The bat’s skeleton was a wispy little thing, delicate as a hummingbird hatchling. Both of them stood there, watching it, for some minutes.
Finally, Marcus broke the silence. “I don’t fucking believe it.”
“It’s right there.”
“It’s got to be some sort of anomaly. Maybe the rock layers folded.”
“It’s half-covered by that trilobite.”
Marcus shook his head. “Either’s it’s a one-in-a-billion anomaly, some asshat discovered time travel while we weren’t looking and thought it’d be fun to toss a bat into the Silurian, bats spontaneously evolved before mammals or even fucking amphibians, or trilobites and half a goddamned Silurian-esque ecosystem survived into the fucking Eocene.” He shook his head. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The simplest answer is that we’re both hopped up on some sort of toxic gas and we’re hallucinating our brains onto the floor.” With slow hands, he raised the camera and took a picture. “There, recorded. Now,” he said, “you go get my backpack. I don’t care if it takes three hours, I am removing this thing, whatever it is, in one piece, in full context. We’re going to go back and get this to someone who won’t think we’re nuts out of hand and who can help us figure out what the hell it is.”
Thomas nodded. “Fine. You coming?” He still wasn’t sure he could fully comprehend what he’d just seen himself. All he knew was that it was there, in front of him.
“No. First, I want to take some more pictures. Second, I want to see if there’s any more of these freak pairings down here. One’s a fluke, two are a coincidence, and three would be as close to pure concrete proof as you’d ever want. And I’d like to know which this is. Now shove off and get my backpack. Dump all the nonessentials out on the floor if you have to, what I really need are the sample packages and the hammer.” He stared at the wall. “Sonuvabitch. Shale mark two I can handle. This…? No way.”
Thomas set off. He tried to think about what he’d just seen, but the unreality of it surrounded it like a fog, making his mind travel as slowly as molasses, as lead-footed as his steps up the boneheap. When he got to the top, he glanced back down. Marcus’s light reflected from the hollow like a little wobbling sun, all alone in the dark.
He turned and squeezed his way back into the tunnel, feeling his hair brush against ancient shells. One hand on the line, one hand on the flashlight, he began the slow trudge back. Before he’d travelled twenty feet he sorely missed the added illumination from Marcus’s light and was silently cursing his sentimentality in bringing along his old, useless, half-broken piece-of-junk.
The line twisted turned, snagged on rock, smooth on the floor, tense and slack in turn, but it was still an accurate guide, and the trip was quick, unmarred by the false turns or dead ends that had fostered the cautious and slow exploration on the way down. Before long the rock opened up grudgingly around him into a little bubble, the microcave in which the line was tied, where the backpack still sat, bulging with supplies.
Thomas opened the main pocket and began to haul out books, giant hardcovered things with tiny print and thousands of pages. Several large cans of soup followed, and he felt a keen temptation to accidentally misplace them before piling them alongside the books. Granola was already beginning to stick in his throat, and if he could wrest control of the stove away from Marcus he thought he could produce something that was within shouting distance of edibility. He dumped out a bottle of water, which he promptly drank half of before putting aside, then eyed the much-deflated backpack. The books had carried much of the bulk, and it looked much more portable now. Thomas grabbed it in hand and began the long crawl again.
If the trip back had been a lightning dash compared to the initial expedition, the return was a weary trudge. His knees were starting to ache, and the backpack may have had its load lightened but it was still an extra twenty pounds. Aside from all this came the new difficulties of crawling with both hands full, one wedged behind him dragging an irregular object that kept snagging and bumping on rocks. As he crawled through the sunken tunnel and its low-hanging, trilobite-coated roof he cracked his head against the ceiling what felt like every time he moved, taking him from suffering in silence to muttered “shit,” to nearly snarling out loud. By the time he rolled out of the crawlspace and onto the rounded peak of the pillar of corpses he was in a foul mood and half-ready to tell Marcus to just rip the goddamned bat out of the stone any way he could and leave on the spot.
He looked down the mound. The little wobbling sun was missing.
It wasn’t until Thomas had stumbled to the base of the pillar and was standing next to the hollow’s entrance that he began to really worry. Marcus had said that he would be looking for more samples. No sign of life or light winked back at him as he crouched his way in, shining his light on the anomalous bat. It sat there undisturbed, prone and half-covered by a curious trilobite. He yelled down the tunnel, and heard nothing but echoes.
“Fuck,” he muttered. There were enough fossils to examine here to keep him busy for what he would think to be hours, and no reason he could think of for Marcus to go charging off down the tunnel, let alone far enough away that he couldn’t hear him. He hadn’t been gone that long, not yet.
Thomas stood and thought, letting segments of logic falling into place. Marcus wasn’t here. None of the cave dangers he could think of – rockfalls, bad air, falls – could move him from this spot. Therefore he must have left under his own power. Why? Because he saw or heard something he wanted to examine. There was very little to make noise down here besides the faint trickling of the streamlet at his feet. Therefore he had seen something, because… Marcus’s flashlight was stronger and had glimpsed something off in the distance that Thomas couldn’t see from here. Marcus would’ve responded to his call if he were able. Therefore either he’d had an accident en route or had found something so interesting that he was in that trance-like state of his again and simply hadn’t noticed, which Thomas thought extremely unlikely.
He began to walk down the tunnel, back hunched, backpack now shouldered and out of the way, giving him a hand free. His light slid back and forth from wall to wall, sputtering on damp stone and shells but nothing new, nothing that leapt out and grabbed his eye the way he guessed it would’ve Marcus’s. He called again, and for the second time heard no reply. The tunnel continued onwards, slanting ever-so-slightly downwards but otherwise straight as a crooked-walled arrow, extending out an unknowable distance beyond the range of his light, which he carefully kept in an ongoing circular sweep over walls, floor, and ceiling. It showed nothing but fossils, onward and onward, nothing but fossils. Then it glinted off a wet patch, and he stopped, suddenly hopeful. He knelt, he went down on hands and knees, flashlight probing from all angles, and smiled.
A shoeprint. He shone the light along the floor and found more, walking ahead into the dark, sometimes smudged into a circular blur where the walker had stopped and turned about before continuing. Marcus had stepped in the streamlet here, probably crossing it to examine whatever was on this wall before moving on. The likely object of interest, saw Thomas, was yet another sea scorpion, a hulking bulk that seemed much more robust than the longer, more lithe specimens of the mound and his father’s project. This creature was built for weight, broad and stocky, legs thick and short, tail half the length it should be. If it had stood, he could’ve imagined it poised as a cross between a sumo and a tank.
Buried alongside it was a smallish, intact skeleton. Thomas didn’t know much about anatomy, but it didn’t take a lot of imagination to see the object for what it was. It looked like some kind of large rat. “Twice is coincidence,” he muttered under his breath.
He started walking again, pausing only briefly at each new point of Marcus’s interest. An exotic-looking trilobite, its carapace festooned with spears. Another bat skeleton – two actually, half-meshed together. An odd-looking shell, its swirls and spirals not quite like any he’d ever seen before. Strange pipes and flutes in the stone marking the grave of some sort of colony-living creature he couldn’t begin to name. As he followed them, the footsteps grew farther and farther apart – Marcus was moving at a brisk trot now, no longer stopping for anything, aided by the gentle expansion of the ceiling’s height. Already Thomas could already walk nearly upright, and the skinny man would’ve had at least two inches of headroom. He walked briskly, flashlight skipping from wall to wall before flicking back to check on the trail of his friend. Then he stopped, frowning, as something changed.
He stepped over the streamlet carefully, following the veer of Marcus’s footsteps. Then he went down on his knees again, flashlight wavering over something new. There was another pair of tracks intermixed with Marcus’s, a sort of odd scraping skitter laden with small wet dots. It meandered over and across the wet shoeprints for at least fifteen feet before veering back into the water. The footprints went with it, and then the small, clearly-defined “banks” of the streamlet were covered in still-dripping water, scattered wildly.
Thomas stood completely still for a moment as he thought again. Marcus stopped looking at the walls, started running. Marcus crossed over the stream, something low-built with too many legs comes out of the stream. It dodges back in, Marcus runs down the center of the stream.
Thomas was very careful not to think about what this might signal, because he was sure he didn’t believe it. Instead, he resumed his walk, started moving his flashlight again. The question sat in the back of his mind with the weight of the rock around him, numbing his mind, and then his light slid off the tunnel wall and into a greater darkness even as his footsteps began to echo into a new chamber, bouncing off walls so far away that his light groped its way into thin, musty air and died without touching stone. At his feet, the stream ran forwards and down, plunging into a slope and over ledges. The faint sound of trickling, splashing water was a soft presence coiling around his ears, and the air felt thick, damp and heavy, almost worrying so, yet he had no difficult breathing.
Thomas panned his flashlight over and around the water. The splashing followed its path all the way to the edge of the first drop, with no signs of stopping. Cautious probing showed a ledge just beneath, slick with spray. A dark object lay huddled on it, unmoving, half-tucked beneath the overhang. With a sense of slow inevitability, Thomas lowered himself down, a four foot drop, shoes placed carefully on the slippery surface. He turned his light to the lump, knowing what it was even before the light hit.
A trilobite lay there, domed shell crushed by some weight from above, its little segmented legs as still as those that lay frozen in the walls. Unlike them, it had no eyes to speak of at all, not even as much as a slit or divot in its carapace betraying where they might have once peered out in so many directions at once.
Thomas sat there for a long, long moment with his mind blank and body unmoving before he let himself think.
Marcus wandered down the tunnel. He saw a trilobite. Naturally, he went after it, and naturally, it fled. It went over the falls, so did he, he landed on it. Absolutely insane, of course, but understandable. Which left one question beyond the unthinkable one of why there was a trilobite: where was Marcus?
Worst things first, he thought, and turned his flashlight farther down the falls. Empty rocks met him, and near the flickering end of the light, a flat and calm pool. The water was so murky that it almost looked to be mud. Something dark lay on its bank, half out of the water, half in. Light reflected off glass, and then Thomas was hurrying, dropping down ledges, scrambling through knee-deep water, sloshing up to Marcus’s prone body and dragging it up out of the water. It was cool, but far warmer than the icy chill of the streamlets.
Thomas laid two fingers on the side of Marcus’s neck. Nothing. He checked his wrist. Nothing. Peeled back an eyelid and shone his flashlight directly into his face. The pupil didn’t so much as budge. He could feel panic start to well up inside him again. Buried under the earth, having just seen something impossible, face-to-face with a corpse. In the dark. Any one he could handle. Two was probably too much. All four was too big to grasp, and he had the dark suspicion that this was the only thing preventing him from panicking.
Then, as he sat in the dark with the body, he heard a sound.
Thomas’s head snapped upwards, thoughts abandoned, instincts focused into a single sense. For a moment there was nothing, and then again, a slight sound, a small one, just on the edge of hearing, not far off from the sound chalk would make on the blackboard.
Tcck, sccrtch, scratch, rrchk, srrciip, scrape.
Very faint, sounding as though it would die out at any second, but unmistakably there and holding on. The sound of spindly legs skittering over naked rock, still dripping with water.
Thomas reached out, as quietly as he could, and began to feel around the shallows desperately for Marcus’s flashlight, one-handed. With his other he waved the feeble beacon of his own, half-search, half-ludicrous ward against something that he knew was completely blind. The sounds grew less faint every second, moving from half-heard scratches to an overlapping wave of tiny claws tapping against rocks, swarming over the floor from what seemed to be every direction at once as echoes warped and twisted each scrape and click into a bouncing, clacking horde.
Thomas gave up trying to see anything past his arm’s reach and shone the light over Marcus’s corpse, checking over his hands, at his side, just into the water. He reached under his legs, found only a curious emptiness, and in a burst of hysterical strength, heaved the corpse head over heels out of the pool, water spraying in every direction. Dampness, warmer than the water touched his face, and in the blue of his flashlight-harried view he saw that Marcus’s legs below the knees were absent, straggles of blue jeans and red flesh torn into a bloody morass. He recoiled, shrieking involuntarily even as his free hand swept across the warm, sticky rock where Marcus had lain and touched hard plastic casing, whisking it into his grip and thumbing the power switch before he could so much as think.
The first thing he noticed was the colour, screaming at him from every side, hemming him in from all angles. It was a sickly pale grey-green, almost white but not quite. It dripped from the walls, sprawled over the floors, and filed the pool – no, not a pool, it sprawled outwards as far as he could, one little bay of a vast lake – to a choking overflow. It stained his clothes where he had mistaken it for condensation, it left great mucus-cobwebbed strands of it hung from the ceiling, tying stalagmites to the floor and one another, and in places on the floor where the terrified ray of light wandered it lay piled in gross heaps the size of houses.
Bursting in the seams of this invasion of the eyes was the scale of the place – Thomas lay prone at the very smallest tip of a cavern stretching farther on and downward than he could possibly see, glimpses of forests of slime and stalagmites and grottoes crowding his vision at the far fringes, and past them all the vast lake of scum drifted, giant heaps of cold, clammy, hard-shelled tube-things bulging from it in colonies like island-tumours, some of the largest towering like tree-trunks. The stone sky that rose above the rot below was as irregular as an insomniac’s bedsheet, rucked high and capricious in some spots and rippled with rocky growths, but for the most part slung by and low, creeping sometimes to the very surface of the lake in a sudden swoop.
All of this Thomas took in without wanting to in less than an instant, in a chaotic jumble of images as the powerful light in his hand swung wildly at the end of his arm. The next thing he saw took up much more of his attention.
They were everywhere, coating every surface as surely as their fossils had back and back along the path he and Marcus had taken, breaking their quiet stealth at the unfamiliar sounds. Some walked the walls, ranging in size from his thumb to his torso. Some dangled from the ceiling in great snarled nets of chemical ooze that secreted from their jaws, bobbing gently as he watched. Great ones the size of cattle watched him eye to blank faceplate, trundling slowly across the floor with legs thick as saplings. And the vile sea began to team with them even as he stared, its surface boiling up on a billion chitinous spines, thick froth dripping from bile-slickened mantles the colour of a slug’s belly.
Big and small, cautious and bold, they all came. Trilobites. Thousands and thousands. How long had they wandered down here in the dark, wondered Thomas. How many times had their tomb shifted and shook, contracting near to nothing before a tremor or chance luck expanded their habitat to new grounds even as the old decayed or collapsed? How many new breeds had sprung up and died out, here and nowhere else, over the last four hundred million years? Before the dinosaurs, before anything with a spine walked on land, these creatures had been trapped, living from second to second on luck and each other’s flesh alone. Deep in the dark they grew strange and wild, and as cave-ins and sudden falls took their toll they were recorded by the stone, their self-consuming pocket of life leaving a trail of unknown species, hidden creatures locked away and preserved one by one. Their only predators were ill luck, and each other; their only contact from the outside world the odd and rare visitor scurrying too far down a deep crevice, one that dropped it into an underworld far darker that it had ever known.
Thomas realized all of this in less than three seconds. Fear may give wings to your feet, but it turns your mind to white lightning. Three seconds passed, and the trilobites crawled closer, blind to the new light washing over their crenulated hides. And at the end of those three seconds, Thomas sprang to his feet and ran.
He ran straight up the sloping ledges that turned the little streamlet into a waterfall, vaulting over the crushed ruins of the trilobite that had led Marcus to his death. He felt his feet skid and twist on dampness and he rolled with it, turning a fall into a painful somersault that turned back into a run as he pelted down that corpse-coated tunnel, the gentle rustle and occasional clack of the otherwise silent horde as they piled their way towards him. Thomas could see it in his mind almost as clearly as if he stood there himself – the fast crawling over the slower in front, the large crushing the small underfoot and stooping to the sudden surfeit of prey, a thousand blind and mindless shells hunting him through the remnants of their ancestors. His thoughts lent him extra speed, and he barely slowed even by the time the tunnel’s height had constricted by a third, running with his hands almost at his ankles.
As he tore his way up the boneheap the rustling of pursuit was fading in his ears, little echoes pouring out of the mouth of the tunnel beneath him. He didn’t slow, following the line as a life-giving blur, hands and feet grappling and shoving whatever lay nearest to hand as his body seemed to over-expand with his gasps for air, jamming him for terrifying milliseconds in crevices he should’ve slide through in a fraction of an instant. The backpack and the end of the rope were there, and then they were behind him. In the larger spaces that opened up he didn’t squirm so much as slide, diving and springing to his feet through crawlspaces, slicing raw every inch of exposed skin on sharp rock. Little passages he’d wormed through so easily as a child now turned into obstinate opponents to his every move so passively malevolent that he almost felt himself begin to froth, but then the magically open space of cave four surrounded him, then the frantic face-first dive through the crack, and then he was running again, sprinting full-force down the gallery, hurtling past the entrance at a breakneck speed as the four giant eyes of his old summer project stared at him from the walls.
The bright light of midafternoon and a fresh sea breeze air hit Thomas’s face, as sudden a call down to reality as anything he’d ever felt. He felt bruised in every inch, and his legs barely supported him, his whole body trembling with fatigue like an old man’s. He wiped his face, and to his dull shock crusted and foamy saliva crumbled away from his lips and jaw.
He had to get away. That was the main thing, the first goal. The car – he laughed aloud without thinking, the first time in years, a hysterical cackle – had been Marcus’s. And Marcus would’ve had the keys. Some trilobite probably had them now, or one of those tubeworm things in that lake that glowed under light in all the wrong colours –
He shivered and stopped that line of thought. He had to cross the ledge next, and panicking would NOT help. He focused his mind on escape. The car was not an option. The cell phone – his cell phone, not Marcus’s, Marcus’s phone was sitting in a neat and tidy pile waiting for a backpack probably resting inside something’s no stop thinking about that – was. Yes, that would be perfect. Use the phone, the reception can’t be that bad out here yes it can it’s too far out in the boonies remember twenty years to build and that includes a good signal tower.
He shook his head, and began his sidling, cautious walk, his body relaxing from overdrive. So, the phone might work. Might not. He’d try the phone, and if it didn’t… Marcus’s phone was a satellite phone. He felt something shrink in his chest at the thought, but let it play out. Marcus’s phone was a satellite phone, Marcus’s phone might get reception out here, Marcus’s phone had been one of the items he’d carefully emptied out of the backpack, therefore Marcus’s phone was probably safe to reach. Safer than the alternative, the keys, back down can’t think about that. He shuddered.
Scrape, step, sidle, step, hop. The satellite phone was the last resort. He’d go looking for it in a few hours, when the can’t think about those had been given enough time to calm down and return to their mindless eternal cannibalization, minds too crude to hold memories beyond their most raw, chemical state. And of course, he probably wouldn’t have to. The cell phone would probably work.
But when no if it didn’t, if it didn’t… then the satellite phone. Which would have to work. But if it didn’t… wait. He and Marcus don’t think about Marcus hadn’t made the trip in secret, when they didn’t show up on Monday someone would be sure to come looking, especially when there was no answer on the phone. He didn’t have DON’T THINK ABOUT HIM the soup, but he could get that when he got the satellite phone, and he had granola, and that would be enough. Suddenly, he felt hungry, and had to resist the temptation to break down into hysterical giggles as his feet edged onto solid ground. Thomas ran the rest of the way back up to the lighthouse, heaved the door open – god it felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, weighed as much as the lighthouse itself – and stumbled inside, slamming it behind him and diving upon his backpack like a starving man. He controlled himself at the last moment, logic arriving just before he would have flipped it over and spilled the contents across the floor. He might have to walk home. He might need to leave in a hurry. Either way he would need to bring many of things in this pack with him, the quicker the better.
Thomas searched the pack as calmly and methodically as he could. He was quite proud of his restraint, the events of the past hour or so only revealing themselves outwardly in a constant, insistent shaking in his hands, a refusal to lay at rest that hide behind his eyelids and chuckled at his pretence of calmness.
Instant noodles. Clothing. The half-a-box of granola bars remaining, one of which he ate in an effort to take his mind off reality. The moment he put it in his mouth and felt the crunch between his teeth his head was filled with images of the silent and twitching legs of the creatures beneath him, their too-many-limbs clicking and waving and skittering oh god they were right beneath him. The idea of Marcus being stripped to bare bones less than a hundred feet under where he knelt burst his calm, and his hands shook so badly that he dropped the granola bar. It broke apart on the floor, and after a few futile attempts to gather its crumbled particles he gave up and sat there, shaking.
It was then, huddled against his knees, that he heard the sound again. How long it had been there, in the background of his busy search, he had no idea. It was a small sound, not far from chalk on a blackboard in the forever-night where no sun had shone for entire geological eras, where the scum ran thick and deep upon the tepid water that was refuse from the world just above and just out of reach.
Scrape, rrcckk, rrchk, scratch, srrciip, tcck, sccrtch.
Thomas badly wished that his mind would go blank, just shut down from pure terror and leave him warmly comforted, hovering somewhere that was nowhere and miles from whatever danger that he wished he could not remember so clearly at this moment. The thin and spidery legs, so many of them, the shell-layered backs glistening with moisture, the way that they watched so closely without eyes, staring in a way far more terrifying than anything he’d ever known.
He waited for the noise to stop, even if it was just a brief-hope destroying pause soon to be resumed, but it went on and on without end, quieter, louder, fainter, faster. Chitter, cllkkr, scccth. Persistent, ongoing, sometimes fading right to the edge of hearing, but never stopping.
Thomas was very still, remaining painfully all-to-focused on the present, silently raging against the cruel survival instincts that would bolster his senses so. They must be right outside the door. How they’d followed along the ledge, wandering along in such a strange place to follow his scent, he had no idea. The brush of a breeze on a chitinous carapace, the warm caress of the summer sun, the whispering sound of pine needles shuffling against one another in the wind, the groan of shifting tree trunks, the soft yet compact mass of dirt underfoot… they would be overwhelmed with strangeness. The only way he’d truly considered their arrival occurring, he realized in a small part of his mind, was in that vague half-nightmare sense that you slipped into alone in a strange place in the dark, a werewolf lumbering out of a downtown park, a shark lunging at you from the five-foot depths of a freshwater lake’s shallows. This wasn’t something that he had felt could happen, only worried of, and he sat there paralyzed, horribly aware of every passing second and its lost opportunities for escape, not having the faintest idea of what to do.
The scraping droned on and on, hypnotic in its mindless, ever-varying repetitiveness, sometimes half-drowned-out by the slowly growing whine of the coastal wind rising. Half-submerged, but even when it was inaudible he could practically feel it, trickling in vibrations through the flat, immovable concrete walls During those times he almost felt his mind work again, turning its way towards the problem at hand.
They were just outside, of that he was sure. The sounds must be coming from their legs don’t remember that on the outer wall, though from the sound of it, if he listened closely Then the scratching came back again, louder, loud enough that he stopped thinking about anything at all but the few small inanities that could squeeze in through the cracks in the sound.
he could hear that it couldn’t be more than one, probably not very large no the biggest ones couldn’t fit through those cracks he had crawled through no they couldn’t. So just one, not big. Why so few? Why only one so
Scratching. He was deeply sad at the loss of the granola bar, so sad it moved him nearly to tears.
persistent? And was it moving? It almost sounded as though it was just in one spot, mindlessly scraping over and
Scratching. He thought about the time his mother had caught him and Sean in the basement of the lighthouse. She had hated it, too musty, too dangerous, with its crumbling bricks. “The wall could fall in at any minute, or the ladder could snap and you’d be stuck down there and your father would have to drag you out with a rope.”
over in the same spot. It wasn’t at all like the sort of thing a creature adapted to dark places would do, one that relied on touch and sound to move. Confused it might be, but concrete was only a strange
Scratching. He remembered the tune that his father had hummed while working on the project. Something they’d heard on the radio the first time they drove here, that became tied up in the work more than it had been in whatever passing pop star that had sung it first.
stone to its senses. It wasn’t acting like any sort of animal at all, trilobite or no, what it sounded like was more like the
Scratching. Like Like the
He felt his mind strain at the edges, like a flimsy barrel overflowing with water, and then something untensed and it all flowed together from the outside in, making him sag with relief.
wind. Like the wind.
Thomas stood up, very slowly and carefully. His legs felt a little cramped after his long sprint and bout of catatonia, but he could cope. He scraped up the spilt and crumbled granola into a neat pile and walked to the door, opened it without fear, and felt no surprise when there was nothing on the other side. Then he walked around the lighthouse in a slow circle. There, on the northwestern side, where the woods had grown close, was a tall and leaning tree. One of its branches had grown close and long, bending against the side of the lighthouse, and as the wind buffeted its trunk and it swayed gently back and forth, the long, needle-bedecked arm sawed gently back and forth against the concrete. Scrape, scratch, scrcccht.
Thomas watched it for a moment, swaying in the breeze, louder and softer with each eddy and gust in the currents of the sky. Then he went into the woods and spent some time searching for a good stout stick, recently fallen, not rotted, not too large, and solid to the core. He found one and brought back his treasure into the lighthouse, where he shut the door behind him and took out his jackknife, whittling away at its tip. He kept a careful eye on his watch as he worked, and by the time he was finished several hours had passed and both ends of his makeshift bludgeon were carved to points; not the sharpest of instruments, but certainly pokey enough to stab in a cramped space, and small enough to carry into it in the first place.
Finally, as he finished hardening the tips over the meagre and greasy flame of the gas stovetop, he picked up his cellphone from where he’d dropped it, next to his backpack, and turned it on. The menu screen lit up, and there was absolutely no signal. He wasn’t surprised, and found himself quietly pleased that he’d prepared himself for exactly this letdown without consciously realizing it.
The return trip was much shorter than he’d hoped and feared it to be. Thomas stepped out the lighthouse’s door, went down the hillside, across the ledge, and was standing at the cave mouth before he realized it. He didn’t get a walking respite to prepare himself mentally, he didn’t have time to ponder over all the memories of what had come before, to feel the fear welling up inside him again. A very mixed blessing. By the time he’d noticed that he’d stepped back into the cave, thumbing the switch of Marcus’s (don’t think about Marcus) powerful flashlight, stick in his other hand, he was already entering the gallery. Relax, he thought, go with the flow. If you stop to think you’ll think too much, and that’s unhealthy right now. Let the body do the talking for once, go long and far while daydreaming on full alert – ouch, these scrapes (where did they come from? Doesn’t matter) made the crawling low and slow. He slid through cracks on hands and knees, then his belly, all the while in a sort of pleasantly vague haze, listening very carefully for sounds that he didn’t really believe were there, keeping a keen eye out for the glistening glow of a carapace that didn’t exist in the slightest. In his mind there was nothing down here, he was merely going to retrieve some supplies that had been carelessly abandoned for some reason he didn’t need to know at the moment. Marcus’s absence was conveniently inexplicable, and he was sure he’d be able to remember that again very soon, when it was needed. Thomas knew that he was lying to himself, and he was doing it so well that he couldn’t believe it even as he thought it.
The light shone sharply against small dark shadows, the leftovers of the backpack’s emptying he’d performed some time ago. Books and bits, a sample or two. He put down the short spear, removed the pack that had hung unnoticed from his spine for the last while, limp, deflated, and defeated, and began to fill it again (he wondered where the drying gunk on its surface had come from – a nasty colour). The satellite phone was first, – an oddly archaic example of its kind, a thick-skulled prototype in a worn and solid case – then the books, then the half-full water bottle he’d drank from earlier, then the soup cans, which weren’t there. This puzzled him immensely, because he remembered lifting the useless things out of the backpack, two cans in each hand, shiny red and white labels dulled in the dark even as their exposed aluminium cans glittered in the light. It was very clear to him, and they should be there, but they weren’t, and now he was worried and looking at everything and why was the rope that he’d tied to that rock missing bar the last few feet? It had been sheared off neatly just a few inches past its anchoring mass, and there was no sign to be seen of the rest.
It was then, as he felt the carefully-manufactured emergency walls in his head start to crumble and snap, that Thomas noticed the dampness on the floor. Little damp spots, from little legs, and small smears of some sort of slimy residue. The wet and bumpy scrape showing where a shell rubbed rock.
Scrape. Scratch.
There were no trees, there was no wind, under the lighthouse. The moment by which this had sunk into Thomas’s conscious mind and shattered his suspension of belief entirely occurred only as he was moving down the gallery at a jog, winded and scraped all over even more extensively that he had been the first time, old cuts reopened. His shirt was sticking to his body, red and tacky with blood, and his jeans had lost their knees at some point. The stick was in his hand again, the pack on his back, but he had no recollection of how they’d arrived there. All the warm comforting clouds of smoke that his subconscious had tossed up to mask him from reality had faded away on the wings of a missing breeze, and he was horribly aware of exactly what was going on, so aware that he broke into a faster run.
The cut line, the tracks, the missing cans, and the sounds. The sounds above all. They were back there, closer than he’d ever feared, closer than they’d ever travelled before. Why would they have before? It was a long trip, a hard trip, but it was worth it for a mountain of meat and bone, a banquet-meal of soft flesh with no hard shell, no spines, no scrawny and malnourished, withered limbs, of which they had already sampled DON’T THINK ABOUT MARCUS.
The ledge was before him, and he sprinted along it, slipping and staggering so high above the water. Why had they taken the cans? Perhaps the textures had fascinated them. Could they be fascinated? He doubted it. Imagination wouldn’t be high on the list of survival traits that would be the first and the only concerns of the creatures, trapped in their own waste products. Hunger, that would be a selector. The ones that went about their food most efficiently, the most effectively, those would be the winners. The hunters in the dark, the quietest and most sensitive who could feel their prey move from far away, who could creep up close without the slightest noise – cushioned by the slime, the sickly molasses that coated their world so fully and thoroughly. Here, far away from their stomping grounds, they would scratch and scuttle; he would have that much warning at least. It was with no shock at all that he noted he was planning as though they would come after him, hunting him across the ledge and up the cliff and out into the daylight that they couldn’t see, night-hunters that were blind to the night. They had followed him too far and too fast, shown too much curiosity. He thought of the way they had moved across the walls, across the ceiling, how nimbly their number might be, and he shivered even as he slammed the lighthouse door open and shut one-handed, the deep sorrowful iron double-clang echoing and reverberating through its shaft up to the cupola’s peak and into the forgotten dustheap of the cellar.
He was trembling, he noticed, but only a little bit, and the tremors came from the deep muscle ache he felt settling over him and suffusing his limbs after their second frantic flight, not the incapacitating terror-shakes he’d felt overcoming him earlier. It was fine now, anyways; he had the satellite phone, he had the half-full bottle of water he’d sampled earlier, he even had the texts. He’d gotten everything back but the goddamned soup, the rope, and Marcus’s car keys. Time was ticking in his mind, and he should start calling for help sooner rather than later. First things first, he decided: he took out the satellite phone, stepped outside to get clear reception, and dialled nine-one-one, draining the water bottle dry even as it processed the call. He’d become terribly thirsty at some point in the past hour and he wasn’t sure why, scrubbing more crusty froth away from his mouth as he tossed the bottle to the floor.
He processed the call on automatic and it nearly flew by, the operator’s calm voice flattened beneath the heavy tread of Thomas’s near-monotone. He said that his friend had fallen off a cliff and he was stuck without a car, gave the location, and hung up without incident. It would look suspicious, especially since there were plenty of people out there who could testify to his dislike of Marcus – and Marcus’s irritating personality – but he was fairly confident that he could show them evidence once they arrived. If nothing else, they would at least have to check the cave system, and maybe he could warn them thoroughly enough that they took at least basic precautions. They’d think he was crazy, but he’d save his cackling for when he was laughing last. Maybe he could ask them to name one of the fossils after Marcus, or even one of the live ones, if they ever brought any of them up alive. If they did, he hoped they did it far away from him. Far away from here was where he’d be, and where he’d stay. Let someone else take the task of digging up the old summer project shared by him and his father. Let someone else make the decisions, whether they chose to seal up the cave for safety reasons, send down unmanned probes to collect data, or blast the whole thing to rubble with military explosives and let the lighthouse topple down into the ruins like the fist of god. Any, either, all or none, all he wanted was to be in a position where it wasn’t his problem and he couldn’t make it his even if he tried. Which he wouldn’t.
Scrrtch, scratch went the branch on the outer wall. Thomas found another granola bar, the very last, and ate it, washing it down with another bottle of water. He almost felt like trying some of the soup next.
Scrape, crrrpk, click click clack scrrpe. Thomas stopped chewing.
Crtch, krrlik, clik klunk THUD click click clik.
The lock on the door slammed home with the urgency of panic, the backpack and food bag were slung against its surface with frantic speed, and then Thomas was up the stairs and away three at a time, stick in hand, slamming open the door to the watch room and barrelling up the ladder into the cupola, ringed with clear glass still mostly-transparent against all odds, eyes straining frantically at the ground for any sign of a dark blot, from up here as small as its ancestors had appeared just inches from his face as he lay on his back to examine them, studded on the roof of the tunnels far below, frozen in immobility.
He paced around the entire ring of vision available to him, he looked, he stared, he watched like a hawk pumped full of caffeine, and he saw nothing against the walls. Utterly nothing. The adrenaline leaked out of his system drip by drip, removing itself to the glands where it bided its time until the moment came for flight and fight. His hyperventilation slowed back to normal, something he’d barely noticed, and he tried to go over what he’d just heard logically. There had been a noise, accompanied by others, that had sounded like an animal of some sort falling over or knocking something over. It had sounded like one of the trilobites (those little clicks and scratches were burned into his mind now, he could almost hear them by thinking). It was not outside.
He had left the door open when he made the call. Surely he would’ve heard them moving even on dirt, not more than five feet from the exit – the squeak of armoured plates rubbing against each other at joints, the rustle of the legs. Therefore if there was an animal nearby it was neither inside nor outside.
Thud. A metallic clang from below, the sound of iron being impacted. A scrape and a scrabble as something fought for purchase. Thud, clang, crash.
Thomas raced to the other side of the Cupola, stared down at the door. Nothing.
Thud THUD.
There was nothing out there. There was nothing in here. Something was banging against metal, there was nothing at the door.
THUD-thud.
The basement snaked its way into his thoughts. The old, old, old cellar, poorly maintained since its construction, set deep into the ground for maximum coolness to preserve whatever lay down there from the summer heat. The cellar with its crumbling, feeble, decayed brick walls that had been all but weaving on their feet fifteen years past. The cellar’s iron trapdoor, half-hidden underneath the spot where Marcus had piled his belongings and slept.
THUD.
He was down the ladder in an instant, half-falling with muscles half-frozen in protest against his every motion, tormented from a half-day of terrified flight and paralyzed recovery in turns. The clang of the watch room door as it flew open was masked in the deep and resonant CRASH of the cellar’s trapdoor slamming open, hinges screaming, unmuffled by the obscuring bulk of Marcus’s discarded sleeping bag. Obscuring and fading, the plasticized exterior of the bedding rippling large under the bulk of something hidden just underneath it, already being savaged by claw-tipped limbs. It heaved its way to one side, scratching and scraping against the floor as in fought its confinement.
Thomas vaulted down the stairs three at a time, four at a time, something he couldn’t truly count, only guess at as however many he could leap in a single bound. The thing under the bag was already beginning to tear free, rips and gaps bulging into existence as chitinous spines and ridges pierced its flesh. He was halfway there, and then rising up from the depths came another, uncovered, unhidden, exposed to the world. A blind survivor in perfect clarity, skittering into its new environment with the mindless confidence of royalty, heading for the stairs on the trail of a new scent, the smell that had come from somewhere farther away than it could imagine and nearer than it could dream.
Thomas took a step backwards, another, saw it begin to take its first steps up the stairway with no difficulty, and then charged it, brandishing his spear-cudgel. It nipped towards him with astonishing speed, coming in at his ankles (Marcus hadn’t had feet, hadn’t had anything below his knees, nothing there at all don’t think about Marcus, busy), but he was ready and stabbed downwards with all the force he could muster, aiming for just behind the bulky head-plating and coming up late, stabbing it in the middle of its body, wood piercing into soft flesh beneath hard shell. It was then that the thing made the first sound he’d ever heard them produce, not the scuttling of their limbs or the rattle of a dragging shell, but a hiss, low-pitched, whispery, raspy, threatening. It wasn’t the mewl of an animal in pain, it was the spittle of an angered ghost, the snarl in the mouth of a wounded bear.
Thomas froze at that sound for just one moment, and in that one moment several things happened. The trilobite continued its rush without stopping or hesitating, wrenching the stick out of his hand. He was forced to spin and run, and as he did so, the corner of his eye spotted the other tearing free from its bag, the creeping shape of yet another looming its way out of the cellar-pit. The stairs were moving slowly, oh too slowly under his feet, so much more sluggishly than they had when he flew down them, and now there was something right behind him, making the elderly metal creak and rumble in agony as it struggled in its moorings. He ran through the open door to the watch room at full tilt, spinning around and nearly falling over to slam his full momentum into crushing it shut, feeling the surprisingly weighty THUNK of the creature on the other side ramming into it full force. It immediately degenerated into a series of hefty slams, each one making the door vibrate and rattle in its frame, thrashing madly. The pointed object lodged in its back seemed to have no effect on its actions whatsoever, and Thomas wondered what would’ve happened if he’d come face to face with one of them down there as he crawled to the backpack, stick in hand.
There was a double thud, and then there were two squirming, shoving bodies on the other side of the door, pushing and pressing and apparently climbing over each other, biting and snapping. And just past that, rising ever louder, the moan and groan of the spiralling stair trembling under the weight of oncoming others, a wave of clacking and chittering bodies spilling their way up against gravity.
Thomas braced himself, shoved as hard as he could, and was rewarded with the protesting crunch of the door driving itself firmly into its frame. He shot the bolt home with hurried fingers, felt half of it crumble away even as he crudely wrenched it from its cemented position, and ran for the ladder, scarcely three steps ahead before he heard the wave of the hunters slam into its surface, crushing it to the floor under their mass. As he hurled himself up its surface, the rust cutting his palms, he swore that he felt the antennae of the leader of the pack brush his boot just before he tumbled into the cupola. He reversed the roll as quickly as he could, setting hands on the heavy hatch and wrenching it forwards and down, slamming shut on the sight of his pursuers filling the watch room like locusts, rearing back on their shells to wave their legs upwards and twitch twirling tendrils laden with senses at him, eyeless shells staring.
Then he collapsed on the trapdoor, holding it shut with his body, and stared at the ceiling. He felt something tickling at his jawline, and wiped away more spittle and foam, slightly surprised at it. Exhaustion? He’d had substantial breaks between any and all of his sudden breaks for safety. Was there something foul in the air down there that he’d breathed? The images of the great skywebs of slime and filth flashed vividly in his mind, the thickness of the moist atmosphere, and he tried to persuade himself that there was nothing black in the froth he’d cleaned from the corners of his mouth. He was thirsty again, and the cupola was gently revolving around his head, and he worried at exactly how much of his breakdown was mental trauma and how much might be artificial. The vibrations of the stragglers down below trickled through the ladder and up into the trapdoor, melding into his spine in a very nearly relaxing manner. He felt at peace for the first time since he’d lost Marcus. All he had to do was wait and rest and watch the sky spin by just outside the windows, a ballet danced to the chorus of a thousand grunts of pain from the staircase outside the watch room door.
The massage stopped then, and Thomas tore enough of his attention away from the ceiling to listen again, only to find there was nothing to listen to. There was no scratching. There were no creaks. There wasn’t (god forbid) a repeat of that hideous hiss he’d heard when he tried to defend himself. Absolute silence reigned beneath him, and he imagined the quiet trickling out from his spine like some sort of delicate fluid, washing over everything and draining it of noise. He giggled weakly, and flinched as the sound broke the moment. Why was it quiet? He’d just heard the stairs singing. Maybe they all went back down. Maybe it was all safe, maybe the police would show up and find one possibly half-poisoned man lying in the cupola.
Then there it was again, a long slow grinding vibration, snaking straight into his vertebrae. Something heavy, something big, moving with unspeakable deliberateness and care, rubbing right up against the ladder. He could feel his neck hairs stand on end, one at a time, as something bumped gently into the rusted, suddenly far-too-thin iron that lay under him. The bumping repeated itself twice and turned into a caress, a slow and cautious rubbing, the caress of something that Thomas couldn’t imagine, barely an inch from his skin, touching what he touched and he could almost feel it the vibrations rubbing his back it was touching his back.
A single, hairline-thin poke reached through the panel and it was suddenly too much to bear. With a spastic twist, Thomas shuddered and heaved upright, collapsing on his side. He watched the trapdoor with stupefied eyes as it lifted slowly, finding himself unable to even rise from the floor.
It rose slowly, intensely, with thought in every motion, every twitch. It hauled itself out and through the trapdoor, mounting higher and higher into the air even as it lowered each new length of its bulk to the floor, claws tipped and dripping with thick grey-green slime pads, every inch of it covered in soft decay and rotting fibre, a coat that muffled the click and clack of each of its motions.
It must have lived in the water, like its ancestors, whose size it matched and maybe exceeded. It must have swum through that strange mixture of water and slime-fungus for its entire life, however long that must’ve been to let it reach its strength and ripe maturity. The only things it lacked were their four great eyes, replacing their blank gaze with a blanker faceplate that so well-reflected that of its lessers. They crowded up the ladder after it, scuttling at its trail, gathering around its feet, humble supplicants before a great priest, a god incarnate, the eater of prey. It watched him from the two long antennae that had replaced its eyes as its tools, their taste and touch on his skin gentle as a newborn baby’s as it hovered above him, jaws macerating at the air as it thought.
There can’t have been many, Thomas realized, never many, the rule of the giant of the jungle: solitary rule. And fewer still would have fallen into the caves. Had his summer project been the first to be entrapped? It could be. Was it one of the ancestors of the silent deity before him, passing judgement on his body? It was likely. He’d stared back into that rock fifteen years ago and watched as time melted away under a chisel, and now he saw it peel back over, the present become the future, the past the present, thought and awareness scabbing away under the rule of mandible and claw to an older, quieter age, when the sun shone brightly over hot seas and the world was silent but for the hiss of the segmented.
The claws came down first, fastening one to either side of him, then the jaws, seized into stillness with a purpose in grasp. Thomas felt the fog flood away as they descended from above, but it was too late to think about it.
***
Thomas and Marcus’s belongings made it back from the lighthouse in the hands of the police, as evidence. Marcus’s notes in particular caused a stir, and the spectacular new genus of Eurypterid, the fossilized sea scorpion, was excavated and brought to a nearby museum for preparation, of which surprisingly little needed to be done.
The lighthouse contained traces of dried, dead fungus of some kind, scarcely remarkable considering its age and depilated state. The caves were examined, but deemed too narrow and dangerous to warrant further investigation.
The best way to keep something safe is to keep it secret. The best secret is one that no one knows. The secret that no one knows is forgotten. And it’s best left that way.
Copyright Jamie Proctor, 2009.