by Greig Beck
Even the walls and ceiling had been mostly smoothed by the millennia of soft rubbing of the languid stream. And where it wasn’t smooth, it was coated in a layer of cushioning moss.
She shone her light at the ceiling, and rather than dagger-sharp stalactites hanging there, she saw round lumps the size of miners’ helmets that she could only guess at how they were formed. Rock blisters, she thought.
Valentina tried to pull her knees up and keep as far from the dark water as she could manage. Ally didn’t blame her one bit. Everything down here seemed dangerous.
“How much further?” the Russian doctor asked.
“I’ll check.” Zhukov handed Ally the paddle and he looked at his GPS. He bobbed his head from side to side for a moment. “Probably another five miles. At this speed, maybe three hours.”
“Three hours,” Valentina repeated wearily.
Ally inhaled. “This air down here is so pure. Something, maybe the lichens, must be producing oxygen.”
She exhaled with a whoosh and pulled out her flashlight. She had been preserving her light’s batteries but switched it on now and scanned the mats of lichen on the walls. There were a few more varieties in the crevices that hung with bulbs like glistening grapes, and she had the horrible impression they pulsated as if breathing.
Ally shone the light around one last time. There was little to see other than impenetrably dark water, the cave walls, dripping with mosses and lichen, and a ceiling hanging with the rounded nodules.
She didn’t mind if it was boring because boring was safe, boring meant life. She sighed and handed Zhukov back his paddle.
Three hours, she thought. She could almost grab some sleep.
***
Ally’s exhalations combined with the breath of Valentina and Zhukov soon filled the tunnel with a wave of carbon monoxide, as well as the smell of warm animal. It changed the environment, even if it was only temporarily.
The scent of the humans was dragged along with them in a wave just behind the raft, and as the gases passed over the walls and ceilings, changes occurred. The main ones were the rounded things on the cave ceiling lifted and a swathe of small eyes on tentacles appeared first. Then came strong, sharp legs that extended along with powerful, grasping claws.
Like a wave of army crabs, the many-legged things began to move along the ceiling, following the delicious scent of the warm human beings.
***
Zhukov poked the wall again with his paddle-stick to ease them a little further out into the center of the stream as they moved near silently down its length.
Ally turned to Valentina and examined the woman closely. She seemed to have physically improved with better hydration, but she still looked haunted with dark rings under sunken eyes. She guessed the woman had been in her late thirties, but now with her blonde hair matted, grimy face, and disheveled appearance, she looked at least a decade older.
She wanted to try and lift the woman’s spirits. “Val?”
The woman looked up.
“Do they call you that, Val? Val for short?” Ally smiled. “My full name is Allison, Ally, for short.”
Valentina shook her head. “No, nobody calls me Val. It is always Valentina.” She looked back down at her hands.
“Can I call you Val?” Ally persisted.
Valentina shrugged. “Okay, sure, I don’t mind.”
“Thank you, Val. So, what’s the first thing you’ll do when you get home?” Ally tried again.
The woman lifted her sunken gaze again. “Have a chemical bath…” She shared a fragile smile, “… and take a big dose of iodine.”
Ally tilted her head. “For the radiation, huh?”
“Yes. It is debilitating and deadly.” She pointed. “Look at your arms.”
Ally didn’t need to. She knew the lesions were there. Plus, she had felt their soft crustiness on her neck and back. She remembered the old Russian woman named Katya; it wasn’t a great path ahead for her.
“That was from my time before. I’ve been down here or in some sort of mid-world, for around a year. You’ll be fine.” Ally was determined to get the woman’s thinking on something positive, so she tried one last time. “Do you have children, a husband, or a lover maybe?” she asked.
Valentina tilted her head back and her eyes took on a faraway look. “Sergei, at the base. Sometimes my lover, sometimes my boss, and sometimes a pain in the ass.” She looked to Ally, and for the first time, really smiled.
“I’m not married,” Ally replied. “But I’m always on the lookout for the next Mr. Right.” She chuckled. “Or the next Mr. Right Now will usually do.”
Valentina’s smile widened. “We wouldn’t talk to them if they didn’t have penis, yes?”
“Yeah.” Ally snorted loudly.
Zhukov looked back over his shoulder. “You know I have ears, yes? As well as a penis.”
Both women shared a look and then laughed out loud, their voices carrying up and down the dark water-filled cave.
“Quiet,” Zhukov hissed. He checked his GPS. “Not long now.” He paused for a moment. “But the gentle river current has meant we have been moving downhill for the last few hours. We may be several dozen feet deep now, and I’ve seen none of the cone-pipes in the ceiling for a long time.”
“I know,” Ally sighed. “We’ll need to plan our exit soon. Do you still have some grenades?” she asked.
“Yes, but last resort only.” He turned away.
As they continued, Ally noticed that the smooth walls were now more riven with cracks and rents, and then a few hundred yards further on, they came to their first side cave; that might have been the good news for a possible way up, but the bad news was their little river was beginning to increase in its flow speed.
It was still silent, as there wasn’t the hint of a ripple or wave yet, but for the first time Ally thought she could hear some sort of background noise.
She turned then pulled her flashlight and shone it back at the cave they had just traveled from.
Zhukov also looked over his shoulder. “What is it?”
She continued to stare, lifting her light. Ally shut her eyes for a moment and concentrated on listening. There it was: a hard, clicking sound, a little like distant chopsticks. She opened her eyes.
“Something is coming. It’s just out of reach of our lights.”
“Oh no,” Valentina whispered.
“Then, we speed up.” Zhukov began to paddle for the first time.
He dug the makeshift oar in deep and dragged it back along the raft on one side, and then the other. The oar wasn’t very flat, and the raft wasn’t built for speed, but it did manage to give them a lift above the current’s languid pace.
“Still there?” Zhukov asked.
Ally listened hard and held up a finger as she concentrated. After another few moments, the sound didn’t seem to be gaining on them. But the odd thing was the Russian captain’s voice echoed, even more than usual.
The stream they were paddling on finally came to its end and it poured them into a vast underground lake. They were pushed out about forty to fifty feet, but shining their lights around, the walls seemed distant and the ceiling now around a hundred feet over their heads.
There were a few red pinholes in the ceiling, indicating there might be more of the cone-pipes way up there.
“So, that is how far we are now underground,” Zhukov said and dug his oar and arm down but couldn’t find the bottom. “It’s deep in here.”
“Take us to the side,” Ally said softly. “If it’s deep, I don’t want us out in the middle. Because that’ll be where the big things live.”
Zhukov paddled them back to the wall close to where they exited from the river cave. He placed the tip of the oar onto the rocks to anchor them. “What now?” he asked.
“We can’t see the end of the lake so we have no idea how large it is. If there’s an exit, we may spend days looking for it… if there even is one.”
Zhukov nodded. “It must drain awa
y somewhere as the stream is filling it. But for all we know, it drains below the surface.”
“Yeah,” Ally replied softly.
Zhukov checked his GPS. “Less than a mile short of where we want to be. Now is the time to leave.”
“Let’s do that.” Valentina’s voice was trembly.
Ally looked up, and then slowly lowered her light beam down along the wall. “It’d be a tough climb. Probably some of it free-climbing. If we had more equipment, it might be possible.” She glanced at Valentina. “But we’re tired, short of rope, and just about everything.” She sighed. “We might need another option.”
“Then we need to find another stream to continue our journey. We skirt the outside of the lake.” Zhukov shrugged. “There must be other openings.”
“And what if the other openings are not in the direction we want to go?” Valentina asked. “Or they keep going lower?”
“Yeah, personally, I’ll be happy if any river exit is uphill. It’ll be hard to paddle against a current, but we need to get closer to the surface, so if we need to climb, we can do it.” Ally shone her light around. “There are more side caves here.” She smiled. “I’m feeling confident.”
Zhukov winked at her. “I’m always confident.” He looked both ways. “Left or right?”
“I think…” Ally held up a hand. “Wait….” She narrowed her eyes. “Can you hear…?”
“Is that a breeze blowing up?” Valentina asked.
“No.” Zhukov’s head snapped around to the cave they had just exited from.
Just then, the cave mouth vomited a boiling mass of scuttling creatures. They immediately spread to the left, right, and up the wall, as they poured from the dark interior.
Ally’s eyes widened. “This is what I heard following us.”
“Get away from the wall, get away from the wall.” Valentina tried to paddle with her hands.
Zhukov rammed the oar into the rocky cave edge and pushed hard. They only scudded out about six feet but it wasn’t enough, as some of the closest creatures began to leap at them.
The dinner-plate-sized arthropods spread ten sharp legs wide. The first arrival, Ally batted aside with her flashlight, but others landed on and among them.
Zhukov yelled as one of the things struck his shoulder and clung there. It immediately set to digging in its legs and using its powerful, sharp pincer claws to try and pull pieces of his flesh away.
More thudded like falling meteorites onto the raft. Ally turned and began to drag, kick, and smash them, but their armor plating was far too thick, and their blows were ineffectual.
The raft was still within landing distance and fighting the crab things meant less movement.
“Just fucking paddle!” Ally yelled.
She resorted to trying to knock them off the raft where they momentarily sank but then bobbed back to the surface. For every one she managed to dislodge, another two took their place.
Zhukov ignored one of the things clinging to his back and began to strike with his oar. Valentina shrieked as one of them landed heavily on her head and used its sharp pincers to snip off the tip of her ear and jam the tiny pink piece of cartilage and flesh into its buzzsaw-like mouthparts.
Ally did her best to try and keep them free, and she herself was covered in cuts and abrasions. Whatever the things were, they were aggressive, strong, and hungry—just like every damn thing down here, she thought furiously.
“Shit.” The walls were now a moving tableau of waving pincers, pointed legs, and armored bodies as more and more poured from the cave mouth.
And then the bigger ones started to arrive. The crab creatures had started out the size of miners’ helmets, but the bigger ones were now as big around as manhole covers, with clawed pincers a foot long. Ally knew that if the small ones could cause as much damage to them, the big ones would easily take off a limb.
In minutes more, they were fifty feet out into the center of the lake. “Fuck off.” Ally kicked the last invader from their raft, and then looked up.
“Oh no.” Valentino pointed. “They can swim.”
“What?” Ally swung to where the Russian female doctor was pointing her light. Sure enough, the bigger crab things had taken to the water. They used their legs like oars, and the smooth round backs and waving eyes on tentacle stalks were all that was above the water line. And they were coming fast.
There were dozens, and worse, there was one now exiting the cave mouth that was easily as big as their raft.
“Paddle, paddle.” Ally dropped to her knees and began to use both hands to shovel water backward. Valentina did the same from the other side.
But even with all three of them frantically rowing, the crustaceans were more adept at swimming and were gaining, fast.
Ally glanced over her shoulder, and then just kept her head down, counting her strokes to take her mind off the approaching horde. And then she saw the shadow pass underneath them. Then another. And they were big.
She sat bolt upright. “Hands out of the water. Now!” she shouted.
“What?” Zhukov did as asked and then spun to her. “Why?”
“Something in the water,” Ally grimaced. “We need… to get out.”
“What is it?” Valentina shrieked while holding a hand over her bloody ear.
The first of the big spider-crabs only had a half dozen feet to get to the raft, when suddenly it vanished below the surface in a swirl of water. Then another, and another.
Zhukov stared. “What’s happening?”
Suddenly, a huge greyish body lifted from the surface among the swimming arthropod creatures. It went over the top of them and when it submerged again, about a dozen of the swimming things, large and small, were gone.
“They’re eating them.” Valentina began to laugh a little madly.
The crab thing’s small eyes on the end of their twitching stalks were becoming more agitated, and then like a retreating armada they began to turn and swim back to the rocky shoreline, perhaps now thinking that the meal on the raft wasn’t going to be as easy to catch as first thought.
“Now’s our chance. We need to get out of here.” Ally saw that the spider-crabs were retreating into the cave. “Head to the shallows at the cave wall. I don’t know what the hell these big things under the water are, but I don’t want them suddenly wanting to see if we’re edible or not.”
Zhukov paddled them back to the wall as the smooth, grey lumps of large backs rose and fell among the retreating spider-crabs.
“Maybe they’re like whales,” Valentina offered. “They can be friendly.”
“Down here? Not a chance.” Ally helped Zhukov paddle.
As if to put to bed the Russian woman’s suggestion, there was one of the biggest spider-crabs up on the wall. The thing must have been four feet across, and its muscular pincers looked powerful enough to cut them in half if it got hold of them.
It edged along the wall, and when it was just a dozen feet from the cave entrance, something rose before it, higher, and higher still, until it was a long length of muscle and glistening grey flesh in the light of their flashlights.
Along the length of the water creature, small arms or legs opened wide, one set on each of the segments.
“Not a whale, more like some sort of giant caterpillar,” Ally said.
The massive thing’s end opened in a giant maw and it slammed forward to totally cover the fleeing spider-crab.
With a crackle and crunch, the arthropod was ground up as the whale caterpillar pulled back into the water.
Ally looked to Zhukov and his eyes told her exactly what she already knew—the things were big enough to eat them as well.
While the feeding frenzy was finishing, the trio worked to move their raft around the perimeter of the underground lake.
They passed several rock platforms at the water’s edge, and on some, laying out like basking seals, were the grotesque pipe-like creatures, but thankfully much smaller.
“Seems they only stay in the water wh
en they’re bigger,” Ally whispered.
“Or older,” Valentina replied. “Maybe the juvenile stage is less aquatic.”
As they eased past, trying to be as silent as possible, one of the creatures must have got spooked and began to inch upward. The three-foot-long caterpillar glistened in their flashlight beams, and its tiny grasping arms at the front pulled the long, grey bag-like body up the cliff wall.
“Look,” Ally urged.
It headed up toward a dot of red light in the ceiling, which was one of the cones they had encountered to enter the river cave. The thing climbed and slithered vertically and didn’t stop when it got to the hole, it kept going until it vanished outside.
“So, they really are only semi-aquatic,” Ally scoffed. “And now we know who made the cones.”
“Maybe they start out as something different altogether,” Valentina mused. “Maybe another species of the sandworms we encountered.”
Ally and Zhukov were at the front of the raft, with Ally sitting and the Russian captain kneeling and using the paddle. Ally shone her light up and around the walls.
“The cliff walls are getting more broken up with more hand and toe-holds. We might be able to climb soon. At the top, we can open one of those cone entrances and climb out,” she said.
“Do you think the worms will bother us?” he asked.
“They might. But they’re not so big, and there’s not a lot of them,” she replied, sniffed, but then frowned. “You smell something?”
***
At the rear of the raft, Valentina listened to her two companions as they worked on a way out. She felt nothing was in her control anymore, and she was just a hostage to strange events now. She never signed up to come here to this center of the Earth hell. She still felt she was living in some sort of nightmare and any second expected to wake up and find she had been sleeping on the chopper ride to the Kola Borehole.
For some reason, that made her smile.
She was lost in her reverie and didn’t hear the slight tinkle of water or smell the overpowering stink of something from the depths of the Hadean-dark, slime-filled lake. But she did feel the drops of cold water as they began to tinkle down on her.