I first realized I might want to try caving when I thought about crawling into the oil well on my parents’ property.
I had never gotten too close before. Mom and Dad had forbidden me all my life, when the workers were around, when the machinery was still, and it had never really called to me. The pumpjack loomed too harshly against the horizon, austere and violent, and when the workers labored, it bellowed out awful noises and swung like Themis’ scales. The bulk of the apparatus honestly still scared me, as well as the idea of the suffocating, iridescent sludge within, but the second it occurred to me that it all tied to a tunnel into the earth, something lit up in my brain: some hubris, some excited sector of castigation, that overrode my faculties and had me stumbling out in the twilight to leer at the lip of the well from a short distance, fingers toying idly with the smooth plastic of the lighter in my pocket until I had the fleeting thought that flicking the spark wheel might blow up my entire family.
I clasped my clammy hands in front of me instead and approached. It wasn’t terribly interesting; just an old steel tube with a rotten and sickly sweet stench that wafted up from the depths of a long, dark hole. I thought about sitting on the edge of the steel, dangling my feet over, and lowering myself down, down into those depths to see what was on the other side.The sirens’ song of a crush injury. But the squeeze wouldn’t be tight enough, I thought.
That night I dreamt of a smaller well, a sort of plaything for a child make-believing about oil barons. My ears rang and the well screeched, but still I climbed inside as if the sounds were simply a lullaby drawing me to my bed. I barely fit, the walls snug against my ribs and hips and shoulders, but as I let gravity suck me down, I knew what it had felt like, the thing that never became a memory. In the dream, there was only the idea of pain. I’m not sure what happened in the end; I woke up sharp and sudden in my bed, at first nearly frightened, and then almost satisfied.
The next few days were spent on daydreams of the well and recollections of long past similar situations. Crawling through plastic playground tunnels when I was a child, hiding in closets with my friends as a drunken teenager, sneaking into a festival curled up in a car trunk. These were fine, almost suitable distractions, but I dreamt of them at night, too, along with what I was more keen to be distracted from: the vision of a glistening coffin being lowered into a cozy grave and suffocated with dirt. Sometimes I woke up with soil under my nails. Sometimes I could almost taste earth and clay in my mouth.
These nightmares and mysterious stains were a bit too much for me. I was never incredibly tolerant. I figured I just had a bizarre, slightly macabre new hyperfixation that my mostly-ghosted therapist would probably easily link to trauma, and I just as easily assumed that I knew how to remedy it. I’ve indulged in worse before, so I texted my friend, Moore, from college, who does spelunking and skydiving and all the other adrenaline-producing shit rich kids pay for when they get bored and want a taste of manufactured danger. He briefly pretended to care whether I had experience in the field and accepted my redirection without much concern for my or his wellbeing. I think he worked in risk management; it’d probably given him some sort of alarm fatigue.
My experience, of course, was nonexistent, and his was too low to take a clueless charge down into the bowels of the uncaring earth, but maybe he did believe me when I hinted at knowing a bit more than nothing. Maybe it was some combination of attraction and indifference; maybe it was pity. There’s a chance it had even been some misguided, cold vitriol that had inspired him to allow himself the opportunity to see me dig my silver spoon into rock and mud, but regardless, he didn’t share his motivations if he had them, and instead emailed me a time and place, as well as a brief checklist:
- helmet
- knee + elbow pads
- headlamp (800 lumens)
- rainboots
- backpack (water, food, batteries, extra headlamp, 3 flashlights)
I was glad for the succinct nature, the lack of request for a chat over dinner or a briefing over coffee. I hadn’t spoken to Moore since college, didn’t have anything good to catch him up on, and wasn’t terribly curious about his own life beyond his ability to go where I never had. My interest wasn’t as locational as it was geological; the act of discovery and the sights within the caverns of our region weren’t of as much importance to me as the scrape of stone and the kiss of closeness. I’d be lying if I said I fully understood it, but then again, I’d never chased the motivation behind my impulses.
I didn’t tell anyone where or when I was going, what my plans were, why I had a sudden urge to deeply inconvenience myself by squeezing into the bowels of the earth. Survivalists and explorers, from my limited research, say you should always let someone know when you plan to return in case of emergency, but I assumed Moore would take care of that. I didn’t talk to many people anymore other than my parents, at least during the daylight hours, and despite my adulthood, I had the feeling my family would try to dissuade me from my adventure. To them, it would seem woefully dangerous at best and passively suicidal at worst, and I didn’t care to listen.
I also didn’t care to listen to Moore, who spoke more than I remembered. His mouth was open the second I climbed out of my car, my boots crunching onto the sparse gravel of the informal parking spot located on the shoulder of a weaving, forested road. He’d been rummaging through packs when I rolled in, working by the hatch light of his SUV and the dim morning light that filtered through the leaves above, but he whirled when I approached, squinting at his phone, at me, at the woods around us. “You’re a little late,” he said, getting a good look at my shoes.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes,” he said. He didn’t sound annoyed, but he didn’t sound thrilled. He’d always been a little too blasé for me. Maybe it was his general demeanor, just a calm guy, but I didn’t like the lack of a leg to stand on I had with him. It would be better if someone was excited at the opportunity to show me the hidden innards of the ground, explain their weird little hobby to me in a way that I could tune out, grab my pack for me and clip me to whatever I needed to be clipped to. Instead, he was methodical about the whole thing. “You bring everything I told you to?”
I nodded. It was a simple list of provisions for what was supposed to be a pretty simple day expedition. I’d stayed awake a lot of nights now looking through pictures and go pro footage of different cave systems, Mammoth Cave, Jewel Cave, the Carlsbad Caverns, but I think any of them would suffice for what I needed.
“You’re gonna fuck up your jeans.”
I blinked at him. He hadn’t specified much for clothing beyond the required safety equipment and general coverage, but he was wearing a stupid-looking yellow polyester suit. I had on sturdy pants, long sleeves with a jacket, the boots and pads and gloves required of me. “That’s okay,” I answered, and he blinked back, shrugged, and bestowed into my hands a crumpled windbreaker from the trunk of his vehicle before he slung his pack over his shoulder and started off into the woods.
The lock systems on our rides beeped their sharp goodbyes at us as we trekked down the worn trail. I pulled the windbreaker over my head at a brief pause and had to hustle to catch back up with Moore, who wasn’t purposefully hurrying but was still moving at a pace I wasn’t accustomed to. It was early fall, cool and damp in the after dawn hours, but I could still feel clammy perspiration building up under the insulated layers of clothing I had on, trickling down my spine like a nose bleed. I took shallow swigs from one of my plastic water bottles as we ventured along, then a surreptitious pull from a patterned tumbler. Moore only looked back when I stumbled over rock or root, but he told me generally of the cave we were marching to.
It’s probably not completely undiscovered but it’s not well documented. No official trail signs leading us towards our destination and Moore says no maps or videos online of it, either. He’s been in once or twice, spurred by the spirit of exploration to branch away from the more well-traversed cave systems in the nearby area, and he says it’s simple, roomy at its best parts in ways that mimic a hike and with a few tight squeezes, but nothing snug enough to be dangerous, no sumps or pits or other vocabulary terms I didn’t recognize that he had to explain. There had been relics of dusty old equipment when he’d ventured in, beer cans and food wrappers illuminated by the beam of his headlamp that indicated it had been touched not just by civilization, but by the heedless, youthful population of humanity that meant it should be an easy trip for people like me. It was maybe a bit reckless on his own part to take me along into a largely unexplored cavern, but I didn’t feel any trepidation as I followed him. All I really felt was the lull of the forest around me, the wet chill of perspiration and autumn, the burn of my calves as I traipsed along the half-trail and of my throat when I took a drink between blurs of still green trees and dirt.
“Becca.”
“Hm?” I crunched to a halt behind Moore. He was standing still at the edge of the clear cut through the brush, and I raised my eyebrows in a mirror of his expression as I re-did my hair tie that didn’t need to be redone.
“I asked if you’d talked to Lacey’s parents. You heard from them at all?”
This did make me feel something other than boredom, for just a second. I pulled at my hairband a little too tightly and snapped it, cursed and fished another out to yank my ponytail back. I shook my head while I did it, pursing my lips like I had something in my mouth I couldn’t let go of, then said, “No,” when he kept looking at me. It was simple, and it was partly a lie. I had received several messages from Lacey’s parents and her sister. My parents had received calls, and our reps had received emails. We just hadn’t responded to any. My mother had brought up the idea of me calling them back, but when I thought of that, I wasn’t smothered tight by the earth or by metal or a wooden box; I was spinning aimlessly up, up through the air, in a direction I didn’t understand. So no, I said, and no, I meant, but it wasn’t for their lack of trying.
Moore accepted that easily, with neither pleasure nor derision, and I took another drink. Down, down, swirled the embers, like a whirlpool, like a tumbling hunk of metal on a hill, down the way I wanted to go. Moore stepped down, down, a gentle incline through a raggedy grove of foliage that he parted and pulled until a swath of rock was revealed. There was a generous enough entrance cut into the stone, jagged and short enough to have to stoop into, but nothing like a mailbox slot. Nothing like my oil well, my wooden box.
“Gypsum,” Moore said with a hint of pride. He tilted his head towards the cave entrance. “Others in the area are mostly dolomite. S’a karst forest. I think.” He shrugged, kicked a stone away with a scuff of his boot, and explained none of those words to me. With one last scrutinizing look at my gear, he bent to step into the maw of the rock and reminded me, “Make sure you do what I say. Let me know if anything is too much for you.”
I ducked in behind him. The entrance to the cave was pale and glittered softly in the brief rays of weak sunlight that managed to worm through the trees. The ground crumbled beneath the heels of my boots and I was distracted enough by squinting into the approaching darkness that I scraped my helmet against outcroppings of rock a few times. Moore didn’t look back at my noises, which were mostly brief stumbles and the chafe of my gloves against the rock wall for support. The air was quiet and somber, colder than the outside in temperature even at this shallow depth, but more so, empty of the vibrant life of the forest. If there was life in this cave, it was near silent; we were the loudest things, our footfalls interrupting and echoing, and only when Moore paused to flip on the bulb of his headlamp did I hear it. Almost inaudible, more of an idea, a gentle whisper of air came from the depths. It came in stilted puffs, only truly able to be felt once I had heard it, and they were just barely warmer than the air around us. They caressed my face like the breath of an animal, and their smell was mostly stale and stagnant and earthen like that which surrounded us, but tinged with something like metal and decay. I wrinkled my nose. Moore took a deep pull.
“Hey, if it blows, it goes.”
If it blows, it goes.
If it blows, it goes.
If it blows, it goes.
If it blows
It goes.
I go.
I go.
I do, I go.
Breath in and out through working lungs. A drink down. My headlamp was flicked on like the high beam of a car, by someone else’s fingers, Moore reaching back and taking the wheel, and the cave came into wet repose again. Dampness clung to the walls and ceilings and floors like spit, and everything was beautiful and boring and awful. It was a harsh, alien landscape, dirty white stone and nonsensical edges. It felt like stepping over tooth and tongue and into mouth, into gullet, into lung. This was the throat of the world, breathing quietly, frozen and gross and–I shrieked as a spider the size of my palm skittered across the ground in front of me, my boot striking out and missing. Moore swung his gaze and his light towards it, catching a streak of amber body as it disappeared into a hovel of rock, and he laughed.
“Yeah, there are animals in these sometimes. Usually just bugs, bats, but I’ve seen scorpions and stuff, too. Gnarly little guys.” He stepped on ahead, his footing surer than mine. “This is mostly just walkable, but there’s a little pass up ahead, and the other side is pretty. Little cramped on the way in, but plenty of room for standing and exploring once you’re through.”
In the cave, all was dark except that which our light illuminated. We were glaring intrusions under the stalactites, and I felt artificial, like I was in a dream. Everything was a bit too quiet; all the noises were us and the distant blowing breath. Moore swept his headlamp over different rock formations, took pictures and videos and pointed things out to me, and I looked dutifully but distractedly. I was uneasy, but not claustrophobic; in fact, I had too much room. I could stand to my full height and stretch my arms out almost fully to the sides to run my covered fingers through the sweaty trails inching down the cave walls. To Moore, I may have looked reverent, but I felt like I was free falling.
I stopped greedily when he halted our expedition in a small dip of the system. It was off a left or right turn; I hadn’t been keeping careful track, but he’d left cracked glowsticks along the way to aid dimly on our way back. He sat down on a mineral ulcer jutting from the ground and I crouched. We ate quickly. I was surprised to find that I was hungry. I hadn’t felt it, but we’d been walking for a couple hours, so it made sense. I drank from a crinkling water bottle and the sloshing tumbler and my eyes blurred momentarily, but they righted themselves as I waited for him on the cave floor. We didn’t move on till he was ready; he had the wheel, and my life was in his hands.
“This is the squeeze,” he announced easily, pointing out a hole that carved itself into the rock wall a few feet above the ground. It looked natural, eroded, and like an altogether bad idea. He’d been through this way before, so I knew it was big enough for his larger frame to crawl through, and I could see it in the width as well, but it was still overwhelmingly small in context. My heart hammered insistently for a few beats as I stared and half listened to his explanation of technique, some foul mix of fear and excitement.
“Yeah, I can do it,” I told him when he asked. I wanted to do it, and so I would. Maybe this was really what drew me underground, the opportunity to overcome hesitance and nervousness and to do something through sheer willpower. I watched as he folded himself into the orifice and shuffled inside. It wasn’t beautiful or graceful, but it was practiced. He went slowly but easily, and there was enough room for his pack to clear the ceiling. I let him disappear and slough through stone until he presumably made it to the other side, and his echoing call came through the tunnel, too quiet to understand but enough to hear. I brushed stray hairs behind my ears and bent at the knees in front of the mouth and called back. “What? I can’t hear you!”
For a moment, all was silent except for my own pulse, and I felt the exhale upon my face through the squeeze. If it blows, it goes, I go, I blow. My ears rang in response to the nothingness and my vision blurred gently at the edges again, like sleep encroaching, and then the wind from where the sky can’t touch whistled again, like static like sirens like screaming like a choir singing, and bubbled into another garbled response that was half Moore’s voice and half not. I squinted and recoiled, and it groaned again, the tunnel, before I heard, “Bec!”
“S-sorry!” I didn’t give it time. I didn’t think twice. I twisted myself in an approximation of the shape Moore had been in when he entered the tunnel and shoved myself forward. My footing wasn’t great, and the rubber of my boot slipped against the slick floor, but I was able to push pull drag myself forward, until I was in. My body hunched in crawl, forced down unnaturally by the low ceiling, and I took a moment to get my bearings. I was surrounded by walls the color of aged bone, pockmarked by time and dirty water, and it was all close enough that if I shifted, I would collide with it in some manner. I took my first tentative drag forward and shuddered as rock bit into my leg through my pants. Mud smeared down the parts of my body that brushed the floor, and water dripped down onto my helmet, ran into my eyes and over my lips. I felt like I was lost to the earth, already buried alive, and the air was full of false promises as I sucked it in. But it was perfect, and I kept going, inch by inch and foot by foot through the tunnel.
It was almost euphoric, having the itch scratched gently after all the dreams. This was maybe the first time in my life I had truly known what I wanted. I crawled and bent as the ceiling lowered, scooting myself forward more by the toes of my shoes and the pads of my fingers than anything. Something scuttled by me again in the small breadth of space between myself and the left wall, but this time I didn’t scream. I imagined it crushed by my body as I moved forward. I imagined myself wrapped tight by the earth. It was a mother’s embrace, and I was the petulant child, the one who angered her. I winced as I scraped my helmet against the ceiling, laughed breathlessly to myself, and realized I was at a very narrow point. Far ahead, I could vaguely see the glow of Moore’s headlamp.
Toes and fingers were not bringing me forward anymore. The rock above me held my head back like a trick when I tried, and when I bowed close enough to the ground, I couldn’t move my limbs in the right order anymore. I faltered for a moment, wrapped in the world, seemingly unable to move. “Get down on your stomach, Becca,” Moore called down the passageway, flickering his light. “It’s just an army crawl. You got it. Breathe out if it feels too tight.”
I lowered myself belly to earth and looked around with bright, concerned eyes. How terrible would it be to be stuck here? A shift forward, just an inch or so. How long could you survive in this exact position? A scoot that got me a little farther this time. How scary would it all be? A drag powered by my weak arms. Would it hurt more or less than a car crash? Moore’s headlight loomed in the distance, almost blinding me when I stared straight down the tunnel, so I fixed my eyes down with the little room allotted to me and kicked my splayed leg to move me forward. The ceiling was still a good half foot about my back, but this time, I didn’t move. I couldn’t feel if my foot had lost its purchase or if I was snagged on some fishhook jutting from the walls, but I hastily returned my leg to its position and pushed forward again. Nothing. Stagnant, still, and I tried to turn to look behind me, suddenly overcome by the feeling that grave things were coming from behind me and clinging to my limbs, but all I succeeded in doing was thunking my helmet against the wall. I swore and sucked in a ragged breath and tried to pull this time, but I was so disoriented by the cessation of movement that I wasn’t sure if I was moving at all.
“I’m stuck!” I shouted to Moore, who wasn’t that far away at this point. “I don’t know what on–”
“You’re fine.” I was not fine, but he sounded sure enough. “It’s not tight enough to actually be any trouble. Just relax, breathe out, and go slow. Take your time. It’ll work.”
My fingers twitched and scrabbled against the rock, my breath getting away from me. I felt feral in my nerves and my excitement. My lungs emptied out with a stuttering breath, I closed my eyes, and I toed forward again. This time I felt the scrape of movement, and I held my breath, latched on, and inched forward until I was dizzy. It was only minutes until I tipped over the lip of the tunnel, addled and cumbersome, into the next room. My shoulder hit the ground hard, and I giggled mindlessly for a second before I got the gall to crack my eyes open.
“You good?”
Moore hovered over me, his face pinched, but I focused on the cavern behind him. It was beautiful. I nodded, breathing out my pain and accepting his hand. He tugged me up and I saw the chamber upright. Much of it was shrouded in darkness, but he had his flashlights arranged in an illuminating, outward facing circle that shed light on some of the closer features beyond the scope of my headlamp. The walls and ceilings were formed from the same glittering gypsum, but gossamer tendrils and rosettes spiraled from the rock like marble carvings. They looked delicate enough that a single touch would break them, but drops of water rolled over their edges into standing pools of water across the muddy floor. The water rose only around shin deep, but it glimmered foggy and serene in the still cave, and the same tendrils reached up from the bed like coral flowers. Blind fish and pearly snails hid amongst the mud and pebbles, like tiny bones come to life, and I crouched down beside the little pond. It was like I had been suffocated in the tunnel and born again to a strange eden.
“This is really beautiful,” I said, and it was sincere. I watched as a drop of water from above sent a placid ripple through the water. “How did you know this was here?”
“This is where I ended up before,” Moore replied, shrugging like it was matter of fact. “You’ll see stuff like this a lot in the hobby, but it’s usually when it’s already been found by someone else. Most of the time it’s still pretty untouched, but I kinda like that this is just for me and a few other people so far. No trash in here, so I’m not even sure if the teenagers tried it through the tunnel. Lame, ‘cause that’s an easy crawl. Usually the good sights are on the other side of some stuff that’ll seriously kick your ass.”
It was a nice thought, finding something special on the other side of it all. There wasn’t much to the cavern all in all; a bit of space beyond the light, more alabaster spirals and tranquil water. I stepped carefully around the pools and watched creatures mill guilelessly through the beam of my flashlight. I was approaching what would soon turn into boredom or complacency when I saw it, new, less than beautiful. A mass the size of a softball undulated through the foggy water, and as it drew closer, I saw that it appeared to be a clew of worms tangled together, red as blood and moving through the pool like they were each the searching limb of an organism. The knot moved over one of the bone snails and when it passed, the shell was still.
“What the fuck.” I grimaced and turned to head back towards the exit before I saw anymore worm amalgams, only to jump when Moore was standing perfectly still behind me. His eyes were wide and the rest of his face flat. I gestured to the pool. “Sorry, worms…”
“Yeah, that’ll happen,” he said. He tightened his grip on his flashlight and shone it behind me, towards the far wall. “Look.”
I crossed my arms and followed the beam with my eyes, squinting through the dark. There in the epicenter of the light was a tunnel–another one, smaller than the one we’d entered from, shaped oblong and low. The flashlight beam quivered, and I looked back at Moore. “I thought you said there was only one crawl.”
“I thought there was,” he said hurriedly. His hand still trembled and there was a manic gleam in his eyes as he lowered the beam to show him the way across the floor to the wall. While this was about the physical sensation for me, a recreation of living and unconscious nightmare, it meant something altogether different to Moore. It must be something like the thrill of discovery, or maybe the chance to ensconce himself so far in the earth that no one knew where but him. He didn’t seem to mind having me along if it was the latter, and he beckoned me to follow him. “This wasn’t here when I–I didn’t see it the first time. I don’t know. I looked all through this chamber, maybe I got turned around and confused it for the entrance, but. I mean, we have to go through.”
“It looks tight.”
“Is that a problem?” He eyed me with a look I hadn’t seen in a long time. He wasn’t trying to strongarm me into it. He looked beseeching, like it would make him vibrate out of his skin if I allotted him the opportunity to crawl into this tunnel. I didn’t know if this was all protocol or not. The knowledge lay with Moore, and it seemed like he was handing me the control. I turned my attention back to the narrow opening, just wide enough for him to slip into, just barely more than wide enough for me. He was explaining something about how we could go together this time, how he’d talk me through any tight spots and we’d back out if he felt it getting too cramped, and I was thinking about how much I wanted to feel that moment at the precipice. Being brave and stupid and crawling into this hole would give me what being cruel and stupid had not been able to: a lasting memory of the squeeze. What had Lacey felt, at the end? The fear of death and the trapping embrace of metal on all sides, while I slept soundly through the worst of what I’d done and still lived. This would be how I found it. I cut Moore off mid-sentence with a short nod and he smiled bigger than I’d ever seen.
It was a snug fit. Moore disappeared into the cleft in the rock slower this time and shouted back at me when he felt he had cleared enough ground for me to follow. He’d had to shimmy off his pack and shove it ahead of him, so I copied the tactic as I bent and twisted myself enough to fit into the entry. It was awful immediately. Rock pressed at my sides and my stomach and if I lifted my head too much or tried to come up from a belly crawl, the ceiling bit at my scalp and spine. My flashlight had just enough room around my pack to illuminate a short distance in front of me, showing rock and narrow path and Moore’s shoes farther ahead. I shuffled forward, feeling terrified and embraced and correct.
Every inch was arduous, much harder than the first tunnel, like the earth itself was rejecting us. I had to shed my helmet and push it ahead with my pack, but I told myself that if Moore could make it through, then so could I. The only way we knew there was somewhere to make it through to was the air; if it blows, it goes, and the quiet puffs of air emanated out from the tunnel. In the claustrophobia, I thought that they even felt stronger, sounded louder, like the source was closer now. We surged forward like devolved creatures, half blind and wriggling through the dirt and over stone, holding back conversation to keep from inflating our lungs enough to make it harder to traverse the depths. We went so long without speaking that when Moore cursed under his breath, it scared me so badly that I flinched upward and met the rock skull first. I gasped loud and felt an immediate wet rivulet trickle through my hair, dripping onto the ground before me.
“You good?” Moore called over his shoulder, pausing his forward momentum.
“Yeah, just a–a gash on my head,” I replied. I wanted to reach up instinctively and feel at the wound, but my arms were pinned too tight for that. I settled for wrinkling my face to try to direct the blood from my eyes and taking a breather. “What made you–” I didn’t finish my question, because I quickly saw the answer. A clutch of amber spiders, at least a couple dozen, streamed past Moore in the tiny cracks left around his body, on ceiling, floor, wall. They scuttled over his legs and shoes, directly towards me, and I cried out and tried to shove myself back to no avail. They weren’t interested in me, of course, but they weren’t dissuaded enough by my presence to give me a wide berth as they worked their way around me either. I felt phantom limbs brush through the cut on my head and squeezed my eyes shut, wanting nothing more than to stand and run in that moment. I kept my eyes closed so long that Moore had to call out to me again, and I shook my head as much as I could, although he couldn’t see. “Maybe we should turn back. I don’t want to crawl into a nest.”
“Probably not in the tunnel,” he reasoned, his voice distant and muffled by the rocks surrounding us. He pulled himself forward a few more inches and muttered something, but it was muffled again not just by the stones, but by a whistle of air and the sound of loud scraping. I froze and saw his feet do the same ahead of me as the sound grew louder, or closer, and I assumed the worst. We were going to be truly crushed in a collapse or at least trapped here in this coffin. I shrieked and Moore started to say something that was probably meant to calm me, but it was cut off this time by a lurching gurgle. It sounded like the noise someone makes when the driver stomps on their brakes too suddenly and they’re choked by their seatbelt. There was nothing after. His feet moved neither forward nor back.
“Moore?” Nothing. “Moore!” Nothing from him, but the scraping returned, and this time I felt the ground quiver with the wind that blew in. It carried the same smell as earlier but stronger, earth and brimstone and tangy copper. I tried to push myself backwards quickly again on instinct, like with the spiders, the fleeing fucking spiders, and got nowhere. The walls of the tunnel shook the vodka in my veins into bubbles and rattled my skull, and I grabbed for useless purchase on the ground, only to feel something wet touch my fingertips, dampening my pack. I jerked my hands back as much as possible in the cramped space and fixed my flashlight on the offending liquid. Thick streams of blood clumped with hair and something gray writhed through the mud and fed the dirt, and for a second I thought my head wound had cracked open and spilled my viscera onto the ground before me. I stopped breathing, frozen by an impossible sight, and could only swallow hard as I pressed down my pack and shone the light on Moore’s shoes.
A river of blood flooded out from underneath him. He was perfectly still. I nearly jerked my shoulder out of the socket maneuvering my arm so I could reach forward and tug at the heel of his boot, my voice still trapped in my throat. He didn’t respond at all, but the ground shuddered and breathed again, and the steady scraaape echoed through the tunnel. The dim edges of my light barely penetrated the tiny space between his back and the top of the ceiling, but I could swear I saw the rock move downward. Not violent and sudden like the cavein I had feared, but slow and methodical. Like teeth coming down. Like something was chewing… I felt the barest twitch of his foot and my heart hammered so hard I thought I was going to die right then and there in the tunnel from shock or excitement that he hadn’t just been killed and left me here alone. But the twitch wasn’t him trying to signal to me; it was the rubber of his heel slipping out of my soaked fingertips as the jaws of the tunnel pulled him forward just slightly, just a few inches, enough to leave a streak of blood in his wake.
I found my voice then. I screamed and I probably swore, but my ears rang so loudly that they blotted out all rational thought in my mind other than the breathing of the cave, the chewing of the cave. I tried in vain a third time to shove myself free of the mouth of a stone beast and was met again with the catch of stone against me. I watched as the tunnel bit down on Moore’s body again, through the last bit of recognizable head I could see over the hump of his shoulders, and I realized in that moment that it wasn’t just pulling him forwards into whatever horrible rock maw it had; it was moving forward as well.
I could’ve passed out. I really wanted to pass out, actually, to go blissfully unconscious and not have to deal with the fear of what was approaching me, the total confusion regarding what was happening to me, and the inevitable crushing pain. Instead, my brain stayed woefully awake, my nerves singing in anticipatory pain as I watched the tunnel eat Moore’s body. Everything in me trembled, but I started to work myself backwards at the same painstaking pace I’d had to crawl forwards with. It felt wrong. It felt like strolling away from a tsunami. It felt like driving through a guardrail. It was slow and difficult and I could barely tell I was making any progress at all, and all I had was the hope that the rock was slower. I wished I was sober. I should’ve gone in sober. Maybe this was all some horrific hallucination caused by the combination of alcohol and cave gases, I thought, but then I saw the ceiling come down on my discarded helmet and crush it like an eggshell. I don’t think I’ve ever been as scared as I was watching Moore slide away, the stone inch closer, followed by gore and death and impossibility. But I don’t know if I’ve ever been as relieved, either, as when my toes slipped off the edge of the entrance finally.
It took maybe five more awful minutes to work myself back far enough that I could tear myself from the wall. I fell from the entrance and expected to hit hard ground, but instead I crashed into something slippery and slick. I fumbled my flashlight as I tried to get my footing and found that the floor of the cavern was covered in shining white mucus. It clung to my clothes and body as I wrenched myself free, and I backed away from the hole in the wall slowly. It was breathing loudly know, exhaling rot and fear into the cavern, and I wondered if the teeth would follow, or if that was the mouth. Maybe the whole cave system was the mouth. Maybe I was in the stomach. I stared for too long, recklessly, until I felt a stinging on my forearm and looked to find a clump of the blood red worms from before, wriggling and intestinal, some with metallic pincers sunk into my skin. I shrieked and ripped it away, but the shining penny-colored prongs took a chunk of my flesh with it, and the skin left around the bite began to redden and swell immediately. I turned blindly on my heels at that and splashed through the snot and saliva and water filling the cavern, coughing and wretching as it soaked me. The flashlight circle Moore left had been covered so I just ran like a madman until I found it, the first tunnel, and threw myself in headfirst.
At this point, after the tightness of the other crawl and the consumption of my friend, it was the easiest thing I’d ever done. I army crawled forward, soaked to the bone in blood and congealed mess, and didn’t stop until my flashlight flickered out. I banged it against the ground to restart it, and it waxed and waned through dim light, but the insides had probably been damaged by the fall or the moisture and soon it darkened permanently. My other lights were in my abandoned pack, so–fuck it, it was a straight shot. I forged forward through the darkness, crawling, crawling, quickly and then as fast as I could as I felt wind at my feet and heard the rumbling scrape of stone behind me. It was pitch dark for what felt like miles, and I imagined myself trapped in a labyrinth down there, running like a rat until the earth caught up to me, but then the blue sheen of a glowstick far, far in the distance caught my eye. Salvation, eden, heaven, paradise was above ground and I would cherish it well. I dragged myself forward with renewed vigor and collapsed out of the tunnel’s mouth once more, into the navigable beginner caves I’d been promised at the start of all this.
The smartest thing at this moment would’ve been to follow the glow and run back towards the surface, but some stupid animal thing in my head had taken over, some sort of testament to Moore’s exploratory spirit, and I turned back to the tunnel. The glowstick didn’t leave near enough light to see anything substantial by, but something in my head insisted that I see if anything was following me. I didn’t have my pack anymore, but I did have the plastic lighter in my pocket. I fished it out with haste, held it close to the entrance while standing back like I was ready to run, and flicked the flint wheel with trembling fingers.
I didn’t see anything. I don’t know if the force of the explosion knocked me down or if I dropped to my knees of my own accord, but I ended up splayed on my back on the cave floor as the spark from the lighter ignited and presumably devastated the tunnel. Rubble from above sifted onto my face like snow, and it was all I could do to right myself. My head swam and I almost stumbled back the wrong way, convinced I was heading towards the glowstick before I realized it was an eruption of blue flames. I coughed and turned again, stumbling at the fastest jog I could muster and navigating by the comparably pathetic glowsticks, gripping onto walls to lead myself out. My eyes stung worse than the flash burn when I first saw the light, but I reached towards it like a child to its mother all the same and tripped forward, forward, forward, until I was out of the cave’s mouth and spilling onto the mud. I cried out and rested my face against the ground for just a moment before I pulled myself to my knees, wiped my nostrils clean, and started the hike back to the cars.
Sunset was tinging the horizon when I reached them. I wasn’t afraid. Being above wasn’t scary. I had foolishly taken my keys into the cave with me, but I tried Moore’s passenger door and it popped open easily. Risk management my ass, I thought as I gingerly climbed in and reached up to the sun visor over the driver’s side which, sure enough, had his keys sequestered away against the mirror. I took them down in a hand almost too weak to grip them fully and hoisted myself over the center console to collapse in the seat. It wasn’t lost on me that just hours ago, Moore had sat here, and now he had succumbed to the earth. I didn’t know what it all meant. I didn’t understand why that had happened or truly what had happened at all. I knew I would live it over and over in my dreams, and that I would remember this time. But I don’t think it was my fault. I don’t. That’s comforting to me, as I turn the keys in the ignition and reach into the pocket of the windbreaker to feel at the grooves of the patterned tumbler stowed away there.