The Deep Zone: A Novel (15 page)

There were none.

“One more thing. When we come to vertical pitches or sections requiring dives, we’ll stop, plan, and then move.”

“How far do you intend to go today?” asked Al Cahner.

“Until we can’t go any farther. Anything else?”

Hallie spoke: “Make sure your suits are zipped all the way up. Make
very
sure the wrist, ankle, and neck seals are secure.”

“This early? They’re hot. I thought we wouldn’t button up until a lot farther in.” Arguello sounded worried.

“We’ll need them very soon.”

Then she led them down terrain steeper than a staircase and experienced, as she always did going into vast caves, not only a sense of descending but of going back in time as well. She knew that a cave like this took tens of millions of years to form. It had already existed for eons when the Egyptians built their pyramids. She knew that when her distant ancestors were knuckle-loping along some African plain, this cave had already been breathing for millennia.

It was both exhilarating and unnerving to enter such a place. What with the wind and rushing water where feeder streams formed rivers, and the heavy wet darkness, she could understand aboriginals’ belief that caves
lived
. There was more than just the rock and water and wind. There was unquestionably something else here, a presence that Hallie could feel. She was a scientist, but her mind remained open. It had always seemed to her that what people thought of as possible only revealed the borders of their own fragment of eternity. Two hundred years earlier, flight had been unimaginable, germs were undreamed of, and doctors treated the sick by bleeding them, sometimes to death. For Hallie, the only certainty was that the world and their knowledge of it would keep
changing, which made the thing denoted by the word “impossible” itself an impossibility.

She had no way to explain what she felt, nor even a name for it, but it was there. Chi Con Gui-Jao was as good a name as any.

The cave ceiling rose seventy feet over their heads—a big chamber, though Hallie had seen bigger, some vast enough to hold Grand Central Station in its entirety. She led them between rocks as big as cottages—breakdown, cavers called such boulders—which had fallen from that ceiling over the eons, and more of which could fall on them at any moment. It was like walking through a minefield, except that the mines were overhead. The gradient eased, but still they had to take each step with great care, their worlds shrinking to the circles of blue light bouncing along in front of their feet.

Hallie stopped them.

“Check those suit seals again.”

She turned and began walking down the moderately sloping floor. After fifty feet, her helmet light revealed a dark, still surface that wasn’t solid rock but didn’t look exactly like water, either. She waded in. The lake’s surface did not ripple like water; it sloshed, heavy and viscous, the consistency of buttermilk but reddish black.

Through clenched teeth, Cahner said, “It smells like rotting corpses and burning crap and year-old garbage.”

“I would keep my voice down if I were you,” Hallie warned softly. “Look up.”

“Mother Mary.” Arguello’s voice, full of sudden fear. “That is
many
. I do not think I ever have seen so large a colony.”

“How many, do you think?” Even Bowman sounded impressed.

“Given the size of this chamber, a million or more.”

Fifty feet above them, every square inch of the cave ceiling was covered with roosting vampire bats hanging upside down. It looked as though the rock ceiling had grown a vast gray beard. The bats had furry bodies like rats, but ears like a Chihuahua’s. Their faces were
pink, and when light from the team’s lights touched them, their lips curled back to reveal jagged white teeth.

“It is said that the ancient Incan kings wore cloaks of vampire bat fur.” Arguello, awestruck. “How do they, ah, poop upside down like that?”

“They invert momentarily, excrete, and go back to their normal hanging position.” Hallie shook her head. “Amazing acrobatics, actually.”

“So we are wading through a lake of bat guano,” Arguello said.

“The stuff must be
teeming
with viruses and bacteria.” Cahner sounded impressed but also horrified.

“It is, Al, but we’ll be through soon. It’s the only way in.”

“Nasty stuff.” No curiosity in Bowman’s voice, just disgust.

“It could be worse, though,” Hallie deadpanned and waited for someone to reply.

Cahner rose to the bait: “How could it get worse?”

“These bats have just come back to roost after a night of feeding. Very soon, their little bowels will go to work. There’ll be a cloudburst of bloody bat guano. You don’t want to be in here when that happens.”

“Let us make great haste, please,” said Arguello.

“Yes, but not too much. The footing gets uneven here. You don’t want to fall in and get a mouthful of this stuff.”

“Sweet Jesus, no. Hurry up, y’all.” Even brash Haight sounded concerned.

After another five minutes, Hallie felt the cave floor begin to incline upward, and soon she was standing on the rocky shore of the “lake,” watching the others make their way out. Before long they were all together, slathered from the chests down in steaming, stinking, bloody bat excrement.

“We’re a rotten lot, y’all.” Haight kept moving his nose around, rabbitlike, trying, unsuccessfully, to get it out of the stench.

Cahner didn’t laugh. “What do we do now?”

“We take a shower. Follow me.” Hallie led them to a small waterfall that shot out from a ledge of sparkling gold-and-ruby-colored flowstone. One by one, keeping their helmets on, they stood under the natural shower while clear, cold water washed their caving suits clean. Hallie showered last. When she rejoined the others, Haight spoke.

“What do y’all call that place?”

“Batshit Lake. What else?”

“Let’s go.” Bowman’s curt tone ended the small talk. “Hallie, move us out.”

She looked at him, hesitated a moment, then nodded. Despite his brusque way of going, something about the big man was still attracting her. She recalled the staring contest, the way he had winked at her. If ever something seemed out of character for a black ops kind of guy, that did. And maybe that was part of it, the contradiction such an act implied. Contradiction suggested complexity, and with complexity came surprises. As she had learned, some could be good, some bad, but she knew herself well enough to know that, for her, any were better than none.

The route steepened again and led eventually to a great portal, roughly rectangular, twenty feet high by thirty feet wide, in a rock wall that rose higher than their lights could reach. Here all the air that had been moving up from the cave’s unfathomable depths was compressed and blew through the opening with such force that Cahner grabbed a golden stalagmite to steady himself.

“I have been in a good number of caves,” Cahner said. “But I have never seen wind this strong moving through an opening this big.”

“Y’all know what they say about caves. If she blows, she goes. This is one monster we got us here.” Haight, impressed.

“What’s on the other side of that?” Bowman was poking his light beam into the void, trying to assess the terrain.

Hallie followed the caver’s protocol of keeping her light focused on his chest rather than shining it onto his face, where it would blind him. “A place where a lot of people died.”

She led on, down over boulders, past pits with bottoms their lights could not reach, through gardens of varicolored speleothems, white and red and black stalactites and stalagmites. Some were as thick as tree trunks, great columns that rose to the ceiling. Other, younger stalagmites stuck up like short spears from Cueva de Luz’s floor.

The darkness down here was the luminal equivalent of absolute zero. It began to have weight, like water on a dive, and it consumed the beams of their lights more quickly than any surface darkness ever could. Hallie felt it pressing her body and her mind. There were other physical manifestations of the cave’s presence. Its out-blowing breath pushed their chests and faces, filled their noses, had substance and force. There was nothing foul or corrupt in the scent now, but neither was it like any odor ever smelled on the surface. It came up from the cave’s ancient heart, carrying a coppery tinge like the smell of fresh blood and other, stranger things unknown to the world of light.

This is the real heart of darkness
, Hallie thought.
Watch over us, Chi Con Gui-Jao
.

THEY ENTERED A TIGHT, TWISTING PASSAGE, THEN DESCENDED
a jagged vertical chute that required them briefly to “chimney”—to press their backs and feet against opposite walls and work their way down foot by foot. They dropped out of that into a room big enough to contain a football field. Near its center, a bus-sized slab of gray stone had peeled off one wall. Following Hallie, they worked their way through boulders and rubble until all were standing beside the giant slab. It rose twenty feet over their heads and was wreathed in mist that boiled up off a small river running down one side of the chamber, an offshoot of the cave’s main watercourse.

“Some piece of rock.” Haight was playing his light over the slab, examining it in detail.

“This is more interesting.” Hallie moved her light down to the floor of the cave, beneath the end of the rock platform.

“Good Lord. Those look like …” Cahner didn’t finish the sentence.

Bowman did. “Bones. Human bones. Right, Rafael?”

“That is correct. The ancient Cuicatecs believed in many gods. They relied on human sacrifices to stay in good graces with them.
Especially
with Chi Con Gui-Jao.”

“Those all’re
little
bones.” Haight’s voice was tight.

“They believed that the most effective sacrifices were children.” Arguello sounded sad. “Their souls were thought to be more pure, therefore more powerful.”

“How would they get down this deep, though?” Haight had turned professionally curious. “We’re two hours past the twilight zone, at least.”

“They would line up from the surface all the way down to the places of killing, each holding a torch,” said Arguello.

“Why here?”

“That we do not know. But obviously they considered such places to have great power.”

Bowman had been shifting from foot to foot. “Let’s keep moving. Good people are dying up top.”

They started down again, following the bouncing circles of blue-white light. After a while, the descent assumed a rhythm that let Hallie’s mind wonder. And what she thought was:
We all change in caves. How will this cave change us?

Then the down-climbing grew treacherous again. It was not like hiking down a trail on the surface, nor even like clambering over boulders and talus, and not just because of the surrounding darkness. Down here, everything was wet. There was no trail or path, only an endless jumble of steeply sloping rocks and debris. The trick was to stay on top of the boulders as much as possible, moving along without dropping down into the spaces between them. It required both balance and courage, because sometimes the distance between boulders was a jump from the slick round top of one to the slick round top of another, with empty space of unknown depth
yawning between them. At other times, the only way to keep going was to down-climb steep or even vertical faces. None was more than twenty-five feet, but such a fall could maim or kill easily enough.

Even in such terrain, Hallie felt the familiar skill coming back as she descended. When she was in a boulder garden, her brain would automatically plot a path several yards ahead that her feet could follow. Climbing down a short face, her hands and feet seemed to find placements on their own, her fingers to become one with the wall’s protrusions and hollows. To those behind her, she appeared to be almost floating along, so smooth and even was her progress. Bowman, coming next, stayed close despite his size, though his movement was less fluid. Next in line was Cahner, his experience in caves serving him well. His progress was not as graceful and efficient as Hallie’s, but he moved easily and with confidence. Arguello was having the most trouble, and before long, he was sweating hard and swearing. Back at the tail end, Haight could have gone much faster had he not had to stay behind the two older men, but he seemed happy to be easing along, taking in the surroundings, even humming some Appalachian tune to himself as he went.

Hallie came to a huge stalagmite, taller and thicker than one of the Parthenon’s columns, colored red and yellow and black by minerals in the dripping water that had created it. The formation rose from the cave floor straight up to the ceiling. Even in this Brobdingnagian cave, such a speleothem was remarkable, and it was the signpost she had been anticipating.

“Let’s stop here.”

“Why?” Bowman impatient, prodding.

“Because if you keep going you’ll fall about five hundred feet straight down.”

“The big wall you told us about?”

“None other. Stay beside me, be careful, and I’ll show you.”

The others waited while she and Bowman stepped closer to the edge of the cliff. Their lights, shining out into the void, revealed the
top of a gigantic canyon, deep enough that their beams did not reach the bottom.