Tales of the Decay

by James Barton

  He began to clear away the small rocks from the opening and soon found that it was going to be an incredibly tight fit. He pried and he pulled at the larger rocks, but they wouldn’t budge. Everything was simply wedged in too tightly. He analyzed the opening and looked down at his slight beer gut. “We can make this Adam, we’ll cut out the chips after this too,” he said to himself. He got on one knee and removed his pack. Ignoring many safety steps and procedures, he crawled on his stomach, pulling himself deeper into the dangerously narrow tunnel. It wasn’t a great distance, but each inch, felt like it took all his energy. Every fiber of his being begged him to turn around; only that undiscovered location had a powerful allure that seemed to take over his sense of reason. He knew he shouldn’t, but victory was so close, he risked everything.

  As he inched his way closer to the opening, his helmet kept scraping on the roof of the tunnel. He fiddled with his straps and removed the helmet, holding it in front of him for the light. After a minute and only covering a few feet he finally could touch the edge of the tunnel. He began to sweep the light across the walls of the chamber and could see a few of the crude drawings better. As he began to illuminate the floor, he estimated the drop to be about ten feet. Suddenly, he felt rumbling as the cave began to shake and shift. Adam began to panic and struggled to get into the chamber as dust and dirt trickled down on him. In his struggle he dropped his helmet into the room where it bounced and rolled toward the far corner and shone a thin beam of light against the wall. The shaking began to get worse and his shoulders were now peeking out into the room. With a thundering crash the tunnel collapsed on Adam. First, sending a jagged stone through the back of his leg and then burying his chest in a thick layer of dirt. He tried to let out a cry of pain as the bones in his legs snapped like twigs, but the rocks compressed his lungs into airless sacs. Then as the quake came to a shuddering finale, the ground crumbled to pieces under him. It sent him tumbling into the chamber below. Adam hit the ground with a sickly thud and the tunnel behind him collapsed and filled in with fallen debris.

  There he was, gasping for air and gripping his broken legs as a single beam of light illuminated an uninteresting portion of the wall. He made weak pained grunts and strains as he tried to push up his chest to breathe. He wheezed and rolled onto his back; the pain in his legs fired off signals that made him nearly grind his teeth to dust. Adam lay on his back and simply stared into the darkness. All his supplies that he might need were in his bag, of course, on the other side of the wall. He fiddled with his pockets and pulled out his emergency beacon.

  “Heh, yeah right,” he said sarcastically to himself. He pressed and held the button, the screen lit up with a green hue. Activate Y/N? Adam double pressed the button and the beacon went dark for a second. Then it lit up with a single message. Attempting Signal… The three periods after the word “signal” began to count from 1-2-3 and repeated over and over. He was too deep and surrounded by a thousand tons of rock, it would never reach anyone. Regardless, he clipped it back to his belt out of nothing more than habit.

  Adam finally got the courage to reach down and touch his legs. They throbbed and he was surprised that he hadn’t passed out from shock. He touched his left leg and felt shredded cloth and wet flesh. When he touched his right leg, it sent needles running across his skin. There was something bulging where it shouldn’t be, a bone. He fell back and winced; a hot tear began to burn in his eye. As he looked back at his mistakes, he took this moment to mentally berate himself for being brash and stupid. He lay in the dark chamber and attempted to come to terms with his impending death.

  In the darkness, time stood still. Adam had lain there for fourteen minutes, but in his mind, he thought an hour had passed. He had tried to dress his wounds, but he wondered if it even really mattered at this point. Shortly after his fall, Adam began talking to himself. At first it was pleas to his god and then it was beratement of his choices that led to this point. A minor change in his environment snapped him back into reality. It momentarily made him forget about the pain and a new fear washed over him. The headlamp grew dimmer, not enough that anyone else would notice, but he noticed.

  “Please no. Oh God no,” he whimpered. He dug through his pockets and let his head fall back onto the rock floor. The extra batteries and flashlight were in his bag. He had packed enough batteries to last him a week, but that didn’t do any good buried in the chasm. Adam decided, that if he was going to die in this room, he at least needed to see his discovery before he lost his light. He suddenly became genuinely scared. Not of suffocation or bleeding to death, but what he couldn’t see. What if he wasn’t alone?

  “Hello!” he shouted. As he waited, only silence replied.

  “Hello!” he cried out again. The more his mind dreamed up boogiemen in the dark the more he began to feel sick to his stomach. He listened intently for a reply.

  As he listened, he heard the hushed pulling of air. It was the sound of someone breathing in a single, ragged breath. Adam rolled away from the sound with all the hairs on the back of his neck bristling in defense. He clenched his eyes shut and balled his fists and tried to cover his face as he turned on his side. Adam wasn’t alone.

  Adam could do nothing but cower in the stifling darkness. He could barely move and a new fear struck him. It was a fear so strong that it felt as though his body had ceased all functions. It was so powerful of an emotion that it caused him physical pain as he tensed every muscle in his body. He didn’t want to hear the sound again, but he needed to. As the minutes passed, he needed the validation that he hadn’t lost his mind. The room felt like it was spinning and he touched his right leg. Despite his attempts to stop the bleeding, his pants were soaked through. He didn’t know much about medical care, but this felt like the end. He let out a low roar of determination and lifted himself to a sitting position. If something was going to kill him, then he figured, dammit do it already.

  “This is my discovery and I will see it before I go,” he said quietly to himself. Adam began to drag himself toward the helmet. The light was growing gradually dimmer, but it was still lit enough to repel the horror of complete blindness at bay. As he pulled himself across the room, his leg shot pain signals telling him to stop and lie down. It took everything he had to ignore them and continue forward. His awkward backward drag put a strain on his already sore arms. He took a breath as he reached the center of the room, it was close now, nearly within reach.

  “Phoo,” he breathed out heavily. “You got this Adam, almost there.”

  He made one exaggerated lunge toward the headlamp and his right arm dug into something soft and giving. There was a moment of pause as his eyes widened to an almost cartoonish size and then he bolted. Even with his broken legs he rolled and pushed off with his left leg to send him sailing toward the headlamp. He snatched it up and slammed it onto the top of his head. As he snapped the strap his eyes were closed tighter than a vault. His heart was going faster than ever, and he finally drew the courage to open them. What he saw made him vomit out of sheer terror.

  There in front of him, reflecting off the dimming light of his lamp, was a crumpled body of a nearly naked man. Its complexion was bleach white and the skin hung loosely on a small frame. Its face had a thin layer of skin that seemed stretched over his cheekbones. His milky eyes seemed abnormally large in their open sockets. Those big white eyes seemed to stare right through him. The man’s lips had shriveled into two thin lines that revealed a pearly row of teeth. Adam frantically crawled away from the corpse and tried to pull himself together. If he hadn’t been sealed in a room with broken legs, he would have clawed his way to the surface by now.

  This tiny shell of a man was disturbing, but he couldn’t look away. Deep down it was almost a child-like fear; if he looked away it could lunge at him. As he looked at it more closely, his attention was drawn to the only piece of clothing it wore, a tattered loincloth. How old could it be? He wondered if the man could have been a caveman or tribesman, or at least someone around
before clothing. That was impossible though, right? The corpse was in bad shape, but not thousands of years old bad. Even perfectly preserved mummies had more decay than this person.

  Adam went to scratch his nose and when his right hand came into the light it was red and splotchy, like he was developing a rash. His fingertips were also dotted with blood from touching his leg. His head still ached, and he questioned his sanity from the sights and sounds he assumed were real. He finally drew the nerve to pull the light away from the shrunken man and examine the drawings on the wall. From this distance they seemed to be chiseled into the rock and a white residue was left behind. In very rudimentary caveman-style artwork it displayed a story. In the center was a man with wavy lines radiating from him, perhaps their idea of a god? The wavy line man stood among many other humanoid figures. Adam moved his light and found the next drawing. The man stood among the prone figures of people as his wavy lines extended over them. Adam could only assume that the figures represented the dead and that this wavy man killed them.

  As Adam scanned for the next picture, his right hand itched and he looked down to scratch it. While his fingertips still had the blood stains, the red splotchy parts had disappeared. If things weren’t so dire, he might have questioned his allergic reaction to touching corpses. He looked closer as a white residue, the same that clung to the walls and floors, was prominent on his fingertips. He raised his left hand to his nose and tried to examine it. The residue was everywhere and for a moment, he almost thought about tasting it. He ultimately decided against sticking strange white cave substances in his mouth, after all it could be bad for his health, a thought that nearly sent him into a burst of insane laughter.

  He spotted the next picture and squinted at it. The wavy-man was still standing atop dozens of horizontal figures, but this time there were two other smaller wavy-men standing with him.

  Adam couldn’t put his finger on it, but something stirred inside him. It was almost as if his despair had been replaced with hope, even as misplaced as that might seem. He turned his back on that decrepit creature and found the last picture. It showed the wavy-man alone in a square, the square appeared to be filled with water and outside the square were dozens of regular stick men holding hands. Had they trapped and sealed the man in, or had he locked himself away after the guilt of killing those people? He had originally thought the wavy lines represented radiating light, but now, he wasn’t so sure.

  With the tunnel nearly entirely collapsed, he sat and just let out a defeated sigh. He spun around and looked down at his emergency beacon, whose panel was emitting nearly as much light now as his failing headlamp. Attempting Signal… The three dots continued to count over and over as the beacon struggled needlessly to find a signal.

  “I guess that’s it,” Adam said to himself with an almost certainty. He slumped over in a heap, preparing to simply wait until the blackness of this chamber consumed him in his entirety. As he sat there, the silence was abruptly broken by a distinct sound. It was a single gasping breath. There was no mistaking it this time and his body went cold as icy daggers seemed to dance along his neckline. Another sound wriggled into his ears, the sound of something sliding across the smooth rock floor. Ssshid ssshid ssshid, it drew closer. Adam raised his head in the direction of the sound and braced himself for something awful. As he lifted his head, his gaze was met with milky white eyes, only an inch from his face. Those desiccated lips curled into a murderous grin. Adam reeled back in fear and took in one massive gulp of air so that he could scream.

  Before he could scream, something came from behind the man. In the dark it looked like snakes, tiny electrical cord sized snakes. They swam through the air and seemed to be looking at Adam. As they drew closer, he could see they had no mouth and instead simply came to a sharp point. The man’s bleached white face became stained with an almost tar-like ooze that began to dribble from his mouth in rivets. All this time he still had that nightmarish smile. Adam tried to crawl backward, but barely covered any ground. The man leaned forward, sitting on his knees and spoke a single guttural foreign word. As he spoke this word, his mouth coughed up black liquid and the snake like tendrils shot across the room and drove into Adam’s chest. Adam fell onto his back and looked up. Those tiny wriggling worms had detached from the man and stood nearly erect two feet out of his chest. They began to hum and shake with small vibrations as they burrowed deeper into his chest, through skin, muscle and bone. Adam tried to scream, but the only thing that came out was a hoarse whimper. The bleached man’s smile grew to almost inhuman proportions, black ooze pouring from his lips. As Adam’s consciousness began to fade, there was one sound that stuck in his mind like a knife. One final breath escaped the man’s lips and he fell onto the floor in a crumple. The man lay motionless on the floor. Adam grabbed at the wriggling tendrils and attempted to restrain them, but found he was powerless as his hands went limp around them. As he struggled, he could see the bleached man’s back, riddled with finger-sized holes. As the pain reached its peak, his vision faded to black and he felt himself slip away. The wavy lines on the drawings … let’s just say, it wasn’t radiating light.

  As Adam’s body lay writhing on the floor, his mind was elsewhere. He felt like he was floating through an underwater abyss. Voices both familiar and unfamiliar, spoke to him in languages he had never heard. They frightened him, and he tried to swim away from the sounds. As he traveled through his dream the voices that had frightened him faded into whispers. Then in the distance of his mind he could hear his wife calling out to him. Only the words she spoke made no sense. Her voice was soothing and soon it was joined by the laughter of his children. Their sentences slowly transformed as he drew closer. At first, they were speaking in a foreign language, but as he drew closer, he understood parts of their English. She spoke in broken sentences that were drenched in love and sadness. “Why … leave? Come … home,” she spoke.

  “But, I’m trapped,” he responded in his delusions.

  “Daddy … don’t give up … come home,” his children’s voices pleaded in unison.“Climb out, you have been gone too long. It is time to come home,” his wife demanded, this time almost angrily.

  Adam felt like he had been floating in the dream for a lifetime, maybe more. He was bombarded with images of people and places that he had never seen, and yet felt so familiar. While his mind wandered, his body had spent the last eleven hours twitching on the floor. When he finally opened his eyes, the room was nearly dark, but had a soft warm glow that it previously hadn’t. He rose to his feet and instinctively walked to the tunnel that he had fallen from. He looked up at the opening and the rocks were looser than the rest of the chamber and a finger-hole of an opening sat in the crumble of rocks. He spoke no words but reached down to touch his right leg. His pants had become sticky with blood, but there was no abrasion … there was no wounds. He put his hand through his pants to touch his leg and felt only soft undamaged skin. He shrugged his shoulders in amazement and reached up toward the tunnel and grabbed at a small rock. His fingers slid into the rocky debris as though he was digging into a bowl of pudding. As he pulled fistfuls of rock from the tunnel his headlamp gave one dying flicker before cutting out completely. Without hesitation, Adam reached up and threw his helmet across the room, causing an explosion of plastic and glass.

  Adam closed his eyes firmly as if he was attempting to shut out the world. After a minute of standing motionless in the corner he opened his eyes. He could see the contours of the rock, the outline of the shapes, even in the pitch black. As he slowly and methodically dug at the wall he felt his insides shifting. It was an unpleasant and reassuring feeling simultaneously. His brow furrowed, and he began to dig faster. He drove his feet into the rock wall and climbed it without effort. Within a minute he was entirely in the tunnel, spitting rocks into the chamber behind him. While Adam had only truly been in that chamber for less than twelve hours, it felt like an eternity. Something inside him screamed to reach the surface. He had to make it back to his
community; there was so much to share with them. With an almost explosive burst of strength he punched through the small tunnel and into the chasm. He peered up at the sky and a small grin spread across his face.

  He walked over to the rope and gave it a good tug to test its strength. The rope snapped and it began to slither to the ground in a mangled coil. As the final piece of torn rope cascaded onto the floor he simply shrugged, disinterested. Adam hunched over and began to breathe heavily. This air was fresh and new. His muscles bulged and throbbed as he prepared to climb to the surface. With one fluid leap he rose five meters and drove his fingers into the harsh rock wall. He jammed his hands through the wall like tissue paper. He grunted and strained as he climbed, meter by meter.

  Despite the new power that had overtaken him, he felt fatigue starting to set in. Halfway up his stomach began to churn and his ribcage felt as though it was literally being bent outward. He pushed through the pain and covered an excessive amount of distance before looking up and seeing the stars. With one final motion he catapulted himself from the rock wall and onto the grassy earth above. He rolled onto his back, breathing heavily, and gazed into the night sky. He felt like it had been ages since he saw the sky like this. There was a subtle beeping that came from his pocket. Disoriented, Adam searched for the sound digging through his pockets. Finally, he pulled out the source of the noise. He held up the emergency beacon. Signal Acquired… Alerting Emergency Personnel, displayed on the small screen. A toothy smile stretched across his face and he lay in the grass, victorious. He wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand and on it was a tiny smear of something black and sticky. He allowed himself to relax, allowed the exhaustion to catch up to him, to send him into the darkest sleep of his life. They deserved to take a break, for they were finally free.