Chapter 4 #2
the Grim Reaper on it, do not go any farther. Not even a single step.”
“Why not?”
“Just don’t, okay?”
“Grim Reaper sign equals death. Got it.”
“That reminds me. Want to see something cool?”
Before Tess could answer, her best friend switched off her headlamp.
Click.
Allie’s circle of light disappeared, and the dirty walls dimmed around them, the chamber’s illumination instantly reduced
by half. Tess felt an ice pick of fear in her stomach.
“What are you doing?”
A whisper in the dark: “Turn yours off, too.”
“Why?”
“Just trust me. A little tradition, and something everyone should experience at least once in their life.” Allie’s voice circled Tess like a ghost. “Whenever I take a group here, this is where we turn off our headlamps, our flashlights, every light source we have. And we’ll all stand together in this perfect silent blackness, so black you can’t even tell if your eyelids are open or shut.
You lose track of your senses, your arms and legs.
The dark stops being an absence of something and becomes a mass, a solid thing all its own, enveloping you and inches from your face.
I swear, it feels soft, velvety. Almost cozy. ”
A grin in her voice, oddly melancholy.
“Everyone experiences it a little differently. Some people hyperventilate or have panic attacks. But to me it feels like I’m
merging with the cave, like I’m a tiny creature being digested inside its giant stomach, and its enzymes are slowly breaking
me down. It’s like . . . it’s like being dead again. If I stand still long enough, I swear I can feel myself drift apart until
I’m—”
“Nope.” Tess gripped her headlamp defensively, now the only light. “Mine stays on.”
“Please?”
“No chance.”
“Here.” She reached for Tess’s helmet. “I’ll turn yours off for you—”
“I will bite your hand off.”
A breathy laugh in the dark. “Fair enough.”
Two years ago in Mexico, Allie died.
She’d been hiking back to her hostel from some unspecified beach when a vine dropped down to slap her head. She’d raised an
arm to brush it from her hair—and felt two needles of incendiary pain in her wrist.
It wasn’t a vine.
It was a fer-de-lance—an oddly whimsical name for a venomous snake—that had dropped from a palm overhead.
This species is known to be a skillful tree climber, but apparently this particular snake wasn’t and fell ten feet to belt Allie Merritt on the head.
Even then, she’d had the presence of mind to grab her phone and snap a clear picture of the viper.
A local man helped evacuate her as her wrist slowly swelled into a fleshy balloon, but through a combination of bad luck and washed-out roads, it took several hours to reach a hospital with the appropriate antivenom.
It was there she died—her heart stopped for twenty seconds before being successfully restarted.
The main thing Tess remembered was Allie’s perfect calmness through the whole ordeal. She’d laughed and joked over the phone
on her ride to the hospital, giving woozy updates on her swelling hand and other concerning symptoms as they manifested: fever,
headache, a taste of metal in her mouth. Allie hadn’t even seemed concerned about losing her right hand to infection (which
doctors had noted was a distinct possibility). She’d kept a stoic smile and a gallows sense of humor through the whole nightmarish
week. Keep Calm and Carry-On, indeed.
Maybe Tess was just a coward and a control freak—well, yes, she knew she was both of those things—but she couldn’t imagine accepting death so serenely. How could anyone? Allie was
like a supernatural creature, perfect and graceful and somehow never afraid.
For years now, while Allie was working abroad, Tess often used a spare key to enter her apartment. She’d secretly rummage
through Allie’s closets and racks and vanity drawers, careful not to leave a trace. Sometimes she’d wear her best friend’s
clothes—always a little big, a little loose on her slight frame—and inhale Allie’s perfume, smell her pillows and bedding.
With the lights off she’d walk around the cavernous apartment in clothes that didn’t quite fit, smelling like someone else.
Allie never suspected it.
And maybe this was just her imagination, but Allie’s living spaces had always felt curiously vacant to Tess.
Like a hotel room. Allie rarely slept in her own bed, preferring to stay at Ethan’s place downtown, and her shelves were bare and her countertops were empty.
She owned no books or Blu-rays and only sparse trinkets for decoration.
She valued space and near-military cleanliness, never indulging in guilty pleasures like trash TV or processed junk food.
But, as Tess had discovered on one of her stealthy excursions a few months ago, Allie did keep three handguns in a hard case
under her bed. They were well used, rich with the candy odor of solvent. Allie had always loved plinking steel targets with
her dad ever since she was a teenager, but such a hobby might not go over well among a travel influencer’s main demographic
of affluent, college-educated women aged eighteen to forty-nine.
Allie Merritt had her secrets, like any other mortal.
You just had to dig for them.
As for that fer-de-lance that injected her with hemotoxins and nearly sent her to the afterlife? The kindly Mexican merchant
had flicked open a switchblade and cut its head off, Allie explained, to bring to the hospital and identify the appropriate
antivenom.
They didn’t have to hurt it, she’d grumbled. That’s why I took the damn picture.
“Watch out.” Allie grabbed her shoulder.
To Tess’s surprise, the tunnel dropped into a steep vertical plunge. In the short-range glow of their lights, dangers arrived
without warning.
“Careful. The rocks are wet.”
Leaning over the precipice with Allie’s arm braced protectively across her collarbones, she was stunned by the size of the
underground crevasse. Like a hairline fissure in the earth’s crust, it went on as far as their weak lights could illuminate
on both sides. The width was narrow—just a few feet across—but the depth was frightening in a visceral way she couldn’t articulate.
Somewhere far away she heard a faint patter of trickling water.
“This is the Cascadia Subduction Zone,” Allie’s voice echoed through the chasm. “Someday the earthquake that’ll sink Seattle into the ocean and kill us all is going to originate here, on this fault line.”
“Really?”
She laughed. “Nope.”
The true scale and depth of the Devil’s Staircase was dawning on Tess. She remembered entire sections of her paper map had
appeared stunted like lopped tree branches. They weren’t dead ends, as she’d assumed; they were only unmapped, leading to
undiscovered routes. It amazed her that all of this could be underground. How had it not collapsed?
“Time to catch up with your old friend.” Allie pressed a metal gadget into her hand. It looked like an oversized paper clip,
oblong and awkwardly shaped with a stepladder of stainless steel rungs. It looked like any number of the gadgets teenage Allie
used to practice with in the tree behind her house. “Remember? It should all be muscle memory.”
“I was sixteen.”
“Same age you learned to drive.”
“Also, you let me fall.”
“I knew you’d still be butthurt about that.” Allie pointed down into the black stillness. “We call this the Great Wall. It
looks scary, but it’s a basic descent. No overhangs, no rebelays, nothing intense. Perfect for a beginner. You’ll carabiner
to your harness, like this.” She felt Allie’s hands moving over hers in the dark, strangely intimate. “And you thread the
rope through the brake bars.”
The Great Wall. Tess tried to remember—had she seen that name on her map?
“Then, by squeezing the bottom two bars, you regulate friction so you’ll descend as fast or as slow as you’d like. See?” Allie clicked them open and shut.
“What’s the rope anchored to?”
“We use this.” She looped an orange rope around a boulder the size of a fridge. It must have weighed a half ton. She patted
the porous surface, as if giving it a blessing. “We call this a BFR.”
“Big fucking rock?”
“Big friendly rock, if there’s kids in the group.”
“Your grotto brings kids here?”
“Haven’t lost one yet.” She rolled her eyes. “But I’ve tried.”
Allie had zero patience with children. It was the closest thing she had to a character flaw, and Tess secretly enjoyed it.
Now she pointed out the anchor bolts they’d use as backups. They looked like tiny steel loops drilled into solid limestone,
artifacts of explorers who came before. Cavers must always use multiple anchors on descents, Allie explained, to create redundancies
if a connector fails and to keep your rope from rubbing against protruding rocks. Or else you know what can happen.
Tess glanced back. “What if someone cuts our rope?”
“That’d be a dick move.”
“I’m serious.”
“No one is going to cut our rope.” Allie tossed a coil of rope over the edge and watched it unfurl. It looked like a fishing
line cast out into space.
A faint thump echoed from below.
“How high is it?”
“Short enough that a fall wouldn’t kill you,” Allie answered, “but high enough that you’d probably wish it had.”
“I hate you.”
“Now watch closely.” She clicked open the descender’s second and fourth brake bars, threaded the rope (a “bight of rope,” she called it) between the first and third bars, then closed the second.
Then again below the third, shutting the fourth.
She narrated every step, how she’d squeeze or spread the bars to control friction, the importance of making sure she didn’t thread the rope backward (which could also result in you know what).
Tess listened and absorbed, but a small part of her brain fixated on the BFR behind them. That boulder, plus two anchor bolts
installed years ago by strangers, would suspend their bodies above a bone-shattering drop. She tested each rope with a sharp
tug, and the connections all felt reassuringly solid. Not even a millimeter of wobble.
It’ll go fine, she told herself.
“Get set,” Allie said.
“On rope.” Tess held her hands exactly where they’d practiced and positioned herself at the edge. Instinctively she wanted
to face the crevasse but couldn’t. She perched eye to eye with her best friend, smelling the coffee on her breath, squinting
in each other’s bright headlamps. Their helmets clicked together as she hung over empty space.
“Now step off, Tess. It’s easy.”
She laughed. “Easy, huh?”
“Just let gravity do its thing.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”
“Remember, whenever you feel afraid, think of all the little things your body is doing.” Allie smiled, her breath fogging
in the cold air. “For example, your pupils dilate so you can see better. Your breathing becomes more efficient so you can
run faster. Blood pumps to your brain and muscles, so you’re stronger and more alert. Remember that being afraid doesn’t make
you weak. In a measurable way, it actually makes you stronger. Fear is power.”
“How does crapping your pants make you stronger?”
“That’s your body lightening its load.”
“Gross.”
“Trust me, Tess.” Her eyes softened. “I’ll be right here, and I promise, no one is going to cut your rope. If anything happens, I’ve got you.”
It felt like they were teenagers again in Allie’s backyard. Tess remembered gripping her descender with sweaty fingers—a different
gadget back then, bright red—and flinching at every microscopic sway. The low creak of branches under their weight. The smell
of tree sap. And Alma herself—yes, hard to believe her name was Alma way back then, before she changed it to Allie—a wild-eyed
teenager with her blond hair tied in a bun and an oily red pimple on her chin that must’ve ached like hell, squeezing her
wrist and telling her: You’ve got this, Tess.
You’re a survivor.
Now that strange melancholy was back in Allie’s eyes. Tess could see it again. Whatever this problem was, it weighed on her.
She wanted to ask her best friend directly: What really happened between her and Ethan?
“You’ve got this,” Allie whispered. “You’re a survivor.”
Past and present aligned, like déjà vu, and it gave Tess a chill. God, she wished they could be those kids again. Their adult
lives were messy and complicated. Back in that tree, they were both still new. Unformed.
Repeat after me, Allie had whispered. I can do it.
I can do it.
Say it again.
I can—
Then sixteen-year-old Allie pushed her ass out of the tree.
Tess tipped over the edge, and for a stomach-turning instant she was in free fall—but then the equipment took over and the harness tugged her pelvis. She lurched, her feet kicking empty air. She gasped embarrassingly loud, and the GoPro surely recorded it.
The rope creaked in her neoprene gloves, as taut as wire.
But it held.
“Perfect.” Allie’s voice was several feet above. “Now spread the bars to descend.”
With numb fingers, Tess pulled the bars apart as instructed. The orange rope snarled through startlingly fast, spraying flecks
of mud. Oops.
One small movement at a time, then.
Slow and controlled.
“There you go,” Allie called. “Like that, all the way down.”
Tess wasn’t listening. She appreciated Allie’s support, but she was deep inside her own head, concentrating on her senses:
her hiking boots wall-walking down slippery stone, the harness snug around her waist, the prehistoric air in her throat. The
only thing suspending her above a near-fatal drop was a rope and the gadget in her sweaty fingers.
She was really doing this. It was a Saturday morning, and Tess DeWater was rappelling down an underground ravine, suspended
in total darkness. Ice-cold water trickled down on her from above, running down the back of her shirt.
She coughed on a laugh. It echoed back, distorted.
Above, Allie was smiling like a proud parent. “Say it again.”
“I can do it.”
“I’ve missed you, Tess.”
I’ve missed you, too, she was about to say when a bolt of incendiary pain pierced her skull. It filled her mind, crowded out every other thought,
and her body lurched to a stop.