Chapter 19
The details of the rescue still boggle Washington’s mind.
The depth, the danger, the sheer psychological agony of being locked under millions of tons of settling earth. The experience
must be worse than any nightmare. Rescuers found the poor woman only because they’d heard her screams echo up through cracks
in the porous bedrock, and they were searching the cave deeply enough to hear it only because of a single distress call sent
via citizens band radio late last night. Just a few words, really, uttered by a weak and near-unconscious voice. The individual
was also apparently inexperienced with radio protocols, having tried several frequencies before finding the emergency channel
by luck.
That distress call saved the woman’s life. And although it originated from the radio mounted to the dashboard of Jacob Herman’s
Jeep, the caller wasn’t Jacob. In fact, when Tess discovers who it was, she’ll be quite surprised. But for now, Washington
files that away in her mind and listens to the survivor’s testimony. Jumping ahead will only muddy things.
Her story will get there.
“I knew I had to go deeper,” Tess says. “Farther down, into a place he couldn’t fit.”
From there, the Drainpipe slopes downward into a slippery ramp marked with coffee cake layers of shale and mud. Cavers are advised to descend cautiously and use a fixed rope as a backup—but Tess wouldn’t have had time to go safely. There was only one option faster than climbing.
Falling.
“I let go,” she says, “and I slid down.”
“Like a waterslide.”
“Basically. But pitch-black.” She shuts her eyes, reliving every detail. “My helmet rattled my brain. I crossed my arms and
braced my feet against the walls, trying to slow myself.”
Sliding feetfirst down the cramped tube would have been a calculated risk. She couldn’t have known what she was dropping into
below. Every surface inside the cave is as hard as concrete, some of it dappled with unpredictable bumps, some of it sculpted
dagger-sharp. If she broke an ankle or knocked herself unconscious, it would all be over. Her only advantage was her mobility,
her ability to stay ahead of the killer.
“At the bottom, I landed hard on my tailbone.” She pats her forehead. “I think that’s when my headlamp broke.”
One source of light down. Two remained.
“I couldn’t see. I found my flashlight and turned it on, but there was too much mud on the lens to see.” She takes a shivering
breath. “And he . . . he was catching up. His red light was growing around me.”
200 feet, Washington writes.
With her gutsy stunt she’d bought herself thirty seconds, at the cost of her headlamp. Few cavers are determined enough to
crawl all the way down the wet, slippery Drainpipe. But those who reach the bottom, it’s said, are rewarded with a spectacular
sight.
“I wiped mud off my flashlight.” Tess’s voice wavers. “And what I saw, all around me . . .”
“What?”
“It’s hard to describe.”
“Allie’s surprise?”
Tears glimmer in her eyes. “I think so.”
When you go deep enough underground, the laws of physics don’t quite work.
Early this morning on a bumpy ATV ride, Washington had listened to a quick primer from a local volunteer on what makes the
Devil’s Staircase unique. A solution cave’s natural formations are all created by the same interplay of gravity and water,
he’d explained, and those forces are inherently predictable. Stalactites form where water drips; stalagmites rise from where
it lands. Where water pools, rimstone dams form. In almost any cave around the world, a trained eye can easily read the gravitational
physics that formed it.
Except here.
In this place, the formations don’t grow vertically—they grow sideways, almost organically. Like plants or fungus. These gravity-defying sights, still unexplained by modern science, are called
helictites. The phenomenon is often too deep underground to be formed by wind, the volunteer had explained, and capillary forces aren’t
strong enough to create structures of such size. Helictites are physically impossible, one of our planet’s natural mysteries,
and this lower chamber of the Devil’s Staircase—a small appendix-shaped room nicknamed Razor Alley—contains one of the largest
known concentrations of them in North America.
“It was beautiful,” Tess whispers. “Like . . . her last gift to me.”
Allie Merritt, who’d cruised the Nile River and sipped cocktails in Lower Manhattan and camped atop Arctic ice floes to watch
narwhals, had seen and tasted more of the world than most people do in their lifetimes—and still it seemed to be this underworld
that fascinated her the most. The unknown. The dark. The depths.
“For just a few seconds, I . . .” Tess wipes an eye. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“I know it sounds stupid.”
Washington scoots closer. “There’s nothing stupid about it, Tess.”
“I know she’s gone. I saw her die. But I swear to God, I felt like Allie was still there with me somehow. Like . . . the last
of her was holding on to the world by her fingernails, refusing to move on, refusing to leave my side. Not until I was safe.
Not until we killed him.”
“Together?”
She swallows and nods.
The sight she witnessed is difficult to imagine. The photos Washington has seen are indeed spectacular, but in a cold and
threatening way. She knows one should never confuse beauty with safety. Humans don’t belong underground.
“I knew he’d kill me if I tried to fight him head-on.” She exhales. “But . . . there was another way I could win.”
“How?”
“By being like Allie,” she says. “By staying ahead of him, by going deeper into the cave, deeper than he could follow me.”
Forward momentum at all costs. The Devil’s Staircase is a grueling trial, relentless in the ways it attacks your body and
mind. Hours later, even expert-level cavers on the rescue team would suffer its psychological effects while fighting to save
the trapped woman.
“By outlasting him. By being braver than him.”
She takes a breath.
Like Allie would’ve done.
Jacob Herman landed hard on the bottom, bruising his knees on rock. He shone his red glow on the walls around him and saw
they were wriggling, covered in worms.
His gut dropped.
But his lizard brain was just a fraction of a second ahead of his upper brain. Of course they weren’t worms.
They were wormlike formations made of stone, all flash frozen solid. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They grew off the
walls as thin as angel pasta, wispy and needle-sharp. At his feet, he noticed more strange sprouts emerging from the ground
to knee height, crooked Cordyceps stalks bending and reaching. He was surrounded by impossible shapes, and the longer he looked, the more of them he saw, like
they were multiplying around him.
The odor of wet socks was stronger down here, earthy and pungent.
But Jacob found space to stand up—yes, he could finally stand without scraping his helmet. The cave had expanded to the size
of a small bedroom, lowering the chance of a ricochet. His gun was viable again. He knew he needed to end this chase quick,
to run the woman down and plant a .45-caliber slug in her brain before she wedged herself someplace he couldn’t follow.
Everywhere, more worms blossomed in his red light. More solid tendrils emerged from the walls, some as thick as antlers. Surreal
chandeliers hung from above, too, like alien flowers blooming in reverse. He balanced himself against a radiant formation
the size of a standing child and it shattered at his touch. Fragments hit the ground like glass shards.
Careful.
A needle of rock had pierced his neoprene glove, impaled right under his thumbnail. With gritted teeth he pulled it out—a
bloody toothpick, pale as fishbone.
Very careful.
He knew the woman was close now. But she’d turned off her flashlight, making herself difficult to track. It felt like his opponent had joined forces with this hostile environment somehow, harnessed its power against him—
Movement ahead.
He raised his pistol—his left hand covering his left ear, right shoulder to his right—and jerked the trigger. The blast shook
his teeth, a microsecond of nuclear white. Did he hit her? He couldn’t tell. His night vision was fried now.
He breathed in the smoky scent of burned gunpowder.
This was hide-and-seek, Marco Polo with a gun. With his red spotlight he pursued the woman through a coral reef of moving
shadows, stooping and crawling under jagged shapes. Some snagged his clothes and slowed him down. Some snapped away freely.
Tiny forms crunched underfoot like bird skeletons.
Ahead, he glimpsed the woman’s helmet.
He fired again.
But she was agile, rolling and crawling and somehow always a half second ahead of him, rock debris peppering her as his bullets
tore gouges out of the fragile terrain around her. She navigated this foreign landscape with skill and confidence—but she
was running out of space. Jacob knew the Chimney was coming up. He would corner her there at the precipice, shoot her in the
head, and finally end this exhausting day. He couldn’t imagine any payout being worth all this pain. Not thirty grand, not
three hundred.
His ankles bled now. Fingers of rock clawed into his jeans, his socks, his boots. The Colt 1911’s single-stack magazine held
seven rounds. How many left?
Head shots only, he told himself. He’d have his chance soon.
He passed an aluminum plate bolted into limestone, decades old and rusted brown. Only the sign’s image was visible—the hooded Grim Reaper holding a scythe—and six words.
Go No FARTHER
You Will Die
“I stopped at the edge,” Tess says. “It was a sheer drop.”
The Chimney.
She was trapped.
“When I looked down, the beam of my flashlight couldn’t even reach the bottom. The walls were smooth, like big curtains of
wet rock, too slippery to climb down.”
“And Jacob?”
“He was close. I heard him crunching through the rock formations, trying to get a clear shot on me. His red light was growing.”
She shuts her eyes. “I tried to imagine Allie’s voice in my head, to remember what she had taught me.”
Earlier that day, Tess had rappelled for her first time underground. Now she needed to do it again, alone. And fast.
“I grabbed the last rope from Allie’s bag. My hands were shaking so badly, I almost dropped it. I tried to remember—all those
hours ago, how did she anchor it? She’d clipped it around a boulder, a BFR the size of a fridge, but all the rock formations
around me were too thin, like glass sculptures. Nothing would hold my weight.”
From this point downward the Devil’s Staircase is off-limits to everyone, regardless of skill level. Green Ridge requires
permit holders to sign an affidavit agreeing they will descend no deeper than Razor Alley or face criminal prosecution.
“I found holes drilled into the walls, but all the bolts must have rusted away years ago. The metal had just disintegrated, bled down the walls, become part of the cave.” She steadies her voice. “Except for one last anchor bolt.”
Corroded by decades of rust.
Bad idea, Washington thinks. The anchor was a time bomb. It might not hold an adult’s weight. It could explode off the wall at the
worst possible moment, and then she’d plunge into the darkness below.
“Bits of metal flaked off as I clipped my rope to it,” Tess says. “I knew it was risky, I knew it would probably fail on me,
but I had no choice. I was running out of time.”
Next, the hard part.
“I had Allie’s rack descender, but I couldn’t remember how the brake bars worked. How to thread the rope through, which bars
to open and shut. My fingers were numb and stiff and . . .” She hesitates, pulling in a shivery breath.
“What?”
“I heard . . . I heard Allie’s voice in my mind.” Her eyes glimmer. “I swear, I heard it.”
The detective leans closer.
“The same thing she always told me when I was afraid. Ever since her family took me in.” She smiles through tears. “You’re a survivor.”
You’re a survivor, Tess.
Years ago it was her mother’s bleach. Now, blades and bullets.
Washington imagines this poor woman struggling against unfamiliar gear and a rust-eaten anchor bolt that might fracture at
any second. Scooting her legs out over the edge. Her heart in her throat, her palms sweaty inside her gloves, her boots dangling
over abyssal black. Maybe she saw her own shadow projected against bright red dripstone, her silhouette in Jacob’s sights.
Afraid to jump, afraid to stay, paralyzed between two terrors.
But even if Tess overcame her fears and descended the Chimney’s vertical shaft, even if the hundred-year-old anchor bolt held her weight, her death was still certain.
Jacob was only seconds behind her, and once he reached the edge he would have a clear shot at her.
On the rope, Tess would be exposed and defenseless.
In this situation, there were no good choices.
Option one: die where she stood.
Option two: die on the rope.
Tess has been silent for several breaths.
“Did you jump?”
She wipes an eye.
“Tess?”
“I . . .” She steadies her voice. “Allie was the bravest person I’ve ever met. She was never afraid. All my life, I’d wished
to be like her. And I tried to imagine if our places were reversed—if it was Allie there with the rope in her hands, what
would she do?”
Tess looks up. The burst vessel colors her left eye vivid red.
At this moment, Washington knows, Jacob would have been just feet behind her, the gun in his hand, brittle formations crunching
underfoot as he raced to catch her.
“I realized . . . I had one more choice.”
Option three: fight.