Holland Suggestions (17 page)

Much later I went inside and undressed. I warmed myself by the fire before crawling in beside Jill, and she snuggled against me, sharing her warmth. But it was a long time before I could doze off, and I woke several times before falling into a heavy sleep just before dawn.

When I woke again Jill was gone. I heard the sounds of water splashing in the bathroom sink, and near the door I saw the dripping bucket she had used to carry it in. I lay still, and soon the bathroom door opened and she came out. She walked naked past the bed and turned away from me as she bent over and felt her clothes. Satisfied, she began to dress. I wanted to reach out to her, but some instinct stopped me. Instead I lay quiet and still while she dressed and went outside. When she was gone several minutes I got up. My muscles were sore, my head throbbed, and even dressing was a pain. I pulled on my boots, opened the door a crack, and peeped out. The sun was just breaking over the mountaintops and the fight was harsh. It actually hurt. Everything hurt. I closed the door for a minute and went around the cabin, looking out of windows. I couldn’t see anything, so I went outside.

During the night the snow had drifted high against the cabin, but now it had stopped and the sun was breaking through. There was still a slight wind and the morning was cold. I pushed through the snow to the rim and looked down at the town. Jill was directly below me, unloading equipment from her jeep. She took out her cameras and a large leather bag, then hiked up to the bluff where I had first seen her yesterday. And she began shooting pictures. I watched her for a few minutes, then stumbled back to the cabin and lay on the bed. My hangover was reaching its peak and I certainly did not feel like solving any mysteries. But the thoughts persisted. Maybe I
was
wrong; maybe there was a MacDougald and Barnes somewhere in New York. I very much wanted there to be, and that opened a whole new bag of problems. I knew then that I was letting her get too close to me; that couldn’t happen until I knew what she really was. But it was happening, and there might not be anything, at this point, that I could do about it

I fell asleep, still in my wet clothes, and I slept until I heard a thump outside. She kicked the snow off her boots and came in, whipping off her knitted hat and her coat in what seemed like one motion. “Get up, sleepyhead,” she shouted, throwing open the window.

I dragged myself into a sitting position. “Holy Christ, what time is it?”

“Nine o’clock; time to be moving on. I am so hungry I don’t think I can stand it another minute.”

“Where do you get all your energy? Don’t you even have a hangover?”

“I don’t have hangovers. Ever. Hey, come on, get up and let’s get back to town.”

“Oh, listen, I’m not even alive yet.”

“Come on, you’ve already got your clothes on. We can be back in one hour. You can have some aspirin or bicarb and I’ll have some ham and eggs. That’s all I need right now.”

There was a pause while she regarded me and I gathered my wits. “Sleep well?” I asked.

She smiled. “Extremely.”

We put the cabin in order, locked up, and climbed down the slope to the jeep. But leaving was another matter. For me it wasn’t yet finished. Again I felt that magnetic pull, back to the cave, and I knew that once more I would have to play it out. A final try, and even I could not ask any more of myself than that. Nothing about it would be easy; I too was hungry and the temptation to drive away with her and forget it was strong. I knew too that she would argue with me, as she did.

“You must be crazy,” she said; “the lack of food has affected your brain. Maybe it was the alcohol…or something else?”

“The combination of the three.”

She was incredulous. “You can’t be serious.”

“My legs are cramping up,” I told her. “If I don’t walk the crinks out I’ll probably be miserable all day.”

“Well, I’m leaving; you do what you want to do. You know the way down.”

She got into the jeep, started the motor, and gave me one last chance three more times. Finally convinced, she started down the road, pushing snow out of her way as she went. At the bottom of a short ravine she paused and blew the horn, but I did not respond and she moved ahead toward the bottom. I watched her until she was out of sight. The jeep handled the snowdrifts well, and far below, near the long strip of timber, the snow had already melted off and the road was clear. I climbed along the mountain opposite the cabin to a point almost directly in line with my lookout point in the early morning. I moved along in a straight line until I came to a half-concealed mine opening. It was the first one I had seen up close, and just what I expected: a black hole bolstered by roof and wall timbers. The hole became blacker as it went deeper, and I had no intention of going in. But just inside the mouth I saw a sign of human activity; it lured me in just enough for a closer examination. Yes, there were footprints, one clear set made by a man’s shoes, and a concave place in the soft earth where, apparently, he had been sitting for a long time. At the mouth of the mine I saw the ashes of a fire burned so completely that I had walked through them without noticing. I held my hand to them and felt faint warmth. I guessed that they were between five and six hours old.

So someone had been here. But where was he now? I peered deeper into the mine and saw only a number of rocks and the rusted remains of a rail where miners had once driven ore-filled carts. There were no footprints leading any deeper than the makeshift camp. The place gave me a chill and I got out of there. I stood on the hill below the mine and watched the cabin, with no question in my mind that he had been able to see me much better than I had seen him. I felt watched even now. My eyes scanned the slopes around me, trying to pick out any movement; there was none. Quickly I moved down the mountain, and almost blundered into one of those deep shafts.

It was completely concealed by snow, underbrush, and rotted timbers. The first warning came when I stepped on a snow-covered timber and felt it give under my weight. I jumped back in panic, and my buttocks hit a slimy mixture of snow and mud and loose rock just as the earth seemed to open around me. I was sucked toward it; only by twisting around on my stomach and gripping a clump of underbrush close down, near the roots, was I able to save myself. All of the timbers and snow slipped into the hole, leaving my kicking feet dangling over the edge.

That left me emotionally drained. I pulled myself clear and got down the mountain, though later I never could remember how. When I opened my eyes I was sitting in the stone building, with “Jake Walters” cut into the wall just above my head. I was breathing hard, trying to force thoughts of gaping black holes out of my mind. But the gloom of the stone building only encouraged those thoughts, and that forced me again into the sunlight. I began to climb the north face, taking care to stay on the path, and soon I was on the stone-lined walk high above the town. The cold air helped clear my mind. Dwelling on near-escapes and men who watched me in the night would only stop me from doing what I had to do. It was a much longer climb than I remembered; even the trek to the Mission rocks seemed to take forever. Afterward there was still a healthy piece of ground to be covered. But I climbed steadily to the cave, stopping to rest only as I neared the canyon of the rushing stream. I waited there a long time while my eyes scanned the trail behind me. Nothing moved anywhere; even the wind was gone now and the mountains looked like a fine still photograph. The hell with it. I moved boldly into the canyon; if anyone wanted to follow me there he damn well would anyway. The water covering the canyon floor seemed colder today, but I splashed through it and moved straight up to the cave.

I took Jill’s flashlight from my backpack and played it along the walls, crawling through to the big room. I went through the same motions as yesterday, feeling around the circumference of the chamber without finding any crack that might go deeper into the rock. The room was almost a perfect cylindrical chamber; the walls had been worn smooth, perhaps by some ancient water flow, and there was no indication that there had ever been more to it than this. But it followed that if flowing water had formed this cave there had to be someplace for the water to flow from. I moved the light beam across the ceiling. It was, I judged, thirty feet above the floor, and again there seemed to be no imperfections. Near an edge I saw it: a flat-looking rock jutting out from the wall. The rock was so close to the roof that it blended with the ceiling and seemed to be part of it. I took my rope from the backpack, tried to make a lariat, played out a long loop, and threw it up toward the rock. The rope collapsed inward and fell around my head. I tried again, with the same result. I tried perhaps fifty times and never came closer than that first time.

I was looking for a different approach when I saw a large oblong rock near the embers of the old fireplace. I tied the end of the rope around the rock and propped the flashlight upward on the floor, fixing the beam directly on the overhang. I threw the rock at the ceiling, letting the rope stream out behind. It hit the wall and bounced back. A dozen throws also went that way before, on the thirteenth try, the rope looped the overhang and dropped on the other side. I lowered the rock into my hands, made a slipknot, and pulled the rope tight. It felt solid. I snapped the flashlight to my belt and started to climb.

Nothing in this project was easy, but that climb was hell. After five minutes of intense struggle I hauled myself over the top of the rock and lay there, exhausted, in a flat space just large enough for a man’s body. Ahead of me, through a tiny hole, the ceiling opened into another cave.

I
CRAWLED TOWARD THE
hole, holding my light out ahead of my body. The tunnel curved up from the ledge, and for a time all I could see was a curving wall of rock. I eased my body into the hole and, using both legs and my free arm, pulled myself slowly upright, sliding over loose rock and filling the narrow passageway with dust. When I was standing erect I clipped the flash to my belt, beam pointed upward, and began to climb. I was climbing straight up, using deep notches in the rock for footholds. On both sides of the hole the notches continued at regular intervals, spaced perfectly for my hands and feet. I had no doubt that they had been cut there. The rise was about twelve feet, curving gradually all the time, and at the top I crawled out into another large room.

It was almost a duplicate of the cylindrical room below, but this time the passage continued at floor level. It continued as a narrow crack, widening slightly, then narrowing and widening again. I heard water running beyond one of the walls, but I could not tell which one even by pressing my head against the rock. I moved deeper into the cave, along a low passageway where the floor was very rough. Tiny stalagmites peppered the place, and once I came to a huge column of rock that extended from ceiling to floor. There was just enough room for me to squeeze past, and again I saw that there had been some cutting of rock; someone had been through here and had notched out the rock column so that
he
could pass. I stopped and played my light across the floor. The cuttings were still there; large chunks of rock obviously battered down by an ax. I picked up the pieces and looked at them, but there was no way of knowing how long they had been here. With the rock column behind me, the passageway started up again, gradually at first, then sharply. Soon it was another climb. I found some more broken rock, and about halfway up I picked up six old flashlight batteries. The ends were rusted out and I guessed that they had been here at least several years. I dropped them where I found them and moved ahead. The passageway turned abruptly and climbed even higher, but there at the turn the left wall was broken away and an immense cavern opened before me. My light was lost in it; there was no floor or ceiling or walls that I could see, just an endless pit of black space. The sound of falling water was very strong and at the same time distant, and a spray came up from the black depths. I cringed back against the one wall and edged past it, breathing hard as solid rock rose up around me again. I came to a crest and started down, and the walls pinched tighter around me. Twice I had to squeeze through very narrow cracks, and once I tore a layer of skin off my right arm getting through. But the cave squeezed itself off and at the next turn came to a dead end.

But there was no stopping me now. I found the crack that I knew was there, again a very small hole opening in the ceiling, and I pulled myself into a small tunnel of crawling room only. I was worming my way forward in a near frenzy, my sense of danger almost totally replaced by my urgent need to get to the end of it. The tunnel went like that for about twenty yards and ended at a wall of packed snow.

A great excitement came over me, much as I had known yesterday with my first discovery of the cave. I pushed against the snowpack, but it had frozen on this side, and it held fast to the rock. I bent my head and got my shoulder into it, heaving upward with my legs until it broke away and sent me sprawling into the raw sunlight

And there, not five inches from my face, was a sheer drop, hundreds of feet down. I had fallen out onto a ledge and was so close to pitching over the edge that I screamed out in terror. My voice came back at me as a hideous echo. The canyon yawned up at me; far below I saw a stream and rocks and trees blending together in a sickening, reeling blur. I was frozen to that spot; I literally could not move. Only gradually did my eyes focus, and then I saw a waterfall and another rushing stream. I could see too where the mountain turned and blocked the canyon from the trail to Taylor’s Gulch. I saw all those things encompassed in that sheer drop, and I reacted instinctively, pushing myself back from the edge. But my hands pushed against air. I knew then that I had been stunned by the fall; my hands had missed the edge completely and I had hit the rock ledge squarely on my face. I felt my mouth; it was sticky with blood. The blood ran from my nose and from another cut somewhere on my forehead; I took out a handkerchief and tried to stop it. With my eyes closed I lay that way until the bleeding seemed to stop. I turned my head then, without moving my body, and opened my eyes. A second shock spread through me. Without doubt, I was looking down the trail of the photographs.