The Black

by Paul E. Cooley

  Marcus is back behind me now. I don’t know why. He seems to like being around me, for some reason. Maybe he just likes having someone around who he can feel superior to. Well, it's either that or he fancies me. That doesn’t make me feel any better, though. He’s got a wife and three kids, and there’s no way I’m being the bitch who splits up that happy family. Not that I’d want to. Marcus is hardly my type.

  He’s blathering on about something, but I’m not really listening. Why would I be when there's so much wonder surrounding me? This part of the cave is something else; that much is for sure. Brendan keeps pausing to study the rock surface, and every now and again, he shakes his head, his expression caught perfectly between excitement and bewilderment. I don’t blame him. I’m pretty excited about it all, too. The walls are covered in a strange slime – probably some kind of chemotrophic bacteria or something along those lines given the lack of sunlight down here – and it glows. As in ‘eldritch grotto’ glows. It’s a weird, bluish green light that is unlike anything I have ever experienced outside of a rave, and it serves absolutely no biological purpose whatsoever, given that everything down here has evolved in pitch-blackness. It's like the cave wants us down here.

  The going is pretty easy now – a few large boulders to scramble over and one partially choked bolt hole are our only real obstacles. There’s evidence of the rocks being moved about, which in turn makes my thoughts shift to the Alpha Team. I’m not surprised that we haven’t come across much in the way of evidence of their passage – the motto of any caver worth his or her salt is ‘take nothing but experience, leave nothing but memory' – and considering just how important this discovery might be, they’ve even got us shitting in special plastic bags that desiccates everything down to almost nothing so we can carry all and any waste back home – but I still cant’ help feel a little twinge of something that skirts the edge of worry. There’s no evidence they were here, but that also means there’s no evidence of what happened to them, and that’s playing on my mind. Are we about to walk into the same trap they did?

  “Fucking hell…” Nik breathes up ahead. Behind him, Fi is shaking her head in disbelief. I clamber up the small section of scree and join them.

  Fucking hell indeed.

  We knew the Alpha Team had discovered something huge when we first received their footage. Their reactions also spoke of their awe at their discovery, but just like most wonders of the world, nothing beats experiencing it first hand.

  The ledge we are standing on drops down about fifteen feet onto what I can only describe as a beach, covered with a glittering, black sand. The nearby cliff sides are all covered in that weird glowing chemotrophic bacteria, making the whole thing look like some kind faerie underworld of legend. But that’s not what’s making us swear and our jaws drop.

  The sea does that.

  The first time I went to America, I witnessed the majesty of Lake Champlain. Being a Brit, I thought I knew what a lake looked like (Windermere, if you’re curious), but when I first saw Champlain, I realised what I’d seen before were mere puddles.

  This body of water exceeds that.

  “How far do you think it goes?” Marcus asks. Beside me, Brendan shrugs.

  “It could just be a trick of the, uh, light, but we’d hypothesised the body of water down here rivalled the Black Sea in size, and it looks like we might have been right.”

  The Black Sea. Yeah, that feels an appropriate comparison. It stretches out as far as any of us can see. Beyond this cave, there is nothing – just a huge expanse of inky water. It’s eerie; on the surface you have the horizon to help you judge distance, but here there is nothing, making it both daunting and claustrophobic at the same time. The nearest analogy I can think of might be looking into the vast depths of space. A strange sense of vertigo overtakes me, and for a moment, I feel like I’m floating. I reach out and grab the nearest thing to me, which happens to be Janos.

  “Dr Stoker,” he says and stops me from pitching forwards. “Are you all right?”

  I nod and swallow hard, but can’t trust myself to speak. Not yet, anyway.

  We begin our descent one after the other. As usual, Nik goes first, declaring the climb a piece of piss – lots of hand holes in the pitted surface. Janos hangs back with me, and I’m a little miffed. Has he been told to keep an eye on me? I won’t lie – his solid presence is a comfort, so I don’t complain.

  Nik is right; the climb is pretty easy, and before long we are all standing on that strange beach, staring at the sea. The air has a briny tang to it, and the glowing bacteria forms thick mats on the rocks nearest the shoreline, outlining the seashore in phosphorescence. Brendan stoops down and cups his hand in the water before swilling a little in his mouth. I’m not sure how wise that is, but I’m not here to stop him.

  “Yep. Salt,” he says. “And warmer than I was expecting. Could be there's some hydrothermal activity down there.”

  “In a sedimentary cave system?” Fi asks. She doesn’t do much to disguise her disdain. I don’t think she likes Brendan all that much.

  “Depends,” I say, feeling the need to defend my fellow scientist. “The upper part of the system is sedimentary, but if this body of water is deep enough, it could just be overlaying a geologically active zone. It isn’t unheard of.”

  “But that would mean it could be thousands of feet deep.”

  I shrug. “It could be.”

  “How long do you think it has been isolated from the surface?” Nik asks.

  Again, I shrug. “I don’t know. They were fracking Jurassic shale, so in theory, we could be looking at, what, one hundred and sixty million years?”

  Marcus lets out a low whistle. “One hundred and sixty million? Are you serious?”

  “Well, I’m not a paleobiologist… but yeah, we could be.”

  “So, if anything is living in there, it could have been cut off from the rest of evolution for nearly two hundred million years?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If anything is living in there,” Fi says.

  “Actually, the chances of there being something in there are pretty good,” says Brendan. “If the presence of bacteria indicates this system is still biologically active, there's no reason why not. Samples from other such isolated bodies of water indicate that life is quite capable of thriving independently of the outside world. Take Lake Vostok, for example. They went looking for bacteria and found fish.”

  “You think there might be fish in there?” Marcus says.

  “Could be.” Brendan grins, and I can’t help smile. His enthusiasm is infectious. “Who knows?”

  PREDATOR X is available from Amazon here