Sea Cave

The water crashes in this dark; a washing roar, wet and briny, eclipsed only by the alarming sense of pressure that arrives with each new wave, searing our ears for a moment and leaving the blackness dripping ice in a muffled crescendo of absolute panic. Seaweed swaddles my legs like wet roiling toilet paper as I scream, “keep looking!”

“I can’t see anything,” Steph screams back at me, over the muting of a new wave, the terror in her voice thunking in time with the heavy driftwood logs the ocean is smashing into the entrance of the cave. Just keep it together, I tell myself, fighting the urge to yell, to rage, to fight the sea that’s already at my waist. You panic, you die, don’t die! My hands race against the wet course rock, the salt stings where the stone has cut and scrapped and peeled my skin, and in spite of that I slap the dark wall and push my fingers into its gritty crevices. I can imagine what my hands would look like, in the light, surely worse than reality, but nowhere near as compelling as what will happen when the tide fully comes in, and we’re still stuck here. Don’t be stuck here.

There’s nothing I can say to reassure her, there’s no way to know how far the cave goes, if it goes up or down, if we drown here or deeper in, our bodies lost and pickled in the dark, in this grave, was it always a grave, did we just walk into our own grave? Stop! My feet slip, the force of the swirling water threatens to drag me over, I can feel impossibly real boulders against my shin, and I know if I fall my bones will snap around them, so I grab desperately, at the dark, at the wall I don’t want to be there but suddenly hope is. The impact is like light, clear, stinging, painful light. But it’s enough to steady me, even though the sensation in my hand tells me at least one finger is broken, that’s still better than a leg.

“There’s something here,” Steph screams from the fwumping swishing darkness. I try to shout back but a surge of water splashes into the cave wall beside me, erupting and drenching the rest of me. My mouth fills with grit and salt and I spit as fast as I can, picturing the ragged dead things that must bloat and disintegrate in here.

I cough, and the saltwater burns my sinuses, “what is it?”

“There’s an opening, I think,” she screams as a new swell sloshes in and throws me back against the jagged wall. More blood for the sea.

“Where are you,” I shout.

“How the fuck should I know,” the darkness shouts back. It’s enough to get a general direct, and as the undertow rips at my legs and I try to feel out a safe route towards her I wonder at the lack of urgency I feel; am I trying not to get my hopes up, or do I believe I’m already damned? What a worthless question, maybe it’s just shock.

“Where,” I yell again, half the word muffled as a heavy surge sings our ears into a burning temporary deafness. In that dark and heavy silence, I almost laugh at the coldness of the water, at the ache of its promise, always there, always ready; and us, we come to this thing as a novelty, to splash and to play, as though it is not a wild and fickle god.

“Here,” she yells, closer now, on my left.

I reach out and there she is, her shirt wet and rough, the skin beneath is cool in that way only water brings out. “What is it,” I shout again.

“I think it goes through,” she yells.

I stop myself from asking where, “can you fit?”

“I think so, but there’s a log, help me get it out!”

I reach past her, fingers jamming into slick rock then dancing along the surface towards her breathing. The water’s nearly at my chest, which means it’s almost at her throat, and still, she keeps focused. Then the wall is gone, and I nearly fall into the space it should have occupied, and there is the log. Nearly a tree. Heavy with water and swaying with horrible weight. It’s lodged in an opening. My hands feel in darting jabs, praying the water doesn’t crush my last good hand between rock and twisted tree trunk, and then I feel a bend. It’s hooked, not stuck.

“Push it towards me,” I yell into the dark, as the sloshing beside me gets frantic, becomes something more like swimming.

“We need to pull it out!”

“It’s caught on a bend, that’s all, you push, I’ll pull!”

 I grab the log under the water and pull. It moves in my arms in ways that have nothing to do with me and everything to do with the water. Its weight is terrifying. Then I hear a splash and the log starts to lever my way, and I can feel from where it is that Steph is underwater, wedged between the log and the boulders down there, shoving hard. I pull harder, it slips a little then a rolling current sweeps it up and she pushes and I pull and I wonder if she’s going to drown there, if the last living thing she ever does is help me push a log in the dark, trusting that I’m right, that I know, that I can save us; not knowing that I’m guessing at best. Then, as the water sloshes back, leaving rivulets draining from my hair, the liquid tickling the contours of my face, the log lists differently. Dangerous, heavy, swinging unstoppably in the slosh, and free.

“Go,” I yell, hearing her break the water with a gasp. And she’s splashing away and I’m right after her, swimming now, washed into the rocky sides of the little passage, aware, as I pause, that my feet don’t touch the floor, pretending not to know that. The tunnel goes farther than I could have hoped, but the roof of rock stays where it is, the water slowly bringing it closer until, with each new heavy pressure wave, my head cracks and snarls against the ceiling, and still I swim, following Steph’s splashes.

I crash into her, a slightly warmer mass tangled in the sickly-sweet rot of seaweed. I’m forced to breathe with my nose grating against the stone, the water sloshing into my nostrils, its chunky contents lapping the side of my face, caressing my throat and jaw and ears like a hungry lover. I hear a spitting spray, and she’s shouting, and I can feel the sound of her sweeping the ceiling and filling the little air that’s left with the one word I’m most afraid of, “Down,” she screams. And I want to vomit, I want to bite the ceiling, I want the numb pain in my hand to take over and fill me up and take this moment away.

The water is reaching for my nose and the world is laughing at me and I feel Eternity swimming in the cave and what choice do I have, what option but to dive and hope and pray that there will be air somewhere down and beyond. The water sweeps across my forehead and the air is gone and I’m feeling though pain and dark and debris and down, down, down, and it’s too far down, it’s only down, there’s no air here! But I push and drag and scrabble to reach Steph because I don’t want my corpse to be alone in here.

There’s a bend in the wall, and I drag myself along it, the water moves and mashes my ribs into the stone and air escapes in bubbles and I don’t have much more and then my lungs are burning and my head is pulsing with negative glitter and a voice in my head is shouting at me to breath and I scream ‘no’ at it in outrage and my air bubbles away, crawling along my face like living things, and the voice is right. I have to breathe. Somewhere, in the weightless dark, as I start to inhale the ocean and fire mixes with an electric buzz throughout my body, a hand grabs my arm and pulls. Hard.

My skin tells me there is air, the tension moving from oily to open like I’m being peeled back into the world. The water mixes with stony air inside my lungs and I’m gasping and coughing and twisting and bending and wondering if I’m going to drown in the dark here, in a miracle, in the air beyond the sea. I heave and gasp at the burn until my lungs crush out a rattling tearing cough that bites and howls deep inside me.

“It’s filling up,” Steph says, her touch is a shock, nubs of life in a lifeless place, ghosts in the dark. I flinch, and I’m ashamed. I draw in ragged breaths and turn to the touch.

“Farther,” I rasp.

“Let’s find out,” she says, grabbing my hand, my fingers explode with color in the dark, and I howl at it, that sweet, horrible pain. I scream, my voice tastes like the smell of beached crabs and the sound of seabirds, and I wonder if maybe I already died, and this is just a fever dream burning bright in some fatty corner of my brain. But she lets go quickly and the pain remains, and the scream dies out and I am alive as she touches my chest and I grab her hand with my one good one and she pulls me deeper into the earth while the water churns and rises at our feet, shallow and pushing, shoving us deeper in.

“Careful, the stones roll here,” Steph says from ahead, no longer shouting, the rush of water softened to a bubbling fwoosh behind us. We walk into nothingness, every step an act of desperate faith that ground will be there. Gradually, we slosh through it, feeling the walls for context, following a soft draft of earthy smelling air.

“The waters lower here,” Steph says from ahead, and I can hear hope in her voice. She’s right, of course, what had run as foaming sandpaper along our calves was now comfortably lapping at our ankles. It took a while to pick out the sounds tangled down here for what they were, the rawling bubbling swirl of draining water, siphoning off through lesser tunnels and sloshing vaguely underneath us and to either side, teasing in muffled slurps and tinkling dribbles in the spaces beyond our confines. But she hasn’t noticed yet that the floor slants down.

“Maybe we should wait here,” hide the fear from your voice, I tell myself, “Until the tide goes out.” The slosh-slosh of our steps rolls around the darkness, the sound itself sloshing along the rock.

“What if it fills up,” she asks, slowing.

“It won’t,” I say. It could, I think.

“We had to swim down a lot, can you climb with that hand,” she asks, and I can see her in my mind, a face that says it knows I can’t.

“You could get out, go get help,” I will hide the thoughts of being alone down here from my tongue.

“Even if I did, probably wouldn’t get back before the next tide,” she says, and my mind fills with jagged rock and salt and cold limitless dark awash in things that crawl and scuttle and wiggle and chirp.

Chirp? No, more of a click. “Do you hear that?”

“What,” she asks, alarm making her voice a cannon in this hollow place.

I shush her, pointlessly holding up my bad hand as a sign. There it is again, something familiar, or, familiar enough. Something not of the sea but the sky, and the above world in general. She inhales sharply and I know she’s heard it too.

“What is that,” she asks.

In the stillness I feel the breeze, a slight flutter of colder air, chilling one side of me more than the other in my sodden dripping state. Am I shivering? It feels like I’m shivering. I hope I’m just shivering. I look at the dark where my body should be, and it stretches and folds and warps into more dark in a way that makes me wonder if I was ever really real or had just imagined myself. Focus, I shout at the dark in my eyes. “I think it’s bats.”

“Bats don’t swim,” I hear her say, her hand cold and jittering in mine, “they had to get in some other way.”

“Doesn’t mean we can get out,” temper her hope, keep her thinking, keep her cautious, she’s better at this than me and I need that.

“Maybe not, but maybe it does. Or maybe we can shout, or see, or something,” she says, seeing options, yearning for sunlight. “We should check it out, just in case. We can always come back here if we need to.”

As though we know where ‘here’ is, as though the world is not riddled with holes all tangled like yarn and filled with darkness so complete it all but swirls about us. And yet, she’s not wrong. “Lead the way,” I say, and squeeze her hand.

The rocky slosh of sand and kelp and other things beneath our feet recedes until it’s only a slopping squish we stick and slide on and then it is something else, firmer, less gritty. The smell of ocean follows in our wake, the salt in the air stinging at our useless eyes, and more and more we come to pockets of cleaner air, stale but absent of fish and sand.

Still, my feet tell me we’re going down, but the bats are louder now, not one but many, their clicks and squeaks sounding too loud in the growing silence. By comparison, perhaps. The silence itself is oppressive, somehow worse than the roaring slosh of the sea that drowns, its weighed by the earth above us into a petty brooding thing, it resents us and the noise we bring. It resents nothing, it’s only darkness.

“It’s getting louder,” Steph says, and she’s right. The calls and clicks bounce along here, originals followed by echoes, and my brain realizes it’s not many but a few. And they are so loud, and we are so deep, and we’re going deeper, away from the sky, away from the sun.

In the dryer quiet of our march my hand throbs with fiery anger, the skin shredded, at least two broken fingers booming with nerve-bound agony. I can feel the sand, and my clothes, catch and sweep flaps of skin all over my body, the knowledge of those wounds a promise of the pain that will come when I stop moving.

There’s a new smell, now. Something animal, distinctly mammal in the way farmers or pet owners can recognize with a whiff. The clicking and tweeting is louder, so loud. How can a bat make so much sound? Its tiny body, fluff wrapped around a ping pong ball, seeing in sound, and fluttering with ease through this jagged crypt. So small. So loud. Suddenly, the sound and the pressure of the place changes and I know the walls are gone and space drifts beyond us, our crunching echoes telling my mind of vastness. The bats go silent, and that silence is crushing.

“They must get in somehow,” Steph whispers, and the tension in her arm and the little pulls and twists there let me know she’s turning her head, open eyes straining to make something of nothing. Something tumbles with a clacking rustle, and I tell myself it’s just the bats and feel the cave air with all my body because somewhere, in some tangled backwater part of my mind, I know I’m being watched. My gut is screaming ‘run’, and my brain is shouting ‘how’ and I sit between them and think of the hike I took once as a kid where I came across a bear, and how completely I understood at that moment that I was nothing, little more than gibbering meat, powerless and stupid and exposed before a truth I prayed wasn’t hungry. Which is a strange way to feel, deep in the earth. Gas, maybe, carbon dioxide poisoning.

“There’s a breeze here,” Steph says, and I think she means the cave but she’s pulling to one side, stretching at something, and I can feel it too. A current, gusting from a hole the size of a basketball in the wall, and nothing more.

“Circle the perimeter,” she says, and drags me along as she traces the circumference of our space with bleeding fingertips, the sound of them, slipping and scraping, mutters away, confusing the flapping scratching skittering bats above. More holes with more forest-fresh air, flowing in, absent of light or sound, only the brutal smell of pine from somewhere far above. The space is big, and the bats stir as we stumble through it, kicking stalactites and boulders, cracking our heads into outcroppings with our eyes wide open. Theres a gap, in the wall, my broken fingers hang at my side, curled against my waist to protect them from the cold hard stone, but I can feel the space in the sound of the silence there, somehow deeper, pulling my mind into its mute siren call, all promises of sunlight and open space.

“We’ll go back,” she says, “we’ll try your plan.”

I nod at the dark and she seems to feel it, pulling me back into the narrow tunnel and towards a floating death. And I think I’m more hurt than I thought, as we slip and crunch and stumble our way through the endless night, because I swear it still feels like the floor slants down.