Inhabited

by Ike Hamill

  Travis slipped and came down on his ass. He slid a few feet closer to Miguel. When he came to a stop, he sat there. His light was trained on Miguel’s helmet.

  Travis sat in silence.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Travis said to the body. “I’m sorry there was nothing I could do to help you. This whole trip was a stupid idea.”

  Thinking about the beginning of the evening reminded Travis of the map. He rooted around in the bag until he found it. He took his first good look at the document. The paper was grade school notebook paper. The lines were drawn in pencil and ballpoint pen. The annotations were “Muerte,” and “Peligro.” It seemed less like a map and more like a written warning to stay away from the mine.

  Travis shook his head and stowed the map. He pulled out the biggest chunk of ore they had found. It really did look like gold embedded in the rock. Travis was amazed at how shiny it looked. It wasn’t hard to imagine how the element had become so valued. Anything that was so beautiful in its natural state would surely be refined and coveted.

  He spun the rock and admired the sparkle of the quartz crystal as well.

  “It really is beautiful,” he whispered to Miguel.

  One part of the quartz sparkled more than the rest. It seemed to pick up the light from his headlamp, twist it and split it, and send it back to his eyes in a million little stars. Travis pulled Miguel’s knife from the bag and used the blade to chip off part of the crystal. He wanted to see if the illusion would be diminished or enhanced.

  Travis stared at the rock for a full minute, trying to figure out what he was looking at. Embedded in the quartz and rock, he was looking at faceted stone. He chipped away a little more of the quartz and the stone fell out. It landed in the palm of his hand.

  “What?” he whispered. He took the little stone between two fingers and held it up to the light. The cut was simple, but it looked like a gemstone. Travis tilted his head and puzzled over the thing.

  “They don’t just grow like this. Someone has to cut them,” he said to himself. It was too symmetrical and too perfect to be an accident. Travis looked back to the chunk of ore. He spun the thing, looking at the stripes of gold in the rock. It took a second, but he found another unnatural feature in the ore. There was a graceful curve embedded in one of the gold stripes. Travis angled the stone and his light caught the edges of one cursive word.

  “Eternity.”

  “How did a goddamn ring get into a rock in the wall of a cave?” he asked the stone.

  Travis looked up at Miguel. He scrambled backwards, nearly dropping the diamond and the ore.

  Miguel had moved.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight — Deduction

  JUSTIN FLIPPED THROUGH THE rest of the diary, looking for more information. He had read all the text. The binding creaked as he closed it and stuffed it into his bag. He kicked the metal box and the sound echoed through the cave.

  He stood up and shouldered the pack. Justin walked along the dry riverbed and thought about this new information.

  As he paced, he whispered to himself. “Darkness swallows people. Bones end up in those powder pods. How do they get there?”

  He had forgotten about his experiment with the paperback books until his light picked one up on the trail ahead. Justin had arranged them in a line at different elevations in the cave. They weren’t in a line anymore. The one at his feet was several feet down-cave from the others. The higher the elevation, the less each book had moved.

  “Some kind of force moves things through the cave,” he said. “Like a giant, glacial digestive system.”

  He looked down at the sand beneath his feet. Suddenly, he wasn’t thrilled to be standing there. He climbed the rocks at his side until he was standing on the ledge with the book that had moved the smallest distance. The cave seemed different with his fresh perspective. His notion of an enormous digestive system didn’t match the horror portrayed in the journal.

  The darkness swallowed them whole. Cracks appeared and then closed on their own.

  Justin stopped. His eyes grew wide.

  He was in one of the cracks. What if it closed and he was trapped? Justin didn’t waste any more time. He began to run towards where Miguel and Travis had left him.

  Justin pulled up short when he got to where the ledge ended. His desperation cast a new light on the passage. The ledge had rounded a corner where it broke away. That’s what made it so difficult to try to leap across. He could barely see the spot where he would need to reach. But jumping wasn’t the only way across the gap. The walls weren’t that far apart. Justin began to wonder if he could put his hands on one and stretch his legs over to the other.

  He would have to try the technique in a safe place, just to try.

  Justin retreated to the dry riverbed. He found a spot where rocks were similarly spaced. He put his hands on one and tested his foot against the other. He fell immediately to the sandy floor. Remembering his theory about the digestive nature of the cave, he jumped up and brushed himself off immediately. He thought about his failure for a second and thought he knew the answer. He had been trying to hold his body in a straight line. Architecturally, an arch was much stronger. He found rocks closer together and tested his theory.

  It wasn’t easy to walk his hands and feet along opposite walls, but it was possible. He broke off his practice with the idea to save his strength for the real test.

  -o-o-o-o-o-

  Back at the fissure, Justin examined the walls. He looked for a spot where the gap was manageable. He would have to climb down, below the ledge, to find a place where he could execute his plan.

  Justin puffed out his cheeks with a sigh.

  This was a bad idea. The only sane thing to do was to stay put and wait for help. With the supplies he had found, he had carbide and water, which meant he had light. And he could drink the water to stay hydrated. That should give him more than enough time to wait for help.

  On the other hand, there was a chance that help wasn’t coming. If his fissure was like the one from the journal, it might close at any second, trapping him inside. Or, the darkness might come and swallow him whole, like the people from the story.

  Justin’s eyes darted back and forth—what if the story was fiction? What if someone had made it up just to mess with explorers?

  He shook his head.

  “It was too well hidden,” he whispered. “Can’t be fake.”

  Yes, he could wait. He could also explore the hall of painted faces more thoroughly. The place had creeped him out, so he had given up on it, but it might also offer a way out. But the crack was known. That’s how he had gotten in.

  Justin decided.

  He lowered himself to the ledge and hung his feet over.

  This had to go perfectly on the first try.

  Justin put his feet against the left wall. After a big inhale, he shifted his weight and braced his hands against the opposite wall. He began to shuffle.

  -o-o-o-o-o-

  Sweat dripped down his nose. Every time he turned his head to see where to put his hand, he burned his arm with the lamp. The helmet threatened to fall off when he looked down. Justin grunted and slid his hand. His abdomen pulled and strained. It felt like the muscles were tearing apart, and he was only a third of the way across.

  Justin glanced back. He debated turning back.

  The mental image of the trapped miners kept him going.

  It was easier to move his feet. He could shift his weight between his heel and toe so he didn’t ever lose contact with the wall. His hands were harder. For those he had to temporarily take all the burden with one arm while the other moved.

  -o-o-o-o-o-

  Justin’s arms vibrated with the effort.

  He shifted his weight and one foot slipped. Stretching out his toe, he finally caught an edge. He was at the far end of the gap, but he didn’t know how to make the transition. The ledge was above the level of his shoulder, and the fissure was too wide to climb higher.

  Justin had no choice. Ther
e wasn’t enough strength in his body to attempt the climb back. He was well beyond the point of no return. With one big push, Justin thrust his hands away from the wall and twisted to his left. He caught the lip. For a second, it seemed like the climb would be easy.

  His feet slipped.

  Justin’s body swung down and he lost his grip. Four fingers were all that kept him from falling down into the squeeze.

  Flailing his feet, one caught a point of rock and he was stable for a moment. He swung his other hand back up over the lip. His muscles were almost useless. Justin began the slow process of inching his way up to the lip. He moved his feet with extraordinary care. He was panting by the time he got his elbows up over the edge. When he finally pulled his torso onto the ledge, he rolled to his side. The lamp sputtered as he turned it upwards.

  Justin smiled and then laughed as the light flickered.

  He sat up and looked at the gap.

  It was wider than when he had started.

  “Impossible,” he whispered.

  It was completely impossible, but it was also true. He was sure of it. This wasn’t just a perspective shift because he was on the other side of the gap—it was at least fifty-percent farther to the opposite edge than when he had started.

  “No going back,” he said.

  He rolled his shoulders, self-massaged his arm muscles, and stood. He set off down the crevice.

  -o-o-o-o-o-

  Justin walked with his head down. He followed the footprints in the dust. He stopped when he came to a place where lots of scuffed footprints covered the whole floor of the passage. Justin looked up. There was no reason to stop there—the passage continued on around a corner.

  Justin kept walking.

  After two more corners, his passage squeezed down into nothing.

  Kneeling, he could still find traces of the footprints, but they moved into a space where the walls closed together, making passage impossible. Distrusting his eyes, he felt the walls. He felt where they came together and blocked his escape.

  He sank down and leaned against one of the walls, trying to think through the problem.

  Justin was tired and thirsty. He found his canteen and poured a little water into his open mouth. It was slightly gritty and tasted a bit of sulfur, but it quenched his thirst. Justin let his eyes drift shut.

  After a second, his eyes flew back open. He’d had the distinct sensation that he was falling. He spun and looked at the wall behind him.

  “Did you move?” he whispered to the wall.

  Justin got back up. He retraced his steps to the place where he’d found the confused footprints and looked around. It only took him a second to deduce what had happened. Someone had climbed. He saw burn marks on the walls from the headlamps. He saw scuffed footprints on rocks above his eye-level. That was the direction that Miguel and Travis had gone, he was almost sure of it.

  But, if his theory was correct, their path might not be reproducible. The walls of this crevice weren’t behaving.

  Justin moved back to the spot where the fissure squeezed down. Using a few of his matches, he marked the narrowest part of the passage that he could reach. He laid the matches end to end across the width of it and then settled back down with his back against the wall. He turned down the drip of his headlamp and let it burn low.

  Justin waited.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine — Choices

  “I MEAN, THIS IS it, right?” Roger asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Florida said.

  He turned away from the hole.

  “Are you suggesting we go back down the hangman’s noose?”

  “We could,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying. We could go back that way instead of committing ourselves to this path.”

  “There’s something down there, remember?” he asked. He lifted his foot for illustration.

  “Your shoe?”

  “My shoe and whatever was pulling on that rope. I have no interest in finding out what that was. I swear to you that it wasn’t a snag.”

  “You were panicked—it’s understandable. I was cranking the noose higher, your foot was caught. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I’m not ashamed. I’m telling you, there was something bad down there. I’m not going back that way. We’ve explored every inch of these crystal tunnels, and I think it’s safe to say that there are only two ways out. We can go into this giant room and try to track down that guy we saw, or we can go back through the hangman’s cave and stare into the face of evil.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” Florida said.

  “I’ll send help for you if I find it,” he said. He didn’t give her a chance to object. Roger pushed forward and let himself drop through the hole. It wasn’t far down to the sloping wall of the enormous room. They had found many holes into the room, but this one had only a short drop to where the wall began to slope away.

  He landed on bent legs and threw himself to the rock to increase his friction. Even on his back, he slid several yards before he came to a stop. He glanced back up to the cave where he’d dropped in. He saw a glow there, but couldn’t tell if it was from the crystals or from Florida’s light. Glancing around, he saw the glow from several of the other holes. It was an unsettling sight.

  Roger scooted down the sloping wall until he got to a place level enough to stand easily. He was starting to figure out Florida. She didn’t respond to cajoling or requests. His best bet was to keep moving forward and wait for her to join him. If she didn’t, then so be it. He had fresh batteries from her pack, and that was the best he could hope for.

  He swept his light around to orient himself.

  The place he was looking for was off to the right.

  -o-o-o-o-o-

  Roger slowed as he approached.

  He heard Florida come up behind him, but he didn’t turn.

  “Thanks for waiting for me,” she said.

  “I’ve never seen a dead body before.”

  “What?”

  She moved around him and walked forward on the tips of her toes. Roger envied her two shoes and uninjured hips.

  “I thought it was just a shirt on the ground,” she said.

  “No,” Roger said. “Look there.” He pointed with his toe.

  Where the shirtsleeve ended, he could see the arm bones disappearing into the rock. Florida, perhaps unconvinced, walked right up to the shirt. She tried to lift it from the back, but parts of the fabric were actually embedded in the stone floor. Instead of lifting, the shirt ripped. She continued the tear and revealed the twisted spine and ribcage. The flesh was gone and all that was left was a half-exposed skeleton.

  Florida knelt.

  “I don’t believe it. This is solid rock. I would have assumed it had been here for thousands of years, but this shirt is modern enough,” she said.

  “If I had to guess, this isn’t rock, but some kind of supercooled liquid. Like glass, you know? Is it wrong that I’m less upset about the body and more upset that his shoes aren’t exposed?” Roger asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She turned her light back and looked at the giant room. “That man we saw—this is what he was looking at.”

  Roger nodded. “I think so. I wonder why he didn’t hear us.”

  “He went this way,” she said, pointing.

  She led the way.

  Where their sloping wall ended, they stood at the edge of the white sediment that made up the floor of the giant room.

  “You think it’s safe?” Florida asked. She turned her head and sneezed.

  “Nothing about this place is safe,” he said. “We’re not going that way unless we can walk on this shit.” He pointed to the tunnel that led to the right. The vertical walls came right up from the white floor. He put out his socked foot and touched it to the white power a little puff swirled around his toes.

  “Fuck!” he shouted. Roger limped backwards away from the white floor. He fell to the sloping rock and pushed himself up and away. Florida followed, looking puzzled as Roger
tore off his sock. Once it was off, he used the sock to wipe at the sole of his bare foot. “Look at this,” he said. He held up the sock. In the center of the bloodstain, the threads of the sock were gone. They had been eaten away and they were still smoking. He tossed the sock down.

  “Whoa,” Florida said. She sneezed again and wiped her nose on her arm. “Oh shit.” There was a streak of blood on her shirt. She tilted her head back and pinched her nose.

  “Shit,” Roger said. “It’s the powder. It’s some kind of acid or something. We have to get away from it. It must be in the air, too.”

  Florida nodded. They climbed as high as they could up the sloping wall. Roger leaned back against the rock to take the weight off his foot.

  “Those rocks over there. We can climb then and maybe get close enough to jump to one of the holes,” Roger said.

  “Then back down the hangman’s rope,” she said. “It’s the only way.”

  Roger sighed and nodded. He looked at the bottom of his foot. He had a spot where the skin looked irritated, but it wasn’t any worse than a minor burn. He set it down on the rock. He glanced back in the direction of the corpse that was embedded in the rock. The thought of it made him push back up to his feet.

  “Hey,” Florida said. She nudged him with her elbow. When he looked over, she was pointing to across the bowl. There was a shape moving there.

  “Hello!” Roger shouted.

  Florida put her hand on Roger’s arm. “Save your breath.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  She didn’t explain. She just nodded towards the shape. Roger couldn’t tell if it was the same person they had seen earlier. The person was too far away both times. He assumed it was a man, but it was honestly just a guess. The shape was climbing up the wall on the far side of the impassable tunnel. He must have walked all the way around the perimeter of the bowl.