by J. S. Brent
“How much further can we walk?” said Liv. “If we keep going, we’ll end up crawling out of a manhole in California.”
But secretly I wondered if we really were 40 feet below ground. It seemed to me that we had been walking along at roughly the same level for the last four to five miles. The tunnel had never begun to decline, not even a little. We were still at precisely the same level we had been when we left the cave a few hours ago. Yet there were seas and even rivers billowing and swirling over our heads. The most likely explanation was that the tunnel had, in fact, begun to dip, but that it had done so so gradually and subtly that neither of us had noticed.
I took a final, long look at my grandfather and promised myself I would come back for him. Then we continued down the path in the direction his finger had pointed, which now began to incline at a steep rate. It was like we were descending a wheelchair ramp, only it went on and on. As had happened early in our journey when we first left the cave, the walls began to enclose on us; a sense of claustrophobia took hold. The walls lowered, giving the eye no relief from the relentless crush of pink. We were descending, slowly and incrementally, deeper and deeper into the earth.
If the walls had continued to narrow, our journey would have been at an end very quickly. We would have had no choice but to turn around and go home. Luckily they slowly opened out again, and the darkness in front of us indicated that the tunnel of glowworms was coming to an end. We were approaching a new chamber in this underground labyrinth.
“There’s something up ahead,” said Liv. “What is it?”
“The end of all our exploration,” I said.
We stepped out of the tunnel into a vast, vaulted expanse. The cavernous roof arched above us like the dome of an Arabian temple. Ahead of us was a rocky shore, and beyond it stood a lake stretching in every direction as far as the eye could make out.
“Have we reached the sea?” asked Liv.
“If this isn’t the sea,” I said, “it’s at least connected to it. I’m guessing this is why we could only have come by night. The rising tide had to fill this pool with water, otherwise there’s no way we could’ve accessed it.”
We drifted along the shore in a dream-like state, passing rocks the size of houses. Sleepy and worn down by grief, I walked in a fugue state, wondering if I was having some colossal and unnaturally vivid hallucination. It was a measure of how surreal the scene was that when Olivia suddenly began stripping off her clothes, I didn’t even blink. It seemed like the natural thing to do in that environment. Unbuttoning her shirt, she motioned at me to do likewise and gestured towards the lake.
We donned the scuba gear we had been carrying. The water was icy and cool, and I tried not to think of the eyeless horrors that must inhabit an underground lake such as this one. Yet there were no fish; there was no life of any kind, from what I could see.
We spent a few minutes lapping the water, letting our bodies adjust, remembering how to swim, scoping out the world beneath the waves.
Liv led the way down a wide underwater shaft that opened out into another cavern. For a moment I panicked, wondering if the sea went on and on just as the tunnel had done, and whether we were going to find ourselves coughing our lungs out trying to reach a shore that never appeared.
But I didn’t have long to worry, because suddenly we broke against the surface. Above us, on the stands, stood what appeared to be the stone remains of an enormous temple. Beside it loomed a copper statue in the form of a bear.
Chapter 12—Olivia
“Flashlights out,” said Henry, as we ascended the steps into the stone ruin. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out a long, metallic black flashlight and switched it on. A thin beam of light shot out, barely visible in the darkness around us. It was a thick, soupy darkness, the kind that has weight behind it. You get the sense that even if a thousand lights were shining, it would find a way to persist.
“Are we not going to change back into our normal clothes?” I asked. “We could be exploring this place for hours.”
“You mean these?” said Henry, holding up the khakis and t-shirt he had been wearing for much of our walk. He wrung the shirt out, and water splashed noisily all over the steps. They were soaked through; they would take hours to dry.
“Okay, but before we go inside,” I said, “let’s get some things clear. Are we going to split up or stay together?”
“That depends on whether we think there’s anything alive down here,” he said. “Which, if what we’ve seen so far is any indication, there doesn’t appear to be.”
I gazed through the pillars into the darkness, feeling an uncomfortable twinge of fear in my stomach. “Just because we haven’t seen it yet,” I said, “doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. I would prefer it if we stayed close.”
“Liv, do you see the size of this place?” he asked, irritated. “It’s going to take forever to search, just the two of us, even if we both split up. If we stick together, we’ll never come to the end of it, and frankly, I’m tired, and I don’t ever want to make the journey here again.”
“Forgive me,” I said, “but are you ever going to collect the—are you just going to leave your grandfather there?”
He threw me an annoyed look, but said, “That’s debatable. I had thought about collecting him on our way out, but the body is so decayed at this point that there’s a strong possibility of getting disease and I don’t want to risk it. The way I see it, he’s already been laid in the earth; he’s just in sight of the place he longed to see his whole life, and I can’t think of a better place for him. It might even be preferable to a box in the ground.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Any other questions?”
I shook my head, then realized he probably couldn’t see me. “Not until we go inside. But if this is what it looks like, then we’ve clearly uncovered the last resting place of the tribe he sought for so long.”
“It would appear so,” said Henry with a faint laugh. “This actually solves several mysteries that have baffled scholars and mystery enthusiasts for decades. How did the clan disappear so suddenly? Well, the short answer is, they went underground.”
“Under sea,” I said.
He bowed slightly. “Here they built their own society and practiced their faith freely. But it wasn’t self-sustaining. Either they failed to produce offspring, or some external force threatened their existence. Our tribe had its enemies, but it’s inconceivable that they would have been a pressing concern in a hidden chamber under the sea near an out-of-the-way Pacific island.”
“So that’s what we have to figure out,” I said, waving the beam of my flashlight in the direction of the temple porch. “We finally know where they fled to; now we just need to find out—”
“How they met their end,” Henry said. “I don’t intend to linger here, but a cursory investigation of the temple should yield the answers we’re looking for.”
“Let’s give ourselves a time limit,” I said. “I know myself, and I know I could spend an entire day here if I’m not careful.”
“How does two hours sound?” he replied. “I’d like to be back by morning.”
“Will that be enough time?”
“If not, I suppose we can camp out here.”
I looked anxiously round at the crumbling ruins in front of us and the dark sea at our backs. “I really don’t care for that idea,” I said.
“Nor me,” he agreed, “which is why I think we should get out of here as soon as we possibly can. Worst-case scenario, we end up having to bed down in the tunnels for a few hours. Ready?”
“Ready.” I grabbed my traveling equipment and together we ascended the steps into the heart of the temple.
Just beyond the pillars stood a small antechamber, sparsely furnished. A carved-oak door at the back of the room led to the temple proper. The only object in the room was a wooden dais supporting an old book that resembled the stage Bibles that grace the lecterns of some churches. The book had a thick leather bind
ing and was open to its middle. I shone my flashlight on the onion-skin pages: it revealed thousands of characters scrawled in a cryptic language.
“Just as I feared,” I said. “I’m guessing that once the tribe made this their permanent home, they abandoned the use of English and other vernacular languages entirely.”
“I wonder if the pages it’s opened to have any special meaning,” said Henry thoughtfully.
“Possibly, but it might just be opened to a random set of pages,” I said. “Even translating a single page from this book would take hours. I’m afraid I just don’t have the time.”
“We’ll bring it with us,” said Henry, taking the book and placing it in his travel bag. Dust from the brittle pages rained down on the stony ground like snow.
We continued on our way through the carved-oak door into the main room. The front part was arranged like a library, with rows and rows of shelves. Some of them were empty, while others contained books like the one in the antechamber. Still others were occupied, but not with books. Perusing the stacks, we found a radiator, some electrical outlets with no discernable use, a jar of jellied pig’s feet, five extension cords coiled up like sleeping snakes, a silver bird cage, a bicycle with training wheels still attached, a red-yellow-green-and-blue umbrella, a stuffed woolly mammoth doll, and what appeared to be an iron lung.
“I don’t get it,” I said, shaking my flashlight around. “I can understand books being on a shelf, it’s where they go, but what use could they have for a large Hoover dust buster?”
“Or an English copy of the midcentury children’s classic The Midnight Folk,” said Henry.
“Or a car battery,” I said. “Do you think this is, like, a store? In the middle of a temple? But if that’s the case, when were they ever going to need half these things?”
“They weren’t,” said Henry quietly, holding up a blue-eyed baby doll, “and I think that’s the point. These things were never intended to be used, they were meant to be collected. They were souvenirs of a life they had abandoned.”
“Like relics,” I said, suddenly feeling immensely sad.
“For them, I think that’s exactly what these items became. The decision to retreat here wasn’t undertaken without much difficulty and handwringing and sorrow from all parties. They wanted to go on living in the world, but felt that the danger they were facing from their enemies and societal pressures and marriage outside the tribe was weakening and threatening to destroy their way of life. This was a last-ditch effort to save themselves, but it came at an extraordinarily high cost. They must’ve realized that living in a secluded temple under the ocean wasn’t really the kind of life they wanted. They began gathering relics from their life on shore, totems that would forever remind them of the life they had left behind.”
We kept walking, past the rows and rows of shelves in the library of relics towards a chair at the far end of the room that was bathed in an eerie green light. Rooms stood to left and right, each one behind heavy oaken doors like the one we had opened to come in. Each door was marked by a different symbol and bore in its center a different object: a ruby, a turquoise stone, a fossilized sprig of leafy fern, the skeletal hand of a small creature.
“These doors are all fairly close together,” said Henry. “Why don’t you take one row and I’ll take the other, and we’ll see what we find?”
I gave him a look of anxiety and frustration. “But—”
“It’s not like we’re splitting up,” he said, although it was exactly like that. “We’re both going to be right here. But I want to find out what’s in these rooms and I don’t want it to take forever.”
The doors appeared to be jammed shut, and only opened after much effort. The first one I entered yielded nothing; it was just an empty room with a ring of stone chairs arranged in a circle. An examination of the room turned up nothing of interest, and when I emerged I immediately sought Henry, who seemed to have disappeared. However, a door was open on the other side of the wide aisle and I called his name. A thick head of hair emerged out of the darkness.
“You okay?” he said, shining his light in my face. “You look scared.”
“You’re not?” I said.
“What did you find in there?”
“Nothing, just a circle of chairs. You?”
“This one has piles and piles of sleeping cots. It makes sense: where else were they going to sleep? Where are all their beds?”
“So it’s beginning to look like this was way more than a temple for them,” I said.
“Way more,” said Henry. “It was a museum, a library, a warehouse, a storage facility… it was an all-purpose place.” He paused, as if listening for something. “Do you hear that knocking?”
As soon as he asked the question, I could hear it. A plain rattling sound, as of something hard being pushed up against a window repeatedly. “Is there someone here?” I mouthed, but Henry shook his head and said, “Listen to it, the way it keeps repeating itself. It’s probably been doing that since the day the last person breathed his last breath in this temple, but where is it coming from?”
Without any prompting from me, he ran forward and leaned one ear against the closest door. “Not this one,” he said, with a shake of his head, and moved on to the next one. Three or four doors down, the noise began to weaken; we had passed it, and were beginning to move further away.
“It’s back there,” said Henry, pointing to a door we had just passed. I followed along behind him; instinctively, he grabbed my wrist and led the way forward.
He pressed gently against the door, but it didn’t budge. He pressed more firmly; still nothing. “There’s something on the other side of it,” he said, “something obstructing it.”
“If only we had some kind of battering ram,” I said.
“We might, actually,” he said. “Stay here; I’m going to have another look at the museum of relics.”
And, dropping my hand, he ran off in the direction of the museum. “But—” I said.
“Be right back!”
I glanced nervously around at the shadows in the room. In my imagination they seemed to be getting longer, drawing nearer. I thought I could feel presences gathering around us. Henry liked to say I was more superstitious than I pretended, and certainly in moments like these I was willing to surrender my hardheaded scientific rationalism for the certainty that ghosts moved among us. My breathing quickened; beads of sweat formed along my brow like morning dew.
“Don’t look at the shadows,” I said to myself. “Forget they’re even there.”
Instead I turned my attention to the door. It had certainly been exquisitely wrought, and I wondered how they had managed to drag such a massive object over four miles underground. It left open the enticing possibility that there was a forest in this vast recess, a forest of oak trees from which they had carved this and every other door in the temple.
While I was admiring the ornate artwork (featuring, among other things, a giraffe and a wyvern being led across a forest by a wise-looking bear), I noticed that in the center of the door was an impression in the size and shape of a human hand. Curiously I placed my right hand into it; with a slight rumble the door slid easily open.
I called out to Henry, but there was no answer. Overcome by curiosity, I entered the dark chamber.
There on the floor directly in front of me lay a slender white arm. I flashed my light on it. The arm belonged to a skeleton, seemingly sprawled out in the last stages of agony. At his feet lay another skeleton, and beside that one, another. The room was filled with skeletons, some large, some small. Some were clearly children; some had only just been born. There were skeletons of beloved pets, dogs and cats. Some were bears, having presumably died in their shifter state.
“So this is where the entire population of the tribe was buried,” I said to Henry, who had belatedly returned with the kids’ bicycle. Not a sound echoed through the temple as we strode through this chamber of the dead but the solid patter of our feet against the cold m
arble. Skeletons littered the ruin, peeking out of shadows or sprawled across the floor.
“They died peacefully,” I said, in the spooky stillness. “There was no battle, no courageous last stand against innumerable forces.”
“How can you tell?” asked Henry.
“Their burial uniforms, for one,” I said. “For another, there’s no sign of a struggle. No broken skulls, no broken bones.”
“But the entrance collapsed.”
“Naturally, I suspect. Whether through an earthquake or the slow decay of time, this temple fell into ruin. The people fled here to escape an enemy, but the enemy never found them. They lived out their lives in peace, but couldn’t escape the greatest enemies of all: death and time.”
“The temple was already here then,” said Henry.