02 – Darkness Wails

The cave stretched out dark and long ahead of the little band of travelers now irretrievably lost.  The light of their torch sputtered and wavered in the unearthly gusts rising from deep within the ground.  The bottom of the cave was slick with bat guano, moisture, and some slimy substance they tried not to think too much about.  Death sat heavy in the hot dark air around them, suffocating, threatening.  And then from behind them came an unnatural wail that drove itself through their heads, scraping at the fragile walls of their slipping sanity.  

“What was that?” one asked.  

“The wind?” another answered.

“It must be.”

“The wind.  It must be.”

They knew that it was not the wind.  They waited to hear if the wail would come again, but it did not.  They continued their trek through the sweltering shadows toward the perceived source of the wind.  The wind must signal a way out of this pit, they had reasoned.  Where the air moved they would find their salvation.  Where the air moved there was life.  

They came upon a fork in the cave they had not encountered on the way down.  Without the guide ropes they had laid, there was no way of knowing which way they ought to go.  

“You two stay here.  I am going down this side.  I will be back,” one suggested.

“But you have the torch.

“I have to see where I am going.”

“We will be left in the dark.”

“Yes, we will be left in the dark.”

“I will be back quickly.  I just want to see if this goes up.”

“Ok, but hurry.”

The man with the torch gradually disappeared down the left side of the fork.  The man and the woman left by themselves in the dark sat down on the floor of the cave and embraced each other.  

“I’m scared,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

Another scream pierced the blackness of the cave.  She dug her nails into his arm.

“It’s closer,” she whispered.

“I know,” he said.  The wind gusted past them, warm and wet with the Earth’s secret horrors.  

“We should go get him,” she whispered.

“No, we should stay.  We can’t see anything.”

“What about the scream?”

“We should stay.”

The fork he had taken ended in an impassable boulder.  He had turned around to go back when he noticed that the floor was littered with hundreds of dead bats.  With no flies so deep into the Earth, he could not tell how long they’d been dead there.  He continued down the rocky path back toward where he left his friends.  Deep in the blackness behind he heard the wail go up again.  

He froze.  He worried about his friends.  And then behind him he heard breathing and turned around.

“Oh my god.”

The man and woman continued holding each other in the damp darkness they both knew would soon be their grave.  

“He’s not coming back,” she said.

“He’s coming back.  We just need to stay here.”

“He’s not coming back.”

“Let’s just be patient.”

From the left hand path they heard a distinctly human scream seeming to come from everywhere and then suddenly cut off.  They waited, but no more sounds came.  

“Oh my god,” she said.  “We need to go after him.”

“We can’t.  It’s too dark.”

“No, I think I can see his light in the distance.  Look.”

“No you…” he said and then looked and saw in the distance the faintest glow, but a glow nonetheless.  “I see it.”

“We should go.”

They stood up with hands outreached to protect them from any jutting rocks and slowly stumbled their way toward the pinprick of light in the distance.  Carefully they climbed over obstacle and pitfall, moving ever toward the light.  They stubbed toe and stabbed hand and slipped and scraped knee and elbow alike, but still they continued.

“It’s wavering,” she said.  “It must be the torch.”

Further down the path they could begin to see the cave walls around them in much clearer relief.  On and on they went, their eyes set on the luring beacon ahead of them.  And then, closer than ever before, the sickly wail went up, reverberating through the cave, their bones, their teeth.  

Silence.  The woman let out and piercing scream.  The man grabbed her.  “Calm down,” he said.  “We’re almost there.  We’ll be all right.”

She responded with nothing but trembling.  

He took her by the hand and walked her further toward the light.  She stumbled behind him, her mind torn to pieces by the sound in the darkness they had both heard and both knew they should not have heard.  Beneath his foot he felt something shift, something distinctly not rock-like.  He bent down to pick up the extinguished torch they had allowed the other man to take down the path.  If the light had not come from the torch, then where was it coming from?  Could it be…?

“Wake up!  The light!  It’s coming from outside!”

“What?” she asked in a daze.

“Look.  The torch.  The light is coming from outside.”

“What?  The torch… why is the torch….”

“Come on.  Let’s keep going,” he said and pulled her toward the light, the light which would save them.  The fresh clean light of day, away from this dank pit.  Where there was light, there was life.

Ahead of them came another sound.

“Wait,” she said.

“What?”

“Listen.”

“Listen to what?”

“Listen.  It sounds like…breathing?”

He pulled her on, more firmly.  They would get out of this hell and he would make sure she was with him.  He didn’t know what had happened to the other man, but it didn’t matter.  When they were outside, they could send a search party in to find him.  He wasn’t worried.  But they couldn’t help anyone way down here.  They needed to get out.  

The light went out.

“Where did the light go?!” she screamed.

“I don’t know.  I don’t know.  Oh my god.”

“Where did the light go?!”  She started to sob.

The breathing returned, filling the small space with the regular, heavy rhythm of something very large.  She gripped his arm, causing pain but he was too horrified by the revelation that there was something else in the cave with them to make a sound.

And then the light came back on, revealing an array of eyes each as big as a man’s fist, onyx black, and looking directly at the two of them.  He wished the light had never come back on at all.

“I’m sorry,” was the last thing he said.