THE PIT
2,150 feet below the surface
Milo made his way toward the gathering cavers, anchor bolt jangling in his pocket. He wanted to kick it into the latrine trench, bury it, throw it into the lake, or melt it to nothing. Holding it only reminded him that someone had hidden the truth from the group.
Last to sit, Milo was handed a plastic cup of wet, starchy noodles and tough, rehydrated beef. The meal wasn’t half-bad; the sun-dried tomatoes dotting the mixture were a pleasant surprise, though a bit over-salted for his taste.
“We cooked this time,” said Joanne. “But the duties will ultimately be shared among all.”
“I don’t think anybody’s going to want my cooking,” grunted Logan through a mouthful of soupy pasta.
“Everybody takes a turn,” Joanne repeated. “And don’t worry—most of the meals are of the just-add-water variety. No need for a Jamie Oliver-type chef down here.”
“Let me know if you change your mind,” said Isabelle, smiling dreamily. “Because I could really use a Jamie Oliver.”
“Just be careful with the stove,” said Duck, barely looking up from his meal as he ignored the producer’s double entendre. “We cook with isobutane cartridges. Gets pretty hot pretty quick.”
Dale let silence fall before changing the subject. “We’ll probably need to turn in before too long,” he said as he absentmindedly stirred his noodles. “No sense in overdoing it on the first day.”
“Agreed,” said Duck with a smile. “Everybody ready for the deepest sleep they’ve ever had?”
Joanne led the cavers in a hearty groan over the pun. Eventually, everyone slowly got up from their rocks, turning their cups over to Duck for washing.
Duck cracked his knuckles and looked up at the ceiling, watching the glowing orbs gently roll across the ceiling in the slight breeze. “The light is nice,” he finally said. “But I kind of liked the old way better.”
“How’s that?” asked Bridget.
“We would always turn off the headlamps and flashlights to save power,” said Duck. “Eat in total darkness. It was pretty cool . . . you’ve never really enjoyed a sandwich until you eat one in the dark after fifteen hours of busting sumps. In the right chambers, there’s no wind, no noise, no light, no sound. Just you and your sandwich. The sandwich becomes, like, your entire universe.”
“That was almost poetic,” said Joanne, laughing.
“Cave sex is awesome for about ninety percent of the same reasons,” added Duck, wistfully lost in his own memories. “Especially if you have a sandwich afterward.”
Using his remote control, Duck set the illuminating globes to slowly fade over thirty minutes, dimming the ambient light until the gargantuan chamber was shrouded in complete darkness. Milo adjusted his sleeping bag in the tent he shared with Logan. Though he felt some natural fatigue as the light diminished, Milo couldn’t help but tuck under the lip of the sleeping bag with his e-reader, speed-reading the first eighty pages of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. The updated translation was better than he remembered; he found himself smiling and highlighting passages, resolving to include himself the next time Dale and Logan started spouting quotes. But soon his eyes grew droopy. He clicked the reader off and fell asleep.
Milo found himself kneeling alone in the vast Tanzanian savanna, dark starlit sky above, alone on the eternal plains. The edges of the land curled up at the furthest reaches, as though the sphere of the earth had inverted, the ground beneath him no more than the thin surface of a bubble in the endless stream of the cosmos.
Milo silently followed a game trail into the long, dry valley before him. The winding path soon revealed the yawning maw of the cave in its most ancient form, unencumbered by collapsed rock or the fragile man-made edifices of Dale’s camp.
Then he saw them—ghostly elephants threading through the distant trees from every direction of the compass, both colossal and ethereal, as, trunks clinging to tails, they slipped into the mouth of the cave like sand through an hourglass.
Milo looked down, watching as his unclothed limbs and torso elongated like the painted figures in the gallery. He strode over the plains, sliding through the grass, his naked feet padding over the billions of tiny holes, pinpricks in the membrane between worlds. A splinter stuck his foot, and when he bent down to pick it out it became a long, obsidian-headed spear in his hand, the length taller now than himself. The holes beneath his feet widened as albino locusts emerged to swarm around his feet. One bite, two bites, a dozen, a hundred, he felt their pincers pull at his skin. As he looked up, he realized the entire breadth of the landscape had transformed into a swarm of crawling insects, so vast in numbers they threatened to consume the very world beneath him. The pain of their pulling bites grew greater with every moment until Milo began to run, slowly at first, their fragile, brittle bodies crunching beneath his feet, and then faster and faster until he lost sensation of any speed, lush grasslands passing in a blur. Their prey having vanished, so too did the locusts, retreating into their shrinking holes.
His vision now unimaginably clear, Milo set his sights on an eland, a spiral-horned antelope, grazing across the valley. With each bounding step, Milo rose higher into the sky, high enough to pierce the constellation of stars, their twinkling orbs rushing past him like fireflies. Spear raised above his head, Milo plunged toward the earth, wind whistling in his ears like the cave’s hurricane howl.
The eland bent before him, submissive, head down, front limbs curled to the earth, and he pierced it through the neck with the stone blade. Bloodlessly, it crumpled at his feet, the penetrating length of the rod vibrating with the force of the blow. Breathing hard, his legs trembling, Milo gazed up to find himself at the foot of a great oasis, surrounded by incalculable herds of elephant, giraffe, antelope, and water buffalo. Hippos and crocodiles floated within as lions and hyenas stalked from the outer perimeter, birds circling above.
Milo crept toward the oasis, the herds parting to reveal a woman’s smooth silhouette before him. Facing away, she allowed him to watch as she waded into the oasis waters, long dark hair barely covering her nude form. He reached toward her with his impossibly long arm, almost touching her bare skin, when she suddenly swiveled to stare at him. The ethereal figure was now recognizably Bridget, her face impassive, one arm cradling full breasts, the other looped beneath an engorged, pregnant belly.
Waking up was a great deal less pleasant than falling asleep. Milo’s exertions from the previous day had gathered in his joints and chest. Knees, arms, thighs, everything ached. The floating lights were a poor substitute for daylight, leaving Milo with the fuzzy, fatigue-laden sensation of the darkest, coldest winter solstice.
The tent rustled as Logan stepped in, naked as he brushed wet droplets from his hairy body and beard.
“Did you have sex dreams?” asked Logan, seeing that Milo was awake. “I had these intense sex dreams all night.”
With that, Logan shook off, hurling water everywhere. Milo grimaced, trying to shield his eyes and mouth from the moisture. “You have to try showering in the waterfall,” said the geologist. “It’s like getting sandblasted clean. Don’t even need soap. Amazing. Cold as hell, though.”
“Maybe later.”
Drier now, Logan took a closer look at Milo. “Shit,” he said, pointing at Milo’s nose. “You’re bleeding.”
“I am?” asked Milo, feeling his face. Sure enough, a steady stream of sticky blood dribbled down his nose and across his mouth. It had already badly stained his sleeping bag below. Milo hadn’t had a nosebleed since he was in elementary school—embarrassing. He couldn’t help but remember the images in the gallery, of crimson blood pouring from the faces of the dancing figures.
“Get cleaned up,” suggested Logan. “I scored us some wet wipes, should do the trick. Joanne is going to hang back with Charlie and Isabelle at base camp, but you’re with us—Dale says we’re hitting the anthill in ten.”
Dale led this time, followed by Duck, Logan, and finally Milo. He felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu: the same claustrophobically hostile cavern walls, the twisting passageways, the forking sub-passages. The cavers dutifully followed Joanne’s chalked directions, taking the most promising routes ever deeper at each intersection. Light from the base camp had long since disappeared; Milo was again reduced to crawling on hands and knees.
As the tunnel turned upward, Milo watched as the slimy mud beneath him turned dry once more. He expectantly turned his head upward to the chandelier of calcite soda straws. Stopping, he withdrew the flashlight from his pocket and pressed it into a collection of the fragile stalactites, watching in awe as they glowed like upside-down candles.
“Knock it off,” said Dale, turning around from the front of the pack. “Joanne said you’ve already wrecked enough of those.”
“Won’t happen again,” Milo mumbled.
Logan started talking about the straws’ formation rates to anyone within earshot, and soon they were again at the natural chasm bridge. Milo could see the muddy furrows where he’d tried to save himself from sliding over the edge. This time, he gave the slippery section a wide berth, following the others across the bridge. No one commented on the corpse still lying shadowed and hidden below.
Duck hung back at the end of the natural span. When Milo caught up to him, the cave guide tapped at another smudged arrow at the intersection. The previous group had missed it in their scramble to reach Milo; this one pointed in a different direction. Marked with calcium hydroxide, the arrow had not been left by Joanne.
“Lead on,” said Duck, pointing to the incredibly tight passageway.
“I could use some help with my pack,” complained Dale from ahead. Logan and Duck sat up cross-legged to help Dale as Milo steeled himself for the crawl to come.
A hundred and fifty feet in and Milo was already miserable. The kneepads were no longer useful; now, on his belly, they only got caught on every jagged rock and loose stone. Hands in front of him, Milo couldn’t turn around, could hardly even wriggle. Even breathing too hard made his spine touch the ceiling above. Every inch-long movement within the dark, airless passage required incredible exertion; every minute felt like hours.
“Just you wait,” said Duck, now behind him. “Just you wait until we have to start pushing scuba tanks through these passages. Now that is all kinds of fun.”
Though the ceiling remained low, the chamber ahead opened up to a disc-shaped void twenty feet across, large enough for Milo to drop his pack, flip onto his back, and gasp for air. Allowing the relief to wash over him, Milo couldn’t help but sense a sort of inpenetrable darkness in the center of the room, an unquantifiable emptiness he’d not experienced before. Flipping onto his stomach, he scanned the room with his headlamp. To one side, a table-sized hole opened up the floor of the chamber. He crawled closer to it, finding that the edges of the hole were composed of crumbling, paper-thin stone hanging over sheer void. The hole was like a skylight and the pit below too vast to ascertain any sense of dimension.
“Don’t come too close,” said Milo as the rest of the party approached. “I think the floor might not support everybody.”
Dale ignored him and crawled up to the very edge of the hole, sticking his head inside. “You’re not kidding,” he said with a long, low whistle. “That is a big chamber down there.”
Dale glanced around the upper room until he found a bowling-pin sized rock. Grabbing it, he slid it across the cavern floor and into the hole as Duck punched the timer function on his wristwatch. Milo caught the whisper of wind as the stone dropped from view.
Ten seconds passed, twenty. By thirty, Dale and Duck were glancing at each other, shaking their heads.
“If we haven’t heard it hit by now . . .” said Dale, not completing his thought.
“What if there’s water down there?” Milo asked. “Could it have splashed down?”
“Still would have heard the kerplunk.” Duck frowned as he clicked open his Zippo lighter above the hole. The flame didn’t even flicker.
“No air exchange,” said Logan. “And I’m not hearing any waterflow either.”
“So where did the rock land?” asked Milo.
“Satan’s featherbed,” said Duck. “His old lady is looking up from the inferno thinking where the hell did that come from?”
“Should be using these sparingly,” said Dale, retrieving a pack of road flares from his pack. “But here goes anyway.”
The cave guide lit two and tossed them into the hole, one after another. For a moment, Milo could see the walls of the pit as the flares tumbled one after another, disappearing into the darkness.
“I can’t see them anymore,” complained Logan. Everyone else mumbled their agreement.
“What should we do?” asked Dale.
“I vote we drop Charlie in next,” suggested Logan.
“Let’s not get fixated on this little mystery,” said Dale. “DeWar wouldn’t have had the equipment to get down there anyway.”
“There’s no air exchange as far as I can tell,” added Logan. “Means it’s probably a dead end. Could be nothing more than a couple hundred feet down.”
“Or maybe a couple thousand,” said Duck.
“Unlikely,” stated Logan.
As the rest of the party moved on, Milo found himself gazing into the inconceivable darkness of the pit, the skin prickling on the back of his neck as the pit stared back. A quote from Journey to the Center of the Earth leapt into his brain, leaving Milo to drift over every word.
An impression of void took hold of my being, Jules Verne had written. There is nothing more intoxicating than the attraction of the abyss.