Scratch, damnit, shuffle, scrape, scratch, shit, ruffle.
Thomas sorted through his backpack, trying to ignore the sounds behind him. Marcus was determined to cook something. Never mind that they had brought granola bars and other raw foods. Never mind that the antique collapsible camp stove Marcus was currently swearing at was finicky and barely worked indoors in perfect conditions, let alone on the bare concrete floor of a World War II-era lighthouse, unfurnished save for the rusted metal hatch in the floor that led to the decrepit brick-and-mortar cellar, which he couldn’t see because Marcus had put his sleeping bag on it. Never mind that Marcus had forgotten to bring a lighter and was now trying to get it started on matches and raw machismo, in a terrible draft. Never mind that all they would be getting out of for his efforts would be a few greasily half-heated cans of instant soup. No, Marcus had said he would cook something. He had said it over and over and over again what felt like every five minutes during the five-hour car trip to get all the way out here in the boonies, about how nice it’d be to have a hot meal to keep the chill out, and about how it would be payback for all the times it was Marcus’s night to cook and he’d ordered takeout. To Thomas’s frank relief on every occasion.
Thomas knew from experience that arguing would only annoying Marcus, especially if there was any logic involved, and so he busied himself unpacking. His sleeping bag already lay near one of the walls, as far as possible from the drafts whistling through the massive cracks that embraced the heavy, rusted iron door in lieu of a frame. Just inside its mouth the granola lay at the ready for when Marcus either gave up on the soup or produced it as a profoundly inedible substance. Now he reached deeper into the backpack, hands grasping on scarred plastic, and carefully extracted his battered flashlight. It was three years older than he was, weighed as much as his leg, and produced as much light as you’d see reflected from a cat’s eye. On the other hand, it had run on the same battery for the last twelve years, so he supposed he couldn’t complain. Besides, the work he and Marcus were going to begin after the dinner of hideous soup wasn’t going to be a rushed job. Diligence and care would be the working words of the evening, and if you were planning to go slow anyways, Thomas couldn’t see how his flashlight would be any trouble. Besides, Marcus’s was newer, and this way he didn’t have to buy one.
Scratch, snap, for fuck’s sake, search, scratch, fwick, there we go, fwoooooosh.
Thomas sighed as the evening shadows fled away, removed by decree of a puny bluish gaslight resting atop its rust-plated throne. Soup, he realized, would soon be up.
“There we go,” said Marcus, placing his plastic spoon inside the can he’d been picking tomato-flavoured porridge out of for the past six minutes. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” The small packet of garbage was tossed from one hand to the other, then idly rolled across the floor, twisting and turning on cracks and crevices.
Thomas wordlessly picked up his granola and flashlight, putting as much sarcasm into the movement of every muscle of his body as he could possibly manage. It wouldn’t work, but it made him feel better. His own, untouched soup was dropped into a plastic bag, followed immediately by its roving predecessor.
Marcus snorted as he wrestled his own flashlight out from inside his knapsack. “Neat freak. We can clean up on Sunday. Hey, you ready?”
Thomas clicked his flashlight on and off, checking to see if the twelve-year batteries had given out yet. Darkness had set in fully, and even the constantly-waning brightness it produced stood out prominently. “Yeah. You?”
Marcus swung his backpack awkwardly onto one shoulder. In one hand a geologist’s hammer, in the other his flashlight, its golden beam casually overwriting Thomas’s. “Am now. Let’s go see what we can’t see.” He guffawed at his own joke as Thomas swung open the creaking door and stepped outdoors into the night.
The stars startled him with their intensity. This far from the city – or any city – their sparkle was unobstructed, and the clarity was such that he felt that he could count every single one. Half-remembered constellations he’d ignored in grade school jumped out at him, demanding to be named. He felt like the first man on earth. Even the looming bulk of the lighthouse at his back felt more primeval than artificial, its unnaturally smooth (if weathered) grey concrete walls faded into the same soft matte black that blanketed the trees and rocks surrounding it. The ocean’s spray and roll filled his ears with softness.
The sharp light of Marcus’s flashlight cut across his body as he stood and watched, breaking the spell. The skinny man whistled as he peered around. “Da-mn. I’d wondered why you weren’t moving. Some seriously nice scenery here. You’d think this place would be coated with cottages by now.”
“Our gain.” Thomas glanced down the dirt – well, dirt and rock – road that the last two hours of their trip had involved. “Too out of the way. At least for another twenty years. Back when dad first took us here, we didn’t see pavement for a day. Now there’s roads. Not close, but there’s roads. Give it twenty years.”
“Barrel of sunshine, aren’t you?” The flashlight spun down and around the base of the lighthouse, probing its foundations, nimbly skipping around the lips of the cliff of rock it sat upon. “We’re looking right under it?”
Thomas nodded. “Right under it. Come on.”
They set off, him in front, guided by memories fifteen years old and a flashlight twice that, Marcus in back, tripping on pine roots and loose rocks. The sea breeze took on the qualities of the inside of the lighthouse, endlessly punctuated by the same series of small sounds and words.
Crunch, crunch, slip, woah, crunch, step, pace, crunch, slip, shit.
Strangely enough, it didn’t seem to detract from the atmosphere. It almost added to it; Marcus became another denizen of the night, albeit a somewhat clumsier one than normally seen. Perhaps he was a supermassive herbivore, an elephant or titanosaur of his environment, a creature grown so large that at full age it had no natural predators and could roam as far and noisily as it pleased, without a care in the world. Yes, Marcus had found his ecological role, at least metaphorically. Physically he was probably outweighed by the local deer, an example of an introduced species faring poorly in its new environment. Although still unbothered by predation, he would surely be out-competed for his own ecological niche, and this bold example of a species foraging into new territories would go down as a failure, his population extinct.
Brushing idle and semi-demented ecological musings aside, Thomas was mildly startled to find himself staring directly at the edge of the cliffside trail. They’d looped down and around its steeply sloped forested top and down to the very lowest rim, the ocean’s swishing susurrus thirty feet below their feet and all but invisible, the lighthouse’s shadowy base somewhere overhead, perhaps an equal distance.
He stood there for a moment, trying to remember if the path had always been so small. It couldn’t possibly have been – his father had walked along it without once looking to watch his step, with room for Thomas to walk at his side, grasping a cautiously guiding hand. The thing he looked at now was a narrow ledge at best, crumbling and wearing away into slopes and crags all along its length for brief moments before it collected itself and resumed its wavering course. “Twenty years,” he said to himself.
“What?”
“The path’s barely there anymore. By the time the cottages arrive, this’ll be nothing but a cliff face and there’ll be no way to get to the spot.” He smiled. “A self-protecting secret. By the time anyone else will be around to find it, they won’t be able to.”
Marcus spun the geologist’s hammer in his hand, far too slowly to impress. “Better look when the looking’s good then, eh?”
Thomas glanced around. Trees behind him, rock beside, sky above, ocean below. A pleasant spot. “Yes,” he said, and began to cautiously inch his way onto the path.
Before he’d reached the halfway point he was cursing his flashlight; what had been poor but meaningless illumination on ground he knew was proving to be a dangerous handicap on this unfamiliar and uneven surface. Stopping every few feet to squint and peer and decide if that was a shadow or a crack was downright vital, and three separate times he’d had to ask Marcus to shine his flashlight ahead so that its brighter light could pick out the details of the stone more carefully. Marcus took it in good humour, leaning out and around over thirty feet of air with fearless care. The moment they’d left the dirt behind he’d stopped his chorus of small crashes and crisises, taking on a mode of movement as slow and careful as Thomas’s own. His newfound silent competence irritated Thomas in a way that his rustling blundering had not.
“Think it’s still there?” he asked.
Thomas leaned as far out from the cliff as he dared, squinting along the dusty ray of his flashlight. The path dipped sharply ahead, slanting off into a tail of debris. “That used to be it,” he said, pointing. “Right ahead. Can’t tell from here if the path fell apart just before the entrance or just after it. Former, we’re screwed. Latter, home free.”
“Good. Plan is, assuming the latterly, happily-picked choice?”
Step by step, ground by ground. Don’t look down. “We look about the entry, get our bearings, you grab a few samples, and then we head back up and leaving the exploring for tomorrow.” He could practically hear the protest rising up Marcus’s throat, and cut it off. “I know we planned for longer, but I didn’t know things had fallen apart this badly, and I don’t want to lose track of time and have to climb our way back up to the lighthouse at two in the morning. And the alternative is to sleep on rocks.” He waited, but no sound came from Marcus but an exasperated sigh. He’d be sulky for a while, but Thomas figured he’d forget all about it in a moment.
One step, another step, and then Thomas’s light shone weakly on a dark blot in the rock, irregular, taller than either of them. He reached out his hand and touched only darkness.
He smiled. “It’s here.” One step, another step, and solid stone underfoot, rock all around him.
This, he thought, was not like the path. The cave surrounded him, far smaller than he recalled, but otherwise perfect. He had changed, the path had changed, but in here, free of air and water bar breezes and raindrops slipping through the door, time had no place. He stood straight, abandoning the half-cautious crouch he’d kept along all of that long, dangerous walk in the dark above the waves. Here there was room to spare, a bare Marcus whistled long and slow, flashlight whipping from side to side. “Not bad. Plenty of headroom, that’s for sure. How far in does it go?”
Thomas shrugged. “Far enough that I doubt we’ll get all of it over the weekend. We’d mostly stay in the first three or four chambers. They’re pretty close together, the passages are all roomy. Past that it gets a little cramped, then widens out a bit. That’s all I could tell you about past the entry area – we didn’t like to go too far back there.”
“What happened to the curiosity of a child?”
“It was equipped with this flashlight and an overactive imagination. Besides, the bats get thicker back there.”
Marcus waved his geologist’s hammer dismissively, the tool’s steel surface shining in their reflected lights. “Bats. Anything else live in here?”
“Not as far as I know.”
Marcus squinted at the cave walls, paying his light across them bit by bit. “Anything else I should know?”
“What you’re looking for is directly to your left.”
Marcus turned according to instruction, sneakers shifting on worn stone, and gasped. Thomas had seen it before and was still impressed. The light danced across the contours of the stone and across something darker, its colour drawing it right out of the rock so vividly that it almost seemed just dead. The half-revealed outlines of giant pinching claws, the curved and smooth outline of a chitinous carapace, even the rounded markings where four gigantic eyes had bulged from sockets, two to almost obscene degrees, that such vulnerability had been exposed on the surface of so much power.
“Fuck…” said Marcus, softly yet passionately. “Two metres, easy. Two and a half?”
Thomas shrugged again. “We never measured it. All I knew was that it was bigger than dad.”
“And it was just sticking out like this down here?”
Unable to help himself, Thomas snorted. “Hardly. What you’re looking at,” he said, reaching out and running his hands over the fossil’s flattened paddle-like tail, “is the result of maybe a little over a month’s worth of chiselling and tweaking, spread out over five years.”
The expression on Marcus’s face was the closest to genuine horror that he’d ever seen in the scrawny man. “You’re telling me that an eight-year-old was digging this thing out of the rock?”
Thomas held it in this time. “Hell no. If I’d been on it, half of it would be gravel. Dad did it. I helped a little, the last few years. It was sort of like his pet project.” Thomas’s fingers slid lightly over the sleek central mass, rows of leg-segments and jointed armour that would’ve been the envy of any knight.
“Then he damn well knew what he was doing,” declared Marcus, who was gingerly running his flashlight around the edges of the exposed fossil, as if he were afraid that the light would be too much for it to take without withering in its glare. “This thing looks like it belongs in a museum. Hell, it looks like it is in a museum already. He even chiselled out the corners all nice and square. It’s practically fucking framed.”
“He did sculpture as a hobby. Said he never managed to make anything worthwhile. Same principles here, once he got the hang of the rock.” Over and across the carapace, twitching involuntarily as his thumbs brushed the hollow giant eyes, then whisking his hands away as if from something red-hot. “When he started, all that was sticking out was part of the tail.”
“Five years…” said Marcus, shaking his head. He was still speaking in that quiet, intense way that he almost never did.
“I think it was the only reason he kept coming back here,” said Thomas. He could feel the sneer edging into his voice as he talked, no matter how hard he tried to keep it out. “’Come see where grandpa worked in the war’ was fine for the first time. We had a week and a half of camping out either in an empty lighthouse that was half-junk even then or the car. Three days in, he found this thing. Then he comes back next year, and the year after. Five years we came back here, and then he finished it and we never did. Mom hated it because it was out in the middle of nowhere, my brother hated it because there were no other kids, and my sisters hated it because everyone else did.”
“And you?”
Thomas stepped back from the mural-fossil, immortalized in its stone frame. “Didn’t mind it. Nice scenery.” He shrugged again, prolonging it, twisting around the stiffened muscles in his back, cramped from the drive and refolded into harsher shapes after their momentary freedom and re-crippling on the slow, dragging cliff walk. “And like I said, the last few years I got to help. Before then, I’d watched.”
“Hell of an attention span for an eight-to-thirteen-year-old, or whatever the hell you were. Then again, I can’t imagine you as a kid.” Marcus tore himself away from the fossil to face him, a phrase Thomas had never felt was more appropriate – he could practically feel Marcus’s attention being forcibly twisted and shredded to remove it from the object of its adoration. “This can’t be the only thing around here. It’s too perfect. I have no goddamned idea how it’s this good, but I won’t believe it’s a fluke. You’ve got to have other stuff in here.”
“Probably,” agreed Thomas. “Little bits and pieces. I don’t remember anything this big, but then again, Dad didn’t need to look for another hobby piece and I was too stupid to recognize one when I looked. Besides, I told you how far in I went.”
Oh, there was avarice in those eyes, peering out at the darkness just past their flashlights. Thomas wondered what he was imagining. A whole fossilized seabed, their very own private replica of the Burgess Shale come again? Who knew.
“I’ve got to get some samples,” he said, geologist’s hammer slowly rising from his side as if under its own power. “Where did you say you found these ‘bits and pieces?”
The entry chamber led into a long gallery, an uneven cleft in the ground that sprawled vertically for some distance. Thomas wondered how near they were to the underside of the lighthouse, watching his light play dimly across the ceiling, drifting gently from crevice to cranny. As he watched above he popped a granola bar into his mouth with his free hand a section at a time, chewing absently.
Marcus’s eyes were fixed lower, not more than two feet above eye height, roving restlessly for something he could find and extract, examine, use for measuring dates and times and eras and epochs all the way down into the murky swamp that was the planet’s history. “Probably Silurian, maybe Devonian” he was saying, still in that focused, tight little voice, too controlled for its own good. “Eurypterid, sea scorpion, giant sea scorpion, not sure what kind, but absolutely perfect preservation. Let’s find something a bit more simple, a bit more iconic, portable, then we can take it back upstairs and look at it in peace and quiet and then we can get some goddamned sleep!” The monologue ended on an exulted note, his voice rising in triumph as he stopped and scraped at the floor. “Got you!” He raised his hand in triumph, clutching a jagged and loose stone in a deeply tender death-grip. “Oh, you beautiful peach. A trilobite, oh I couldn’t ask for a better barometer, and right on request.” Marcus held it so close to the flashlight that Thomas half-expected it to start glowing, the elongated discus shape of the little arthopod’s shell becoming a soft halo. “Yes, this is perfect. And hey,” he said, grinning like a maniac, “it came pre-chiselled. This was hacked out of a larger chunk of rock, even if it hasn’t been cleaned up. One of your dad’s practice efforts, or did you get bored back in the day?”
“The latter, I’d think.”
“Any idea these would still be lying around here?”
“I’d forgotten.” Thomas waved his flashlight over the end of the gallery, back and forth. “It splits in two directions back there. And past that is where it gets a bit hairier. Now,” he said, pocketing the empty wrapper, “let’s go get some rest.”
“Just one or two more samples –” protested Marcus.
“Every pound of rock you put in that backpack is one more pound you’re carrying with you back up that ledge, and every minute you spend looking for that pound of rock is one minute longer you’ll have to get tired and unfocused before you go back up that ledge.”
Marcus sighed venomously. “Shit. Fine, this should do for starters, you heartless robot.”
The return trip was silent. Marcus only swore once when he tripped, probably because he was too busy thinking. They reached the lighthouse without incident, where Marcus messily unpacked reference texts and a flashlight to create a sort of crude study area while Thomas wedged excess belongings into the door’s cracks in an effort to stop up the draft a little. It didn’t work. Eventually he gave up, returning to his sleeping bag and huddling into it fully clothed while the air stirred itself at his back. He drifted off slowly and hazily, sleep arriving underscored with the mindless humming of Marcus reading, and the occasional small clang of a hardcover flipping open on top of the iron hatch.
He woke up surprisingly early, just as light was starting to peel its way through the thick, cracked, and dirty glass of the windows. Just as Marcus’s humming had signalled his slumber, the skinny man’s snoring heralded his awakening. He was sprawled over three very large books on paleontology, one hand still clutched tightly across his prize, which had been cleaned up a bit from when Thomas had seen it last. Obviously Marcus had done a bit of picking at it while he slept.
All of a sudden, Thomas felt tremendously, staggeringly stifled by the tiny concrete room, with its dusty window and omnipresent, seemingly unstoppable draft. He unfurled himself from his sleeping bag, grabbed another granola bar with a stretching of his arms, and began to walk up the rusty spiral staircase that bordered the lighthouse’s wall. Despite its age and debilitated appearance, the creaks and groans it produced were muted, a tired and defeated protest with no real effect. Up and around went Thomas, glancing down from time to time to see if Marcus had been awoken by a particularly loud squeal of metal. Each time, he hadn’t moved a muscle. As he opened the door to the watch room he thought he heard a drowsy mumbling begin beneath him, half-masked by the grumble of rust-throttled steel.
The watch room was a little bunker suspended forty feet above the concrete floor, and it remained exactly as he remembered it: empty and bare as the room at its base. It had been too impractical to bring any of their possessions up here, and all the cooking and sleeping had remain firmly at ground level, but he and his siblings had rocketed up and down the stairs for days, half out of their minds with their need for something to do. His parents had told them to be careful for the first few days of any trip, then stopped trying. The only furnishing of any sort was the thin metal ladder bolted firmly in place on one side of the room, rust liberally coating it. It crunched under Thomas’s fingers as he pulled himself up it. The trapdoor was even more depilated, almost solid orange-red, but it gave way after a few hard thumps from his hands, popping upwards with a shriek and a puff of iron-laced dust particles. He wiped his face as he climbed up and through, into the light chamber.
The roof, he thought as he looking about, clambering through the gaping trapdoor, was surprisingly sound yet. Exposed a hundred times more to the abuses of the elements than any of the metals inside its concrete body, the steel cupola ran overhead, marred and occasionally dented, but firmly sound, much more so than the stairs that Thomas had trusted his life to just a minute ago. The glass of the walls surrounded him, and at his side were the deep divots in the floor where the lamp had been bolted before the lighthouse was abandoned. His father had been to see it just before it closed, when grandpa worked here, and had described it to them: a chest-high machine with a great glaring glass eye and a smooth shell concealing tiny complexities. He’d drawn a few pictures of it, he recalled. He unwrapped the granola bar and began to eat it, walking in a brief and small circle around its empty seat.
As he looked out through the glass, eyes tracing the border of the shore, his mind idled in circles. Why come back here? His family had despised it for the most part, his father had stayed only to complete a very specific task, and he himself had shared in his father’s opinion for the most part: pretty scenery, but only as an accessory to a project. Once it had been through, so had his father and he himself, wilfully and knowingly leaving the place he knew from peak to basement without so much as a pang of heartsickness. And now here he was with his university roommate, someone whom he found only marginally tolerable at the best of times, looking to dig up old bits and pieces. One idle comment on Marcus’s interests into the older life of the world, an extracted and vague description of his old project, and then before he knew it he was coming back, armed with intent to study something that he’d lost interest in long ago. Yet standing here, looking down, straight down a hundred feet of cement and cliff, staring at the exact spot he knew the cave’s entrance lay, he felt a murky, unfamiliar tinge in his mind. Not quite excitement, but something close to it; a presence he hadn’t felt in some time and was having difficulty identifying.
A call echoed up from down below as he tucked the granola bar’s wrapper into his pants pocket, drifting through the trapdoor’s open hatch and the watch room’s carelessly ajar door. Marcus was awake, and eagerly so.
Just as he was descending the ladder, pulling the trapdoor shut again behind him, Thomas named the emotion: anticipation.
“Silurian for sure,” he said, pointing at the little fossil in his palm. Now awake, his grip had relaxed from its militant stranglehold into a loving cradle, a secure nest for the arthropod’s remains. “It’s solid. And if your lovely big boy downstairs is any reckoning, you may have a new weight record for the period. Even if he isn’t the biggest, he’s one of the most spectacularly fucking preserved things I’ve ever seen, a perfect example. You’ve probably chipped out a fucking holotype – a type specimen – and left it here all these years, whether it’s a beautiful example of something we’ve already seen or a completely new one.” He paused in his excitement to tear off and swallow half a granola bar, scarcely bothering to chew as specks of food shook themselves free from his still-talking mouth. “We’ve got to get down there right away now that we’ve got some time. Get pictures, make sketches, maybe take a few chips from it and its rock matrix so we can get some samples for analysis. No, just from the matrix. It’s almost completely unblemished, we can’t touch that now, not even a little.”
Thomas nodded absently, working on his second granola bar, flipping his attention between the proffered textbook Marcus brandished and the fossil. He couldn’t tell any of the pictures on the page from one another, let alone identify which was kin to the rock-embedded sample. “Shall we?” he asked.
Marcus’s grin threatened to rip open his skull and let the top half skitter away, hands already scrambling for his backpack and stuffing in books, snapping together buckles. “Oh fuck yes.”
The hike down the cliff was much less ethereal than it had been past nightfall, although far more practically safe. They crossed the crumbling ledge in what Thomas estimated to be a third of the time made the previous night, aided by both better light and the confidence that came from proven success. This time the cave’s opening was plainly visible from some short way, a darkened ring of rock that let the rising sun shine in.
Inside was cool air and stone, and the now more visible and looming form of the sea scorpion, mounted in its wall, lit indirectly yet distinctly. Surrounding its softly darkened bulk, the stone seemed to practically glow, a strangely gentle light.
Marcus was on it like a swarm of bees, digital camera clicking antenna-like, distended knapsack-abdomen trailing an unnoticed stinger of granola bar wrapper, eyes wide and looking everywhere at once, combing his hair away as it steadily and constantly dripped down into his field of view. His geologist’s hammer picked and poked and tapped gingerly at the fossil’s rocky bed, striking with firm hesitation here and there to produce precise and exact flakes of stone that he bagged in Ziplocs and quickly stored away in some pocket or another. “Beautiful,” he kept whispering, and “fuck,” and “perfect.” Eventually his voice dwindled to nothing at all, his whole mind and body focused rigidly on examining the scorpion’s form, with no attention to spare for anything else. It was like standing next to a black hole.
Thomas sat, and watched. Sometimes Marcus, sometimes the fossil, and sometimes nothing at all. Now and then he checked his watch, not out of boredom, only curiosity in its mildest form. The minutes ticked by as steady as a river’s flow, and Marcus’s fascination showed no sign of diminishing, though his hands gradually and imperceptibly slowed in their restless crawling. They paused longer and longer, stroking and probing whatever he looked at less and less. And at last, after more than two hours, his search stopped, and his hands rested gently on its eyes. They were bigger than his palms.
“Unique,” he said, blissfully. “Completely, utterly unique.”
“Really,” said Thomas.
“Oh definitely. This gorgeous bastard isn’t in any textbook, any database, any museum. Nobody’s ever seen him but us, for maybe four hundred and twenty-five million years.” He grinned like a maniac again, eyes goggling. “Probably not any of his relatives, either. Bits and pieces of him just look… off. He’s not a great wobbling physical impossibility that overturns everything we know, but he’s unique. Very unique.” He rubbed his hands together, knuckles squeezing over the hilt of his geologist’s hammer. “And if he’s here… I wonder what else is, eh?”
“Where do we start looking, then?”
Marcus patted his backpack down, feeling its side pockets. “I figure we’ll start back in that second chamber, the one you found your ‘bits and pieces’ trilobite in. Might just find more of ‘em, might just find something completely new that you missed, maybe as new as your pretty friend right here.” With a satisfied grunt, he extracted his flashlight. “Now, what’s say we go take a look.”
They’d worked halfway through the gallery’s length before the thought struck Thomas. “Marcus.”
The skinny man jumped upright from the rock he’d been examining. “Found something?”
“No. But I think I know why we haven’t.”
“Great. Planning to share, or do you want to spend another hour in here?” Time hadn’t been kind to Marcus’s expectations. Not even another trilobite had surfaced, and his almost unnaturally focused attitude had reverted to a more normal semi-surly complaining.
“It’s stupid, but simple,” said Thomas. “I never found that trilobite here. I must’ve picked it up from farther inside and brought it out here to pick at while my father worked on the project.”
“And why,” asked Marcus, sarcastically but with a note of rising hope, “didn’t you think of mentioning this fucking sooner? Or, for that matter, recall that none of your ‘bits and pieces’ ever came from in here?”
Thomas shrugged. “I forgot. Fifteen years is a long time.”
Marcus stared at the ceiling with a theatrical sigh. “Early-onset Alzheimer’s, I’m sure of it. So where then, o cave guru of little memory, do we head next?”
Thomas felt almost malicious pleasure as he shrugged again. “I’m not sure where exactly. We check the next two chambers, I’d guess, and then if there’s nothing there, head farther in. I didn’t go back there a lot, but I did go exploring now and then.”
“Oh wonder-fucking-full. I’m glad to have such precise directions on our side.” He squinted at the gallery’s end. “Two rooms, huh?”
“Yeah. The entrance might be a little tighter than the last one.”
A little tighter was an understatement. The entry chamber didn’t lead to the gallery so much as flow into it, widening all the way. The half-sagged, half-tumbled pile of rocks at the gallery’s far end, on the other hand, possessed two major openings, the smaller, leftmost one barely large enough to permit Marcus entry while wearing his backpack, something he grumbled about quite a lot more than was strictly necessary, thought Thomas.
Inside, it cleared out a bit more, back to standing room. Cave three was a dead end, a boxed-off portion of cave two’s gallery, an oversized alcove-like chink in its wall made less accessible by a chance slip of stone long ago. It rapidly proved to be just as fruitless as its parent chamber, and Marcus’s grumbling began much earlier in its investigation. Privately, as he had so many times before, Thomas wondered how in hell someone with this deep and firm a streak of impatience had ever decided to pursue a career in paleontology, but then he remembered that odd, fierce focus that he’d seen arise over last evening and the day, and abandoned that line of speculation.
“Nothing,” declared Marcus, as he began to squirm his way back into the gallery. “More nothing. And this is the last of your pick before we start getting into burrows like fucking rats, right?”
Thomas watched the scrawny man’s legs kick and wriggle as he struggled onwards, like a bug trapped under a rock. “It’s not that bad – not for most of the way. And the next one’s different.”
Cave four was different. For one thing, it could be entered on hands and knees, even by Marcus and his backpack. For another, it meandered on for quite some way, a sprawling, irregular area clumsily bordered in stone. Water trickled down small channels on some parts of its walls, dripping in tiny, polite increments in a way that made Thomas think of perpetual motion machines. He wondered how much of the cluttered chamber around him had been made solely by the erosive efforts of those little dribbles. The entrance, the gallery, the alcove, they all felt finished, stable, permanent. This pocket of damp stone, steadily eating its way outwards, felt like a work in progress.
According to Marcus after half an hour, it also felt like another dead end. “There’s fuck-all here. There was fuck-all back there. Rat time then?” He stared with single-minded hostility at the nestled hollow Thomas had pointed out to him on entry. Flashlights aimed at it revealed a deeper darkness beyond.
“Rat time,” Thomas said. “It’s not all crawling, though. There’s open spots. Just not as big as out here.”
“Fun.” He began to unbuckle his backpack, a look of resignation covering his face.
“You can probably bring that with you. If you drag it.”
Marcus looked hopeful. “You mean there’s enough room?”
“For the first while. I told you, it gets cramped, then widens out a bit. Past that it’s not so good.”
“Not so good?”
“Put it this way,” said Thomas, lowering himself to hands and knees as he began to slip through the passage, “you won’t be bringing that backpack.”
They’d crawled, scraped, and squeezed their way through any number of cramped openings and at least four micro-caves before Thomas called a halt to tie a line to a nearby weighty rock. “It gets more complicated up ahead, does it?” asked Marcus, as he sorted through his pack.
“Hard to say. We’re almost as far in as I ever went.” Thomas accepted the proffered rope and began to loop it around the boulder as snugly as he could manage.
“What wonderful goddamn news. You think it could start branching ahead?”
“I don’t know.” Thomas finished his knot, yanking the ends of the line sharply a few times for good measure. “But it’s probably a good time to leave the backpack. We can come back for it later.”
From then on it got worse, more so than he’d remembered. A boy grows a lot from age thirteen, and what Thomas recalled as cramped was now positively stifling. Marcus was only slightly better off than he was, and every few minutes he would hear a quiet, fervent swearword rustle its way towards him from behind. Before long his thoughts were confirmed and the tunnel began to branch and twist this way and that, widening itself into flattened chambers with three or more apparent exits, any of which may have been dead ends. Twice Thomas was forced to back up from narrow avenues that abruptly swallowed themselves up into crannies too small for even his arm to fit through, and each time he began to back up he could practically feel Marcus beginning to panic, fear drifting through the air with a sour scent. He was glad of the line fastened to his belt, unrolling a trail behind them for their return.
Then, as he wormed his way across and through a sinkhole-like depression, he heard Marcus hiss in triumph. “Mother of shit. We’ve found it.”
Thomas paused, flashlight still wavering ahead into the black. “Where? And what?”
“Right above your head, and what do you think, asshole?” The warm light of Marcus’s flashlight cupped the back of Thomas’s neck, bobbing and weaving as it examined whatever he’d found. “Holy shit… just look at this.”
Thomas wriggled and twisted, turning over onto his back as the rocks that had been digging into his ribs transferred their flinty attentions to his spine. There he paused, eyes focusing in on a dark blotch on a darker wall. Two inches from his nose, suspended from the ceiling and almost twinkling under the first light it had seen in four hundred million years, was a trilobite, frozen in mid-crawl forever.
“That’s one,” said Thomas. “Total of three.”
Marcus was starting to laugh, half-cramped gasps wheezing their way out from a compressed set of lungs. “Oh, a few more than that. Follow the ceiling.”
Thomas obeyed. It was difficult to see in the guttering light of his own flashlight, but small dark marks festooned the tunnel roof ahead, ranging in size from a quarter to bigger than his hand.
“Beautiful,” said Marcus. “Beautiful.” He scrabbled at his pants for a moment, then reached upwards, digital camera in one hand as he carefully aimed the arc of his flashlight. “Let me just get a few shots of this shit, and we can move on a bit. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and this isn’t smoke, it’s a goddamned volcanic ash cloud.” The camera twitched and clicked in his grip as he moved it rapidly from fossil to fossil. “Mind moving up a bit? I’m going to want to look at those ones in front of you in a second.”
“Fine. But we’re almost out of line.”
“Point of no return? This’s more than good for our efforts.”
Thomas wormed his way back onto his belly and moved forwards, shoes scraping and shoving against the stone. Behind him, the whirr and whine of the camera continued, regular as clockwork. There were a lot of trilobites, but Marcus was moving obscenely fast, gorging himself on a glut of data, information in pictures streaming into his grasp.
He inched his way forwards, felt the line tighten as its last few inches slipped loose, and then Thomas’s flashlight was suddenly a spot in a mass of darkness, his hands resting in open space once more as the faint tinkle and drip of water filled his ears.
“New cave up here,” he said over his shoulder. “Bigger than the last few.”
Click, whirr, buzz. “Go ahead. Be there in a second.” Marcus was wound up tightly once more.
Thomas took a moment to undo the line from his belt before he moved ahead, patting the floor with his hands and finding at least enough room to stand on, which he did. The ceiling was out of reach of his head or his grip. A few sweeps of the beam revealed a steeply descending chamber, floor slanted downwards in a deeply irregular slope. The light passed over the brightly glittering tell-tale motes of condensation, the trickle-down of water worming its way through soil and down into stone through cracks thinner than hairs, invisible to the eye.
All told, thought Thomas, this was almost as large as the gallery, if you discounted the lowered ceiling. He traced the lines of water, following their blind meanderings across the walls and down the slope, watching the many streams feed into one that was just wider-across than his wrist and shallower than a puddle. There, at the far end of the vault, just beyond the arthritic reach of his flashlight, it dropped into darkness.
“Much bigger than the last few.” And then the light brushed across an irregularity in the stone, and he felt his eyes widen without his will.
“Christ,” he heard behind him, which suddenly seemed much farther away. “This one’s fuckin’ enormous. Look at this shit.”
“You first. Come out here.”
“Oh yeah?” The rustling and swipe of cloth and denim on stone, and Marcus emerged at his feet like a grub from a cocoon. “Look at this,” he said, stumbling to his feet and holding the camera out like a talisman. “Look at this shit. I went damned carefully over those texts yesterday, and I know these aren’t in any of them.” Images flickered in Thomas’s face as photos were quickly cycled through. “None of them are. Some of them don’t look quite right, but most are just different – solidly, one-hundred-fucking-per-cent. All trilobites, and none of them what I’d expect to see here. Either we’ve got some seriously out-of-temporal-locale fossils and we’ve expanded the know lifespan of a half-dozen families of trilobites at a swoop, or they’re all new species. And –”
Thomas smacked his shoulder with one hand, aiming the flashlight with the other. “Look over there.”
“What? You find…” Marcus’s voice died away momentarily as he noticed the faint markings illuminated by Thomas. “…something. Oh sweet Christ on a crutch with a stick up His ass.”
A pair of blank eyes stared out at them from the slope, from a smooth bump that was revealed as the head of another sea scorpion. It stretched downwards and onwards, what Thomas faintly thought looked to be twice his length in chitinous carapace.
“Holy shit,” said Marcus. His flashlight’s beam meandered up and down the length of the giant. “Three and a half metres or I’m a fucking sophomore on a drinking binge.” Hands shaking, he lowered the beam, then snatched it up again. “Holy shit. You see that?” A smaller, lighter shape was picked out against the rock. Thomas had seen enough in the past while to name it: a trilobite. Marcus slowly swept his light across the slope, focusing on spots wherever they lay. A trilobite, another trilobite, something Thomas didn’t recognize that looked to have been all legs, a blocky form unrecognizable… and then Marcus wasn’t pausing anymore, was waving his flashlight with frantic swiftness. Every stone suddenly held an entombed body, every divot marked where a form had rotted, every bump an empty, spherical eye.
The chamber wasn’t a chamber. It was, or had been, a shaft, a steep drop. And the slope that they stood on, that flowed down to its very base, was very nearly a pure mass of mineralized flesh and shell, a tower of graves.
“Fuck,” said Marcus, shaking his head as he probed at the skull. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Recognize any of this?” asked Thomas. For the first time, he thought he could understand exactly why the skinny man felt what he did.
“No,” he said, straightening up and almost immediately diving down again to peer at a trilobite the size of his fingernail. “Not a damned thing. None of them. They’re worse than that fucking roof. Some of these don’t even look right.” He pinpointed a particular target. “This fucker right here is almost four feet long – he’s almost twice the goddamned length of the largest described trilobite. And he’s still not twice the actual size, because he’s as thin as a doorpost. Bastard almost looks like a millipede.” He shook his head. “And that’s just the stuff that I can put into some sort of category. Some of the things in here?” The odd leggy thing was illuminated, a bifurcated creature with more limbs than mass. “I have no fucking idea what that is, or what it’s related to.” He lowered the light to his feet. “Tom, we’re literally standing on a goddamned gold mine of new species. This is the find of the century. This is the burgess shale mark-freakin’-two!”
“So what do we do?”
The scrawny man’s face was a nightmarish battle between exultation and frustration. “With where it’s at, with the gear we’ve got right now? Not a fucking lot. We take pictures, we leave, we map very carefully the exact path we used to get here, and then we drive the hell back to home as quick as you can without getting arrested. We need to get someone, anyone, to get a team out here last year.”
“Why the hurry?”
Marcus gesticulated furiously with his flashlight. “Erosion. Look at all the little fucking channels covering this place. They aren’t big, and there isn’t much water, but every goddamned second we’re standing here they’re carving another sliver off’ve this entire heap. I bet you that when that lighthouse was built there wasn’t a single fucking drop of water down here and this place was solid rock. Now its foundation’s done something screwy to the way the groundwater flows, and it’s been tearing this place a new one bit by bit.”
Thomas looked up at the ceiling. “You think that’s the problem?”
“If it’d happened much farther back we wouldn’t be looking at anything here. This isn’t goddamned granite, water will rip it a new one faster than you can say blinkety sink.” He shivered, as if a horrifying thought had just struck him. “Shit… what if this whole cave right here was full of them when it began? We’d have lost three-quarters of it by now.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Listen, I’ll start taking pictures. You can… I don’t know, wander around, take a look around the edges, see if there’s anything else besides what we can see here. Let’s figure out exactly where this place goes.”
Thomas nodded and began to pick his way down the slope. Every step required using some antique cranium as a foothold, or bracing himself on a segmented leg, or using a paddle-like tail as a grip. It felt sacrilegious and more than a little disturbing. His light wandered over a trash-heap tomb, a pile of bodies unceremoniously preserved where they lay with flippant carelessness. The descent itself wasn’t unduly difficult; the water had only made its impact so far as small channels and divots, no small sinkholes waiting for an unwary foot. Still, dampness was omnipresent, and the stone was slick and slippery. Cautious descent took several minutes, with several near-falls.
By the time he reached the base of the pile Marcus was a little yellow light above him, swerving from side to side and shining at discoveries invisible to his sight. Occasionally a quiet “fuck” would drift down from above as he found something new, or maybe stumbled. It was too far and too dark to tell.
He completed his circling of the boneheap at last. There was only one path out – a narrow hollow with hints of water-carving about, barely tall enough to walk hunched, with the little streamlet running down its center. Thomas, crouched on one knee, shone his light down it, watching the reflections on the water. It was almost completely colourless, without a hint of impurity. Straightening up, he panned the flashlight across the walls. More of those empty eyes stared back at him mindlessly. The walls of the tunnel were as thick-coated with the preserved corpses as the pillar behind him.
“Marcus!” he called over his shoulder. “It goes deeper in!”
“What?!”
“I said it goes deeper in! Look at this!”
“Gimme a minute!”
Thomas watched the bobbing light above begin its slow descent, then walked into the hollow. He changed his initial evaluation swiftly: the number of fossils here didn’t equal that of the pillar – if anything, it exceeded it. The walls, ceiling, and floor were coated so thickly that he was hard-pressed to see bare stone. If climbing down the hill of bones had made the hair stand up on the back of his neck, this feeling of being enveloped by ancient death was actively worrying him. For the first time in his life, he thought he felt a twinge of claustrophobia, smothered in a million-ton blanket of rock.
A skid and a dull thud behind him, accompanied by a curse, announced the arrival of Marcus. The scrawny man came up alongside him, rubbing his leg. “Tripped on something’s head,” he explained, then did a double take. “Fuck, every time I think I’ve seen everything here, something like this happens. This is unbelievable.” Then his eyes alighted on something near Thomas’s hand, and he stopped talking.
“What is it.”
“No fucking way.”
Thomas turned and looked. “Bones. So?”
“That’s it. Bones.”
“And? There were fish and things back around then, right?”
“Yes,” said Marcus. “But not bats.”