by Jeff Strand
“What fresh hell is this?”
•
TUESDAY EVENING—Ross started drinking first. In other words, as they all had known, he had been drinking the whole while, but now that they were stranded for the duration of the storm—and it looked like it would be a continuous downpour all night—he made the executive decision to salvage the day and make sure everyone got utterly shitfaced like him. Ross loved to drink, but he preferred that others drank with him. It was easier to deny that he had an alcohol dependency that way.
Gordy initially took it easy with the alcohol intake. He had the thought in his head that the rain would stop soon and he could get them to the cabin where they would start a fire, dry off, and get thoroughly obliterated in front of a campfire. Soon, however, he realized that they would probably be sleeping in the cave and it quickly became apparent that he would never live this down, so he might as well have some fun.
They had all brought some beer, but without a stream in which to refrigerate the cans, it was piss warm, so they started on the hard stuff right away. Gordy and Hector had each brought a couple bottles of cheap rum, Seth had his usual bottle of scotch, and Ross had filled his Camelbak canteen with Kool-Aid and a generous amount of grain alcohol.
Things got stupid rather quickly after that.
After several hours of drinking and praying for the storm to subside, the guys grew restless. The four of them huddled in various stages of undress, waiting for their clothes to dry. Even though there was still at least an hour of daylight remaining before sunset, the rain clouds outside obscured the sun and the illumination inside the cave was little more than a dim glow from the entrance, muted and gray. Gordy did have a couple of flashlights, but he only used them sparingly in order to conserve the batteries on the chance they would be here through the night, namely when they were searching their backpacks for alcohol. During those brief moments of light, they saw that the cave became funnel-shaped, narrower towards the back wall where a small waist-high opening led into darkness.
The howling wind blowing across the cave entrance produced a continuous haunting sigh that hissed off the walls like the final gasps of dying men. A mutual chill traveled up their spines at the sound. Conversation had ceased earlier. Listening to the rain, they had come to the obvious conclusion that they would be staying the night. Hector had already unrolled his sleeping bag and passed out. Gordy had changed out his wet clothes and now sulked next to him in his pajamas until they dried off. Seth sat near the entrance, smoking another cigarette and watching the rain pound the earth mere feet away, while Ross paced around in a nervous circle like a dog waiting by the door to go outside.
“I’m bored, guys.” he said, slurring his words. “This seriously sucks.”
“I said I was sorry, dude. I should’ve known better,” Gordy replied. “Next time we’ll go to Foxwoods and play the slots.”
“Foxwoods?” I’d rather go to a Pats game and tailgate. We could watch them stomp the other team”
“And be home sleeping in our own beds,” interjected Seth.
“Anything would be better”, he said. “Hey Gordo, let me borrow that flashlight for a bit.”
“What for?”
“Just want to walk around the cave a bit and see if we missed anything.”
“Fine,” Gordy said, handing over the SureFire. “Don’t use it for too long. It’s expensive and we may need it later.”
He nodded and flicked on the beam, immediately blinding Gordy, who cursed as he covered his face and stumbled back into the wall. Ross ignored his friend’s pain and walked away, waving the light in a back-and-forth pattern along the walls and floor.
Other than the debris of the past few months—branches, stones and leaves mainly—nothing seemed to stick out and spark his interest, until the flashlight beam washed over the hole on the far wall. He looked in the opening with the light and immediately realized that the small tunnel curved down into a narrow chimney. Aiming the beam down the shaft, he realized something immediately.
“Holy crap, this is deep,” he exclaimed. “I can’t even see a bottom.” To prove his observation, he picked a baseball-sized stone from the floor and dropped it down the hole. Nearly ten seconds later, the sound of it hitting bottom echoed up to them.
Seth looked up sharply and walked over with a curious look on his face.
“Try that again,” he said.
Ross repeated his action and Seth counted the seconds.
“Nine,” he reported.
“Wow … that must be like a football field.”
“Try five of them. It would have to travel a few hundred yards to take that long to hit bottom.”
Ross shook his head in bewilderment. “How do you even remember that? We took Physics over a decade ago.”
“You might still know it too if you didn’t spend your high school years stoned off your ass,” blurted Gordy from the other side of the cave.
Seth laughed as Ross grumbled under his breath. He seemed about to respond with a when he cocked his head and frowned. “Do you hear that?” he said as he stuck his head back in the hole.
“Hear what?” Gordy said. “All I hear is the rain.”
“Ross, give it a rest,” Seth added with a sigh.
“Shhh, shut up! Just shut up! Stop talking and listen!”
Seth and Gordy exchanged worried glances. They had been friends with Ross for a long time. He had a severe inferiority complex and they were well aware that he had a short fuse when he felt he was being mocked, especially when he was drunk. Sometimes it was fun to needle him until he did something that he would regret the next morning, but now was not the time for him to have a meltdown. Neither of them would put it past him to rush out into the night and get lost in the storm where he would probably get struck by a falling limb from a tree or maybe die of hypothermia. That was definitely something they did not want to deal with at that moment.
So they held their tongues and shut up … and, surprisingly, they heard the noise, too.
A slick, rustling sound came directly from the hole in the wall. Hearing it painted a picture in Gordy’s mind of someone crumpling a large amount of cellophane at the bottom of a well. Crackling and echoing up the twisting stone chimney, the noise sounded like a chorus of whispers that moved with an organic ebb and flow.
Ross, grinning at the looks on their faces, proclaimed, “I told you I heard something!”
Seth walked back into the cave to take a look. “It’s gotta be an echo. Some trick of the acoustics warping the sounds of the storm.”
“Maybe an underground stream?” suggested Gordy.
Ross shook his head. “Nah, it seems like something’s moving down there. Up and down the sides of the hole.”
“Shine the flashlight at it.”
“No shit, Sherlock. I’ve already tried that, but it’s too friggin’ deep. The light can’t reach that far down.”
“Let me try looking,” interrupted Seth. Ross handed him the flashlight and he looked down the shaft, carefully aiming for the center of the darkness. Nothing. Shadows and stone walls extending down. That was all.
“Sounds like a giant bowl of Rice Krispies down there, but I still can’t see shit,” he admitted. “It’s black as hell down there.”
An updraft of warm air hit him in the face and he pulled his head out coughing as he tried not to vomit. The smell of rot and methane filled the chamber, so thick they could taste it on their tongues. Hector woke screaming. “Aaauuggh! What is that? It smells like the Devil’s asshole!” He ducked back into his sleeping bag and covered his head. The others covered their faces with their sleeves and alternated between holding their breath and trying not to fall down laughing as he spewed forth a barrage of muffled Spanish profanity.
Seth began shouting in a fake Speedy Gonzalez accent, “Andale! Andale! Es el Culo del Diablo!”
Normally Gordy would have sighed in disapproval when Seth or Ross blurted out an ignorant comment like that, but now he couldn’t even
catch his breath. He was already feeling a bit sick from the amount of rum he had drank and the stench was more than he could handle. Sinking to his knees, he attempted to filter it out by breathing through the fabric of his sweatshirt.
Behind them, Ross was on a mission. He ran to his backpack and pulled out a long thin object wrapped in plastic. He peeled the wrapper off, revealing a bundle of long, thin, brightly-colored cardboard tubes—roman candles left over from the 4th of July. He had planned to light them one night at the cabin, but now seemed more appropriate.
“This’ll light things up,” he laughed as he separated. “I’m gonna shoot this down where the sun don’t shine—right down the Devil’s Asshole.” Pulling out his lighter, he walked to the opening and stuck his head in once more to check if anything had changed.
The smell of decay was even stronger and the beam from the flashlight still could not penetrate the stygian depths of the shaft. “This is gonna be awesome,” he muttered to himself. He flicked the lighter and held the flame to the wick.
Back behind him, both Seth and Gordy were watching. Hector was still huddled in his sleeping bag. Seth was somewhat confused. Gordy, on the other hand, felt nervous when Ross pulled out the fireworks, but he couldn’t think clearly.
“Ross—” he said. “What are you—?”
The wick sparked and ignited. Ross pointed it down the hole and prepared for the pyrotechnics to begin. All at once, the pieces all clicked together and Gordy knew what was wrong.
Methane.
Fire.
“Stoooopppppp!” Gordy screamed, but it was far too late. The gas ignited and a plume of fire exploded into the main cave.
•
Something was making the dog lose its mind. It straddled the edge of the shit pit in the center of the yard and howled so loud that it seemed its throat would rupture. Gordy recognized it as the one he considered the alpha male of the Timusovs’ pack of untamed mutts. He didn’t know its name, but since one of its favorite activities during the winter was to scour Gordy’s yard for frozen poopsicles for a midday snack, he liked to think of it as the Unholy Ravenous Turdmonster.
The Turdmonster was an extremely large dog. Scratch that—it was freaking humongous. There was obviously some St. Bernard blood in its bloodline, or perhaps a Bull Mastiff, or some breed that regularly gets mistaken for a horse or a baby mammoth. Gordy also thought that there might be some poodle in its lineage since its hair, though matted, overgrown and filthy, was on the curly side. If it weighed anything less than two hundred pounds, Gordy would eat his hat.
Though it could have intimidated anyone who was unfamiliar with it, Turdmonster had never bothered Gordy or scared him. Before today, he had only heard his canine neighbor bark a few times, and those instances were in response to other dogs yapping down the street. To be honest, Gordy’s backyard would have been much more unsanitary if it hadn’t been regularly looking for some snacks. Whenever Gordy came out during one of its frozen feces foraging missions, it just gave him a look that said Okay, okay, hold your horses, buddy. I’m outta here, and then he slunk into the woods between the yards. The unspoken agreement between them had always been that neither one of them would deny the other passage through the backyard. It was an amicable truce.
As its booming barks echoed through his and the neighbors’ yards, Gordy went to look out the screen door to see what was causing the canine meltdown. The Turdmonster was thoroughly enraged by something in the hole where Gordy had had his unfortunate accident earlier. Quietly, he stepped out onto his back deck, careful to avoid the boards that creaked, and leaned against the wooden railing to get a closer look.
Now that he was closer, he heard a whisper of something in the air in the few moments between the barks and growls. Bubble wrap, he thought. Sounds like someone is popping bubble wrap. A shitload of it. The weird noise was coming directly from the makeshift toilet. He wanted to go investigate, but, with the Turdmonster in a mindless frenzy less than ten yards away, he realized that the idea was ill-advised.
Seconds later, the opportunity presented itself. Turdmonster leaned forward sniffing and whining at what he saw in the hollow. The big dog appeared confused and frightened. A hole filled with shit wasn’t something it found every day, but it seemed to sense that something was off kilter. The bubble wrap noise seemed to increase in pitch and a flash of movement lashed at Turdmonster’s muzzle. He reared backwards with a sharp yelp of pain. The dog scrambled frantically away from the hole and turned tail, yipping in panic as it ran away, blood leaking from a deep circular wound that had been ripped from its nose by whatever had attacked it.
What the hell just happened here? Gordy thought to himself. He looked around but the Turdmonster was long gone, having run off into the trees.
Did something attack the dog? What the hell is in that hole? He would rather not see the contents, considering where they had come from, but he had to see what had scared the dog away.
Taking the wooden stairs gingerly, Gordy stepped down to his lawn and walked to the edge of the hole, wincing with every movement. He still heard the popping bubble wrap sounds and they were growing louder as he came closer. Reaching the hole, he peered in and immediately staggered back, nauseated by what he saw.
He had expected to see the remnants of a soup of blood and feces soaking into the earth. Not pleasant at all, but instead the pit revealed a mass of worms writhing and churning in the stew. No, not worms—worms didn’t have scarlet pincers and mandibles and dozens of small, thorny, chitinous limbs. Worms weren’t translucent and their innards weren’t visible—at least Gordy didn’t think so. He could see clumps of the most recent meal they had eaten (and he was pretty certain he knew what had been on the menu) passing through their abdomens.
Again, Gordy felt sick to his stomach and more than a little afraid. Did he really crap those things out, and were any still inside him? He steeled himself and peeked over the edge again to get a second look. This time, he forced himself to take note of the details, regardless of how disgusting they were. If more of these worms/grubs/larvae were actually still inside him, he would need to be able to describe them to the doctor. They could be some type of exotic parasite that he had picked up in the woods. Who knew what diseases he could have now?
The larvae swam in the pool of waste, rolling over each other in a slimy tangle. Their constant motion and chittering mandibles were the source of the bubble wrap sounds. Gordy realized now that he couldn’t delay any longer. He had to go to the ER immediately, and he needed to bring a sample of the larvae so they could quickly identify what they were. To do that, he needed some tools.
A not-so-quick trip to the kitchen later, he was back at the hole with New England Patriots souvenir cup (that Hector had left in his sink last week), and a plastic ladle (which he would toss in the trash as soon as he was finished with it).
“Ugh, this is vile,” he muttered as he skimmed a couple of the smaller larvae from the surface of the pool into the cup. Each were about an inch long and they began wriggling furiously as soon as they were pulled away from the warm comfort of the pit. Violently, even. As if they were calling for help …
Gordy secured the lid of the cup and turned to walk back into the house and call for a ride to the ER when something jabbed his left ankle. All strength in that leg and fell to his knees. A sensation of burning acid spread past his knee into his thigh. He looked back to see what had attacked him. One of the larvae was attached to his leg, but this one was much larger than the ones in the cup. By a factor of ten, at least, perhaps as much as twenty times larger. It was the size of his forearm with serrated pincers larger than his thumb buried in the meat of his left calf. The larva squeezed the pincers again, cutting deeper into the meat. Through the jelly-like flesh, Gordy could see a gland beneath each of the pincers pumping the acidic venom into his muscle.
With each squeeze, the burning crimson liquid seared inside him, cauterizing his pain receptors and gradually numbing his lower leg, but Gordy was too shoc
ked to care. The sight of the giant gelatinous larva had triggered a critical synapse in his brain, opening the floodgates, and he remembered the missing days.
He remembered every horrible second.
•
The explosion was instantaneous. A blinding white radiance filled the cave, followed milliseconds later by an equally powerful swell of scorching heat that had the three of them diving for the cave floor to escape it. And then, as soon as it happened, it was over.
The cave smelled like burning hair and ozone. A high-pitched ringing muffled their screams. Hector whimpered in panic from inside his sleeping bag; Seth and Gordy were sprawled on the cave floor, amazed that they were still alive; and Ross leaned against the wall, moaning in pain. Even in the dim light of the cave, it was apparent that he had taken the brunt of the explosion in the face. His hair and eyebrows were singed and the skin on his face was bright red as if he had been sunbathing without any sunblock for hours.
“Asshole!” screamed Seth, losing his usual cool composure, “You stupid, braindead burnout asshole! What the fuck were you thinking, Ross? Have you killed every single brain cell in your skull?”
“Dude,” muttered Ross. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”
“It was a mistake that could have gotten us all killed, man,” said Gordy. “You gotta tone it down with the ‘crazy and unpredictable’ act. It’s old.”
“Man, I said I was sorry! We wouldn’t have been here if you had …”
“Gimme a break, Ross. That’s beside the point. My mistake has no connection to your decision to shoot a roman candle off at all.”
Hector sat up suddenly and cocked his ear. “Guys, is it me or is that weird noise getting a lot louder?”
“What?”
“That noise,” he said, pointing toward the opposite wall with the hole where the fire. He was right. In the minute since Ross’ adventures with gunpowder, the sounds echoing from the hole had steadily increased in volume until it could easily be heard from every area of the cave. Needing a distraction to calm his nerves, Seth walked over to the gap in the wall and stuck his head in to look down the shaft.