Fatalis

Chapter Twenty-Three

It was seven o'clock in the morning when Jim Grand returned to the "volcano" cave. That's what he was calling it, since the volcano-the one with the serpent, not the dolphin-was the only image he could identify positively. He had a little more than six hours before his afternoon class and he wanted to use them productively.

The scientist had brought extra gear to explore the underground tunnels, including rubber boots and crampons for negotiating the sloping floors of the lower passageway. However, Grand knew when he got there that he probably wouldn't be needing any of it. The water runoff from the ledge was just a trickle now, not only because the rain had stopped but because the extensive drainage system built by the California Water Resources Department over the last twenty years was finally able to handle the overflow above ground. As a result, less of it was spilling into the caves.

After hammering a piton into the ledge, Grand tied a rope to the duffel bag and lowered the gear to the cave floor. Then he secured the other end of the rope to the piton and climbed down. Since he wasn't going to be studying the walls there was no reason to use the harness.

Grand spent nearly two hours exploring the fissure on the opposite side of the main cave. Before going back to the "white designs" tunnel and possibly descending deeper into the cave system, he wanted to see where the more accessible southern tunnels led. He also wanted to find out whether the Chumash had painted designs there. Driving up here he'd had a wild notion. If this complex of caves was as extensive as he thought, perhaps the Chumash had charted them and left the map on a wall. Though that would have been unprecedented for the Chumash, other ancient peoples had left similar designs on cave walls. It would be better to check before he went down rather than after.

There was nothing inside.

Unlike the tunnel on the north side, this section was extremely difficult to negotiate. Though it was dry in here- the slant of the ledge above sent the runoff to the north side-the runnel was also small, narrow, and unventilated. According to Grand's compass he was headed southwest. It didn't surprise him when, after nearly two hours, he came across chalk markings on the wall. Unfortunately, the designs weren't made by the Chumash. They were a pound sign and an arrow pointing away from that spot, a geologist's notation that the tunnel had been explored to that location from the direction in which the arrow was pointed. No doubt Dr. Thorpe had come this far from the other direction, from Painted Cave sinkhole-probably a good quarter-mile-looking for the two missing engineers. The geography would be right for her to have reached this spot. He could picture the world above. Behind him, in the northern tunnel, was where the ravine sinkhole had dumped the creek water into the lake.

Grand made a similar chalk notation pointing in the other direction. Then he returned to the main cave. He wondered, as he always did when he made markings on a cave wall, whether some future archeologist would find the chalk marks and wonder who made them and why.

Shortly after 10:00 A.M., after taking a water and granola-bar break, Grand was ready to go back into the north-side tunnel that led to the underground lake. During the long night Grand had spent with the Chumash archives, he'd developed an adversarial relationship with the mysterious images. He was looking forward to spending more time with them, wrestling with them, trying to figure out whether they were eyes or something else.

The floor of the tunnel was dry and he reached the lake in less than twenty minutes. There was very little water running in from the creek and the lake had shrunk to nearly half the size it had been the day before. Crisp stalagmites split the softly rippling surface and the waterfall leading to the lower cavern was a smooth and gentle flow.

Grand made his way along the ledge to the tunnel where he set down his duffel bag. He put away his flashlight, donned his night-vision glasses, and stepped into the mouth of the tunnel. He'd brought along the video camera but decided not to take it with him until he'd reconnoitered. If the ground was solid and the footing secure, he'd come back for it.

Grand looked at the paintings, but only for a moment. Something else caught his attention.

The waters in the lower cavern had also subsided, leaving just a small, still pool in the center. There was detritus on the surrounding stone floor. Among the smooth pebbles, soggy pieces of tree bark, and leaves that had washed down from the creek, he saw a pair of batteries. They had probably fallen from the flashlight he found the previous day. Before he did anything else. Grand decided to retrieve them and see if there was anything else that might have washed down from the engineer's backpack.

Grand squatted and started down the tunnel. He didn't need his crampons to get down the passageway, though he moved slowly and was extremely careful not to place his hands on any of the images.

As he descended. Grand glanced at the paintings. Looking at them, he was less and less sure that the images were eyes. While they looked exactly like the shapes he'd seen in Fluffy's eyes, they were extremely fuzzy. Chumash work was typically sharp-edged.

Reaching the bottom of the passageway, Grand tested the ground with a foot and then stood. He had suspected that this cave was much smaller than the one above and that was confirmed. It was nearly one-third the size. The air was surprisingly musty and the cave was extremely cool and dry. He guessed that until the creek bed opened up there hadn't been any water down here for ages. The scientist stepped around a stalagmite, walked a few steps to the still, small pool, and took a quick look around. There were no paintings on the walls, so he removed his goggles and turned on the flashlight.

What he saw surprised him.

The walls were covered with a webwork of fine, jagged, superficial fractures. He'd never seen anything like them. His first impression was that they resembled the sutures of a human skull. The rock also had a strange, multicolored surface. Though the basic tone was steel-gray, almost like graphite, there were very pale reds, greens, whites, and blues swirled into the surface. The cave above had been entirely charcoal gray.

Grand began moving around and under the stalactites and stalagmites. The stalagmites rose about four feet from the floor and the stalactites descended five or six feet from a twelve-foot-high ceiling. Like the cave wall, they were stained with color and had wire-fine cracks up and down each one of them. Reaching up, he closed his gloved hand around the tip of one of the stalactites. The stone crumbled easily, like burned wood or charcoal.

"What the hell did this?" Grand murmured. He brushed off his glove on his pants and continued to look around. He couldn't figure out what had caused these cracks. He hadn't seen anything like them in the cave above and he had never seen two caves so close together that had experienced such obviously different geological stresses.

Then Grand noticed something on one of the stalagmites. He bent closer and shined the light on the stone. There were several long, straight hairs caught in one of the cracks. Grand removed his glove and carefully plucked the hairs out. He examined them carefully under the light. There were five of them, each one stiff and thick and approximately five inches long. The hairs weren't dark, though he couldn't tell precisely what color they were. Because they were bristly, one strong possibility was that they had been part of a Chumash paintbrush that had been left down here and torn apart by the swirling waters.

Grand placed the samples in a plastic bag, then looked closely at the other outcroppings. There were hairs caught in several other stalagmites as well. A dog or a coyote or a mountain lion could have been washed down here. They might have been caught in the sinkhole at the creek. But unless the water had been much higher down here, he couldn't imagine how the hair had gotten stuck three and four feet from the floor.

Grand had intended to spend time in and around this passageway measuring the icons, taking a few low-light video images, trying to see the designs fresh by looking at them from different perspectives: from the middle and bottom of the passageway, from the far end of both caves, and lying flat on his back in the center of the tunnel. He had planned to explore the extremely steep, narrow, twisting tunnel that led from the small cave to who-knew-what below. He had wanted to run the video camera around the lower chamber so he could study the site later, maybe share it with Dr. Thorpe.

But now he had another mystery and he had to get this one into the lab. For the one truism of science was never to let too many mysteries collect. Knowledge can't be built on leaps of faith.

The scientist took a moment to scrape mineral samples from the cavern walls. He used the edge of a small blade from his Swiss Army knife. Then he carefully brushed the rock fragments into a plastic bag. He would also bring those back to the university for analysis, see what had caused the discoloration and how long the non-native minerals had been present in the rock.

Grand exited the cave, then checked his watch before he began packing his gear. He would have just enough time to get the samples to the various university laboratories before teaching his class. He was looking forward to getting back in front of students. It was an enforced break, a time to clear his head. It was also a place to get a new perspective. Going back to basics always helped him to see things fresh.

With his finds safely stored, Grand left the cavern.

Behind him, the darkness was still, silent, and absolute.