The Labyrinth Key

by Christopher Cartwright

  Tom glanced back at the colorful blurs of Sam and Armando above the surface still rippled by his entrance. As the ripples calmed, he turned his focus downward, intent on getting this done as soon as possible.

  The water was as clear as air beneath the surface, too, a friendly blue expanse vastly different than the ice-cold blackness of the Tomb of El Dorado. Tom stared straight ahead and squinted through his mask. Even with the transparency, he couldn’t see an end to the cenote, which was too bad – because that was where he had to go.

  Tom groped at his hip, removing a spool of dive-line. He wrapped it around the entirety of a relatively large limestone boulder. He gave the line a firm tug to confirm the knot would hold. It was his lifeline to the surface world – the one for those still living.

  He shivered despite the warmth and kicked himself forward.

  Even before the cave system started, he could see the cenote expanding in all directions, almost inviting him to explore its secrets.

  Tom looked at his compass. The passageway before him headed on a bearing of 308 northwest. According to the mystical and antiquated map that Armando possessed, it seemed to match the historic references leading to Xibalba. He swam toward the darkest corner of the cenote. The warm water, while only mildly annoying before, was really starting to get to him. Tom was trained for diving in the ocean, where he had gotten used to the biting cold. The warm jungle water made him almost feel dirty.

  As he traveled through the cenote, his sense of unease escalated. There was something off about the entire place. Was it the mystical powers of Xibalba? Tom distinctly remembered the bubbling feeling deep in his belly that he’d felt as Sam and he got near the Tomb of El Dorado, long hidden from tomb raiders. That had been months ago, and he could recall the visceral feeling even now, as if it had happened mere seconds earlier.

  Somehow, it felt the same.

  Tom forced himself to smile. He hoped this adventure would involve fewer guns and people with bad teeth. Far ahead, in the cave, he caught sight of something. A way in perhaps? He picked up the pace.

  He’d only been swimming maybe another minute before he knew what had happened – the outline of a gaping hole in the wall. He saw it quite clearly, quite suddenly, and in its entirety. While all the water around it was blue, it seemed to shift to an insidious black at the opening. The sensation of something supernatural was stronger than ever. Like a curtain of death closing in on him.

  Tom swam through.

  Entering the deep black of the void, he quickly switched his flashlight on.

  Illuminated by the beam, he could see that the cavern beyond the opening’s threshold was larger than he’d imagined. While falling far short of the near abandoned-mansion feel of the Yellow Dragon Cave they’d navigated to reach the Tomb of El Dorado, Tom certainly felt small. He had to swing his head back and forth to illuminate each side. From what he could tell in the glare of the lamp, both sides of the cave appeared to be a kind of marble, almost blackened beyond recognition by impurities. He swam closer and ran his hand over the right side. Rough, not artificially smooth. This place wasn’t some man-made death trap, at least. Then, he noticed the wall was getting closer to him. Was he not swimming straight? Tom looked ahead.

  No. They were closing in on him.

  He could feel his breathing getting shallower and more labored with every flipper stroke and he fought to keep it steady, to pull in through the respirator. He summoned the image of Darth Vader and tried to feel like the super villain, capable of destroying planets. It was a trick he’d used ever since he’d learned to dive, and it always made him feel better in tricky situations. He’d never told Sam.

  It didn’t work as well as he’d hoped. This was bad.

  After twenty years of diving, I should be able to control myself at this point, he thought, angling himself slightly to avoid an outcropping of marble. If his air tank was penetrated, he was too far in to swim back out on one lungful of air. It wouldn’t kill him instantly, but it would kill him nonetheless.

  Armando had told the group that they were diving individually to make sure they had enough space to turn around should they need to backtrack to the point of entry, but Tom wasn’t sure if that possibility had ever been an option. It certainly wasn’t now.

  With no choice, he continued down the long, narrow, and almost perfectly straight passageway, then stopped.

  Up ahead, was a deadly choke point.

  Chapter Seven

  Tom stared at the choke point.

  Almost a perfect circle, it had a diameter of two feet, making it wide enough for an adult to slide through, but impossible for a SCUBA diver with equipment to breach. Tom shined his flashlight inside. Like most choke points, the narrowest constriction opened to a much larger space inside.

  He focused the beam of his flashlight through the opening, scanning the chamber beyond. The space itself looked like it could accommodate a large bus, making it easy for him to turn around once inside. That was, if he could get there in the first place.

  It was the classic catch twenty-two.

  Although he might have been able to squeeze through by himself, there was no way he could manage with all the gear he was carrying and without his SCUBA equipment, he would drown. He shifted his position, considering any possibility of turning around in the narrow passageway.

  Impossible.

  That left making his way through the choke point as his only option – and that meant holding his breath while he did it.

  Chapter Eight

  Tom took a couple of deep breaths.

  He mentally ran through each individual step of the process. First he’d undo the Velcro straps that held his buoyancy control wing and his closed-circuit rebreather system. Next, he would need to drop to the seabed, allowing enough room above him to maneuver his equipment out in front. If he made it that far, he could then easily pass his gear through the narrow constriction. If he was lucky, he could follow right behind – that was, if his loop hoses reached.

  He squeezed his dive wing’s air release.

  A small burst of air bubbles escaped, sending him ever-so-slightly negatively buoyant. Unlike a traditional open-circuit SCUBA system, where you can control your short-term buoyancy by breathing in or out, breathing never altered one’s buoyancy on a closed-circuit loop. In a closed-circuit setup, gas never left the system. If the air expanded in the diver’s lungs, it would deflate the wing balloon, never altering the diver’s overall buoyancy.

  Tom gave an equally small burst of air into the closed-circuit and his buoyancy turned neutral, his descent easing to a stop just ten inches off the rocky seabed.

  He took another breath, collected his thoughts, then began the process of removing his dive equipment.

  The Velcro came off easily, but the next phase of the process was harder. Slipping free of his CCR system felt more like a Brazilian jiu-jitsu wrestling match, but inside a constricted cave, underwater and with an opponent who knew how to instantly choke you if you made one wrong move. To make matters worse, the passage was barely wide enough to slide it free.

  Tom breathed out as far as he could, gaining precious inches between the limestone walls, his deflated lungs, and the CCR dive system. He gently pulled the tank and aluminum backpack over his shoulders, until they couldn’t move any farther. He pushed hard, trying to free it, but it had become lodged.

  For a second, nothing moved.

  Panic rose in his throat and his heart pounded. If he didn’t wriggle free, there wouldn’t be enough room to take another breath.

  He maneuvered his arms forward, but in his current position the angle was all wrong. It meant that all the effort had to be generated from the smaller muscles of his triceps, and it wasn’t enough. He tried only twice. Any more than that would be a precious waste of oxygen and strength; on something that would never work.

  Instead, he turned his efforts to the larger, stronger muscles of his legs.

  With his feet finding purchase on a small vertical l
edge, he pushed hard. A small, muffled crunching sound filled the chamber as he pushed off. The dive equipment slid free and now floated in the void, middle of the passageway.

  He closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths, trying to consciously slow his heartrate.

  Tom swallowed. He’d just dodged a deadly bullet.

  Careful not to disconnect the loop pipes that connected him to the CCR system, he slowly eased it through the opening. He gave the tank a gentle nudge, and it slowly cruised through, and then stopped – just shy of the large chamber on the other side.

  It was the loop pipes that had prevented it from making it through.

  He cursed silently to himself.

  That left only one option. He needed to disconnect from the CCR system – and that meant removing his dive mask.

  He took a couple more deep breaths, closed his eyes and removed the dive mask – blindly passing the entire CCR system through the choke point, until he could no longer reach it.

  Now his turn.

  Tom angled his head downward and grabbed the edges of the entrance. With a precision mastered over years of military training, he kept his arms tight against his body and flicked his feet to move forward. He came out unscathed on the other side.

  Flawless, he praised himself, victorious.

  And then, in the void of darkness, he realized he couldn’t reach his dive mask.

  Chapter Nine

  Tom was an expert cave diver.

  But in the darkness, blind panic began to flood over him, trying to drown out any rational thoughts. Without a facemask, his vision was nothing more than an obtuse blur. Unable to breathe, he frantically searched the chamber for his dive mask. His outstretched fingers ran through the gravelly seabed in front of him. He spread his arms wide, like one would to make a snow angel.

  He forced himself to open his eyes. The saltwater stung. Without a dive mask, his entire field of vision was no better with his flashlight on or off.

  He mentally pictured the outline of the chamber, reconstructing it from memory. It was roughly the size of a bus, maybe a little wider in parts, and potentially much longer. The fact was, if he could see at all, he could probably swim around the entire chamber within twenty seconds but, lacking vision it was a completely different story.

  Tom visualized the dive equipment being pushed through the choke point.

  It was neutrally buoyant making it easy to move through the water, gliding like silk. He thought about Newton's First Law.

  An object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force.

  He had needed to give it a decent push to slide it through the opening, but with the resistance of water, nothing moves very fast or far.

  So where did it go?

  Tom began a systematic grid search, focusing on those seven or so feet closest to the choke point. When he reached the wall at the end of the chamber he turned around and kicked off the wall like a competitive swimmer. He did this four times, crisscrossing the chamber, in slow, determined movements.

  But his dive mask nor equipment materialized.

  Panic raged in his hypoxia-driven madness, but he didn’t allow it to take over. He had time, not a lot, but some. He was a strong swimmer and an extremely competitive free diver, capable of holding his breath for upward of five minutes.

  It was a puzzle, but it had a simple answer.

  Even Newton would agree the damned thing couldn’t have gone far.

  Tom turned and following the edge of the flooded cavern, felt his way back to the choke point. He carefully turned around and stopped. Despite his urge to quickly kick off in search of the dive equipment, like some hidden prize, Tom forced himself to remain perfectly still.

  And that’s when he realized he was floating across a gentle current and into an unknown passageway.

  Chapter Ten

  It was the one and only clue Tom needed.

  Elation surged as he imagined the only possible explanation. The dive gear had been pushed through the choke point only to become picked up by an underground current and dragged elsewhere.

  He swam hard in the direction of the current.

  His heart raced and his lungs burned. Maybe twenty feet along the passageway his fingers reached the dive mask. His fingers grasped the mask as if his life depended on it – which it did – and placed it on his face. He depressed the purge button and a large bubble of gas cleared the flooded mask and rebreather circuit of debris and water.

  He took a couple of deep breaths and calmed himself.

  The beam of his flashlight shot across the narrow confines of the subterranean river system. The water moved horizontally, despite the passageway being level. If he had to guess, it was related to a distant tidal pattern, rather than a natural, fresh water source.

  Tom scrolled through his dive gauges on his heads-up-display. The purging process had expelled way too much of his gas supply. There was enough to get back, but not a lot more than that. He should have turned back immediately but after the effort to get through the choke point, Tom needed to see whether his efforts had been worth it. If not, he could at least rule out this particular passageway for Sam.

  He took a new spool of dive line and tied it to a protruding section of the rocky passageway. The tunnel was narrow, but not so narrow that it would be difficult to turn around in – not yet, anyway.

  Letting the spool unwind, he swam north, along the new tunnel.

  His deliberations about how best to get himself through the tiny opening within the cave wall had wasted time. Tom flicked the flashlight beam ahead of him, half expecting to face yet another opening he’d be forced to squeeze through. To his surprise, the tunnel widened, revealing what seemed to be a corridor. He remembered what Armando had said.

  Had he reached the flooded passages of Xibalba?

  Well, heck, he thought. That was easy.

  He tried to remember what Armando had told him about Xibalba. Would it be better if he actually knew anything about Xibalba, Tom reflected, instead of just offering conjecture? Gateway to hell, human sacrifice… hadn’t he also said something about a maze?

  What he did remember was that ‘Xibalba’ roughly translated to Place of Fear. Well, he thought, looking around the dark passageways, a chill crawling up his spine…

  That sounded about right.

  Xibalba was the underworld in Mayan mythology, Armando had said. Ruled by the Mayan death gods and their helpers. According to the Popol Vuh – a creation narrative written by the Kʼicheʼ people before the Spanish conquest- the ten gods were often referred to as demons and lorded over the different realms of human suffering: sickness, starvation, fear, destitution, pain, and ultimately, death. He remembered the gods had worked in pairs because Tom had thought of Sam and made a joke about it. Down here in the dark it wasn’t as funny. They’d had names like Flying Scab and Gathered Blood, Pus Demon and Skull Staff. They and their minions fulfilled their duties, dragging souls down into the underworld.

  Tom’s eyes narrowed. Too easy, indeed.

  Slowly swimming through the passageway, he realized that it must have been a hallway at some time. The steps that rose under him seemed to be designed almost in an effort to deter entry; each step just a little taller than comfortable for anyone but a very tall man.

  Before Tom knew it, he had reached the end of the passageway, revealing that the cave branched off.

  Abruptly, a memory of Armando’s distant voice popped in his head.

  “It’s a maze,” he had said, pointing to the dead middle of his map. Damn. “But as far as we have been able to ascertain, it all goes to the same place. It sounds strange, I know, but that’s the way it is. Just choose a path and commit to it.”

  This didn’t change the fact that Tom felt incredibly uneasy with the whole dive. He glanced at his dive gauge. He was running dangerously close to the point of no return. He made the conscious decision to go just five minutes farther, and then turn around – no mat
ter what he found.

  His heart raced. He swallowed down the fear. He couldn’t afford to get nervous. He looked around and decided to just take the wider passage. Maybe he wouldn’t feel like he was getting suffocated this time.

  And, this time, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It looked exactly like the one that he had entered through. Or, maybe it was the same one? Tom swore he had seen that same rock on the ground a few minutes earlier. No. His eyes were playing tricks on him.

  He was distracted from his growing concern when he saw another tunnel branch up ahead. He took the right side, again. A couple minutes later, Tom was starting to get nervous. He had been trained never to panic, but he would have to head back soon if he wanted to survive. The oxygen gauge was now an ugly mix of green and orange, marked thirty percent. Fifteen minutes left. Every single passageway he went through looked the same. The uneasy idea that it was a circle pestered him, but he’d yet to cross his unspooled dive line. Surely he was traveling deeper into the earth, but he felt like he was going nowhere.

  All right, screw this. Tom twisted his body to turn around and leave. He’d have to get out quick or he’d wind up as just another body; the classic fool who’d decided to explore one passageway too many.

  When he turned around, he came face to face with something that didn’t belong…

  A single SCUBA diver flashlight floated – its beam still bright against the gravelly seabed.

  Chapter Eleven

  Beneath his dive mask, Tom’s lips curved upward in the slightest of grins.

  A flashlight didn’t belong anywhere near his location. Not this deep underground. There wasn’t enough of a current to have carried it in from the outside, and the fact that it still shined brightly meant that it hadn’t been left on for very long. A few hours, at most.