Quest Chasers: The Deadly Cavern (A Magic Fantasy Adventure Book Series)

by Thomas Lockhaven

  Eevie followed behind Tommy as he dove down about two feet below the surface. Sure enough, she could see them: a series of rock handles that traveled horizontally along the wall in roughly eighteen-inch intervals.

  Instead of fighting the current, they let the water pull their bodies almost horizontal as they began their arduous journey.

  I’m never eating salmon again, thought Tommy. Anything that has to fight this hard to survive deserves to live.

  Tommy and Eevie quickly created a pattern to pace themselves. Four stone handles forward, breathe, rest for thirty seconds, repeat. After what seemed like an eternity, Tommy could see a torrent of bubbles and rushing water. It was a waterfall. There was no way around; they would have to try and fight through the deluge of water.

  Tommy signaled up with his thumb. He wanted them to get as much air as possible before battling the waterfall. They descended quickly and Tommy grabbed the rock handles with all his might. Water came crashing down onto him, making it impossible to see. I hope Eevie is OK!

  Ugh! Tommy slammed face first into solid rock. No, it can’t be!

  "Come Closer” – Is Never a Good Thing

  Two seconds later, Eevie slammed into the back of Tommy. She looked confusedly at him. A huge boulder was blocking their path. Tommy motioned for Eevie’s hand and swam up to the top of the huge boulder. Gripping with all of his might, he looked for a way around the stone. His lungs were screaming, his grip with Eevie was starting to slip, and he knew she needed air. He pushed off hard, and Eevie pulled with all her might to haul him in. That’s when he saw it—a channel carved into the wall, hidden by the stone.

  He and Eevie quickly kicked, grabbed their reeds, and sucked in much-needed oxygen for a couple of minutes. Tommy fought back fear. He had exhausted himself, and his lungs needed more air than he was able to suck in. Calm yourself, Tommy. Almost there. Calm yourself.

  Eevie looked worried. There was no way for Tommy to describe what he saw, and he was about to ask her to follow him into a place they may not be able to escape from. He gave her the signal to stay. He wasn’t about to have her risk her life for him again.

  Tommy wedged himself between the huge boulder and the rock wall. Pushing ferociously, he was able to slowly work his way up to the top of the boulder, and then he was free of the water. He sucked in deep mouthfuls of air. To the right was a hidden series of carved stones leading upward.

  Eevie began to shake; the water was freezing. It helped to move, but staying still, her body was beginning to convulse. Come on, Tommy!

  Just then, she saw Tommy’s backpack. She could just make out Tommy’s hands, gripping it tightly. Does he want me to take his backpack? Is he stuck?

  Eevie gripped the backpack only to have it ripped out of her hands. What is he doing? her mind screamed.

  The backpack reappeared again. This time she grabbed it and hung on. She felt herself being pulled up. Her reed broke loose, and she turned her head to see it immediately crushed in the churning water. Using her legs, she pushed herself while Tommy pulled her to the top of the boulder. With her nose just a few inches from the ceiling, she gulped in air. She was alive, Tommy was alive, and that was all that mattered.

  “You made it!” said Tommy breathlessly.

  Eevie nodded. “Invitation via backpack officially accepted.”

  Tommy pointed at the rocky wall. “Those carved rocks go up about 20 feet, and above that...!”

  “Light!” said Eevie excitedly.

  Eevie didn’t wait for a second invitation and began crawling hand over hand up the wall. She could hear Tommy panting as he followed close behind her. A pale, flickering light beckoned Eevie onward. At the top of the stairs, Eevie could see a narrow passage cut through the stone. Cautiously, she pulled her head and shoulders through the opening. She let out an audible gasp.

  “What is it?” asked Tommy, clambering up the makeshift steps behind her. Eevie pulled herself the rest of the way through the small opening. Slowly, she turned in a circle, taking in the room.

  The room was small and cold and veiled in thick shadows. The air was moldy and heavy, making their eyes burn and water. Flames flickered atop long, thin black candles, sending thick rivulets of melting wax dripping down the ragged stone walls to the floor.

  Carved into the walls were hundreds of white faces, their eyes closed as if in prayer. In the center of the room was an altar of sorts, carved out of what looked like white marble. A huge, ragged, leather-bound book lay on top.

  “Who...,” said Eevie crossing her arms and shivering. “It’s freezing in here.”

  “More like creepy,” whispered Tommy.

  “Fine, creepy and cold,” agreed Eevie.

  Tommy dropped to one knee and opened his backpack. He pulled out Eevie’s hoodie and sneakers.

  “Thanks,” said Eevie through chattering teeth.

  Tommy carefully unrolled his favorite hoodie. The razor-sharp hair fell to the ground, making a hollow, metallic ting sound. He held his hoodie up; light shone through the jagged cuts in the fabric. “Great...it looks like Edward Scissorhands is my tailor.”

  “Don’t complain—you have a brand new set of clothes to wear to church.”

  “Church?” Tommy asked, confused.

  “Yes,” laughed Eevie, “because they’re holy.”

  “Eev... really?” said Tommy, shaking his head.

  “Holy, get it?”

  “Yes, can we please move past this awkward moment and focusing on getting out of here?”

  “No one is ever going to believe us when we finally get out of here,” said Eevie, looking at the faces on the wall. Did one of the faces open its eyes? An ice-cold chill ran up her spine and she walked over to Tommy’s side. She stared again. It was a face near the bottom, she was sure.

  “Can you blame them?” asked Tommy, continuing the conversation and walking toward the altar. “Eevie, check your phone. See if you have any battery left. We can at least take a few pictures as proof.”

  “Are you sure we want to waste what little battery we have left? What if we get a signal?”

  “I hardly think a couple of pictures is going to kill your phone.”

  Eevie shrugged and grabbed her phone from Tommy’s backpack.

  “It’s at eighteen percent,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “OK, just take two or three pictures of the room. Like those creepy faces, the old book...”

  Eevie turned toward the wall of faces. The flash from her camera blinded them.

  “Ah, you scorched my eyes again,” said Tommy, watching globs of orange and greenish white light dance across his line of vision.

  “Then close your eyes,” said Eevie, shaking her head. “I’m going to take one of the book and the altar-looking thing.”

  Another flash illuminated the room.

  “OK, done. We now have proof.”

  “Eevie, I’m gonna take the book too. Who knows what we’ll find inside?”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” said Eevie, shaking her head. “I’ve seen too many movies about bad things happening to good people when they take something that isn’t theirs.”

  “Eevie,” said Tommy seriously, “this book might answer a lot of questions. We have no idea where we are, and why this is happening to us.”

  “I guess,” said Eevie, still hesitant.

  Tommy grabbed the book and pulled. It wouldn’t budge, as if it was glued to the altar. He tried to open the book; the pages seemed to be sealed together. “What the heck?”

  Tommy pulled and pushed from every angle. “Maybe it’s not even really a book.”

  “Maybe we should just leave it alone and keep going.”

  Tommy looked at her disappointedly. “It could have clues, you know. Did you at least get a picture of it?”

  “Yes.”

  Eevie opened the photos on her phone.

  “Here are the faces.” She quickly swiped to the next pict
ure. “And here’s the book.”

  They both saw it at once. The flash had made visible what couldn’t be seen with the naked eye.

  “Eevie, there is something on the cover of the book!”

  “I see it. I see it,” whispered Eevie excitedly.

  “Eevie, take a close-up picture of the book, like right on top of it.”

  Eevie held her phone directly over the book. “Close your eyes. I don’t want to scorch them again,” smirked Eevie.

  Tommy just stared at her, nodding his head and giving her the “come on, come on” gesture with his hand.

  Like lightning, the flash illuminated the room.

  Eevie stepped back and opened the picture.

  “Whoa,” whispered Tommy.

  The book cover revealed the word “APERIO,” and under that, an outline of a human hand.

  “You don’t suppose...,” whispered Eevie.

  “APERIO,” said Tommy, directed at the book.

  Disappointingly, nothing happened. Eevie placed her hand on the book, on top of the invisible hand on the cover. “APERIO.”

  Again, nothing.

  “Did you use the same hand as in the picture?”

  “I think so,” said Eevie, opening the image again.

  Tommy placed his hand over the invisible hand. “APERIO!”

  Suddenly, the serpent’s eyes on his ring glowed blood red. He quickly pulled his hand away. The cover flew open. As if by an invisible hand, pages turned to the center of the book.

  Tommy couldn’t turn away. On the page were two closed eyes and the words “Come Closer.”

  “Tommy, what is it?”

  Tommy’s voice caught in his throat. “Two eyes and the words ‘Come Closer,’” he whispered hoarsely.

  Suddenly the eyes flew open. Tommy screamed, jerking his head back. A face appeared and as if the page were made of stretch silk, the face began to come out of the book. Tommy tried to jump away, but from the altar, two marble hands locked around his wrist.

  Tommy twisted and pulled, screaming. The face began whispering, “Come closer.”

  Eevie screamed, grabbing the book. She tried to close the cover. She tried to pull Tommy away with all her might, but nothing.

  She looked for a huge rock to smash the book, and then she saw it, the spider’s hair. Rushing over, she picked it up. She grimaced as it cut through her flesh, warm blood running down her fingers. She ran over to the book and with one hand steadying the steely hair and one hand atop, she drove it down into the face. A horrific scream cried out. Tommy ripped his hands free, falling onto the floor. He looked up and all of the eyes on the wall opened.

  Eevie grabbed the book. The face was still screaming, black, bloody ink dripping from the face to the ground. The book writhed and fought in her hands. She ripped and tore at the pages. Spinning, she slammed the book against the wall, driving the spider hair completely through the book.

  Tommy grabbed the book from her, rushed over to the stone ladder, and threw the book down into the raging waterfall.

  Eevie stood shaking, adrenaline coursing through her body. She held her bloody hands against her chest.

  “You OK?” asked Tommy, his eyes filled with worry.

  “Tommy, those eyes,” she said, not wanting to look at the wall.

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re watching us.”

  “I know...” said Tommy angrily.

  Inside, he was battling the desire to smash each and every one of those faces into oblivion.

  “What do you think that was, Tommy? What do they want from us?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know one thing. Whoever it was has a massive headache now.”

  Eevie smiled at her friend. Her heart felt like it added an extra beat now when she looked at him.

  “Oh, and I do know one other thing.” Tommy was still talking. “You know the saying ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’?” Tommy shook his head. “They have no idea.”

  “None.”

  The eyes followed their every movement.

  Eevie picked up the scraps of paper she had torn from the book. Many of the pages were covered in bloody black ink, but a few of the pages she could see contained a lot of text.

  Tommy shuddered when he saw the pages from the book.

  “What do they say?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Eevie. “I can’t tell if this is Latin or what language it’s written in.”

  “If we make it out of here, we’ll have the pictures and these pages as proof that this awful place exists.”

  Tommy walked back to the altar. Where the book had been before, a single black stone lay in a hollowed-out depression. Tommy picked up the glistening stone. He looked at the wall of staring faces.

  One of the faces stared back with only one eye. Tommy walked toward the face. The face immediately tried to close his eye, but Tommy was too fast. He quickly pushed the black stone into the empty eye socket.

  There was a loud grating sound as the wall beside them groaned and shook, revealing a staircase.

  “Oh, cool,” said Eevie.

  Then her expression soured. “It leads down, Tommy; it leads down.”

  Eevie felt Tommy’s hand on her shoulder. Hot tears began to well up in her eyes. She thought about her family, her friends. This seemed more like a horrible nightmare where she was fighting and fighting to wake up, but the dream world had other ideas.

  “Eevie! Eevie!” Tommy’s voice finally broke through. “The wall is closing! Hurry!”

  Tommy pushed Eevie through the opening. A thin slab of rock barely large enough for them to stand on was all that separated them from a series of steps that descended at least a hundred feet into the cave. On either side of them stood solid walls of rock.

  Wham! Eevie and Tommy jumped as the wall slammed shut beside them, sending up a cloud of dust and debris.

  “Geez,” exhaled Tommy, whipping around. “I guess we overstayed our welcome.”

  They looked down the narrow stairway; the angle was impossibly steep. The walls were illuminated by thin, black candles that stood like centurions.

  “It makes me dizzy just looking down there,” said Eevie, peering over the edge.

  “We don’t really have a choice. We’ll just go down slowly and take our time. We can use the walls to balance ourselves,” said Tommy reassuringly.

  Eevie placed her hand onto the wall and placed her foot onto the first step. She turned slowly to Tommy. “One step down, ninety-nine to...”

  Eevie never got to finish her sentence as the step crumbled beneath her. She screamed. Throwing her arms up, she grabbed a candle holder. The candle holder turned downwards, and hot wax poured onto Eevie, searing her hand and wrist. As Eevie screamed out in pain, the candle holder ripped from the wall and Eevie plunged downwards. Throwing out her arms, she clung to the next step as her feet dangled into blackness where the first step had been.

  “Tommy!” screamed Eevie as the step crumbled under her fingertips.

  I'm Falling for You

  Tommy didn’t hesitate. He jumped down onto the third step, clawing at the walls so he didn’t lose his balance. Eevie’s hands were scrambling at the step as it disintegrated, crashing down into the unknown.

  Tommy knelt down. His foot slipped to the step below him. It shattered under his weight, falling into nothingness. Tommy regained his balance, then crouched on the tiny step and grabbed Eevie’s hands. Placing his back against the wall, he pulled with all his might. Her hands were slippery and wet with sweat. Tommy closed his eyes. He leaned back even more, his body now precariously hovering over empty space where the step had been. The fact that the crumbling steps never seemed to hit the ground did not escape him.

  Eevie’s hand slipped. Tommy screamed and yanked so hard he thought he might snap her arm out of joint. Half of Eevie’s body was now on the step. As if pulling up a bucket using a rope, Tommy worked his way down her arm, pulling her
closer and closer onto him, until at last, Eevie lay across his legs and chest.

  For a long time, she didn’t move. She felt dizzy and sick. Angry, hot tears streamed down her cheeks. Tommy closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing. They had both narrowly escaped death and he couldn’t keep his body from shaking. For now, they seemed safe on a step that was barely wider than Tommy’s leg.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Eevie looked up at Tommy, her eyes red and swollen. “At least this step held...but who knows about the others.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. Every single puzzle has been set up to move us through this nightmare maze to get to somewhere.”

  Eevie listened silently.

  “Why would they make a stairway that is impossible to get down? They wouldn’t,” said Tommy, answering his own question. “We just have to figure this out without falling into the eternal abyss of death. So far we know that the first two steps crumbled but this one held. So I suggest we use this step as home base and carefully try to test the other steps.”

  “I was thinking,” said Eevie, wiping the tears from her face with the back of her hand, “that maybe it’s some sort of a test. If you make it through the maze, then...hopefully, you’re free. But, those who didn’t make it through the maze are never heard from again. Does that make sense?”

  “Nothing makes sense, Eevie. Honestly, I think that at any moment, I’m going to wake up and all of this will have been a dream. Ouch, what the heck? Why did you pinch me?”

  “You’re welcome,” smiled Eevie. “You’re not dreaming.”

  “Can we please get back to testing my step theory? You’re invading my personal space.”

  Eevie smiled. She needed this. She needed a plan, something to move them forward. Her near-death experience had really shaken her, and it helped to have Tommy take the lead.

  Tommy carefully stood as if on a tightrope. He stretched his arms out. He was easily able to touch each wall with his outstretched hands. Keeping one foot on the step and supporting most of his body weight with his hands, he smashed his right foot onto the next step.

  Eevie gasped as the step immediately collapsed. Quickly, Tommy brought his foot back to safety. They both listened and listened...nothing.