E. G. Ross - Project BTB(1).pdf - E. G. Ross - margozap

PROJECT BTB

By E.G. Ross

SALVO PRESS

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SALVO P RESS INFO

COP YRIGHT PAGE

E.G. ROSS BIO

MORE SALVO P RESS T IT LES

PART 1: Lost in the Caves

CHAPTER 1

Everything has a reason. If you persist, you can find it. I try to remember that. I know it's true. I just

don't always understand how to make it work, at least not right away. It takes practice, I guess.

Patience, too, because life can test your trust in reason. Can it ever! Take this weird business with

Darkhorse.

How was I to know way back then that I'd stumbled into what became World War 3, into what the

historians sometimes called the Engels Extension Conflict? How was I to know that I'd help cause that

war? Me, a stupid teenage kid! How was I to know that an out of the way town was the secret base for

some of the oddest-

Well, just a minute now. I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me calm down and start at the beginning. My

name is- Uh, no, that doesn't matter. Not yet. Probably best that you don't know for awhile. That no one

knows.

Let's see, then. Where do I start? With Dan, I suppose. It always seems to come back to him.

I don't remember how my cousin Dan and I first discovered my half of the caves. Maybe it'll come to me

as I start to tell it. I hope so. It seems that I ought to be able to remember more. However, as Dan used

to say, the difference between "ought" and "can" is sometimes a canyon. The simple explanation is that

subsequent events overshadowed the discovery; dampened my recollections. They say traumatic events

can do that. Lately I try not to consider it too intensely. I'm afraid that if I got started on it again some

Saturday morning after one too many beers during the all-night Friday poker game, I might be tempted to

tromp up to Darkhorse Butte and take a look in my half of the caves once more.

No matter how waxed I got, Dan couldn't go with me. Not anymore. I haven't seen Dan in-what's it

been? Thirty years? Yeah, about that. Been awhile. Common sense tells me I'll never see him again. I

hope, though. Because everything has a reason. Dan used to pound that into me. Reason wins, he said,

even if it doesn't seem like it at the time.

Guess I'd better step back. Explain a few things.

Oh, by the way, excuse the glitches in advance. I'm an ordinary guy with a cheap digital recorder. I'm

trying to make sense of what happened to me. That's why I'm recording this on my own, secretly,

because I have to get it out there somehow, soon. I don't have a lot of time. They're after me, you see,

and that means-

Well, never mind about that . Later on that.

Okay, when I said "my half of the caves," I put it like that on purpose. There's a lot I don't remember

clearly, but some things stand out. I know for sure that "my caves" are up there in old Darkhorse Butte. I

truly don't recall where "Dan's caves" are anymore. Not exactly. The psychologists would call it a mental

block. If I got put under hypnosis or shot up with one of the new drugs or zapped with a virtual therapy

program, maybe I'd be able to remember more than that Dan's caves were near his old farm somewhere

southeast of Salem, Oregon. That's about forty miles up the Willamette Valley. Darkhorse Butte, where

my caves are, is due west of my old home town of Lebanon. That's where I live again. Well, I do and I

don't. Later on that, too.

If you're not familiar with the Willamette Valley, merely by looking at the heavy blanket of flora - the fir,

cedar, oak, maple, alder, and shit 'em chitum - you wouldn't know that there's a different, less inviting

landscape down underneath. Below this Garden of Eden greenery there's a natural hell. Not many people

ever see it, or want to, but it's there. It's a dark, damp underworld honeycombed with thousands, maybe

millions, of tunnels and vents and caves. Believe me, you don't want to go there. If you do, you want to

be damned careful; bone-breaking careful. That underworld is deep enough and twisty enough, and

spooky enough, to make getting lost as easy as slipping on an icy sidewalk. Like that sidewalk, the caves

can look fine when you start out. Then suddenly, WHAM! Your world goes upside down. Some people

have never come back from Darkhorse. It's an aspect of Eden that the tourist bureaus tend to

de-emphasize in their pleas for out-of-staters to bring their money and Come Visit!

Anyway, Dan and I were about fifteen when we stumbled onto something under Darkhorse-something

that at first was fun, but bit by bit started to scare the living skin off us.

Now please understand something. Whenever Dan and I went into the caves, we knew enough Boy

Scout and camping lore to blaze our explorations. Maybe not in the conventional way, but we did it. We

were careful in both in Darkhorse's tunnels and in the ones near Salem. Darkhorse was by far the more

complex system, though. That's where it was most critical. Blazing was a simple process. We got cans of

orange and green fluorescent spray paint from the autobody shop that Dan's older brother ran over in

Albany. (For you out-of-staters, that's the Linn County seat.) Using the paint to blaze the rock walls of

the tunnels and vents was easy enough. Every few yards, we'd spray on a backwards arrow. It was

orange at Dan's caves and green at mine. That way, if we got into trouble and needed to get out fast, we

could follow the trail of arrows without having to think. That's important, because when panic wiggles

down your backside and pokes you in the ass, thinking gets tough.

These days, they've got hand-held, inertial guidance positioning computers. They're supposed to be

amazingly accurate. Nothing against 'em, I guess. But it's hard to go wrong with a blaze mark. Not

impossible, but hard. Unlike computer directions, blazes don't disappear if the battery runs out or a

software bug starts getting hungry at the wrong quantum moment.

Despite our best efforts at preparation, I think we were incredibly lucky to have survived. That bothers

me a little, because I don't know where luck fits into the reason equation. I guess luck is that number you

never see coming. I do remember how rambunctious and eager we were to explore the caves. Especially

Dan. But given our state of mind, there's no way we could have sprayed enough arrows-or done a

half-dozen smarter things-to be as safe as we ought to have been. On the other hand, our ignorance

helped us come on 'em down there. The things. The things that never should have been there, not by any

science we were taught. Not by anything we could grasp at the time. You see, it was our ignorance that

enticed us to look into a side passage that we otherwise would have missed. If we hadn't dipped into that

tunnel, I wouldn't be telling you any of this. Everything would be different.

As it was, we went deeper into Darkhorse, and ourselves, than we'd imagined possible. So, no, although

I don't remember how we originally found the entrance to the caves, I clearly recall when we discovered

that bizarre tunnel. It was the one with the voice. The voice that howled in perpetual pain.

CHAPTER 2

We were on a roll that summer vacation. Regular junior spelunkers. Nowadays they'd call us cavers. I

hear some of the cavers use the term "worms," but I don't go for that one. If the other cavers had

experienced what we had, I doubt they'd go for it, either.

We'd just finished a few days of poking around at the caves near Dan's place. They had proven to be

dreadfully disappointing; just a few straight passages and a lot of dead ends. Too simple to be interesting.

Or so we'd thought at the time. "Boringsville," as Dan had put it. We shrugged it off and decided to

tackle Darkhorse instead. Action was the game back then. We hoped that Darkhorse would provide

more of a challenge, a few dares, and perhaps some stories we could brag up at school. That's what I

wanted, anyway. Dan usually had more exalted scientific interests.

Mind you, while we were amateurs we weren't running a Tom Sawyer operation with candles and hope.

Dan's family wasn't rich, but was certainly well off. So he'd purchased miners' lights and hard-hats, good

nylon ropes with grapples and mountain tackle gear, including pitons for the steep passages and

drop-offs, good back packs, first-aid kits, and so on. The point is, as young and eager as we were,

neither of us was stupid. Inexperienced, sure. But we had more than bullshit for brains. Truth is, when the

chips are down, I think most kids are smarter than adults typically anticipate. And when we went into

those caves, we had every intention of making it back with our body parts intact. Bragging rights bruises,

yeah. But nothing more.

We hadn't considered that it might be necessary to take precautions to protect our minds .

Okay, where was I going with all this? Let's pick it up down in Darkhorse. A few more things are

starting to come back to me. I remember the fact that the caves existed was an open secret. More of a

legend, really. Darkhorse had evolved into the grist for threats from parents who couldn't get their kids to

quiet down at night. I recollect how my own mother told me that the "Darkhorse Demon" would get me if

I didn't go to sleep. We didn't have the boogie man in our house, but believe me, the Darkhorse Demon

served well enough in our young imaginations. As they got older, the Lebanon kids transformed the

Darkhorse Demon into stories of ghosts of lost prospectors and crazed, escaped killers, rapists, and

molesters. Because of their nasty reputation, not many people ventured into the caves-not thirty years

ago, not now. Childhood legends had a way of sticking with us when we grew up. Just to make sure, the

city had put up a sign outside the caves, urging extreme caution and telling people that they were on their

own as far as liability was concerned.

As you might guess, that sign was a neon invitation to Dan and me. We'd both read Ayn Rand's Atlas

Shrugged the previous summer and we were suddenly "men of intransigent reason." We didn't buy the

legends about demons, gods, ghosts, or poltergeists-at least not consciously-and delighted in any

opportunity to debunk them. In our respective high schools-Dan at South Salem, me at Lebanon

Union-we developed minor reputations for annoying everyone from UFO fanatics to young Christian

missionaries. As far as we were concerned, it was all in the same box labeled "superstition." Hence, to go

into the caves was to strike a blow for the ideals of the rational mind-of which we were, of course, the

self-appointed vanguard. True, the idea of defying the authorities' fuddy-duddy conservatism added a

certain spice to the adventure, but we'd convinced ourselves it was for a nobler purpose.

The caves' entrance was small, maybe four feet square. It was largely overgrown. Even the sign was

mostly buried in the brush. Ah, okay! Here comes a memory shard: we would never have known about

the cave entrance if it hadn't been for Dan's older brother Sam. He was a great guy, but also a blooming

alcoholic. Shitfaced Sam was his nickname. But for us, there was an advantage to his condition. After

consuming his third or fourth beer in a row, it was possible to get Sam to tell us almost anything. One hot,

slow July afternoon out back of his shop, he mentioned that he'd been down under Darkhorse when he

was a kid. He said he'd heard screams and moans in there and was convinced that something was after

him, something he never actually saw but could feel coming. He swore it was true. Well, that certainly

whetted our appetites. We kept at him until he laughingly, but somewhat nervously, told us how to find

the entrance. Despite the booze, his directions had proven remarkably accurate.

Anyway, we took the first day to blaze what we called the ground floor. That was a level of the caves

with a few, short dead-end passages. It wasn't much. Not a single demon. No dead bodies of crazed

crooks or unlucky prospectors. No slobbering molesters. So we headed down to the second level. To

add intrigue to our adventure, we called that one the basement. You needed rope to get there.

The connecting passages, two of them, were sheer drops. The first opened directly above an

underground stream that gushed from beneath a rock face and then disappeared into a gurgling drainhole

a few yards farther on. We took turns lowering each other, but it was a bust. There were no side vents

from this tunnel and nowhere to go. Worse, the water reeked of fresh pig shit. Dan said the stream

probably drained through from a hog farm up higher on the butte. It sure wasn't the kind of water you'd

want to lug around in a canteen. The first passage into the basement was clearly a no-go.

Taking the other drop down was a quick, 20-foot rappel. The next two days we spent in that part of the

basement. It was more like what we'd been hoping for. There were dozens of unexpected turns and

smaller passages, branching and breaking off in intriguing ways. There was a huge room large enough to

play tennis in. I recall how utterly awed we were, gazing at that cavernous space. Dan said it would have

been a good place to be during a nuclear war because of the rock above and around us. He said it might

be possible to seal it off from the outside.

At one end of the room there was a cold, clear spring. It bubbled up from the rock and ran along the

side. It eventually emptied with a roar into a wide, deep passage. We never did find out where the other,

contaminated stream ended up, but it had missed this part of the basement.

At first, we thought that the basement was it, the sum total of the Darkhorse system. Teenagers are

easily bored and we were getting antsy already. However, Dan insisted that because the spring emptied

down, there must, naturally, be even lower levels. He said we had to keep looking.

"Dan," I asked, "don't you think maybe that springwater is falling into the only way down? Maybe that's

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