One of the men up on the ledge looked at Ridley when he entered and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“That line has already been used tonight,” Ridley said. “Hope somebody comes up with new material.” He didn’t look any of them in the eye, but that wasn’t because he felt intimidated — looking these folks in the eyes required staring into the beams from their headlamps. He crouched on the ledge and watched the men in the bottom of the funnel. One was Cecil Buckner; the other was Anmar Mirza, the cave rescue coordinator.
“He’s down there?” the sheriff asked.
“That’s where you can hear his voice,” Rachel said. “At first we weren’t sure it was a voice. Pretty weak.”
“Is he responding to you? Can you communicate?”
“He seems to be talking to himself.”
Down in the funnel, Cecil said, “Quiet! Listen!”
Everyone fell silent and looked toward the base of the funnel, casting their beams downward. For a time there was no sound, but then it came, faint but clear, a drawn-out call.
“Saaaarraaah.”
The sound whispered out of the funnel and echoed through it, the name clear as a bell.
Silence lingered until the sheriff broke it with a soft question. “Who’s he talking to?”
“We’re not sure,” Cecil answered. “He’s stuck on that name, though. It’s all we can hear.” He pushed back from the wall on his toes, letting the rope take his weight, and wiped sweat from his face. “To tell you the truth, it’s kind of freaking us out. Those of us who were... you know, in here before. Back then.”
They all looked at Ridley. It was impossible not to realize that; their headlamps followed their eyes. In the cave, there was no such thing as a surreptitious stare, because light couldn’t lie. Ridley felt as if he should say something, felt as if he should be defensive and angry or dismissive and wiseass or any combination thereof as long as he was something. But he couldn’t come up with a response. When the voice came again — Saaarrraaah — gooseflesh broke out across his arms, and his spine prickled with a fear he’d thought he would never know again.
I’ll be curious to see how being back in that place works on you, the sheriff had said. The way it worked on Ridley was supposed to be private, though. Internal. If the cave called her name, Ridley should have been the only one who could hear it.
He looked around the group then with an urgent need to make sure that they were hearing it. Because down here, your mind could warp a little. Down here, real things could become false, and imagined horrors could leave bruises.
Nothing was imagined about this, though. They all seemed to be hearing it. If he was imagining—
“Saaarrraaaah...”
— this, then he was as good as done. What happened next could be very, very bad. Could be the end of him. He knew that better than any of these suspicious sons of bitches. He’d lived it.
His heart was racing, and all those beams were lancing at him from different directions like searchlights, and he closed his eyes against them despite himself.
“Saaarrraaaahh.”
“You think you can get to him?” the sheriff asked Anmar after the last echo of that hair-raising whisper was gone. “Do you need blasting equipment, something to get through the rock?”
Ridley kept his eyes closed, but he was glad the sheriff was talking, providing a moment of distraction. Ridley concentrated on his breathing, trying to get steady. It wasn’t easy. He was waiting on that whisper again, although it wasn’t a real whisper, more of a weak howl. A cry from someone who wanted to sound strong but was too close to dead to achieve anything near that.
He heard it again, weaker stilclass="underline" “Saaarrrraaaah.”
Everyone went silent when it came, the way you did when the minister spoke in church. Even if you knew the message, you had to listen to it respectfully.
“Can you get to him?” the sheriff asked again.
“I don’t know,” Anmar Mirza said. “We’ve got to find him first. It sounds as if he’s just a shelf below us, but how he got there... I have no idea.”
“Could we drill it?”
“We go up,” Ridley said. He opened his eyes, and though he shielded them with his hands, like a golfer reading the green before a putt, he wasn’t bothered by the harsh beams from his audience this time.
“What?”
“There’s nothing down there but solid stone floor. You could drill all night and not make any progress. So we go up.”
“I don’t follow you, Ridley.” This was from Cecil Buckner, and he was the only person who’d spoken Ridley’s name. The only one who didn’t have pure contempt in his voice. Regardless of what he thought of the past, he understood this about the present: Ridley could help. Ridley had drawn the maps.
“Shelves,” Ridley said. “The cave is built in shelves.” He made a stacking gesture with one hand. “But they’re not laid properly. It’s like an old fieldstone wall — uneven, overlapping. What can always find its way down through one of those walls?”
“Water,” the sheriff said.
Ridley nodded. “So we turn into water. To find him, we become water. He’s below us, but we can’t get there from here. We’re sitting in a little catch basin. This is where water gets trapped. So we go up and we go sideways until we get off this shelf. You follow now?”
Several headlamps turned upward, putting a gloss of light across the ceiling.
“There’s no passage up there.”
“You didn’t draw the maps, Cecil.”
“And I didn’t get to see them either. But there’s no passage up there.”
“There’s a crawler. A chute that will take us to the shelf below this one. Down toward his voice.”
“Has anybody ever been through it?”
“Only one,” Ridley said. “And it’s tight.”
“Can you make it again?”
“Yes.” Ridley slipped his backpack off his shoulders and unzipped it.
“I’ll stay with him,” Blankenship said, but the unease in his voice was obvious.
“We need an experienced caver with him,” Anmar said. “With all due respect, you’re not right for the job. I’ll do it. I’ll make sure that whatever happens in here today, there are eyes on him.”
Ridley ignored them both, removed a drill powered by lithium ion batteries from his pack, then opened another compartment and grabbed a handful of expansion bolts.
“What are you doing with that?” the sheriff asked.
“Building us a ladder,” Ridley said. “And we need to do it fast. It’s wet down where he is, and it’s cold. Time isn’t on his side.”
As if to confirm this, the whisper came again, softer than ever: “Saaarraahh.”
19
Mark met Sarah Martin in the water.
She came to him only after he quit fighting ahead, when he finally stopped moving and let the current take him.
There wasn’t much current to speak of, because he’d made it back to water that was only up to his waist. Wading through waist-deep water was chore enough for a strong man, though, and Mark had stopped being strong long before, and he’d stopped being a man somewhere along the streambed, someplace where the water ran high and every now and then he’d stepped into a hole and was completely submerged, choking, close to drowning.