Part 2 (1/2)

On the second morning, Ike found that the snow had drifted to basketball-rim heights outside the cave's entry-way. By then the tattooed corpse had lost its novelty, and the group was getting dangerous in its boredom. One by one, the batteries of their Walkmans winked out, leaving them bereft of the music and words of angels, dragons, earth drums, and spiritual surgeons. Then the gas stove ran out of fuel, meaning several addicts went into caffeine withdrawal. It did not help matters when the supply of toilet paper ran out.

Ike did what he could. As possibly the only kid in Wyoming to take cla.s.sical flute lessons, he'd scorned his mother's a.s.surances that someday it would come in handy. Now she was proved right. He had a plastic recorder, and the notes were quite beautiful in the cave. At the end of some Mozart s.n.a.t.c.hes, they applauded, then petered off into their earlier moroseness.

On the morning of the third day, Owen went missing. Ike was not surprised. He'd seen mountain expeditions get high-centered on storms just like this, and knew how twisted the dynamics could get. Chances were Owen had wandered off to get exactly this kind of attention. Kora thought so, too.

'He's faking it,' she said. She was lying in his arms, their sleeping bags zipped together. Even the weeks of sweat had not worn away the smell of her coconut shampoo. At his recommendation, most of the others had buddied up for warmth, too, even Bernard. Owen was the one who had apparently gotten left out in the cold.

'He must have been heading for the front door,' Ike said. 'I'll go take a look.' Reluctantly he unzipped his and Kora's paired bags and felt their body heat vanish into the chill air.

He looked around the cave's chamber. It was dark and freezing. The naked corpse towering above them made the cave feel like a crypt. On his feet now, blood moving again, Ike didn't like the look of their entropy. It was too soon to be lying around dying.

'I'll come with you,' Kora said.

It took them three minutes to reach the entranceway.

'I don't hear the wind anymore,' Kora said. 'Maybe the storm's stopped.'

But the entry was plugged by a ten-foot-high drift, complete with a wicked cornice curling in at the crown. It allowed no light or sound from the outer world. 'I don't believe it,' Kora said.

Ike kick-stepped his boot toes into the hard crust and climbed to where his head b.u.mped the ceiling. With one hand he karate-chopped the snow and managed a thin view. The light was gray out there, and hurricane-force winds were skinning the surface with a freight-train roar. Even as he watched, his little opening sealed shut again. They were bottled up.

He slid back to the base of the snow. For the moment he forgot about the missing client.

'Now what?' Kora asked behind him.

Her faith in him was a gift. Ike took it. She - they - needed him to be strong.

'One thing's certain,' he said. 'Our missing man didn't come this way. No footprints, and he couldn't have gotten out through that snow anyway.'

'But where could he have gone?'

'There might be some other exit.' Firmly he added, 'We may need one.'

He had suspected the existence of a secondary feeder tunnel. Their dead RAF pilot had written about being reborn from a 'mineral womb' and climbing into an 'agony of light.' On the one hand, Isaac could have been describing every ascetic's reentry into reality after prolonged meditation. But Ike was beginning to think the words were more than spiritual metaphor. Isaac had been a warrior, after all, trained for hards.h.i.+p. Everything about him declared the literal physical world. At any rate, Ike wanted to believe that the dead man might have been talking about some subterranean pa.s.sage. If he could escape through it to here, maybe they could escape through it to there, wherever that might be.

Back in the central chamber, he prodded the group to life. 'Folks,' he announced, 'we could use a hand.'

A camper's groan emitted from one cl.u.s.ter of Gore-Tex and fiberfill. 'Don't tell me,' someone complained, 'we have to go save him.'

'If he found a way out of here,' Ike retorted, 'then he's saved us. But first we have to find him.'

Grumbling, they rose. Bags unzipped. By the light of his headlamp, Ike watched their pockets of body heat drift off in vaporous bursts, like souls. From here on, it was imperative to keep them on their feet. He led them to the back of the cave. There were a dozen portals honeycombing the chamber's walls, though only two were man-sized. With all the authority he could muster, Ike formed two teams: them all together, and him. Alone. 'This way we can cover twice the distance,' he explained.

'He's leaving us,' Cleo despaired. 'He's saving himself.'

'You don't know Ike,' Kora said.

'You won't leave us?' Cleo asked him.

Ike looked at her, hard. 'I won't.'

Their relief showed in long streams of exhaled frost.

'You need to stick together,' he instructed them solemnly. 'Move slowly. Stay in flashlight range at all times. Take no chances. I don't want any sprained ankles. If you get tired and need to sit down for a while, make sure a buddy stays with you. Questions? None? Good. Now let's synchronize watches...'

He gave the group three plastic 'candles,' six-inch tubes of luminescent chemicals that could be activated with a twist. The green glow didn't light much s.p.a.ce and only lasted two or three hours. But they would serve as beacons every few hundred yards: crumbs upon the forest floor.

'Let me go with you,' Kora murmured to him. Her yearning surprised him.

'You're the only one I trust with them,' he said. 'You take the right tunnel, I'll take the left. Meet me back here in an hour.' He turned to go. But they didn't move. He realized they weren't just watching him and Kora, but waiting for his blessing. 'Vaya con Dios,' he said gruffly.

Then, in full view of the others, he kissed Kora. One from the heart, broad, a breath-taker. For a moment, Kora held on tight, and he knew things were going to be all right between them, they were going to find a way.

Ike had never had much stomach for caving. The enclosure made him claustrophobic. Just the same, he had good instincts for it. On the face of it, ascending a mountain was the exact reverse of descending into a cave. A mountain gave freedoms that could be equally horrifying and liberating. In Ike's experience, caves took away freedom in the same proportions. Their darkness and sheer gravity were tyrants. They compressed the imagination and deformed the spirit. And yet both mountains and caves involved climbing. And when you came right down to it, there was no difference between ascent and descent. It was all the same circle. And so he made swift progress.

Five minutes deep, he heard a sound and paused, 'Owen?'

His senses were in flux, not just heightened by the darkness and silence, but also subtly changed. It was hard to put words to, the clean dry scent of dust rendered by mountains still in birth, the scaly touch of lichen that had never seen suns.h.i.+ne. The visuals were not completely trustworthy. You saw like this on very dark nights on a mountain, a headlight view of the world, one beam wide, truncated, partial.

A m.u.f.fled voice reached him. He wanted it to be Owen so the search could be over and he could return to Kora. But the tunnels apparently shared a common wall. Ike put his head against the stone - chill, but not bitterly cold - and could hear Bernard calling for Owen.

Farther on, Ike's tunnel became a slot at shoulder height. 'h.e.l.lo?' he called into the slot. For some reason, he felt his animal core bristle. It was like standing at the mouth of a deep, dark alleyway. Nothing was out of place. Yet the very ordinariness of the walls and empty stone seemed to promise menace.

Ike shone his headlamp through the slot. As he stood peering into the depths at a tube of fractured limestone identical to the one he was already occupying, he saw nothing in itself to fear. Yet the air was so... inhuman. The smells were so faint and unadulterated that they verged on no smell, Zen-like, clear as water. It was almost refres.h.i.+ng. That made him more afraid.

The corridor extended in a straight line into darkness. He checked his watch: thirty-two minutes had pa.s.sed. It was time to backtrack and meet the group. That was the arrangement, one hour, round trip. But then, at the far edge of his light beam, something glittered.

Ike couldn't resist. It was like a tiny fallen star in there. And if he was quick, the whole exercise wouldn't last more than a minute. He found a foothold and pulled himself in. The slot was just big enough to squeeze through, feetfirst.

On the other side of the wall, nothing had changed. This part of the tunnel looked no different from the other. His light ahead picked out the same gleam twinkling in the far darkness.

Slowly he brought his light down to his feet. Beside one boot, he found another reflection identical to the one glinting in the distance. It gave the same dull gleam.

He lifted his boot.

It was a gold coin.

Carefully, blood knocking through his veins, Ike stopped. A tiny voice warned him not to pick it up. But there was no way...

The coin's antiquity was sensuous. Its lettering had worn away long ago, and the shape was asymmetrical, nothing stamped by any machine. Only a vague, amorphous bust of some king or deity still showed.

Ike shone his light down the tunnel. Past the next coin he saw a third one winking in the blackness. Could it be? The naked Isaac had fled from some precious underground reserve, even dropping his pilfered fortune along the way.

The coins blinked like feral eyes. Otherwise the stone throat lay bare, too bright in the foreground, too dark in the back. Too neatly appointed with one coin, then another.

What if the coins had not been dropped? What if they'd been placed? The thought knifed him. Like bait.

He slugged his back against the cold stone.

The coins were a trap.