They crawled, wriggling through narrow gaps. Down, then up, then down. Janie's knees ached. It smelled of dust and something sweet.
The bottom dropped out of their passage and Roxy hopped down into a chamber. Janie splatted behind her and lay, assessing the damage, while Roxy ran around picking things up and exclaiming. Janie had bitten her tongue on the landing. Her wrist was sore, and she had gravel up her nose.
"Do you think these are human bones?" Roxy asked. She held them like drumsticks.
Before Janie could get a good look, Roxy stooped to pick up something else.
"Wow, do you think this is like a crypt or something?" Roxy said. "Look at this!"
It was an old leather boot, smashed flat. She tossed it aside and scampered up a rickety wood ladder and turned left. Janie dragged along behind her.
"Roxy, we need to figure out how we're going to get out of here. I don't think we can get back up to that hole we fell out of."
"Back that way." Roxy gestured behind her.
Janie glanced over her shoulder into the darkness. The tunnel must run in both directions.
They wound downward. The sweet stench was suffocating.
She chased Roxy down the tunnel, into one side passage and then another. She collided with Roxy as she whirled around at a dead end and started to double back. In the sweep of Roxy's headlamp, Janie thought she saw clay figurines lined up on a ledge, but that had to be her imagination.
Back, they went.
"Where are we going? Would you slow down for a sec?" Janie panted.
A moment later, Roxy stopped and inspected a narrow section of cave wall that appeared to be built of stone and mortar. She backed up a few feet. Her breath came faster.
"Nooooo!"
Janie flinched back. "What?"
Roxy beat the rock with the palms of her hands. "She's trapped and she can't get out!"
Janie gathered her courage and crept closer. "I thought you said the exit was the other way."
Roxy's headlamp suddenly blinded Janie. Janie couldn't read Roxy's expression behind the glare. Roxy turned back to the wall, flung herself at it, and bounced off. She lunged forward again, tugged on a stone.
"Let's just go home. Roxy? Can we just leave? It's not going to move." Janie tried to pull her away.
"Let go of me!" Roxy shook her off. "I need a pick! A battering ram! A jackhammer! Look around!"
"Roxy, there's nothing here."
"Where can we get one?"
"A jackhammer?"
"Do you think we can rent one?"
"Uh. I guess."
Roxy bolted back the way they had come.
Janie caught up just as Roxy wriggled into a slot at the base of a wall and disappeared, along with the light.
Imprisoned by darkness, Janie fought panic.
"What's taking you so long?" Roxy's muffled voice.
"Is that the way out?"
"Oh, yeah."
Janie knelt and groped forward, wormed into the slot. Her breath bounced off the rock and blew back into her face. She thrashed around, trying to find something to push off with her feet, lifted her head a fraction of an inch and butted her forehead on the ceiling.
Roxy's voice sang out, a little closer than before, "What are you doing?"
"I can't see, dammit!" Janie yelled.
"Oh. Just come this way."
Janie pushed with her foot and scraped forward. Sharp stones dug into her back. A chain of curses flowed out of her mouth, filled the space.
The mountain threatened to crush her. There was no room to breathe.
More curses.
The view behind her eyelids turned red. She opened them and yellow rock bore down on her. A half-basketball-sized bulge pinioned her to the ground. Light shone through a narrow gap.
"I can't fit."
"Stop being a baby."
Janie blew all the air out of her lungs, wriggled and scraped. Rock ground across her nipple.
Then the slot widened slightly and Janie rose to her feet in a room-sized cavern.
A steel vault door gleamed in the occasional flash from Roxy's headlamp.
Rubber-legged, Janie ran to it and yanked on the lever. It wouldn't budge. A wave of nausea washed over her. Would they be trapped until Monday morning? Could Janie survive that long? Was there enough air?
Roxy had squatted at the opposite wall and the sound of slurping echoed in the chamber. Janie wanted to ask what she was doing, but she was working on breathing.
"It's all so beautiful and perfect and whole, I could just drink the whole world!" The cave echoed with Roxy's racking coughs. Slurp, slurp.
The yellow orb of light from her headlamp gleamed off the surface of a puddle.
Janie wanted to tell her to stop. Any water in Long Shot could be contaminated with cadmium and arsenic from mining.
Now Roxy was rolling in the dirt at Janie's feet, squirming out of her clothes. Janie caught a flash of bare thigh and closed her eyes.
The sound of deep breathing and a gentle flutter by her face made her open them again. Roxy pirouetted and leapt around the chamber babbling about beauty and wholeness. Janie wasn't feeling it. All she felt was anxiety and dread. She was suffocating in it. Roxy splashed into the little pool. Soon, she fell silent.
Janie worked up some saliva. "Roxy?" It was like the shout that breaks you free of the nightmare. Suddenly, Janie's mind cleared. She stumbled forward, found Roxy facedown in two inches of water. Janie heaved Roxy upright, stumbled around the room giving her abdominal thrusts. Water spewed out of Roxy's mouth, and finally she coughed weakly. Janie flipped her onto dry dirt, whipped off Roxy's headlamp and put it on her own head so she could see. Her own useless headlamp had been lost long before.
Roxy began to mumble as Janie ran to the door, threw herself on the lever, wrenched to and fro. It didn't budge, but that was her plan and she was sticking to it. "Open, open, open!" she yelled, until it finally gave under her weight and she fell to the floor. She snatched up Roxy and what she could find of her clothes and dragged her into a vestibule with electronic equipment arrayed on shelves. Two PC's hummed and ticked on a desk. Janie caught a whiff of cigarette smoke. In the opposite wall, there was another steel door.
Janie hauled the first door shut, then threw herself at the second door, wrestled it open and dragged Roxy into a dim hallway. Vaguely, she recognized it as the basement of Long Shot, Inc., where Ron Essing had brought her on her first day. Janie dumped Roxy on the wooden gangway and hauled the door closed behind them.
But something still chased her. It leaked through the stone walls, through the sealed door. It permeated the hallway. Tentacles of it tugged at her heart, her limbs. The ghostly paintings on the wall taunted her: "Run away! Run away!"
"I have it, I have it," Roxy's eyes shone.
"Yes, fine. Bend your arm."
Janie pulled on Roxy's T-shirt and pants, helped her into her windbreaker, shoved sneakers onto her feet.
She ran down the hall and hammered the elevator button. "Roxy, let's go!"
"I'm trying to think," said Roxy. "This is really important."
The elevator clanked open. Janie yanked Roxy in before the thing could catch up to her again. Somehow, she knew that if she paused, she'd be bogged down again by anxiety and doubt, by the vastness of the universe.
Eyes closed, Roxy sighed, sighed again.
"Are you going to throw up?" Janie asked.
"No. I can't remember! I'm losing it!"
"Good."
"No, you don't understand how important it is."
"No, it's not."
"We have to go back! There's something we need to do!" Roxy slapped at the elevator buttons, but luckily it was too late, and the doors dinged and slid open in the silent lobby.
It was silent for a second, then a voice boomed out of the darkness: "Did you listen to anything I told you?”
Janie caught a lungful of cigarette smoke: "Pete?"
He stood in the shadows, hands on h
is hips. "Turn off that damned headlamp."
Janie tugged off the forgotten headlamp, sheepishly smoothed down her hair.
"You're lucky I happened to be here. How do you think you got out? You think the airlock doors unlocked themselves?"
Janie's heart sank. "I'm fired, aren't I?"
Roxy gripped her so hard it hurt.
Pete shifted from one leg to the other. "Not if you keep your mouth shut. Now, get out of here."
He shoved them out into the light of day. It seemed like it should be nighttime. It seemed like Janie had lived a whole life down there.
"We'll go back," said Roxy, patting Janie's shoulder blade to reassure her. "Maybe tomorrow. We'll figure out how."
Chapter 17
While Janie walked Roxy home, then started the long hike back to her car at the pullout above town, Pete the desk guard lit up another cigarette and rubbed his wrinkled forehead. Why did he do it? Why take the chance for someone he barely knew? Just because she reminded him of his daughter Mel?
He wandered back behind his desk and gazed at the computer screen as it paged through infrared scenes from the cavern and various spots around the building. Then he paused it at the cavern, enlarged the picture and fiddled with the contrast. There it was, crumpled on the floor of the chamber: Roxy's bra or something. Something that didn't belong there, and might invite questions.
Pete promised himself a fifth of Crown Royal if he could just take care of this. Tomorrow was Sunday. He could sleep until two p.m. and wake up numb. The thought gave him a little motivation. Then, before he could change his mind, he dove for the elevator and inserted the key that allowed him to access the basement for the second time that day.
He breathed deeply in the elevator, like you do before entering a port-o-john, and when the doors squeaked open, he pressed the "stop" button and scurried toward the cave.
His head swirled. "Bra, bra, bra," he panted as he wrenched open the vault door, flicked a light switch, spun the combination lock on the inner door and dove into the chamber. Down, down, he swam through thick air, reached out a slow-motion hand, hooked the lacey little thing on his index finger, brought it wonderingly to his face. "Out," he screamed in his head, but the trip back to the surface was slower than the dive down. He drifted over, sagged into the first vault door, watched himself grasp the handle. Part of his mind was still in the chamber, wanting to check the whole place over, make sure nothing else had been left. And was it really a good idea to remove the evidence? And where should he place his feet when he walked? "Out." He made the word fill his whole mind, to black out all the indecision, all the other actions and worlds and possibilities. Forced his mind to turn to the one task. Yes, the bra was still hooked on his finger. He curled his fist around it, backed out. He had the outer door half closed when he remembered the lights. A whimper of despair sounded in his ears. What had made that animal sound? Was it him? He ran his palm down the wall, hit the switch and the light extinguished. He fell to his knees after locking the second vault door. It was probably for the best. Crawling was safer. Then he noticed the individual planks of the wooden gangway. Some had a slightly different grain than others. Was that meaningful?
"Out," whispered a voice from far away, and he crawled forward into the elevator.
As he reached up from the floor to push the red button, he had serious doubts about where this was going, but it was too late. The doors squeaked shut.
When his head started to clear, he opened his eyes, struggled to his feet and punched the lobby button with the side of his fist. It was getting worse. Every time he went down to the cavern, it affected him more. Why had he risked so much just now?
Back at his desk, Pete stuffed the bra to the bottom of the garbage can, ejected the security tape from the VCR, dropped it in his coat pocket and pulled a random one from the tape archive in the credenza. He placed a new label over the old one and wrote the day's date on it. The sun disappeared over the mountain tops and washed the lobby floor with a tender pink. He hadn't found any answers about Mel that day, but maybe it was good that he'd been snooping around on his day off. Maybe he'd found what he was meant to find.
Chapter 18
On Monday, Roxy was still lit up like a Lite-Brite about her experience in the cavern over the weekend. She kept peeking around the cubicle wall, grinning maniacally and dancing around the office.
Janie couldn't understand it. It was the kind of experience a reasonable person doesn't repeat.
But no, Roxy rhapsodized about the ordeal in the cavern to the point that Janie wondered whether she even remembered it.
Or perhaps Roxy was still under the influence of the cave and not to the "hangover" stage yet?
"So, why did you want to knock over the wall?"
Roxy's face clouded. "What wall?"
"You wanted to rent a jackhammer. You can't even remember, can you?"
Roxy turned from the window, where she'd been gazing out like a princess waiting for her prince, all giddiness and longing, and her face formed into sober lines for the first time that day.
"No." She searched Janie's eyes. "But I remember that it was wonderful."
Janie groaned.
The spark rushed back, then. "I had it, Janie. I had it, and I lost it."
"You're deluded."
Roxy turned a pitying eye her way. "I almost had it all, and I lost it, but a part of it is still right here.” She put her hand to her heart. "And I know--" Her eyes brightened and her voice trembled. "--I have to go back into that cavern, with or without you."
"Can you keep it down? Somebody might hear."
"Nobody ever comes in here, Janie."
That was true, but still Roxy was being careless. Maybe Roxy could afford to lose her unpaid internship, but Janie had a mortgage to pay and Top Ramen to buy.
Roxy flounced back to her cubicle, but Janie could hear her rustling around. Obviously not getting any more work done than Janie. They squirmed around in their separate worlds for half an hour. Then Janie heard a squeak as Roxy bounced out of her chair.
"I'm going to talk to Mr. Essing."
"What?"
"Don't worry. I won't mention you."
"What are you going to say?" Janie shoved her chair back as she stood. It rolled off the edge of the carpet protector. "I don't think you should--"
But Roxy was already halfway to the elevator.
On the fifth floor Roxy burst out of the elevator. "Where's Ron Essing?" she demanded of Crystal the receptionist, who flicked a hand toward her right.
Bounding into Ron Essing's office, she got right to the point: "You don't know what you're doing!"
Ron stood. "You're Roxy, right?”
Roxy ignored him. "And you're a hypocrite."
"Fair enough. Exactly what did I do?"
"Of course you don't know," Roxy mumbled to herself. The floor squeaked as she paced in front of Ron's desk. "Where do you people get off interpreting the oracles? What makes you think you know any better than anybody else what they mean?"
"We only--"
"I had a--revelation--over the weekend. The cavern spoke directly to me. I felt it in my soul."
Ron sighed. "What did it say, then?"
Roxy waved a hand. "I can't remember, exactly…"
"Okay."
"But it was something important. I need to go ba--I need to go into the cave. And not just me. We should allow--"
"We?"
"Allow," she said, louder, "everybody to directly experience the cavern. It shouldn't just be about making money."
"You think I'm getting rich?"
There was a knock at the door.
"Come in!" Ron shouted.
Andrea opened the door and froze mid-step when she saw Roxy.
"Sorry, Dad. I thought we were meeting at--" she looked at her bare wrist as though it could tell her the time.
Roxy jumped up and made a grab for Andrea's hand. "You must be Andrea."
Andrea allowed Roxy to shake her limp hand and fo
rmed her lips into what would have to pass for a smile.
Ron stood as well. "Roxy came to see me unexpectedly."
"Dad, something's come up, and--"
"Don't mind me," said Roxy. "If this is important, you should take care of it." She showed no intention of leaving, however.
Andrea jerked her chin toward the hallway and Ron followed her out.
The oak door clunked shut behind them.
"Jeff won't come out of his apartment," hissed Andrea. "The client's supposed to be here in ten minutes for an oracle."
Ron's mouth formed into an 'O'. "He has been looking...frazzled."
"We can use the usher as a backup," she said, "but I'm going to have to usher him in and out myself. You can do the recording and interpretation, meet with the client, and so forth."
"I don't think that's a good idea."
"There's no one else, Dad. And it's just once."
She studied his face as he stood there, thinking.
"No," he said at last. "Roxy can usher him."
When Essing re-entered his office a minute later, Roxy was spinning in his leather executive chair. She put a foot down and her hair bounced to a stop a second after.
He managed to keep a straight face but secretly he was charmed. Her cheek was, well, awe-inspiring.
"I suppose you're going to fire me," she said. "Go ahead. I've got nothing to lose. You're the one with the problem."
He gestured and she slid out of the chair, which he then reappropriated.
He spoke slowly. "I can't give you everything you want. But. We have an opening in the Oracle department. An usher position."
Roxy's chin jerked up.
"The usher escorts the Oracle in and out of the cave, assists him if something goes wrong, monitors the computer equipment in the airlock. The work there is more exhausting than you would think. Most ushers burn out after just a few months."
Essing leaned back in his chair and almost toppled over. She'd adjusted the tilt mechanism.
"If you can handle the exposure, there is the slight possibility that one day you could become an Oracle."
Her hands trembled as she lifted the hair off the back of her neck.
"What does it pay?" She kept her voice even.
"I think we can work something out. But I have to warn you this job is not for everyone. And cave access is strictly limited. You don't smoke, do you?"
Roxy shook her head.
They eyed each other.
"You can start today."