Curt's headlamp came on, pushing the cave back where it belonged. With the return of the sense of sight, the chilling cry seemed an unreal memory. Panic subsided, and thought resurfaced; still, every cell in Anna's body quivered.

At their feet the Pigtail yawned. The long rift looked bottomless in the imperfect light. Curtains of stone, rounded and draping from ages of gentle erosion, filled the chamber with theatrical shadows, a stage where the most impossible fantasies were rendered credible.

"You did hear it?" Anna begged. There was something about the bend and waver of the sinuous limestone walls that brought back memories of acid nights and flashback days. She needed reality ratified.

"I heard. Let's get out of here."

A good idea. A great idea. Probably the best idea Anna had heard in weeks.

"We can't," she said finally.

"Why not?"

"We're grown-ups."

"Now you tell me."

20.

Anna and Curt sat without speaking. Breathing deep and slow to return her heart rate to normal, Anna listened until her ears ached with the silence.

"Maybe we should turn the light out again," Curt suggested.

"No," she said too quickly, then relented. "Try it." Entombed in darkness they waited. The eerie cry was not repeated.

"An aural hallucination?" Curt took a stab at explanation.

"We both heard it."

"Jesus. It's been nearly four days."

Anna said nothing. She doubted she herself would have lasted four days.

"Doggone that Kelly," Curt exploded. It was as close to swearing as Anna'd heard him come. "I hate people who can't grasp the obvious. If you think you hear a woman wailing in the dark, there's probably a woman wailing in the dark."

"Sondra!" Anna shouted.

The name ricocheted from tiers of limestone. A tiny avalanche broke loose to their left, skittering furtively as far as gravity would take it.

Curt turned his lamp back on. By its light Anna replaced the batteries in hers and added its inadequate glow.

"Let's keep the hollering down until we're clear of the Pigtail," Curt whispered. "Ulterior motives aside, resource management was right to close this section. It's wanting to come down; I can feel it."

Anna could too, or thought she could, a pregnant heaviness in the atmosphere that was only partially accounted for by an overactive imagination. Once, snowshoeing in the Rockies under an unstable drift of spring snow, she had had the same sensation, as if the air between her and ten thousand tons of snow was being compressed.

Talking only when they had to, and then with an eye to the boulders preying on them from above, she and Curt rigged a rudimentary belay using his body as anchor. The descent was not so steep that Anna needed to be roped up, but, should the dirt begin to shift, Curt might be able to pull her free. Failing that, he could dig along the line, confident that at least a part of her would be waiting at the end of it.

The claustrophobia from which Anna had recently declared herself cured thundered back and took up residence behind her breastbone. Lechuguilla no longer seemed a benevolent fortress. With each trickle of stone set in motion by her boots, Anna heard the chuckle of a mountain waiting to bury her alive.

Then the Pigtail was at her feet. Crabbing sideways she set foot on solid rock. Leaving the line secured to her web gear, she picked a trail along the side of the chasm following the goat track that would never see a goat. To her left the rift dropped away, sheer on one side and vicious with broken rock on the other. Her light didn't reach the bottom, but the Pigtail's terrors were all in memory. Falling no longer frightened her. At this point in the journey it was the lesser of half a dozen evils.

When she was far enough away that a second slide would not reach her, she tied the line to a stalact.i.te, moist and growing in its imperceptible way, and called gently, "Off-rope." With his greater weight, should he trigger a slide, Curt could drag Anna down with him. The stalact.i.te would hold. Intellectually she knew this was appropriate. Viscerally she would have preferred to station herself directly below Curt. Standing at ground zero when the bomb dropped would be a quicker and easier end than being left alive to deal with the fallout.

Schatz's light winked as he turned his back, following the route she had taken. Though streaked with mud and darkened with sweat, his tee-shirt shone a rich emerald green. Color. Anna longed for the sight of color. Above ground the bleakest desert landscape was alight against the blue of the sky at midday, dyed in hues of red and ocher with the setting of the sun. The darkest nights sparked silver from the sand. As a child she'd learned color was only a trick of the light, a wavelength reflected back to the human eye. Till entering a lightless realm, the truth of that hadn't come home to her.

Curt reached bottom. Years of caving made his big feet fall with such delicacy he dislodged scarcely half a cup of soil. Winding line as he came, he made his way down the rift to where she waited.

Pride, a favorite sin of Anna's, wasn't operative this deep in the earth. Content to let the younger, stronger, more experienced Schatz take the lead, she concentrated on where she put feet and hands. As they worked along the sketchy traverse, she kept an ear open for a recommencement of the haunting cry. If it came, she didn't hear it over the rasp of labored breathing.

From the repet.i.tive clutching required in cave travel, the muscles in the palms and fingers of her hands ached as if she'd opened dozens of recalcitrant peanut-b.u.t.ter jars at a single sitting. By the time the Pigtail was behind them, Anna was wringing her hands in an unconscious parody of Lady Macbeth. Twenty feet into the dirty and uninteresting pa.s.sage connecting the Pigtail to Lake Rapunzel, Curt stopped abruptly.

"It's gone."

Anna came up beside him, cramped under his arm by a pinch of stone.

"The tape is gone. Somebody took it."

The monomania of sustained movement cleared from her mind. The orange plastic surveyor's tape marking both sides of the trade routes through Lechuguilla was missing. Without it as a guide, the cave became a treacherous maze, each junction in the sinuous underground indistinguishable from the last. The way was not linear. Jagged rips in the limestone, some big enough to drive a truck through, others providing only wiggle room, were above, below, all around. Only one led out. A hundred such junctions, each with its myriad possibilities, rendered the odds of consistently making the right decision virtually nil.

"Why would Sondra take up the tape?" Curt asked.

Anna remembered when, during the carry-out, they'd finally reached the field phone: Frieda talking to her folks, Oscar Iverson and Brent Roxbury on the phone, Sondra sitting too close, taking notes.

"She didn't," Anna said with certainty. "She was eavesdropping. Something Oscar or Brent said must have struck her as that big news story she was so hungry for. She went back to find it. Somebody must have followed, pulled the tape, and left her."

"Gad, but that's cold."

"Or desperate."

Curt dug through his pack for a roll of tape. Anna carried some as well, part of the rudimentary kit for cavers in new environments. Following footprints and scuff marks, they moved on but much more slowly, leaving orange ribbon to mark the way back.

On a natural balcony overlooking Lake Rapunzel, they cried Sondra's name but could not scare up the ghost of the cave a third time. Urgency was growing in Anna, a need to find the woman, to reach Tinker's h.e.l.l, to get out of the realm of the dead before she started seeing three-headed dogs and smelling sulphur. Had Curt not insisted on a rest, she would have pushed on.

They sat; they drank. They did not speculate. It took too much energy, and even Curt was beginning to flag. Anna shined her light down glistening red-gold flowstone and ignited the perfect topaz of Rapunzel. That serene and liquid jewel, cradled in its basket of burnished limestone, made her doubly glad for the invention of the buddy system. Without Curt to curb her baser instincts, she knew, with what would have been shame had she not been too tired to care, she might have plunged in, clothes and all, introducing a cloud of grime into the pristine waters. Tracing her light up the far side of the sunken lake to Razor Blade Run, she remembered the gla.s.sine forest of aragonite crystals yet to be threaded through. She hoped she'd never be so brain-dead she would bull her way through that china shop. She liked to think that even without witnesses there was a limit to her fatigue-induced evil.

They moved without incident through the descents and ascents of Rapunzel and the dry pit of encrusted pillars called the c.o.c.ktail Lounge. The two rooms and their connecting pa.s.sages were simple by Lechuguilla's standards. Few openings existed that hinted at further trails. At the mouth of each they called and listened lest Sondra had wandered in and become disoriented.

In the long and crushing pa.s.sage that linked the c.o.c.ktail Lounge with Tinker's h.e.l.l, their shouting at last elicited a response. Standing upright in the chamber where Sondra and Peter had argued, they froze, willing the sound to come again. Just beyond was the belly-crawl where Anna had lain newtlike and eavesdropped. Anna's muscles twitched and her psyche trembled. Holding the reincarnated claustrophobia at bay took energy, akin to carrying a pit viper in a cotton pillowcase, ever vigilant, ever careful not to let it get too close.

"Sondra!" Curt shouted.

Moaning from hearts of stone dripped into their ears.

The chamber where they stood was not so much a room as an irregular void left behind by the shifting of immense blocks imperfectly mortared with lime. Walls were not smooth, not unbroken. The floor was not flat. The ceiling was dizzy-making with fractured planes. Cracks gaped from every angle. More were hidden by shadows. The one, true, going lead, the exit that would take a traveler to the Lounge and on, was one of these. Anna had recently crawled through it. She stood with her back to the bib of stone camouflaging it, yet she couldn't say with absolute certainty she'd find it again without the orange flagging.

No wonder Sondra hadn't made it out. Without tape she was lost. Without light she was doomed. Her batteries wouldn't have lasted four days. The miracle was that they had heard her through the rooms and pa.s.sages between this forsaken rent in the earth and Katie's Pigtail. Either there was a crack somewhere high in the rock that carried sound, or Frieda had indeed been whispering, trying to summon help.

Whimpering oozed from all directions. Curt pointed with his light to a triangular opening five feet up and slanting away to the right. "I'm guessing that one. What do you think?"

"We've got to start somewhere."

Ten minutes in, the lead dead-ended. No room to turn, the two of them backed out. Curt gathered up the tape as they retreated. Sweat ran from Anna's hairline in blinding streams. Her shirt hinted at a life of wet tee-shirt contests and mud wrestling. Humidity and exertion were as deadly as the dehydrating sun of the Trans-Pecos. Every time she thought of it, she drank. Every time Curt told her to, she drank. Fortunately, with Lake Rapunzel and several other designated watering holes, getting enough liquid wasn't a problem.

Despite renewed shouting, the whimpering came no more.

Curt marked the failed lead, and methodically the two of them began following the others, moving counterclockwise around the room. To save time, they split up, each leaving a trail of tape. On Anna's third solo crawl she found Sondra McCarty.

Before she'd squirmed twenty feet, the smell met her, a vile odor of excrement and human despair, the odor of prisons, hospitals, and madhouses. A smell that can be masked but never completely expunged. Fighting nausea, Anna pulled the neck of her shirt over her nose and mouth, Joe Bazooka style, and crawled on. Sweat soaked through the rip-stop covers on her elbow and knee pads. Mud formed, creating minuscule dams that broke and reformed as she moved.

Trailing a lifeline of surveyor's tape, she heaved herself over a fall of flowstone. Stench hit her in full force. Her light shone into a room more s.p.a.cious than any they'd found since leaving the Lounge. Twelve to fifteen feet high and twice that long, it stretched into the darkness. Blocks of limestone broke it into a maze. Piles of human waste dotted the flat areas. Paper and foam cartons were scattered around. A sidepack and helmet, cast off as in anger, hung precariously on an abutment halfway down the room.

At the far end, a wall glistened with water. Seepage formed a pool at its base. The body of a woman was beside it, curled into a fetal position so tight her head was hidden. All Anna could see were arms, legs, and b.u.t.t. Having lowered her feet into the room, she slid down till she stood on the floor.

"Sondra?"

The fetus began to unwind with painful slowness, limbs like sticks, stiff as a puppet's, unfolding. Matted hair was pushed back by skeletal fingers to reveal eyes as devoid of humanity as any Anna had ever seen. They closed against the unbearable brightness of her lamp. No spark of recognition had registered, no gleam of incipient sanity.

Hunkered down on her heels so she would present a less alarming figure, Anna said, "Sondra, it's me, Anna. One of the cavers who came down to help carry Frieda out. Do you remember?" She kept her light just off Sondra's face. No intelligence was burgeoning. The vague, soulless stare continued. "You've been lost down here for four days." She spoke softly, easing Sondra back into the world of the living. "I see you found a water source. I'm impressed. You've kept yourself alive. That took courage. We're here now. We're going to take you home. Can you get up? Can you do that for me? Are you hurt?"

With a suddenness that caught Anna off guard, Sondra uncoiled, rose to feet and hands, and charged. Guttural cries rumbled behind bared teeth. Anna tried to stand, to jump clear, but legs too long without rest had cramped in the crouching position. She fell, rolling helplessly onto her back.

In an instant, Sondra was upon her, hands clawing, the growl becoming a staccato bleat.

Though moderately painful, the a.s.sault turned out to be friendly in nature. The tall, once haughty young woman held on, trying to burrow into Anna's arms, crawl into her pockets, hide in the warm safety of her.

Anna held her and muttered a slightly profane version of "there, there" till Sondra's hysterical flailing ceased. Bit by bit the grunts began to form into words, an ongoing litany of "Oh, G.o.d. You're real. So long. G.o.d. Don't let go."

Just as Anna began to think she would soon be able to form complete sentences, Sondra dissolved in racking sobs, her body jerking as if an electric current surged through it. Any attempt on Anna's part to pull away triggered such a fit of violent grasping that in the end she just hung on to the quivering mess that was Sondra McCarty and waited for the storm to blow itself out.

"Mind if I join you? Or is three a crowd?"

Anna looked up from where Sondra had her pinned in the dirt to see Schatz's most-welcome face.

"My lead dead-ended. I followed the bellowing." He slid down beside them and looked around, his lamp raking over the filth. "Not exactly the Hilton."

"She found water and stayed with it. Good girl," Anna said in that peculiar voice usually reserved for dogs and horses.

"Hi, Sondra. Everybody's been missing you," Curt lied without a hitch.

Pulling her face away from Anna's chest at the sound of her name, Sondra stared at Curt. Face streaked with tears, hair in dreadlocks from sleeping and living in the mud, she looked every inch the tragic refugee. Momentarily her hands loosened their grip.

Opportunity was knocking. Aiming Mrs. McCarty at Curt's broad chest, Anna gave her a shove. Neat as a flying squirrel, Sondra let go of Anna and smacked into Curt, fingers, toes, every prehensile inch of her reattaching to the new savior.

"Thanks a heap," Curt said dryly, eyeing Anna over Sondra's head where it wedged between his jaw and neck.

"Don't mention it." Rubbery legs took Anna's weight. Rubbing clutch marks from her arms, she tried to shake free of the insanity if not the stink of it.

Affixed to Curt, Sondra made gurgling noises and hid her face. A line from an old Travis McGee novel came to mind: "You girl, do you dither? Do you bleat and snuffle and carry on?" Anna looked away. The woman had earned the right to a breakdown. Batteries would have gone dead on the first day. Food run out on the second. Without water Sondra would have died on the third. Carlsbad's volunteers were going to have fun cleaning up after this adventure.

Turning her back on what had become a prison for Sondra, Anna knelt. The younger woman's shoulders grasped between her hands, she gently pulled her several inches away from her human rock.

"Time to go. You've been here plenty long, don't you think?"

Childish in extremity, Sondra nodded and pawed away tears with one hand. The other had a fistful of Curt's tee-shirt and looked in no way ready to let go.

"You must be real hungry," Anna said coaxingly. "I've got a whole bunch of food in my pack. If you can come just a little ways, back out to the real trail, we'll eat something. Then go home." To Curt she said, "Take her hand. The one on your shirtfront if you can get it. Hold it till you can't anymore. I'll be right behind you with her gear."

Schatz did as he was asked. In the confined crawl s.p.a.ce leading back to the Trade Route, there was a scuffle and some wailing when he tried to detach himself so he could move ahead. Anna took a bandana from her pocket, tied one corner to the end of Curt's bootlace, and gave the other to Sondra. Tenuous as the tether was, it gave her confidence to go on.

Back in the crumpled s.p.a.ce whence this side trip had begun, Anna got a container of ravioli from her pack and let Sondra eat half of it. The rest she set aside to see if her patient could keep the food down.

Anna had brought Sondra's helmet and pack out. Curt put fresh batteries in her headlamp. With her own light strapped to her head, she calmed down significantly. Given light, food, and the promise of salvation, she showed signs of regaining the rudiments of human intercourse.

The ravioli stayed down. Anna let Sondra have what was left, her cautions to eat slowly totally disregarded.

"Can you tell us what happened?" she asked.

The brown eyes filled with tears fat as summer raindrops. They dripped from the narrow jaw, splashing onto her trousered thighs with audible plops. Tears were an improvement. Tears were human; they helped to melt the unnatural rictus of her face. Still, Anna didn't want to risk a setback.

"You don't have to talk about it," she said quickly. "You just eat and get your strength back."

Curiosity might have rendered her less kindly, but she had a pretty good idea what must have transpired. Sondra had heard someone- Brent or Oscar, or Brent and Oscar-talking about the original injury to Frieda. She'd put together that Frieda had been attacked to keep her from finding something they didn't want found. Sondra sneaked away in search of an exclusive story. Her disappearance was noted by someone wishing her ill. During the night the rescuers had been trapped in the Pigtail, this person had slipped away while the others slept. By the simple expedient of removing the tape, he had seen to it that Sondra would not come out.

Anna had awakened that night. Brent had been gone from his sleeping place. Another reason guilt might have driven him to what became his own death. Killing would be hard to live with. Burial alive, impossible.

"Did you get all the way to Tinker's h.e.l.l?" Anna asked.

Sondra shook her head, her mouth full of ravioli. In a shuddering gulp she swallowed it. Her eyes refilled, and she whimpered, "There was somebody following me." Memory, mixed with trauma, was drawing a veil over her mind.

"Don't," Anna said sharply. "Stay right here. Right now. With us. Eat. Talk to her, Curt."

Curt, still tied to their acquisition by Anna's handkerchief, began telling stories of the incredible abuses perpetrated on the English language by his students. The talk was pointless, mildly amusing, and just what the doctor might have ordered. That is, if the doctor wanted his wife back.

Harmless male chatter was a balm to frayed nerves. Sondra's eating slowed, and her eyes dried. Stretching her legs, Anna mingled the muddy soles of her boots with those of her companions. Closing her eyes she invited a catnap to recharge her batteries. Tinker's h.e.l.l was close-no more than a twenty-minute trek from where they sat. She needed to get there; otherwise the whole trip was for nothing. Mentally, she apologized to Sondra. Saving a life, even one as irksome as Sondra McCarty's, was probably worth something. Mind drifted. It would be not only cruel but, more significantly, unwise to ask Sondra to go deeper into the cave. At best she'd be an anchor. At worst she'd flip out and become a serious liability. In her fragile state she couldn't be left alone. The briefest sentence back in solitary confinement could do irreparable harm. The mind-breaking solitude of the underground was stressful for the healthy and well balanced.

Anna enjoyed a peculiar sensation of simultaneously floating and weighing five hundred pounds. Ten hours' sleep would have been a boon, but if anything she'd read about long incarcerations in the dark was true, Sondra had been sleeping fifteen to twenty hours out of every twenty-four. Leaving her alone even through the act of becoming unconscious didn't sit well. Anna would have to make it out of Lechuguilla on catnaps. Once outside, she promised herself, she'd spread a sleeping bag on the open desert and sleep till Christmas.

"Christmas."

She'd been talking in her sleep. Curt's "Ho, ho, ho" woke her up.

"How long was I asleep?" she demanded.