Over and Under Read Online Free Page A

it from above, growing the wall microscopically, imperceptibly between us. I was lost for a minute, watching a perfectly spherical drop of water fall onto it and roll along its edge.
    “Over here,” Tom yelled from far away—he had darted away from me again, moving on with his exploration. At the end of the chamber, one of the giant treelike stalagmites had fallen. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be in the chamber when that thing had tumbled over. It was broken into three even sections, looking like a column from a ruined ancient temple. Tom scurried up the ragged broken end of one of the pieces, using the jagged nubs for handholds. He soon stood atop the fallen column, which put him within reach of a horizontal crack in the wall.
    The crack was about two feet high, and ran the length of the chamber, at least as far as we could see with our underpowered flashlights. Tom hoisted himself into the crack, and lay down inside of it, looking down at me, where I still stood on the cave floor. “Come on up,” he said.
    I hesitated.
    “Come on up,” he said again. “This crack’ll take us to Squire Boone.”
    “Wait, don’t you want to check this out? This room is better than anything at Squire Boone, even the five-dollar tour.”
    Before I was done even saying it, Tom was crawling forward, endlessly enthusiastic about finding the next chamber, learning how they all tied together. I climbed up the broken end of the column, peered inside the crack, andpulled myself up and in. Tom didn’t say anything; he continued scurrying forward, into the darkness. I paused just a moment to look ahead. The crack was rough and dirty, with no formations—it really was more of a fissure in the dirt than what we typically called a cave.
    We crawled until I completely lost track of time and distance. Gradually, the ceiling above and floor below turned back into smooth, damp limestone. I hustled to keep Tom in my light. The crack shrunk as we progressed, a millimeter at a time, until eventually I felt my back scraping against the ceiling and my belly on the floor as I moved forward. Soon, I was pushing hard through the crevice. Then I was stuck.
    I watched as Tom, slightly smaller than me, continued forward a foot more, until he, too, was stuck fast. I could see only the soles of his shoes, struggling, his toes scraping the hard stone in an attempt to push forward. His shoes scraped a line into the thin film of watery mud that coated the rock. Then, just as I had, he tried to move backward. “Shit,” he said.
    No one knew where we were—that was my first thought. Both Tom’s parents and mine accepted that on fair summer days we would both disappear into the woods all day, returning home filthy and tired but always in time for supper. Local folklore about boys killed in the caves began racing through my mind. Being trapped in a chamber as it suddenly filled with water was one popular motif. Tom had once explained to me that a dusty cave was safe, while a wet cave like this might get flushed out once in a while by a lethal flash flood. And drowning wasn’t the only way to die in a cave. Sheriff Kohl sang lead in a gospel group aroundtown, and I suddenly remembered a lyric he sang at the Harvest Homecoming about a Kentuckian who had died in a cave long ago: I
dreamed I was a prisoner, my life I could not save.
The man in that story, Floyd Collins, had died of “exposure,” a word I found horribly vague and descriptive at the same time. Without even a T-shirt to protect me, the stone on all sides leached warmth from my body. My teeth started chattering.
    “Are we screwed?” I asked, trying not to sound like too much of a puss. Tom stopped struggling just long enough to let me know that we were.
    The fear seemed to make my body swell, fixing me even tighter in the crack. I knew better than to try and muscle my way out—I wasn’t stronger than all that limestone. I could tell by watching Tom’s feet that he had not