They’d been caving together for six years, long enough to trust each other blind in the dark, literally, headlamps failing more than once in that time and neither of them panicking because the other one was there counting steps and calling out the shape of the walls from memory. This particular cave was supposed to be an easy one, a known system with a mapped main chamber, good for a Saturday when neither of them wanted anything more ambitious than mud and echoes.
The crawlspace that wasn’t on any map opened up behind a rockfall that shouldn’t have been loose enough to move, and Mack found it first, calling Syl over to look at a draft coming from somewhere that had no business having a draft at all. They told each other it was worth a quick look, the kind of decision cavers make constantly and mostly get away with, and they got maybe forty feet in before the walls stopped being rock in any sense either of them recognized, warm and faintly pulsing under gloved hands, lit by a reddish glow with no visible source.
Neither of them said the word out loud for a long time, mostly because saying it felt like it would make the situation worse somehow, more permanent. Syl kept insisting it was some kind of geothermal formation, bioluminescent minerals, anything with a name that belonged in a textbook, and Mack kept nodding along because the alternative was standing in a tunnel that smelled like sulfur and old smoke, listening to something like distant screaming that might have just been wind moving through rock formations shaped wrong on purpose.
They found their way back out by following the draft in reverse, which shouldn’t have worked and did anyway, emerging into ordinary daylight eleven hours after they’d gone in, though both their watches insisted only two had passed. They never told anyone what they’d seen, partly because nobody would have believed it and partly because they weren’t sure themselves what they were supposed to call it. They still cave together most weekends. They stopped going anywhere near unmapped crawlspaces, and neither of them has ever needed to explain to the other one why.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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