I have come to learn why they cemented the entry of the caves.
As a kid my parents always told me the caves eat people.
I have come to learn that they don’t do it on purpose.
The caves only swallow if you go in too deep.
I have come to learn, as well, why before they sealed it off there were people around it, and my mother never let me go out alone to the cave in my teenage years.
Not a lot of people come into or out of my town. It isn’t a particularly small one, but it has nothing to drive it’s fame. Of course, if we’re not talking about Rote Tannen cave. Nothing interesting at first, a hole in the nearby creek, and yet, it leads down into the bowels of the earth, where there is only the gray rock, the tight turns, a whole ton of bat droppings, and the sound of water somewhere in the distance, just below freezing. Although you wouldn’t see any of that, light would be forgotten long before the first large room.
Peter Burkhat and Jack Elomar were good people. I think. I’ve never met them myself, I just asked who was on the news.
A couple that thought it was a great ideea to explore the cave for their anniversary, and thought it was an even greater ideea to go into a narrow crack in the wall, that they thought was leading into the 4th big room: Der Raum der Kronleuchter. You have to crawl on your stomach to reach it, through a passage that is prone to flooding on rainy days, because of the dam collecting water overflows. A great date ideea in my opinion! You might even get to trip on wet rock and split your head open if you’re lucky! It had been two days from last time it rained, and that was the day they entered the cave sistem. It began to pour almost an hour later.
There’s no mistery on what happened next, only the slow misery of the water slowly eating them whole.
But that was so long ago. The mind forgets. Time itself forgets as well. How very trivial all of it seems…Not for the families of the deceased though. Even twenty four years later, I can see their eyes watering when we speak of Rote Tannen cave. Now no one visits the place, not even eager teenagers with a sense of reckless courage and out of places to smoke. It has been drilled so deep in our heads that the cave is dangerous, that I don’t think I can get it out even if I’d drill a hole in my brain.
But I’m not telling you this because I cared about the bastards. They’re dead, they won’t care if their story is told or forgotten for some “Creepy things that happened in caves” YouTuber to post the poorly researched case hoping to garner likes.
I found an entrance in the cave. Three kilometers down the river. I can crawl through it if I twist a certain way, and I’ll have a try at what the other salvagers couldn’t: in and out in about four hours, recover the bones, take them out, cash in the money. I’ve been reading all the books I could on salvage operations, and this should be pretty simple. I bought the equipment, and took a walk through the cave one time, to learn the basics of safe exploration. It should be enough. The money that the two families offer is life changing.
I don’t rule out death either, but I’ve made peace with it. The nightmare that is my life now will be changed tomorrow either way. I won’t have to go to my crappy job that pays minimum wage, or deal with my father. I should be scared, but I’m not.
This is my last message under this name. If I die, this should clear out all questions of what happened. I want my possessions given to my mother and my mother only. If I live, I’m getting out of here and changing my number and name.
I’ll give myself to the caves, and I’ll pray to god that they’ll have the mercy to spit me out.