My heart beat in my whole face. I was stuck upside down, dangling by a hip bone in the blackness of the long worm shaft, which drops twistingly from the back of a limestone chamber with 44,000-year-old paintings. My father and I—archaeologists from our nation’s greatest university—studied the kaolin clay and charcoal images, and there we discovered the oldest human writing, recording the oldest human idea, in a language so perfect that it could be read by anyone.
The words said to offer your children and, in exchange, “We will create you.” The paintings showed the instructions carried out, with Paleolithic families offering their children to a shaman with a star-shape instead of a face.
My father believed the buried words. He entombed us together in the painted chamber and then attacked me. To escape I fled down a tunnel, to the narrow and unexplored long worm passage. He followed, but became stuck.
I could hear him above me. He was crying. Soon his heart would give out, stuck upside down like that.
That held for me too. I had to get unstuck. I had to go deeper into the perfect dark. The passage downward had a kink here, so I pressed my face into a flat pane of rock beneath me. I wish I had my father’s stone lamp, then I would be able to see ahead. With one hand I felt out into the open channel and I stretched, looking for a handhold. My rib cage cracked like a knuckle as I pulled myself around the curve. I was able to climb down again.
The passage was too tight for me to fall, but with every downward inch I was aware that it could snap open into a chasm. Strangely, the idea didn’t scare me: falling to my death was more appealing than my neck twisted against the dead end of a stone corkscrew as I suffocated under the weight of my own body.
Then the anticipated fall came, and I took my thankful last breath, until I hit a pile of brittle rocks and my last breath got slammed back out. My legs were folded up against a limestone wall—I had plummeted into a space about the size and shape of a barrel. The passage I had fallen from was open like a chimney above me. I patted at the walls, but there was no way out.
I had my phone in my pocket, but I had already used most of the batteries writing my first account. I would have to save its light for the direst emergency. Instead I emptied my cargo pockets into my lap. It was a substantial pile—a work mask for close examinations of cave paintings, a charcoal pencil, a north arrow (looks like a bookmark, used for scale in photos), a wad of flagging tape, a small spoon used for scraping dirt, a spirit level, a piece of chalk, a loupe, and an Altoids tin with a tallowed lump of lamp fuel—but it wasn’t food, or water, and now it was all getting muddy from the clay paste my boots were making of the bones.
The tin especially made me feel hopeless. I had a fuel cube and wicks for a stone lamp, one of humankind’s first and simplest inventions. But without the lamp’s shallow well (or even the right recessed stone), the cube was worthless. The waxy fat would run apart and the wick would burn itself away. I was helpless down here. And I was now certain that the brittle pile underneath me was made from the stacked bones of previous explorers, whose lives ended in this same barrel of stone. My bones would jumble with theirs.
I could hear my dad crying. My breath and my heart had been too loud before, but I could hear him again. It was far away, bounced down to me like the light from an alien planet in a telescope. He was crying, but struggling to catch his breath, so his snuffling sounded jagged and glottal. There was nowhere to go to get away from the sobbing.
Briefly I considered going back up the long worm. But even if I did somehow have the strength to climb it, would I find the father who taught me to play Neanderthal flute, or the man trying to murder me? Or would he be dead by then—an impassable plug?
There was no going back.
Suddenly I remembered what happened to my lamp. It stayed lit, even after my father detonated the explosive that sealed us inside the painted chamber together. He didn’t give me time to unfreeze from shock, and was on top of me, trying to close his fists on my neck. Flailing, I drove him back, until he returned with a hammer. I flung the lamp at him, but it only clattered against a painted wall, spreading a thin sheen of flame that lit our struggle in electric blue.
Iit was gone forever, hundreds of feet above me. My father had given it to me as a gift earlier that morning, and it made him visibly upset. I was stupid enough to think it was sentiment, when really it was his discomfort at having to think about the future I wouldn’t have because of him.
“Shut up!” I shouted at my father’s disembodied voice, stomping my boots in the bone mud. “Shut up and die!”
There was a moment of silence, then he started bellowing—a tormented sound without words. I’m not proud that I said that, but I didn’t and don’t feel bad for him. I won’t allow that. He was never much of a dad. He wasn’t even a good doctoral advisor.
I felt around the round wall of the barrel chamber, more thoroughly this time, even though my hands were shaking. I was frantic to get away from the horrible keening above me. But the chamber was solid.
“Can you hear me?” I said to my dad, but his incoherent wailing continued. I raised my voice to a shout and didn’t stop until I was done with what he had to say. “You told me that our cave painters were better than us, because they spoke so clearly to the future…”
“You said you had no choice. That you had to listen. But you had a choice! You had the choice to speak clearly to the future yourself! But you were too arrogant to learn, so you surrendered. You showed what your life is about. Well let me say with the full force of my life: you are my enemy and you need to die. So if you are appealing to me with your crying, why don’t you shut up instead and think about why you let some dead troglodyte talk you into killing your daughter.”
There was silence when I stopped. But when my heart slowed and stopped beating so hard, I could still hear a quiet snuffling. He was still crying, but this time it was so quiet I could barely discern it, and I briefly wondered if it was only in my head.
Then I heard a different sound entirely, this time not from my dad. Instead it was a low-pitched scraping, which rumbled my feet like an apartment building above a metro line. Little pieces of stone fell from the walls of my narrow chamber, but already the rumbling was past. My barrel was silent again. I couldn’t even hear my father, not even in my head. Maybe he was finally dead.
But something else was different too. I felt around the wall, and found a rivulet dribbling from a crack. I couldn’t fill my hand with enough to drink, so I contorted myself, tucking my legs under me and mashing the powdery bones until I could lift and close my whole mouth around the minuscule spring, wetting my cracked throat. Maybe that’s what made the sound: some sudden and geologic redirection of water, probably caused by the explosion in the chamber above. I didn’t yet have a better explanation, but I would get one later.
I felt a cold exhalation on my ankles, and found a nostril-sized vent letting air into the barrel chamber. With a kick, I opened up the hole like a mouth. I kicked again and the stone wall crumbled around the toe of my boot. After a few minutes I had a narrow fissure opened at my feet. If I turned my ankles, kept one leg down, and brought my hip bone through on a diagonal I might be able to fit.
I went through headfirst instead. It was like crawling out of a vacuum bag and into the hose. But it wasn’t long before the hose splayed apart on each side, until I was belly crawling between the two fractured halves of a bus-sized stone. The fault plane beneath me was slick with a loose layer of wet silt.
I saw a narrow rectangular slot ahead. I could see! There was the silhouette of my hands. The opening expanded ahead of me as I crawled and I could feel a cool, still immenseness beyond. The passage ended in a cliff face. I felt down the escarpment as far as I could reach, but there were only dimpled extrusions—calcite, the size and shape of popcorn—which crumbled in my hand.
As my eyes adjusted I began to discern a dim phosphorescence beneath me. It was hard to be certain of distances, but it looked like the cave floor was far below, at least far enough to break a leg. I could see the dim outlines of cave formations: a field of flowstone and blob-shaped stalagmites. There were also soda straws dangling right in front of me, which meant I was near the top of the chamber, pinched in a slot too tight to breathe fully.
The water making the stones slick… where did it flow from here? There weren’t any calcite formations on the cliff lip, so it wasn’t running down the wall’s face. The rippling accretion formations were slightly more pronounced to my right, so I crawled over and found flowstone drooling out the side, where it formed the dangling velvet folds known as draperies. These formations had probably been growing for a hundred thousand years already when humans returned to Europe.
I punched the drapery with my little spoon and it fell shuddering to the cave floor below. As I had hoped, there was a zig-zag seam beneath it, where the water had carved a trough into the wall. I thought maybe I could dangle from the ledge, then find a handhold in the channel I had opened up—just enough of a grip that I could lower myself close enough to the ground to drop down.
Instead I fell immediately, screaming as I hurtled toward the chamber floor below.
…
…
I splashed down into water that was so still it had been invisible from above. I thrashed and fumbled until I found a stone ledge (I had missed hitting it by centimeters) and pulled myself from the pool. A blue-green glow swirled where I had disturbed the water, and I saw that it came from a school of translucent eels, which scattered before coming back together in a dimly white clump. I turned away from the pool and shuddered in the dark, though the water was warm.
Right at my feet was my stone lamp. It was a nearly round plate of stone, with a bluntly triangular handle just large enough to hold with a thumb and index finger. Since it was made by humans—my father had chiseled it from basalt himself—the lamp looked completely unlike the natural features that had waited in the dark here for thousands of years. I picked it up. It was definitely my lamp. It was still slick with oil after my father’s attack.
The passage to this place had curled like intestines. There was no way for the stone lamp to get down here, unless someone carried it down. It had to have been my dad. He must have found another way down, to this same cave chamber. He was in here right now, ready to finish his grim task.
I passed to the far side of the cave in terror, bouncing off drip columns and piles of flowstone. Feeling out in the dark, I hid under the eaves of a limestone formation shaped like a melted wedding cake. All I could hear was the blood in my own head and my breathing.
But this time I had the lamp. I pressed a wick into the tallow fuel cube, then draped it so the flame would rest against the lip of the lamp reservoir. It was pointless, because I had no way to light it.
Cell phone batteries caught on fire, I knew that much, so I fumbled the back off my sodden phone and pulled the battery. The metal terminals were slightly raised–I could feel them with my thumb. After wrapping the handle in plastic flagging tape, I pressed my small metal spoon against both terminals. The terminals threw a hot white spark. After a few tries a gout of sparks caught the wick of the lamp’s fuel cube.
The light was yellow and bright. I suddenly felt very exposed. Now my dad would attack, I thought, but he didn’t.
Then I searched the entire chamber, my body fully tensed as I dispelled every shadow. The more I searched without his attack, the more I imagined an even worse fate: finding him injured, begging for forgiveness until I had no choice but to reembrace him down here, where we would both die. In his eyes we would have reconciled, but I would know that I had surrendered to my killer.
But that didn’t happen either.
Instead, I used my last fuel cube to search the chamber in circles—and finding nothing—until my light was expended and I was in complete darkness again.