a caver, but to the inexperienced, it might look terrifying. Ridley didn’t glance back at the sheriff to see his face, just dropped to his knees and said, “Let’s go.”
“Her first,” Blankenship said. “You stay with me.”
“Going to have to go single file in there, Sheriff. Not a lot of room.”
“You just let her lead the way, and you stay back with me.”
Ridley shrugged, ignored another withering glance from Rachel, and waited as she dropped to her hands and knees. She was a bigger girl, wide-shouldered, and she had to wriggle a bit to slip through. Ridley could almost feel Blankenship tighten up, watching. Blankenship was a large man. Not fat, but tall and broad.
Ridley gave her a five-count to get moving so he wouldn’t be nipping at her heels, and then he slid into the tunnel, feeling more at home once the walls closed in and there was stone all around. Some said that Ridley’s unique abilities in cave exploration were a product of recklessness, of taking risks that others wouldn’t, wedging his body into any crack in the rock without hesitation just in case it might lead somewhere, but that wasn’t so. Ridley just read caves better than most. Listened to caves better than most. They told you things, if you wanted to hear. Funny, considering that caves had been used for silencing things so often in human history. As places for hideouts, secret meetings, buried treasure, buried bodies.
He listened for Blankenship, but the only thing he could hear was the scrabbling of boots and hands on stone. The sheriff was scared, which was natural enough, but he was also holding his breath.
“Sheriff? You’re going to want to take some deep breaths.”
“I’m fine.” The words shook.
“I know you are. But you also probably haven’t been in a space this tight before, and you probably feel like you could use up your air if you breathe too deeply, am I right? A sense that there’s a finite amount of oxygen in here, and we are going to use it all up?”
“Just move,” the sheriff barked. “I’m fine.”
But Ridley could hear him breathing now, deep inhalations. One of the best ways to rush toward panic was to hold your breath and worry about your air. It was a common mistake of first-timers in tunnels; they assumed that because they couldn’t see wide-open spaces, the air supply must be limited.
When the sheriff stopped moving, Ridley stopped too and said, “Rachel, hold up.”
He could tell by the way she stiffened that she didn’t like hearing him use her name. Probably didn’t like that he even knew her name.
“Sheriff? You okay?”
Blankenship’s breathing had changed again, gone faster. It took a few seconds before he responded, and when he did, his voice was soft and unsteady.
“I’m getting squeezed,” he said. “It’s getting too tight for me.”
“No, it’s not,” Ridley said. The sheriff ignored him and began to slither backward. Ridley spoke more firmly. “Stop moving.”
The sheriff listened. Silence again, except for those uneasy breaths. Edging toward hyperventilating, but not all the way there yet.
“Now, I can’t turn around to get my light on you, so you’re going to have to use your own,” Ridley said. His voice was measured and calm, a bedside manner. “I want you to do as I say, and to concentrate. Give me five seconds of focus. You going to do that?”
“Yes.” The word was a whisper full of self-loathing. The sheriff hated that he was showing fear, and he hated even more that he was showing it to Ridley.
“All right. Look to your right side.”
The beam of the sheriff’s flashlight bobbed around, casting shadows. He was doing as instructed, at least.
“Good,” Ridley said. “Now turn it to the left.”
The light bobbed again. Here the walls on each side were nearly touching Ridley’s shoulders, and the sheriff had broader shoulders than he did. So did Rachel, for that matter. One of Ridley’s greatest assets in a cave was his size.
“Those walls,” Ridley said, “haven’t done anything in hundreds of years. They’re not going anywhere. They’re solid. Now lift your head up.”
“I can’t. Too tight.”
“I didn’t say sit up. I told you to lift your head. Just lift until you can feel the stone.”
There was a pause and then a clink of plastic against stone as the helmet found the roof.
“Okay. It’s right there on top of me.”
“Sure it is. But you had to move to touch it, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” Already the sheriff’s breathing was steadier. The simple act of following instructions kept him from feeling alone, and that made a dramatic difference.
“Then you know it’s not actually squeezing you,” Ridley said. “You can move. But the direction we need to move is forward. You ready?”
“Yeah.”
Ridley reached out and tapped Rachel on the back of the leg. He felt the muscle go taut. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t you ever touch me.”
“Let’s go,” he repeated.
She began crawling again, moving faster, and that was just fine. Speed would help the sheriff, because he would imagine he was getting closer to an open space instead of deeper into the tunnel. Ridley would have preferred to take his time and let Trapdoor talk to him, but the circumstances weren’t right. He wasn’t communing with the cave now; he was just passing through.
When Rachel entered the chamber and stood, Ridley said, “Made it, Sheriff. You might need to duckwalk in here, tall guy like yourself, but you’ll be all right.”
“Duckwalk?”
“Just watch me.” Ridley rose to half standing, upright but bent at the waist, knees flexed. “You ever play baseball, Sheriff?”
“Yeah.”
“Think of yourself as a shortstop going after a ground ball. You’re moving laterally, you’re bent over, but you’re still fluid, still loose. Pretend you’re closing on second base, but you’ve got to keep your eye on the plate, right? That’s where the ball is coming from.”
“I played third.”
“Pretend you were a little more athletic, then.”
The sheriff scrambled awkwardly to his feet and imitated Ridley’s posture as best he could.
Rachel said, “Let’s go. It’s not a tour.”
“You think it would be faster if he’d frozen up back there in the crawl?”
“I’m not freezing up,” Blankenship said. “Let’s move.”
“Good man.” Ridley followed as soon as Rachel went into motion, moving in a side step, watching the sheriff’s footwork. Blankenship crossed his feet over now and then but he did all right. Being as tall as he was, he was going to have one hell of a stiff back by morning.
They were almost through the chamber and closing in on the next passageway when Blankenship said, “I can hear him!”
“No, you can’t,” Ridley said. He’d been listening to the voices for a while. “Those are the people who are trying to find him.”
They curled through the passageway and came out on the other side in a room larger than any they’d seen since the entrance chamber. This was the Funnel Room, so named because it was shaped like an upside-down volcano. In the center was a nearly perfect funnel formation, thirty feet in diameter at the top and about three feet at the bottom. There were six people in the room, five men and one woman; two of the men were down in the bottom of the funnel, clipped to ropes. You could make it up and down the funnel without the use of ropes and ascenders, but the rescue teams took their safety protocols seriously. They’d seen what happened to those who did not.