Inhabited

by Ike Hamill

Justin stopped in front of a young woman who looked very sad and frightened. Her mouth was open in what must have been a moan or a scream. The emotion was so clear on her face. It gave him the creeps to look into her eyes. Justin backed away from the cave painting.

  “I’m going to add this to the list of crazy things about this cave,” he whispered. Justin glanced up the length of the cave. It extended as far as his light penetrated. He had no idea how many paintings he would find. After looking at the sad and frightened lady, he had no interest in seeing more of those faces. There was a cold spot growing inside his chest.

  He wandered back to the first woman.

  She didn’t look nearly as miserable. But her eyes—they were so sad. Maybe his perception had been colored, but he didn’t even like looking at her anymore. None of the faces looked even a little happy. Justin wondered if this was the fault of the artist, or if the models had all shown that same emotion.

  He turned his light back up the cave when he heard the grinding sound again. Cool air blew in his face. His nose twitched at the odor. It wasn’t overwhelming—in fact, he could just barely smell it. It reminded him of walking by a puddle of vomit that has mostly dried.

  “Fuck this,” Justin whispered. He backed away from the wall of paintings. He didn’t want to turn his back on the breeze. It seemed like that breeze might be bringing something his way. If it was, he wanted to see it coming. Justin backed all the way until he found his arrow, scuffed into the face of the rock. He felt vulnerable climbing back down through the gap, but he stopped to brush away the evidence of his arrow. If the artist of those sad portraits was still around, he didn’t want them following him back down into the cave.

  Justin stole glances over his shoulder to see where he was going. The breeze was still blowing in his face. He heard the grinding sound again and the air stopped.

  Justin stopped too.

  His light moved around the cave as he thought. An image popped into his head. He imagined an enormous corpse, buried under the desert soil. The cave was petrified tube leading into the corpse’s lung. But the thing was waking up and starting to breath again.

  The thought made him shiver. He was a tiny explorer, the size of bacteria compared to this giant creature. Something that size wouldn’t even know of his existence. It would live and die without a thought for the miniature invader.

  Justin imagined that somewhere there was an enormous skull, the size of an apartment building, buried under a mountain. He imagined that the thing’s once-dead eyes were opening to the darkness.

  Chapter Twenty — Together

  ROGER HELD THE ROPE out to his side as he walked. He didn’t like when it brushed against his leg. When he heard the sound up ahead, he reached up and turned off his light. Whatever else was in this mine, Roger wanted a chance to observe it before it knew of his presence.

  He crept as quietly as he could.

  He stopped when he heard static. After the click, he heard laughter. The sound was foreign in this place. It made goosebumps rise on his arms. Roger inched towards the corner and poked his head around. He saw her in the distance. She was crouching down, doing something on the floor.

  He must have made a sound—she whipped around and pointed her light right at him.

  “Don’t run,” he said. “Please?”

  She stood slowly, tucking something under her arm and brushing off her hands.

  “What do you want?” Florida asked.

  “Probably the same as you,” he said. “I want to get out of here while I’m still young.”

  He came around the corner with his hands raised like a bank robber. A thought flitted across his mind—how did he become the bad guy in this scenario? He brushed it off. It was what it was. She had the bag with the radio and the extra batteries, so she was in control.

  “What’s that in your hand?” she asked.

  Roger looked. He had forgotten. “Dead rope.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a rope,” he said. “I assume it belongs to a dead guy. If not dead, then the guy is missing a couple fingers.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” he said. He inched forward and she held her ground. “What are you doing?”

  “Mapping,” she said.

  “That’s good. That’s what I’m doing, too. I’ve marked all the passages I’ve explored. I think I’m getting a sense of this place. It’s like a giant loop.”

  She tilted her head and regarded him. “It’s not a loop.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I mean, it’s a loop, but not in two dimensions.”

  “Oh!” he said. He had no idea what she was talking about, but he had a real problem with admitting ignorance. He had the feeling that if he had nothing to offer to the conversation that she might run off again. Roger could never hope to keep up with her.

  “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “No,” he said. He walked forward and looked at the thing she had carved on the floor of the mine. It was a circle with a set of lines inside. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s my system,” she said. “I think I’m close to finding the center point.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The center will have the exit,” she said. “I haven’t figured out how we got into this section, but I think I’ll know when we find the exit. It should be obvious.”

  “That’s the part I figured out,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah,” Roger said. “We got into this section because this place is magic.”

  Florida frowned.

  -o-o-o-o-o-

  Florida counted under her breath as she walked. Roger didn’t bother talking. He figured out quickly that she wouldn’t answer or even listen to him when she was pacing out the steps to her next measurement.

  She stopped and held up her hand for him to be quiet. He hadn’t said anything.

  Florida clicked the button on the radio, listened to the static. Once that stopped, Roger heard the strange laughter again. Florida knelt and began scraping the floor with the drop-stamp mounting tool.

  “What the hell was that?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s useful.”

  He tried to figure out the sense of her lines, but it remained a mystery. She didn’t seem at all inclined to explain her system.

  “Tell me about that rope,” she said as she stood up. “Where did you find it?”

  “Well,” he said. He scratched his head up under his helmet and looked at the coil. “I’m not sure how to describe where I found it. It was a while ago. I marked all the tunnels since then, and the spot was the only one with a double mark.”

  “You said it belonged to a dead person?”

  “That’s a bit of an assumption on my part,” he said. “I think some unfortunate person had looped it around his fingers and then it got pulled off. See this bloody end? There were a couple of fingers and part of a hand tangled in here. The flesh looked torn.”

  Florida scrunched up her body at the thought and then shook it off.

  “From what I saw, all the packs that Dr. Grossman gave out were identical,” Florida said. “And that rope doesn’t look anything like the rope we had in our packs. I have to assume it’s from a different expedition.”

  “You think there are two groups in here studying the mines today?” Roger asked.

  “Maybe. Maybe not today,” she said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “You heard the laughter after I used the radio, right?”

  Roger nodded.

  “Do you see anyone around who was laughing?”

  He shook his head.

  “Where do you think the laughers are?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a disquieting sound though.”

  “Exactly. Your disquiet could be an instinctive response to something that shouldn’t be here. It makes you uneasy because it’s not of our time.”
/>
  “Time-traveling laughter?”

  “Maybe ghosts,” Florida suggested.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m not going to reject the idea just because it seems preposterous,” she said.

  She turned and started walking again. Roger followed her and listened to her count. She stopped again and clicked the radio.

  Static.

  Nothing.

  He waited for the laughter. It didn’t come. Florida nodded and bent to mark the floor. Roger waited for her to finish with her strange lines.

  “So where were your ghosts?”

  “We’re out of range,” she said. “One more set and I’ll be able to triangulate the center.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  -o-o-o-o-o-

  “Okay,” Florida said. “This is the last spot.”

  Roger had been following her around for a dozen readings. He still had no idea what she was doing, but she seemed confident that she had it figured out.

  “So this is the center?” he asked.

  “No. This tells us where the center will be. We go this way and then take our next right. Then the tunnel we want will be on our left.”

  Roger shrugged. He was content to follow. He could tell that his headlamp was becoming weaker. If he had to, he would wrestle away her bag and take the batteries from her. She hadn’t yet offered to give him any.

  As she turned the corner, Florida turned on the radio and clicked the button. This time, she didn’t pause. The radio gave static. When she clicked it again, the static was intermittent. He saw a tunnel coming up on their left. Florida clicked it once more before they turned. There was no static following the click. Florida looked at Roger with a triumphant smile.

  “That’s good?” he asked.

  “That’s very good,” she said. So quiet that it was almost impossible to hear, she added, “I think.”

  “There was no laughter?” he asked. It wasn’t really the question he meant to ask. Roger revised it. “Was there supposed to be no laughter?”

  “I think we’re getting farther away from the spirits and closer to reality,” she said. “The center should be right up here.”

  Roger couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Right in the middle of the tunnel, he saw their flag sitting below the hole in the ceiling. It was the flag they had dropped when they went up to the hangman’s room. It felt like he was waking up from a bad dream. Roger raised his finger to point to the flag and he shook his head with disbelief. The rope was gone. It had disappeared from his hand without him noticing.

  “Holy shit,” he whispered.

  Florida’s grin was infectious. She nodded and sped up.

  He caught up with her as she stood below the vertical shaft. She was looking up towards the hangman’s room. Roger slowed. Even with his light on he could see the yellow glow coming from up there. He felt a dull ache in his stomach. That glow seemed sick, like the light itself might be contagious. He wondered what the glow of uranium looked like. He wondered if he was seeing it now.

  “Give me a boost?” she asked.

  “I don’t think we should go up there,” Roger said. “I don’t like the looks of it.”

  “The rest of this place is just a maze,” she said. “There’s no way in or out. If we don’t go up there we’re just going to wander around here forever.”

  “But we’ve been up there,” he said. “We saw the paws sticking out from the walls. We saw the noose and felt the wind. Why would we go back up there?”

  “Somehow that’s the way that leads out. Our flag is here, see?”

  “That’s the one I dropped because our first one was missing,” he said. “Remember? I dropped another one while you tried the radio.”

  “I don’t remember that,” she said. “We put down a flag, went up the shaft, and it was gone when we came back down.”

  “Right,” Roger said. “So I dropped a second one. I know because I moved it out of the way so it wouldn’t be visible from the shaft. I didn’t want anything to follow us.”

  “Whatever,” she said. She pointed. “That’s the way out. Now give me a boost.”

  “This is a lousy idea,” Roger said.

  -o-o-o-o-o-

  The ache in his stomach grew as he climbed. The breeze wasn’t as strong as before, but it was still there. He could see the hangman’s noose swaying every time he glanced up. It looked like it was waiting for them.

  Florida was scanning her light across the walls when he finally pushed himself up through the hole in the floor. He sat there for a second with his legs dangling—unwilling to commit to the room. He imagined hands reaching up from below and dragging him back down the shaft. That thought was enough to make him pull up his legs.

  “Where did we chip away the wall?” Florida asked.

  Roger spun slowly, scanning with his headlamp. The walls were all undisturbed.

  “I’m not sure,” he said.

  Florida shrugged off her bag from one shoulder and dug through it. She pulled out her rope. After playing out a length, she wound the rest into a ball and knotted it. She backed towards the wall of the chamber and tossed the ball of rope underhanded, while holding onto the loose end. It took a few tries. The ball arced through the noose. Florida walked the loose end to the center of the room and stood on her tiptoes to release the ball. She made a knot in the rope so she had a loop connected to the hangman’s noose. She tugged on it and tested her weight.

  “What are you doing?” Roger asked.

  “I’m going to climb.”

  “Why?”

  “I think it’s the way out. Don’t you understand?”

  “No,” he said. “One thing I can say for sure—we didn’t come down through that hole. Why would you possibly think that the way out is through that hole?”

  “Well, for one, there’s a light up there. It could be sunlight. Also, that’s the only direction we haven’t tried. It could be as simple as climbing up there and then we’re out.”

  “I don’t think I can climb a rope like that,” Roger said.

  “You only have to get as high as that shaft and then you can use the walls,” Florida said. “Hold this.” She handed him the ends of the loop. “I don’t know how it’s attached up there, so hold this tight. I’m going to test it.”

  Roger took up the slack while Florida grabbed the rope at shoulder-height. She jumped and tucked her legs, jerking the rope. It held steady. She gave him a nod and then began climbing. Florida moved very fast at first, pulling with one arm to reach a higher grip with the other hand. Her strength faded fast and she locked the rope with her feet so she could push with her legs. Roger held the sides of the loop together so she wouldn’t be working one side against the other. As her feet passed the height of his head, Florida began to grunt. She had looked like a gymnast at first. Now she looked like a tired kid trying to win a schoolyard dare.

  She paused when her hands got to the hangman’s noose.

  “Don’t stop!” Roger shouted. Stopping was the predecessor to giving up.

  With another burst of speed, Florida grabbed the old rope and inched her way up. Roger’s loop went slack as she transferred her weight to the rope. She slipped her foot into the noose and stood. It tightened on her foot but stopped constricting before it really latched onto her.

  “What do you see?”

  “Same as down there,” she said. “The shaft goes up for a while. This rope is warm.”

  “Warm?”

  Florida adjusted her grip and she started to spin with the rope. Roger took up the slack, but it didn’t stop her. She put out a hand to touch the wall and stopped herself.

  “The shaft is warm too,” she said. Florida reached over her shoulder and withdrew a short section of rope. She tied a loop into the end and then a fancy knot around the hangman’s rope. When she was done, she slid the thing down as far as it would go.

  “What are you doing?” Roger asked.

  “I’ll yell down when I’m ready
. See if you can get up to the noose once I’m off the rope,” she said.

  Florida slipped her foot into the little loop she had made. She lifted her knee to her chest, dragging the slipknot up the hangman’s noose. She tested her weight on the foot carefully and then used the leg to lift herself up. It held. She had made a knot that slipped up the rope but gripped when she put her weight on it. It was ingenious. The only thing that would have made it better is if she had shown Roger how to do it before she left. He stood there with the loop of rope and looked up at his predicament.

  The noose wasn’t actually that high. If there hadn’t been a hole in the middle of the floor, with a shaft leading back down to the mine proper, he might have tried leaping for it. Then again, his vertical leap was never that good even when he had been a much younger gentleman. He took the two ends of the rope and began fiddling with an idea. Florida was making good progress. He had to lean under the shaft to see her climbing. It looked like she was propping herself against the walls to hold herself up. She was certainly industrious.

  -o-o-o-o-o-

  Roger had a plan. He was only a foot off the floor, but he thought it would work. One end of the rope was looped over his shoulder. The other was tied in his best idea of how a slipknot would work. At first, the end kept coming loose, but he finally figured out that a knot in the loose end of the rope would keep it in place. He put one rope in the crook of his elbow for balance and pulled on the one draped over his shoulder.

  His foot had no other choice—it had to elevate. Roger pulled until his leg was bent at a right angle. Now the hard part—he tried to straighten his leg without falling over backwards. As he rose in the air. He started to swing back and forth. Above him, the noose picked up the opposite swing.

  “Hey!” Florida yelled from above. “Cut it out.”

  “Sorry,” Roger said. He tried to play out some slack in his shoulder rope, but nothing happened. His plan didn’t include a contingency for lowering himself. It was a simple pulley made of ropes and it only moved in one direction. He couldn’t even fall to the floor—the shaft was below him. With no way down, he hugged the ropes to his chest and prayed that the vibration would settle down.