The Cave (Inktober, Sunday 25, 2020)

For Inktober, October 25, 2020. Prompt word: “buddy.” Tuckerization: Matt Alleman

A reminder that volunteering for tuckerization only means a character in the story shares the participant’s name. Other than that, no other similar characteristics are implied.

 

The Cave

by Alan Loewen

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The quartet stopped in front of the forested hillside and dropped their backpacks with sighs of relief.

The leader looked at the small crevice on the side of the hill with excitement evident on his face. Just wide enough for a man to enter, Matt approached it, holding out his hand. He smiled. “Just feel the breeze coming out of there! This system has to be huge.” Matt pointed at the ground. “No footprints or signs anybody else has been here. We’re going to be the first explorers.”

Brandon grinned. “Good find, Matt.”

Matt had found the crevice a few days ago when walking the woods near his home. The breeze from the gap implied it led to a cave large enough to be affected by the highs and lows of the weather. Contacting his three closest buddies, Brandon, Jared, and Ricker, Matt made them swear to silence as it was evident the cave was as yet undiscovered. This guaranteed pristine formations and rooms and hallways that had never seen the presence of any other explorer.

“Okay, gents,” Matt said. “Hardhats with helmet lights? Extra batteries? Good. Flashlights with extra batteries? Does everybody have at least four light sticks? Ricker, why are you carrying a knife?”

Ricker laughed, took the knife out of its sheath, and spun it expertly in his hand. “You know I never go anywhere without my Spyderco Bow River. We might run into some troglodytes.”

Matt rolled his eyes. “If it snags on a crawl, you’ll just have to leave it behind.”

Jared opened his backpack to reveal five energy bars and a bag of trail mix. “Can’t eat a knife, Ricker.”

Ricker shrugged. “I also brought beef jerky. Homemade. Anyway, like we all planned, we’re only going in for an hour and then turning around and coming straight back.”

Brandon tied his backpack shut. “Yup, one hour in and one hour out and turning around if we discover a technical climb.”

Matt nodded. “That’s right. Okay, light check.”

After being satisfied the helmet lights and flashlights worked, Matt turned to the group. “Okay, I’m first, and I’ll let you three fight it out as to what order you want to follow.”

With that, Matt turned around and, turning sideways, began to squeeze himself into the crevice while carrying his backpack behind him in his left hand. The way was tight but navigable, with a steady breeze blowing into his face. About fifteen feet in, the passage turned to the left and became so close, Matt had to exhale all the air out of his lungs. He pushed himself a few feet further where the passage opened enough to allow him to breathe normally. Behind him, Matt could hear his friends as they followed. “It’s real tight where you make a left turn,” he yelled. His voice echoed ahead of him.

In the light of his helmet, Matt could see the passage ended in a larger space that the light could not penetrate. Excited, Matt forced his way further until the crevice ended up in a much larger room, so large, his light could not reach the far wall. He moved to the side to let Jared, Brandon, and Ricker into the room. The combined light showed walls receding to the left and right into the darkness. The ceiling was a modest eight to ten feet high.

A breeze could be felt coming from ahead. “Okay, let’s be logical about this. Jared and Brandon follow the left wall, and Ricker and I will go to the right. If you find any passageways, mark them.” With that, Matt took out a glow stick, snapped it in half, and shook it until it gleamed with a bright white light. It would remain active for twelve hours illuminating the exit, long enough for a quick explore.

Slowly, Matt and Ricker made their way around the right wall as Jared’s and Brandon’s lights became smaller as they made their way around the cavernous room.

Matt and Ricker had not gone thirty feet before they found the remains of an ancient campfire, small but once a source of light. Now the cold ashes only spoke of a bygone time long before the four explorers had entered the cave.

“What do you think, Matt?” Ricker asked. “Indians?”

Matt nodded. “That would be my guess. I don’t know how old these ashes are, but this area was uninhabited until 15,000 years ago. I can’t believe the ashes are that old. Just don’t touch them. We’ll have to let some archeologists know eventually and let them sift through it all.”

The duo continued to follow the wall, and far across the room, they could see the twinkling lights of their friends. Then, a few minutes later, a glow stick glimmered from far across the room.

“They found a hallway,” Ricker said. Matt nodded in response.

Suddenly Matt and Ricker stopped as a burst of excited chatter came from across the room. The two stopped and tried to listen, but the distance could not carry the conversation.

“Let’s keep going,” Matt said. After a few minutes, Matt could see the far lights continue their exploration as well.

Twenty minutes later, the two groups met neither having encountered any other exits from the room.

“Guys, you are not going to believe what we found?” Jared said.

“A campfire?” Matt asked.

“What?” Brandon asked. “No, but you have got to see this. Come on.”

Matt and Ricker followed the other duo. Ten minutes later, they found themselves staring at the wall next to a large hallway leading into the darkness.

“Pictographs,” Matt said in awe.

“We’ll be famous,” Ricker said. “Have any ever been discovered in a cave?”

Brandon shook his head. “Not that I know of. There are a lot of rocks in streams and rivers, but none in a cave.”

The quartet stared in wonder at the figures carved into the wall.

“This is weird,” Matt said. "Pictographs that I know about are nothing more than symbols. This kind of tells a story.” He pointed at the carvings, crude images of men with spears and clubs fighting what looked like a …

“Is that a dinosaur?” Jared asked.

Matt scrutinized the carving. “No, it can’t be. It’s walking on four legs so I think it may be a cave bear. No way could they be fighting a lizard that big.”

Brandon gestured down the dark unexplored hallway. “Should we?”

With that, the quartet made their way into the stygian darkness, their lights for the first time illuminating cave formations. Flowstone, stalactites, stalagmites, and columns glistened wetly as they reflected back the light.

Ricker turned around to study a column they had walked past. “Um … guys!” he said. “Look at this!”

The rest turned about and mutely stared at the ancient skeleton half concealed in the column that had formed over it.

Matt stared in a combination of awe and wonder. “I cannot even guess how long that’s been laying here. This is a living cave with formations still growing, so I have no idea how long it took for that skeleton to be covered like that.”

“There’s another one over here,” Jared said. The rest turned around to see another skeleton, this one with a shattered rib cage. Next to it lay a stone-headed spear, the wooden handle mostly rotted away.

“I guess some of them didn’t get away from that cave bear,” Jared said.

“Glad those things are extinct,” Ricker muttered, his hand subconsciously dropping to knife sheathed on his belt. “He looked at the rest of the group. “We’re coming up on our hour time limit. What do you say about adding another 30 minutes? Our lights are going strong.”

Matt looked at Jared and Brandon who nodded in agreement. “Okay. Thirty minutes more, then we clear out and notify somebody who can make sense of all this. We’ve already made our mark in history.”

The group continued but hadn’t gotten more than thirty feet when they stopped again with yet another surprise before them. “Is … is that a cave bear?” Brandon asked.

The skeleton was monstrous, twice the size of a man, laying on its right side with several spears around it and two of them penetrating its rib cage. Under it, they could see a complete skeleton of a man, except the skull lay a few feet away from the body.

“Oh, man,” Ricker muttered. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

“Yeah,” Matt said in response. “Just don’t touch anything.”

Jared shook his head. “That is not a skull of a mammal. And those teeth! Look at the front fangs. They’re hollow. This animal was venomous.”

Stunned into silence, the quartet studied the skeleton and then, as one turned down the cavern tunnel and walked further done the corridor.

About forty yards, they stopped in shock at another unexpected surprise. Where the corridor narrowed, a primitive door blocked the way. The wood was at the point of crumbling, and remnants of thick vines littered the cavern floor.

“Now what?” Brandon asked.

Matt chewed his lower lip for a while, lost in thought. “Common sense says we turn around and let the experts handle this, but I have got to see what’s on the other side of that door.”

Carefully, Matt attempted to shine his flashlight through the gaps in the door. Still, the darkness refused to yield any discoveries. So finally, he turned to his companions.

“Okay, let’s take a vote. Who’s for opening the door?”

Three hands were raised. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

As Matt touched the door, it crumbled into dust and fragments. “Well, now we can tell the experts it was already in pieces when we reached this spot.”

The hallway continued into the darkness.

The group had not walked more than twenty yards when suddenly Matt was blinded by a flash of brilliant cobalt blue, and the next thing he knew, he found himself in a rushing torrent of water.

Desperately trying to keep his head above water, the water flowed so fast he could not gain a secure foothold on the bottom of the stream. A bright white light in front of him made him feel disoriented.

Gasping for air, Matt felt himself fall a short distance and plunge into a deep pool. As he struggled for air, he was stunned by the presence of the light, and Matt felt relief that he had clearly exited the cave for the surface.

He made his way toward a stone bank made slippery with algae. Behind him, he heard his friends sputtering and splashing about. Matt turned and grabbed Jared’s hand and pulled him toward the safety of the rocks.

Ricker came to the surface, and Matt pulled him to safety as well. “Where’s Brandon?” he yelled.

Further down the pool, still struggling in the current, Brandon surfaced, gasping for breath. Jared and Matt pushed off the shore and reached Brandon, helping toward more rocks further down the stream. Behind them, the small waterfall they had all tumbled over poured into the pool. The strong current flowing to the far side of the pool ultimately flowed into a …

“Where in the world are we?” Jared asked. 

Hugging the rocks, Ricker made his way to the group. Together, they struggled over the rocks and out of the water.

Soaked, they ignored the discomfort to stare in shocked surprise at the scene before them.

The fast-flowing stream from the pool ran about fifty yards before emptying into a sea that stretched to the horizon. To their right and left, massive cliffs soared into an alien sky composed of bright, roiling clouds that never ceased in their boiling, clearly the source of illumination.

The cliffs curved about the sea and disappeared in the distance, vanishing in the mist.

The shoreline was composed of large trees that swayed in a breeze. Thirty feet away from the breakers, the beach stretched to the right and left in an unbroken vista of glistening black sand.

“Now what?” somebody asked.

Matt turned and stared at his friends in shock, his emotions mirrored in the faces of all three.

He turned and looked at the cataract that spilled out of the cave mouth where they had just escaped. “I don’t know how we can return. That water … the current is just too fast. There is no way we can swim against it. We didn’t carry any pitons or any climbing gear because we weren’t going to climb.”

Brandon dropped to the ground, his head in his hands. “We’ve got to find a way out of here,” he said.

“Listen,” Matt said. “I left a note in our car giving the location of the cave and the time of our return. That’s what I do even when I’m just hiking. So somebody will find the car and come rescue us.”

“What do we do until then?” Ricker asked.

“We survive,” Matt responded.

Thirty minutes later, the group dried out their clothes over a campfire courtesy of Jared’s waterproof Zippo lighter. There was plenty of firewood from the trees, and the presence of a warm fire brought a modicum of feelings of calm and security.

After drying their clothes and the contents of their backpacks, Jared shared his energy bars with the group.

Brandon’s watch had not survived the unexpected swim, but when the rest of the watches said it was time for nightfall, there was no dimming of the clouds overhead.

Curious and careful, Ricker made his way down to the shoreline. Moments later, he ran back to the group. “Better put that fire out right now,” he said.

The group questioned his urgent command until Ricker motioned them down to the shore. There, away from the noise of the water that poured from the cave, they stood in stunned silence, listening.

At some distance away, the quartet heard the faint sound of drums.

“I hope we’re rescued soon,” Matt said. “The sooner, the better.”

+++

Days later, a large, hastily erected tent at the cave’s entrance served as a base of operations for several men and women who bustled about carrying exotic electronics. Occasionally a figure in a hazmat suit would make their way into or out of the cave’s entrance.

A woman entered the tent and stood before a man seated at a table covered with electronic equipment and paper reports.

The seated man looked up. “Yes?”

“We sent a camera on the back of the mobile robot down the hallway past the door. As soon as it goes twenty-three yards, it vanishes in a flash of harmless Cerenkov radiation. And the tether is cleanly severed.”

The seated man sighed and pushed the papers away from him. “So going down the hallway is a one-way trip?”

The woman nodded.

The seated man stood. “Okay. We’ll give up the four men for lost. Seal the cave with concrete and then bury the entrance in dirt and stone. We’ll explore the cave sometime in the future when we have better tech. Until then, all the reports are sealed." He sighed. "I suspect those four men are dead. Whatever happened to them, we can’t help them. Maybe someday, we’ll solve the mystery."

The woman nodded. “Very good, sir. I’ll make sure there are cover stories available for the missing men and the rest of our team. Nobody will ever know the truth.”

THE END