The discovery floored me, and I forgot about the icy water and other dangers. Arizona possessed cavates aplenty, with a whole mess of them over in the Verde Valley, but they were high up on cliffs, not underground.
I scrambled for the largest entrance, pausing only to touch a few old blocks, part of a masonry wall that would have once made the entrance more of a frame than a doorway. Once inside, I found myself in an oblong space about fifteen feet long with openings to other chambers on each side. The entry room was tall enough to stand in, though Temi would have had to duck. There weren’t any furnishings remaining or, at first glance, evidence of habitation. My first thought was that looters had been through, but it might be simpler than that: any time the river flooded, it would clean out the interior. What would have prompted people to scrape out dwellings down here? Hostile neighbors, I supposed.
“Amazing,” I whispered, turning a full circle. “I wonder if any archaeologists are aware of this spot.”
If the other rooms were as bare as this one, there might not be many clues left, but the simple existence and unique placement would raise a lot of questions. The answers might be somewhere within the complex.
I walked across a flat floor made of a rock and plaster aggregate to poke my flashlight into one of the side chambers. A bedroom most likely, though it was as devoid of remains as the main room. It was interesting though that the original floors were visible, that they hadn’t been coated with silt from floods. If these cavates were as old as the Verde Valley ones, they’d date back to the 1300s or 1400s. Without artifacts to offer more solid clues, I’d only be guessing. People might have come along much more recently and emulated the style.
After exploring a few more rooms, I was heading back to the entrance when Simon jumped inside, almost startling the pee out of me.
“You gotta see this,” he whispered, then scrambled back out again without waiting for me to ask questions.
If I hadn’t hurried, I would have missed seeing him duck into another cavate, three holes down. There was enough of a ledge that I could make my way to it without stepping back into the water. I shivered though, with my sodden jeans clinging to my skin. The air temperature was cool down here, far chillier than the sun-warmed forest above.
“Simon?” I asked.
He wasn’t in the main room, but three doorways opened in the walls.
A hand thrust out of the one in the back. “This way,” he whispered.
That whisper was telling. He must have found sign of the riders we were following rather than some interesting relic he wanted to share.
Keeping my flashlight beam toward the floor, so its glow wouldn’t travel far, I crept after him. He stood in a small room with a depression in the floor that would have been used as a fire pit; a hole in the ceiling must have served as a smoke vent. The decor wasn’t what held Simon’s attention though. In the far back corner, a hole dropped away, a steaming hole.
“All right,” I murmured. “That’s not normal.”
Simon knelt and prodded the edge, turning wide eyes toward me. “It’s hot.”
“As in from hot springs?” I scratched my head. Arizona had some hot springs, but I wasn’t aware of any near Prescott. Of course, I hadn’t been aware of any cave dwellings either.
Simon shook his head. “No, hot, like burning. Come feel.”
I knelt beside him and touched the rim of the hole-it was about four feet wide and curved out of sight under the wall. The stone wasn’t hot enough that my hand would burn, but it was unpleasantly warm.
“Weird. Heat from friction?”
“I think they just made this hole,” Simon whispered. “Burned it right into the stone. Like the Horta in that episode of Star Trek where miners were getting killed by that wicked acid.”
“You’re seeing aliens in every corner of the woods this week, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t say it was a Horta, just that they’d done something like the Horta.”
“Uh huh.”
As we knelt there talking, the smoke lessened, making me realize how recently the hole had been created. I wondered how they’d done it. There wasn’t any rubble or other debris. Could they truly have incinerated the stone? Even then, wouldn’t there be ashes or some sort of residue?
I crouched and shone my flashlight into the hole, but the curve a few feet down made it impossible to see far without crawling in.
“Should we…?” Simon waved to the hole.
I envisioned smacking into the two riders while they were on their way out. Somehow I doubted they’d built hiding spots into their little tunnel.
“We could wait for them to come out,” I suggested.
“What if they come out somewhere else? We’d be waiting a long time. Temi would get bored and hungry up there. She’d eat all of your little boxes of cereal, and you’d have to replenish your hiking supplies.”
“I don’t think pro athletes eat Fruity Hoops. The packets of almond butter might be in danger though.”
“There you go: a reason we should follow them.” Simon touched the walls again and must have decided his sandals were unlikely to melt off, for he stepped inside. If he was willing to lead, I supposed I could go after him…
He scooted forward in something between a crouch and a crawl. I stepped in after him, using my hands to keep from plopping onto my butt. The slick chute reminded me of one of those tubular playground slides. I imagined us both slipping, then caroming down the tunnel to dump onto the floor of a subterranean chamber, right at Eleriss’s feet.
A few feet ahead of me, Simon halted and turned off his flashlight. I turned off mine as well, though I kept my thumb on the switch. Stygian blackness surrounded us. I knew we were only a few meters below the surface, but the utter darkness made it feel like we were miles down with millions of tons of rocks overhead waiting to crush us, and that we had no hope of seeing daylight again.
Way to be melodramatic, Del, I told myself. I inhaled deeply, seeking a calm state, or at least a state that wasn’t tinged with claustrophobic panic. The damp mustiness of the caves filled my nostrils, along with whatever they’d used to burn through the rock-the scent reminded me of the chemical smells of the short-lived meth lab that had cropped up down the street from the dorms at school.
Before I could ask what Simon had seen or heard, the sound of voices floated up the passage. They were familiar voices speaking in that unfamiliar language.
“Back,” Simon whispered.
I was already scooting out of the hole. I moved slowly enough that I didn’t trip, but the darkness was as absolute at the top, and it disoriented me so I couldn’t remember the direction of the door. Simon brushed past me. He turned on his flashlight again, this time with a red lens over the bulb. It provided enough light to find the way to the doorway and the cavate entrance beyond, but it didn’t carry far. With luck, the men behind us wouldn’t catch up and see it.
We started to head back upriver, but hadn’t gone past more than two of the cavate openings when the voices grew clear and distinct behind us. Simon pulled me through one of the entrances and extinguished his light again. We patted our way to either side of the door, and I pressed my back against the wall.
The voices continued on, calm and unhurried. I hoped that meant they hadn’t heard us.
I kept waiting for a lamp or flashlight to brighten the air outside of the cave. It didn’t. They couldn’t possibly be navigating the narrow ledge in the dark… could they? No, they must have night-vision goggles. Although didn’t those need some ambient light to work?