Blind Descent

"Would you think less of me if I pretty much said, 'you're on your own,' and went home?" Curt asked. Another drink, another bump of the elbow against A

"Oh, yeah," she said. "Absolutely. Left alone and helpless I would naturally have to accompany you out and blacken your name on ladies' room walls forever after. Are you going to back out?" she asked hopefully.

"Not now."

"Damn."

The light from her helmet had dimmed to a myopic eye, a dull yellow-brown iris around a darker center. With the movement of her head the watery orb wandered across the rockfall. "'S'pose she's under there?"

"Could be."

"Want to dig?"

"We'd be digging for days."

"Days," A

"Not Zeddie?" Curt said.

"I don't think so. Maybe Peter. Zeddie didn't know Sondra was going for the jugular over the divorce issue. Peter did. Besides, Zeddie didn't have much of a motive. Neither money nor marriage rings her chimes."

"She's young," Curt said. "Give her a few years. They will."

"Too true." A

"If you tell me about Zeddie and Frieda, I'll go down first," Curt offered.

A

"And I can dig faster."

"Good point." A

"Frieda and Zeddie," she said, her voice sounding odd in her ears, as if the going of the light had altered the acoustics of Katie's Pigtail. Or those of her own skull. Resisting an impulse to feel her cranial bones to see if they had shifted, she went on. "Frieda's mom told me the story. It's Zeddie's secret to share or to keep, not mine."

Curt didn't say anything. Without light, not only space was rendered a bizarre and changeable entity, so was time. A blunt-edged clod of it tumbled by to a ticking in A

"Strictly entre nous?" she said when a brief struggle between ethics and temptation had concluded.

"Oui, oui," Curt replied. "Sub rosa and all that good stuff."

A

"Short and sad," she said, and in her blindness felt as if she spoke only to herself. "Zeddie was a sophomore in high school. Her sister was home from college on spring break. She and Frieda took Zeddie climbing with a group of other college kids up to some rocks on the Yellow River, north of Mi

A moment passed, then Curt said, "Like I'd dine out on that story."

Drowning in cave ink, A

"No wonder she went ballistic when you so rudely brought the subject up."

"I said maybe Frieda had died like her sister. I meant killed for revenge. Zeddie must have thought I was suggesting she'd screwed up."

"She was always anal retentive about rigging."

"Nobody was going to die on her watch again."

"Maybe that's why Zeddie got so strong," Curt suggested. "The woman is an ox."

A tremor took A

Time for the monsters to scuttle back under their stones. She flicked the button and turned on her lamp. A pool of light no bigger than a Frisbee and the color of mud feebly illuminated their boots.

"Why do people bury their dead?" A

"Did you hear that?" she whispered.

"No. God, no. And I never want to hear it again," Curt breathed, a voiceless warmth in her ear. Fear shook through his words. A

"Wind?" she managed.

"No."

"Kelly's ghost?" She was thinking of the obnoxious grandstanding of the man swearing he heard Frieda calling from beyond the grave.

"Get a grip," Curt hissed. Veiled by a testosterone version of the heebie-jeebies, his irritation failed to bolster her courage.

"Light!" A

Curt sat too still. She wanted to pound him. Fractured visions from movies her mother had told her not to watch flickered through her brain. "It" had gotten him. She sat next to a headless corpse. Possessed by an evil spirit, even now he lifted his hands to close around her throat.

A

"Doggone it, A

Relief tugged a giggle from her throat. A thin heartless wail trailed on after her laughter stopped. Adrenaline worked its way to her bowels. The phrase "having the shit scared out of you" took on a sudden and graphic interpretation.

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 A

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?" A

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

A good idea. A great idea. Probably the best idea A

"We can't," she said finally.

"Why not?"

"We're grown-ups."

"Now you tell me."