Death is Forever by Elizabeth Lowell
He snuffed out his candle and tried another lamp. It didn’t work. Neither did the third. The fourth one did. He took off his bush hat, strapped one of the miners’ helmet lamps on, and walked over to Erin with the other helmet light burning in his hand.
She learned real fast not to look directly at either light.
“Take off your hat,” he said.
She did, waited while he strapped the helmet on, and then turned her head. The helmet wobbled wildly.
“Too big,” he said. He adjusted the webbing of straps. “Try again.”
This time the helmet stayed in place.
“Stay at least ten feet behind me,” he said. “No point in both of us falling through the same hole.”
Her eyes narrowed. She hesitated before blowing out her candle. “Are you trying to frighten me into staying here?”
“No. I’m simply telling you the truth. We could be walking on limestone that’s as thick as a mountain or as thin as summer ice. There’s no way of knowing until the floor either gives way or it doesn’t.”
Uneasily she looked down at the ground beneath her feet. It was uneven and felt as solid as the stone it was.
“Maybe we should hold off exploring until we can come back with ropes and things,” she said.
All Cole said was, “Wait for me at the entrance. You’ll be safe there.”
“No.”
“Then follow me and walk where I walk. If the floor holds me, it should hold you.”
She blew out her candle and started after him, leaving ten feet between them.
The passageway quickly closed down until they were forced to duck-walk. To keep her mind off the darkness and the massive weight of limestone that was between herself and the sun, she thought about Crazy Abe Windsor.
“How old did you say Abe was?” she asked, breathing heavily from the strain of the unnatural walk.
“Old enough to be your grandfather, why?” Cole retorted.
“Maybe there’s more to beer and raw croc liver than I thought.”
He laughed, then swore when the ceiling came down even more, forcing him onto his hands and knees. Water seeped from every surface, making the stone clammy and slick. Long horizontal stains ran the length of the smooth walls. As the floor slowly dropped, the stains rose.
“There’s something wrong with this cave,” she said after a time.
“Like what?”
“It’s little and narrow and ugly. Caves are big and grand and gorgeous.”
“Only the ones you hear about. Most caves are small muddy wormholes that never get decorated.”
“Why?”
A knob of limestone stabbed Cole’s kneecap. He swore again and muttered, “Conditions aren’t right.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so,” he retorted.
She took the hint and shut up. As she crawled, she turned her head slowly, playing the lamplight over the narrow passage, trying to reason with the cold fear that was whispering to her, telling her that Bridget’s Hill was going to settle on her shoulders and crush her flat. She saw several shadows in rapid succession off to her right. When she turned her head, the light couldn’t penetrate their depths. The openings were big enough to hide a man. From somewhere in their darkness came the sound of falling water.
Shivering, she pressed forward. Water dripped and gathered and twisted into thin streams, pulled by gravity through cracks in the limestone. The water was cool, almost secretive, sliding away into black crevices and vanishing or flowing in thin channels along the edges of the tunnel. The stain marks on the wall had disappeared. Puddles collected in small, shallow depressions in the uneven surface. The floor looked like it had been scalloped by running water.
The passageway pitched down at an increasing angle. Erin thought about the alternate openings that had been revealed in the glare of their helmet lights.
“How do we know we’re in the right wormhole?” she asked.
“Arrows.”
The floor pitched downward more steeply. A limestone ripple gnawed on her kneecap, sending pain lancing through her leg.
“How far have we come?” she asked.
“Fifty feet, max.”
She hissed a word beneath her breath.
“That’s not shit, honey. That’s cave mud. Takes a hell of a long time to collect. In fact—don’t move!”
She froze. “What’s wrong?”
“No floor,” he said succinctly.
He turned his head slowly, playing the light around the roughly circular shadow that had appeared in the floor a few feet ahead. Narrow streamers of water glittered and twisted from an invisible opening in the ceiling and disappeared through a hole in the stone floor of the passage. Stretching out on his stomach, he inched forward over the slippery, scalloped surface until he could point his light straight down the narrow vertical tunnel.
Water danced and spun away into blackness. About twenty feet below, the disturbed surface of a pool returned the light in random flashes. A more orderly pattern of light came back from a pile of what looked like a tangle of flexible chain.
Cole picked up one end of a heavy aluminum ladder and shook it out over the hole. As the flexible ladder descended, water splashed and slid over the thick metal surfaces. The top end was bolted into stone a foot from the lip of the hole.
He spent a long time shining his light on the huge bolts that anchored the top of the ladder to the mouth of the shaft. There was some sign of wear on the metal, but not much.
“Is it safe up ahead?” Erin asked.
“I’m thinking about it.”
Just when she was certain he wasn’t going to say anything more, he did.
“Abe was a good miner. The shoring in all the Dog mines is still sound.”
“So?” she muttered.
“So he probably bolted that ladder into place well enough to take my weight, not just his. Besides, those bolts could hold up the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“There’s a ladder?”
“After a fashion.”
Cole grunted as he jackknifed his big body around and lowered his legs into the hole, supporting himself on his braced forearms. To Erin it looked as though he was trapped in stone up to his waist.
“Shine that light somewhere else than in my eyes,” he said.
“Sorry.” Hastily she tilted her head down.
He found one of the aluminum rungs with his right foot. Slowly he shifted more and more of his weight from his arms to his foot, ignoring the water falling on his face and shoulders.
His foot slipped.
He caught himself on his forearms.
“Cole.”
“No worries. The rungs are just wet.”
This time he jammed his foot all the way to the rock wall before he put on any pressure. The metal took his weight without complaining or giving way. The bolts didn’t even quiver. He shifted his weight quickly, repeatedly, bouncing up and down, testing the bolts that held the ladder.
Nothing moved.
“That old bastard wasn’t entirely crazy,” Cole muttered. He looked up at Erin. His light made the water falling over him sparkle and shimmer. “I’d just as soon you didn’t try this, honey.”
“Into each life a little rain must fall.”
“I’d settle for a little, but it’s the wrong damn season.”
He tilted his head and looked up at the black opening that was drooling thin streams of water over him. As he watched, he slowly realized that the volume of water falling down had increased just in the few minutes he had been there.
“This could be bad news,” he said.
She followed the direction of his lamp, adding her own light. Despite the fugitive glitter of reflected light, the thicker streams of water appeared more black than silver or transparent.
“Right now it’s running enough to be annoying,” he said. “In a few hours it could be a gusher. Depends on how much of the surface water this is a collection channel for, and how long it takes for the rain to get th
“When Abe talked about swallowing black and drowning,” she said uneasily, “I thought he meant claustrophobia.”
“Doubt it. The deeper the mine, the better he liked it. Besides, he was a literal bloke, for all his metaphors. If he said drown, he meant drown. In water.”
“Black water.”
“No other kind in a cave.” Cole eased his left foot onto the ladder. “We’re under a high-water mark right now.”
“What?”
“The horizontal stains on the wall on the way in. High-water mark.”
“Very comforting.”
“If you want comfort, go back to the entrance.”
She took a slow breath and bit her tongue.
“The scallop marks we’ve been crawling over are proof that water ran through the tunnel at some time in the past and could run again in the future,” he added.
“Could or will?”
“Once the limestone below gets saturated, the water level will rise and rise and rise until it overflows through places like the crevice we came through. If the level rises slowly, we’ll be able to get out. Or if there are enough outlets lower down for the water to escape, we’ll be safe.”
“And if there aren’t?”
“Then we’ll find out how much black water we can drink before we drown.”
44
Abe’s mine
Slowly Cole shifted his right hand to one of the flexible ladder’s rungs. The stone was uneven enough to keep some of the rungs a few inches away from the wall of the shaft. Where the stone didn’t slope, Abe had chipped out places for hands and toes.
“Cole? Are you sure we shouldn’t wait?”
“I’m sure it’s going to get a lot wetter down there before the dry begins. I’m damn sure our chances of surviving the ladder are a hell of a lot better than our chances of surviving ConMin’s attention for the next six months with only the possibility of a diamond mine as a weapon.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“This from a woman who thinks king mulgas are beautiful?”
“Tasty, too.”
His smile flashed as he shifted his left hand onto the ladder. For an instant the handle of his knife gleamed beneath the flap of the muddy leather sheath.
The ladder held his full weight.
He let out a long, silent breath and began feeling blindly with his foot for the next rung below. The ladder flexed and twisted slightly until it crunched up against rock. He found another rung and dropped more deeply into the hole. The rucksack scraped against rock and hung up in the narrow opening.
Cole cursed and went up a rung. He wriggled out of the rucksack and slung one of the straps over his right arm. Carefully he descended again. It was still a very tight fit. If he’d put one more item in the rucksack it would have hung up.
“You’re too big,” she said. “Let me take it down.”
“I was hoping you weren’t coming down at all.” But he climbed back up again and handed the rucksack to her. “Put my extra shirt back on before you get any colder.”
She reached for the clammy shirt and pulled it on. “How long will it take for the limestone below to fill up with water?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it hasn’t filled this far for ten thousand years. Maybe it won’t fill up at all.” He glanced up and caught a flash of intense green from her eyes. “But I’ll tell you this, honey. I wouldn’t plan on making more than one trip before the next dry.”
She bit her lower lip as he went back down the ladder once more. She heard the scrape of stone against cloth and flesh, followed by Cole cursing the size of the very body whose strength had gotten them this far.
“Can you make it?” she asked.
“Barely.” He grunted and swore again. “Abe was built more narrow in the shoulders than I am.”
Cole vanished by inches into the hole. Water hissed when it hit the glass shielding the flame in his helmet.
“Have you ever used a flexible ladder before?” he asked just before he disappeared completely below the stone lip.
“Every time I went from a cargo ship to a Zodiac. Usually in a force-five gale.”
“After that, this will be a piece of cake. The wall slopes away enough so that you don’t bang your hands much, but not enough to let you twist in the breeze.”
When he called up from the bottom, Erin put on the rucksack, took a deep breath, and reminded herself that she’d done the same thing before under worse circumstances.
But not in the dark.
Silently Cole watched her descend the ladder while water dripped and slid and splashed all around. The rivulets had become trickles as thick as his finger. They fell harder and stayed around longer. He was standing at the bottom of the ladder in an ankle-deep pool of water. There was just enough space for two people to stand close to each another. Closer than an embrace.
A nearly circular passageway led off at an angle. The tunnel was smooth-sided and narrow.
“Watch it,” Cole said, catching Erin when her foot searched for and didn’t find a final rung. “The shaft is two feet longer than the ladder.”
Her breath came in as cool water lapped above her ankles. “I hope we aren’t going much lower.”
“So do I.”
Cole looked down and ran his helmet light over every bit of floor that he could. In a spot that would have been the base of a waterfall during the wet, the limestone floor was eaten away, making an irregular bowl. Small hunks of water-rounded stone lined the bowl.
“Can you go back up the ladder a few feet?” he asked.
She climbed back up several rungs. “Is this far enough?”
“One more.”
Ignoring the cool shower of water, Cole sat on his heels in the space she’d opened. He started scooping out handfuls of stones, trying to find the bottom of the basin. Something in the eighth handful winked and shimmered in the light with a life of its own.
“Bingo.”
“What?”
Without answering he stood up and held out his hand so that it caught the full flood of his helmet light. A rounded crystal the size of a small marble gleamed between his thumb and forefinger.
“Diamond?” Erin asked, hardly able to believe.
“As ever was. Hang onto it. I’ll see if Abe missed any more.”
“Missed?”
“This is the first pothole I’ve seen. He must have worked it over more than once on the way into the cave.”
The diamond felt cool on her palm. Adrenaline swept through her. In that instant she understood why men risked their lives mining the earth. She closed her hand around the crystal until her fingers ached.
Below her came the sound of rocks rolling together, Cole searching through debris down to the stony bottom of the basin itself. There was a long crack in the bottom where water flowed out. He probed the crack. It was too narrow for his fingers.
“Oh, well,” he said. “If there are any diamonds in that crack, they’re not real big.”
“How can you be so calm?” she demanded.
He laughed. “Calm? Honey, my hands are shaking almost as much as the first time I made love to you.”
The sound she made could have been surprise or laughter or both.
He stood and absently wiped his hands on his soaked khaki shorts. “Let’s not waste any more time here.”
“Waste? We just found a diamond!”
His only answer was “Watch that last step.”
Cole dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the opening that began at a right angle to the bottom of the shaft they had just descended. The floor of the tube hadn’t been pounded by falling water, so it wasn’t as deeply eroded as the plunge pool had been. The surrounding limestone was damp but not under water. The floor was scalloped.
He probed the scallops at random and found one small diamond. Tucking it beneath his tongue, he went forward. He didn’t bother to probe any more of the shallow scallops. Grimacing at t
Erin grubbed along right behind him, pushing the rucksack.
Gradually Cole realized that the tube was descending. Water seeped from ceilings and walls and collected into steady trickles. The trickles gathered in shallow channels on either side of the tunnel floor or found small cracks and disappeared deeper into the limestone. He wondered how high the water table was in this area of the Kimberley, and how long it would take to saturate the ancient, partially dissolved reef until the tunnel they were crawling through became full of water.
“The ceiling looks scalloped, too,” she said. “Does that mean this tunnel spends a lot of time full of water?”
He grunted. It was something he’d just as soon not think about.
From ahead came the sound of rushing water. He slowed down and began searching the flickering shadows ahead very carefully, seeking any openings in the floor.
Overhead, the ceiling shed water like a sieve with a handful of uneven holes. The tunnel widened from side to side. The floor was very rough, potholed from the con stant hammering of waterfalls during the height of the wet. Some of the potholes were as big as bathtubs. Others were no bigger than a fist.
Small mounds of stony debris appeared randomly, piled at either side of the tunnel.
“Abe dug out some of the potholes,” Cole said.
“Can we?”
“He kept going, which means there’s something better ahead.”
Water showered down on Cole and Erin, drenching them while they crawled forward. The temperature of the water had gone from cool to chilly. She began shivering as soon as she stopped to probe a small pothole, but she kept at it. Even her cold hands could tell the difference in texture between fragments of limestone and the sleek texture of a water-rounded diamond.
“I found one!” she called out.
“Good for you. Put it under your tongue and keep crawling.”
“But I found—”
“Abe’s tailings,” Cole interrupted. “See the debris shoved aside? He’s already been over these potholes.”
“Then why did I find a diamond?”
“Offhand, I’d guess he found something up ahead that made these potholes look like a waste of time.”