Cave Crawlers

by Alex Laybourne

  “What the …?” Justin began, when suddenly the light from Declan’s helmet shifted away from the body, to the blood pool that was slowly spreading over the surrounding rock.

  Justin watched and his heart froze in his chest as he saw what lead away from the creature’s body.

  “Declan,” Justin began his words nothing but icy lumps in his mouth.

  He didn’t need to say anything further, because he saw the tremor in the beam of light, and heard Declan’s fear-laden exhalations, shuddering releases of breaths held for too long.

  Leading away from the body, tracking through the blood were footprints, oddly misshapen but clearly human in origin.

  The heel print, the ball of the foot, and then the imprint of toes clearly marked in blood, hurried deeper into the darkness.

  “Declan,” Justin repeated, his mind unable to conjure any other word. His heart still felt as if it refused to beat, and the sweat that had covered his body had now frozen, leading him to shudder.

  “Maybe … maybe it’s not what it looks like,” Declan said, his words about as convincing as a used car salesman during a late-night advert break.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Justin said, his eyes locked on the prints. “We’re hurt, exhausted, we are seeing things.”

  “Exactly.” Neither brother truly believed what they were saying, but there was a comfort to be found in the shared lie, a twisted understanding that if others bought into it, then surely there was a chance that it was true.

  They stared at the footprints until the trail became dry, the creature behind them dead, and starting to stink, the odor rising from its stinking carcass already attracting the first round of bugs to the feast. With little option but to keep moving, they set off, making their way through the dark, the light firmly focused on the floor now, as if they were tracking the fleeing figure, rather than praying they could avoid making contact with it.

  The tunnel continued on in an upward gradient, hitting moments of a steep incline that made it hard for walking. Once again, the walls began to expand around them and feed them into another large chamber, only this one was far from empty.

  The ground was littered with bones, both in the form of fully complete skeletons as well as individual bones ripped from bodies and casually discarded. The stench of death was heavy in the air, and as they stood in horror, their backs pressed hard against the walls of the cave, both Declan and Justin saw fresher kills, with rotting meat still sitting on the festering corpses.

  There were spiders and bugs, and four-legged creatures of a range of shapes and sizes. Clothing lay strewn about the carnage as if ripped from struggling bodies in the eager quest for meat.

  There was a savagery that hung in the room, and the screams of those long since dead still seemed to echo around. It was a chamber of horrors, hidden beneath the surface of the world, a place where cruelty reigned supreme and compassion was a concept never heard before.

  “What the hell is this place?” Justin asked.

  “It’s their meat locker,” Declan replied.

  Justin snapped his head up to look at his brother, ready to admonish him for a poor taste and timing in using humor, only he saw from Declan’s face that he was not joking. They were inside the meat locker of whatever lived in the caves. They were trapped inside a hellish reality; the stuff late-night movies were made of. Only their blood would not be corn syrup, it would be real, and if they were not careful, it would be spilled by the bucket load.

  They carefully picked their way around the edge of the cave, pausing as they stepped over the remains of a young girl, her body a heap, the legs stripped of flesh and meat, the bones beneath scratched and scarred with deep gouges. A crack ran along the length of her left femur, and black marrow had bubbled up through the fault, spilling over the bone, staining it like rot.

  “Look,” Declan said, staring at the body, the remaining flesh of her torso shining blue under the light of the torch.

  “I’d rather not,” Justin said, feeling his stomach churn, the acidic taste of vomit rising in his mouth while saliva flooded his mouth in an effort to help wash away the looming pre-taste of what was to come.

  “No, look. She’s fresh, but look at her chest.” Declan held the light on the girl, who could not have been more than late teens if she was a day.

  There could be no mistaking the crudely stitched up lines of the Y-incision that had sliced across the top of her breasts and down towards her pelvis. The stitching was cheap, the job rushed, with no care or attention given to the girl.

  “That’s from an autopsy,” Justin said, finally realizing what his brother had been trying to tell him.

  “Exactly, so that means somebody is actually dumping bodies down here.” Declan looked at his brother, blinding him with the light from the helmet.

  “To hide them?” Justin asked.

  “To feed them,” Declan added, his words inducing another shiver that thickened Justin’s blood to the point of freezing. His entire body ached from the pain of pushing semi-solidified blood through his veins. He felt as if he might split open, a fitting end to join the pile of the dead they had just discovered.

  “Who are they?” Justin found strength in his words, realizing that if he kept his mind busy, he gave himself less chance to focus on the horror of their situation.

  Declan turned around, leaving Justin in near darkness, giving him a moment to realize that the sea of bones was reflecting the light and actually helping him see more of the cavern. He shuddered and moved closer to Declan.

  Declan took a sharp breath, a painful sound that brought Justin’s heart to a stop. “Holy shit, would you look at that,”

  “What?” Justin asked, his eyes seeing the etchings just as he spoke.

  The walls around them were covered in paintings and symbols. Most looked more like hieroglyphics than anything else, but there was something about their structure that made Justin feel as though he could somehow read them, or at least glean a modicum of understanding from them.

  His eyes moved over the figures. The stick images were crude, yet when viewed as a whole they created scenes. Each scene appeared to correspond to the image closest to them.

  “It’s a story,” Justin said, as he felt his mind getting drawn deeper into the imagery.

  “You can read this?” Declan asked, surprised.

  “No, but … well, it kind of reminds me of my first job in tech. I was coding for some shitty piece of software, and none of it made sense. Not just because I was new, but because the code was a mess. But you had the code in the back end, and the screens the users see. If you look at it from both sides, then things started to make a little more sense. This is kind of like that. Here, take a look at these.” Justin pointed up to the closest group of pictures that showed a circle of stick figures surrounding a central figure that seemed to be lying prone on the ground before them. “That text there goes with this image, and it moves into this one here.”

  The next image showed the prone figure in pieces, the head, legs, and arms pulled apart, while the heads of those surrounding it were painted a rust-tinted red.

  “They cut up and ate that man. Sacrificed him, maybe. The symbols would tell us if only we could actually read them.” Justin’s eyes moved slowly over the walls, the intrigue into the macabre story they told distracting his mind from the horrors that surrounded them, as if reading about the hall somehow made it a work of fiction and thus removed the truth from the floor around them.

  “You don’t think that this is them, do you?” Declan asked, once again turning to look at his brother.

  “Who?” Justin looked at Declan confused.

  “Them, that camp of people that got chased away back when people were first settling here,” Declan said. “The ones Ben and Trevor told us about?”

  Justin gave a laugh. It was a sudden and unexpected reaction, and it felt extremely alien to him. “That was just a campfire ghost story.”

  “Really, then how do you explain a cave full of bone
s, a mother-fucking corpse that’s had a full autopsy done on it, and all of these drawings.” Declan spoke faster and faster, his voice rising in pitch as his nerves finally started to break through the thick wall he held them all behind.

  Justin paused, unsure how to answer it. Declan had pulled him out of the theory that it was all just in his head and rooted him back into the sobering present.

  “Well … that was hundreds of years ago,” Justin started, but stopped as the light of the helmet began to flicker.

  Declan shook the helmet and the light came back on. He held it in his hands at an angle that highlighted the wall higher up than they had been looking. What the beam highlighted left no doubt in their minds, for there could be no confusing the lettering there. Crawleigh was spelled in large block capitals, the dye used long since faded, but what remained was as clear to the brothers as a lighthouse beacon on a misty night.

  Justin opened his mouth and swallowed, his throat suddenly as dry as the morning after a heavy drinking session.

  He spun around as something caused the bones behind them to clatter. They head the pattering of footsteps, but the darkness offered them nothing. By the time Declan had the helmet spun around, there was nothing.

  “It’s nothing. Just our imaginations running wild,” Declan told his brother, but it was clear from his tone that he didn’t believe himself either.

  That’s when the darkness laughed at them, a high-pitched, child-like laugh; dainty and carefree. Both looked up and saw the figure standing at the entrance to the central tunnel. It looked like a little girl, but the instant the light pick up on her form, she turned and ran. Her movements were skittish and somewhat disjointed, but there could be no denying that she was not a bug.

  “Hey,” Declan called out.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Justin gasped, lashing out with a backhand across Declan’s arm.

  “She could help us find a way out,” Declan said.

  Justin gave an irritated snort before answering, “If they knew a way out, do you really think they would still be living underground?”

  Declan ignored his brother’s snide remarks and kept his voice as level as possible. “Those bodies got down here somehow. Either they went up and got them, or someone delivered them here. Either way, they know how to get out.”

  Justin didn’t realize it, but they were walking after the girl whether he liked it or not. It was only when they entered the tunnel and the walls closed in around him again that he realized what was going on.

  The tunnel was tight, and he needed to stoop down in order to walk through. Etchings and images covered the walls, like modern-day graffiti; images and characters, words and lines of text. They covered the rock, overlapping each other with no real sense of continuity. Unlike the story being told in the bone chamber, this was a jumble built up over the years and the centuries.

  “Wait for a second,” Justin said before they had moved too far away from the chamber.

  “What?” Declan asked.

  “We should arm ourselves … just in case.” Justin looked back toward the chamber.

  “That might not be a bad idea,” Declan said, giving the first indication of the fear he felt coursing through his veins.

  Returning to the chamber, they each grabbed a femur, and after testing them for signs of a break or decomposition, or anything else that may impact the integrity of their weapons, they returned to the pursuit.

  They could not hear the girl, the echo of her laugh long since extinguished, but they would follow the tunnel in whatever direction it took them. They had no plan but knew they were running out of options. The trail of dead behind them was motivation enough to keep moving forward.

  The tunnel moved at a steady incline, which had their muscles burning with the buildup of lactic acid, their tired bodies struggling under the new demand.

  Justin carried his bone weapon in two hands and strongly considered letting it fall completely, his body ready to stop.

  Then each time, he thought of his kids. Their faces popped into his head, and they gave him the motivation to continue. He thought of his wife and how she had rescued him. But then the dark thoughts came, riding on the coattails. Her drinking problem, the way it had become just a normal part of their lives. It hung over Justin like a black cloud, knowing he had facilitated it for so long. Sure they had argued about it, and she had tried rehab and meetings a couple of times, but each time she would break again, blaming the past, and he would let her get away with it.

  Both light and dark thoughts bolstered him. He was determined to see his family again and determined to do things right. He would fix the problems, fix the real issues, the ones that money could not solve or bury.

  Then, as his will to survive rose up, his determination pushing the last ounces of adrenaline through his body, he looked over and saw Declan.

  He saw his brother, who was alone in the world, who had sacrificed so much, and continued to push on, to strive towards a new tomorrow.

  The emotions were strong and confusing. They swirled around inside his brain and left his head aching even more, the steady beat inside his skull strong enough to tear through the blood-soaked wrapping, or so it felt.

  “Do you smell that?” Declan spoke first, ending the silence of the tunnel and silencing the voices in Justin’s head.

  “I smell something, and I don’t like it,” Justin said, the odor filtering through to his brain.

  The stench of wet rot and sewage was heavy on the air, thick as if it was a physical presence that was attacking them. It coated every breath, tainting them with its overpowering aroma. They could taste it every time they swallowed and could feel it settling on their skin like a fine rain, seeping into their bodies like a toxin.

  “We must be getting close to something,” Declan mused.

  They carried on down the tunnel, ignoring the stench of rot that surrounded them until they reached a fork in the road.

  “Maybe –”

  “Don’t even fucking suggest it,” Justin interrupted Declan before he could even finish starting to speak. “We are not splitting up.”

  Declan was quiet for a moment before nodding. “True, we’ve only got one light.”

  After choosing the right-hand fork, they moved on, and when the tunnels split again, they went to the right once more. They had no basis for their decision, but both moved without hesitation down the same fork, and so they rolled with it.

  They had seen no sign of the girl, but it was clear they were still in the warren constructed by the original Crawleigh family because the walls were still covered in markings.

  “There has to be something,” Justin said, frustration beginning to conquer the fear. He was tired, and his body longed to rest, his spirit begging him to sit and let his wounds heal up some. All he wanted to do was sleep.

  “Let’s just keep going,” Declan said, exhaustion clear in his voice also.

  When the light went out for the third time in as many minutes, it took several attempts to get it to work again. Justin, who had taken control as he was the one walking at the head of their small procession, slammed it against his hand, cursing under his breath, when suddenly a fading yellow beam appeared, the color a dull and dirty shade, indicative of how tired they were.

  Justin squinted and turned the light away from him, highlighting the features that were standing inches from his face.

  Milk-colored blind eyes faced his direction, set in the center of a pasty, hairless face. The skin was a wet grey coloration, with open sores and weeping lesions covering it, dripping on opaque liquid, which glinted on the skin, leaving a snail-like trail of putrescence behind. The head was unusually long, with one ear torn vertically through the middle, flapping uselessly to one side, while the other was missing completely, a rotting hole, a bubbling black mass of weeping tissue all that remained.

  Justin gasped, but Declan’s hand appeared and covered his mouth. The creature was inches from them, yet did not seem to realize they were the
re.

  Its body shook as it took wet, rasping breaths, shallow and quick, like a dog in the sun. Its body was lacking any real signs of muscle or power. It looked soft and dough-like. Yet it dragged a bone club behind it, the ball joint on the killing end stained brown with blood.

  The creature sniffed the air and opened its mouth wide, revealing black, near-toothless gums with wriggling maggots filling the crevices where teeth should have been. Its breath was foul and made Justin gag, and as terror overwhelmed him, he lost all control. He felt the warm stream of piss travel down his leg, and as soon as the aroma hit the air, the creature changed.

  Its eyes narrowed and its nose twitched. Snarling, it lunged forward. Reacting fast, Declan hauled Justin backward.

  The creature fell to the floor, dropping down onto its hands and feet. Its body cracked as its joints moved in ways that seemed wholly unnatural as it lowered itself to the floor.

  It sniffed the puddle of urine before a long black tongue descended and began lapping at the pungent, yellow liquid.

  Seeing the creature, knowing that they were more of them, Justin felt something rise up inside him, disgust and anger that he had not felt in many years. It was resentment at the way his life had gone. It was everything that had happened to him and been stored away; the sessions and the counseling. Sure, he had talked about the abuse, he had confessed, but it had done nothing to extinguish the fire, the burning hatred that had been etched into him. Flaring now, the fires consumed him as he watched some abomination drinking his piss from the floor. It was the final straw, the final thing anybody would take from him.

  With a battle cry that startled the human-like creature, Justin brought his femur weapon down onto the things head. The wet thud, like a rotten twig snapping in half, was not as satisfying as he had hoped. The blow stunned the creature, opening up a long wound on the back of its head, thick blood bubbling to the surface.

  Justin raised the club again and brought it down, driving it into the squirming creature’s skull. It gave a shrill, squawked cry as its head burst from the force of the impact. Globs of grey brain matter oozed through the gaping wound, but it was not enough to satisfy Justin’s sudden blood lust. Striking again and again, Justin growled, the blood splashing up to cover his face with a black mask of gore.