Depths

He looked between us once more and said, “It’s either her or me…”

The storm that whipped its vicious fury overheard and cast its song echoing strangely around us nearly stole his words from me, lost to the sheer intensity of the wind that remained unacquainted with our skin. Perhaps it was a mercy, after all, if it were to struggle to hear him as I stood alongside him, surely she had not heard him. Heard him, and worse, saw the sense behind his words and agreed.

“Don’t be ridiculous, we can all make it out of here, don’t start ruling anybody out as being dead before anything bad happens,” I insisted with all the certainty that I did not truthfully feel the more insistent the scrape on my thigh ached, “We just have to be smart about it, even if we do have to wait around for a while, between the three of us we should have enough snacks to ration out a few days comfortably, and probably a couple more uncomfortably.”

There was a sound from the third member of our unfortunate little party. A mumble that had been lost both to the elements but also from the way she turned her back to us. Through the perpetual gloom that had become our constant companion over the last few hours, I could vaguely make out Victoria trailing one hand, now gloveless, over the cool earthy wall before her, the other raised to keep the light in check. Whatever it was she had seen that had her so fixated was lost on me, and yet I could feel a prickle of discomfort race my spine like running water.

“-has to mean something, right?” questioned she, as she turned her attention to the nook where we presently resided. It must have been clear in our faces that we did not know what she was talking about, and so with a sigh, repeated herself at a volume only a former theatre kid could maintain comfortably, “I said,” began she, “While you boys were standing around like useless lumps, I’ve been looking around and found something. There’s a draught coming from cracks in the soil here, that has to mean something, right? Maybe when the roof caved in it covered up the entrance to an underground tunnel or something. If there’s air moving through it, maybe there’s an exit somewhere through here.”

“And what if it’s not?” Nathaniel protested in a spectacular impersonation of how he had sounded in our childhood when either of us suggested anything even remotely risky, “What if it just leads straight down into the ground and we’re lost forever?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to have a look,” I chimed in, “If there is something there and it is an exit, good, that means we don’t have to be stuck down here anymore. If it isn’t, we can just turn around and come back here again.”

“Oh, do forgive me,” returned he with a touch of exaggerated haughtiness, “If the idea of wandering about in the labyrinth of some unmarked cave. Nobody would know where we went! At least if we wait here, somebody coming to look for us when we don’t show up is bound to see where the roof caved in and get us help.”

“So, you’re more in favour of sitting around here doing nothing until we have to resort to cannibalism than you are of having a look around and trying to find a way out of here before that?”

“Who said anything about cannibalism?” Victoria asked, her nose wrinkled up in exaggerated displeasure, “I think I’d get food poisoning if I had to eat either of you.”

“Can we at least try literally anything before we start eating each other, please? I’m not going to be the one to pass on the news that we fell down a hole and you two started just immediately eating each other?” I sighed, the roll of my eyes audible enough even if my friends could not see it.

Before they had the chance to start drawing straws, I made my way over to the wall Victoria had been investigating. I tugged my glove free from my hand with my teeth (a mistake, I learned immediately, as the dirt that had clung to them ended up in my mouth) as I fumbled for a light. As we had not planned to spend any time whatsoever underground that day, I had not brought a flashlight with me. We were fortunate enough that Victoria had not bothered to take one out of her pack from the last hike we went on, but she was the exception and not the rule. So, instead, I had to settle on the glow of my watch to guide my hand without risking any unpleasant and unexpected surprises.

She was right. Before too long I could feel the faintest brush of moving air creeping in through cracks in the earth, stirring the small hairs on the back of my hand as I moved. Perhaps it was just the optimist I wanted to be hiding away in me somewhere, but I was sure that the ebb and flow of air I could feel coincided with the grumbling windstorm (unforecasted, and just frankly awful at timing itself) outside of the cave we found ourselves in. I did not want to think too much about the possible dangers of returning to the surface now, after the weather proved so violent that the earth itself crumbled away to escape it. I also did not want to think too much about the danger of sitting around doing nothing long enough for a tremble to come with enough force to finish the job and have the cave play its part as a tomb. I also did not want to think too much about what could happen to the structural stability if I started digging and – okay, yeah maybe I just did not want to think too much about anything. Being trapped underground by a sudden cave-in of a cave one did not even realise was underfoot until it was all around a person was more than enough to leave anyone feeling at least a little bit claustrophobic and generally weird about it all.

So I stopped thinking and started doing.

I tugged my glove back on unceremoniously before I plunged my hand right into the soil. It was soft, loamy, and certainly did not belong so deep underground. It was topsoil, possibly even the very soil we had been standing on before our tumble, and proved Victoria’s hypothesis that a natural exit had been covered up. She caught on relatively quickly to what I was doing and moved to join me, occasionally turning her flashlight beam upwards to make sure nothing was threatening to further collapse. It took a little bit of coaxing to get Nathaniel to join us, the man suspicious of every stone that happened to tumble down unprompted. But, before too long, he took on the role of the tallest person in our little group very seriously, feeling around to try and see how much space had a reassuring amount of give for us to push through.

“It feels very uniform,” the man mumbled to my right, “I wonder if there used to be an underground river that used to flow through here.”

Of course, even if there had been a river there once, it would have been more lifetimes ago than any one of us could rightly fathom. But still, the thought of being swallowed up by the inky blackness of water that had never seen sunlight was more than enough to cause me to pick up my speed a little bit, clawing the soil off to the side, shrinking our already horribly small work with each effort to expand it.

It was Victoria who had managed to push a hand through to the other side first. She let out a little gasp when her fingers greeted the lack of resistance that was customary for air. Even when the little hole closed up after she pulled back, her little victory sparked an urgency that he had not quite known was bubbling beneath the surface.

It took a little bit of clambering up the pile, digging at the bottom would have been a foolish task, but eventually our combined effort left us with a hole big enough to climb through.

As it was her effort that meant we broke through, Victoria climbed through first. The task of holding the flashlight was passed along to Nathaniel as she squeezed through. I passed our packs through to her before making my way after her. The shimmy through the cold, uncertain tunnel of soil was unpleasant, to say the least, and I was more than grateful to skid down the other side of the pile. With his burden of the light, soon the last of our group joined us on the other side. He turned the beam of the flashlight to the pile to assess the damage and let out a gasp all of a sudden.

The makeshift doorway he had concluded to be the result of ancient rivers proved to be significantly more doorway and significantly less makeshift.

A doorframe crafted from fine marble, intricate but unfamiliar carvings decorating the stone with clear care. A motif that carried on beyond just the doorframe, but stretching out along the walls as far as the light permitted us to see. With a growing sense of collective confusion, we found ourselves right in the middle of a long, stretching hallway. A hallway that could not have been anything but manmade, even if it had been lost to time long before the soil had swallowed it up.

It could have only been the ruins of some ancient civilization, one that time and earth had worked in tandem to forget.

“What is this?” I marveled, my voice bouncing oddly around. I wondered, quietly to myself, if my voice was the first to echo thereabouts since the time it had succumb to the earth, and was left feeling oddly proud about this. Like my being there was a part of a history I did not know of but was now my own.

But then came the sounds.

It started out small, a soft scratching that I initially passed off as nothing more consequential than the late tumbling of earth as it settled once more. It was, after all, the far more easily understood explanation. Or it was, right up until the moment it stopped being quite so explicable.

The scratching grew louder and louder, the sound of something sharp dragging along the age-old stone. The tip of the executioner’s blade grating along the ground as they let it dangle in faux nonchalance as the inevitable grew nearer and nearer. The mighty claws of some terrible old creature that the surface world had forgotten but had made the ruins its home and sanctuary, and woe to all that dared deny it its solitude.

The fact they were not alone down there, not a soul knowing where to find each and every one of us, settled like thick, sticky cobwebs clinging to our skin no matter how one might want to shake it off. Rather unfortunately, even the mere act of likening our torment to something spider-like conjured unwanted imaged of terrible, ghoulish spider-creatures crawling about the darkened corners of this damned, light-forsaken tunnel.

I am not ashamed to admit my nerve, already fraying, broke when the shadows at the corner of the flashlight’s beam began to flicker and dance with approaching movement. A shapeless reinforcement that there was something there. Something that knew we were there and knew a lot more than we did.

My injured leg was set aflame as I ran, but it was nothing to the sudden dread that sent ice through my veins and spoiled any wonderment our discovery and partial escape had brought to me with the efficiency of mildew. I did not know what it was that was lurking there, and I had no desire to find out.

I did not know where it was that I could run to, no knowledge of the layout, no secret clues hidden away in the architecture or swirls of the air, but ran I did. My singular destination being no more grandiose than away from whatever it was that was ever so slowly creeping towards us.

It was to my great relief to note that my friends were clearly of the same mind as I was in that moment, I recognized their own rapid footfalls bouncing about around us in a disorienting cacophony of flight. If the foul creature had the intention of luring itself to some even fouler nest hidden away in the darkness, at least we were together. At least we had a fighting chance if we were able to stand together as one.

In my adrenaline, I managed to miss the cooling of the musty air, gradual enough to be mistaken for wishful thinking. The thunderous volume of our feet hammering against the stone losing the battle of volume to the roar of the wind. The slightest upward tilt of the ground. I’m sure, in that moment, I could have run to the very ends of the world and right back again and would not have noticed any of it. In fact, the only reason I could tell anything had changed at all was that the glow of the flashlight had seemed to bleed into the stone and brought with it a lingering illumination. Little details, the scar on Victoria’s chin from when she fell out of a tree as a child, Nathaniel’s unsuccessful attempt at facial hair, all becoming more and more visible with each stride.

There was a break in the gloom, lazy late midday sun pooling in like a rich honey from a gap right ahead of our path. How had it taken me so long to recognise what was right in front of me? Terror does do strange things to the mind, playing with priorities as if survival was nothing more than a wicked game.

I did not allow my pace to dip until I had flung myself out of the strange passageway and into the overgrown, grassy clearing just beyond. The prickles of a wild-grown bush tried to slow me by clutching at my clothes, my skin, anything it could but this was to no success. The wind, however, had a great deal more success with this. A gust hit me with such a force I had briefly wondered if I had been struck by some manner of flying debris (or worse, got snagged by the flailing limb of some ravenous beast that had already captured my friends), and I doubled over. The wind was doing its darnedest to make it difficult to try and catch my breath after far more exercise than I had planned for when we set out for our hike that morning.

Conscious, then, that I ought not to be alone in the wilderness, I cast a frantic glance about, the sort that I’m sure would have looked comical under any other circumstances, with the hope of locating my friends. By the grace of something that likely never peered down into the forgotten tunnels, they had both emerged no worse off than I was. Nathaniel had perched himself clumsily down on the grass, an unsuccessful attempt at using a stone as a windshield. Victoria, braver than I dared, had crept back to the obscured entrance of the tunnels.

“Is it-“ I began at a slightly uncomfortable volume to be heard over the wind.

“-There’s nothing there,” she said before I had the chance to finish my question, “The sunlight must have scared it off.

A sigh that I had trapped down deep within me slipped through my lips, and I promptly joined Nathaniel down on the grass, sinking down to my knees to give my shaky legs a rest without having to deal with the unfavorable weather. I was safe. We were all safe. Whatever it was that had chased us (had it chased us, or had we just panicked?) could not handle the light any better than we could the dark, We each returned to our rightful domain, intruders dispelled yet still living to greet the sun and the depths of the darkness once more. A strange harmony.

My attention turned to the sky, clouds dragged away as soon as they dared form to create a deceptively comforting blue. The sunlight soft on my skin, and in that moment I could not have appreciated the light of day more.