CAVING

DAVID J. SCHOW

I told Mike to hold up a bit because the tunnel was getting narrower.

Mike and I had caved off and on for about a year. We weren’t spelunkers or professionals, merely lackadaisical teenagers stuck in the boring-ass small town of your choice . . . with access to mountains and caverns. Call it Colorado, or Arizona. It didn’t matter where, any more than it mattered where my parents dumped me next. Our gear was all scrounged or home-made; this was a couple of decades back, when you couldn’t get boutique skatepunk kneepads or helmet cams or use your phone for a flashlight. I was the spawn of mobile parents, practically gypsies—I didn’t share the same growing-up class of kids from the time I was in third grade until I was almost free of high school. A new house, practically every year, but no home. My younger brother and I played whatever we were dealt. Mike and I were thrown together for the summer of 1972. If America continued fighting in southeast Asia much longer, we’d both have to start thinking serious thoughts about the draft.

By then I’d be gone anyway, to some other home in some other town maddeningly like this one.

We were hundreds of feet underground, worming through passages barely wider than our shoulders. Mike’s little brother Danny and my equivalent little brother Jack had accompanied us on the hill hike and the explorations of the first large cavern room, which was filled with litter and shellacked in graffiti, scabs upon scabs of paint. Pit fires had smoked the ceiling in here. We set off a few firecrackers to enjoy the acoustics. There were beer cans everywhere and we used them to see if we could make shrapnel. Young? Dumb? Not yet mutilated enough? Who, us?

But Jack and Danny took one look at the first floor crevice and said uh-uh, no way. So Mike and I said fine, see ya when we get back, and left them with one of the canteens and a couple of flashlights. We had brought illumination par excellence—headlamps on elastic bands (no helmets), baton flashlights, a clip-on light each (for your pocket, for hands-free), and spare batteries for everything in one of the canvas pouches on my military surplus web belt.

Like I said, Mike and I had been doing this—hanging around, burning up time, blowing off school, comparing notes on record albums, reading paperbacks, staying up too late, caving—for a year or so, and it was about time for our parents to split us up, move on, and relocate remotely enough to require us to be friends long-distance, and that never works when you’re an enervated teenager. My family, such as it fit that definition, had arrived in the latest backwater too late for me to be involved in the current school year. Mike lived half a block away and didn’t care all that much for the joys of the public educational system, which cut into his guitar practice, riding his tenspeed, or loafing around when there was nothing good on TV, which was most of the time.

I am being circumspect about the location of the town, and the cave in which we were crawling. This is no accident.

I often thought my father was in the Witness Protection Program, or on the lam from even more supernatural authoritarian forces, as one explanation for our frequent hauling of stakes. It wasn’t an Army brat deal. Decades later, a father myself, it dawned on me that my father had been doing his best to support a family he didn’t really ask for, and was often compelled to duck away from various bills in a dramatic yet expedient fashion. (Sometimes if you waited long enough on large expenses, the entities that held them blew up or got redistributed and there was an excellent chance of your bill getting lost in the corporate shuffle. Sometimes, even more magically, bills just went away. My father was heavily invested in magical thinking.)

My mother was heavily invested in cocktails. Five p.m. sharp, without fail.

Needless to say, young Jack and I had to improvise a lot of our own entertainment. Our parents usually left us alone until they remembered that a certain amount of time had to be wasted in playing parent. Then, big reset, do it all over again. It came and went like sea tides, their feigned interest, their obligatory concern.

The cave started out as a crack in the hillside at the terminus of a forty-five-minute inclined hike, just far enough out of the way to deter picnickers and juveniles with no real verve for partying. Basic desert wasteland scruff with very few trees. It looked as though some giant had sunk his ax-blade into the rise and then abandoned the effort, leaving a gouge frosted with desiccated weeds that made the access resemble a shadow or trick of the light. You could miss it if you weren’t looking for it.

Inside the crack, shale and sandstone debris sloped downward about twenty degrees into a well-trodden dirt arena about fifty or sixty feet in diameter, with random boulder outcrops, each made surreal by gallons of melted candle wax. The colors were muted; the wax was full of dust, but the display still held a mildly otherworldly air. A lot of spray paint had been invested in the walls, at least to head-height, although the overhang of the stone arch was thirty feet above our heads. The usual obscenities overlapped with boring regularity, but in one corner somebody had inscribed the words PRIMEVAL SLIME with soot. Lampblack, not paint. Without any evidence, we adjudged this to be the oldest graffito in the room, and perhaps a clue to bigger things waiting.

Thus did the first chamber become the Primeval Slime Room, for our reference alone. At the northeast wall—ten o’clock from our entry position—we found the floor crevice.

Now, bear in mind that we are not talking about picture-postcard vistas of high-desert beauty at sunset or the kind of tourist-attraction formations that would give National Geographic a great big honking Earth Day boner. This was more like Nature’s Recycling Dump—rough-scrabble rockfall and bluntly slabbed limestone of no particular pretty color. Some of the river caves had actual lava tubes, but nothing vivid enough to bother photographing.

A whole lot of dirty rock. No beauty there . . . unless you had the eye to look for it.

I got on my back and shoved my head and shoulders through the crevice after an initial recon. About three feet high and it seemed to go on, well, forever. Into pitch-blackness.

That was when Jack and Denny vetoed further exploration, and after demeaning their never-to-be manhood, Mike and I reminded them this was not a democracy and left them to wait us out. So they putzed around in the larger cavern and set off a few more firecrackers, but with no real verve.

Inside the crevice it was already thirty degrees cooler than the ninety-plus on the hillside we’d ascended. Holed-up or sleeping critters were a real possibility. Most animals will retreat if you let them, but I’d seen rattlesnakes strike in near-wintry conditions, especially if they felt cornered.

It’s difficult to flinch away faster than a rattler, particularly if you are in cramped conditions with no room to rebound. Guess how I learned this.

Mike and I both had fatigue jackets, also Army surplus, that could zip up and tie off (around the waist) and featured hoods that could unfurl as needed. I also had a bayonet that had seemed like an authentic piece of World War II crap until I sharpened it. No snap rings, expansion bolts, pitons, or climbing rope. No extra fifty pounds of gear we couldn’t afford anyway. Just Mike and me, free-caving. Improvising.

Prone nightcrawling seemed to move us the quickest, a pantomime of knees and elbows, until the “ceiling” began to dip down in places, tight enough to obstruct passage. The vague light from the crevice behind us—along with the sounds of Jack and Danny farting around— gradually diminished.

Cave acoustics are difficult to explain to anyone who has never been utterly surrounded by miles of solid rock, any more than you can tell people that the darkness inside a cave network is darker than any darkness they have ever experienced, with zero points of visual reference whatsoever. It is in effect total blindness, a completely blank, black slate. Sounds get weighed down with a metallic bounce—not a ring, not even really an echo, but more a close-quarter distortion caused by the imprisonment of both you and the air around you. Talk with your head inside a cardboard box to hear what I mean.

We had plenty of lateral room, but the vertical was closing in on our progress.

“There,” Mike said, swinging his baton flash past me. Pure white light, not yellow. We had been moving practically side by side for several minutes.

Time works differently inside a cave, too, mostly due to the lack of visual markers. It’s probably the same on a space station, but at least they have portholes.

This shit is not recommended for claustrophobes or anyone prone to anxiety attacks. Your panic will not impress the rock, not at all.

Mike was looking toward a downward-sloping gouge about the size of a minimalist bathtub. “Feel how cool that is. I thought it was wet, but it’s not.”

Written right above it in Magic Marker on the wall was FUCK YOU IF YOU GO IN HERE FUCKFACE.

“Well,” I said. That was worse than a dare.

“After you, Fuckface,” Mike said.

Mike’s dad, unlike mine, was home all the time, dirt poor, on some kind of disability, and it had been suggested in a nonspecific fashion that he was mentally ill, which is the way of small towns like the burg in which we were currently incarcerated. His mother had decamped and divorced, but Mike and Danny lived with their father, which further suggested a nontoxic stewardship. My own dad was not in residence most of the time, working assorted gigs that paid enough to allow us to move and change houses and neighborhoods practically every year. (Sometimes, a logical explanation for this fiscal problem would dimly present itself in my adolescent brain, but I never mentioned the obvious to Mom.)

“It opens up,” I reported rearward. “I think we can stand up in there.”

The slide down was gravity-assisted and not too daunting to climb if we had to go back. Many times, if you crawled around in the dark long enough you would discover an alternate exit that would save you from having to retrace laborious steps. What we found at the bottom of the slide was a series of thin vertical walls like displays of curtains shoved haphazardly into a storage corner and confused together, forcing you to eel around the edges. Imagine your average maze, with twists and turns and dead ends and go-backs.

We had been gone from the main room for about forty-five minutes.

This seemed to be the end until Mike’s foot poked into a space near the floor that was not visible until fully lit. Two feet wide, max; hardly a foot tall.

“After you, Fuckface,” I said.

“There’s barely enough room for me to stand,” he reported. “But I think there’s like a blowhole or something up top. Lemme get up there. No room for you in here if I don’t. Come through headfirst or you won’t be able to stand, either.”

I reversed position and immediately got a face-full of choking downfall.

“Sorry,” Mike called down. “The walls are shit—they’re almost all dirt.”

His boots were about four feet above me. The narrow tube into which I stood up was only a couple of inches wider than my shoulders, and the walls were, as advertised, not rock but packed dirt. You could trace your fingers down its length and watch it crumble apart.

“Uhhh . . . not very stable, Mike, we could get buried ali”

“I know, goddammit!” he overrode, sounding pissed off, but not at me. He was fighting handholds that were dissolving in his grasp . . . and raining down onto me.

The dirtfall raised dust, and things began to get chokey.

Mike wouldn’t quit, though. I already knew this. After some flailing and a lot of swearing, his feet counterblanced further up and he said, “Okay okay, I’m up, it’s solid, it’s a tunnel, and . . . euggh, it stinks like shit, but it’s a tunnel!”

Five hilarious minutes later, I poked my own head up through the same access, with a steady belay from Mike’s grip, helping me up.

The tunnel was about four feet high and roughly cylindrical. It seemed to vanish off into infinity in both directions. The “belly” of the tunnel was slimed with gelid liquefied crap like the floor of a sewer; it gleamed in our lights, indicating flow, like a pipe on low drip. The smell was unparalleled.

The only way to traverse was on hands and knees.

“Which way?”

Up implied an exit—skyward. Except the vile-smelling runoff was coming from Up. Down implied deeper down, with a possible cavern spillout that might once again go Up. It was potluck either way and we were already coated with liquefied horror, as though we had been puked on by a T-Rex following a bowel-wrenching over-eat.

The left-handed path was downward.

Remember that in caving, every step taken is a step that will potentially have to be repeated, so we really should have gone Up. But the vague slope wouldn’t really help us against the lack of traction.

Fifty or sixty yards later, we weren’t so sure. We had been gone two and a half hours, one-way. If discovered, we would get yelled at for abandoning our siblings. Pretty soon the sky outside would be shading down to civil twilight, and I didn’t want to thrash down the hill in the dark. Inside the caves it was different; the external world ceased to matter as much. Time flowed to an alternate clock here.

“Hold up a bit,” I told him. “Tunnel’s getting narrower.”

No passage is consistent unless it is hewn by tools, and caves were often huge puzzles composed of mismatching pieces.

“Shh!” Mike came back. Then, hoarsely, he added, “Did you hear it?”

I had. An echo of my own voice, very slight.

We were over a hundred yards in and our backs and knees were beginning to cramp. Negotiating cavern passages is not as brisk as strolling down a corridor in a well-lit hospital. You must double-check every footfall, target your foot placement, and know how to shoot your lamps. The easiest thing in the world is bashing your head if you’re not careful, and like I said, we had come without helmets this time.

Walk in the park.

Twenty more yards, the vein began to relax, to unconstrict. Our lights revealed a huge, dark nothingness up ahead.

“Kill the lamp,” said Mike. “In case there’s, y’know, bats.” Which would explain all the rich, fetid dung greasing the chute. When the bats took wing at dusk, this tunnel might be one of their exit routes . . . which meant that behind us, Up, would lead to a surface opening.

We broke glow-sticks so as not to blunder off the edge of a sheer drop.

We could hear distant, dripping water . . . some squeaking and rustling. Bats, for sure. By the sound, several thousand of them, snoozing on the ceiling far above. We could feel air pressing against our faces that teased a large chamber, but no way down. The tunnel literally terminated in a sheer drop-off. In big bat caves you can risk a peek by masking your flash with your fingers, but you have to be good at it.

The floor was nearly fifty feet below, straight down, no slope.

If you scare a lot of bats into forsaking their cave, you risk killing them because they’ll die if they can’t locate another daytime roost immediately. Despite the stench, we had nothing against bats. They were, frankly, fascinating creatures . . . and we were invading their home. You don’t want to disturb them with lights if you can avoid it, but we snuck a few peeks to get an idea of the length and breadth of the cavern, and it was pretty gigantic.

Our path was clear. We’d reverse course and work our way back up the tunnel, hoping to be let out into the world via the same path the bats depended upon every night. If we knew a more efficient way in from above, we could revisit more easily.

Except, my skin prickled.

There was something right in front of me in the dark, which was impossible because the only thing in front of me was a fifty-foot drop to a stone floor covered in bat guano. But I felt the air displacement. I thought I saw something move against the black on black only illuminated by the glow-stick. Something touched my face, like the wing of a passing moth.

And something said, “Who are you?”

***

In the next few seconds, the following things happened:

I may have blurted out a total-meltdown yell of terror while grizzlybearing my hands in front of me, almost windmilling. There was nothing and no one there because, as Mike and I both knew, it was empty space and a dead drop.

I lost the grip on my baton flashlight and it plummeted. When it hit the rock floor, instead of shattering, it jolted on, dousing a great many bats on the ceiling with a spray of white light.

There was nothing in front me.

Hence I lost my balance. Slipped. Bye-bye forever.

Mike grabbed my jacket from behind, dropping his own free light. The tussle made him slip in the batshit, and thieved his footing. We fell back onto our asses in the narrow, beslicked tunnel, Mike banging the back of his head against the lip of the rock wall. He lost his vision for a couple of heartbeats.

And I was scrambling, a mad spasm of arms and legs, a spider on LSD, fighting insanely to get back back back and away away away . . .

. . . from something that wasn’t there.

The voice repeated in my head, Who are you? Over and over. Not mummy-dry or death rattle clogged. I had felt the warm, moist exhalation of the question on my face as soon as my ears tried to deny hearing it. The speaker had to have been less than a foot from my nose. My skin registered the vibration of that same question, sound waves skidding off my face, particularly in the newly sensitized patch of cheek that may or may not have felt the passage of a moth’s wing.

Both of us were making incoherent animal noises.

Then a great many of the disturbed bats took wing and began to fly toward the exit tunnel where Mike and I were still lolled together like groping drunks.

Mike’s headlamp, still dark, smashed against the rock when he fell.

Airborne bats were buffeting us on all sides, madly trying to get past the obstruction in their accustomed route. Like I said, they were harmless, but we were in no condition not to freak out completely. All we needed now was for a hidden boobytrap net to dump a load of aggravated rattlesnakes onto us.

I kept making a howling caveman noise until Mike regained his senses and clamped his hand over my face in the dark, which nearly caused my heart to explode.

Who are you?

Some immeasurable time after that, we were slogging through the freshest and most abundant bat poop ever—PRIMEVAL SLIME, indeed— following the lead of smarter mammals than us. When we emerged to fresher air, it was nighttime. We tramped around in the dark with only two working lights left, trying to find our entry point. When we did, it turned out that our little brothers had hiked home without us.

We were exhausted, but we didn’t laugh honestly enough to make it all just a hoot.

You know how if a blade is thin enough, and sharp enough, you never feel the cut? Like those micro-edged X-Acto hobbyist knives, or a scalpel? I had two white parallel lines on my left cheek, about a quarter inch in length and an eighth of an inch apart. My old buddy Mike pointed them out, exactly where I thought I had felt the imaginary moth’s wing touch my face. They had reddened, but did not bleed. They formed a mark not dissimilar to that of an allergic reaction.

I never went into a cave again. Brother Jack asked what had happened down there, and I told him a story that was mostly made up.

Fewer than four months later my family relocated once more. New town, new house. Despite our blood-brother promises, I never heard from Mike after that, either.

Today, if you wish to poke about in most cave systems in the United States, you have to decontaminate so the cave bats won’t be decimated by white-nose syndrome. You have to get licenses and permits and wear latex gloves.

I grew up—supposedly—moved out, kept moving. Got a tech job, got married, had one son, got divorced, got remarried, fathered two more kids, both gone from the nest now. I loved them but honestly, none of them were intended. The rest of my unremarkable life became the usual stuff that happens when your dreams evaporate and paying bills becomes not only your responsibility, but your reason for continuing to exist at all. I had entered that phase where I frequently found myself up in the middle of the night, smoking in the kitchen, wondering what had become of that version of me who had been fiercely devoted to staying up past bedtime.

Later, Marilyn, my wife, would give me hell for smoking, when I had quit. Every time, just like clockwork.

Eldest son Michael (so named because I had never forgotten my caving buddy, who had assumed the status of #1 Lost Friend) had just pulled the big party popper and made me a grandfather. Past that dubious life-achievement, all anybody truly expected of me was to be pleasant, enjoy meals, and settle on a reliable death date. Younger son Ernest was still hacking away at making club gigs work for his band. Daughter Diora had just evacuated home for college. I tried to warn her off sociology and political science, but it did no good.

New city, new (better) house, and no, I will not divulge where we landed. This omission, too, is no accident.

But it was one of those places where many houses have actual cellars, or full-on basements, and we were in the midst of storm season. It had been raining and blowing like hell for two weeks. Flooding was common and sometimes the power dropped out.

I’ve had those little white scars on my left cheek for most of my life, now. They never completely healed, or faded, or decided to join up with the rest of my skin. They are subtle, almost surgical, ridged by a micromillimeter. You can feel them but they don’t hurt and aren’t disfiguring. They’re just there.

My cellar door is exactly what you are imagining it to be—it swings outward (into the kitchen), revealing far too much junk hanging on inadequate hooks on the obverse. I tore out the dicey wooden stairs about four years ago; they tended to swell and warp when wet and were always far too creaky. I put in more durable grated metal steps with twice the support. When you descend it makes a pleasing ptung-ptung-ptung sound.

The basement covers the entire floor plan area of the house above it, which means an entire corner devoted to laundry, a whole wall of dedicated junk boxes that will probably never be opened again in my lifetime (but my goddamned souvenir wooden hoodoo mask from Malaysia was still in one of them, I just knew it), a shelf with nothing but dusty flowerpots and vases, everything elevated six inches on risers or pallets in case of flood. More obsolete or decommissioned junk hung askew from every available rafter. Most basements tried to round your shoulders upon entry; this one had a higher ceiling clearance than most.

Like a charm of making, the power went out precisely when I put my foot on the first stair. Ptung.

I could already hear dripping water and wondered if there were any mouse or rat lairs that were getting an unscheduled flush. One time I yanked a box out of an unsteady stack and the back face of it was completely chewed away, shredded to nesting and dried pellets of poop. Everything inside the box had been completely recycled for rodent use. They stuck to that one box, in secret, accessorizing their own homes invisibly for god knows how long.

It was a moonless night and there wasn’t much to see via ambient light. I stepped down into a puddle, though. Marilyn was running the upstairs playbook, turning everything off against a power surge. We didn’t have a generator, extra gasoline, or an evacuation plan. Outages were sometimes frequent enough to justify beefier circuit gear to protect the computers and such, but at their worst the outages rarely topped a couple of hours. We weren’t over-provisioned survivalists, here.

No candles. Fire could get you in trouble. We had plenty of flashlights, lanterns, and extra batteries. It had always been a thing with me.

Lightning strikes a transformer—instant blackout. Raccoon or possum up the wrong pole—blackout. Falling tree, ditto.

I snapped on my head light on its little elastic band and began to wade deeper in order to give the breaker box the old what-for. Make sure no independent circuits had tripped unduly. Check the ancient—almost decrepit—chunky fuses on the main switch, which was inside its own box and resembled a knife switch from a Frankenstein movie. Water sloshed. It was nearly five inches deep, but I had my rubber boots on.

Abruptly I got the queer sensation that I was not alone down here. Not monitored by spiders or spied upon by the critters involved in the box-shredding project, but an older feeling that caused me to turn around and check the stairs to see if Marilyn was overseeing my progress.

Nobody there. Of course.

But I misjudged my position, and when I turned back to work, my headlamp glanced off the cast metal door of the breaker box, which was already hanging open. The glass imploded with a scratching crystal sound and I was stuck in the dark. I mean, serious dark—I could not see anything except residual violet globes dancing across my crippled vision. I squeezed my eyes shut in a dumb attempt to hasten the return of my visual purple. Rhodopsin. The “dark adapted eye” that aids night vision.

I was still blind as a bat.

The almost imperceptible scars on my face, tiny and white, seemed to throb one single time.

I felt the moist air of exhalation from a living throat but there was nothing in front of me but the wall. And a voice I knew far too well spoke to me, three little words.

“I found you,” it said.