Death is Forever

was.
    “Maybe we should hold off exploring until we can come back with ropes and things,” she said.
    All Cole said was, “Wait for me at the entrance. You’ll be safe there.”
    “No.”
    “Then follow me and walk where I walk. If the floor holds me, it should hold you.”
    She blew out her candle and started after him, leaving ten feet between them.
    The passageway quickly closed down until they were forced to duck-walk. To keep her mind off the darkness and the massive weight of limestone that was between herself and the sun, she thought about Crazy Abe Windsor.
    “How old did you say Abe was?” she asked, breathing heavily from the strain of the unnatural walk.
    “Old enough to be your grandfather, why?” Cole retorted.
    “Maybe there’s more to beer and raw croc liver than I thought.”
    He laughed, then swore when the ceiling came down even more, forcing him onto his hands and knees. Water seeped from every surface, making the stone clammy and slick. Long horizontal stains ran the length of the smooth walls. As the floor slowly dropped, the stains rose.
    “There’s something wrong with this cave,” she said after a time.
    “Like what?”
    “It’s little and narrow and ugly. Caves are big and grand and gorgeous.”
    “Only the ones you hear about. Most caves are small muddy wormholes that never get decorated.”
    “Why?”
    A knob of limestone stabbed Cole’s kneecap. He swore again and muttered, “Conditions aren’t right.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I said so,” he retorted.
    She took the hint and shut up. As she crawled, she turned her head slowly, playing the lamplight over the narrow passage, trying to reason with the cold fear that was whispering to her, telling her that Bridget’s Hill was going to settle on her shoulders and crush her flat. She saw several shadows in rapid succession off to her right. When she turned her head, the light couldn’t penetrate their depths. The openings were big enough to hide a man. From somewhere in their darkness came the sound of falling water.
    Shivering, she pressed forward. Water dripped and gathered and twisted into thin streams, pulled by gravity through cracks in the limestone. The water was cool, almost secretive, sliding away into black crevices and vanishing or flowing in thin channels along the edges of the tunnel. The stain marks on the wall had disappeared. Puddles collected in small, shallow depressions in the uneven surface. The floor looked like it had been scalloped by running water.
    The passageway pitched down at an increasing angle. Erin thought about the alternate openings that had been revealed in the glare of their helmet lights.
    “How do we know we’re in the right wormhole?” she asked.
    “Arrows.”
    The floor pitched downward more steeply. A limestone ripple gnawed on her kneecap, sending pain lancing through her leg.
    “How far have we come?” she asked.
    “Fifty feet, max.”
    She hissed a word beneath her breath.
    “That’s not shit, honey. That’s cave mud. Takes a hell of a long time to collect. In fact— don’t move !”
    She froze. “What’s wrong?”
    “No floor,” he said succinctly.
    He turned his head slowly, playing the light around the roughly circular shadow that had appeared in the floor a few feet ahead. Narrow streamers of water glittered and twisted from an invisible opening in the ceiling and disappeared through a hole in the stone floor of the passage. Stretching out on his stomach, he inched forward over the slippery, scalloped surface until he could point his light straight down the narrow vertical tunnel.
    Water danced and spun away into blackness. About twenty feet below, the disturbed surface of a pool returned the light in random flashes. A more orderly pattern of light came back from a pile of what looked like a tangle of flexible chain.
    Cole picked up one end of a heavy aluminum ladder and shook it out over the hole. As the flexible ladder descended, water splashed and slid over the thick metal surfaces. The top end was bolted into stone a foot from the lip of the hole.
    He spent a long time shining his light on the huge bolts that anchored the top of the ladder to the mouth of the shaft. There was some sign of wear on the metal, but not much.
    “Is it safe up ahead?” Erin asked.
    “I’m thinking about it.”
    Just when she was certain he wasn’t going to say anything more, he did.
    “Abe was a good miner. The shoring in all the Dog mines is still sound.”
    “So?”